Taylor Swift Didn't Win a Pulitzer Prize This Year
Evaluating the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and exploring the possibility of a Taylor Swift book. Stay to the end for a big swing of a character description.
“Biggest” News in Books: The Pulitzer Prize and Taylor Swift
The Populist Pulitzer
The Pulitzer nominations and winners came out this Monday (the logic escapes me for why they would release nominations and winners simultaneously). The Pulitzers give out many awards, all of them worthwhile and career-changing, but none more impactful than the award for fiction (full list of winners linked). The Pulitzer bestows a kind of importance on fiction that is usually reserved for nonfiction books: a sort of you-have-to-read-this aura for people who would normally never go near fiction or fiction readers who stay away from serious or challenging works. At their best, awards are vessels for getting people to read something they would normally shy away from, something out of the ordinary that if they just tried they might actually fall in love with.
The most profound transformation in the Pulitzer for fiction over the past ten years has been the move from rewarding the traditional literati to a more palatable and widely appealing version of literary fiction.
The century began with Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, one the Pulitzer’s rarest selections: a debut short story collection. This set the tone for the first decade of the 21st century, which largely followed the path trod by previous decades of the award—the Pulitzer for fiction went to serious works of literature, about serious stories of the human condition, by serious authors.
Something changed in the second decade of the 21st century. The tipping point happened in 2014 or 2015. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, the 2014 winner, is an expansive, epic work of one life, no doubt a serious work by any measure, but given what came before and what came after you can see a decisive shift toward books that, while being perhaps no less pedigreed, are often less formally demanding or heavy in the traditional literary sense. Donna Tartt, although lauded and largely considered a genius in the critical world, wrote the quintessential literary genre novel a couple of decades before The Goldfinch and enjoyed popular reception not strictly because of her accolades. The Goldfinch is not an intense interior family drama or a geopolitical statement, it’s a compulsively readable, pure storytelling marvel that would have succeeded just fine without the Pulitzer. In fact, it did—by the time the Pulitzer was announced in April of 2014, The Goldfinch had already sold a staggering 392,000 hardcovers (Bookscan). If The Goldfinch was a portend, then All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr was the sea change. All the Light We Cannot See had sold 550,000 hardcovers by the time it won the prize in 2015 (Bookscan). An elevated version of a red-hot commercial genre—the World War II novel—it is a book that fits with book clubs more than the old-guard literary crowd or the Pulitzer. Although all Pulitzer novels see a huge bump in sales, All the Light remains the bestselling Pulitzer in the modern era with over 5 million copies sold (Bookscan), data that speaks to the Pulitzer’s move towards literary fiction that has more average reader appeal.
It hasn’t been a straight-line hard turn toward commerciality however, as you still have books like The Netanyahus last year and The Sympathizer in 2016 that could have belonged in any era of The Prize, but by-and-large the winners have tracked the general trend in fiction towards a new definition of literary. The capstone of this tread and the prize’s move towards pop is arguably Less by Andrew Sean Greer, the 2018 winner. Less only sold around 20,000 copies before it won The Prize (and would go on to sell a million after winning). Less is a smart, light, wistful autobiographical novel written by a mid-career novelist. This is not to say that Less isn’t extraordinary, just that it’s the type of slice-of-life novel that we see dozens and dozens of a year—keeping in mind we have dozens and dozens of very serious works of literature a year also—but it was a category of book that had never once been rewarded or even really nominated on the highest stage. But you can see why the Pulitzer is incentivized to pick more commercially-appealing books as the Pulitzer-accelerant effect for a novel is even greater for a novel like Less. For example, compare the Less trajectory from 20,000 to 1,000,000 to The Netanyahus, which went from 10,000 in sales to a life-time sales of 33,000 (Bookscan).
Taken as a whole, we have seen The Prize move with greater consistency toward the accessible. And this year’s two winners, Trust by Hernan Diaz and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver are largely a continuation of this tread. Trust and Demon Copperhead were on every “best of” list and had plenty of commercial success before the Pulitzers immortalized them. Demon Copperhead, like Colson’s Underground Railroad, was also an Oprah pick, and Kingsolver has been a popular literary writer for decades. Another way to put all of this is that literature is becoming more democratized, and the highest prize in the land is no exception to that.
None of these observations come with any value judgements. The pro to democratization is that we get books that more people actually like and agree are good. The drawback is of course a potential flaw of any democracy, which is the risk that pure popularity can spiral into a populism. An easy sort of state where the majority rules and we are never pushed to consider what’s outside of the norm. This is perhaps the most fascinating push and pull of the Pulitzer. In the age of selectivism we got serious books that “normal” readers wouldn’t buy or read unless they were told they had to by the literary powers that be, but these books that might have not been read also had a fundamental alikeness. Now these same issues are playing out in a slightly inverted way. Democratization means that we are getting more diverse and varied types of books and authors than ever before, ones outside of the normal conventions of what a small group of people thought should be considered serious literature. But the drawback is that these very different types of books all share a kind of agreeability that makes them alike. Some things change; some things stay the same. The other drawback is that this alikeness is not one that necessarily challenges readers in the same way to try something out of their comfort zone—case in point, many of us had already read this year’s two winners before they were awarded the Pulitzer.
I did quite like Trust however (I haven’t read Demon Copperhead, yet), and in honor of its win, here’s a description in the book that I found quite good:
“Morning brought out a deeper sort of white from the changeless snows capping the peaks on either side of the valley, which later, in the midday sun, would become blinding splinters. A pastoral bell echoed across the sky, dappled with flocks of small solid clouds, while unseen birds found themselves, yet again unable to break their bondage to their two or four notes. The air was laced with the scent of water, stone, and long-dead things that, darkly, were finding their way back to life deep under the dew-soaked dirt. During that unpopulated hour, the buildings ceased to be objects of artifice and industry to reveal the nature fossilized in them and come forth in their mineral presence. The breeze dissolved in stiller air; the treetops, so green they were black against the blue, stopped swaying. And for a moment, there was no struggle and all was at rest, because time seemed to have arrived at its destination.” (pg. 98)
Is Taylor Swift Releasing a Book?
There was a fun article that went around about a mystery book coming out this July that has an Austin-Powers-esque announced print run of one million copies. The speculation is that the book could be a Taylor Swift’s memoir, and while that is an exciting thing to imagine, it’s pretty obvious with the most lucrative music tour of all time and the next re-release of one of her earlier albums also coming out in July, that this highly unlikely to be true to say the least. The article posits the most likely theory that it is by the South Korean pop super group BTS, which does seem significantly more likely, but I’ve also heard Britney Spears, which I wouldn’t count out either. The 544-page count and $45 retail price does hint as an insider to something that leans more toward merchandise than a traditional reading book. It could also be another famous person’s biography that we didn’t see coming that has a life and career worth 40 full-color photographs (for the publishing uninitiated, that’s a lot!).
*By the time I was able to post this the news came out, it is in fact BTS.
Should this be a book? Taylor Swift
Most obviously. The thing that I’ve never puzzled together is how or when writing a book would exactly make sense for someone like Taylor Swift. With Swift specifically, but with musicians in general, one wonders exactly how much more there is to say creatively that isn’t already explored in the music. When so much of the fun and power of Swift’s music is tied up in its autobiographical nature, what exactly is the purpose of expounding that in memoir form? Yes, many, many, many of us want it, but if we put our desires aside and put ourselves in Swift’s shoes: doesn’t writing any sort of tell-all sort of kill the magic of the music? Over money or anything else, that is the primary reason I don’t think there will be a book anytime soon. Here’s to hoping I fully eat these words and my prediction above in July.
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 104, Pages 511
“Seat thyself Sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate.” (pg. 508)