The Booker Prize is Back to Being Weird
And Why That’s a Good Thing
Earlier this year I predicted James by Percival Everett would win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. But despite being up for some other big awards, like the UK’s most prestigious prize the Booker, I did not predict a clean sweep for James even though it was the favorite to win the Booker according to British oddsmakers. Although formally and thematically dazzling, like all of Everett’s work, even by Everett’s own scale of experimentation James is a rather accessible novel. By the Booker not picking James, an obvious frontrunner in terms of having both wide critical and commercial acceptance, the prize returns to its roots of picking strange winners over obvious ones.
The Booker, as long as I’ve known it in the past decade or so, has always been the weird prize. Reliably — except for in 2019 when they inexplicably chickened out and gave a joint-prize to definitely-didn’t-need-it legend Margaret Atwood— they have picked some of the most challenging pieces of fiction to honor. Including but not limited to Shuggie Bain a dense, visceral, upsetting Scottish novel. There’s also 2014’s A Brief History of Seven Killings an epic, 700-page, dialect-forward, multi-perspective, blisteringly surreal novel. Or, there’s Milkman, a relentlessly interior novel in which the narrator is stalked and harassed (also relentlessly) during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The point is that the Booker tends to pick books that are hard, almost purposefully picking books that go against what your typical reader might find enjoyable or gravitate towards based on the jacket copy.
So, with that in mind, it’s no surprise that this year the bookmaker’s second favorite won, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a book that Joshua Ferris writing for The New York Times noted is “nearly free of plot.” Orbital a book that I, professional reader of books, hadn’t heard of until the prize nominations were announced is about six astronauts observing the wonder of the cosmos over 24-hours. The Genius Narrative behind this book is that Harvey watched many hours of space on live stream and wrote the book largely in Covid lockdown (matching the isolation of, you know, space). If this seems like an improbable concept for a book you would pick up and read — people staring into space and contemplating life for 300 pages — it is exactly why the Booker might be my favorite award giver.
What makes the Booker prize laudable rather than merely annoyingly pretensions, is that the award has an extraordinarily strong record of picking difficult books that are actually good. “Good” is far from an objective metric, but there’s some qualitative reasoning to back this up. Awards tend to drive sales up. For example the Pulitzer has routinely pushed book’s sales into the millions in recent years, largely by virtue that they’ve been picking more and more conventionally popular books. However, these sales and popularity gains aren’t a guarantee—a counterpoint to the Pulitzer picking consistently popular novels is The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen, which won a slew of prizes and never gained traction with wider audiences relative to this critical success.
Meanwhile, the Booker has managed to pick challenging books that end up minting careers and establishing the authors they pick, the aforementioned A Brief History of Seven Killings made the book a blockbuster and turned Marlon James into a bona fide literary star. The Booker also has an international prize (which used to mean writers outside of the UK and now means works in translation) that is worth following. Most notably they paved the way for South Korean novelist Han Kang way back in 2015 when they awarded The Vegetarian the International Booker Prize. This is a very strange, wonderful book about a woman who stops eating meat and the spiraling consequences of that simple act. The Vegetarian would end up selling hundreds of thousands of copies in the US alone. Ten years later, Han Kang went from a prolific, respected author in her home country never translated in English to an internationally phenomena and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
No award is perfect, but the Booker has long operated in a way that shows the important counterbalance and purpose that a critical award can serve to the marketplace. At its purest an award can create a new demand, not based on structural market forces, but by pushing readers to consider something they wouldn’t have otherwise given a chance. If an award does it right, they can take a book that is daunting on its surface (intensely interior, plotless, long) and with care say to readers hey, actually…this is worth reading. If they choose right, readers will pick the book up, agree, and pass it along. And given that there are many Booker prize winners that I’ve done exactly that with, I look forward to gazing out into the endless void and reading Orbital and you should too.
