Prizing Debate: The Fourth Decade of the Booker Prize and the Contemporary Novel in the UK 9783839438534

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Contexts, or Debating the Prize
1. The Booker Prize as Problem under Academic Scrutiny
2. Attention and Participants’ Perspectives on Literary Interaction
3. The Booker and Public Attention: The History of the Booker as a History of Problems
Part II: Case Studies, or Prizing Debate
4. Leading the Booker Prize into the New Millennium
5. Literary Outsiders and Odd Titles: A New Era of the Booker Prize
6. 40 Years of Booker Choice: Between “Freshness” and “Literary Magic”
7. Beyond “the end of its natural ‘front list’ life”: The Booker and the Afterlife of Novels
Conclusion
Appendix
Works Cited: Academic Criticism
Works Cited: Journalistic and Other Sources

Citation preview

Anna Auguscik Prizing Debate

Anna Auguscik teaches English Literature at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. She is a postdoctoral fellow in the Fiction Meets Science research group. Her research interests include the novel in the literary marketplace, the history and current state of reviewing and criticism, and the relationship between literature and science.

Anna Auguscik

Prizing Debate The Fourth Decade of the Booker Prize and the Contemporary Novel in the UK

Zugl. Dissertation Universität Oldenburg, 2014.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: HerrSpecht / photocase.com Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3853-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3853-4

Contents

Acknowledgements | 7 Introduction | 9 Situating the Booker Prize in the Context of Literary Interaction | 10 Aims, Questions, Methodological Choices | 13 Structure, Scope, Selection of Texts | 18

P ART I: CONTEXTS, OR DEBATING THE P RIZE 1. The Booker Prize as Problem under Academic Scrutiny | 25

1.1 From Footnotes to Full Studies: Early Prize Commentary and the Sociology of Literature | 26 1.2 The Booker Prize as Inclusionary or Exclusionary Mechanism | 29 1.3 Bourdieu and Beyond: A New Objectivity in the 21st Century? | 35 1.4 Booker Prize Research: Examining Prize Culture in Context of Literary Interaction | 40 2. Attention and Participants’ Perspectives on Literary Interaction | 49

2.1 Judging a Book by Its Cover: The Reader’s Perspective | 50 2.2 Creating a Buzz for Retailers and Editors: The “Advance Reader’s” Perspective | 57 2.3 The Economy of Attention: Literary Prizes and other Multipliers | 66 2.4 Media Presence: Public Attention Profiles for Contemporary Literary Fiction in the UK | 74 3. The Booker and Public Attention: The History of the Booker as a History of Problems | 81

3.1 The Booker’s Intricate ‘Problematicness’, or How the Booker Garners Attention by Generating Problems | 83 3.2 The Booker and Literary Value, or the Prize as Short- and Long-Term Indicator of Quality | 92 3.3 Analytical Approaches for Case Studies: Positioning the Booker in a Novel’s Public and Critical Attention Profile | 100

P ART II: CASE STUDIES , OR PRIZING DEBATE 4. Leading the Booker Prize into the New Millennium | 119 4.1 Booker by Concession: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin | 123 4.2 Winning by Not Winning: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth | 142 4.3 “Long service, good conduct”? The 2000 Booker Prize | 167 5. Literary Outsiders and Odd Titles: A New Era of the Booker Prize | 179

5.1 Feigning Fiction? DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little | 183 5.2 A Crossover “Grand Slam”: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | 206 5.3 “A rite of passage”: The 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction | 230 6. 40 Years of Booker Choice: Between “Freshness” and “Literary Magic” | 245

6.1 A Rags-to-Riches Story: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger | 249 6.2 The Secret Flaw: Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture | 281 6.3 “Does it knock my socks off?” The 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction | 300 7. Beyond “the end of its natural ‘front list’ life”: The Booker and the Afterlife of Novels | 311

7.1 The Discursive Power of Problems: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008) | 312 7.2 Quality as a Question of Use: DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident (2003) | 315 7.3 History, or Which Novel Can Pass the Test of Time: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) | 319 Conclusion | 327 Appendix | 335 Works Cited: Academic Criticism | 359 Works Cited: Journalistic and Other Sources | 367

Acknowledgements

A revised version of chapter three was published as “The History of the Booker Prize as a History of Problems and Precarious Alliances” in Precarious Alliances: Cultures of Participation in Print and Other Media, eds. Martin Butler, Albrecht Hausmann and Anton Kirchhofer, Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. An early draft of chapter six was published as “Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger: Zwischen Repräsentanz und Kontroverse” in Medienobservationen (July 2011). Thanks to Anton Kirchhofer, Martin Butler and Claire Squires. Thanks to Maike Engelhardt, Lauren Freede, Michaela Koch, Michaela Keck, Christian Lassen, Cornelia Leune, Birte Lipinski, Megan Macdonald, Christina Meyer, Annika McPherson, Natalie Roxburgh, Olaf Simons and Daniel Sip. Thanks to the participants of the workshop on discourse analysis at the Department of English and American Studies; to the participants of the post-graduate colloquium at the School of Linguistics and Cultural Studies; and to the English Literature students at the University of Oldenburg. Thanks to the organizers of the workshop Gegenwart Kontrovers (Tanja Prokic, Frank Habermann, Anne Kolb, Christian Kirchmeier); to the editors of Literaturbetrieb: Zur Poetik einer Produktionsgemeinschaft (Philipp Theisohn, Christine Weder); and to the editors of The Institution of English Literature: Formation and Mediation (Barbara Schaff, Johannes Schlegel, Carola Surkamp). Thanks to Daniel, Jakob and Felix, and to both sets of (grand)parents.

Introduction

After winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2009 and repeating this rare feat in 2012, English writer Hilary Mantel was transformed from a quietly respected author with moderate sales to a literary star, one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. The Man Booker Prize, rewarded for the best novel of the year, was an immense catalyst in her career, her novels became international bestsellers and her name would henceforth appear alongside the likes of J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. The success of her books led to a renewed interest in historical novels – so much so that critics coined the term the “Mantel effect” to describe the recent buzz around historical fiction.1 Despite the sudden hype, however, it really took Mantel over 20 years to become an ‘overnight success’. This journey involved and required the cooperation and the efforts of many institutions and their representatives. After the publication of her first two novels in the mid-1980s, she became a critic and reviewer for The Spectator and other papers. By the end of the 1990s, Mantel was an author of eight novels, some of which were recognised with due praise by critics and prize juries. She was awarded the Cheltenham Prize for Literature in 1990, the Sunday Express Book of the Year in 1992, and UK’s oldest literary award, the Hawthornden Prize in 1996. In 2006, after the publication of a memoir, a collection of short stories, and another novel, Mantel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. That same year she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). When she was announced as the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for the first part of the historical trilogy set at the court of King Henry VIII, Mantel was far from an unknown entity to the literary establishment. By the time she was nominated in 2012, the betting agencies handled her as the clear favourite, and

1

Natalie Haynes, “Confessions of a Booker Judge”, The Independent 22 May 2013.

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when she finally triumphed, she became the first female writer and only one of four authors in total to be awarded the Man Booker twice. The Booker is not alone in ‘making authors’ and not all the impact it has on winners and nominees can be measured or predicted. The effect of the Booker Prize, as it was called from 1969 (the year it was first awarded) until 2002 when Man Group took over sponsorship, and as it continues to be known in literary circles, is both quantifiable and unquantifiable. On its website, the Booker promises “fortune”: sales, reprints of backlists, international rights, spin-offs and book tours. It also claims to guarantee “fame”: wide publicity, including TV coverage, radio broadcast and leading articles in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, both in news and books sections. But, as Booker history shows, all books involved are different, and the ensuing stories on them vary in relation to the assets later proclaimed indispensable to their success. Sometimes the decisive element is actions taken by a committed agent or an influential reviewer; at other times it is an innovative marketing strategy, the spiralling effect of word-of-mouth or a topical theme which hooks the desired audience at the right time. Looking back at a winner’s story, it is difficult to determine for sure how much a winning title owes its success to the Prize or to any particular individual and institutional backing it received. Indeed, and this shall be the premise of this book, it seems to be the mix of all involved that leads to a text’s ideal – if desired and even then rarely achieved – journey from manuscript to award-winning, critically acclaimed bestseller. The Booker’s impact, then, only seems ‘guaranteed’ when all the participants in the process cooperate – authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers alike.

S ITUATING THE B OOKER P RIZE IN THE C ONTEXT OF L ITERARY I NTERACTION The history of the Booker Prize has been written – not least by its own makers – as a history of individuals who created it and have fought for it since the mid1960’s, or alternatively, as a history of institutions and their representatives which were involved in its founding and rise to “the Commonwealth’s premier literary award”.2 I propose to understand the Booker Prize as a double entity, or one situated on two levels: while it acts and is called upon as one among other

2

Liam Hoare, “Why the Man Booker Prize Is More Necessary Than Ever”, The Daily Beast 15 Oct. 2012.

I NTRODUCTION | 11

participants in ‘literary interaction’, it also consists of individual representatives of these participants. On one level, the Booker functions as a participant in a range of discussions and, perhaps most easily detectably, on diverse written documents. It can be part of a book’s final layout as a strapline or sticker. In this function, it becomes one of many lures which draw the reader’s attention to the book as well as to themselves (similarly, the author’s name, for example, is visible on a book’s cover in both functions). But the Booker can also be visible on advance reader’s copies as one of many drawcards that publishers use to attract the attention of ‘advanced readers’, i.e. retailers and reviewers. Finally, and most crucially, it is part of the discourse on books which can be traced in the media. It is via these documents that the Booker is understood to be acting as an agent, as taking part in literary interaction. And it is via these documents that I propose to understand the Booker’s particular position in this interaction: it is through the act of addressing that the Prize becomes a participant. On the second level, the Booker consists of various interrelated components which, in turn, interact and draw on other participants. The administration of the Booker can be divided in three arms – a management body, an advisory body, and the annually changing body of judges – and each of them consists of figures with a mixture of personalities and of functions in literary interaction: publishers, booksellers, librarians, authors, critics and academics sit on these panels alongside politicians, businessmen and other public figures, and come to what is known as the Booker’s decisions. It is a crucial characteristic of the Prize that it combines the realm of finances and political networks with literary expertise, unites participants who are commonly viewed as part of literary communication (authors and critics), those who can be considered part of it (publishers, booksellers and librarians), and those who will be generally perceived to be on the outside (businessmen and politicians). This particular framework, paradoxically, makes for both the Booker’s perceived ‘problematicness’ and is what enables it to interact in debate as one participant alongside others. The Booker’s relationships with other participants in literary interaction have been problematic and, not rarely, have become the object of debate. Some decisions taken by the Booker have been interpreted as pandering to retailers, and its titles then perceived as being too conformist, too commercial. In other years, or just according to differing standards, the lists were described as too elitist, too scholarly, aimed too much at the ivory tower of critics in search of unreadable, if fashionable chic. Some authors – mostly the chosen few but others as well – have spoken out in its favour for the way it promotes fiction, triggers careers and recognises talent. Others have criticised it – and sometimes changed their minds

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when they were finally chosen in later years – for bringing too much attention to those who had already been in the limelight, for creating competition in a realm where the sports-like designation of winners and losers is not desired or even possible. Small publishers have been scathing towards the Booker for favouring the big conglomerates, while established publishers have complained that they could only send in two titles when several of the authors on their lists would easily have been eligible. The Prize has been pronounced too powerful, declared to exert too much pressure on the authors and the industry – even labelled to drive everyone “mad”.3 But every so often it is also judged to have lost its charm, to have become less influential, with new prizes allegedly taking its place as annual attention catalysts.4 The Booker’s predominance and its financial power, in particular, have been criticized, but its problematic relationships are nonetheless actively cultivated. Authors write novels which are eligible for this “best novel of the year” prize.5 Once nominated, they have to bear with the procedure of a competitive event while cameras are rolling and everyone reacts to winning or losing. Publishers send their ‘best’ books for judgment, and they are also required to invest further in the books they have already promoted. On top of their own marketing strategies, each participating publisher is asked “to contribute £5,000 towards general publicity if the book reaches the shortlist”, another £5,000 if they win, and have “no fewer than 1,000 copies of that title available in stock within 10 days of the announcement of the longlist”.6 Booksellers provide shop-window space, shelves and bargain-bins. They make 3-for-2 offers, install point-of-sale material and have staff wear promotional T-shirts. Journalists and critics cover the occasion of the dinner ceremony and accompany the annual process from the selection of the judges to the narrowing down of nominees into a longlist, shortlist and a final winner with interviews, reviews and features on TV and radio and in regional, national and international papers as well as in magazines and scholarly publications. Making the Booker shortlist serves as more than a ‘double publication’: the chosen books enjoy another wave of attention in the media and their discussion is extended to a debate about the Prize. Readers take interest in the Booker – as a consumer guide, as a measure of quality and as a topic for dinner parties.

3

Julian Barnes, “Diary”, LRB 9.20 (1987): 21.

4

Cf. Ellie Cheele, “The Booker Prize: Scandal, Controversy and Marketing Tool”, The

5

Nigel Reynolds, “Curious Tale About Dog Wins Prize by a Whisker”, The Telegraph

6

“Entering the Awards”, The Man Booker Prizes.

Journal of Publishing Culture (Apr. 2013). 28 Jan. 2004.

I NTRODUCTION | 13

They can even participate actively in the process by placing bets on their favourite authors and novels. All these participants are united by an interest in literature and interact with others to forward their own, as well as the interest of literature itself (though what that might imply will, of course, differ). The Booker seems to make debate valuable and to lend itself to use by other participants who can combine their interests with those of the Prize.

AIMS , Q UESTIONS , M ETHODOLOGICAL C HOICES Literary interaction is based on debate, and the Booker Prize offers itself for discussion as much as it calls for conversation about the chosen novels by presenting itself as a problem. For my analysis of the Booker’s double role as object and subject of debate, I chose a discourse analytical approach. The interdependence among the participants and their diverse but co-existing perspectives on the Booker becomes the focus of attention when one specifically asks who invests (money, prestige, attention) in Booker-eligible novels and how and in what ways these investments function. It is the aim of the present study to look closely at exactly these negotiations, those who participate in them, and the contexts in which they take place. In other words: this inquiry asks how the Prize and its influence on a particular novel or on literature in general are discussed with regard to both the speaker’s position as an author, a publisher, a reviewer, an academic or a prize judge and the particular settings in which these people make their observations: at a book reading, on the book’s cover, in a review or critical essay, or in a laudation at the gala ceremony. My conceptualisation of the different perspectives on the Booker as ‘subject positions’ and the interest in ‘the setting in which subjects speak’ is informed by and based on a particular understanding of what is commonly referred to as ‘discourse analysis’ in the sense of Michel Foucault, who provides a theoretical and terminological framework which lends itself for the evaluation of statements made in debates on the Booker Prize. In his Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault argues that, in order to understand any form of statement, “we must first discover the law operating behind” it and “the place from which [it] come[s]”.7 First we have to ask “who is speaking”, secondly we “must also describe the institutional sites” from which discourse is made, and thirdly we must bear in mind

7

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London, New York: Routledge, 2002): 55.

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that “[t]he positions of the subject are also defined by the situation that it is possible for him to occupy in relation to the various domains or groups of objects”.8 According to Foucault, then, discourse analysis not only entails finding out what is spoken about but also who speaks, in which subject position, and in which setting.9 Based on a range of case studies, I examine the influence the Booker has on the chosen novels, or, to be more precise, on how these novels are spoken about in the documents mentioned above with an emphasis on their media coverage in national newspapers, literary, trade and other specialist magazines, as well as academic journals. For this, I draw on the four principles of reversal, discontinuity, specificity and exteriority that Foucault outlined in his 1972 inaugural lecture, L’ordre du discours.10 The distribution of attention in the various media constitutes what I call a novel’s ‘public and critical profiles’, i.e. the sum of statements made in a novel’s media coverage in chronological order. The creation of a novel’s profile – a list of who says what and in which context about this particular novel – facilitates an analysis of their presence in the debate according to the four principles and helps understand the changes and adjustments to the discussion during a book’s ‘life cycle’. Novels are spoken about in different settings and need to be understood in the context in which they are given attention (exteriority). Each novel and its profile are thus highly specific, and neither the public’s reaction to Bookerwinning books nor the Prize’s influence on a novel’s further trajectory is the

8

Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 54-58.

9

I have chosen a methodological strategy – discourse analysis – that has been understood in various ways in academic discourse, cf. Anton Kirchhofer, “The Foucault Complex: A Review of Foucauldian Approaches in Literary Studies”, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 45.4 (1997). It has been accepted for a long time that Foucault himself not only gave different definitions of the approach in his writing but also did not stick to one homogenous method throughout his oeuvre, cf. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983): xi. The focus of my analysis of discourses about the Booker and the Prize’s influence on literary interaction rests on a particular understanding of discourse analysis and the mechanics of power. For the purposes of this study, I will depend mostly upon Michel Foucault’s reflections in The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge for the latter and The Order of Discourse for the interest in the former.

10 Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language”, Critical Theory since 1985, eds. Hazard Adams and Leeroy Searle (Talahassee: Florida State UP, 1986): 158.

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same (specificity). A novel presents itself differently to an informed reader before or after it has been honoured with a prize (discontinuity). In fact, a book which was awarded the Booker is not the same book it was before it was thus distinguished: instead, it becomes a Booker book. To exaggerate the point and to employ what Foucault has spoken of as the principle of reversal: the Booker Prize is not awarded to the “best novel” – it creates a “best novel” by facilitating a space for debate. In each case study, therefore, the media coverage of the selected title, an analysis of which is the basis for the creation of its individual profile, is organised according to the different publications that enable participants to speak about the novel. I distinguish between statements made in journalistic (general, trade and specific newspapers and magazines), essayistic (literary magazines) and academic criticism (journals and other academic publications). When speakers make publically available observations about the Booker or a Booker book – for example, in an interview or comment in a newspaper – they will be aware of that publication’s readership. This knowledge informs the statements made in general newspapers, literary journals or specialist magazines. Such statements made by the different speakers are part of a series of events, but they need to be considered as discontinuous depending on when they are made in the chronology of a book’s profile. They are also specific insofar as they could be read differently in different contexts. This means that when reading a piece of criticism, one needs to understand at which moment of the novel’s ‘life cycle’ it is made, at which moment it joins the debate about that novel, and how it positions itself in contrast to or in accord with other statements about the novel. For example, UK reviewers will encounter a debut novel published in the UK as a relatively unknown quantity, but if the same novel wins a major prize (say, the Booker) and is then published in the US, the US reviewers will have a different novel at hand: no longer a dark horse, it will be treated with all its newlyacquired importance as a distinguished book from across the Atlantic. Thus any statement made about this book will have to be viewed in light of when it was made and which other statement it follows. Finally, the criteria under which a novel is evaluated also need to be considered according to their discontinuity and specificity: which questions are directed at the object of a given statement and which reasons are given for speaking about it? Similarly, before one can consider the Booker’s influence on the novels’ profiles, and in accordance with Foucault’s principles, the Prize itself will have to be described from ‘without’, not confined to available histories but from the various conflicting perspectives that contribute to it, its rules and its subject positions. The respective Booker years will be considered as separate instances given

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all their discontinuities (for example, the annually changing jury), while the relationships between a year’s nominated titles will have to be considered in their specific degree of comparability and rivalry. The choice in favour of discourse analysis differentiates this study from most previous scholarship on literary prizes, which largely draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach and his theory of the literary field. The heuristic decision to consult a discourse analytical approach is in no way a rejection of Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of agents, their social position, and their diverse forms of capital. In fact, prize research is almost unthinkable without Bourdieu’s concepts, particularly the different forms of capital (economic, social, cultural and symbolic) and their conversions, as well as the idea of exerting power through symbolic violence. His reflections on ‘the field of cultural production’, ‘the market of symbolic goods’ and ‘the rules of art’ create the basis for what is the most influential approach to the interdisciplinary study of literary prizes and other instruments of literary consecration. The comparably young sub-field of Booker Prize research includes perspectives from sociologists, economists, political theorists, postcolonial and Marxist scholars, as well as researchers in publishing studies and the history of the book. Bourdieu’s theories inform almost all academic studies on the Booker Prize, including those combining his perspective with a criticism of the market and/or that borrow from his concepts but add other ideas, stating the need to adapt his theories so that they might fit a more contemporary (rather than nineteenthcentury), Anglophone (rather than Francophone) field. Yet although so many of these existing studies use Bourdieu’s concepts, not all of them do, and in order to incorporate those that do and those that do not, in order to describe the ‘constellation’ of different but co-existing perspectives, including non-academic perspectives by publishers, booksellers, reviewers, politicians etc., the methodological tool which most effectively allows me to describe this constellation of speakers, their subject positions, the settings in which they speak, which terms they use, and what it is that they say about the novels and the Booker’s involvement in the books’ life cycles is discourse analysis. My choice of methodology is further motivated by an advantage it provides beyond the ability to focus my analysis on the Booker’s position among other participants and their respective subject positions. It also enables an analysis that does not proceed on the assumption of the top-bottom idea of power.11 In the

11 Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978): 94: “Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the

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first volume of the History of Sexuality, Foucault defines “power relations as both intentional and nonsubjective”.12 This reflection seems particularly crucial in a study of a subject position which is – as mentioned above – no homogenous subject: the Booker, while it is often designated as a fellow participant, is also the sum of many speakers, some of whom accompany the administration of the Prize for years or decades, while others change with each Booker year. Moreover, they come from a variety of backgrounds and represent a rich mix of personalities and functions, and although they may be part of one cause at a particular moment, they will also have their own agendas.13 Earlier studies, adopting a sociological approach with a ‘top-down’ notion of power, provide an important foundation for understanding much of the critique of literary prizes.14 However, later Booker scholarship has begun to question the top-bottom idea of power and welcomed the notion of interdependent relationships with other participants. These studies have used Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field and, extending Bourdieu’s question of how meaning enters the work of art as cultural capital, they have coined specific terms describing the media’s interest or academia’s investment.15 Recent scholars have also added other theories and models to suit a contemporary twentieth-century context and to combine their specific interests, such as the position of literature in a period of globalisation or the marketing of literature, with Bourdieu’s theory. I am indebted to these later accounts, as they understand the Booker’s involvement in liter-

root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix – no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body.” For a detailed study of Foucault’s understanding of power, cf. Paul A. Bové, “Power and Freedom”, In the Wake of Theory, ed. Paul A. Bové (Hanover, London: Wesleyan UP, 1992). 12 Foucault, The History of Sexuality. 94. 13 I follow the established practice of treating the Booker as a quasi-subject but, to be consistent with my method, I will depict the mechanisms of local tactics and “antagonism of strategies”, cf. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983): 211. 14 Cf. esp. Sharon Norris, “‘Simply the Best (Better Than All the Rest?)’: An Investigation into the Booker Prize, 1980-1989, with Particular Regard to the General Rise in Business Sponsorship of Literary Awards During the Eighties, and the Likely Effects of the Booker on Fiction”, Dissertation, U of Glasgow, 1995. 15 Cf. James F. English’s coinage of the term “journalistic capital” and Claire Squires’s concept of “scholarly capital” (cf. also chapter 1.4).

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ary interaction as a relationship of interdependence rather than as a hierarchical process. Through my analysis, what emerges is a situation where each individual involved in the process has the choice to acknowledge or resist the Booker’s decision but that they take a risk if they do not participate. Their negligence can prove risky if as critics they do not discuss the Prize; if as publishers they do not put forward their titles; or if as readers they miss out on taking part in a potentially historical debate. Individual participants risk irrelevance in a system which is (potentially) productive: a system of appreciation which raises the reputation of anyone who risks joining. By building on previous research of the Booker and its interdependent relationships with other participants, therefore, and by focusing on the mechanisms of debate, I hope to capture the process of participation in these institutional constellations of power.

S TRUCTURE , S COPE , S ELECTION

OF

T EXTS

The methodological approach depicted above gives rise to a two-part structure. In the first part, based on written accounts by industry experts and prize theoreticians, this study explores the functions of each participant in literary debates, their particular perspectives and their relationships with other, at times competing individuals and institutions, and the role of the Booker in this interaction: as problem calling for reactions. In the second part, based on individual case studies of six books in three selected years of the first decade of the twenty-first century (2000, 2003 and 2008), this study asks how novels come to be part of public debate; and how their public and critical profile is changed by the attention which is bestowed upon them with the nomination and selection for the Booker, and as a consequence of the consideration of literary editors, reviewers and critics. In short, this study examines the interplay between nomination and awarding of the Booker Prize, on the one hand, and the presence of novels on a ‘market of debates’ on the other. The first part of the study, then, provides three different kinds of contexts for this study of the Booker Prize in its fourth decade of existence: (1) it embeds this study of the Booker Prize and its impact on a novel’s media presence in an already existing academic discourse on the problems presented by literary prizes in general and the Booker in particular; (2) it considers the Booker Prize as an agent in literary interaction in terms of interconnected effects with other active participants such as authors, publishers, retailers, critics and readers, all of whose subject positions and settings are exemplified by means of different materials which they use for their communication; (3) it provides a short history of the

I NTRODUCTION | 19

Booker Prize and reconstructs its particular subject positions which will then serve as a background for the case studies in the second part of the study. This last section also demonstrates the way the Prize produces problems that entice public participation and transform discussions of literary quality (short-term), thus having an impact on literary history as a whole (long-term). The first chapter looks at literary awards and the Booker Prize in particular as an object of study in academia. It asks how scholars discuss the Prize – in which subject positions and in which settings – and argues in favour of considering academic responses as part of literary interaction rather than something outside of it. Since the late 1980s, the Prize has been taken seriously and examined as a central agent in the sociology, economy, and politics of literature as well as in cultural and literary studies. Four main phases of prize research can be identified: early commentary up to the 1980s, sociological studies with a peak in the mid- to late-1980s, a problematisation of prizes, including the Booker, by literary and cultural studies from the mid-1990s, and an objectification and quantification of the Booker in the twenty-first century. This study’s preliminary agenda is an analysis of the Prize’s relationship with other participants in literary interaction, mainly those involved in literary criticism. It focuses on the issues of problems, quality and history. These are based on questions which have been posed by other researchers in the field of literary studies: the Booker’s relationship with the media or criticism and its potential for scandal (problems), its participation in debates of literary value (quality), and its role in canon formation (history). The second chapter describes the territory in which the participants act, communicate and represent their varied interests. It depicts the different positions these participants take and their awareness of other, at times competing, agents. It also shows how certain decisions are influenced by the presence and actions of others. While it is true that a novel as a material product has to undergo a certain linear process of production, distribution and reception, this chapter takes the complex network of participants and their role in ‘building a novel’ as a starting point in order to portray their form of interaction as neither linear nor circular, but interwoven. Most of all, the chapter’s aim is to test the notion of a flexible field which presents itself differently to different participants through their perspectives. The third chapter develops the notion of participants who are reciprocally aware of and observe each other and focuses on the historical development of the Booker’s relationships with other instances of literary interaction. The state of mutual observation leads to cycles of attention. Attention from other participants is best triggered by offering them problems, which they do not necessarily have

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to solve, but which they can debate, and which they can ideally combine with their own agendas. Participants need to raise, partake in, and enhance debates which will then be taken up by others. This chapter presents the Booker as a particularly well-adapted subject position in instigating debates, even controversies, as its history, and its success can be traced to a continuous production of problems and sometimes ‘precarious alliances’. It also tests two particular kinds of problems which the Booker has less triggered than used for debates about literary fiction: (1) quality – from the different definitions of literary value to the different sorts of use which certain representatives of other institutions find for the Booker and its titles; and (2) history – from the Booker’s interest in writing its own history to its influence on future literary history, i.e. canon formation. The Prize participates in the definition and construction of literary vs. genre fiction, and it further participates in a competition for legitimacy to predict which novels, authors, and debates will win the test of time, or be relevant in the next 5, 10 or 50 years. Lastly, the reflections on the Booker’s relationships with other participants and its role in settling questions of literary value and the literary canon will form a basis for discussing questions of the Booker and its power to exert influence. The second part of the study asks what difference the Booker Prize makes in the public and critical attention pattern of selected novels and in their debates. It consists of case studies which gauge the short- and long-term profiles of six novels which were chosen bearing in mind the aspect of competition in literary interaction and the status of the authors. The main two categories of writers consist of established authors on the one hand and debut authors on the other, though this division is not exhaustive since there is also a third category of what I will call ‘odd’ writers who challenge the other two with their mostly one-off success stories.16 Each chapter of the case studies for the years 2000, 2003 and 2008 presents both the respective winner of the Booker Prize and a rival which was discussed in the course of media coverage and subsequently played a decisive role in the media’s interest for the Whitbread (Costa) Book Awards – itself a rival institution to the Booker Prize. Chapter four describes the competition between an established and a newcomer author and their two millennial novels: Margaret Atwood’s Booker-winning The Blind Assassin and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a Whitbread First Novel book. Chapter five traces the profiles of a pair which was more explicitly treated as a couple of rivals in media coverage. In 2003, DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog

16 The criteria for the selection of novels – relationships of rivalry and status in the marketplace – will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3.3.

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in the Night-Time first competed for the Booker Prize and later for the Whitbread Book Awards. Chapter six revisits the established vs. newcomer constellation in reversed order. In 2008, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture came second in the race for the Booker behind Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, but was then ‘consoled’ with the title of Costa (former Whitbread) Book of the Year in 2009. Each case study describes the specific profiles of the given novels, contrasts their respective rivals in their ability to offer problems for debate, and then reevaluates that particular year from the perspective of the Booker Prize. The profiles can be organised into several phases of critical and public attention. The intensity of the phase of Booker-induced coverage will depend on the length and dynamic of the other phases. In addition to changing the profile of a novel, the Booker also exerts influence on the quality of the discussion and the issues which are raised in relation to a novel. Problems of authenticity, legitimacy and literary value become particularly vital when the novels are discussed as Booker winners, nominees or even as novels which missed out on that year’s Prize cycle. The individual mix of questions which the novels offer for debate, the Booker’s current situation, and the narratives which can be added to the discussion based on former winners, decisions and problems, creates the specific short- and longterm attention profile of the novels. The three longer case studies in chapters 4, 5 and 6 take a short-term perspective and focus on the first 1-2 years of the novel’s ‘life cycle’ and how it is mediated in the press, while the seventh chapter gives a first glance at what a long-term perspective might look like and what happens when academic criticism enters the debate. In Prizing Debate in Literary Interaction: The Fourth Decade of the Booker Prize and the Contemporary Novel in the UK I have chosen to use a focused and specific period in the Prize’s history to highlight its relationships with other participants and to analyse the mechanisms by which it becomes the object of debates (Part I: Contexts, or Debating the Prize) and through which it recognises novels triggering debates (Part II: Case Studies, or Prizing Debate). By using discourse analysis as a method, this study places the focus on the waves and patterns of public attention directed at contemporary novels published in the UK in the first decade of the twenty-first century in order to examine both the Booker’s impact on these reactions and the relationships with other participants in literary interaction which allow the Prize to exert such influence. Together, the two parts offer different perspectives on the functions of the Booker Prize in literary interaction: (1) which difference does the Booker make for novels that were rewarded, nominated or simply discussed in relation to the Prize, and (2) what is the relationship between (a) the discussion of this influence which the Prize exerts and (b) the critical debate on these novels?

Part I: Contexts, or Debating the Prize It is at the dinner, with the cameras trained, that the announcement of the winner is finally issued – whereupon the debate re-opens in the media, and the wrangling already begins over who might win, perhaps, next year. GRAHAM HUGGAN, THE POSTCOLONIAL EXOTIC, 2001. Perhaps we should decide how seriously to take any one of them [literary prizes] based on whether it seeks to start a conversation or to end one. GARTH RISK HALLBERG, THE MILLIONS, 2010.

The first part of this study seeks to prepare an analysis of the mechanisms of ‘prizing debate’ by taking a closer look at the Booker as object of and partner in debate. In a way, the Booker Prize seeks “to end” a conversation by delivering an absolutist judgment, by selecting a book and ascribing the title of “the best novel of the year”. But such preliminary ‘end’ to the conversation does not function as a once-and-for-all resolution. Instead, the announcement of the winner works as an invitation for other participants – publishers, booksellers, critics, readers – to discuss the ruling. The conversation works through their interaction and negotiation of whether or not the decision was right or wrong. And it is part of a longer history of the Prize and its winners. The Booker thus can be said to “start” a conversation on both a short- and long-term basis: not only is every year’s cycle from the announcement of the jury, the longlist, shortlist, and winner discussed but there will also be another winner the following year, and the coming problems and opportunities will always be viewed in the light or shadow of past decisions. As soon as one year’s decision has been made, the new panel

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of judges is announced and a new decision process begins, “the debate re-opens in the media”. Significantly, the Booker’s involvement in the debate of books also calls on other participants to debate the Prize. As an object of academic scrutiny, the Booker only gained prominence in the 1990s but it has ever since inspired multidisciplinary studies which take positions and which aim at positioning the Prize in wider contexts: changes in the literary marketplace, struggles for cultural autonomy in the literary field, as well as contemporary and historical geo-political constellations (chapter 1). As part of literary interaction among participants who are aware of each other, the Booker is also an object of discussion between authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, readers and critics (chapter 2). The Prize’s own representatives produce reasons for its success and strive to position it in a prolific field of literary prizes, in a wider culture of literary appreciation, and through its diverse relationships with participants from an alleged ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of literary communication (chapter 3). It is only through understanding other participants’ perspectives, those involved in ‘debating the prize’, that we can grasp the influence which the Prize has on the discussion about individual novels and the mechanisms of ‘prizing debate’.

1. The Booker Prize as Problem under Academic Scrutiny

Although the invention of modern literary prizes can be traced back to the early twentieth century, academic responses to this global phenomenon have been comparatively scarce until the early twenty-first century. For the purpose of this study I differentiate between four phases of prize research: (1) early descriptions debating the pros and cons of prizes (until the 1980s), (2) sociological studies of the literary field and its participants including literary prizes (mostly in the 1980s), (3) research which problematizes prizes from diverse perspectives such as postcolonial, gender, Marxist (from the mid-1990s), and (4) research which seeks to provide insights to prizes based on sociological studies while focusing on the specifics of prize culture (from the turn of the century on). In the following, I will give a short overview of the first two phases, which can be discussed together as they do not, for the most part, relate specifically to the Booker Prize, and then proceed to examine the latter two in more detail, as these will be most relevant to the prize at the centre of this study – a subject which has only been of interest to academia since the mid-1990s onwards. These phases, as the research presented on each one suggests, are not rigid and they will, of course, overlap at times. They are neither temporally enclosed nor hierarchical in nature: to the contrary, the main representatives have been selected precisely because their insight, even their line of argument, is continued and used in today’s contributions. Nevertheless, this somewhat static grid will be helpful in order to mark the differences in perspective directed at the Booker from various disciplines; to understand the scope in which the Prize – or parts of it, or in fact the Prize as part of a bigger system – has been studied; and to establish a context for self-reflection. In order to contextualise this study’s interest in the Booker Prize as part of literary interaction, and to trace proposed ways of describing the Booker’s relationships with other participants, prior prize studies have been examined on the basis of the following questions: How are prizes generally positioned and which relation-

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ships are they said to entertain with other participants in the literary marketplace as well as with other prizes? What is their impact on sales, on fiction writing, on canon formation? And what is the nature of this impact (money, prestige, attention)? What is their main function? Finally, how can their success (or failure) be measured?

1.1 F ROM F OOTNOTES TO F ULL S TUDIES : E ARLY P RIZE C OMMENTARY AND THE S OCIOLOGY OF L ITERATURE Early academic responses to literary prizes began forming in the 1930s and focused on two topics: (1) the arrival of the modern literary prize as a new literary institution in the twentieth century, and (2) its uncertain, even uncanny position among other literary institutions. Literary and book scholars compiled lists of award winners and combined these with short, dictionary-like descriptions of the respective prizes, which was conducive to keeping track of their perceived expansion.1 In order to debate prizes’ position in the field, their relationships with other participants, and their overall advantages and disadvantages to a mix of these participants, scholars also gathered voices from the literary world, drew up lists of arguments for and against literary prizes, and reached conclusions in either direction based on these testimonies as well as on the quality of the lists of winners.2 Today such arguments in favour of and against prizes are quite common in journalistic prize commentary, but some of the early reflections on prizes – their relations with other representatives of the industry, the element of competitiveness and the question of whether they further the cause of literature, as well as their significance in shaping literary value and canon formation – have also influenced how awards are regarded in academia and the readiness (or, for

1

Cf. Bessie Graham, Famous Literary Prizes and Their Winners, ed. Jessie H. Murray (New York: Bowker, 1935); Fred B. Millett, “Literary Prize Winners”, English Journal 24.4 (1935): 269-82; Duke Rank, “Major Literary Prizes: 1945-63”, College English 25.2 (1963); Ian Marshall, “Literary Prizes”, British Novelists, 1930-1959: Part 2: M-Z, ed. Bernard Oldsey, Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1983).

2

Cf. Richard G. Lillard, “Competing for a Literary Prize?”, Saturday Review of Literature 28 (4 Aug. 1945); Stephen Rubin, “Literary Prizes: All That Glory Is Not Gold”, Book World 2 Aug. 1981; Lawrence Sail, “Good, Better, Best”, PN Review 21.6 (1995).

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much of the twentieth century, the lack of it) to seriously engage with the culture of literary prizes. Prizes were only established as a serious object of analysis via sociological studies of the literary field and its institutions. So naturally did the prize align itself with other participants in the field that Pierre Bourdieu needed mostly to do little more than treat the subject in brackets and footnotes.3 Based on his analysis of the nineteenth-century French literary field, Bourdieu saw prizes as a bourgeois form of recognition, equivalent to academy places, which were bestowed upon both mass-market writers and leading avant-gardists, as well as a form of co-optation which consecrates the awardee according to the degree of the prestige of the awarding institution. The benign inclusion of the prize analogous to reviews, anthologies and literary histories, had a far-reaching effect on later studies. In the second half of the 1980s, studies in and around the sociological journal Poetics drew from earlier findings on prizes and their function, particularly those of Bourdieu. Prize juries were identified as one of many institutions “moulding the taste of readers” such as “schools and universities, literary criticism, public libraries”.4 Prizes were understood to be one of several specific attributes and considerations, which also included the “attention in the media” and “name of publishing house”, which buyers took into account in deciding which books to purchase.5 Both lines of sociological investigation – the abstract location of prizes in relation to other agents and their workings in practice, i.e. their influence on consumers’ choices – form a basis for some of the more extensive research on literary prizes by sociologists whose interest focused on individual parts of the institution of the prize. Wouter de Nooy examined the conditions of empanelling judges for literary prizes according to literary seniority and versatility, active practice of literary criticism and administrative experience,6 as well as the implications of such hierarchies for a prize and its standing, which is thus mirrored in

3

Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, Or: The Economic World Reversed”, Poetics 12 (1983): 339; and Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods”, Poetics 14 (1985): 13, FN 23.

4

Hugo Verdaasdonk, “Effects of Acquired Readership and Reviewers’ Attention on the Sales of New Literary Works”, Poetics 16.3-4 (1987): 237.

5

Susanne Janssen and Hein Leemans, “Differences in Consumer Behavior between

6

Wouter de Nooy, “Gentlemen of the Jury …: The Features of Experts Awarding

Buyers of Literature”, Poetics 17.6 (1988): 573. Literary Prizes”, Poetics 17.6 (1988): 543.

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the careers of authors who were first awarded lower-ranked prizes before being nominated for prizes for their collected works.7 Since the late 1970s, with a peak in the 1980s and to this day, sociologists of literature have come to understand prizes as important “instruments of consecration” whose effects in the literary field can and should be measured as well as compared to other institutions.8 On the one hand, prizes have been perceived as part of the production of symbolic capital. There is a close kinship between prizes and other institutions which attribute (symbolic) value to writers and their works, first and foremost literary criticism.9 On the other, prizes have been placed within the circle of economic considerations. In order to control the risk of uncertainty, publishers need to both overproduce and control book distribution at the same time, and for this, they need “intermediaries” such as the literary prize.10 These insights from the perspective of the sociology of literature, though on prizes in general rather than the Booker, have influenced almost all full-length studies of the Booker Prize. These range from Sharon Norris’s unpublished PhD dissertation (1995) to Richard Todd’s first published monograph on the Booker and its socio-political background (1996), Graham Huggan’s postcolonial criticism of the Prize (2001) and Luke Strongman’s examination of the post-imperial and post-colonial Booker novel (2002), James F. English’s comprehensive history and theory of prize culture (2005), Claire Squires’ inquiry into late twentiethand early twenty-first-century ‘literary fiction’ market (2007) and Gillian Roberts’ analysis of prizes and (Canadian) national identity (2011). These monographs are part of a third and fourth phase of general prize research and will sub-

7

Cf. Wouter de Nooy, “Literary Prizes: Their Role in the Making of Children’s Literature”, Poetics 18 (1989). For further research on judges and judging panels, cf. John Street, “Luck, Power, Corruption, Democracy? Judging Arts Prizes”, Cultural Politics 1.2 (2005); and John Street, “Showbusiness of a Serious Kind: A Cultural Politics of the Arts Prize”, Media, Culture & Society 27 (2005).

8

Gisèle Sapiro, “The Literary Field between the State and the Market”, Poetics 31 (2003): 445. Cf. also Priscilla P. Clark, “Literary Culture in France and the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 84.5 (1979): 1057-77; de Nooy, “Gentlemen”; and de Nooy, “Literary Prizes”.

9

Cf. de Nooy, “Literary Prizes” 199-201. For further sociological work on intermediary institutions, cf. e.g. Nel Van Dijk, “Neither the Top nor the Literary Fringe: The Careers and Reputations of Middle Group Authors,” Poetics 26 (1999): 405-421, esp. 407.

10 Sapiro, “The Literary Field between the State and the Market” 452.

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sequently be presented in more detail and with specific references to their respective approaches.

1.2 T HE B OOKER P RIZE AS I NCLUSIONARY OR E XCLUSIONARY M ECHANISM If the first phase of prize commentary was influenced by the notable expansion of prizes in the first half of the twentieth century, both the second phase of sociological reflection on literary prizes in general in the late 1980s as well as a third phase of literary and cultural reflection around the mid-1990s can be linked to the sudden and much wider proliferation of literary prizes in the 1980s. As they grew in visibility and importance prizes came to be debated as inclusionary or exclusionary mechanisms with implications which went far beyond the annual maelstrom of attention. Their power was now seen in the subsequent increase in short-term sales, but it also extended to, at least medium-term, canon formation and influenced discussions on taste and literary value, even the writing of fiction itself. It is in this phase, in the mid-1990s, that literary and cultural studies as a field began to be interested in literary prizes and the Booker Prize has been a prominent object of this interest. A first set of critiques of the Booker in this respect was voiced from the perspective of postcolonial criticism. Most significantly, Graham Huggan questioned the Booker’s practice of including Commonwealth writers but excluding Commonwealth writing industries. A second set of critiques was formulated as market criticism. Sharon Norris examined how the Booker excluded particular themes and regional writers as well as experimental fiction in favour of praising that which had already been included by the literary establishment all along due to its corporate sponsorship and social interconnections between judges and shortlisted authors. While acknowledging these flaws, the literary critic Richard Todd took a more forgiving stance, taking the problematic aspects of the Booker seriously but choosing a more optimistic approach and writing a history of the Prize as part of the changes in the book trade of the 1980s and its influence on the opening up of literature written in English. The Booker’s immense success in the 1980s, its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1993, and its own reflection in the same year on its winning titles with the celebratory Booker of Bookers which was awarded to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children provided Graham Huggan with “a useful opportunity to reflect upon

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the glamorous world of literary prizes”.11 The first stage of contributions from literary studies to the academic interest in the Booker would later culminate in his book-length study of the Prize in 2001, as well as further research into the Booker from a postcolonial perspective. In his early essay, Huggan examines the “checkered history” behind the Booker Prize and its sponsors against the backdrop of the exploitation of postcolonial literature for marketing purposes.12 He sees all parties included in producing and consuming postcolonial products as operating in an intricate space of complicity: publishers, academics, even the writers themselves, and, of course, allegedly international awards such as the Booker Prize. He argues that the Booker’s interest in stories about the Empire is not, as has been presented by other commentators, a form of proof for “the internationalization of English literature” but is in fact, “a source of marketable ‘otherness’”.13 The Booker assumes “the rights of patronage”, the right to “determine what carries ‘intrinsic’ value” and mediates the metropolitan taste of “white male judges”.14 Their tastes lie with novels which mostly “deal with Empire” and which, as the example of Rushdie’s success with Midnight’s Children shows, lend themselves to “the Booker’s glossy multicultural criteria”.15 The Booker can usurp sovereignty on behalf of “the power of corporate publishing” and “media hoopla”.16 After all, with a prize which embraces the talent of writers from the periphery but is restricted to books published in the UK, it is the publishing industry in the centre which profits from the trade. In his later research, Huggan builds upon the distinction between postcolonialism as assigning value to the ‘other’ and postcoloniality as the attempt to capitalise on the assigned value but expands the argument about the Booker’s complicity in commodifying the exotic by introducing a sociological perspective to postcolonial literature. The Booker, he argues, occupies a “site of struggle [between these two regimes of value], casting a generously pluralist light on contemporary English language literature, but operating at the same time within a narrowly profit-driven corporate framework”.17 In his 2001 monograph, The

11 Graham Huggan, “The Postcolonial Exotic: Salman Rushdie and the Booker of Bookers”, Transition 64 (1994): 22. 12 Huggan, “The Postcolonial Exotic” 24. 13 Huggan, “The Postcolonial Exotic” 29. 14 Huggan, “The Postcolonial Exotic” 25. 15 Huggan, “The Postcolonial Exotic” 26, 28. 16 Huggan, “The Postcolonial Exotic” 22. 17 Graham Huggan, “Prizing ‘Otherness’: A Short History of the Booker”, Studies in the Novel 29.3 (1997): 428.

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Postcolonial Exotic, Huggan’s critical perspective on the Booker as questionable agent in the literary field with negative consequences for postcolonial literature becomes part of a much wider, global argument for “the inextricable connection between the production of ‘the postcolonial’ and the globalisation of consumer society”.18 Huggan’s critique of the Booker Prize is part of a wider postcolonial scrutiny of prize culture in general and the Booker in particular. It is undeniable that many Booker winners tackle the topic of the British Empire and the history of Britain and the Commonwealth. By 1994, Huggan himself had counted that “of the twenty-seven Booker prize winners to date (in 1974 the prize was shared), no fewer than seventeen deal with Empire”.19 This early observation was taken up most prominently by Luke Strongman, whose monograph is an examination of the history of the Booker Prize and its interest in post-imperial and post-colonial fictions which negotiate “the changing relations among nations, tribes and cultures in the aftermath of empire”.20 The constellation of the Booker as a state-ofthe-empire Prize also presented the Commonwealth nations with the problem of how to react to the ambivalent accolades of the mother country.21

18 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001): 263. 19 Huggan, “The Postcolonial Exotic” 26. Huggan observes “a conservatism brought out in approaches to the prizewinning novels’ themes” and considers the Booker’s interest in “revisionist history” part of such conservatism (The Postcolonial Exotic 111). 20 Luke Strongman, The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire, Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English 54 (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2002): 237. 21 Cf. Paula Burnett, “Hegemony or Pluralism? The Literary Prize and the Post-Colonial Project in the Caribbean”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 16.1 (1993). Canadian fiction has invited much interest for its recent international recognition, esp. in relation to literary prizes. Gillian Roberts examined “the workings of this ‘golden age’ of international celebration, circulation, and commodification” in relation to the national identity of Canadian authors and their texts, cf. Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011). For further studies of Canadian fiction and literary prizes, cf. also Christine Evain, “‘Whatever the Trick Is, You Have It’: International Marketing of Canadian-Authored Books in Relation to Commonwealth Literary Prizes”, Pre- and Post-Publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English, eds. Vanessa Guignery and François Gallix (Paris: Éditions Publibook Université, 2007); Jennifer Scott and Myka TuckerAbramson, “Banking on a Prize: Multicultural Capitalism and the Canadian Literary

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There is a parallel development and close relationship between prize proliferation and the institutionalisation of postcolonial literatures in English.22 Many anthologies of or introductions to postcolonial literature refer to the Booker Prize and analyse its effects on selected authors and their works.23 Because of this proximity, postcolonial critics have often questioned the complicity of prizes in “the politics of the exotic”.24 Although many see this combined effort to push postcolonial writers negatively,25 and there are indeed cases in which “token” authors only remain in the spotlight for a short time, some postcolonial authors are said to have had a lasting effect by shifting both the aesthetic and commercial reception of literature, and by challenging and opening up the more traditional canon.26 Moreover, while the state of dependence of, for example, African writ-

Prize Industry”, Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 32.1 (2007). For a specifically Scottish focus, cf. Sharon Norris, “Scots and the Booker”, Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain, eds. Wolfgang Görtschacher, Holger Klein and Claire Squires, Salzburger Beiträge zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft 5 (Vienna, Austria: Praesens, 2006). 22 Cf. Jesús Varela-Zapata, “Literary Prizes and the Institutionalization of Postcolonial Literatures in English”, Pre- and Post-Publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English, eds. Vanessa Guignery and François Gallix (Paris: Éditions Publibook Université, 2007). 23 Cf. e.g. Neil Lazarus, “Introducing Postcolonial Studies”, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004): 13-14; C. L. Innes, Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007); Justin D. Edwards, Postcolonial Literature, Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Julie Mullaney, Postcolonial Literatures in Context, Texts and Contexts (London and New York: Continuum, 2010). 24 Susan Hawthorne, “The Politics of the Exotic: The Paradox of Cultural Voyeurism”, NWSA Journal 1.4 (Summer 1989). Cf. also Huggan, “Prizing ‘Otherness’”; Deepika Bahri, “Marginally Off-Center: Postcolonialism in the Teaching Machine”, College English 59.3 (1997); Susheila Nasta, “Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise”, The Popular & the Canonical: Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1940-2000, ed. David Johnson (London and New York: Routledge, 2005): 294-343. 25 For an early sceptical view on the canonisation of contemporary African, Asian and Latin American writers, cf. Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’”, Social Text 17 (Autumn 1987). 26 Sandra Ponzanesi, “Boutique Postcolonialism: Literary Awards, Cultural Value and the Canon”, Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain, eds. Wolfgang Gört-

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ers on overseas publishers and prizes is indeed lamentable,27 rather than the issue remaining one of debate alone, a consequence has been to establish prizes for the African continent as well as individual African countries.28 The other problematic Booker issue raised among academics in the mid1990s was the Prize’s conflation of economic and aesthetic values. In her 1995 PhD thesis, Sharon Norris – like Huggan – focused on the years 1980-1989, between which the Booker was able to command higher sales and thus arguably influenced not only the marketing but also the production of fiction, i.e. the writing itself. In her account of the Booker’s history, Norris predates the beginning of the Prize to a meeting of the Young Publishers’ Association in 1964 and contrasts the initial ideal plan for an award with its realisation in order to describe the problems which have arisen mainly because of corporate sponsorship and “the conflation of aesthetic and commercial ideas”.29 Her line of argument – a critique of the Booker which ultimately is a critique of the market – has often been taken up by both authors in opposition to the system of prizes and awards, and mainly, though not exclusively, by journalistic critics. In accordance with this position, others have perceived the Booker Prize as “a symbol of one of the cultural paradoxes of living in an era in which the market principle is encroaching into every area of life, even those previously held by definition to be immune to it.”30 Richard Todd’s Consuming Fictions – an examination of books as products of consumptions – presents a very favourable account of the institution when compared to the critical postcolonial and market-opposed stance described above. The first published monograph and indispensable historical record of the

schacher, Holger Klein and Claire Squires, Salzburger Beiträge zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft 5 (Vienna, Austria: Praesens, 2006): 133. 27 Cf. Eldred Jones, “The First Decade: The Noma Award – Africa’s Leading Book Prize”, West Africa 18-24 May 1992. 28 Cf. Walter Bgoya, “Literary Prizes, Book Prizes, and African Writing”, Media and Identity in Africa, eds. Kimani Njogu and John Middleton (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2009). The first such pan-African literary award, the Etisalat Prize for Literature (1993) celebrates first-time African writers whose books have been published in Africa. 29 Norris, “‘Simply the Best’” 44. Norris’ manuscript remained largely unrecognised until she rewrote some of its main findings first for the Edinburgh Review in 2003 and then in three subsequent contributions, all published in 2006. 30 Timothy Bewes, “What Is ‘Philosophical Honesty’ in Postmodern Literature?”, New Literary History 31.1 (Summer 2000): 429. [emphasis added]

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Prize is a “history of the replacement of ‘the English novel’ by ‘the novel [published] in Britain’ since about 1980”.31 Todd traces the impact of the major shifts in the book trade and publishing industry in the 1980s to the consumption of fiction and the Booker as “a consumer guide to serious literary fiction”, and also tells the other side of the story by showing the impact of the Booker on the market.32 Not only does the Booker secure sales which are much higher than the actual prize money, but it also offers the possibility of “double publication” when a novel reaches good sales both on first publication and later that year with the announcement of the shortlist.33 The perspective on consuming – hence the programmatic title – allows him to dissect the relations between literary canons, the realities of the market, and the influence of the two on actual topics in contemporary fiction: My assumption is that the novelists I discuss have worked in an increasingly intensified atmosphere, one in which both the promotion and the reception of serious literary fiction have become steadily more consumer-oriented. […] Such self-conscious commercial categorization offers a real challenge to today’s novelists, agents, publishers and readers.34

He admits that an inversion of the former centre-margin hegemony is possible but rejects this as an oversimplified assumption based on the observations that (a) not all of the multi-cultural fiction is embedded within the post-colonial context (e.g. Kazuo Ishiguro, Tibor Fischer), and (b) many of the contemporary novels exhibit a distinct Englishness (e.g. A.S. Byatt, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes).35 Todd is adamant that the “[i]nsight into the richness and variety of serious literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s thus absolutely depends on our willingness to recognise the presence of the mechanisms by which […] we now consume fiction.”36 One such major mechanism is the Booker Prize whose vast role he sees as “the extraordinary energy that has transformed serious literary fiction in Britain into a truly global literature”.37

31 Richard Todd, Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (London: Bloomsbury, 1996): 77. 32 Todd, Consuming Fictions 61. 33 Todd, Consuming Fictions 72. 34 Todd, Consuming Fictions 128. 35 Cf. Todd, Consuming Fictions 305. 36 Todd, Consuming Fictions 309. 37 Todd, Consuming Fictions 309. The claim of Booker’s or other prizes’ influence on literature was later narrowed to being “part of an internationalization process of the

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The question of Booker’s biases and tokenism in terms of gender, race, nationality, age and status were predominantly discussed in the phase from the mid-1990s to around the turn of the millennium, but they remain relevant today. In contrast, positive accounts of the Booker have been much rarer. However, it is worth remembering that the Prize was discovered as object for research by scholars whose main goal was to assume a more pragmatic stance towards this and other prizes, not least on account of Todd’s monograph. In a review of his work, literary scholar James F. English took issue with overly one-sided accounts – be they positive or negative – of the “new relationship […] between publishers, literary agents, bookstores, media entrepreneurs, critics, and, especially, the organizers of literary prizes” and called for a more objective analysis.38 While this study does not follow English’s critique of earlier research – and particularly the three main contributions listed above – as lacking in objectivity, it is striking that a change for more objectivity was perceived as necessary in academic discourse. In the following two sections, I will present studies which focus on describing the Booker and the conditions which enable its interaction with other participants and argue that the only at least partially objective stance which can be taken is a description of the plurality of perspectives rather than a search for the most pristine.

1.3 B OURDIEU AND B EYOND : A N EW O BJECTIVITY IN THE 21 ST C ENTURY ? James F. English’s review of the first academic Booker book set the tone for a fourth phase of reflection in which scholars ostensibly took an explicitly descriptive angle and provided academia with theoretical tools for discussing the culture of prizes and awards. In the course of the twenty-first century, the Booker has drawn the attention of many disciplines but the findings of these mostly quantitative studies show limited success in gauging its impact. Recent research in liter-

marketing of literature” (Evain, “Whatever the Trick Is, You Have It” 192). Other studies have used a list of Booker nominees “to illustrate the diversity” of the novel written in English, cf. Victor Ginsburgh, Shlomo Weber and Sheila Weyers, “The Economics of Literary Translation: Some Theory and Evidence”, Poetics 39 (2011): 231. 38 James F. English, Rev. of Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today, by Richard Todd, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 45.2 (Summer 1999): 533.

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ary and cultural studies has therefore tended to combine quantitative and qualitative methods. Bourdieu’s concepts of the literary field, its different capitals and their currencies, have gained in importance, though they have been used and interpreted to varying degrees. The previous argument against the Booker as manifestation of market interference in literary realms – as presented by Sharon Norris – found an apt set of concepts in Bourdieu’s sociology of literature and culture. English himself took up the sociological approach and extended Bourdieu’s theory of nineteenth-century France to fit the workings of the late twentieth century UK literary field, situating the Booker Prize within a wider, more global tradition of art competitions. Claire Squires, too, used Bourdieu’s concepts and combined them with insights from publishing studies and communication models from the history of the book to discuss the Booker and other prizes as crucial part of literary marketing. Throughout his writings, English expresses the hope to “provide us with a clearer recognition of the nature of the struggles as well as the opportunities that define our immediate cultural frame”.39 More specifically, his goal in approaching awards is not to demonize them as the enemy of culture but, on the contrary, to grant their essential continuity with other kinds of cultural practice, and thus to learn from them how better, or more reflexively, to understand our own cultural lives – our tastes, our dispositions, our investments, and our illusions.40

English performs a triple task in describing: the phenomenon of the literary prize, and specifically the Booker Prize; its “functioning […] as a piece of objectified symbolic capital”; and its position “as an instrument of exchange and conversion”.41 Firstly, he distances himself from Bourdieu’s main preoccupation – cultural autonomy – in favour of a more topical, more distinguished “negotiation of capital conversions”, while holding on to the necessity of a “sociological approach to culture in general”.42 This is where he situates the success of literary prizes, and to a greater extent, their (positive) cultural value. Prizes provide all

39 James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005): 24. 40 English, The Economy of Prestige 27. 41 James F. English, “Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art”, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 33.1 (Winter 2002): 110. 42 English, “Winning” 126-27.

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parties with new opportunities: those who hold “noncultural assests” such as “wealth, social connections, political power” are rewarded with the heightened value of these very assets; those who hold cultural assets – “‘serious’ artists and writers who know how to work with the non-seriousness of the contemporary awards scene to enlarge the scope of their own authority” – are recompensed with strengthened positioning and the power of “greater subversive efficacy”.43 Secondly, and mostly in his monumental monograph study, The Economy of Prestige (2005), English approaches the topic of literary prizes as part of a wider cultural phenomenon. He opens the door for a global perspective on the “economy of cultural prestige”. The arts are viewed as becoming increasingly similar to a sporting event; as moments of “denationalization” as much as “deterritorialization of prestige”; and as agents of new geocultural relationships.44 Finally, he declares a demand for further studies: he envisages the need for a model which would use Bourdieu’s sociological theory but move towards what Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life coined as “practised place”, one which consciously includes academic criticism as active participant rather than passive observer.45 The second ‘objective’ path in later Booker research, which focuses on the relationship between prizes and the diverse agents in the literary field, combines literary and sociological approaches with those from the history of the book and publishing studies. In Marketing Literature (2007), Claire Squires describes the impact marketing has on literature – in its different stages of production, reception and interpretation. In a publishing age of immense production and intensified marketing activity, the literary prize, according to Squires, both profits from the need for guiding reader-consumers and takes a pivotal role in widening the gap between writers who trigger attention and those who do not. Along with branding, packaging, imprints and bookshop shelving strategies, prizes are not only an important marketing tool in terms of creating attention for a title and stimulating sales, but also crucial to categorising vast literary production via genre. Prizes, Squires argues, are not the scapegoats in a scenario of cultural pessimism but one among many new and changing phenomena of the present publishing reality. This reality is characterised by conglomeration and competition, and needs to observe a cultural and commercial shift (the re-organisation and reevaluation in publishing and retail), as well as the larger context of new media and new technology in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In that sense,

43 English, “Winning” 126. 44 English, The Economy of Prestige 282. 45 De Certeau qtd. in English, “Winning” 128. [emphasis in original]

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Squires’s study continues both English’s and Todd’s lines of argument according to which the Booker or other prizes can only be understood against the background of its relationship with other participants and changes to the market. Outside of the disciplines more commonly associated with literary studies, scholars from linguistics,46 economics and management studies,47 psychology and psychiatry,48 sociology,49 and cultural politics50 have also taken an interest in prizes in general and the Booker in particular, and have used their ‘objective’ (in this case referring to quantitative and empirical) methods to study some of the aspects which had been raised previously in cultural studies such as gender underrepresentation and postcolonial bias, and which have also been studied in comparative quantitative studies51 and in research of organisational structures52. Quantitative research also seeks to answer questions of literary value and the power which the Booker exerts over future literary history from a different angle – though the results are not unanimous. Quantitative comparisons of Booker

46 Cf. Edgar W. Schneider, “The Dynamics of New Englishes: From Identity Construction to Dialect Birth”, Language 79.2 (June 2003). 47 Cf. Victor Ginsburgh, “Awards, Success and Aesthetic Quality in the Arts”, The Journal of Economic Perspectives 17.2 (Spring 2003); N. Anand and Brittany C. Jones, “Tournament Rituals, Category Dynamics, and Field Configuration: The Case of the Booker Prize”, Journal of Management Studies 45.6 (Sept. 2008); John Ashworth, Bruno Heyndels and Kristien Werck, “Expert Judgements and the Demand for Novels in Flanders”, Journal of Cultural Economics 34.3 (Aug. 2010). 48 Cf. Hilary M. Lips, “The Gender Pay Gap: Concrete Indicator of Women’s Progress toward Equality”, Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 3.1 (2003); Albert Rothenberg and Wyshak Grace, “Family Background and Genius”, Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 49.3 (2004). 49 Cf. J. Lynn Gazley, “Branding the Booker”, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting (Aug. 2006). 50 Cf. John Street, “The Arts Prize: Organizing Popular Taste and Influencing Cultural Policy”, Trends and Strategies in the Arts and Cultural Industries, eds. K. Ernst, M. Halbertsma, S. Janssen and T. Ijdens (Rotterdam: Barjesteh, 2001). Cf. also Street, “Luck, Power, Corruption, Democracy?” and Street, “Showbusiness”. 51 Evidence of the underrepresentation of female writers in prize winners from the Pulitzers to Nobel to Booker serves as further proof of a continuing gender pay gap and male domination in public including the arts (Lips, “The Gender Pay Gap” 102). 52 Empirical research of the Booker as “transorganizational structure” shows that the Booker configured the field of English language fiction through championing postcolonial fiction, cf. Anand and Jones, “Tournament Rituals”.

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Prize winners and a sample of Commonwealth fiction since 1970s show that the Prize “does not just reflect but actively generates the distinction between literary and popular fiction”.53 It can thus be said that the Booker does not propagate “traditional, conception of quality”,54 which was argued to be an inherent quality of the Prize, but instead actively loads literary works by non-white authors from outside Britain with “moral value” and thus, by acting as filter between producers and receivers with “enormous power”, fights established values in “the canon war”.55 A comparative study of three different awards in three different art categories – movies, books and music – shows that (1) there is no difference in terms of sales between winners of the Booker Prize and shortlisted authors, and that (2) although the Booker has immediate impact on sales there is no long-lasting effect.56 This is contested in other studies based on examples in which prizes do, in fact, influence the canon, and – though admittedly based on speculation – the notion that the Booker Prize may be an exception because it communicates its lists of nominees better than others.57 Although quantitative research has sought to prove or undermine some of the assumptions made in theoretical analysis and such based on case studies, their results are no more or less definitive than the studies they criticise. Both English and Squires can be said to be pioneers of a ‘new objectivity’,58 one which purports that no all effects of the Booker are quantitatively measura-

53 Gazley, “Branding the Booker”. 54 Priscilla P. Clark, “Literary Culture in France and the United States”, American Journal of Sociology 84.5 (1979). Cf. also Norris, “‘Simply the Best’”. 55 Gazley, “Branding the Booker”. Cf. also Ponzanesi, “Boutique Postcolonialism”. 56 Ginsburgh, “Awards”. 57 Ashworth, Heyndels and Werck, “Expert Judgements”. The writers of this study, however, also admit that (a) the results differ from prize to prize, and (b) not winning can be harmful to nominated titles (214). 58 In 2003, the Booker’s 35th birthday, its Archive was relocated from Book Trust to the University Library at Oxford Brookes University. At this occasion, Claire Squires and David Lea conducted an international conference, sponsored by the University and the Booker. The conference can be followed in parts in a volume of conference proceedings Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein and published in 2006 in Salzburg, Austria, in association with Squires. Another volume on contemporary fiction and literary prizes which sprung from a collaborative conference series between scholars and authors was edited by Vanessa Guignery and François Gallix and published in Paris, France, under the title Pre- and Post-Publication Itineraries of The Contemporary Novel in English (2007).

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ble and that any study of the Prize needs to take into consideration both quantitative and qualitative data. In this study, the quantitative aspect is tied to a systematic accumulation of media response; the qualitative aspect entails reading the Booker’s impact not on numbers but on the communication about novels. In addition, such an ‘objective’ perspective on the Booker suggests a reflection on how to represent the Prize and its relationship with other participants in literary interaction in a model which would adequately (and, I would add, according to the demands of discourse analysis) portray all speakers in the discourse and illuminate their subject positions and settings.

1.4 B OOKER P RIZE R ESEARCH : E XAMINING P RIZE C ULTURE IN C ONTEXT OF L ITERARY I NTERACTION When James F. English and Claire Squires first looked at prize studies around the turn of the millennium, they found the state of research in its infancy. Over a decade after their and others’ explorations, this claim can no longer be made, but the interest in prizes and their relationship with other participants has not declined. From early sociological studies to more recent literary and cultural research, scholars have agreed upon the Booker’s and other prizes’ important place among other participants in the field: they have been said to take a “central position in the literary field”,59 to represent “an essential part of the field”,60 and to be found “at the very heart of the literary system”61. What researchers have not agreed upon so far is precisely where the heart of the field or system is to be found, or what its essence may be. Depending on the scholars’ position, the Booker has been placed in a series of positions and in different relations to other participants. Prizes in general and the Booker in particular have been described

The introduction of the latter book presents “promotional processes and prize-giving institutions” as mediators “between author, work and mass audience”, cf. Vanessa Guignery, “Introduction: The Infinite Journey of Books”, Pre- and Post-Publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English, eds. Vanessa Guignery and François Gallix (Paris: Éditions Publibook Université, 2007): 14. 59 De Nooy, “Literary Prizes” 199. 60 Claire Squires, Marketing Literature. The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 58. 61 James F. English, “The Literary Prize Phenomenon in Context”, A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945-2000, ed. Brian W. Shaffer (Malden: Blackwell, 2005): 175.

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as “consumer guide[s]”,62 as part of a wider “marketing of literature”,63 a “media event”,64 and “an instance of literary criticism”65. In order to explore the role of the Booker Prize in literary interaction, I will discuss the most relevant models previously referred to in prize research. Since the 1980s, scholars in the field of the history and the sociology of the book have introduced assorted models and descriptions of the entities involved in the making of books and/or literature. Each of the seven major models presented below privileges a certain perspective on what it seeks to describe as can be seen by the different names under which they are known: the communication circuit (Darnton), a model for the study of the book (Adams and Barker), three diagrams of the literary field (Bourdieu; van Rees and Dorleijn), and models of supply chain and value chain (Thompson). My choice of the term ‘literary interaction’ is made in awareness of the difficulty of finding a descriptive term which would encompass the diverse goals of these models and, of course, implies a particular view on participants interacting through their debates on literature and particular examples thereof and characterised by mutual observation. In the early 1980s Robert Darnton proposed a model of the “communication circuit” which references the eighteenth-century book market in France and which is based on the example of Voltaire’s Les Questions sur L’Encyclopédie (1770-72). This model traces the transmission of books and their messages in a circle from author to publisher, printer, shipper, bookseller, reader, and from reader back to the author, who, after all, is influenced in his decisions by “implicit readers” and “explicit reviewers”.66 Darnton emphasises the desire to

62 Todd, Consuming Fictions 61; cf. also Monica Girard, “The Curious Phenomenon of the Award-Winning Novels: The Case of Mark Haddon”, Pre- and Post-Publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English, eds. Vanessa Guignery and François Gallix (Paris: Éditions Publibook Université, 2007): 301. 63 Squires, Marketing Literature 40. Cf. also Simon During, “Literary Subjectivity”, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 31.1-2 (Jan.-Apr. 2000): 42; Wolfgang Görtschacher, “Fiction and the Literary Prizes in Great Britain”, Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain, Salzburger Beiträge zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft 5 (Vienna, Austria: Praesens, 2006): 3; and Evain,“Whatever the Trick Is, You Have It” 192. 64 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic 108; Street, “Showbusiness”. 65 De Nooy, “Literary Prizes” 200. This comparison of prizes with literary criticism bears controversial potential for literary critics and a challenge to position themselves. 66 Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?”, Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 67.

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communicate as the underlying motivation for all those involved in book production and book reception.67 A decade later, Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker modified Darnton’s model and created a “new model for the study of the book”, which relies on the example of “a group of eighteenth-century English maritime books published by the firm of Mount and Page”.68 It exchanges Darnton’s person-centred approach for a book-centred perspective suggesting that it is not an external wish for communication but “the text” itself which is “the reason for the cycle of the book”.69 The new model replaces the earlier six figures with five elements accompanying the “movement and momentum” of any “bibliographical document”: publication, manufacture, distribution, reception and survival.70 Each of the five events in the book’s “life cycle” involves various interest groups with various factors in their decision-making, a mixture of diverse “desires” to create, communicate, profit, possess and to preserve.71 Although both models do consider “other elements” or the book’s “socioeconomic conjuncture”,72 they have been criticised for not having sufficiently accounted for the specific factors and participants involved in the making of cultural artefacts as opposed to other types of product.73 In contrast, Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field includes the forces which were previously regarded as external and shows participants who are involved in the production of the material work, the “artist, writer, etc.”, as much as those involved in the production of its meaning and symbolic value: “critics, publishers, gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognising the work of art as such, in particular teachers (but also families, etc.)”.74 He concentrates on the struggle between producers of poems,

67 For a discussion of Darnton, see Squires, Marketing Literature 51-52. 68 Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, “A New Model for the Study of the Book”, A Potencie of Life: Books in Society. The Clark Lectures, 1986-1987, ed. Nicolas Barker, British Library Studies in the History of the Book (London: British Library, 1993): 15. 69 Adams and Barker,“A New Model” 15. For a discussion of Adams and Barker, cf. Squires, Marketing Literature 52-54. 70 Adams and Barker,“A New Model” 25, 13. 71 Adams and Barker,“A New Model” 25. 72 Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?”; Adams and Barker, “A New Model”. 73 Cf. Squires, Marketing Literature 54. 74 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Johnson, Randal (New York: Columbia UP, 1993): 37.

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novels and drama for recognition by different audiences and for consecration of their works within the French literary field in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bourdieu’s concept forms the basis for the diagrams of the literary field in Western Europe proposed by Kees Van Rees and Gilles J. Dorleijn. They have distinguished between the late twentieth and the eighteenth century, making explicit the specificities of each period. Both diagrams present “the set of literary institutions, organizations and agents involved in the material and symbolic production and in the distribution of reading materials”.75 The model referring to the older historical period shows the distribution of books from author to publisher/bookseller to reader via the three options of circulating libraries, shop libraries, or reading clubs. It also includes the influence of literary criticism and education on the producing and receiving participants, and covers institutions for literary discussion such as magazines and journals on the one hand, and academies, salons, coffee houses and debating clubs on the other. The diagram for the twentieth century shows the diversification of functions such as literary criticism in journalistic, essayistic, and academic publications, new participants such as literary agents, and the professionalisation of the field exemplified by professional author associations. Both diagrams also feature non-readers, an important addition which hints at an audience before whom all those involved are positioned again. Finally, John B. Thompson’s separate representation of the chain of supply and the chain of value has the most industry-specific perspective, focusing as it does on the publishing chain in the early twenty-first century. Similarly aware of the “linguistic and spatial boundaries” of literary fields, Thompson, too, focuses on one sphere, predominantly that of the US and UK trade publishing industry.76 The supply chain shows the book’s production and distribution process; the value chain presents the added value after each contact with one of the many agents who participate in this process.77 The assorted models revise each other and the new perspectives they add appear to remedy deficits of preceding models. I propose, however, that the differences should not be seen as flaws, but can be accounted for by the fact that each

75 Kees van Rees and Gillis J. Dorleijn, “The Eighteenth-Century Literary Field in Western Europe: The Interdependence of Material and Symbolic Production and Consumption”, Poetics 28 (2001): 333. 76 John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the TwentyFirst Century, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2012): 12. 77 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 14.

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seeks to describe different things, different cultural settings and different periods. Depending on this specific space and historical moment they have in mind, these models include a different set of participants with changing vocations and varying institutional affiliations. They put different emphasis on the basic elements and reasons of the respective participants’ interaction – communication, changing desires stirred by the text itself, capital (symbolic and material production) and value – and use different terms for the object which the participants circulate: a book’s message, texts (or bibliographical documents), works (or symbolic goods), reading materials (and the different pre- and post-eighteenthcentury notions of ‘literature’). All who participate in the novel’s discursive and material existence have a different perspective on it. By naming their object, placing it in relation to certain participants, and identifying the reasons for these participants’ interest in the object, they each construct a unique model dependent upon the idiosyncratic set of relationships that they describe. While none of the discussed models explicitly includes literary prizes, their depictions of participants in literary interaction have influenced those who put prizes at the centre of their research.78 Based on the previously described specificity of perspectives, I would like to reflect on the importance of including the view of the alleged ‘observer’ as part of the picture as well as widening the status of the observing participant beyond that of the critic. As mentioned earlier (cf. chapter 1.3), James F. English took up Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field but sought to adapt it for a late twentieth-century, “postmodern” attitude towards literature and culture and dissolve the binary opposition between art and economy with regard to the culture of literary prizes. He focused on the prize’s relationship with the media as a relationship of “dependent independency”,79 and declared the close tie to literary reviewing and criticism as one of its major assets. He added “journalistic capital” as a mediating entity in the dichotomy between economic and cultural capital, arguing that there is a third party among the participants on each side and that this third party not only witnesses or comments on the events but also changes the field.80 According to English, it is this “journalistic capital” that literary prizes have come to use (and be used by) in order to function as converters of capital.

78 The sociological models of the literary field mention prizes implicitly by including participants in the symbolic production of literature. Bourdieu, in particular, mentions literary prizes as part of the consecrating entities (again, in brackets), cf. The Field of Cultural Production 42. 79 English, “Winning” 116. 80 English, “Winning” 123.

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The close relationship between prizes and criticism has been taken up by critics in order to question their position, even their complicity, vis-à-vis prizes and what these are criticised for. While commentators from the field of sociology do not perceive their stance as complicit, the academic literary critic’s role in prize research, in contrast, has been scrutinised ever since Huggan’s postcolonial critique of the Booker Prize (cf. chapter 1.3). Huggan followed Gayatri Spivak in taking the danger “in institutionally validating marginality” seriously, and pleaded with fellow critics “to question the motives behind our support”.81 Later, Ankhi Mukherjee fully embraced the role of literary prizes as catalyst for academic introspection: […] the criteria deployed in the determination of this yearly award speak to the supposedly more serious and premeditated considerations that inform academic literary criticism. […] Booker judging highlights the limits of literary criticism: the triumph of creating a classic is not unmixed with the terror of choosing the wrong book. Finally, it addresses the politics of impersonality that marks the inception and transmission of modern literary criticism. […] Prizes such as the Booker expose the vested interests behind cultural recognition […] . 82

Not only does Mukherjee point to the establishment of a literary canon and the criteria used to arrive at it as the tertium comparationis between prizes and criticism, she also sees the need to probe the stakes behind the seemingly impersonal decision-making and the (moral) responsibility which accompanies the process. Most critics of literary prizes, particularly those in postcolonial studies, and especially so with reference to teaching postcolonial literature,83 as well as in market-critical scholarship, have displayed a normative self-awareness. Sharon Norris concluded that a rigid Bourdieusian study of the Booker and other prizes “allows us to see it as a site of symbolic violence, and to assess the possibilities for resistance”.84 Both Huggan and Norris, but also Richard Todd and Claire Squires have underlined the authors’ and their novels’ potential to create strategies of resistance by anticipating certain modes of appropriation and developing

81 Huggan, “Prizing ‘Otherness’” 428. [emphasis added] 82 Ankhi Mukherjee, “‘What Is a Classic?’: International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question.”, PMLA 125.4 (2010): 1027. [emphasis added] 83 Cf. Bishnupriya Ghosh, “The Postcolonial Bazaar Thoughts on Teaching the Market in Postcolonial Objects”, Postmodern Culture 9.1 (1998). 84 Sharon Norris, “The Booker Prize: A Bourdieusian Perspective”, Journal for Cultural Research 10.2 (2006): 157. [emphasis added]

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textual modes for manipulating their own future interpretations. But they have also depicted these opportunities for resistance as limited. In fact, Squires concludes that despite the awareness of the machinery of marketing, there is no escaping it, there is no space “hors-promotion” – neither for novelists nor for critics.85 Following English’s invention of the term “journalistic capital”, Squires coined “scholarly capital” to describe the particular investment of the scholar in retrieving the history of the book and uncovering its narrative.86 If one were to observe “a text’s travel through time”, the very moment of reconstruction of a book’s life by a book historian or by a literary scholar becomes part of the book’s journey.87 In accordance with this vision, each of the voices behind the different models of literary interaction as presented above, including hers, or for that matter my discussion of them, changes the preconditions for reconstruction. Robert Darnton, the book historian, seeks to trace the transmission of the book’s message. Adams and Barker, operating from the perspective of librarians, emphasise the centrality of the text, i.e. the bibliographic document, and prolong its life cycle beyond its initial reception (even beyond a possible phase of rest) with the phase of survival, at which stage the book again becomes relevant as an object. The introduction of the sociologist’s perspective to the line of argument not only allows for the co-presence of economic and symbolic production of value and meaning but also changes the object. As cultural sociologists, Bourdieu as well as Rees and Dorleijn, are not concerned with books as messages or texts as bibliographic documents but with literary works in societal context and the changing literary-sociological implications of the very term ‘literature’. Because the observer is caught up in the relational setting he or she lays out, Squires concludes that the objective description or a “total reconstruction” is impossible.88 For one thing, it is unclear whose perspective should dominate such a model. Secondly, any model becomes problematic if we assume that the observer becomes one of the participants in the book’s “life cycle”, as Adams and Barker have termed it. What English described as the “postmodern” handling of the prize system – by novelists, journalists and academics – may be playful and conscious, but any form of participation is always already cooperation. In fact, a reviewer of English’s study of the culture of literary prizes observed that “in its attempt to put both prizes and their audiences in some larger perspective, [it]

85 Squires, Marketing Literature 192. 86 Squires, Marketing Literature 59. 87 Squires, Marketing Literature 59. 88 Squires, Marketing Literature 58.

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simply lifts the economic cycle to another level, at which scholarly interest in the cultural institution of prizes serves to establish their importance once and for all”.89 Is, then, any study of the Booker Prize automatically complicit in its success, in its commodification and commercialisation of literature, and does it thus forsake any possibility of resistance? This would certainly be the case if the field were understood as a field of struggle between winners and losers, if the Prize was viewed as part of something other than literature, of a system altogether adverse to it. But both English and Squires have shown that literary interaction is much more complicated than a binary model can purport to grasp. To conclude, like English’s reviewer does, that his study is caught in a vicious circle would not do justice to the idea that in order to understand our ‘postmodern condition’, we need to go beyond the simple idea of winning the literary game: What is needed in the meantime are not more pronouncements about which side is winning or losing the great game, but more careful study of the game itself – a game which is in any case not to be understood as involving two sides or two teams. In particular, we could use some close study of the concrete instruments of exchange and conversion whose rise is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of our recent cultural history.90

At the end of his 2002 essay, English envisaged a model for the twenty-first century based on Bourdieu’s literary field of cultural production but which: would sustain, more than Bourdieu has been willing to do, an emphasis on tactics, on the many forms of provisional and witty alliance, duplicity, and double-dealing that characterize effective instances of contemporary cultural agency, on the fluid and improvisational practices of intraconversion that defy any reduction to simple laws of opposition between properly commercial and properly cultural interests.91

He asked for a model which would resemble Michel de Certeau’s “practiced places in which our own intellectual practice is fully implicated” and which “could, in short, afford us some slight but welcome competitive advantages in the game called culture – even while it complicates the very problematic of

89 Michael North, Rev. of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value by James F. English, Modernism/Modernity 13.4 (Sept 2006): 577. 90 English, “Winning” 127. 91 English, “Winning” 128.

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‘winning’”.92 It is striking that English uses the image of a game where players compete against each other and where winning – though its notion may have become complicated – still remains as an underlying force. Whenever literary criticism acknowledges a participatory character in this game, any analysis of one participant – in this case the Man Booker Prize – cannot but use the object of study as a catalyst for critical introspection. While scholarly account has left us with the impossibility of “total reconstruction”, this study does not aim at reconstructing a totality but making room for a co-existence of pluralistic perspectives. Despite the seeming impossibility of winning and/or breaking out, Squires argues that one ought to continue, ought to try harder, “[f]or it is only by searching for the appropriate terminology and hence the specific structural paradigms for the contemporary period, that the dimensions of the field can be properly plotted”.93 In line with Squires and English, this study seeks to argue that one can, indeed should, try to accommodate the observer within the constellation of participants. After all, any answer to this study’s initial question about the nature of the relationship between the Booker and other participants in literary interaction will depend on the perspective of the observer. A possible way of going about the problem could be found by not searching for the common denominator, and not looking for something to put at the centre of one’s gaze but instead accounting for a multi-perspective literary interaction. More specifically, instead of offering an own model I will formulate an argument of the irreducible multi-perspectivity of literary interaction. I argue that it is not just the journalistic critic or academic scholar who observes, but that each and every participant observes and is observed by others and that the decisions made in literary interaction are based on both an awareness of observing and the assumption of being observed. Each speaker in the discourse is aware of their own and others’ subject positions. A description which includes the notion of each participant’s perspective will not be free of its own gaze either, but it will at least accommodate the objective fact that there are various participants who each have a distinct perspective, and who may have multiple functions but in given situations speak as representatives of particular institutions, and whose presence one will have to acknowledge if a (new) objective survey is what one strives for. This study’s idea of ‘new objectivity’, then, in line with the methodological choice of discourse analysis, does not imply a totality in the end, but the registering of the presence of multiple perspectives.

92 English, “Winning” 129. 93 Squires, Marketing Literature 58.

2. Attention and Participants’ Perspectives on Literary Interaction

Instead of proposing a model of literary interaction in a twenty-first-century marketplace in the UK and making assumptions about the participants, their relations and where the Booker Prize could fit in, I will describe the mechanisms of mutual observation based on selected written documents. In accordance with the demands of a discourse analytical approach, I will trace the communication between participants in order to find out whom they perceive to be part of their interactions and this will allow me to make statements on the particular nature of these relationships. A range of (mostly public) written materials which document the communication between participants gives insight into the perspectives of the speakers, their awareness of and their assumptions about the perspectives of relevant others. In other words, instead of describing the information flow between a preconceived set of participants, the following intends to deduct who is called upon as participant in literary interaction, and in which patterns of relationships – with all their underlying tensions and dependencies – based on data found on book covers, pre-publishing materials, press releases and media coverage. Not all participants are equally presented in these documents and not all documents are available to everyone to the same degree. They can be made available publicly or may take the form of private correspondence. For example, the communication between authors and publishers, often mediated by a literary agent, is mostly hidden from an outside observer. Publishers communicate openly with readers via a book’s cover, less overtly with booksellers and literary editors in ‘advance reader’s copies’ in earlier stages of the book’s production, and more discretely still through the administration of a literary prize when bringing eligible authors to a jury’s attention. The literary prize announces its decision in a press release which is then disseminated via diverse media channels and finally manifests itself in bookshop windows or online recommendations. A reviewer’s

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evaluation of the book is an easily available document which anyone – including an audience who might never read the book – may obtain by buying the respective newspaper or magazine. The interaction between participants often works in both, if not in many, directions and is rarely limited to one document only. These loops of communication show an awareness of interaction between participants and they aim to catch and stir the attention of some, using other participants as an incentive to lend attention. Each of these documents – the agent’s pitch-letter, the advance reader’s copy, the book’s cover, the press release, the review – are not only directed at different participants but also refer to others. Most importantly, the Booker Prize can feature in all of these documents and its presence in other participants’ communication as well as its own interaction with others proves that it is perceived as one of them. By describing the different participants’ perspectives – the subject positions of readers, authors, publishers, booksellers, wholesalers and distributors, literary agents, prize administrators and judges, journalistic and academic critics – and the more or less direct communication and traditions of interaction which they entertain, I am hoping to show which speakers call upon the Booker Prize and in which settings they do so. One could, of course, begin with the novels, what is most commonly described as a ‘communication’ between the author and the reader. However, for the purposes of this study, which is concerned with the discourse about novels rather than in novels, I will start by taking a closer look at the book cover as a document of communication between the publisher and the reader, and then proceed with tracing other participants and their forms of interaction. In order to envisage a descriptive rather than a normative constellation, I will take a specific situation into account and use the example of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger – a novel which will return as a case study in part II (cf. chapter 6.1).

2.1 J UDGING A B OOK BY I TS C OVER : T HE R EADER ’ S P ERSPECTIVE How do books target and invite the reader’s attention? What is known about the reader’s expectations and how to meet them is based partly on market research and partly on past experience with books which proved popular or not. Furthermore such information can be deduced from readers’ recommendations in social networks, blogs and Amazon reader reviews, and gathered based on changing fashions, curricula or canons. In short, what we know about the reader’s expecta-

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tions is partly based on empirical data but mostly draws on the knowledge and assumptions of those who are targeting this reader’s attention.1 When a customer enters a bookshop, there is a fifty percent chance that she has already made up her mind whether or not to make a purchase.2 A prospective reader may have heard about a particular book and be eager to buy it, or she may just want to browse or ask the bookshop assistant for advice. In 85% of purchases, the book in question will be for the buyer; in 15%, it is a gift for someone else.3 The reasons for buying a book and perhaps reading it are manifold and so are the elements of a book which might have inspired this decision. Most customers buy books because of a particular author, some because of the topic; few will favour a particular publishing house or imprint.4 Despite the proverbial warning not to judge a book by its cover, in many instances the book’s cover and the “blurb”, i.e. the text on the back of its cover, the inside flap of a book jacket and the quotes on the front cover, are what will attract the potential reader’s attention.5 Drawing this attention is the goal of a given publishing house and its design department, which is responsible for a book’s cover in consultation with the editorial and sales team. The cover holds necessary information about the author, ti-

1

The content of book club editions and reading guides is revealing in this matter. Discussion questions for novels revolve around the protagonists, their decisions and their voice, the novel’s tone and its message. Guides make comparisons with other books and reveal information about the author deemed relevant as an insight into the novel. They might even disclose initial responses to the book by reviewers or other first readers, but they will not – in general – raise the question of how the book got into the reader’s hands and who may have been involved in the process. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, not least the “Reader’s Guides” in the Continuum Contemporaries series, e.g. Claire Squires’s introduction to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (New York, London: Continuum, 2002).

2

Cf. Giles Clark, Inside Book Publishing, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001): 68. For more information on the decision-making process, cf. Hein Leemans and Mia Stokmans, “A Descriptive Model of the Decision Making Process of Buyers of Books”, Journal of Cultural Economics 16.2 (Dec. 1992).

3

Cf. Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry, 2nd ed. (Mahwa, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005) 214.

4

Cf. Thompson, Merchants of Culture 15; Squires, Marketing Literature 89.

5

Cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 214. Cf. also Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody, eds., Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers and the Marketing of Books (London: Ashgate, 2007).

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tle and publisher, but because it will often decide whether or not the book moves over the counter, and because its main goal is to sell, publishers seek to steer and direct the book buyer’s attention in collaboration with authors, agents, testimonial voices by other authors, reviewers and public figures, as well as with the help of booksellers.6 The cover of a book does not necessarily reveal what a particular customer and potential reader is interested in. Instead, it sheds light on what those who want to catch readers’ attention think they want to see. The 2009 trade paperback edition of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger offers itself as an apt example to extract those details about the book, its genre or market segment,7 which the publishing house deems important to present to a possible future reader.8 The black front cover features an illustration of a white tiger and a red rooster against the background of red grass in the bottom third of the image as well as symmetrically laid out colourful feathers in blue, red and gold in the top third of the page. The title of the book is laid out in three rows in white bold capital letters at the centre of the book, above a black rooftop silhouette of a city showing the domes of mosques. Underneath the title, the author’s name is placed in one row, in gold, in a smaller font than the title but also in bold capital letters. Three additional, though much smaller text passages in capital letters are also placed on the front cover. The most prominent of the three, at the very top in white lettering, is a strapline revealing the novel’s connection with the Man Booker Prize. Two quotations, one in white and red right underneath the feathers, the other in blue and red on the tiger’s chest, give the opinions of critics from The Times and The Sunday Telegraph and advertise it as “A Masterpiece” and “Blazingly Savage and Brilliant” respectively. The black spine features three illustrations interspersed with the book’s title and the author’s name. At the far top is a bouquet of feathers, at the centre a white tiger and at the bottom a small logo of the publishing house. The back cover, also in black, depicts a rooster

6

The importance of a book cover becomes particularly evident in the process of “stripping” books from their covers to make them worthless and thus symbolically rather than actually returning the product to the publisher when it has not sold as expected, cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 182.

7

In contrast to a traditional, vertical understanding of the book market according to which literary fiction is considered hierarchically higher, the more recent perspective in book studies tends to take a horizontal view of market segments, i.e. literary fiction as one of many genres which are targeted to different readerships rather than social groups, cf. Squires, Marketing Literature 41. On marketing and genre, cf. Squires, Marketing Literature 70ff.

8

Cf. appendix, 5d.

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with feathers at the top and red grass at the very bottom. Between these illustrations is a short description of the book; three quotations taken from reviews in the Sunday papers (this time including the respective reviewers’ names); information about the cover illustration and cover design: the name of the publishing house (Atlantic Books); their web page; and the ISBN barcode. The author – Aravind Adiga – is very clearly visible to the eye of the customer. On the front cover, his name is written in smaller letters than the title – a possible hint to the status of the author as a newcomer to the market and not yet a brand in himself – but still more prominently than the rest of the information. While the novel is further described by two blurbs on the front, the potential reader learns more about Adiga from endorsements on the back. According to three different writers from three different newspapers, the Adiga is presented as an informed author (“sets out to show us a part of [India] that we hear about infrequently”), one who has discovered unusual material and presents it in a way which might surprise the reader (what he “lifts the lid on is also inexorably true”). Emphasising this proof of his legitimacy and the novel’s authenticity, Adiga is compared to the protagonist – he is said to play an even “bigger game” than his “sharp and satirical” narrator – but he is compared in a way that confirms him as an authority. The debut author may not be the centre of the reader’s presumed attention – this position is taken by the title – but he is introduced as the man in charge, a reliable guide on a journey to the real India. The quoted reviewers (or review publications) are less obviously significant than the author but are evidently still very important and their opinion is visible on both the front and back cover. Publishers frequently use endorsements by established, recently popularised or mentor colleagues, especially in the case of newcomer authors. This edition bears four different quotes and reinforces each one with the institutions in whose context the speakers gave their assessments. In fact, Adiga’s paperback does entirely without a publisher’s description of the novel and replaces it with three longer quotes by journalists and critics from the Independent on Sunday, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph. The quotes from three Sunday papers single out the novel as one of the chosen few given the privilege of attention in these publications. While any book cover is likely to feature blurbs by other authors, critics or public figures whose opinions are presented in short testimonial quotes or excerpts from reviews, literary fiction is particularly prone to advertising praise taken from national review publications. The endorsements on the back cover – as well as the two quotes on its front – position the novel in a specific market segment. In particular, The Times’ short superlative – “A Masterpiece” – seems to catapult the book to the highest ranks of literary art.

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The 2009 copy advertises the novel as the “Winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize”. Like blurbs, or more specifically the type of speaker and the setting of their statement, prizes, too, help to sort out the market niche of a novel (or its genre). Readers of science fiction will be more likely to pay attention to a book endowed with the Arthur C. Clarke Award; a reader of romance novels will recognize a Betty Trask Award; as a fan of crime fiction might do with The Hammett Prize awarded by the International Association of Crime Writers. While any prize sticker will draw attention to the book, few will be recognised by the targeted reader of a particular genre, and even fewer by the general reader. The Booker carries particularly high recognition value and – where ‘literary’ functions not only as an indicator of market segment but also as a marker of quality – it makes a statement as to the literary value of the novel.9 The Booker’s presence on the book’s front cover indicates its presumed influence on sales and its role as a consumer guide. Most importantly for the argument of this chapter, it proves the publisher’s awareness of the Prize as an attention catalyst. The publishing house itself is indicated with a logo on the spine and its name and website on the back cover but is far less visible than any of the above participants to whom its representatives have chosen to draw the reader’s attention. Those who recognise Atlantic Books or follow the link to its website will learn that it is an independent publishing house founded in 2000, with a list of fiction, history, politics, memoirs and current affairs.10 In fact, only a few publishers will be identifiable within a certain market segment. In literary fiction, publishing houses and imprints such as Faber or Bloomsbury might be recognised by the general novel reader as “ways of attesting quality”.11 But imprint branding works mostly for industry “insiders” rather than “outsiders”.12 In addition, and no longer as part of the publisher’s perspective, a large yellow sticker has been placed on the front cover of my personal copy of Adiga’s novel, informing the customer that the book is of a sales promotion. This round

9

See Squires, Marketing Literature 97ff. on literary prizes and particularly the Booker as indicator of literary fiction. On straplines indicating nomination for or award of the Booker Prize and the double-advertisement for both the book and the Booker, see Claire Squires, “Book Marketing and the Booker Prize”, Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers and the Marketing of Books, eds. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody (London: Ashgate, 2007).

10 “About Us: Who We Are”, Atlantic Books. 11 Thompson even speaks of “the mystique of the imprint” (Thompson, Merchants of Culture 132). Cf. also Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 157. 12 Squires, Marketing Literature 93-4.

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sticker indicates the presence of the retailer, or rather the existence of a particular advertising campaign which includes this book: a “3-for-2” sales promotion at Waterstones, the UK’s largest high street book retailer, where the customer can buy three chosen books and pay only two.13 Apart from the explicit mention of the bookseller’s name and presence in this form, the retailer is also present in the final price assigned to the book – which, after the 1995 collapse of the Net Book Agreement, needs not reflect the recommended retail price.14 The bookseller, of course, also provides the entire context in which the book is found.15 After all, the customer is aware of where the purchase is made: online with a small book retailer, a large electronic commerce company like Amazon, directly from the publisher, a newspaper’s store, or offline, in a ‘terrestrial’, i.e. high street shop, an independent or second-hand bookshop, or even a supermarket. In the example of a Waterstones copy of Adiga’s novel, the book could have been placed in designated spots for fiction, among new titles, on a stand with a certain topic (for example, books on India), or a shelf reserved for Booker Prize nominees. A high-profile book like The White Tiger could be exhibited in the shop window with other point-of-sale material such as a poster; on a mobile shelf with additional information, multiple editions, and a possible invitation to an author’s reading; in piles of several copies on tables; or, if on shelves, faceout rather than spine-out. Some bookshops will include the information that a book has been positively reviewed in renowned review publications next to the displayed books; in small independents the staff may even write up short notes themselves to create a more individual sense of recommendation. To recapitulate, three groups of participants can be identified from the paperback edition of The White Tiger in order of their visibility to the potential reader. The book’s title and the author’s name are most clearly positioned at the centre of attention. A second group of participants in literary interaction is mentioned in a smaller font than the title and the author’s names, or on the book’s

13 Waterstone’s has undergone rebranding since James Daunt took over as managing director. In 2012, it shed its apostrophe and has since been known as Waterstones (which I will use for the sake of simplicity). More importantly for the trade, in 2011, it also dropped the 3-for-2 offers, cf. Lisa Campbell, Graeme Neill and Charlotte Williams, “Trade Greets End of Waterstone’s 3 for 2”, The Bookseller 1 Sept. 2011. 14 For more on the collapse of the Net Book Agreement (NBA) and its consequences for the book market, cf. Thompson, Merchants of Culture 51-53, Clark, Inside Book Publishing 22; Squires, Marketing Literature 27ff. 15 On bookshop design, cf. Squires Marketing Literature 94-97; on different categories for books, cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 27.

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back rather than front cover, but nevertheless deemed relevant: the publisher, the bookseller, reviewers and review publications, and the Booker Prize. Finally, a third group of participants comprises those who are least visible or absent from the book’s cover and whom the reader is either presumed not to be interested in or considered not in need of knowing about. Among those who are not brought to the customer’s attention are representatives of participants linking the author and the publisher, such as the literary agent, or between publisher and bookseller, such as printers, distributors and wholesalers (to whom I will return in chapter 2.2).16 Yet, even among those participants who are more visible, the reader is given varying degrees of information, with differences between editions as well as between the participants. In the hardcover edition of The White Tiger,17 the author’s person, biography, and even his looks are considered important. The 2008 hardcover, like most dust jackets, features a short bio note and a picture on its back flap. Underneath the picture of the author, basic data about where Adiga comes from and what he has done and published so far is presented: Aravind Adiga was born in Madras in 1974. He studied at Columbia and Oxford Universities. A former India correspondent for Time magazine, his articles have also appeared in publications like the Financial Times, the Independent, and the Sunday Times. He lives in Mumbai. The White Tiger is his first novel.

In both the hardcover and the paperback edition, the reviewers are only referred to by their name and that of the institution behind them, but in the hardcover edition the author who endorses Adiga’s book is named as Mohsin Hamid and his credits are disclosed as the author behind the 2007 bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In the hardcover edition, the publisher is only identifiable by a logo on the spine, while in the paperback version Atlantic Books is explicitly mentioned by name and the publishing house’s website is listed. The bookseller in both cases is only represented by the price label, or promotional price offer, and

16 Adiga’s paperback also features the names of the cover illustrator and designer – participants who are not usually counted among those involved in literary interaction. There will only be a small group of readers who would buy a book specifically because of its design, and the name of the artist will seldom figure as an attention grabber. Instead, the mentioning of the name has more to do with the copyright of the image. What the presence of those responsible for the design could do is shed some light on the cover’s looks and their influence on market segment. 17 Cf. appendix, 5c.

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the complex calculations behind the final price are not included. In neither the hardcover nor the paperback copy is the reader informed about the many departments and functions of the publisher, from editing to production to sales. While the newly circulated hardcover copy featured a sticker informing the reader of Adiga’s Booker success, the paperback edition incorporated that information directly into its design. More prominently than the publishing house and the retailer, and at least as distinctly as the quotations from review publications, its success as the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize was mentioned on the top of the front cover of later hardcover and paperback editions (as well as his follow-up books). Such inclusion of the Booker proves that it is perceived as a significant part of the group of participants who draw attention to the book, who act as an incentive to buying it, and who position it in a given market segment. Even more so, however, it shows that the Prize is part of the participants used to show others that the book is worthy of their attention.

2.2 C REATING A B UZZ FOR R ETAILERS AND E DITORS : T HE “ADVANCE R EADER ’ S ” P ERSPECTIVE The previous analysis of the paperback edition of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger exemplified the efforts undertaken by a large part of the industry, those involved in the book’s economic as well as its symbolic production, in catching a reader’s attention with the cover of the book. The cover thus offers a reader’s perspective as publishers, booksellers and reviewers assume it to be. In contrast, “advance reader’s copies” (ARCs), also known as publisher’s editions, proofs or galleys, depending on the state of their refinement, reveal the publisher’s attempts to catch the attention of ‘advanced’ readers. ARCs are unfinished editions of the book which publishers send to booksellers some three to six months before publication in order to encourage higher orders as well as to literary editors in review media to allow for the preparation of reviews on time. In short, they reveal the publisher’s strategy for placing a particular title on the market. The ARC is aimed at “big mouths” who will promote the title before or around its publication and, in the case of a lead title, can be distributed in thousands of copies.18 Because it is produced for the consideration of a different kind of audience, i.e. professional readers, those who Squires calls “insiders”, and is intended to have different consequences than an individual transaction, the cover of an advance copy will present both some of the same participants who are introduced

18 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 247-48.

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on the finished cover, though possibly with alternative or additional information, as well as participants who will not be made visible on the cover for end buyers, final readers or “outsiders”.19 The advance reader’s copy of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger circulated in the UK by the publisher, Atlantic Books, before the novel’s publication in April 2008 as “uncorrected bound proof”, is an early, soft copy of the book and resembles the later paperback version in some aspects while differing in others.20 Again, the front carries the title and the author’s name in the centre and features endorsements on the front and back cover. The ARC includes a short description of the novel’s protagonist in the upper half of the front cover (the same one which was placed on the back cover of the paperback edition), and a longer endorsement by Pankaj Mishra on the bottom half of the page. At the bottom of the page, in its far left corner, is a small publishing house logo, which would be visible on the paperback’s spine. In contrast to the paperback, the ARC comes with an unillustrated black cover and all the lettering is done in white only. The back of Adiga’s ARC is substantially different to the paperback edition. It is densely lettered and can be divided into three parts: a summary of the novel, a list of unique selling points, and more technical information about the forthcoming publication and contact details for those whose attention has been caught. The narrator-protagonist and his story are introduced in the first third of the page. The summary is concluded with an evaluation of “Balram’s journey” as “a brilliantly irreverent, blackly comic, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable tour de force” [italics in the original]. The central part carries seven bullet points describing the novel’s status as “one of the most hotly anticipated novels of 2008”; and its subject matter, “a sensational debut novel which reveals a wholly contemporary, unromanticized view of India – a land of superstition and poverty, teeming with entrepreneurs”; promising that it “will be one of Atlantic Books submissions for the Man Booker Prize 2008”; introducing Adiga as a writer; emphasising the suspense which the book has already created with a quotation from The Bookseller about its success at the London Book Fair; evaluating of the narrator-protagonist as “a great literary creation: amoral, cynical, unrepentant yet deeply endearing” whose “voice grips from the start”; and quoting Gary Shteyngart. This list is followed by information about the publication date, formatting, ISBNs and three different sets of contact details for the publisher: a general address, one for publicity enquiries and one for questions regarding

19 For more on the information found on ARCs, cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 183. 20 Cf. appendix, 5a.

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sales. This part is concluded by a note for reviewers to check any quotations against the forthcoming bound edition. The ARC presents some of the participants who also featured in the paperback edition: the author is visible on the front and back cover, the publisher is identified with a logo and further details on the back cover, and, although the individual quote-producers are not the same as the ones on the paperback copy, the ARC also features endorsement quotes. Yet the information about these participants differs as booksellers and editors, who need to invest more than an end customer who only buys one copy, seem to need more persuading. The author is not only represented with his name, or as was the case with the hardcover edition, a picture and bio note. Instead Adiga is introduced as “a 32-year-old writer of huge talent”. His book may be a “debut novel” but he is explicitly classified as an author of “literary” fiction twice: According to the publisher’s statement, he is the author of “a great literary creation” and in the words of a fellow novelist he is entering “the literary scene resplendent in battle dress and ready to conquer”. Adiga is compared to Gogol, which supports this literary classification and points booksellers and reviewers to the particular market segment which the book targets. Adiga’s promised presence “in the UK for publication” creates another incentive to organise author readings, book signings and interviews. The publishing house is present not only with its logo, name and website, but as a complex institution with various representatives who fulfil different functions. Literary editors are supplied with a contact for publicity enquiries with whom they will be able to get in touch in order to organise interviews, etc., as are booksellers who would be interested in knowing about the author’s availability for readings and book signing events. Professional book buyers who order stock for wholesale, retail and libraries are directed to another contact for sales enquiries. In addition, the advanced reader is informed about rights, which – in transactions made by the rights department – have already been sold to 13 countries. The ARC gives insight into some of the publisher’s manifold functions: commissioning, editing, producing, design, sales, marketing, publicity, rights and accounting.21 Bigger publishing houses will have departments for each of these functions and semi-annual meetings at which commissioning editors pitch their ideas to colleagues and make collective decisions about whether or not to acquire a book.22 Moreover, for each function there are different interests: pub-

21 Cf. Bill Swainson, “Understanding the Publishing Process”, Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2010, 103 ed. (London: A & C Black, 2009). 22 At a panel at the London Book Fair 2013, Laura Barber, Editorial Director, Portobello Books & Granta Books, said that with each book project she, in fact, pitches four

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lishers need to know if and why a book will sell, if there is a market, i.e. an audience for it, which type of attention it might garner, and how it will reflect on their imprint, not least in competition with other houses.23 Only when the manuscript passes all these tests, is successfully acquired,24 and is well into the process of becoming an actual book,25 do sales, marketing and publicity people release the first material to booksellers and trade and review media. This preliminary material, which is later used partly as point-of-sale material in the shops as well, can consist of posters, advertisements, advanced information sheets (“AIs”) with the most crucial data about the book including an abstract and a bio note, “samplers” with extracts, “blads” of front and back cover with finished design and layout and advance reader’s copies.26 The ARC reveals how much a publisher is willing to invest in a particular title. As a document of both stages in sales – “sell-in”, i.e. marketing, and “sellthrough”, i.e. publicity27 – ARCs lend themselves to showing the interactions between publishing and selling, and publishing and reviewing a book. The earlier stage consists of (traditional) marketing which involves a financial investment on the part of the publisher and its main goal is to make retailers (online, high street and independents) order as many copies of a title as possible. This in-

times: first to herself (pitch in her head), then to her immediate colleagues, then to the sales team, and finally to the outside world. Analogously, Clark distinguishes between a publisher’s “internal” and “external” contacts (Inside Book Publishing 83). 23 Clark lists ten conditions for publishing a book: suitability for list, author assessment, unique sales proposition (USP), market, competition, frontlist/backlist potential, investment and return, risk and innovations, content, book’s physical appearance and price, cf. Inside Book Publishing 85. 24 On acquisition methods, cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 150. 25 For a detailed description of the process of turning a manuscript (“ms.”) into a book, cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 159. 26 Swainson,“Understanding the Publishing Process” 233; cf. also The Bookseller’s annual list of material to be submitted by publishers for inclusion in the Buyer’s Guide (“Buyer’s Guide”, The Bookseller). On preliminary material, or “prelims”, cf. also Clark, Inside Book Publishing 93. On point-of-sales material, or “POS”, cf. Clark, Inside Book Publishing 127. Advance information sheets (“AIs”) are based on a questionnaire which the author or the agent on behalf of the author fills out, cf. Clark, Inside Book Publishing 122. The questionnaire is another document which stands proof for the complicated communication processes between participants in literary interaction. 27 Swainson,“Understanding the Publishing Process” 233-34.

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volves sending off sales representatives to buyers, developing marketing and promotional campaigns in stores or online and acquiring shelf and window space.28 There are visible and less visible titles in public discussions, but the visibility in bookshops can be steered directly via pre-order campaigns and co-op advertising and also through other arrangements between publishers and booksellers.29 At this stage, advance copies may not even have a title, let alone a cover, but they will reveal information about the second stage (i.e. publicity) to reassure retailers that their investment will pay off. Bookselling, like publishing, involves several steps and a range of expertise. There is no one way in which books get from publisher to bookshop. In a hypothetical supply chain, publishers are represented by distributors who sell to wholesale companies who then serve retailers. But there are differences between large, small, conglomerate and independent publishers as well as online, terrestrial and independent book retailers, or other outlets through which books are bought, such as book clubs or supermarkets.30 A small independent bookshop will have contacts with publishers who will do their own distributing and sell directly to the shop, other publishers distribute via bigger publishing houses and still others via wholesalers. A big chain like Waterstones, or an online giant like Amazon, also has diverse sources. Independent publishers and self-publishing authors who want to sell books to Waterstones, for example, are required to do so via the two biggest wholesalers in the UK, Gardners or Bertrams.31 Big publishers like Random House or HarperCollins are granted more direct access to the buyers’ team at Waterstones. The buyers ultimately decide what is stocked in the shops in a particular genre and are therefore considered crucial to the actual availability of books for end customers and possible readers.32 The journey of many books goes both ways: if buyers stock too many copies of a title, the surplus may be returned to the publisher. Up to 30-60% of all copies are in fact sent back to the publishers.33 Books need to prove that they sell

28 For more information on “reps”, cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 178. 29 On co-op advertising, cf. Thompson, Merchants of Culture 261. 30 Cf. Clark, Inside Book Publishing 69ff. 31 The chain recently discontinued relations to wholesalers via each shop and now has a centralised warehouse (“the hub”) functioning as another go-between the shops and wholesalers or publishers’ distributors, cf. Stuart Jeffries, “How Waterstone’s Killed Bookselling”, The Guardian 10 Nov 2009. 32 Cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 184. 33 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 285. This costly practice for both sides has been reduced somewhat due to the new technology of print-on-demand (POD) publishing.

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quickly. The average book is granted six weeks on the shelf; with some fiction titles, it may be as short as a fortnight.34 As a result, the cooperation with literary editors, reviewers, bloggers and other producers of attention is vital. This has direct consequences for the structure of publishing houses. As marketing departments are reduced and there is less money invested in selling-in, publicity departments and the investment of time and staff-power gain in influence.35 The second stage of sales, also called the ‘sell-through’, is handled by publicity professionals and does not involve immediate financial investment. Instead, reviewers need to be “softened up”,36 interviews arranged, extracts of books placed in relevant media,37 ‘mouth-to-mouth’ campaigns started via social networks and author readings arranged. This therefore shows that ARCs not only reveal the publicity strategy for a particular title but also call the attention of participants who are targeted to other institutions and individuals who have already given their approval. Looking at the example of Adiga’s paperback, we saw that the blurb on the back of the cover consisted of three quotations by other novelists and critics taken from reviews in the newspapers after the book’s publication. The ARC of Adiga’s The White Tiger carries two testimonial quotations, one on the front and one on the back, both of which must have been procured at an earlier stage of the editing and production process, and which present the voices of individuals rather than newspapers. It is possible that the author or his agent initially used these quotes to persuade the publisher of the book’s worth. The front cover quotation is by Pankaj Mishra, an Indian essayist and novelist. Mishra not only emphasises the literariness of Adiga’s novel but also focuses on its ‘grander’ political relevance. The other quotation, later used for the US paperback edition, is by American writer Gary Shteyngart, credited as the “author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook”. Shteyngart hails the novel as “[a]n exhilarating, side-splitting account of India today, as well as an eloquent howl at her many injustices”. He, too, categorizes Adiga as a literary author who “enters the

34 Cf. Thompson, Merchants of Culture 266; cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 189. 35 Cf. Jane Lawson, Editorial Director on the Doubleday imprint at Transworld, email message to author, 26 July 2013. See also Thompson, Merchants of Culture 205, on how selling to bookstores without publicity inevitably results in returns. On the practice of book returns, see also Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 36. 36 Larry et al. Brown, “‘Go, Little Book ...’ Getting a Book to Readers”, Publishing Research Quarterly 9.4 (Winter 1993-4). 37 Cf. on extracts Clark, Inside Book Publishing 126.

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literary scene resplendent in battle dress and ready to conquer” and challenges all involved to “bow to him”.38 In addition, Adiga’s ARC includes a quotation from a media source which did not feature on the final edition, and which would have been recognised by “insiders” rather than “outsiders”. The Bookseller, a weekly trade magazine, is quoted as a credible source in order to emphasise the attention the novel has attracted at the London Book Fair, an international event which encompasses influential figures from publishing and retail, and which offers a place for auctions and negotiations between authors, agents, publishers and booksellers.39 The information that Adiga’s novel “set the London Book Fair buzzing” heavily implies that it was not only a great talking point on that occasion but that it had also begun to entice others to act and get involved, including international publishers who acted on the attention raised and bought the rights.40 (I will come back to the perspective of journalists, reviewers and literary editors in chapter 2.4.) As was the case with the paperback cover, there are some participants in literary interaction who were also missing from the ARC: distributors and wholesalers, whom I have mentioned along with the booksellers, and literary agents, who comprise a comparatively new group which has nevertheless become very influential for literary interaction in the course of the twentieth century. In fact, the latter would have a great influence on a writer’s early presence on the stage of international book fairs. Literary agents represent writers in negotiations with publishers. As they are often former publishers themselves, agents are aware of what publishers expect of writers, and they use this knowledge in the best interest of the writer. In describing the logic of the field and the workings of the Anglophone publishing industry, John B. Thompson describes publishers as being squeezed between two forces: producers and consumers. These in turn are represented by middlemen: book retailing ideally works on behalf of the consumer, literary agents act in the interest of producers, i.e. authors.41 While booksellers put pressure on publishers to keep prices low for their customers, agents in contrast seek to win the highest possible price for the product in the form of author advances and royalties. Booksellers make money by demanding discounts and selling the product for a higher price than they had to pay for it; agents earn a 15-

38 In the meantime, Shteyngart has acquired a reputation for prolific blurbing. On blurbing, cf. Rachel Donadio, “He Blurbed, She Blurbed”, The NYBR 15 Aug. 2008. 39 The attention garnered at book fairs is crucial for the interest of trade magazines but the hype can also spill over into general media (cf. chapter 6.1). 40 On creating “buzz” at book fairs, cf. Thompson, Merchants of Culture 96. 41 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 102ff.

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20% share of the author’s profit. Ultimately, the agent performs several functions. He or she is often the first reader of an author’s manuscript and may act as first editor of the book, to the dismay of some publishers increasingly so, and the manuscript presented to publishers is often the result of much back-and-forth between writer and agent before it ever reaches a publishing house. They also advise the writer on the choice of a publishing house using what Thompson describes as an agent’s “cognitive map of the field”.42 How do agents pitch to publishers? Agents seek the publisher’s attention differently depending on the type of book they want to sell and have the option of presenting the manuscript in an exclusive submission, via a multiple submission or through an auction.43 Depending on the prospects of the book and the relationship an agent has with a publisher, they may introduce the writer and his or her project over lunch in an oral presentation, add a written outline, or, most commonly, write a pitch-letter.44 The main goal is to give reasons as to why the author is the right person with the right idea at the right time and to sell the manuscript. The auction – which may take place during a book fair – is a place of emotions and quick decisions. If a publisher competes with other publishers, they may easily end up with a higher investment than expected and which will then have to be balanced out through profits. The risk is particularly high with debut authors but it is also most likely to pay off when taken with a ‘fresh face’. When publishers agree to a large advance, and especially when they do so with debut writers, they will have acted based on the strength of the story as well as market research and their own experience, and the title will henceforth be treated as a ‘lead’: a book which receives more attention, more time and more money throughout the processes from editorial to production to sales. In short, the more the publisher spends on the product, the more of it will they need to sell; ergo, the higher the advance, the more the publisher will invest in the title to heighten the probability of its success.45 Nevertheless, the best deal, in the eyes of the agent, is not always that which promises the largest advance. Rather, it is a mixture of a large advance, optimum division of rights, the right editor for that particular manuscript and the best opportunities for a possible follow-up book, for the next deal. The optimal outcome is a compromise between immediate financial gain and the scope for future action. Ideally, the agent, as “choreographer of

42 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 90. 43 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 93. 44 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 91. 45 Cf. Wylie, qtd. in Thompson, Merchants of Culture 69.

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the author’s career”, needs to have both the author’s short- and long-term interest in mind.46 These written documents – the book’s covers, the ARCs, the literary agent’s pitch-letter – are not available in the same way. The glimpse at all three of these documents has given us a list of participant positions which are more or less transparent for the general reader. Each has a different function and a different perspective and each counts on the actions of others. The agent’s presentation prepares for and influences later descriptions but is the least publically available. The ARC emphasises not only what the publisher is prepared to do in order to push the success of the book but also highlights an array of participants who are prepared to invest money and attention. While the details on the ARC demonstrate who has already claimed their stakes in the book and why it is advisable for others to follow suit, the product available for the general reader is evidence of the situation after booksellers and reviewers have already picked it up. Hence, the information which is given on the ARC targets and refers to “insider” participants: alongside quotes from general newspapers, it will mention the approval of trade magazines such as The Bookseller; it will be more specific about the entire process of publishing, and give insight into the different stages of the process;47 and it might reveal information about the author’s involvement in the sales and publicity process, such as scheduled book tours and readings.48 Finally, the published book and its finished cover focuses on the expectations of the reader. If there is a common denominator among these documents, it is that they not only allow a view of different participants’ perspective and expectations but that they show how participants observe and steer the attention of others and give insight into the role which the participants assign to multipliers of attention such as the Booker Prize.

46 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 86. 47 Some ARCs explicitly divide the information in “marketing” (media advertising, catalogue promotion, point-of sale material, other formats and special editions) and “publicity” activities (author tour, media and review attention). Cf. The ARC for Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, appendix, figure 1a. 48 The ARC of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (appendix, figure 2b), or Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (appendix, figure 1a), even specifies particular destinations. Cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 194; Thompson, Merchants of Culture 246 on author tours.

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2.3 T HE E CONOMY OF ATTENTION : L ITERARY P RIZES AND OTHER M ULTIPLIERS We have seen that some participants are more prone to compete for the reader’s or the advance reader’s attention but that all those involved seek visibility for the book. In order to be picked up by a customer, a book needs at least half a dozen “touches”,49 meaning that the potential reader needs to have heard about the book repeatedly, ideally from several sources. There are additional participants in literary interaction which grant such visibility. These “recognition triggers” lend “accredited visibility” to books upon which attention is bestowed. They are independent bodies and need to be acknowledged for this “independence”; and they add to the element of “unpredictability” which characterises the already high-risk undertaking of trade publishing.50 Highly influential contemporary triggers include televised book clubs such as Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club in the US and Richard & Judy in the UK, movie tie-ins and, especially relevant for this study, literary prizes.51 In Adiga’s example, both covers – the finished copy and the ARC – explicitly directed the reader’s attention to a literary prize whose involvement seems equally important in all stages of the publishing and sales process, and indeed beyond. The ARC of The White Tiger stated that the publisher was preparing to submit Adiga’s novel for the Man Booker Prize, an indicator of its market segment as much as a proof for the book’s high profile. The Booker Prize was featured on all formats: the ARC, the paperback and hardcover editions. Of course, the connection between submitting the book for the Booker and it becoming the winner of the 2008 Prize can only be made in hindsight, but its success would not have been possible had the publisher not acknowledged the literary prize as a relevant participant whose attention needs to be gained, and whose attention is in turn essential in acquiring the attention of others. Modern literary prizes, like literary agents, are comparatively recent participants in literary interaction and have spread and proliferated since the early twentieth century. There are prizes across a large spectrum of categories and niches: for authors of different genres, age and experience, for women writers and writers with different nationalities, ethnicities and religion. There are also prizes which are awarded by a particular institution within literary interaction and whose criteria will, therefore, attempt to cater to the needs of that particular

49 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 244. 50 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 271. 51 Cf. also Thompson, Merchants of Culture 277-78.

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group. The publishing industry, for example, rewards best-selling books that are already successful with the British Book Awards.52 Retailers have their own tokens of distinction. Waterstones, for example, chooses an annual cohort of 12 New Voices. The Society of Authors in the UK administers a range of prizes which support authors at the different stages of their careers: for debut novelists under 35 (Betty Trask), for newcomers over 40 (McKitterick Prize) or for the best second novel (Encore Award). Individual newspapers also sponsor prizes. These include The Guardian First Novel Award, The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award or The TLS Translation Prize. The Booker Prize, in contrast, has maintained its position of trying to cater to everyone at once rather than to any one group in particular. The Booker Prize administration has shown itself to be well aware of the demands which are made from all sides of literary interaction but, instead of trying to solve the problem by choosing one side, they have embraced and internalised this ‘problematicness’. The Booker has been positioned as a marketing mechanism, the long arm of the publishing and retail industry, a readers’ guide, a media event or an accelerated form of literary criticism, but it does not exclusively identify with any of those participants. (I will come back to the particular case of the Booker Prize, its attempts to appease aesthetic and commercial interests and thus present all sides with a problem which every year needs their attention anew and which this study perceives as The Booker’s main asset, in the chapter 3.) The Booker’s pre-eminent standing has inspired the foundation of new awards and created competition among them. In 1996, the Orange Prize for Fiction for women writers was founded in response to the Booker’s predisposition to awarding the accolade to male authors and appointing male chairs of judges and jury panellists. In 2000, the retailer WH Smith instigated the more popular WH Smith Book Awards as an antidote to the presumably more elitist Booker Prize. The establishment of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize was received as a welcome, more legitimate alternative to selecting literary excellence among Commonwealth writers as its winner is chosen out of several regional winners, regionally judged by local judges. The most publicity-friendly competition with the Whitbread Book Awards (founded in 1971 and renamed Costa Book Awards in 2006), which selects the best books in five categories – best novel, best first novel, best children’s book, best biography, best poetry – and then sends them into competition to be named the best overall book, has accompanied almost five decades of their respective history (cf. chapter 3.3).

52 The British Book Awards (1990-2009) were later renamed to Galaxy National Book Awards (2010-2011) and currently operate as the Specsavers National Book Awards.

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Prizes have a massive impact on the economy of attention as the analysis of an advance reader’s copy and a paperback cover has already made clear. Each of the participants who have been so far introduced more closely or mentioned in the process of this chapter – readers, authors, literary agents, publishers, retailers and reviewers – take note of prizes and take them into account in the decisions they make. A prize gives feedback on all other participants and, in the case of high-profile prizes, functions as an event similar to the book’s publication in repeating the attention that was bestowed upon the book when it was first launched. As prizes interact with other interlocutors in literary discourse, they allow for a discussion of forms of participation and processes of appreciation. They create room for a debate about essential questions of literature and provoke everyone into taking part in this debate and positioning themselves in it. Prizes create an occasion which makes the constellation of allies and their diverse agendas visible. Readers are made aware of a ‘prized’ book in a number of ways: on the book’s cover, in designated bookshop sections, by following prize websites and announcements in social networks, in the papers or other media, through watching or listening to the broadcasted event of prize celebrations or partaking in them in person in bookshops, at literary festivals or at book fairs. Immediate prize awareness is raised in the form of stickers on the front cover. Later reprints and editions of the book will have a strapline mentioning the prize printed on their cover.53 Even follow-up books may state that the author has been the recipient of a particular prize. The direct influence of prizes on readers can be manifold – in fact, it can even cause them not to buy a book. But the sheer success and proliferation of literary prizes for different age, genre, gender, ethnic and even religious categories speak in favour of the esteem for them. Publishers are aware of a prize’s potential influence on sales and publicity, but they are also influenced into more direct action. Immediately after a book on their list has won a prize, they will print more copies, publish new editions and endow the book with even more attention than before. They will also need to announce the new success of the book. In some cases, they will even be required by the prize’s management to contribute to the publicity for the prize book directly. Further, the status of a publisher whose books have won many prestigious prizes in the past will determine future negotiations with authors and agents. In

53 For an in-depth analysis of the Booker Prize strapline on the covers of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and John Banville’s The Sea, the respective winners of the 2002 and 2005 Prize, cf. Claire Squires, “Book Marketing and the Booker Prize”.

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the eyes of publishers, then, prizes work both as marketing tool and, to use Thompson’s term, as a ‘recognition trigger’. These multiple functions as consumer guide, marketing tool and recognition trigger make a prize especially valuable in the eyes of retailers. Booksellers will stock more copies of a prize book. They might create extra shelf space or find another way to exhibit it more prominently. Moreover, prizes have a provable impact on sales. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, for example, sold 400 hardcover copies in the week before its Booker Prize success and 8,000 copies in the week after. This enormous 2000% increase in sales is not unusual among Booker winners and shows that retailers, too, have stakes not only in the fact that books win but also which particular books win. Not all choices are welcomed equally. Retailers prefer books which have not sold many copies already but for which the Booker can make more of a difference, and whose sales can really jump after the recognition. Prizes also work as media events and in this function will attract the attention of literary editors and reviewers who will lend them new and/or additional coverage. The document through which prizes communicate their selection process is the press release. Not all prizes will instigate attention from the public media, and some will simply be mentioned upon the announcement of the winner. A limited choice of prizes, however, including the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread (Costa) Award and the Orange (Bailey’s or Women’s) Prize for Fiction, will be accompanied in the media throughout the entire decision process: from the appointment of judging panels, to the announcement of their lists of nominees and of winning titles. A prize book will be reviewed again, or sometimes for the first time, but in either case judged not only based on its merits but the context known around its publication with the additional accolade in mind. Also, all participants – the book’s author, as well as those who will not have been of interest to the reader so far, e.g. agents, publishers and retailers – will be given a voice in interviews and features. This is why prize coverage lends itself to a study analysing the different perspectives of those involved: from author to publisher, from agent to retailer they will all be asked to make their reactions publically available. (I will come back to this point in chapter 2.4). Prizes have a very particular relationship with authors and academic critics: two participants whom I have not yet focused on specifically and who are – especially in the market segment of literary fiction – regarded as outsiders to the book industry, or who are at least required to keep a certain distance from it, even though they are central to literary interaction and to what Adams and Barker describe as the “life cycle” of a book (cf. chapter 1.4). The reputation of literary prizes, some more than others, seems to be particularly intertwined with the

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marketisation of literature, a ‘tarnishing’ of creativity with financial concerns. All participants in literary interaction can, therefore, be scandalised by an overly extensive cooperation with prizes, though this is less the case with those who are traditionally involved in the pecuniary side of the book business, such as publishers and booksellers. The accusation extends more acutely to cultural journalists and reviewers and, to an even greater extent, to academic critics and, of course, the source of creative genius, the author. What is the perspective of authors in literary interaction and why is their relationship with literary prizes so contested? According to Giles Clark, authors want to communicate ideas and gain recognition.54 But just as it is difficult to identify the varied desires and expectations of readers, it is difficult to adequately describe the perspective of any individual author. It is, however, possible to search for signs in the communication between participants of what they think might be desirable in an author’s positioning. As I have shown in chapters 2.1 and 2.2, the author is presented more clearly on the less visible advance reader’s copy than on the final cover as an active participant in literary interaction, in the publicity for his or her book. While the ARC will show him or her as someone prepared to tour the nation (and beyond), to participate in book readings and signings, and to commit to interviews and speeches, the copy which is placed in the hands of the general reader will present him or her as an authority responsible only for the content of the book. In fact, one of the many reasons for the proliferation of literary agents and the seemingly paradoxical propagation by publishers of the very institution which puts them under heavy pressure is that publishers prefer to separate the business part of book production from the creative process and the presence of an agent allows for this division of labour.55 It does not follow that authors are in any way naïve; only that such positioning seems to be of some advantage to them. Authors are also readers; hence, their knowledge or expectations of a book and those involved in literary interaction will at least be in line with the general reader. Through working with publishers, however, they will also be aware of the workings behind the finished book cover, and of the information on an advance reader’s copy. Some authors will have been asked or will have offered to review their colleagues’ output themselves and they will be – to some extent – knowledgeable about reviewing practices.56 They will have

54 Clark, Inside Book Publishing 2. 55 Cf. Thompson, Merchants of Culture 74. 56 On the different traditions of writers acting as reviewers in the UK vs. less so in the US, where academics are more prolific reviewers, cf. Morris Dickstein, Double Agent: The Critic & Society (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992): 167.

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heard of prizes and be informed about those for which they and their books are eligible. If successful, they will need to collect the prize, give a speech and show gratitude. In short, the question about the author’s position does not extend to a particular biographical person but to the position which they are expected to take and the conditions under which their involvement is made possible.57 Whatever their stance on the book market, authors will have to seek some attention if they want their book to be published, even if not all writers will aspire to garner attention for themselves rather than for the book in question, and they will therefore have to be aware of who will give them access to this attention. Many published authors of literary fiction will be represented by a literary agent who will provide this access and become the door to other participants. The agent then will be their “necessary point of entry” through which the author can build relationships with other participants.58 Others will have to rely on publishers directly, and a few (though their number is growing) choose to self-publish and will have to seek this access on their own. Either way, they will be expected to know their market segment, envision their potential audience, and be aware of possible classifications for their book even though they may not be prepared to handle this side of communication themselves and might need to seek the services of a literary agent after all. Writers will have gone through at least one education system and will have experienced how authors are treated in school and/or college curricula. Many contemporary writers have attended creative writing courses and received insights into critical perspectives on literary history, literary movements and literary theory.59 More than any of the other participants presented so far, authors are most aware of the participant in literary interaction who cannot be accessed by following certain steps like approaching and winning over a literary agent, but whose attention is instead aleatory, and who is deemed the most independent, even if this is only due to a temporal distance from the immediate events surrounding the publication, distribution, and even the initial reception of the book: the academic critic. Contemporary academic criticism’s relationship with literary prizes is often viewed as controversial. The self-aware discussion of literary prizes among liter-

57 For example, Aravind Adiga writes journalistic comments for publications in which his book is discussed and thus brings himself into discussion (cf. chapter 6.1). 58 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 73. 59 For an in-depth analysis of creative writing programs and the professionalisation of authors, cf. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA et al.: Harvard UP, 2009).

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ary critics, in contrast to other academics (sociologists, economists, political scientists) shows that there is a belief that academic criticism should remain uninfluenced by the process of production and distribution (cf. the discussion of criticism’s “complicity” in chapter 1.4). In fact, and as I have tried to show in the first chapter of this study, academic criticism was very late in showing interest in the processes of the literary marketplace and particularly in literary prizes. Nevertheless, there is a growing field of research which addresses what this study has termed as literary interaction of diverse participant positions. From the perspective of those involved in the immediate publication process, criticism’s influence on the book market is marginal.60 From the perspective of writers who are interested in being read not only by their contemporaries but by future generations as well, however, academic criticism plays a major role. Authors who draw and hold academic attention during their lifetimes are aware of the change in their profile: their websites begin to list academic monographs about their writing,61 and they are invited to speak at conferences, especially when the object under scrutiny is the contemporary book market.62 At such venues, they often take the perspective of academics. Authors also decide what happens with their estate and what level of insight will be allowed to those later researching their archives. Some of the least publically-available documents will only be preserved for the eyes of collectors and (future) literary historians: the author’s manuscript, correspondence with the publisher and/or literary agent, proof copies, advance reader’s copies and first editions. Yet increasingly, contemporary authors are giving this documentation away in their lifetimes. An archive of the writings and correspondence of Sebastian Barry, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize along with Aravind Adiga in

60 In a response to my question which role criticism plays in the everyday decision of publishers, a panel of four publishers at one of the workshops at the 2013 London Book Fair, in unison, have dismissed the influence of academic criticism altogether, and maintained that journalistic criticism only plays a role in quantity rather than quality. 61 Cf. Ian McEwan’s website which lists both journalistic and academic criticism of his books, including theses: “Bibliography & Criticism”, IanMcEwan.com. His website (as well as that of several other authors) is maintained by professional webmaster and librarian, Ryan Roberts, cf. IanMcEwan.com. 62 Cf. Author David Lodge on the pre- and post-publication stages of a book’s life cycle, cf. “A Mixed Blessing: A Writer’s View of Literary Prizes”, Pre- and PostPublication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English, ed. Vanessa Guignery and François Galli (Paris: Éditions Publibook Université, 2007).

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2008 (cf. chapter 6.2), can be found at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, among the papers of other writers such as the 2011 Man Booker winner Julian Barnes and the double Booker and 2003 Nobel Prize recipient J.M. Coetzee.63 The acquisition of an author’s estate during their lifetime involves speculation on both sides – the value of the documents is not easily discernible by either party and could always be estimated as being higher or lower than the price offered at the time of the transaction at a later point in time – but the presence of an archive also makes authors more available for academic research. Like the rest of the participants already introduced, the archive, too, relies on the power of literary prizes. The Ransom Center, for example, has taken notice of their authors’ successes and advertised their collection of his papers when Barry was awarded the Costa Book Award in 2009,64 and when both he and Barnes were nominated for the Man Booker Prize two years later.65 In this economy of attention, the book is under pressure to connect with different participants at different stages. It needs to acquire visibility not only in the largest possible space and with the most participants but also across time. Among the many scholars who have envisioned the journey of the book, Adams and Barker, the most prominent of those arguing from the perspective of the text (a participant only if the capacity to participate is extended to objects as I have done in the analyses of the books’ covers) instead of concentrating on the people involved – producers, distributors and recipients – referred to the book’s “life cycle”.66 The question they raise is what the process of literary interaction looks like from the perspective of the text. In the next section, I will focus on this ‘connectivity’ of the (prize-eligible) novel in contemporary review publications with a focus on print media.

63 Anne Trubek, “Canon Fodder”, The Atlantic 6 Feb. 2012. 64 Cf. Harry Ransom Center, Harry Ransom Center Holds Archive of 2008 Costa Book of the Year Award Winner, 29 Jan. 2009. 65 Alicia Dietrich, “Two Ransom Center Authors Long Listed for 2011 Man Booker Prize”, Harry Ransom Center, Cultural Compass 27 July 2011. 66 Adams and Barker,“A New Model for the Study of the Book” 25.

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2.4 M EDIA P RESENCE : P UBLIC ATTENTION P ROFILES FOR C ONTEMPORARY L ITERARY F ICTION IN THE UK Prizes become visible in form of straplines and stickers on book covers, in bookshops and at literary festivals; they can be identified in the diverse documents used by publishers, booksellers, authors, agents and readers; but where they are most easily traceable is through prize coverage in the media. Just as a novel’s cover calls for the reader’s attention, the advance reader’s copy calls for the attention of retailers and reviewers, and given that each of these versions reveal who else is already involved with the novel and why those addressed by these documents should also get on board, prizes draw attention to books and raise the stakes for others to participate. If publishers are prepared to invest in a book and display their investment through publicity and marketing campaigns, through large advance payments to authors, through a large first printing, retailers and reviewers can hardly afford not to take part in the hype. Similarly, when a novel receives the accolades of a major prize, not only is this news-worthy and naturally the object of media attention but also worthy of further inspection of what enabled the book to get this far. Prizes are an important element in the media presence of a book. But not every book is nominated for literary prizes and even fewer books win. Thus there are other elements in a book’s life cycle which will secure public attention. The central event is, of course, the book’s publication. Other event-based generators, apart from the book’s publication and prize recognition, are literary festivals, book fairs and other distinctions and competitions, such as the selection for TV and radio book clubs, retail promotions and adaptations into other media. Secondly, there are seasonal reasons for giving attention to a book, such as Christmas and summer recommendations, annual previews and end-of-year reviews. Thirdly, there is a less ritual, more situational, reason: the topical appeal for a particular book which is the least predictable of the three types of attention generators but which “insiders” will nevertheless seek to draw and which is known in the industry as the novel’s “non-fiction hook”.67 Together, these elements help build what I call the book’s public attention profile. The establishment of a chronological pattern in the public discussion of a title helps to identify the afore-mentioned ‘connectivity’ of the book, the participants who give it momentum and the influence of particular elements – eventbased, seasonal or topical – on its success. The Booker Prize is one such event influencing the quantitative and qualitative pattern in the discussion of a book

67 Rachel Donadio, “Promotional Intelligence”, The NYT 21 May 2006.

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and the ensuing prize coverage is one of several phases in a novel’s public attention pattern (cf. chapter 3.3). Public attention for a contemporary novel in the general media does not typically begin with the author writing a manuscript, him or her finding an agent, the agent offering the manuscript to a publisher, and the publishing routine from editing to production to sales. Although all these stages of a book and all the participants involved in these processes have expectations about if, what and how much public attention will be bestowed upon the book, the most important event which calls for the realisation of this attention is – as the term already signifies – the publication of the book. But even this central event does not necessarily initiate media attention either. Because shelf-lives are as short as two to six weeks,68 and the overall sales life of titles, including hardcover, paperback and mass-market paperback, rarely exceeds more than one year, books rely on advance orders and quick media response.69 The publication of a book is preceded by pre-publication alerts, reviews and features and is followed by similar types of attention after the event. Traditionally only books in hardcover were reviewed; these days paperbacks are also granted space in the review pages, which creates an additional publication event and another set of coverage.70 The “window”71 between the publication of hardcover and paperback – generally 9-12 months – can then either be left open (though the book will then probably lose in visibility) or be filled with additional event-based, seasonal or topical coverage. Book coverage in newspapers and magazines gives insight into the literary calendar, or rather into several calendars as adhered to by the main participants. In publishing, there are two “selling cycles”, spring and autumn, for which publishers publicize catalogues in advance. These catalogues – along with other material, such as the advance reader’s copy – give insight into forthcoming publications and prepare booksellers and reviewers for what to expect.72 Autumn was traditionally the time for literary fiction and October the busiest month for this section of the market. However, in an attempt to diversify, spread, and find gaps for their titles, some publishers have introduced a third or fourth season (sum-

68 Cf. Thompson, Merchants of Culture 266; Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 189. 69 Clark, Inside Book Publishing 44; cf. also Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 189. On the effect of amazon.com on pre-orders and the measuring of first-day-results, cf. Thompson, Merchants of Culture 251. 70 Depending on the relevance of the title, the publication of the audio format may also trigger such wide response. 71 Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 211. 72 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 189.

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mer, winter) and autumn no longer dominates to the same extent.73 For booksellers, Christmas has always been the fifth and most important season of the year, in which sales rocket.74 Accordingly, prize administrators in the UK have tended to use autumn to announce their winners, thus capitalising on preChristmas attention. Today, however, and in a process which reflects the publishers’ search for gaps and niches, prizes are spread throughout the entire calendar year: some have retained their connection to the old literary season (for example, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), others have moved to the spring and profit from the media attention which is bestowed upon the London Book Fair (for example, the Orange [Bailey’s Women’s] Prize for Fiction), and still others even use the otherwise quiet summer months (for example, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). The Booker Prize occupies several of the seasons and garners media attention in phases, with the announcement of a longlist in July, a shortlist in September, and the winner in October, targeting both the crucial summer and Christmas recommendation seasons (cf. chapter 3.1). Reviewers follow these seasons and develop their own strategies to encourage and profit from this pattern of increasing and decreasing interest. They use the weeks before Christmas to review the year’s production and to recommend books which their readership might want to acquire as gifts or include on their wish lists. In the weeks approaching summer holidays, the literary sections particularly promote ‘beach reads’, mostly titles available in paperback. Finally, the appeal of a novel’s topic, its characters and tone will be covered in comparison to other books or cultural products with a similar topic, or even with reference to current affairs when the book’s setting, characters, or theme happen to shed light on a past, current or future event. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, for example, was mentioned in some of the coverage on the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which happened half a year after the novel’s publication, mainly because the book treats similar tensions in India. The public attention profile develops itself in and through various outlets, but newspapers are a central media for tracing it. The three types of attention generators – event-based, seasonal and topical – have a different appeal for the different genres of coverage (reviews, news, interviews, features, comments and col-

73 Cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 210. In the US, for example, February has become the month in which John Grisham publishes his latest novel and it makes little sense to compete for visibility with similar titles at this time of the year. 74 Because of higher sales of gifts, Christmas is also the better time for hardcovers whereas the summer months are better for paperbacks.

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umns) and especially for the different types of review publications (general, literary, trade and non-literary). There are two kinds of publications which are involved in the public discussion of novels and which can be distinguished by the respective audiences which they target – general and specialist – and the degree to which they keep to the publication-induced attention rhythm. Reminiscent of the different information on the cover of the finished as opposed to the advance reader’s copy, the information about books found in general papers will appeal to a general, wider audience, whereas the information which can be found in specialist media will be less widely visible and will appeal to a specialist readership. General media, such as national dailies and weeklies, and their audience of general readers, have an interest in following current debates, as well as learning about newly published books and the events which they are part of. It is here that we find the pre- and post-publication pattern as described above with the widest representation of other coverage based on prizes, seasonal interest and connectivity to other topical debates. Specialist media – trade, literary and non-literary – have a specific interest in the novels which they discuss and, depending on their audience, will deliver news about the novel with a more or less strong connection to the attention rhythm with pre- and post-publication coverage set by general media. Trade media such as The Bookseller in the UK or Publishers Weekly in the US will stick most closely to the literary calendar presented by the publishing and retail industry: the publication of catalogues, buyers’ seasonal interests, the publisher’s description and market placement. They will concentrate on pre-publication reviews and post-publication news which signify the book’s success: bestselling lists, prize coverage and retail promotions. Literary media such as the London Review of Books in the UK or The New York Review of Books in the US will adhere to the interest in new publications but much less strictly than trade or general media. They will seldom pre-review books (especially in the UK). They choose a very small percentage of books published for review and place emphasis on the literary quality of the titles. Specialist, non-literary media will only review novels if they present a topic or problem which coincides with their interests: science magazines such as Nature might review a novel whose protagonist is a scientist or which deals with a science-related topic, economic magazines such as The Economist might take interest in a novel about entrepreneurship and a women’s magazine such as Grazia might cover a book about female empowerment. All in all, there are three important points about the potential and actual attention pattern. For one, the attention pattern as described above applies almost

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exclusively to very few chosen titles. From the titles arriving at the desk of a literary editor of a national newspaper, perhaps 1 in 10 will be reviewed. Not every novel reviewed in hardback will also be reviewed in paperback, and very few novels go on occupying column inches in the time between those two publication events with the help of prize or festival coverage, seasonal or topical interest.75 Secondly, there are some differences between the UK and the US cycles of coverage which could only be touched upon in the above, and which will be further explored in the course of the individual case studies. Booker books are only eligible if published in the UK but then often go on to be published overseas – sometimes within a month, sometimes 6-12 months later. In rare cases, they will be published overseas first and then in the UK. The profile of a book, as well as the discussion which it is granted (both the sum and the kind of statements made in reference to it), is heavily influenced by the interplay between its UK and US publication, and the attention given by reviewers, commentators and prizes in either country. Finally, as the following analyses will show, it is important to stress that in reflection of who is responsible for the scheduling of individual events or giving incentive for coverage, both the potential attention and the actual profile of a book are the result of interplay between various participants and their particular perspective on the novel. Publishers decide on the date of publication and thereby set the foundation for the attention pattern but they do so in awareness of the literary calendar of other participants, with its seasonal, prize and festival cycles. Throughout this chapter, I have shown that participants have a particular awareness of other participant positions and each – though in different degrees – seeks public attention. Not only should the entire chain of supply and value be regarded as a circular process, but each instance of communication is dialogical (at the very least), and rests on the principle of feedback or loops, i.e. expectations of the other participant’s interest and awareness of past and future actions. In addition to the material analysed closely in the early part of this chapter, i.e. the covers of the final editions and the advance reader’s version, there are numerous other documents which represent such loops. The drafting and reworking of the manuscript relies on the previous experience of the author, the agent

75 For an overview of major review outlets, cf. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 197. The New York Times publishes some 300 reviews per year (this does not include the Sunday review), while Publishers Weekly has as many as 5,000. On diminishing pages in book sections and fewer print ads, cf. Thompson, Merchants of Culture 244247.

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and the publisher and their expectations of one another. Along with the manuscript itself, information about the future book travels with similar expectations in mind: the author queries the agent, the agent pitches the manuscript to the commissioning editor, the editor proposes the book to his internal contacts, the sales manager briefs the sales representative, who will prepare files on both the books to be sold and the customers (retailers) to be sold to. The publicity manager makes presumptions on which review publications and other media to target and how. They will know the interviewers, radio and TV hosts, and they will prepare authors with “tour memos” as well as detailed information about what and how much to say to each of these individuals.76 The contract between the author and the publisher and the agreement on advances, royalties and rights will influence the publisher’s actions and, more specifically, the profit and loss (P&L) sheet,77 which will then influence the price, retail discounts and any promotional offers. In his overview of the publishing industry, Albert N. Greco regrets the lack of market research and the overemphasis on perception as the basis for decisions in the business. But it is this interplay of participants in literary communication which allows them to divert and direct attention and to secure the widest possible range of action. In the following, I will describe the literary prize at the centre of this study, the Booker Prize, in more detail, highlighting its own patterns of relationships and its positioning in debates on literary value and literary history.

76 Greco, The Book Publishing Industry 196. 77 Thompson, Merchants of Culture 69, 131.

3. The Booker and Public Attention: The History of the Booker as a History of Problems Geraldine Byers now knew her literary destiny; she would win the Booker Prize. [...] Because of her sense of destiny, [her] level of excitement about the award of the first Booker Prize was probably higher than that of most of the literary establishment. SIMON BRETT, THE BOOKER BOOK: A NOVEL, 1989.

In Simon Brett’s novel The Booker Book (1989) about a novelist in search of literary recognition, the news of a new literary prize to be inaugurated in 1969 is not greeted with much fanfare among London’s literati. Apart from Geraldine Byers, the protagonist and author of one slight debut novel, who sets out to pen her follow-up book in the hope of winning this new Booker Prize, the award fails to incite any excitement. Geraldine’s ambition and her plans to style her next novel after the winner may be a caricature of authorial responses to the lure of awards or other such competitions, but the description of the initial reaction to the Booker is spot on. Apart from its founders, nobody could or would foresee the Booker’s potential, and even they were hard-pressed to do so in its initial years. The sponsors wanted to quit the whole undertaking until things began to change drastically in the 1980s when the prize managed to draw the interest of national newspapers and TV broadcasts. Ever since, the Booker Prize has had a roller coaster history of immense influence on sales and careers, heated annual debates, controversies, and – due to different expectations and agendas – a close if somewhat tense relationships with

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other participants in the game of literary fiction. By the end of what is commonly perceived as its peak decade, the 1980s, the Booker had become a major force on the book market and, according to Julian Barnes, one of the shortlisted authors, was driving everyone “mad”: The Booker, after 19 years, is beginning to drive people mad. It drives publishers mad with hope, booksellers mad with greed, judges mad with power, winners mad with pride, and losers (the unsuccessful short-listees plus every other novelist in the country) mad with envy and disappointment.1

In addition to those whom Barnes labels as “mad” as a consequence of their relationships with the Booker (publishers, booksellers, judges, winning, losing and nominated authors) and in the light of chapters one and two, one might add readers as well journalistic and academic critics to this list. How the Booker exerts such extreme influence on every other participant, and how it has attained such agency, is the topic of the third chapter of this study. It will present the relationships in which the Booker stands with the participants made more or less visible on the different editions of a novel’s book covers as well as in media coverage. It will also add new participants to the prize discourse by focusing on those who become visible as part of literary interaction when the prize’s framework is analysed: its administrative and executive bodies, as well as its link to sponsors and other networks. Finally, it will show the ways in which the Booker opens the door to interactions on an international level. This was already the case to a lesser extent – for example, the advance reader’s copies (tend to) refer to international rights sold to publishing houses abroad (cf. chapter 2.2) – but it is with the arrival of the Booker that these relationships are emphasised. These moments at which the Booker causes friction – on the inside and outside of what are commonly perceived as the boundaries of literary interaction – are problematic. They are problematic in the sense that they ask to be solved and

1

Barnes, “Diary” 21. Julian Barnes changed his public perception of the Booker when he was finally awarded the prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending, after three of his previous novels had been nominated for the prize in 1984, 1998 and 2005. At the awards ceremony, he revised his position with a tongue-in-cheek statement: “I was saying that the best way to stay sane is to treat it as ‘posh bingo.’ That means unless and until you win it, when you realize that the judges are the wisest heads in literary Christendom.” (Hephzibah Anderson, “Julian Barnes Wins Man Booker Prize He Once Called ‘Posh Bingo’”, Bloomberg 18 Oct. 2011.)

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that they generate new problems. It is this troubling and productive characteristic of the Booker’s problem-generating which I mean by its ‘problematicness’. The Booker’s offering of problems and identifying of debate-triggering problems will lead the analyses in the case studies in the second part of this study. At the end of this chapter, bearing in mind the results of the analysis of the academic discourse on the Booker Prize (chapter 1) and the constellation of participants and their settings of interaction (chapter 2), I will outline possible analytical approaches to the question of the prize’s influence on the discourse about the novels, and which will be used in the second part of this study.

3.1 T HE B OOKER ’ S I NTRICATE ‘P ROBLEMATICNESS ’, OR H OW THE B OOKER G ARNERS ATTENTION BY G ENERATING P ROBLEMS Can the Booker’s success be measured according to the attention it garners by generating problems and how is this success accounted for? In his introduction to a volume of writing samples by past winners entitled Prize Writing (1989), published as a manifesto in celebration of the Booker’s twenty-first birthday, Martyn Goff, the Prize’s administrator from 1969 to 2006, asked the question of what exactly constituted the Prize’s success. He gave five reasons for the Booker’s pre-eminence: “scandal”, “dramatic timing”, “the amount of the prize”, “careful choice and balance of judges” and “structure of [its] management”.2 At first, Goff makes every attempt to play down the influence of “scandal” as a distinguishing characteristic of the Booker Prize – claiming that other awards have in fact caused much bigger scandals – but he then proceeds to tell the history of the Booker based on this very aspect, making it the most vital ingredient in the creation of the Booker myth. From authors raging against the Prize and its sponsors at the award ceremony to judges declining to continue the process of reading and selecting books on the basis that they found the entered titles “too

2

Martyn Goff, “Introduction”, Prize Writing: An Original Collection of Writings by Past Winners to Celebrate 21 Years of the Booker Prize, ed. Martyn Goff (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989): 11, 12. The volume is one of many instances in which representatives of the Booker Prize have sought to write its history. Apart from this collection and several other articles written by Martyn Goff for Logos and The Bookseller, cf. also Jonathan Taylor, ed., The Man Booker Prize: 35 Years of the Best Contemporary Fiction (London: The Booker Prize Foundation, 2003).

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sexy”, the Booker has produced many a potential scandal to be picked on by the press.3 It seems indeed that it is the Prize’s biggest problems which attract the most interest. But scandal, (particularly) those instances in which the problems are voiced by one party or another, really seems to be only one side of the coin.4 Rather than as a history of scandal or controversy, I would like to present the Booker’s history as one of a series of problems which can but do not need to erupt in the form of scandal. The Booker creates problems which others can respond to in accordance with their own interests. In the following, I want to argue that the problems which it creates for others largely derive from its interaction with these others in the first place. The Booker’s ‘problematicness’, then, is both produced and compensated for via the criteria named by Goff – the management structure and the annual schedule pattern in particular – which have in turn been subject to change as the Prize has proceeded in its collaboration with other participants in literary interaction. The administrator’s take on the history of the Booker Prize and its scandals is therefore also a story of how the Booker management has reacted to such disturbances: at times changing its own rules to try to solve problems, but in doing so often creating new ones. From a questionable and questioned set of ‘founding fathers’, to its rules of eligibility, to the criteria of selection and the use of the literary calendar’s cycles of attention, the history of the Booker seems problematic, and, more often than not, fruitfully so, if not always for everyone to the same degree. Its “dramatic timing” can be said to encompass both the pattern of the Booker year as well as the Oscar-like announcement of the final winner. The Booker has established a very particular pattern, with the biggest event in the cycle – the annual announcement of the winner – taking place in mid-October. The awards dinner, televised live by the BBC from London’s Guildhall, is preceded by a number of events which are announced to the public via press releases. The public Booker year (actually) begins with the announcement of the chair of the judges in November of the previous year, then the full panel of judges in December, their first selection in a longlist of thirteen titles in July, and another reduction to a shortlist of six titles in September. Each of these steps is followed in the press, with questions being asked regularly or specifically in reference to individual

3

Goff, “Introduction” 16.

4

James F. English defined this problem-seeking characteristic of the prize as its a priori “scandalousness”, the potential to instigate controversial debate by the sheer positioning at the cross-roads between cultural and economic capital.

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judges or individual titles which have been included or excluded, as well as particular constellations of judges and titles. At these public events, the Booker lets others ‘see its hand’ and follow the decisions which it makes. Everyone can take part and discuss the different stages of selection and speculate about the next step in the process. The contemporary pattern of the Booker season is the result of constant change and adaptation.5 When the first award was made in April 1969 it was for a book published between December 1967 and November 1968. This was changed in favour of a more immediate judgment in 1971, which promised closer ties to the current publishing output but also resulted in a ‘lost’ year for books published during the year 1970. 6 The new problem of the eligibility of novels bearing that year’s publication date really became evident in 1984 when half the titles shortlisted in September had not yet been published. It was then resolved that all eligible novels needed to be available to readers by the end of September; however, this resulted in a loss of three months from October to December – not just any three months, but the strongest sales season for book retail. Since the late 1980s, therefore, the winning title announced in October needs to have been published between 1 October of the previous and 30 September of the award year. The initial use of the calendar year has thus given way to a distinct Booker year, which has become more and more current. The moment of Booker appreciation is now closer to the first launch of the title in questions, at times even preceding its publication. Yet the late publication of books which are already present in Booker discussions can have negative consequences for the book trade when not all shortlisted books are available to the customers. The chronology of suspense has, too, been the object of fine-tuning over the years. In its initial years, the decision about the winner was made months before its actual announcement, resulting in leaks to the press. Now the judges decide in the hours immediately preceding the announcement, sometimes even late into the dinner ceremony and the fresh news is then delivered instantly by the chair of judges to a surprised audience – the media’s and the public’s as much as the dining authors’ and their entourage of spouses, family, friends, agents and pub-

5

For a detailed account of these changes, cf. Todd, Consuming Fictions, and Richard Todd, “How Has the Booker Prize Changed since 1996?”, Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain, eds. Wolfgang Görtschacher, Holger Klein and Claire Squires (Vienna, Austria: Praesens, 2006).

6

“In an act of literary reparation”, this injustice was later made up for with a “Lost Man Booker Prize” which JG Farrell won for Troubles with a public vote in May 2010, cf. Motoko Rich, “Shortlist Unveiled for ‘Lost’ Booker Prize”, The NYT 25 Mar. 2010.

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lishers. Previously, the announcement of the winner had initially been linked to the announcement of the shortlist. When the rules were changed to postpone the final decision, the six shortlisted titles were given a more independent space for suspense and speculation which currently lasts for over a month. Until the 1980s, there was an unofficial custom of releasing a longer list of titles which narrowed down the choice from the initial pool of sent-in and called-in titles. This unofficial practice was revived in 2001 when a longlist was officially announced for the first time. The length of this list has now been consolidated and since 2007 spans a more regular “Man Booker Dozen” of 12-13 titles. The announcement of the longlist was probably inspired by a rival award, the Orange Prize for Fiction, a prize by women for women, which was founded in 1996 specifically to counterbalance the Booker’s poor gender quota and which had adopted a longlist, shortlist, winner process from its very beginnings. The rivalry with other awards and the change of sponsorship also resulted in a change in ‘prize money’. Today each winner is given a cheque for £50,000 and each shortlisted author £2,500. This relatively high prize money compares generously with other prizes. Although there are richer awards – the Nobel Prize for Literature is worth about £700,000, the IMPAC Dublin promises some £80,000 – the Booker tops its immediate rivals: both the Whitbread (Costa) Book Awards and the Orange (Women’s) Prize present their winners with cheques for £30,000 and the Guardian First Novel Award hand out £10,000. The Booker had been well remunerated from the very beginning, its first iteration coming with a comparatively large sum of £5,000, which was gradually augmented to £15,000 in the late 1980s. As the competition among prizes rose, however, the Booker lost ground to other prizes when it came to the extent of the immediate reward. When the Man Group took over, the Booker was worth £20,000 for the winner – less than the Orange or the Whitbread. Man doubled the award so that that prize money was again outstanding rather than merely solid and “outstripped inflation for the first time in its history”.7 In addition to the scheduling pattern, the dramatic timing and the prize money, the Booker’s main distinguishing characteristic is its intricate structure of checks and balances, which became more and more professionalised over the years and culminated in a tripartite framework consisting of the Booker Prize Foundation, the Advisory Committee and the judging panel. While the first two remain constant and lend continuity to the Prize, the members of the last body change annually and give the Man Booker Prize a different direction with each

7

Todd, “How Has the Booker Prize Changed since 1996?” 12. On the relation between the Booker Prize and sales figures, cf. Todd, Consuming Fictions 103.

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constellation of the five judges, one of whom bears the responsibilities of being Chair. The “structure of the management” and the “careful choice and balance of judges” – as Goff described them – are the result of constant changes in negotiation with participants who have collaborated with the Booker, and who have entered into an, at times precarious, alliance. A further look at the organisation of the Prize and how it came into being will allow for a better understanding of the intricate process to obtain legitimacy vis-à-vis some of its structural problems. In 1968, Tom Maschler and Graham C. Greene, publishers at Jonathan Cape, approached Booker-McConnell, whom they had known from previous collaborations, and came together to lay the foundations for the Booker Prize – with possible advantages for both parties. This alliance was later reported to have been a dream-come-true for both sides as they had already been cherishing expectations in this direction for some time.8 The publishers had been thinking about invigorating the UK book market with a prize which would instigate debate. This wish was made concrete at a meeting of the Society of Young Publishers in 1964 at which Maschler took a leading role and where the first set of criteria for a possible prize was sketched.9 Preferably, it would come with a large sum of money attached, reward books published in Great Britain, attract publicity (not least with a spectacular award ceremony), be judged in a way which would grant objectivity and be sponsored in a way which would guarantee autonomy. The authors present at the meeting requested that the criteria for winning the award not be coupled to book sales and that the atmosphere should be kept worthy.10 The critics – represented by the literary editor of a daily newspaper – were in agreement with the propositions made so far, emphasising the hitherto lack of publicity for prizes, the need for

8

A most comprehensive history of the Booker Prize can be found in Todd, Consuming

9

Cf. “Unnoticed Literary Prizes: Plea for a New Major National Award”, The

Fictions. Bookseller 7 Nov 1964. For a detailed account of a pre-history of the Booker with an emphasis on the publishers’ side, see Norris, “‘Simply the Best’”. 10 Four decades later, David Lodge named “the reason why prizes for fiction are of such enormous interest to the literary world and to the reading public” from the perspective of authors (“A Mixed Blessing: A Writer’s View of Literary Prizes”, 154): “they offer the writer the possibility of acquiring artistic prestige and making a large amount of money at the same time. The novel and the drama are the two forms in which you can do that, if you are lucky – hit both targets with a single arrow. It is quite difficult but it can be done. Winning a major prize is one way of doing it.”

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autonomy from sponsors, and additionally calling for a possible tie with universities. This ideal, multi-perspective take on what a prize should accomplish does lay out the different perspectives and demands, but would stand in contrast with the actual realisation of the plan. The final partner in the deal, Booker plc – a wholesale company with previous interests in the sugar industry in Guyana – had only just consolidated their activities in the UK as a consequence of the post-independence movement, and, in an attempt to diversify, had made their first moves in the book world. Booker’s newly established “Author’s Division” had bought the rights from several authors, forming a tax-shelter for, among others, James Bond creator Ian Fleming and crime icon Agatha Christie. Hoping for better publicity and more inside expertise in the trade, the company was happy to sponsor a prize which would carry its name. Administered by the Publishers Association and sponsored by an outsider with inside profits, the product of this win-win situation, the Booker Prize, was first awarded in 1969. Yet critics soon perceived the bond as problematic. The colonial and capitalist involvement in the Booker Prize came to be understood as insurmountable at certain times and by different agents, but it also turned out to be one of its advantages, precisely because of the need to constantly intervene in its administration and constellation of participating representatives. In order to make up for this disequilibrium between aesthetics and money, moral high standards and political and economic realities, the Booker needed a way to find a more balanced representation. The Publishers Association withdrew its support one year into the Prize, making room for new management. This change provided a much needed institutional framework for a literary prize which had been prone to criticism for its sales-oriented ‘industry’ background. The critics of the Prize could thus concentrate forthwith on the other side of the ‘dowry’, its corporate ties to an organisation with a past of colonial exploitation. When John Berger was awarded the Prize in 1972, his acceptance speech lay open just how sensitive the literary scene could be towards a money-lender with a colonial past. The author did not accept his laurels without pointing out the exploitative operations of Booker plc and disclosing his plans to give half his prize-money to the Black Panther movement. Berger’s reaction also pointed to the difficult situation writers found themselves in when having to publically accept appreciation from an institution which did not fulfil their expectations – such as those voiced in that first preBooker meeting.

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The new management, “representing all parts of the book world”,11 gave an insight into who was prepared to join the alliance and whose representatives were needed in order to establish the widest possible legitimacy. The Management Committee consisted of an author, two publishers, a bookseller, a librarian, the Booker chairman, another Booker representative and the administrator of the Prize, the previously quoted Martyn Goff. Its main responsibility was to appoint the annually changing judges and – if necessary – to amend the Prize’s rules. When Booker plc merged with Iceland and formed the Big Food Group in 2000, there was much speculation about the Prize’s future. After three decades of sponsorship, Booker plc announced their withdrawal and transferred ownership of the Prize to a new registered charity, the Booker Prize Foundation, which was to take over the organisation and to look for new sponsorship. The new sponsor, the Man Group, a British alternative investment management business with a focus on hedge funds, came on board with new (and more) money, with new rules and new gossip. Old suspicions of hegemony gave way to new anxieties such as the fear of ‘Americanisation’ (to which I will come back in chapter 5.3).12 The contemporary structure of the Man Booker Prize is an even more intricate framework of checks and balances in which all participants are carefully represented. The three bodies – the Foundation, the Advisory Committee and the judges – accommodate members from different institutions who are involved in the public discussion of literature and those who are interested in it. The even spread of politicians, businessmen, publishers, booksellers, critics and writers involved is an attempt on the part of the Prize to live up to the desired high standards of objectivity and balance out the investment on the part of the diverse groups which it takes on board. The Booker borrows know-how from both among the participants in literary interaction and those ostensibly outside it but who join the interaction with their membership in the diverse panels and committees. But there is a (key) difference between the three bodies: the more public the panel, the more ‘literary’ the pan-

11 Goff, “Introduction” 14. 12 The rumours according to which the Man Booker Prize was supposedly going to open up its rules of eligibility in favour of the hitherto shunned US-Americans accompanied the change of sponsorship and peaked in May 2002. After much protest and debate, the initial plans were not realised but the decision was put back on the agenda in 2013 when it was announced that the Man Booker Prize would expand globally as of 2014, cf. Man Booker Prize Announces Global Expansion. The Man Booker Prizes, 18 Sept. 2013.

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ellists. Politicians, businessmen, as well as representatives of the publishing industry are especially included in the Foundation; critics and fellow novelists form the jury. The Foundation consists of representatives of the former and current sponsors, politicians, journalists, figures from the publishing and book industry, as well as writers of fiction and non-fiction. In its first years, Martyn Goff was the president of the Booker Prize Foundation, followed by the academic Jonathan Taylor, and more recently by Baroness Helena Kennedy, former chair of the British Council. The affiliation of the other members (as well as their names and titles) makes instantly clear just how much Booker’s profile has risen. The Foundation appoints the members of the Advisory Committee, which “represents all sides of the book world”.13 The Advisory Committee is responsible for the selection of the judges and for changing the rules. While the judges change annually, the Booker’s sub-structure guarantees historical continuity. The need for historical continuity was particularly evident when Man decided to retain the Booker name in order to preserve the brand which it had inherited. Finally, the annually changing panel of judges is equally under the obligation to represent as many interests as possible, and each of the participating groups has an interest in being represented. The authority of the Prize to judge over novels is carefully constructed across the three bodies but particularly in the most public, the panel of judges: an individual juror is chosen to adorn the Prize; he/she will in turn profit from the reputation of the Prize that chose him or her to make a choice. Judges are appointed with a balance of both their personal and their institutional tastes. The institutional make-up of the annual jury resembles the composition of public literary debate. Since 1977 it has been established as a five strong body consisting of “an academic, a critic or two, a writer or two and the man in the street”.14 These days the Booker website specifies “a literary critic, an academic, a literary editor, a novelist and a major figure.”15 But the members are also assembled so as to ensure their heterogeneity and mix of personalities. Despite annual changes to the constellation, eccentric chair personalities lend the Booker continuity via unpredictability: each year there is room for speculation as to the particular judge’s character and profession and the consequences of both for their management of group discussion and possible selection. After all, it is with the judges where the highest responsibility of the Prize lies. Each year, the panel chooses “the very

13 “FAQs”, The Man Booker Prizes 8 Feb 2017. 14 Goff, “Introduction” 18. 15 “How the Prize Works”, The Man Booker Prizes 31 May 2012.

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best book,” or more specifically, “the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.”16 The Booker’s explicit goal may not be “to drive people mad” but the programmatic choice of the best novel turns out to be a problem in itself. In fact, the Prize’s construction as described by Goff, coupled with the Booker’s short statement on eligibility, which presumes that there is such a thing as a best novel and that the Booker is best positioned to select this book, has been perceived as highly problematic. Graham Huggan has perhaps most prominently spotted a major flaw in a prize which is situated in the UK and judged by a set of British judges, and makes a selection among authors from around the English-speaking world with the condition that their books are published by a UK publishing house: “The Booker might be seen […] as remaining bound to an Anglocentric discourse of benevolent paternalism”.17 While some have seen the Booker’s interest in what has come to be known as postcolonial fiction positively, or at least as a form of compensation for the first sponsor’s exploitative past, Huggan elaborated on the ironies of picking authors and their writing (instead of sugar or other resources) from around the former empire whilst the money and infrastructure remains (mostly) in London (cf. chapter 1.2). From the perspective of the Prize, however, this area of conflict ensures an annual check of forces, not dissimilar to a cricket championship or a wider version of The Ashes, and positions the Booker as a state-of-the-empire prize. In addition to the annual speculation about gender or genre, this inter-national debate is one which secures (circulating) media coverage from Ireland to South Africa, from Canada to Australia. Mostly, however, it puts the other nations in question under pressure: should they rejoice in case ‘their’ representatives win or withhold attention from such a renewal of imperial imposition.18 The question of whether or not Goff’s five ingredients can successfully lead to the best novel in a year’s production being chosen is a controversial one. Critics have questioned whether this is (ever) possible and have put forward other

16 “About the Prize”, The Man Booker Prizes 5 May 2012. 17 Huggan, “Prizing ‘Otherness’” 111. 18 In 2008, for example, after the Indian-born Aravind Adiga won the Booker with his novel The White Tiger, an Indian critic found himself in that very position between national pride and the feeling of British usurpation and, somewhat reluctantly, decided to accept with anxious pleasure (Suresh Menon, “Keep Your Socks On”, Mumbai Mirror 24 Oct. 2008): “The Brits have chosen and who are we to cavil at that? An Indian novelist has won the Man Booker. We can rejoice in the Indianness and ignore the novelist for the moment”.

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reasons for the Prize’s particular success, particularly in the 1980s (cf. chapter 1.2 and 1.3): the exploitation of postcolonial writers (Huggan), the government’s withdrawal from funding the arts (Norris), shifts in the book trade and publishing industry (Todd), and historically and nationally specific debates about literary value (English).19 But the question of whether or not the structure allows for the ideal choice remains vital. My analysis does not aim to determine whether or not the Booker manages to fulfill its goal. Instead, I would like to rephrase the question. My argument is that the construction of the Booker Prize, as described by Goff, is ultimately less about choosing the best novel, but rather helps to keep the question controversial and raises the interest in discussing it every year anew: Has the Booker succeeded this time? Has it succeeded over the years? In the following section, I will show how such questions have been discussed as an issue of quality and how they emerge each year contributing to the writing of literary history.

3.2 T HE B OOKER AND L ITERARY V ALUE , OR THE P RIZE AS S HORT - AND L ONG -T ERM I NDICATOR OF Q UALITY The biggest claim which the Booker makes and the biggest challenge it presents to others is at the same time the reason it has successfully and repeatedly been able to catch the attention of publishers, booksellers, authors and readers – the reason for “driving people mad”: its selection of “the best novel of the year” is long-awaited, extensively prepared for, and then evaluated each year. This statement of absolute value is discussed on all sides. Everyone who participates in the discussion bows to the question of whether or not the Booker has succeeded in selecting the best, the worthiest book. The judges give reasons for their choices and verbalise their criteria. Publishers and booksellers are interviewed in the public media, and at times even offer their congratulations, surprise or dismay about certain choices via the Booker website’s forum, Twitter, or in social networks. Retailers – usually a Waterstones or Amazon representative – will offer their prognosis of whether or not the book will sell well. Bets are placed on the nominated titles and their value changes as the bookies see fit based on how much money is placed on them. Readers give their opinions in blogs, literary forums and by buying the chosen novel or refraining from doing so. Reviewers

19 Cf. English,“The Literary Prize Phenomenon in Context” 170. The question of literary value will be discussed in more depth in the subsequent section.

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contemplate how the judgment corresponds with their choices and with the novels which they reviewed and held in high or low esteem that year. The Booker’s claim challenges all commentators to think about the value claims they make, about the contingency of literary evaluation, and the criteria involved in making such assessments. After all, though each participant has different stakes – money, prestige, attention – they each make value judgments in the answer to the question: what makes for a good book? Depending on the role of the speaker in literary interaction, participants will come up with different answers and each year discussions prevail about high- and lowbrow literature, literary and genre fiction, complex and/or readable novels. Authors pull manuscripts out of a drawer because they think them worthy of being published. Readers pick up books which they or someone else whose opinion they value think worthy of their attention. The retail industry will want a good book to sell, to have wide appeal, to be recommendable to old and young, literary versed and general readers. Publishers will applaud a Booker judgment if it falls in favour of someone they think highly of, preferably their own contestant, one from a related imprint, or a publishing house with whom they cooperate. Each reader will have different tastes, and critics’ opinions, too, will vary from a preference for challenging literature to gripping page-turners. Some will want more character work, others demand poetic language, and still others prefer not to reduce their favourites to one particular characteristic. Literary critics are particularly challenged by the similarity of their role in literary interaction to that of awards: after all, both are expected to make judgments. The repeated comparisons of literary criticism and prizes have prompted critics to dispute whether the prize was a legitimate representative of value or whether its judgment was in fact some sort of caricature of the longer process of criticism, which involves a more careful display of criteria and fewer absolutist judgments.20 In this respect, literary criticism has found a rival institution in prizes and although critics have sneered at awards for a long time, they could hardly ignore the competition entirely.21 The Booker’s claim to choose the best novels is not confined to a particular year. The Prize sees its achievement in the consistent appreciation of great literature over the years. In fact, each year’s winner is not only assessed from a short-

20 Cf. Lodge,“A Mixed Blessing: A Writer’s View of Literary Prizes”. 21 Confirming this competition between prizes and critics, Jason Cowley contemplates the role of literary prizes for writers as much as for literary debates and challenges his own position and that of his colleagues claiming that “[t]he culture of prize-giving has gone mad. It has replaced the art of criticism in determining cultural value and shaping public taste.” (“And the Winner Is?”, The Observer 22 Oct. 2006.)

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term perspective – in comparison to that year’s output and competition – but also in the longer-term – as part of a long list of Booker books. There is not just a best novel every year; rather, the goal is to create the best chain of novels. In a statement to The Bookseller, the Booker’s literary director, Ion Trewin, reflected on the Prize’s investment in quality fiction and asserted that quality will always be recognised: “The Man Booker Prize is about the highest quality of fiction, and as long as that continues to be published, it will always rise to the surface. It comes down to quality. If you’ve got quality, it will get noticed.”22 If one presumes that the Booker chooses high-quality works every year, it would follow that its choices stand the test of time. Put differently, if the Booker selects the best novels each year, the sum of its winners should give an apt (recent) history of the novel in English.23 The Booker’s claim to select the best novel raises the problem of literary value and it does this on several levels (as the case studies in part II will exemplify). In a typical Booker debate, the question of whether a title is good is quickly turned into the question of whether this was the right decision. Was the author too young, or maybe too old or too well-established to be thus distinguished? Then comes the question of whether the judgment was also good for the Booker itself. How will it affect the Booker’s publicity, its legitimation to choose the next set of authors and their writing? Finally, the question of whether the Booker judges ‘got it right’ this year is posed on a still larger scale: is the Booker ever right? How do Booker judgments influence contemporary writing? Is it good for literature? A number of critics and scholars have utilised the problem of literary value and the question of how it influences literature in order to assess prizes in general and the Booker in particular. As I described in chapter 1.1, early commentators on the proliferation of literary prizes in the twentieth century asked if awards furthered literature as a whole and if competition was at all desirable in the arts. They were divided on the question of who it was that awards really helped – the publishing industry or the struggling authors – and whether a sports-like rivalry was a blessing or in fact completely misplaced in a realm in which any sort of comparison was difficult, if not impossible to make. From the early beginnings of prize research, the list of an award’s winners was used to evaluate its credentials. Early sociological and later quantitative studies at times conveniently pre-

22 Ion Trewin, qtd. in Benedict Page, “Trewin: ‘Fewer, Better Man Booker Entries’”, The Bookseller 25 Oct. 2013. 23 In fact, even the biggest critics of the Booker were troubled by the eeriness of the prize’s ability to mirror the literary “zeitgeist”, cf. Norris, “‘Simply the Best’” 97.

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sumed the prize as an indicator of quality in order to measure their impact on and the relationship with other representatives. In order to assess the hierarchy among British publishers, Eric de Bellaigue, for example, consciously chooses the presence or absence of publishing houses on the Booker list as evaluation criteria and made “Booker Prize judges arbiters of excellence in the matter of fiction”.24 Discussing the Booker as an exclusionary or inclusionary institution throughout the 1990s, literary critics tackled the question of whether or not the Prize was good for literature. This question was often raised in reference to a feared “standardisation”25 of literature, and it was suggested that the Booker was, in fact, averse to innovation.26 Richard Todd acknowledged that the Booker did have an impact on how novels were written (or at least how they were perceived to have been written): the idea that a certain kind of novelist may actually deliberately set out to write a ‘generic’ Booker winner was probably raised seriously for the first time as early (or as late) as 1987, with Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger seen to possess many of the ‘epic’ qualities, and much of the exotic setting.27

But for Todd this “Bookerization” of the contemporary novel came hand in hand with its “internationalization”: The most important point, however, was that Rushdie’s 1981 success created a precedent that enabled commentators to conceive of the Booker as a prize administered in Britain

24 Eric de Bellaigue, British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s (London: The British Library, 2004): 18. See also Ginsburgh, “Awards”, whose comparison of diverse prizes with the aim to establish their impact on the future reception of the recognised products presumes that they do appreciate the quality of a given product, be it a musical performance, a movie or a novel. 25 Cf. Norris, “‘Simply the Best’”; cf. also Akin Adesokan, “New African Writing and the Question of Audience”, Research in African Literatures 43.3 (Fall 2012): 4. 26 Cf. Norris, “‘Simply the Best’”. In hindsight, many established authors who were never rewarded with major awards were deemed “a bit too transgressive for the taste of prize juries”, cf., for example, Betsy Draine, “Angela Carter and Kathy Acker: Not a Eulogy”, Contemporary Literature 44.2 (Summer 2003): 332. 27 Todd, Consuming Fictions 81.

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Although critics agreed that the Booker had an influence on writers and writing, Todd’s positive idea of British literature turned global was not shared by many. The more critical voices not only doubted Booker’s positive influence on literature, but, in fact, detected its inherent potential for harm. Graham Huggan described the negative consequences of the Booker Prize for postcolonial literature, while Sharon Norris saw negative consequences for literature in general. For one, the Booker made use of extra-literary criteria (links between judges, critics and authors via Oxbridge, and later increased connections to the University of East Anglia), and secondly, it conflated aesthetic and economic judgments, which to Norris, in accordance with Bourdieu, weakened the autonomous position of literary fiction.29 The Booker’s interference with ‘literary autonomy’, its dubious sponsorship first by a company with a colonial past and then by a hedge-fund corporation, its close ties with the publishing industry and the explicit desire to simultaneously further the cause of literature and boost sales not only for its winners and nominated titles “but, in the long run, by authors all over the country”30 made it a problem for commentators to respect the Prize’s legitimacy in making the call for literary value. The Prize could and was questioned as to both of these claims: choosing the best novel in a given year and furthering the cause of literature in its entirety. But what happens to the critics’ assertions when the very possibility of making value statements is questioned? James F. English has described the change in commentary on the Booker from indignant at first to playful at last, from offended to ironic.31 Postmodern disenchantment in art’s magic has brought a different stance towards the Booker’s claim of choosing “the best”. English argues that “in the face of ever more apparent truths about the mutual implication of aesthetic value and capitalist relations of power, the religion of Art has collapsed and the Artist-God has been dethroned”, the prize works as a constant reminder of “selective demystification”.32 This situation – a post-Bourdieusian abolishment of the dichotomy of cultural and economic capital – makes the prize “a perfectly magical guarantor

28 Todd, Consuming Fictions 81. 29 Norris, “‘Simply the Best’” 18. 30 “Background: The Prizes.” The Man Booker Prizes. 31 English, “Winning” 117. 32 English, “Winning” 112, 111.

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of an imperfectly magical system”.33 The prize uses its status in a postmodern continuous suspense of disbelief and is used by others. According to English, the truth about art is that there is no one truth: art is situated somewhere between the cynical positioning as a “Ponzi scheme” and the idealistic presumption of “separate space”.34 Based on this preliminary notion, English believes that instead of asking if prizes can adhere to qualitative standards, we should instead ask what prizes can tell us about these, and what we can thus learn about our tastes. When literary value is complicated – because there is no ‘sacred space’, even for critics who are, after all, part of the system, not outside of it – a problem is created for those who need to assert some sort of autonomy, lack of involvement or “disinterestedness”.35 With reference to literary prizes, Pierre Bourdieu described how value is created when books are consecrated and given symbolic capital.36 The different capitals which English (“journalistic”) and Squires (“scholarly”) have added to the opposition between cultural and economic capital underline the fact that quality is not so much a question of value but a question of use: different participants have different uses for literature, for the Booker and for the chosen novels. As was shown in chapters 2.3 and 2.4, the attention which a book may hope to reap depends on its ‘connectivity’. In light of the above definition of quality as a question of use, the Booker book which has the better, more lasting connectivity will prove the better book. Consequently, when Booker judges make use of a text – by selecting, appreciating and evaluating it – they identify the quality of this text in relation to how they can use it. Such an understanding of quality as the aimed-at-use invites the conclusion that literary prizes can, in fact, recognise quality. Despite the questioning of literary value, despite the redefinition of its meaning as use rather than quality, the competition for who has the right to assign quality, who can make predictions, even recommendations for future literary history has not been abolished. On the contrary, the Booker’s premise of choosing the best of fiction in both the short- and longer-term is proof of an existent rivalry between different participants, all of whom are seeking to make such claims. And despite the criticism, the Booker has proven to be an institution which needs

33 English, “Winning” 116. 34 English, “Winning” 118. 35 Cf. Bourdieu, qtd. in Squires, Marketing Literature 55. 36 There is also a latent value statement in the favouring of an autonomous over a heteronomous field, cf. Squires, Marketing Literature 50ff., as well as chapter 1.4.

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to be taken seriously, if only based on its similarities to literary criticism.37 The criterion of literary quality as literary complexity, followed by a need for interpretation, followed by a large portion of secondary discourse, is compressed and fast-tracked for any Booker Prize winner (though, admittedly, to a varying degree, cf. the case studies in the second part of this study). With the sheer amount of money and publicity behind the Booker Prize, we may come – as a first step – to understand its impact as exercising power top-tobottom in a process of self-fulfilling prophecy. But having seen how intricately interwoven the Booker Prize is with other participants in literary interaction, and how complex the net of dependencies are, how much each is in need of attention-drawing and steering, we might – in a second step – question this topbottom idea of power and understand power instead as continuous negotiation over history. The third step will then be to see the debates over quality and the competition for influence over future literary history as only two kinds of problems, two reasons for questioning the Booker and/or asserting its hegemony. Apart from short- and long-term questions of quality, there are many more problems which the Booker can trigger in order to raise attention for itself and its books and which it needs to keep vital in order to maintain this attention. In combination with those which the Prize presents for its interlocutors (driving them “mad”), each Booker book develops its own unique sets of problems.

37 Both sides, it seems, seek to make claims of literary judgment and compete as authorities in matters of literary value. Prize judges have the advantage of collective judgment (often constituted from the ranks of reviews and critics), the continuity of the prize’s brand, and the speed of their verdict. In contrast, reviewers and critics make individual decisions, only some will act as tokens of continuity, and the speed with which they can respond to the market depends on the type of media (newspapers can react within days, scholarly articles are often published years after the first publication). Yet, although they differ in the way they arrive at their verdict and what arguments they present to back their choices, the problems which the Booker presents lend themselves for discussion in the media: questions of allocation, of literary quality, of authenticity and legitimation, questions concerning selection criteria, those responsible for such criteria and their legitimacy, questions of canon formation and power among participants. In the long run, critics opt to let history decide about a novel’s quality, while they themselves write this history. Prize makers work on the same premise. They have acquired ‘power’ to write the very history which will prove them right as an institution that is, again and again, able to anticipate (one should rather say, generate) an upcoming judgment.

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The problematic alliances which are at stake here are both on the outside and the inside of the models of literary interaction described in chapter 1.4. The twofold tensions perceived to be on the outside of the traditional participants in literary interaction, and described in chapter 3.1, were (1) the ties to the corporate world of sponsors – be it a wholesale company (Booker plc) or an investment business (Man Group); and (2) tensions on a national, or inter-national, level. The UK book market – with the Booker Prize as their tool – intervenes in other national book markets by appropriating their creative talent. On the inside of literary interaction, tensions are played out among the participants as described in the second chapter: from author to reader via publisher, printer, distributor, retailer and critic. One of these internal tensions, i.e. the potential accusation of the Booker Prize as an industry award, can be said to have been avoided quite early. With the withdrawal of the Publishers Association, and the representative composition of its managing bodies of publishers, retailers, critics and authors, the Booker has gained much legitimation. Yet the Booker’s aim of promoting literature and boosting sales continues to inspire concerns over the commercialisation and commodification of fiction. This ‘inside,’ then, also seems divided: into a core-inside, core-literary position, a realm of aesthetics; and a pecuniary side of the literary endeavour, the publishers and retailers; in short, the industry. With the description of these inside problems, we arrive back at the beginning of this chapter: examining the Booker’s claims and goals, the difficulty in keeping everyone happy and the Prize’s structural internalisation of this problem. In 1989, Goff wrote: The judges’ biggest problem […] is […] the definition of the ‘best novel of the year’. It is very flexible and each set of judges will give their own interpretation. It is not, of course the only aim of the Prize. Booker plc want to reward merit, raise the stature of the author in the eyes of the public and increase the sale of books. The rub probably comes in the third aim. Booksellers in any case regard the choice of the winner as good if the book sells well and bad if it does not. […] To find a book that passes the tests of literary critics and academics, and pleases the booksellers is not easy.38

The pressures which Goff describes and the attempts to please several parties at once – publishers and booksellers on the one hand, and critics and academics on the other – are somewhat relieved by bringing justice to either set of criteria by rotation, but they can never be fully resolved to the satisfaction of all partici-

38 Goff,“Introduction” 17.

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pants. However, the Booker’s annual attempt to overcome such “dualist structures” is media-worthy material.39 The complex arrangement of participants in the annual award of the Booker Prize may guarantee representation from all sides of literary interaction but it does not guarantee harmonious negotiations. Instead, it guarantees – or rather, offers, as it cannot replace other participants – a reason to negotiate. The annual media coverage of the Booker comprises discussions of ethics in the marketplace, questions of literary quality and problems of canon formation. Most of all, it puts gate-keepers and their competitive race for the authority to make pronouncements about future literary history into the spotlight. The Booker Prize does not prove to be an uncontroversial mediator between pure art and its contaminating elements, between a literary field and the forces of economy. Rather, its main interest – and one which may offer a possible explanation for the collaboration and the participation in a potentially problematic alliance – seems to arise from its offer of problems which may never be eventually solved but which can be debated.

3.3 ANALYTICAL APPROACHES FOR C ASE S TUDIES : P OSITIONING THE B OOKER IN A N OVEL ’ S P UBLIC AND C RITICAL ATTENTION P ROFILE Before I examine the case studies in the second part of this book, I will first outline my specific approach, which employs the concept of a ‘public and critical attention profile.’ I will specify the advantages of this concept by distinguishing it from other models used to describe the patterns of public and critical reaction. I will then show that a ‘short-term’ perspective on media presence, one derived with the help of ‘attention profiles’, illuminates the immediate reaction to novels in the first 1-2 years of their public life – a phase in which they are eligible for most literary prizes and during which one can gauge the Booker’s impact on the waves and patterns of reactions to the contemporary novel in the UK. I will then lay out which media I use to create these ‘attention profiles,’ as well as the novels for which such profiles were analysed in order to provide a representative view of the Booker in its fourth decade, and at the same time to observe the specific fate of each novel.

39 English, The Economy of Prestige 220.

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Public and Critical Attention Profiles As was shown in the first chapter of this study, a large part of Booker research poses the question of the kind of influence the Prize exerts on novels and how long this influence persists. In other words, scholars have asked if the Prize has an impact on what is perceived as the novels’ literary quality; if it has an impact on what is discussed as literary canon; and, if so, how. Having established in the second chapter of this study who it is that participates in such discussions and which role is ascribed to the Booker based on a range of written documents in which these participants communicate, I discussed both ideas – quality and canon – as central elements of Booker’s short- and long-term ‘problematicness’ in the third chapter of this study. The Booker participates in annual discussions of quality with its claim to choose the “best novel” of the year, and it takes part in debating questions of the canon with the second claim, that of making a historical judgment – one whose truth can supposedly be proven in hindsight years later, and which the Prize itself attempted to do with the selection of the Booker of Bookers (which in both celebratory years, 1993 and 2008, went to Salman Rushdie’s 1981 Booker-winning novel Midnight’s Children). The effect of the Booker Prize, then, can be understood as being both short and long-term and it can be described through the negotiations available from the participants’ documented interaction. The relationship between the Booker and other participants in literary interaction has been described as ‘problematic’ (cf. chapter 3.1) and the relationship between the Prize and literary criticism emerged as particularly close, yet at the same time tense (cf. chapter 1.4). In fact, even though the Booker has been perceived as problematic in academic literary discourse and by other representatives of the media in a wider sense of the word, literary prizes and the Booker in particular were frequently considered on a par with criticism by scholars from other disciplines. The equation of the prize with literary criticism,40 or its definition as a “media event”,41 was made on the grounds that both seek to determine literary value and that they cultivate a relationship of “dependent independency”42. Negotiations between critics and awards are publicly available in the form of the media coverage of prizes and it is at this intersection, i.e. in the moment of critical reaction to prizes, where not only their relationship is debated but the perceived influence on the novels which they select can also be established.

40 De Nooy, “Literary Prizes” 200. 41 Street, “Showbusiness” 825. 42 English, “Winning” 116.

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In order to describe and analyse these entanglements between critics and awards and to specify their relationship, a number of (mainly sociological approaches) have been developed to date. To be precise, sociologists of literature have come up with different ways of accounting for the effort of critics to evaluate literature. They have found that, for one, critics use a ‘trickle-down’ model from journalistic to essayistic to academic criticism in order to temporarily and hierarchically limit risks and legitimize judgments.43 Secondly, according to these studies, critics show a high level of awareness of their colleagues’ opinions and assimilate judgments according to certain modes of orchestration.44 Thirdly, critics rely on extra-textual criteria for evaluation including social and economic factors.45 How, then, can this study of the waves and patterns of public and critical attention and the Booker’s influence on these reactions use these sociological ideas (i.e. ‘trickle-down’, ‘modes of orchestration’, ‘extra-textual criteria’) for the following case studies? It is (of course) possible to view prizes as such ‘extratextual criteria’ which critics might use to help justify their judgments. In addition to using ‘extra-textual criteria’, critics also resort to ‘modes of orchestration’: like other participants in literary interaction, they observe each other (cf. chapter 2), and may also borrow from one another. However, any concept of an orchestrated formation of opinion needs to take into account the competition among participants (within one group and with other groups), or as Wouter de Nooy writes, needs to assume “two opposite processes [which are] operational in

43 C.J. van Rees, “How a Literary Work Becomes a Masterpiece: On the Threefold Selection Practised by Literary Criticism”, Poetics 12 (1983). 44 C.J. van Rees, “How Reviewers Reach Consensus on the Value of Literary Works”, Poetics 16 (1987). 45 Hugo Verdaasdonk, “Social and Economic Factors in the Attribution of Literary Quality”, Poetics 12.4-5 (1983). Later studies have also shown that race and ethnicity have been used as tools for constructing the value of literary fiction, cf. Phillipa Chong, “Reading Difference: How Race and Ethnicity Function as Tools for Critical Appraisal”, Poetics 39 (2011). This insight could be made use of if concentrating on the particular profile of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger in more detail (cf. chapter 6.1). A similar discussion of gender as another such tool could be applied to a study of the profiles of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin for the more obvious reason that they are women writers (cf. chapters 4.1 and 4.2), but also in the case of Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture because of its appeal to women’s magazines (cf. chapter 6.2), and DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little for a similar interest shown by men’s magazines (cf. chapter 5.1).

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literary criticism: agreement strategies and disagreement strategies”.46 Similarly, the ‘trickle-down’ model of journalistic, essayistic and academic criticism can be seen as a simplified version of the three realms of criticism whose communication is less directed than a purely hierarchical representation might imply. For example, the stage of pre-publication assimilation from one reviewer to another is only partially possible. More decisively, academic critics only partially devote their studies to contemporary literature, and a great amount of literary scholarship is focused on finding uncharted territory: authors and their works which have not been picked up by contemporaries in reviews or sighted on bestseller lists. Hence, not all authors who are reviewed extensively and who benefit from ‘extra-textual’ criteria such as prestigious publishing houses or popularity with literary prizes find their way into scholarly discussion. Although both journalistic and academic critics discuss literature, they do so in different contexts and with different aims. The sociological ‘trickle-down’ model, to whose distinction between the three realms of criticism the approach laid out in the following is much indebted, does not take into consideration the quantitative and temporal dimension of critics’ interaction. In order to understand just how much attention is paid to a novel by journalists, essayists and academics, and how long any of the particular phases of attention lasts, it is necessary to look at specific examples and to bear in mind others’ perspectives. Publishers speak of a novel’s “natural life”47 and one could imagine that what comes after these first 1-2 years might well be termed its ‘afterlife’, but this period in a novel’s life does not seem to be of much interest. The sociologist Gisèle Sapiro, for example, distinguishes between short-term and long-term strategies in a publisher’s plans for a title.48 According to Sapiro, the former is more closely connected to financial planning while the latter is concerned with the symbolic capital which a title needs in order to live longer. This neat divide between a financial and a symbolic phase might not always be feasible but Sapiro’s distinction is useful for contextualising other studies. The distinction between ‘short-term’ and ‘long-term’ focus can be applied to two kinds of studies – those that look at the immediate 1-2 years around a novel’s publication and those which are concerned with whatever comes afterwards. On the one hand, depictions of a novel’s journey which use the idea of a novel’s ‘life-cycle’ are mainly concerned with what, following Sapiro, one could call a

46 Wouter de Nooy, “A Literary Playground. Literary Criticism and Balance Theory”, Poetics 26 (1999): 387. 47 “Barry Print Run Doubled after Costa”, The Bookseller 30 Jan. 2009. Cf. chapter 6.1. 48 Sapiro, “The Literary Field” 453.

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‘long-term cycle’. A model which fits this description, and which was discussed in chapter 1.4, is the ‘life-cycle’ as illustrated by Adams and Barker. It envisages five phases from the perspective of the text: publication, manufacture, distribution, reception and survival.49 As librarians, Adams and Barker were particularly interested in the long-term phase of survival in which the book is archived and rendered available. This phase also includes a title’s life as an object of academic criticism, which will be examined in the seventh chapter of this study. In contrast, John B. Thompson’s model of the publishing chain is essentially an example of the short-term cycle, one which focuses on the publisher’s perspective (cf. chapter 1.4 as well as references to Thompson in chapter 2.1 which looks at the publisher’s perspective in literary interaction). While there are models that take a ‘long-term’ perspective at what happens with novels (e.g. Adams’s and Barker’s ‘life-cycle’) as well as those which bring the mechanics of critical judgments into focus (e.g. C.J. van Rees’s ‘trickledown’ model), this study is mainly interested in the ‘short-term’ perspective. In this, my goal is similar to what Vanessa Guignery refers to as the concept of the ‘itinerary’,50 to what Wendy Griswold, Susanne Janssen and Kees van Rees describe as a novel’s ‘timetable’,51 or in fact to the case studies which Claire Squires examines in Marketing Literature and which one could understand, in a complementary way, as ‘publishing profiles’ of the contemporary novel. Each of these models covers the question of what happens with a novel in the first phase of 1-2 years around its publication. My question, however, differs slightly from this. I do not want to take into account the sum of events which a novel experiences but instead inquire how these events are mediated and therefore concentrate on the type of attention the novels garner. Nor do I want to consider the specific perspective of the publishing industry alone, but instead intend to examine the co-existent plurality of perspectives as shown by different participants in literary interaction and which manifest themselves in public media. The discussion found in newspapers and magazines is here regarded as an important document of chronological attention development (cf. chapter 2.4). And while this study does not set out to research the intricate processes of reviewing, the detailed structure of reviews or reviewers’ networks, each of these do play a role in reconstructing the ‘public and critical attention profile’ of a novel. Print (and online) articles document literary interaction revealing which

49 Adams and Barker,“A New Model for the Study of the Book” 25, 13. 50 Guignery, “Introduction: The Infinite Journey of Books” 13. 51 Wendy Griswold, Susanne Janssen and Kees van Rees, “Conditions of Cultural Production and Reception: Introduction”, Poetics 26 (1999): 285.

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participants are involved in debating a book and how. They are public, widely accessible, written documents which allow for a quantitative and qualitative study of literary interaction. Although articles in newspapers and magazines mainly voice the perspective and opinions of journalists and reviewers, they also allow for assumptions to be made about other participants and the incorporation of their perspectives in news articles, features, and interviews. In the case of outstandingly successful novels, and particularly in the case of a nomination for or even the award of a major literary prize, authors, agents, publishers, and even booksellers will be interviewed, asked to reveal the journey leading up to the success, the steps they have taken which have enabled the book to arrive at this stage, and to estimate how it might push the title at hand, the author’s B-list or other similar titles. In an economy of attention, publishers and booksellers also benefit from such references in articles which document prizes and/or festivals more than they do from actual reviews which mostly focus on novels and their authors. All those involved in the making of the book will be asked to participate in what I will call “prize mystique” and discuss how the award has modified and mobilised attention for the winning title anew. Public media, in short, become the setting in which various participants in literary interaction take subject positions. The newspaper allows for the creation of a day-to-day chronology and the comparison of the discussion of a book in several sources creates a pattern which not only discloses the opinions of the writers and those who were involved in producing and distributing the book and which prizes it has received, but also reveals how it has been judged in each of these instances. This pattern, a novel’s public attention profile, documents the quantity and quality of attention with which the book is endowed, and, in addition, it allows for both an overall overview and an insight into each response as a particular moment in a novel’s ‘life cycle’. The case studies which make up part II of this book largely rely on the attention profiles I have assembled. These profiles were created by searching the pool of general, specialist, and trade media via their online search function and adding any pieces of criticism available via the two main databases for contemporary criticism in English, the Literature Resource Center and the MLA International Bibliography. Each profile consists of all media references to the novel in question, including any statements due to topical, seasonal or event-based interest such as reviews, interviews or prize coverage, as well as comparisons in reviews, interviews and comments which focus on other books by the same or by other authors.

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Building on the distinction made in the sociological ‘trickle-down’ model, I differentiate between statements made about novels in journalistic, essayistic and academic media. Furthermore, I distinguish between general, trade, literary and other specialist publications (cf. also chapter 2.4). While general media form the backbone of each ‘attention profile’ because they include the most diverse range of subject positions and because their interest in the novel’s life comes closest to what can be described as its ‘public attention’, trade media give insight into the industry and, as their opinions are usually circulated at the earliest stages, often long before publication, they influence booksellers and editors, particularly in the US but increasingly in the UK as well. The novel’s presence in literary magazines and journals and the literary supplements of national newspapers is a good indication of their market segment and the extent of their inclusion in debates of literary quality. Coverage in specialist magazines, on the other hand, depends on the book’s non-fiction hooks and its topical appeal. Some novels will call for attention in thematically specific papers (for example, science, economic, women’s or men’s magazines) or in the national press of other countries. Such specific media could not be searched for every title but it will be taken into consideration when applicable. For the following case studies, I have mainly used UK and US print and online sources.52 In addition to the documents discussed in more detail in chapter 2 – advance reader’s copies, book covers and press releases – I use a range of media sources for the corpus of reviews and other articles which mention the novel’s title. I employ articles from the four US pre-publication reviews – Publishers Weekly (PW), Kirkus Reviews (KR), Booklist, Library Journal (LJ) –, as well as the UK trade magazine the Bookseller. From among general media, I use the four biggest non-tabloid dailies in the UK (The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and The Independent), their respective Sunday publications, as well as the widest circulated print newspaper in the US – USA Today – and the largest local metropolitan newspaper which is also the nation’s third-largest newspaper overall, The New York Times (NYT). For the consideration of essayistic criticism, I include UK and US literary magazines – Times Literary Supplement (TLS), London Review of Books (LRB), The New York Times Book Review (NYTBR), New York Review of Books (NYRB) and New Yorker – and the online magazine Salon.com. In addition, I look at references to the novels made in weekly general magazines – the New Statesman and the Spectator in the UK, TIME magazine and

52 For the particular interplay between UK and US review publications, see chapter 2.4.

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Newsweek in the US.53 These choices, particularly for the UK, are part of the list of publications which the daily newspapers are explicitly aware of when, for example, in annual end-of-year roundups, they take into account their direct competition and compare each other’s Christmas recommendations.54 To sum up, in the following case studies I focus on the core period of a novel’s public and critical attention profile, its ‘natural life’ or short-term profile, and then also take a peak view at its media presence until the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the ‘afterlife’ or long-term profile (chapter 7). In the case of ‘high-profile’ novels, both phases in their lives are particularly crowded. They are lavished with attention in pre-publication and postpublication reviews in trade, daily, Sunday, literary and specialist publications for a core period of 1-2 years and which might well extend for years and decades after first publication. In addition to the documentation found in newspapers and magazines and in correspondence around the interaction as described throughout chapter 2, I include the communication as found on the advance reader’s as well as hardcover and paperback covers, and the Booker’s communication in press releases. While the examination of case studies is not meant to be part of a discourse which evaluates novels, it will nonetheless put some emphasis on the fact that the question of literary value is introduced throughout the different phases of their ‘attention profile’ and that it is particularly vital when the Booker enters this discourse. On the Choice of Novels In the subsequent case studies, I examine six novels in three different years of the fourth decade of the Booker Prize, which I consider particularly representative of both the first decade of the millennium and as particular types of novels which are eligible for the Prize. I have chosen to concentrate on three Booker novels and three novels which surfaced as the winners’ rivals in the discussion about these victorious novels – a discussion which was retrieved from their media coverage and which played a decisive role in their ‘public and critical atten-

53 The US magazine Newsweek merged with The Daily Beast website in 2010. Its archive can be found in the domain of the latter. 54 See, for example, Christmas end-of-year roundups in The Telegraph (David Robson, “Who Was the Chosen One?”, The Telegraph 22 Dec. 2003): “In the Christmas books-of-the-year selections by critics and celebrities in the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, The Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Mail on Sunday, The Evening Standard, the TLS, The Spectator and The New Statesman, …”.

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tion profiles’. This selection, as well as my assessment of the representative nature of the chosen novels, has been informed by a number of considerations, which will be outlined in the following. In the existing research, each decade of the Booker Prize has been dealt with as a different stage in its history, contributing to a particular “zeitgeist”. From the perspective of the 1990s, the 1980s were considered the peak of Booker Prize influence,55 although the beginning of its influence was later pre-dated by English to the early 1970s.56 In the concluding remarks of her dissertation, Sharon Norris contrasted the Booker Prize in the 1990s with that of the 1980s as being less conservative, more commercial.57 But while she claimed that the attention bestowed upon the Booker has continuously diminished since the 1980s,58 it can be argued that this attention has not become less, only different.59 Others concentrated on the Booker in reference to millennial changes in book marketing from the 1990s to the early 2000s.60 While these scholars have focused on the distinctive traits of particular decades, I suggest that the history of the Booker Prize can, in fact, be roughly divided by decades. The first, from the Prize’s inception in the late 1960s to the late 1970s, can be classified as a decade of establishment during which the first scandals appeared (for example, John Berger’s speech in 1972) and in which the chosen novels could also be a reason to name it a decade of Empire nostalgia. The 1980s have been widely recognised as the peak decade of the Booker with rivalries between big-name authors (for example, William Golding vs. Anthony Burgess in 1980) and the launch of Salman Rushdie’s career with the award of the Booker for his 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children. In consequence, the second decade could be termed the postcolonial decade. The third decade is one of both critical attention and partly adverse critical debate, as we have seen with the contributions to the Booker Prize research which negotiated it as an exclusionary or inclusionary mechanism (cf. chapter 1.2). Finally, in the first years of the new millennium, the Prize underwent significant reforms due to the change in spon-

55 Norris, “‘Simply the Best’”; Huggan, “The Postcolonial Exotic”; Huggan, “Prizing ‘Otherness’”; Todd, Consuming Fictions; cf. chapter 1.2. 56 English,“The Literary Prize Phenomenon in Context” 167. 57 Norris, “‘Simply the Best’” 219. 58 Norris, “The Booker Prize” 154. 59 Cf., for example, English, The Economy of Prestige 214. 60 Cf. especially Squires, Marketing Literature; and Todd, “How Has the Booker Prize Changed since 1996?”.

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sorship from Booker plc to Man Group in 2002, and thus the fourth decade can also be said to exhibit distinctive characteristics. On the basis of such precedents of academic interest, I have also chosen to focus my analysis on one, namely the fourth Booker decade, or the years 19992008 in which the Prize underwent major changes. In the early 2000s, and for the first time in its history, the Prize saw a change of sponsorship and was under particular scrutiny from all sides of literary interaction. Changes in rules, administration and prize money had consequences for other participants but they were also influenced by changes in the industry and not least by changes to literary prize culture. The relationship of the Booker to other prizes has also undergone changes with a renewed proliferation of rivalling institutions in the past years,61 and, as the turn of the new millennium was imminent, the conditions of intensified competition prevailed. The 2000s have also seen a rise of interest in literary prizes and the Booker Prize which can be proven via sales figures.62 Arguably, the 2009 choice of Hilary Mantel’s first part of her Henry VIII trilogy (and the subsequent distinction for the second part in 2012) marks the beginning of a new era, though perhaps, the next decisive change will be seen in 2014, when the eligibility for the Prize changed to include all writers of novels in English (and thus finally US authors as well). The selection of contemporary novels bears an additional pragmatic advantage as it offers easier access to reviews, press releases and other material available online, including advance reader’s copies and cover pictures. A closer look at the Booker winners in the first decade of the new millennium gives insight into different types of novels and their authors and helps to explain the final choice of case studies. In the period of its fourth decade, the

61 A renewed proliferation of prizes in the past quarter of a century has intensified competition for the best judgment, the best slot in the literary calendar, the most media attention and the best grounds for discussion. The establishment of new prizes since the 1980s, such as the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 1987, the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 1996 (later known as Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction), or the WH Book Awards in 2000, whose agenda was largely driven by a wish to oppose or to refine Booker’s rules of eligibility, put already established prizes under pressure and reinforced already established quota discussions: nationality and ethnicity, gender, genre and popular fiction. 62 Katy Stoddard, “Man Booker Prize 2011: Sales for All the Booker Prize Winners, Including Julian Barnes”, TheGuardian.com 26 Oct. 2011. Even though this study focuses on the media attention bestowed upon Booker-nominated novels, sales figures are a good indicator for its strong position among other participants.

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Booker produced diverse winners by gender, nationality and ethnicity, age and experience. Before the change of sponsor, the Booker went to established ‘big players’ in four consecutive years: Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam won in 1998, JM Coetzee’s Disgrace in 1999, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin in 2000 and Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. The winners of 1998 and 2000 belong to the category of established writers who had been on the Booker shortlists before (McEwan twice, Atwood thrice) and were overdue, so to speak, for final recognition. By contrast, Coetzee and Carey had already won the Prize for earlier novels and now won for the second time. When Man Group first took over sponsorship, established, if less internationally known writers were still among the winners: in 2004 Alan Hollinghurst won with The Line of Beauty, in 2005 John Banville with The Sea, in 2007 Anne Enright with The Gathering and in 2009 Hilary Mantel with Wolf Hall. But the list of winners also included authors who match neither description. Among these were several rather unusual or ‘quirky’ authors. In 2002, Yann Martel won with his second novel, Life of Pi, after he had been rejected by prestigious publishers such as Penguin and Chatto & Windus. In 2003, DBC Pierre won with Vernon God Little, a first novel which had been auctioned quickly in the UK after being fished from the slush pile of its UK agency but which had great difficulties in procuring a US publisher. In addition, the years 2006 and 2008 saw the success of less ‘quirky’ newcomers. Kiran Desai was applauded for having scooped the prize her mother, Anita Desai, had never been able to win despite numerous nominations (in 1980, 1984 and 1999), when her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, convinced the 2006 Man Booker judges. In 2008, the journalist Aravind Adiga won with his debut entry The White Tiger. In addition, almost all of these winners have seen their novels discussed as part of a rivalry with other long- and shortlisted books or novels which were nominated for competing institutions. Although the Booker has not limited itself to the selection of one particular category of novels (established, debut, odd), it has provoked the question which of these types would prevail as part of the annual speculation, particularly so in the last decade, which saw a heightened interest in newcomers. Such speculation is charged by the interplay with other prizes and especially with the Whitbread (Costa) Book Awards, which are awarded in the weeks after the Booker and prolong discussions of possible rivalries which may have emerged with the announcements of the Booker longlist or shortlist. Each year, the discussion around the Booker Prize and possible competition among novels can be taken up in the coverage of the Whitbread (Costa) as commentators ask if the rival prize will reward the same, a competing or an altogether different book. The Whitbread (Costa) Book Awards are particularly well equipped to deal with the rise of in-

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terest in debut novels and newcomer authors with their selection of best books in five categories and particularly the distinction between First Book (Novel) vs. Book (Novel).63 The competition between the Booker and Whitbread (Costa) therefore often comes down to a rivalry between an established Booker winner and the Whitbread (Costa) winner in its First Novel category, or a debut Booker winner and the Whitbread (Costa) winner in its Novel category. In order to select as representative a sample as possible, I have picked novels from an early and a late year in the fourth decade, from before and after the change of sponsorship, and novels which represent the different categories of typical Booker titles, tentatively identify as those written by established writers, as debuts, and as ‘quirky’ or ‘odd’. Finally, instead of covering only the winners, or extending the scope to include all the novels on the shortlist, the choice was made on the basis of the observation that in retrospect, there is often one great rival book which surfaces in the course of prize coverage and which can be, but doesn’t necessarily need to be, included on the shortlist or often emerges in the interplay with one of the winners chosen for the Whitbread (Costa) Book Awards. The rivalry between novels generates debates which shed light on how participants in literary interaction evaluate the Booker’s impact on the novels. From a discourse analytical perspective, this impact can only be traced in the discourse of those who perceive it and this is what the novels’ attention profiles allow me to do. In the following, I will examine the profiles of the 2000, 2003 and 2008 Booker winners and one of the competing novels. The year 2000 saw a novel by an established writer in a rivalry with a debut novel. Margaret Atwood’s Bookerwinning novel The Blind Assassin and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, did not, in fact, compete on a single list of nominees but surfaced as rivals in the course of Booker coverage. In 2003, two ‘quirky’ or ‘odd’ novels competed throughout the entire year: DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time were discussed as rivals throughout both the Booker and Whitbread coverage cycles. The year 2008 reversed the established vs. debut competition seen in 2000 as this time, the Booker was awarded to a newcomer, Aravind Adi-

63 Other awards have followed suit. The Commonwealth Writer’s Prize added a First Book Award in 1989, the Guardian Fiction Award was exchanged for the Guardian First Book Award in 1999, the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction saw the establishment of a sister award for the years 2005-2010 known as the Orange Award for New Writers.

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ga and his novel The White Tiger, and it was an established writer, Sebastian Barry with The Secret Scripture, who was handled as the runner-up. The selected novels offer this study diverse public attention profiles with varying entry conditions and varying degrees of promise for surviving the test of time and continuing their presence in debate long after their “natural life”. They also have additional advantages: their comparison helps to account for big conglomerate-owned publishers as well as independent ones, and their sales records vary from exceptionally successful titles to milder forms of retail success. Some of these novels have gained wide appeal in secondary discourse, while others have enjoyed only limited success among academic critics. Moreover, they have been at the centre of a wide range of discussions from the authors’ nationality and gender, to authenticity and genre questions – how these novels engage with diverse discussion will be traced in the second part of this study.

Part II: Case Studies, or Prizing Debate A story for our times, told entirely from media sources. L.D., “NB”, TLS 16 JUNE 2000.

The second part of this book consists of case studies which aim to show both the presence of the Booker in the ‘public and critical attention profile’ of particular novels and the effect which the Prize has had on their debate. The profiles construct a view which one does not usually have: an archive of different perspectives and an excerpt from the debate in which the novels were used. I will assume various such perspectives by diverse participants in literary interaction through a reconstruction based on a range of documents. Newspapers and magazines are used as documents of public archive which report and document events but which mediate them according to a public interest. The literary communication in these publications shows that the interest in awards, and particularly in the Booker Prize, plays a major part in the literary calendar. Such an archival perspective does not reconstruct a totality but allows for the inclusion of many subject positions in the discourse about the Booker and about the novels which the Prize impacts (cf. chapter 1.4). The story of the novels’ discussion and the Booker’s involvement will indeed be told almost “entirely from media sources”: the ‘attention profiles’ are based on the discussion found in general, literary and specific media as described in chapter 3.3. The ‘attention profiles’ extracted from the diverse publications are completed with the perspectives of academics, publishers, booksellers, readers and ‘advanced’ readers. In order to gauge the Booker’s effect on the discussion of the novel, I focus on how all these participants – mainly through comments in public media – evaluate the appearance of the Booker in the course of an ongoing conversation about the novel. Drawing on the principles of discourse analysis, the second part of this study therefore examines the effect of the Booker as it

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is negotiated among those who participate in the debates about the Prize and the novels. The attention profiles for the six chosen novels trace each discussion chronologically and answer two important questions for a discourse analytical approach to gauging the effect of the Booker Prize on a novel’s discussion: (1) who positions the novels, and (2) what are the perceived changes to this discussion? Each of the following analyses starts with that year’s Booker winner; compares the successful novel’s profile and the problems which it offers for debate with that of the given rival; and examines both what effect the appearance of the Prize has on this discussion, and which additional problems arise with the presence of this already ‘problematic’ participant. The juxtaposition of the two rivals is therefore contextualised within the Booker’s current situation and the elements of the Prize’s history which are used in the media by those who were involved in making it and those who choose to take position in order to give meaning to the decision. The ensuing pattern of attention for each novel has been organised in spreadsheets into several phases which are geared to the main events in its ‘itinerary’: hardcover and paperback publications, as well as events between these two, such as the nomination for literary prizes (cf. chapter 2.4). In the case of ‘high-profile’ novels, – and this applies to all six novels discussed in the following – the biggest event, the one secure element of any book’s ‘itinerary’ or ‘timetable’, is its hardcover publication (marked in red). The second, paperback publication is already less secure. If the novel is re-issued in paperback, the timing of this may depend on how the hardcover edition fared in terms of sales figures and the attention which it was granted in the media and elsewhere. The difference in publication timing between the UK and the US may also vary depending on when rights were sold and whether or not the launch can be planned for both or whether an entrance into the US market was only confirmed after an initial success in the UK. The date of the novel’s first publication will be accompanied by pre- and post-publication coverage and a similar, if less pronounced pattern can be traced with the publication of the paperback format 9-12 months later. Such ‘core critical’ responses to the novels, i.e. reviews (marked in blue), mostly surround the date of publication, but they can also be triggered by other events as well as occur at other times, particularly in review publications which do not adhere to the attention pattern most visible in national newspapers. In between the two publications, a high-profile novel can be expected to catch the attention of prize juries, festival organisers and cultural commentators. These stops on the novel’s itinerary are additional events which depend on di-

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verse calendars – publishing, retail, media – and the book’s ‘connectivity’ to topical debates, discussions of the literary marketplace or seasonal coverage. Such responses to the novel are less focused on the book and more on its public appeal, and make up its public attention (marked in yellow). There are two additional types of attention a book can gain. These are a mix of the three reasons for interest mentioned before: marketing (red), critical (blue) and public (yellow). Articles which present a mix of critical and public attention (and are therefore marked in green) include interviews with the author or what are known as author profiles, references to the novel in reviews of the author’s other works or comparisons in reviews of other writers’ books. Examples which present a mix of marketing and public attention (marked in orange) include a novel’s presence on bestseller lists, previews, as well as (mostly pre-publication) blurb-like alerts with no critical input. Indeed, novels with a high expectation about them, with substantial backing on the part of their publishers and a presumed interest in their success on the part of booksellers and literary editors will resemble each other in their ‘attention rhythm’. This can be divided into five rough phases: (1) pre-publication positioning; (2) post-publication coverage; (3) attention on behalf of prizes and other events; (4) interest surrounding the paperback publication; and (5) remaining attention in the media granted on behalf the novel’s ‘connectivity’ with other events (including prizes), seasonal coverage, and in comparisons with other novels (follow-up projects, thematically related books, fellow prize nominees).

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Five Phases of a Potential Attention Rhythm (Sample Spreadsheet) The actual ‘fulfilment’ of such expectations, the novel’s ‘actual attention profile’ is a manifestation of all the attention it attracts from its conception to publication and the specific dynamic of the different phases between the first and the last public reference to the novel. In the case studies in chapters 4, 5 and 6, I will only pay attention to the ‘short-term’ version of this profile – which ranges from its first pre-publication mention in one of the selected public media to the moment of diminishing public attention after its paperback publication, one which usually signifies the end of its prize cycle as well. I will then introduce a tentative ‘longterm’ perspective for the six novels in chapter 7. It is the aim of the case studies to describe the differences between the potential attention rhythm and the actual attention profiles. Following this aim and the two questions which ensue from the choice of methodology – who positions and to which effect – the case studies contribute to the scholarship on a novel’s ‘life cycle’ and the question of the nature of events and ensuing phases which constitute this cycle, on the one hand, and the existing research on the Booker Prize and the question of its particular influence on Booker-eligible novels, on the other. The two questions directed at the analyses of profiles are: (1) what does a

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typical ‘life cycle’ of the contemporary novel look like?, and (2) can the Booker’s influence be adequately described as the effect of a ‘second publication’ or, what is the specific space which the Booker creates in the debate about a nominated or awarded novel? It remains to be seen in how far the described patterns will differ depending on the author’s status as established, newcomer or ‘odd’ (cf. chapter 3.3), as well as on the mix of problems which the novels offer and which will be negotiated in literary interaction as documented on the book’s advance and final covers and, most effectively for public debate, in media coverage.

4. Leading the Booker Prize into the New Millennium

The transition from the old to the new millennium, from Booker’s third to its fourth decade, was accompanied by discussions about the condition of literature, the welfare of the novel, and the state of Britain’s leading literary prize. The sponsors of the Booker Prize, Booker plc, were experiencing financial difficulties, and their continued collaboration was at risk. The Prize was under pressure to produce results which would emphasize its predominance at a time when other consecrating institutions – such as the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Book Awards – were catching up in media exposure or had even outpaced it in the amount of promised prize money. At the time when the 2000 Booker jury made a decision to recognise Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin instead of any of her co-Booker nominees, or in fact instead of a book which was much discussed in the months preceding the nominations and widely considered a Booker favourite, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, the courses of these novels’ lives, their future statuses, were impossible to guess. Neither is it possible to say in hindsight what the course of events would have been had Smith won and not Atwood. Instead, what I will describe in the following is how the decision was received and how those who reacted perceived the consequences for each novel. I will lay out the story of these two novels and how they were placed in a competition, and I will provide a context for the debates surrounding them by reviewing the course of their attention profiles, bearing in mind the situation of the Booker Prize at the turn of the millennium. In the year 2000, at least two novels were launched whose publication was accompanied by the claim to lead literary fiction into a new era. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth was hailed by The Observer as “the first publishing sensation of the

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millennium”.1 Both the UK and US paperback covers advertised the novel as “the outstanding debut of the new millennium” and “the first great novel of the new century” respectively.2 Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin carried a similar endorsement on the front of its paperback edition. Apart from a description as an “international bestseller” and a golden Booker sticker, the US edition featured a quote from Newsday which claimed that the title of “the first great novel of the new millennium” belonged to Atwood’s book.3 Despite a common claim to millennial triumphs, Atwood’s and Smith’s novels could not be more different from the outset. The Blind Assassin was anticipated as another success in a long line of triumphant productions. It was hailed as a “mature” novel of a “seasoned” author, whose literary credentials were not in any way questioned, and if criticised then for an excess of conscious literariness, not for the lack of it. White Teeth, in contrast, needed to be assessed as the first work of a newcomer whose craftsmanship was not displayed for the umpteenth time but had to first be proven. And yet, both were presented as the books which would triumphantly make an impact on literature in the new millennium. Although Smith’s novel was published at the very beginning of the year and Atwood’s only in the autumn of 2000, and hence major parts of their profiles were not played out parallel to each other, they crossed at several moments throughout the stages of their media attention. Most importantly of all, Smith was expected to win critical acclaim in the form of the attention of prizes, but when she failed to be placed on the Booker shortlist (the longlist was only introduced a year later), the media reaction largely viewed this omission as a major mistake and carried some of this disappointment to their assessment of the judges’ final selection of Atwood’s fourth-time Booker attempt as the less adventurous choice. White Teeth was the first novel written by Zadie Smith who was born in London to a Jamaican mother and English father. Smith had been a 21-year old student of English Literature at Cambridge University when one of her short stories which appeared in The Mays Literary Anthology, a new writing medium for students from Oxford and Cambridge, in which Smith published four stories between 1995 and 1997, caught the attention of a literary agent in 1997. This first link to the publishing world was discontinued when encouraged by a friend’s mother, British novelist and PEN activist Lisa Appignanesi, Smith pinned her

1

Stephanie Merritt, “She’s Young, Black, British – and the First Publishing Sensation

2

Cf. appendix, 2e and 2f.

3

Cf. appendix, 1f.

of the Millennium”, The Observer 16 Jan. 2000.

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hopes on The Wylie Agency, whose other clients included Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. Subsequently, a legendary deal of a quarter million pounds was negotiated with the publishing house Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books. This deal – based on an excerpt of what was to be the first novel and the promise for a second book – instigated substantial hype in publishing circles. Following her agent Georgia Garrett, Smith moved to AP Watt literary agency in September 2000 and to Rogers, Coleridge and White in 2011. The circumstances of the marketing and publication of White Teeth were partly substantiated by hearsay and the production background was granted a somewhat mythical nature, which can be seen in the varying reports on the sum of the advancement, the quantity of the manuscript on which this advancement was paid, and speculations about a picture of the author which may or may not have been included in the first portfolio that was sent to publishers. This myth-making and suspensecreating constitute an important part of the novel’s first positioning vis-à-vis its readers. Smith’s debut proved an outstanding success. Within the first year of publication, it had already sold over one million copies in print. It has appeared in 28 languages in over 30 countries. Smith received nine literary awards and was nominated for seven more with White Teeth. The book was adapted into a fourepisode TV series for the BBC which aired in the fall of 2002. In 2003, and again in 2013, the author was announced one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists”. In 2005, TIME magazine included the book among the “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005” and in 2006 crowned Smith, rather than the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, as the only Brit among the “100 People Who Shape Our World”. As of March 2014, the Modern Language Association database listed 79 entries of secondary sources for the novel while literary criticism encompassed an early published volume in the Continuum Contemporaries series by Claire Squires (2002), an anthology of critical essays edited by Tracey L. Walters (2008) and a book of criticism and context for Smith’s first three novels by Philip Tew (2010). With and after her debut success, Zadie Smith garnered an established position on the market. As of 2017, she wrote four other novels, a collection of criticism and edited several other collections. In 2001, Smith co-edited a collection of The Mays Literary Anthology, the publication which helped launch her career. As Writer in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), she edited and introduced an anthology of erotic short stories, Piece of Flesh (2001). Her 2002 follow-up, The Autograph Man, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and was awarded the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. Her 2005 novel On Beauty was shortlisted for the Booker Prize

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and won the Orange Prize for Fiction as well as the Somerset Maugham Award. In the context of a charity event, she edited a compilation of character vignettes, The Book of Other People (2007), in which she also published one of her own short stories, “Hanwell Snr”. Some of her journalistic writing and parts of a planned book on writing was published in a critically acclaimed collection of non-fiction, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009). She was shortlisted for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction (former Orange Prize), for her fourth novel, NW (2012). Smith taught creative writing as Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and in 2010 became a tenured professor of fiction at New York University. In contrast, Margaret Atwood could look back on a long and renowned literary career when The Blind Assassin came out in the year 2000. Her life as a published author began with a first collection of poetry in the early 1960s. Atwood’s first novel The Edible Woman was published in 1969 by André Deutsch, her third novel Lady Oracle (1976) assured her the position of an acclaimed Canadian novelist, and her sixth novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) catapulted her to international fame. By the time The Blind Assassin, Atwood’s tenth novel, was published, she had been on the Booker shortlist thrice (for The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, Cat’s Eye in 1989 and Alias Grace in 1996), had won Canada’s premier awards (the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and Giller Prize), was awarded the highest science fiction accolade with the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction and the US National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. Atwood has written poetry, novels, criticism and short stories and she has become something of a literary champion who also steps up frequently on questions of human and animal rights. She has been hailed a feminist, an environmentalist and a literary activist. She has ventured into genre literature (scifi, fantasy, crime) without renouncing her literary status and brought Robert A. Heinlein’s genre description “speculative fiction” to wider familiarity. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. The Margaret Atwood Society, an international association of scholars, teachers and students who promote and collaborate on conferences, papers and volumes on her writing, publishes a journal solely dedicated to her works, Margaret Atwood Studies. Atwood’s tenth novel continued the long line of success. It was published simultaneously in Canada, the US and UK. Foreign rights to the novel have been sold by the literary agency Curtis and Brown for 26 languages. The book was a New York Times bestseller. It won the 2000 Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2001 Crime Writers’ Association Dashiell Hammett Award. It was shortlisted for the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction and The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and it was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

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In 2005, TIME magazine distinguished it among its “ALL-TIME 100 Greatest Novels”, along with Smith’s White Teeth. Atwood was again shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2003 and she was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize twice, in 2005 and 2007. Her MaddAddam trilogy was a veritable publishing event and stretched for an entire decade from Oryx and Crake (2003) to A Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). She won Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Letters in 2009, Germany’s Nelly Sachs Prize in 2010 and the LA Times Innovator’s Award in 2013. In the following, I will present the phases of public and critical attention profiles of the two novels and show how the millennial publication, as well as the simultaneous eligibility for the Booker, turned attention to an unlikely and uneven relationship which only peripherally showed signs of competition. I will then elaborate on the specific situation of the Booker Prize at the turn of the millennium and show how the 2000 choice of winner was perceived as having presented a welcome solution to some problems while creating others to be solved – or pondered – at a later stage.

4.1 B OOKER BY C ONCESSION : M ARGARET ATWOOD ’ S T HE B LIND A SSASSIN Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin was presented and received by all participants involved in its discussion as the next big work by an established writer. And more than any other of the case studies in the second part of this study, the profile of her novel can be said to be incredibly dense, with every participant reacting almost at the same time. The Blind Assassin was published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Atwood was interviewed only moderately. Instead, media attention was given to the book, which received much critical coverage in all the relevant publications and was then promptly nominated for the Booker Prize. With her fourth nomination for the Booker, the question was raised at once if she would finally receive the accolade. The immediacy of all the responses points to the fact that the novel had long been expected and that the mechanisms of interaction needed only to be released. If there was a challenge for her tenth novel, it was in continuing an already acquired position at the centre of attention – one which the author had earned over decades – and not disappointing any of the participants. Alongside the many contemporary rivals The Blind Assassin needed to surpass – not least Zadie Smith’s sparkling new White Teeth –was Atwood’s own list of previous works.

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Accordingly, the advance reader’s copy of The Blind Assassin presents the book as that of an established author with a long backlist and previous successes on which to build. It introduces the book as a “dazzling new novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist” and promises a suspenseful, challenging but “rewarding experience”.4 Suspense is set up through the description of the novel as a young woman’s account of her sister’s death and through foreshadowing that the reader will learn the reasons for her premature departure and “much more”. The description cautions the reader of a challenging process of untangling the many layers and carefully explains the back-and-forth between different levels of narration. Accordingly, the reader will need to set aside expectations of settling with one narrative voice and prepare for a novel-within-novel, a science fiction story, as well as inserted newspaper clippings. The book’s quality is guaranteed by the author’s résumé, as Atwood “[f]or the past twenty-five years […] has written works of striking originality and imagination”. After a quarter of a century of steady production, “Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights” and “proves once again that [she] is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of our time”. The security of past successes was translated into a prediction of future greatness: “Like The Handmaid’s Tale, it is destined to become a classic”. As a future classic, The Blind Assassin was presented by the publisher as a book to be greeted by all participants with due attention. Atwood was set to go on an author tour and her novel was selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club. The publishers also promised to provide a large array of point-of-sale material and to advertise widely in all relevant media. The publisher’s promise was taken up and the triple publication of The Blind Assassin in Canada, US and UK was expected in previews and trade commentary as Atwood’s next-in-line novel. The publication of The Blind Assassin received much critical attention, and the novel was promptly nominated for the Booker Prize. There was no need to wait for others to establish its worth or to orchestrate opinions. The prize reacted almost as quickly as the cycle of postpublication reviews. With the subsequent nomination for the Orange Prize, the novel went through a second important prize coverage cycle. The attention profile for Atwood’s tenth novel can be divided into five phases which will be described with more depth in the following: (1) pre-publication coverage in trade media starting in May 2000; (2) attention in general media around the time of its autumn publication; (3) coverage in reference to its Booker Prize nomination with a peak in November and a post-Booker and end-of-the-year media pres-

4

Cf. appendix, 1a.

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ence; (4) attention on behalf a nomination for the Orange Prize in the spring of 2001 coinciding with of her publisher’s success with the Harry Potter series; and (5) the publication of the paperback format and more awards. “The new Margaret Atwood”: Pre-Publication Interest in Trade Media Coverage The novel stirred interest in trade media coverage from spring to late summer of 2000 and met with predominantly sympathetic reactions in previews, in articles covering North American book fairs, and a full range of attention in the relevant US and Canadian pre-publication reviews. The first media attention in the US and Canada began in May 2000 with short pre-publication alerts in the trade magazine Library Journal, where Atwood was confirmed as “a constant level of value”,5 and later in Publishers Weekly where both the hardcover edition and the audio format were peek-previewed at among other upcoming fall events. The summer of 2000 was a difficult time for stirring excitement. According to PW and for want of a “breakout title” at the Book Expo America (BEA), held in Chicago from June 2-4, booksellers at least could count on one secure seller “the new Margaret Atwood […] with its gorgeous cover”.6 The transitional, sponsorseeking phase of the 2000 Canadian Bookseller’s Association (CBA) convention and trade show gave signs of an uncertain future as no book, not even Atwood’s latest seemed “to generate a stir” among the participants.7 From June to August, The Blind Assassin was recommended in all four big US pre-publication reviews – Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal – and the Canadian pendant, Quill & Quire. The US reviewers agreed with the information on the advance reader’s copy. They recognised Atwood’s capabilities, showed familiarity with her oeuvre and favourably compared The Blind Assassin with previous novels: “Atwood here surpasses even The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace”.8 The book was described as a canvas for human emotions and power relations as reviewers added their labels in three climactic steps of “avarice, love, and revenge”9, “frailty, greed and passion”10,

5

Staff, “Fiction in September 2000”, LJ 1 May 2000.

6

Bridget Kinsella, “A Season of Steady Buzzes”, PW 19 June 2000.

7

Leah Eichler, “CBA Confab in Transition”, PW 26 June 2000.

8

“The Blind Assassin”, PW 24 July 2000.

9

Donna Seaman, “Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin”, Booklist 1 June 2000.

10 PW 24 July 2000.

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“tragedy, corruption, and cruel manipulation”11. The review of her novel in the Canadian pre-publication review Quill & Quire was three times as long as the average US pendant and took more space to elaborate on the vast range of topics, a map of “the human genome”, which Atwood handled in this “saga”, on the one hand, and the eventual disappointment with a heroine who takes too much life from the other characters rendering her own account difficult to stomach, even “implausible”, on the other.12 This was the first evidence of a more mixed evaluation revealing that the novel’s vastness did not in each case persuade the ‘advanced’ reader. An Autumn Event: Pre- and Post-Publication General Media Coverage The launch of The Blind Assassin signified a real event in the autumn of 2000, the traditional season for literary publications. Atwood’s long-time publishers McClelland & Stewart, Nan A. Talese (Doubleday), and Bloomsbury launched the novel simultaneously which in practice was first published in Canada (2 September), then in the US (5 September) and finally in the UK (2 October). The book was an instant sales success. Barely two weeks after it was available Atwood’s tenth novel entered The New York Times hardcover bestseller list at #6, and did even better with independent book shops (#4) than with chains (#7). Soon after, trade media reported that the book sold a total of 185,000 copies “after three trips to press”13 and placed it as number eight among the “titles most in demand by librarians prior to the week ending September 23, 2000 from Baker & Taylor Books nationwide”14. The copies which the reviewers held in their hands in each of the three countries differed slightly. Like the advance reader’s copy, whose cover had already been admired in trade media, each front cover showed the same image of a young woman in a black dress seated on a wooden object, possibly a trunk, looking over her shoulder at the observer. Only the font of the title and author’s name differed from publisher to publisher. The back covers, in contrast, placed different emphasis on the author (Canadian copy) and previous achievements (US and UK copies). The Canadian edition showed a large picture of Atwood and a short

11 Beth E. Andersen, “Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin”, LJ 31 Aug. 2000. 12 Stephen Smith, “The Blind Assassin”, Quill & Quire 31 Aug. 2000. 13 Daisy Maryles, “Behind the Bestsellers”, PW 18 Sept. 2000. 14 Staff, “Prepub Best Sellers”, LJ 15 Oct. 2000. Baker & Taylor is a privately owned company for the distribution of books and entertainment.

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description of the novel as “providing the sweep of an epic and the intimate focus of a family drama” with a reference to her previous “internationally celebrated Alias Grace”.15 In contrast, the US and UK editions made use of appraisel for her previous novels on the back and a photograph of Atwood with a description of her writing career on the back dust jacket flap.16 Each featured blurbs from the respective national papers. The British edition quoted from the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and London Review of Books and also indicated that she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize with The Handmaid’s Tale in 1986 and Cat’s Eye in 1989 and for both the Booker and the Orange Prize for Alias Grace in 1997.17 In Canada, Atwood’s novel found favourable resonance on all levels of general publications. It was greeted in a wide range of regional newspapers, such as the Edmonton Journal, Winnipeg Free Press and Toronto Star but more importantly, on the day of its first publication, Atwood’s novel was reviewed in Canada’s largest-circulation national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, and a week later in “Canada’s National Magazine”, Maclean’s. In contrast to the mixed pre-publication evaluation in Quill & Quire, Canadian reviewers in general media were full of praise. Marina Warner, British novelist, scholar and cultural critic contradicted the idea of the main protagonist’s implausible behaviour and decisions and, to the contrary, claimed that Atwood was consciously “exploring disjunctions, contradictions and fissures within a seemingly single entity”, that any such implausibility was, in fact, intended on the part of this “sphinx”-like author, who on top of her “command of all these [earlier] qualities” added a “sparkling feel for fiction’s capacity for mischief”.18 John Bemrose, Canadian arts journalist, novelist, poet and playwright, presented Atwood in the role of the nation’s conscience, as “Canada’s premier novelist”, who “looks back on the 1900s through the prisms of class and gender politics”, thus challenging “taboo[s] in Canada” and “revealing the bittersweet contradictions by which we live”.19 Expecting the novel to become a publishing sensation and a riddle for her reviewers, Bemrose noted that Atwood did not show a willingness to reveal the meaning of her novel’s title: “she’ll leave that to the critics”.20

15 Cf. appendix, 1b. 16 Cf. appendix, 1c. 17 Cf. appendix, 1d. 18 Marina Warner, “Eyes Wide Open”, The Globe and Mail 2 Sept. 2000. 19 John Bemrose, “Margaret’s Museum”, Maclean’s 11 Sept. 2000. 20 Bemrose, Maclean’s 11 Sept. 2000.

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In the US, The Blind Assassin called for wide attention in pre- and postpublication reviews in general media. It was part of two seasonal fall preview articles in TIME and Newsweek, the two main weeklies competing for circulation and advertising. TIME magazine included Atwood’s latest in its “Critic’s Choice” column and described it as “a literary page turner”, a recipe for satisfying two kinds of audiences: “English professors will relish the postmodern trick – a novel within a novel within a novel” while “[t]he less theoretically inclined can simply kick back and marvel at Atwood’s gripping tale”.21 The other weekly voiced the industry’s hopes for the book and described it as “[m]uch anticipated, and sure to get a lot of press”.22 The prediction was proven right. The book was reviewed pre-publication in The Wall Street Journal, the biggest US national daily newspaper with an emphasis on business and economic news, followed by metropolitan interest in the Star Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times and St. Petersburg Times (today, Tampa Times). It received postpublication reviews in The New York Times again, in the literary magazine The New Yorker, the two weeklies TIME and Newsweek and the two pertinent literary ‘ezines’ Salon.com and January Magazine. Two weeks after the book’s publication, Atwood was interviewed by Carla Meyer, a staff writer for San Francisco Chronicle, who described her as “engaging, expansive, witty”, and gave room for the author’s self-characterisation as “a walking footnote”23 – a trait which can be said to permeate her books and one which not all reviewers received with praise. The US reviews were mixed and the knowledge of Atwood’s oeuvre was either perceived favourably as “variations on a single story: how a desperate woman escapes from subjugation into the ambiguities of freedom” either judged as a risk which the author managed triumphantly,24 or as a burden which pressured her into showing off “showmanship”,25 “exercising once again her own allegorical bent”,26 and leaving the reader with a sense of “gimmickry”27. While some particularly praised Atwood for creating “one of [her] most memorable charac-

21 “Fall Preview: A Taste of Autumn”, TIME 4 Sept. 2000. 22 Steven Ambrose, “Fall Preview”, Newsweek 4 Sept. 2000. 23 Carla Meyer, “Atwood as Complex as Her Latest Novel”, San Francisco Chronicle 20 Sept. 2000. 24 Steven G. Kellman, “The Old Maid’s Tale”, San Francisco Chronicle 3 Sept. 2000. 25 Cathleen McGuigan, “As the Pages Turn”, Newsweek 18 Sept. 2000. 26 Thomas Mallon, “Wheels within Wheels”, The NYT 3 Sept. 2000. 27 John Updike, “Love and Loss on Zycron”, The New Yorker 18 Sept. 2000.

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ters to date”28, a “near-distasteful hero or heroine” in the manner of “Ignatius in ‘A Confederacy of Dunces,’ or Harry in ‘Rabbit Redux’”29, another complained that the author neglected her readers by creating characters “we don’t give two hoots about”30. The author of Rabbit Redux, John Updike, praised Atwood’s craftsmanship but remained rather sceptical of her overall vision. Although he suspected that this might coincide with the author’s intention, her “message”, he sided with an exasperated reader faced with a shattered worldview: “The novel gets us in its grip and then loosens it and leaves us feeling lost”.31 In contrast, the influential Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michiko Kakutani felt surprisingly entertained by a novel which she perceived as “largely unencumbered by the feminist ideology”, “shorn of those books’ satiric social vision” but instead, and very much to its credit, “most purely a work of entertainment – an expertly rendered Daphne du Maurieresque tale that showcases Ms. Atwood’s narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic”.32 In the UK, where the responsibility of pre-publication attention remains largely with the daily newspapers rather than trade publications, Atwood’s book was anticipated from the very beginning of the year up until right before it was available in the bookshops – and when it was, it was immediately paraded on the pages of Britain’s leading literary magazine. The first announcement of the book appeared in a January preview of the year in The Telegraph where it was summarised with an emphasis on the narrative structure: “An old woman reflects on the stories and stories-within-stories of life from the Twenties onwards.”33 Half a year later, and months before the novel was available on the market, British novelist and journalist Amanda Craig revealed her anticipation for “[t]he new Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, because I adore her” in her summer reading recommendations in The Observer.34 The first longer piece in the UK general media was an interview with Margaret Atwood conducted by The Guardian’s

28 Linda L. Richards, “Brilliant Tapestry”, January Magazine Oct. 2000. 29 Karen Houppert, “The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood”, Salon.com 12 Sept. 2000. 30 McGuigan, Newsweek 18 Sept. 2000. 31 Updike, The New Yorker 18 Sept. 2000. 32 Michiko Kakutani, “Three Stories Woven into a Suspenseful Design”, The NYT 8 Sept. 2000. Kakutani has reviewed books for The NYT for over a quarter of a century. For an article on her position as public literary critic, cf. Ben Yagoda, “Michiko Kakutani: A Critic with a Fixation”, Slate 10 Apr. 2006. 33 “Future Fictions”, The Telegraph 4 Jan. 2000. 34 “Sunscreen, Swimsuit, Shades…”, The Observer 2 July 2000.

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feature writer and deputy editor Katherine Viner. Despite its evident focus on the author, their conversation ended with a warning not to confuse the writer with her work: “She doesn’t really want you to read her at all. What have you been doing reading this interview? Read her books instead.”35 A series of prepublication reviews followed in The Observer, The Economist, The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and the New Statesman. Only a few days after publication, a long review of Atwood’s The Blind Assassin was printed in the London Review of Books, where Margaret Anne Doody, the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, compared it favourably to the author’s previous work: “A complex rumination on narrative, it is as elegant and dynamic as its predecessor [Alias Grace], but more contemplative and more edgy – and much more witty.”36 Although this favourable tone was predominant in the UK reviews, it is striking that more women reviewers backed the novel than their male colleagues. The writers and academics Kathryn Hughes, Lisa Appignanesi, Lorna Sage, Elaine Showalter, and later Anita Brookner assessed the novel with approval if for various reasons: they praised its architecture, its effortless performance, its modern self-referentiality. Elaine Showalter gave a possible explanation for these different opinions by defining the novel as “that most elusive of literary unicorns: the woman’s novel”.37 For that matter, The Observer critic, Adam Mars-Jones, in recollection of John Updike’s earlier criticism of Atwood’s portrayal of all men in the novel as “monstrous”, was particularly taken aback by the gendered black and white painting, of her “flattening out the characters”: “He so dark, sarcastic and righteous, she so vulnerable in her youth and lovely gown.”38 In contrast to the supportive assessment of The Blind Assassin as meta-fiction, The Economist reviewer saw the novel as too constructed, in fact, too appealing for literary criticism: “The trouble is, Ms Atwood’s novels tend to bring out the literary critic in us. They are full of significant images and patterns that lend themselves nicely”.39 Again, much of the criticism – positive and negative – was played out in reference to earlier works. Alex Clark explicitly referred to the reader’s expectations of an Atwood story’s “emotional impact” but which for her were not met

35 Katherine Viner, “Double Bluff”, The Guardian 16 Sept. 2000. 36 Margaret Anne Doody, “Royal Classic Knitwear”, LRB 5 Oct. 2000. 37 Elaine Showalter, “Virgin Suicide”, New Statesman 2 Oct. 2000. 38 Adam Mars-Jones, “Where Women Grow on Trees”, The Observer 17 Sept. 2000. 39 “New Fiction”, The Economist 21 Sept. 2000. The same point was made earlier in a TIME preview but perceived as a postive characteristic at that time.

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this time.40 In contrast, and rare exception, Kathryn Hughes claimed that everything about The Blind Assassin was “sparkling new” and “[t]he only thing familiar about [it] is its technical accomplishment and exhilarating emotional power.”41 The continuation of Atwood’s writing was acknowledged by Lisa Appignanesi with a recommendation of the novel to this year’s Booker Prize judges: “Atwood has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize several times. The Blind Assassin, her most daring novel to date, should be the winner.”42 The later English PEN president’s public incentive for the Booker jury was soon taken up in the media. “Fourth time lucky”: Booker Prize Coverage and Turn of the Year 2000/2001 In early October, and before any official nominations were announced, Atwood’s long presence on that year’s Booker Prize coverage cycle began with a round of speculations – after all, she had been on the list of nominees on three previous occasions. First “Booker rumours” predicted the novel’s good chance of being nominated for the prize.43 When The Blind Assassin was announced as part of the Booker Prize shortlist on 5 October 2000, it was referred to the next day in The Guardian, The Independent and The Telegraph. More coverage on Atwood’s Booker-nominated novel followed in the news and comments in The Observer (twice), The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and the London Review of Books. At this stage, only The Guardian and The Observer articles featured short summaries of Atwood’s novel. The former almost neutrally referred to the book’s length and complexity, interlinked narratives and genres, and specified its main themes as “authorship, secrecy and female fulfilment” alongside its historical and industrial plots.44 The latter also highlighted “the interwoven narratives” but less objectively, quoting the negative judgment of a “tricksy plot” and gender stereotypes made earlier by Adam Mars-Jones.45 Despite the much-debated openness of the outcome, Atwood was deemed “likeliest to win the prize”, “an early favourite at 2-1”,46 among bookies and insiders.

40 Alex Clark, “Vanishing Act”, The Guardian 30 Sept 2000. 41 Kathryn Hughes, “One Assassin after Another”, The Sunday Telegraph 17 Sept. 2000. 42 Lisa Appignanesi, “Bright Star of Planet Canada”, The Independent 23 Sept. 2000. 43 “Book Trade News”, guardian.co.uk 3 Oct. 2000. 44 John Ezard, “Obscure Authors Make Booker History”, The Guardian 6 Oct. 2000. 45 “A Year for the Outsiders”, The Observer 8 Oct. 2000. 46 Ezard, The Guardian 6 Oct. 2000.

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The shortlist called for more attention among reviewers but also radiated to other participants of literary interaction. Anita Brookner, fellow novelist and art historian, as well as former Booker winner, had a generous verdict for the book and contextualised the novel not only within the writer’s oeuvre but also the overall Canadian women’s fiction tradition which she praised for its “directness” and presented Atwood’s “intriguing performance” as “a prime example”.47 Her Spectator review allowed for “the mildest of objections” – a potential for “modish intertextualities” and “occasional longueurs” – but concluded that it was “of the highest quality” and a confirmation of the writer’s “high reputation”.48 But the book was also mentioned in some good news about the printing group St Ives who had printed four of the Booker nominees, “including Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin”.49 Atwood’s nominations clearly served as an indicator of the market segment. In fact, when the bookseller WH Smith announced a new set of anti-elitist prizes “in which readers will be able to pit Booker Prize nominees such as Margaret Atwood against bestsellers such as Maeve Binchy”,50 it was to emphasize the status of The Blind Assassin as a ‘literary’ novel – as opposed to more ‘popular’ books. In the US, the shortlist inclusion drew attention in several respects. For one, the title bounced back from #8 to #7 on The New York Times bestseller list. Secondly, Atwood was interviewed by the theatre and movie critic Mel Gussow for The New York Times, where an extract of her book was also printed. The January Magazine, too, followed up its very enthusiastic review with a long interview one week after Atwood’s nomination. The writer was eager to tell the story of the book’s cover, which had stirred commentators’ interest long before The

47 Anita Brookner, “Artfully Administered Shocks”, The Spectator 7 Oct. 2000. 48 Brookner, The Spectator 7 Oct. 2000. 49 Rosie Murray West, “St Ives Has £100m Fund for Acquisitions”, The Telegraph 11 Oct. 2000. The following year, when St. Ives failed to continue the lucky streak, The Blind Assassin was mentioned as influential for the as yet lucrative part of the business; cf. Stephen Foley, “Company Bumf Dip Hits St Ives”, The Independent 10 Oct. 2001. 50 Jane Robins, “New Books Prize to Be Judged by Public”, The Independent 13 Oct. 2000. The heated discussion about Seamus Heaney’s triumph over JK Rowling in that year’s Whitbread Awards was said to have inspired the general market retailer to venture a more “populist route” and add further Book Awards in eight categories to its already existing Literary Award. Atwood’s novel competed against Joanna Trollope’s Marrying the Mistress and Maeve Binchy’s Scarlet Feather in the Fiction category, while the longlist for the New Talent Award was led by Zadie Smith.

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Blind Assassin was published. Her team had selected a picture of a young woman thinking it was an image for some kind of product advertisement but when the book was available in stores a woman from Texas revealed that the picture was of her mother, “a society girl in 1934” who “had posed for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post magazine”.51 Thirdly, Atwood and her latest book were included in a feature article on “The Gray American Novel” which singled her out alongside male colleagues – Updike, Bellow and Roth – as a generation of writers who have come to focus on old age in their works.52 A closer look at a compressed discussion of the reasons for and against Atwood’s possible predominance on the 2000 Booker shortlist proves a representative account of the wider debate. As the papers prepared for the final announcement, The Observer asked four of its critics whom they would like to see winning and whom they thought the judges would pick, with three out of four clearly favouring Irish novelist and ultra-marathonist Michael Collins and his fourth novel The Keepers of Truth. British writer Robert MacFarlane formulated the wish that the judges should arrive at their decisions considering every candidate “on equal footing” implying that this would leave “the two writers with real form – Atwood and Ishiguro” at the bottom of the list.53 He criticised Atwood for her “self-consciousness”, compared her strategy with that of James Joyce’s enigmaplacing for professors, rejected her novel for making the reader “feel coerced into admiration rather than offering it up voluntarily”, and pronounced that her success would be “a lifetime achievement award” and therefore “unjust”. Robert Potts, the politics editor of The TLS and the Guardian’s poetry critic, embedded Atwood’s novel in what he perceived as the Booker’s core in reflecting “contemporary readings of the British Empire and the Commonwealth” as a story of “political intrigues located around twentieth-century Canada”. He chimed in with MacFarlane in admitting that Atwood “certainly merits reward for her exemplary corpus” but declared “The Blind Assassin, though engrossing and brilliantly written […] not her finest work”. Biographer Joanna Griffiths and bestselling author Justine Ettler detected the representation of “family” at the centre of the list. The former also emphasised the presence of narrators acting as “incorrigible genealogical detectives” and “traumatised inhabitants”, taking on the role of “memory” and “clue-hunting” in these “identity quests”. Griffiths’ choice was Collins, followed by Atwood “as runner-up, for a grand scheme perfor-

51 Linda L. Richards, “Margaret Atwood”, January Magazine 15 Nov. 2000. 52 Charles McGrath, “The Way We Live Now: The Gray American Novel”, The NYT 22 Oct. 2000. 53 “The Bookies’ Booker…”, The Observer 5 Nov. 2000.

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mance with desultory lacklustre”. Ettler similarly noted “a haunting preoccupation with tragedies past”, and defined Atwood’s book as “a kind of obituary to industrial capitalism, Canadian style”. The critics’ opinion was counterbalanced by the bookie’s choice with the odds putting Atwood lengths ahead of her competitors according to William Hill and Ladbrokes.54 Finally, Atwood was ceremoniously awarded the prize on 7 November, promising to donate the prize money to a fund to save endangered species,55 and The Blind Assassin was celebrated and discussed in news and comments for almost three weeks. Despite the expected “Booker effect”, sales remained low for the Booker titles in 2000 with “[t]he exception [of] Atwood, who gained 6,180 on her October figure of 1,069, mainly because her book was new in the shops.”56 Atwood’s publishing house Bloomsbury, which received massive media coverage concerning its double success with a Booker-winning novel and its other big sales booster, the Harry Potter series, cherished their financial triumphs. Right after the announcement, it was revealed that “120,000 copies” of the hardback edition sold already,57 promising a bright future for her backlist. Nigel Newton, the chief executive, classified the Booker victory as “significant as it will also drive sales of her previous titles”.58 Her novel was picked up in The Guardian (five times), The Independent (four times), The Telegraph (twice), as well as in The Economist, The Observer, New Statesman and The TLS. On the other side of the Atlantic, the winner was reported in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly and Maclean’s. The headlines conveyed the overall opinion of Atwood’s long expected recognition and hailed the winner as “fourth time lucky”.59 But the decision – though it may not have been unanimous among the judges – was also a popular

54 “Margaret Atwood 9-4, 11-8; Kazuo Ishiguro 11-4, 4-1; Trezza Azzopardi 7-2, 4-1; Michael Collins 9-2, 5-1; Matthew Kneale 9-2, 6-1; Brian O’Doherty 6-1, 6-1” (The Observer 5 Nov. 2000). 55 Nigel Reynolds, “Booker Prize for Atwood at Fourth Attempt”, The Telegraph 8 Nov. 2000. 56 John Ezard, “Fourth Time Lucky for Atwood in Booker Prize”, The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000. 57 David Teather, “Bloomsbury Set”, The Guardian 25 Nov. 2000. 58 Andrea Babbington, “Bloomsbury Makes a Killing on the Blind Assassin”, The Independent 24 Nov. 2000. 59 Ezard, The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000; Boyd Tonkin, “At the Fourth Time of Asking, Atwood’s ‘Narrative Energy’ Snares Booker Prize”, The Independent 8 Nov. 2000; and Reynolds, The Telegraph 8 Nov. 2000.

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one. Guardian readers favoured Atwood over Ishiguro in a Booker ballot.60 Professional commentators, too, showed both surprise and support for the decision. Boyd Tonkin most abundantly paid homage to the winner in quoting the very generous review written by Lisa Appignanesi and assigned Atwood the position of “a virtuoso stylist who thinks as hard about the form of her fiction as about its content”.61 The US and especially Canadian response focused on Atwood’s role as a national author with The Blind Assassin “already the No. 1 national bestseller”.62 Atwood’s surprising success (“Margaret Atwood was delighted but so unprepared she was without a thank-you speech”) was contextualised in what was perceived as “a season of international success for Canadian writers”.63 However, they also point out the debate around this winner who was not embraced by everyone and which was received as “more of a lifetime-achievement gesture than a justified homage to a single novel”.64 Atwood’s newly confirmed established literary position called for another round of critical attention for the book and its audio format. On both sides of the Atlantic, after the Booker Prize, The Blind Assassin was presented more often as a novel about writing itself.65 The novel was reviewed again in TIME magazine and for the first time in The Austin Chronicle. The Guardian’s John Crace picked it up for his satirical column “The Digested Read” and summarised the book as a woman’s novel in a less flattering description than Showalter’s: “The innocent but all-too-knowing Iris Chase trawls through her family history in a sort of prewar Aga saga”.66 The audio format was reviewed with references to

60 “Who Should Win the Booker?” guardian.co.uk 2000. 61 Tonkin, The Independent 8 Nov. 2000. 62 Brian Bethune, “Queen of the Booker”, Maclean’s 20 Nov. 2000. 63 Bethune, Maclean’s 20 Nov. 2000. 64 Bethune, Maclean’s 20 Nov. 2000. 65 Cf., for example, Rebecca Allison, “Atwood Wins Booker Prize”, The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000: “The novel features the elderly Iris Chase Griffen reviewing her life and, in particular, her relationship with her sister Laura, whose premature death in the 1940s affords her iconic status as the author of a scandalous novel.” Cf. Sara Lyall, “Margaret Atwood Is the Winner of Britain’s Top Fiction Award”, The NYT 8 Nov. 2000: “Laura has achieved posthumous fame through the novel she wrote before she died – a potboiler called ‘The Blind Assassin’ – which Iris found and published for her”. 66 John Crace, “Digested Read: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood”, The Guardian 17 Nov. 2000. The somewhat condescending connotation of the “Aga saga” stands for a genre mainly inhabited by the characters of Joanna Trollope’s novels, who earned

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the Booker in The Independent and The Observer and in the US twice in the Library Journal, and in early 2001, in Booklist. The audio reviewers reiterated the topic of Atwood’s alleged “self-centeredness”67 and of her triumph as a lifetime achievement. Some even claimed that the complicated storyline became more accessible because of “the superb reading by Lorelei King”.68 The Booker accolades also promoted Atwood’s presence in the end-of-year coverage. She and her book were mentioned in commentator’s reviews-of-theyear 2000 in The Guardian (three times) as well as The Observer, The Independent on Sunday and Publishers Weekly. The Blind Assassin was recommended as a Christmas present by TIME magazine and The Guardian. Despite the allegations of failure and little impact on media attention, there were other articles which – sarcastically or less – mentioned Atwood as a valiant Christmas gift especially because of her award success. Hence, Tim Dowling recommended forging the signature of an established author to enliven the value of a book present and focused on the Booker winner as “a fairly safe bet”, because it says “‘BOOKER PRIZE WINNER’ right on the cover and shows that you care enough to give only the very best”.69 Another article promoted Atwood’s novel as “this year’s Booker winner, therefore a guaranteed talking point”.70 Christmas sales helped the novel climb back onto The New York Times bestseller lists at #6 for Independents Fiction and #20 for Chains Fiction. The simple narrative of Atwood’s Booker success as a consolation prize would ignore all those who showed support not only for the author but also for that particular novel. The Blind Assassin was not an undisputed winner but it was not very controversial either. The Booker did exert influence on the journey of the novel – it received a massive amount of coverage in the course of its nomination and then with the final award – but it did not stir much additional critical attention nor was the author more in demand for interviews than she might have without the award. Atwood’s triumph lay in finally scooping a prize which she had been repeatedly nominated since the early 1980s. And in that respect, the Booker may be said to have been less consolation, more confirmation.

the title as “Queen of Aga saga” in a successful attempt to label her fiction as middlebrow, cf. Miles Kington, “A Sorry Saga of Disparaging Literary Labelling”, The Independent 20 Feb. 2007. 67 Christina Hardyment, “Spoken Word”, The Independent 18 Nov. 2000. 68 Kim Bunce, “The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood Read by Lorelei King”, The Observer 19 Nov. 2000. 69 Tim Dowling, “How to Pick a Great Gift”, The Guardian 23 Nov. 2000. 70 “What We Really, Really Want”, The Guardian 23 Dec. 2000.

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Bloomsbury’s Triumphs and a Feminist Prize In the early spring of 2001, the triumphs of the past year showed in analyses of figures and sales. Atwood’s novel sold over 200,000 copies in the US after an 8 week run on the bestseller lists.71 Her publishing house Bloomsbury had doubled its revenues in 2000 with an exceptional year which saw the publication of JK Rowling’s fourth novel in the Harry Potter series and the Booker winner within its strong list of 400 titles.72 The Blind Assassin continued to be mentioned among the publisher’s “other hits” in features about its success due to Rowling’s Potter books years later.73 After a gap of four months in the coverage of literary awards, Atwood’s Booker-winning novel renewed media attention with the announcement of the 2001 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction longlist on 26 March 2001. The biggest news in that year’s all-female Orange Prize coverage, however, was the experiment of a double jury, one composed only of women and one only of men: “The £30,000 prize, the richest and most controversial in the country […] will this year have a men’s jury to second-guess the shortlist chosen by its female judges”.74 Atwood was mentioned as one of the “stars” and “big hitters”, along with Jeannette Winterson, and her novel was described as a “[m]ulti-layered story of repression, sisterhood and science-fiction”.75 Also in March, and in accordance with the feminist turn in discussion, Atwood’s book was enthusiastically

71 Daisy Maryles, “How They Landed on Top”, PW 19 Mar. 2001. 72 Cf. John Cassy, “Harry Potter and the Money Mine”, The Guardian 29 Mar. 2001; cf. also Philip Aldrick, “The Week Ahead”, The Telegraph 26 Mar. 2001; “US a Threat to Signet Sparkle”, The Independent 29 Mar. 2001; George Trefgarne, “The Questor Column”, The Telegraph 30 Mar. 2001. Atwood’s novel received attention in reference to its publishing house already in the previous year. With surplus money from the successes with the Harry Potter series and Atwood’s Booker triumph, Bloomsbury founded Bloomsburymagazine.com. The publisher was applauded for the introduction of a diverse range titles in this new magazine including books from other publishers’ lists. But when The Blind Assassin was promoted on this platform as “book of the month”, a Guardian commentator expressed his doubts about the magazine’s objectivity; cf. “Waterstone’s War Gets Dirty”, guardian.co.uk 8 Dec. 2000. 73 Matt Seaton, “The House That Harry Built”, The Guardian 10 Apr. 2006. 74 Fiachra Gibbons, “Male Perspective for Orange Prize”, The Guardian 27 Mar. 2001. 75 Gibbons, The Guardian 27 Mar. 2001: “The story of Iris, an octogenarian looking back on her life, and Laura, an author of pulpy romances, it won the 2000 Booker prize – which had to happen, eventually.”

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reviewed by the Cornell Professor of English Molly Hite in the Women’s Review of Books for whom the reading experience became a dish of “truffle prose” with “succulent pieces […] for savouring, for saving, and for rolling around in your mouth and your mind”.76 When the controversial shortlist was announced on 10 May, Atwood emerged as the contested front-runner. She was thought “likely to be the favourite to pick up the literary prize for her 10th novel, a multi-layered tale in which an 80-year-old woman looks back on her life”,77 and was mentioned in The Guardian, The Independent and The Observer. The shortlist was heavily criticised by the unofficial male judging panel. Atwood became the main target of male critique directed at the women’s choice of “dull or soppy books by big name writers”.78 The three men – novelist Paul Bailey, writer and journalist John Walsh, and marketing director of Ottakar’s, Paul Henderson – questioned the official jury’s choice, claiming that Atwood’s book was her worst, and calling it an “overblown, inflated piece of sci-fi – probably the least interesting book she had written”.79 In a similar line of argumentation to that which faced the Booker judges with their decision in favour of Atwood, the Orange Prize male jury accused the female jury of paying “too much respect to writers with Big Literary Names”.80 Although the Canadian star author was ultimately topped by the Australian winner of the award, Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection, The Blind Assassin was nevertheless mentioned in news about the winner in The Guardian and The Telegraph. The constellation of a surprise winner who beat “the bookies’s favourite” was compared with the previous year’s outcome when “Zadie Smith was pipped to the prize by Linda Grant”.81 Interestingly, however, the role of established vs. debut writer was reversed with Atwood – due to her long literary career and her recent Booker triumph – slowly but surely acquiring the status of a Goliath-esque favourite in the media. In a review of Grenville’s Orange winner, Atwood was mentioned prominently in The Guardian.82 When Grenville

76 Molly Hite, “Tongueless in Toronto”, The Women’s Review of Books 18.6 (Mar. 2001). 77 Emma Yates, “Atwood Heads the Orange Shortlist”, guardian.co.uk 10 May 2001. 78 Fiachra Gibbons, “Sexes Clash on Orange Prize”, The Guardian 19 May 2001. 79 Maureen Freely, “Gender Is Still the Crudest Agenda in Town”, The Independent 21 May 2001. 80 Freely, The Independent 21 May 2001. 81 Chris Alden, “The 2001 Orange Prize”, guardian.co.uk 6 June 2001. 82 Alice Cartwright, “Victory by Stealth”, The Guardian 9 June 2001.

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was profiled five years later, Atwood was remembered as her fiercest adversary for the Orange Prize: “That was the year Margaret Atwood’s Man Booker prizewinning The Blind Assassin was every bookmaker’s favourite and Kate Grenville was looking forward to a low-profile evening.”83 Atwood’s role as the front-runner for the Orange was based on both the already acquired status as a ‘big’ literary author and the Booker success. Bestselling Paperback and the End of the Prize Cycle Just when the interest in The Blind Assassin seemed to ebb away after almost a year of intense presence in the media, the novel was issued in paperback format and this helped trigger attention in summer reading recommendations, another set of previews and reviews and a final cycle of prize coverage. The paperback editions of The Blind Assassin were launched in August by Virago in the UK and by Anchor in the US. In addition to the book’s title and author’s name, the image of the young woman on the US edition was now framed by the words “international bestseller” and a button proclaiming it the “winner of the Booker Prize”.84 The paperback made it onto the bestseller list in Publishers Weekly in September at #14, climbed to #2 and dropped out in December at #14; in The New York Times it entered in September at #5 and a month later at #15; and in The Telegraph it made it just in time for Christmas sales at #10. The paperback edition of The Blind Assassin was later reported to have been one of the year’s biggest sellers in the UK, behind Zadie Smith’s White Teeth but ahead of the only other “serious lit”, as The TLS columnist would have it, by Lorna Sage and Atwood’s two Booker contestants Kazuo Ishiguro and Matthew Kneale.85 The paperback publication did not inspire the same amount of reactions as the launch of the hardback but it, too, was accompanied by pre- and postpublication reviews in general and trade media. In the early summer, The Blind Assassin was recommended for summer reading by Maclean’s and The Guardian in preparation for a busy month: “during July publishers are flooding the market with paperback editions, including the Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin”.86 The Independent reported that the book was to be adapted to a mini-series after rights were sold to Tessa Ross at Channel Four

83 Helen Brown, “A Writer’s Life: Kate Grenville”, The Telegraph 3 June 2006. 84 Cf. appendix, 1f. 85 J.C., “NB”, The TLS 4 Jan. 2002. 86 Alex Clark, “A Novel Idea”, The Guardian 22 June 2001.

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and Clare Hirsch at Union Pictures.87 A preview of the Booker-winning paperback was published in the “Fall 2001 Trade Paperbacks” column in Publishers Weekly. The Library Journal reviewed the novel in their “SF for Novices” section. In The English Review, Lionel Warner, Head of English and Drama at Newlands Girls’ School, Maidenhead, compared the use of espionage fiction in The Blind Assassin with John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In The Telegraph’s “weekly round-up of the latest releases”, the novel was presented least favourably and the main problem, which reviewers had spotted before, Atwood’s omnipresence, was re-opened again: “when the surprises come, they reveal less about sibling competitiveness and more about the tricksiness of the writer’s art”.88 The last cycle of prize coverage for The Blind Assassin was less extensively traced in the media than the Booker or the Orange but it may, too, have introduced the book to other audiences. In September, Atwood’s novel was awarded the Dashiell Hammett Prize by The International Association of Crime Writers.89 Although the prize announcement did not find much interest in the media, the genre award is of importance for booksellers to sift through the overwhelming supply of crime writing. The same month, Lorelei King, the narrator for The Blind Assassin’s audio edition, won an award for best performance at the 2001 Audiobook Awards.90 The Blind Assassin’s active prize cycle ended with a longlisting for The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In March 2002, reports of the shortlisted titles, Atwood’s novel was positioned in competition with Peter Carey’s 2001 Booker winner but both were finally overtaken by Michel Houellebecq whose controversial second novel Les Particules élémentaires (French ed. 1998, trans. as Atomised by Frank Wynne, 2000) scooped the €100,000 award in May 2002. The Blind Assassin: Debate and Profile Summary In a later review of Atwood’s oeuvre, a critic compared her fiction to “cilantro”, you either like it or you don’t.91 In fact, the first year of Atwood’s novel’s presence in the media showed some of this split reaction. The Blind Assassin was

87 Jade Garrett, “Brit Stars Secure Deal to Turn Atwood’s Booker-Winner into a TV Mini- Series”, The Independent 23 July 2001. 88 “Paperbacks”, The Telegraph 8 Sept. 2001. 89 “Crossing the Genre”, Booklist 1 Sept. 2001. 90 Christina Hardyment, “A Word in Your Ear”, The Independent 8 Sept. 2001. 91 Linda L. Richards, “Cilantro Prose”, January Magazine 2003.

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packaged as a literary title, which required the attention of all media channels: trade, general, literary, and even specialised business and financial press. But the responses ranged from recognition to disappointment. Some critics saw her capabilities confirmed with this tenth novel or even surpassed in the most recent production. Others based their negative evaluation on the sentiment that this novel clashed with the otherwise brilliant body of literature or detected too much repetition with the latest book confirming an agenda or author-centred approach to fiction. And when The Blind Assassin won the highest accolade when it was chosen the 2000 Booker Prize winner only several weeks into its postpublication media attention, the choice was contested as a lifetime achievement award, a concession granted on behalf of her earlier novels’ merits rather than based on this particular novel’s qualities. Some of the conclusions from that year’s Orange Prize contest which were drawn by Jenny Hartley, a principal lecturer at the University of Roehampton, who participated in the judging process and sat on both the male and female jury panel, are fruitful to understand the novel’s profile. Hartley was surprised that “the men didn’t go for the science fiction strand of Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, since research indicates 8 male science fiction readers for every one female fan” and that they “turned their backs on the two big hitters of the season” and “went instead for smaller books, and for the home patch”.92 The researcher reported that both juries placed “the quality of the writing” over “subject-matter”, and pointed out that the controversial double jury experiment revealed the current situation of “cross-reading”: not only do men not read but they also “practically never review women’s fiction”.93 Her results showed three points which are revelatory for the analysis of Atwood’s novel and for the wider scope of this study: (1) the 2000 Booker winner’s appeal was confirmed as women-oriented, (2) the choice of the right reviewer for the right book often follows the same criteria of authenticity and legitimation which are then applied for the assessment of the novel (in this case, female vs. male reviewers), (3) the question of quality is not universal and reveals more about those who pronounce it than about the object under evaluation. In the course of the nomination processes, first for the Booker, and then for the Orange Prize, Atwood’s novel was positioned as a competitor against other novels. The book was measured and then positioned in the ranks of the other contenders creating a hierarchy. While the more obvious contestants included Matthew Kneale’s The English Passengers and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were

92 Jenny Hartley, “Gender on the Jury”, guardian.co.uk 4 June 2001. 93 Hartley, guardian.co.uk 4 June 2001.

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Orphans for the Booker or Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection for the Orange, Atwood’s novel, as we have already seen, was often mentioned next and in contrast to Zadie Smith’s much celebrated and no less contested book, White Teeth.

4.2 W INNING BY N OT W INNING : Z ADIE S MITH ’ S W HITE T EETH Zadie Smith’s White Teeth was positioned as a literary debut on both sides of the Atlantic, long before it was available in bookshops or even for advanced readers. Hamish Hamilton’s decision to publish the book in January 2000 rather than towards the end of 1999, which could have opened it up for Christmas sales, may well have been guided by hopes of producing the first big buzz in the new millennium. However, the promotion of the title began much earlier, and rumours about the circumstances of its acquisition spread even before the manuscript was finished. Smith’s short story “The Waiter’s Wife”, which closely resembled an excerpt of the book, was published in the autumn 1999 issue of Granta magazine, which had acquired a reputation for discovering new talent by not only including short stories but also by featuring a Best of Young British Novelists issue. The US publication – scheduled by Random House for May 2000 – was similarly preceded by a short story printed in the December 1999 issue of The New Yorker, which appeared after a first profile of the author and an early assessment of the book in an October issue of the same magazine. Both previews of the content of the novel prepared the readership for a multi-generational and multi-cultural epos set in contemporary London. But the existence of these previews along with the marketing hype behind the novel and its young author also presented the first readers with the question of how to position themselves vis-àvis a book which did not need discovering but which had been discovered for them. Both the decision in favour of the publication at the beginning of the millennium and the additional promotion which ensued from early previews and prepublication placement of excerpts influenced the attention profile of the novel. The first decision resulted in two consecutive years of prize coverage which began with the more media-oriented Orange, Booker and Whitbread and ended with the time-honoured and prestigious but less media-savvy James Tait Black Memorial Prize and John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Smith may not have received all of these awards, but her novel was an important part of the coverage of their adjudication processes in the years 2000 and 2001. The second factor, i.e. the hype

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around Smith’s novel, influenced the reactions of reviewers, which became particularly strained in those phases which reminded commentators of the ‘marketability’ of the novel – the cycles of prize coverage. The attention profile for Zadie Smith’s White Teeth can be divided into five phases: (1) pre- and postpublication coverage in the UK which was accompanied by a heightened interest in her person and the status of her debut; (2) a pendant phase in US coverage which was even more favourably inclined in comparison to the British media; (3) a first cycle of prize coverage with the nomination for the Orange Prize and the controversy ensuing from her remarks about one of the judges; (4) a second cycle of prize coverage with missed opportunities for being nominated for the Booker or for winning the final Whitbread Book of the Year; and (5) a long phase which spans the entire year 2001 and covers the paperback publications in the UK and US, as well as a final range of prize-related media coverage. Rushdie’s Blurb and Burden: Pre- and Post-Publication Coverage in the UK The UK advance reader’s and hardback copies of White Teeth – both with a colourful design by Ali Campbell in strong pinks and blues, with the book’s title and author’s name in large bold capital white letters – feature an endorsement by Salman Rushdie in the centre of the front cover.94 Rushdie’s blurb is cut in two with a first part on the front and a second on the back of the jacket. His name is framed and highlighted. He praises the novel as “[a]n astonishingly assured debut” which had “bite”. The book is thus immediately presented as a literary achievement, worthy of the praise of one of Britain’s leading literary stars. In addition to this distinction, the ARC reveals the publisher’s plans for “a huge promotion for this exciting new author”. It promises a “[m]ajor national press advertising campaign”, the attention of “[n]ational and regional radio”, “[s]elected bookshop and festival events”, a “[b]eautiful A1 window display poster” and that it “[w]ill be submitted for all major prizes”. Such revelations – including the backing by Rushdie and the reference to literary prizes – charged the hype around this title. Instead of the publication of ‘just’ another first novel, the publisher proclaimed the launch of a major literary debut. The launch of the UK hardback was not only prepared for by the rumours of the book’s publishing circumstances and an excerpt of the novel in a literary magazine but also by two long interviews in which Smith was positioned and was given room to position herself. In conversation with Stephanie Merrit for

94 Cf. appendix, 2a and 2c.

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The Observer, Smith was described by the journalist as “unusually confident for a young writer”, a made author about to begin “a stint as writer in residence at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London”, on the verge of (television) fame.95 Smith, in contrast, seemed weary of the media hype, emphasised her childhood memory of assimilation by overcompensating, and expressed the wish for her next book to be “funnier” than White Teeth, and “cool”.96 In an interview with Christina Patterson, former director of the Poetry Society and literary programmer at the Southbank Centre as well as deputy literary editor and columnist for The Independent, sympathy for the author was similarly channeled through her self-critical approach to the media attention she experienced. More openly than her critics, Smith emphasised the importance of religion in contemporary Britain and linked the topic of multiculturalism to the resurgence of faith rather than racial identity: “I don’t know how you deal with religions. If what Blair and the rest of them are aiming at is a multi-cultural Britain in which nobody has a faith, then I think they can forget it. I think religion’s going from strength to strength. I don’t know what the solution is. I get fearful […]”.97 She also showed a strong opinion on the comparisons of her novel with Salman Rushdie’s and Hanif Kureishi’s work, and problematised some quickly made classifications: I think some writers, not just me, feel that you’re being compared to Rushdie or Kureishi just because there are Asian characters in your book, and if that’s the case, it’s a waste of time and a pain in the ass because there are thousands of books with white people in them and they’re not all the same. 98

Smith may have been a newcomer but her voice was instantly presented as strong and undaunted. The interest in her person – manifested in the form of interviews – was interspersed by a series of unanimously favourable reviews of her book in The Observer, The Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday and The Sunday Times. The critics could not conceal the unusual hype around the novel and almost all followed the first reviewer and fellow writer Caryl Philips’s lead. Philips asked if the book was “all it’s cracked up to be” first and then endorsed the “hyped tale” based on

95 Merritt, The Observer 16 Jan. 2000. 96 Merritt, The Observer 16 Jan. 2000. 97

Christina Patterson, “A Willesden Ring of Confidence”, The Independent 22 Jan.

98

Patterson, The Independent 22 Jan. 2000.

2000.

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Smith’s writing, energy and the relevance of the discussed issues.99 Another common trait between Phillips’s review and his colleagues’ was the recognition of literary traditions – foremost that of Salman Rushdie – followed by an immediate acknowledgement of Smith’s own voice and wit. Smith’s humour and her idiosyncratic voice were repeatedly and universally praised. Where Phillips characterised a central part of the book as the shifting image of Britain from colonial to postcolonial, others described it as a “multicultured 20th-century family saga”,100 a “polyphony of postcolonial London” which was also “post-war” and “post-migration”101. The weaknesses – if any were spotted at all – were perceived in the portrayal of the Chalfen family, which Phillips called “cartoonlike”102. A “few callow remarks about imperialism and one or two gimmicky topographical experiments” were specified “as the only signs of immaturity”.103 In general, however, Smith was perceived as “a writer of mighty potential” with a “generous understanding of human nature”.104 The first respondents proved collectively persuaded. The debate changed with the publication of the novel. Although some reviewers still raised the topics of class, gender and science, these themes gave way to extensive discussions about multiculturalism and history instead and they showed less restraint in their critique of the hype. One day before the book was launched these early reviews and responses were evaluated by Stephen Moss who emphasised the hype rather than the content of the novel. Moss was particularly sceptical towards the book and put Smith on a pedestal of literary fame with details about the “chorus of praise” and financial concerns, and questioned Smith’s allegedly naïve representation of Britain: “A ‘post-racial society’ is a controversial notion and could have been mined more: there are plenty of people who would disagree with that description of Britain and it would be interesting

99

Caryl Phillips, “Mixed and Matched”, The Observer 9 Jan. 2000. See also, among others, Melissa Denes, “The Sexiest Man in Cricklewood”, The Telegraph 15 Jan. 2000.

100 Ali Smith, “Saga That Goes Straight to the Heart of the Century,” Scotsman 15 Jan. 2000. 101 Maya Jaggi, “In a Strange Land”, The Guardian 22 Jan. 2000. 102 Phillips, The Observer 9 Jan. 2000. 103 Hugo Barnacle, “The Highest Form of Flattery”, The Sunday Times 23 Jan. 2000. 104 These two positive quotations by Anne Chisholm (“Post-Racial Conflicts”, The Sunday Telegraph 16 Jan. 2000) and Sukhdev Sandhu (“Excremental Children”, TLS 21 Jan. 2000) later found their way onto the US hardcover edition by Random House.

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to hear their view of Smith’s ‘warm-hearted’ novel”.105 Immediately after the launch White Teeth was reviewed in The Spectator where Zenga Longmore, a writer, actress and blues singer did not find the book lived up to “the brilliance of its author” and warned her readers that the novel will shortly find its way on college curricula: “Reader beware, you are about to hear a lot more of Zadie. […] I predict that, in a few years’ time, students all over the country will be poring over Zadie’s opus in an attempt to ‘re-examine the marginalisation of the multi-ethnic urbanisation of the late 20th century’”.106 John Crace selected it for his satirical “Digested Read” series in The Guardian and he, too, detected the many topics serving as a vast canvass for the characters in the foreground: “Postcolonial Britain is confusing. Identity, race, gender and genetics are serious issues. But that doesn’t make ordinary people serious – they just get on with their lives”.107 An early TLS preview of a PEN debate in London with Zadie Smith and two other debutants, chaired by Philip Hensher and scheduled for February, claimed that with lead slots in two consecutive weeks of The Observer and a Saturday interview in The Telegraph, the author of White Teeth may be taking away precious coverage space from other hopefuls.108 The newcomer had quickly grown out of the role of a David and into a similar Goliath-esque position which Atwood held after a decades-long career. Better than all the Rest: Pre- and Post-Publication Coverage in the US In contrast to the UK presentation and responses, the US covers and commentators made less of a deal about Rushdie’s patronage and instead leaned on an already existing array of praise. The US advance reader’s and hardcover editions came in an elegant cream-coloured jacket with the book’s title and author’s name in big bold golden letters. The ARC had Rushdie’s quote on the back, framed by a longer description of the book and a short introduction of the author as a young Cambridge graduate whose work had appeared in Granta magazine. The 50,000 copies in print were to receive particular care: a 5-city author reading tour, advertising in The New York Times and on National Public Radio, and a

105 Stephen Moss, “White Teeth by Zadie Smith”, guardian.co.uk 26 Jan. 2000. 106 Zenga Longmore, “Fairy-Sweary-Land”, The Spectator 29 Jan. 2000. 107 John Crace, “Digested Read: White Teeth by Zadie Smith”, The Guardian 28 Jan 2000. 108 J.C., “NB”, The TLS 21 Jan. 2000.

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special “Fiction at Random promotion”.109 Alongside Rushdie’s endorsement, the US hardcover used quotes from British review media which presented Smith as “a major new talent”, “a writer of mighty potential”, one with a “generous understanding of human nature”.110 The promise was to incite the media attention in a wide range of US publication, exceeding those mentioned in its marketing and publicity plans. The premier US pre-publication review, Publishers Weekly, prepared American readers for the spring publication of White Teeth a full four months before its launch. The trade magazine published a review of the book and interview with the author early in 2000 and classed via literary comparison with Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. Its commentator detected a myriad of contemporary themes such as “religious fanaticism, women’s lib, racial politics and even cutting-edge genetics” and as British “black humor”.111 In March, the magazine reported from the London Book Fair and quoted a very pleased Helen Fraser, managing director of Penguin General Books on a good start for the company, not least due to their lead title, White Teeth. The good news from overseas about the book’s success was followed by prepublishing reviews in all four major pre-publishing review publications: Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Booklist and Publishers Weekly. They each praised her ventriloquist skills and her empathy. Smith was credited with having “a perfect ear for nuances”112, “a wonderful ear for dialogue”,113 “an excellent ear for dialect and a wonderfully descriptive sense in the way she presents the multiethnic underclass”114. No topic was left out in this “stunning polythematic debut novel”,115 “the ambitious undertaking of first-time novelist Smith”116. Apart from detecting again the theme of “the immigrant’s experience in a postcolonial world”,117 “the experiences of two eccentric multiracial families”118 in this “multigenerational, multiethnic, somewhat zany novel”,119 there was a range of other

109 Cf. appendix, 2b. 110 Cf. appendix, 2d. 111 Mallay Charters, “A Budding Crop of First Fiction”, PW 10 Jan. 2000. 112 “White Teeth”, PW 3 Apr. 2000. 113 “White Teeth by Zadie Smith”, KR 15 Mar. 2000. 114 Danise Hoover, “White Teeth”, Booklist 1 Apr. 2000. 115 PW 3 Apr. 2000. 116 KR 15 Mar. 2000. 117 PW 3 Apr. 2000. 118 KR 15 Mar. 2000. 119 Hoover, Booklist 1 Apr. 2000.

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topics to be discovered: “provocative themes of science, technology, history and religion”120 in a “novel about ethnicity, class, belonging, homeland, family, adolescence, identity, blindness, and ignorance”121. Finally, it was offered up to the reader to contemplate the message of the tooth metaphor as much as pay attention not to be distracted by it “from the all-encompassing theme of fate”: “the reader must contemplate whether our choices determine our future or whether fate leads us to an inevitable destiny.”122 For a British newcomer, Smith was granted an unusually broad coverage in US general media. The first review in US general media, a very welcoming evaluation in the San Francisco Chronicle was printed almost two months before publication and hailed the “smashing debut” as “the first great novel of the new century”.123 In late-April Smith’s debut was reviewed by none other than Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, followed shortly by an interview in the same paper and the same double-attention on Salon.com. Other prepublication reviews followed in The Boston Globe, again in The New York Times and Newsweek. After the publication, the book was evaluated in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Austin-American Statesman and The Village Voice. In the first and second week after publication, White Teeth did not make it on the bestseller list in The New York Times but was explicitly mentioned as the paper’s “Editor’s choice”. US reviewers were immediately taken by Smith’s writing which they deemed at least on par with long-established authors. They put much emphasis on the relationship between the book’s “almost Dickensian characters”, and the “element of randomness” in “all bonds between human beings”, so much so that Smith’s London became “a merry capital of mismatched lovers”.124 But they also focused on Smith’s relationship with her characters. The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani praised “her gift for sympathetic characterization [which] enables her to satirize her peoples’ vanities and self-delusions without ever seeming patronizing or judgmental”.125 In the same publication Anthony Quinn, film critic for The Independent in London, also emphasised that “Smith likes her

120 PW 3 Apr. 2000. 121 Rebecca A. Stuhr, “Smith, Zadie. White Teeth”, LJ 1 Apr. 2000. 122 Stuhr, LJ 1 Apr. 2000. 123 David Wiegand, “A Tale of Two Families”, San Francisco Chronicle 7 Mar. 2000. 124 Maria Russo, “The Flower of Cities All”, Salon.com 28 Apr. 2000. 125 Michiko Kakutani, “White Teeth: Quirky, Sassy and Wise in a London of Exiles”, The NYT 25 Apr. 2000.

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characters”.126 In contrast, though to the author’s credit and not as one might suspect as a scolding, Greg Tate used Smith’s comic distance towards her characters to conclude that this allows her to pursue a literary career, rather than becoming an icon or representative of a Black community: “If nothing else, that reticence points to her knowing how the world conspires to set agendas and steal young, gifted and successful Black artists from their work desks. Incredibly enough, Smith just might be even smarter than her smackdown writing declares her to be.”127 According to her critics, not only did Smith refuse easy appropriations as a Black icon, but also as a young women’s author: “‘White Teeth’ is so unlike the kind of comic novel currently in vogue among young British women – the girl-about-town Bridget Jones wannabe – that its very willingness to look beyond the stock in trade of boyfriends and weight problems is a mark of distinction”.128 She was presented as “smarter” than the literary Goliaths whose “literary heir” she had been professed to become: Dickens, Amis, Rushdie.129 In addition, her novel was described as “even more ambitious” than one of the year’s biggest US debuts, Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In fact, White Teeth was positioned both as a “pop-event”, “the stuff of Cornershop records, Mike Leigh films and Chris Ofili canvases”,130 and a debut into the literary realm. Critics detected her “playful” approach to the novel “as a heterogeneous, improvisational genre”,131 counted it among “reasons, so late in the day, to be cheerful”,132 and attested to her impact on the future of literature: “In her you find someone who not only listened well to the lessons of the elders, but also has taken the great leap over everybody’s heads and so has changed literature’s future.”133 In short, US reviewers put much hope in this debut by a young writer whom they saw on the verge of becoming a ‘big’, ‘literary’ author.

126 Anthony Quinn, “The New England”, The NYT 30 Apr. 2000. 127 Greg Tate, “Fear of a Mongrel Planet”, The Village Voice 9 May 2000. 128 Quinn, The NYT 30 Apr. 2000. 129 Lynell George, “Author Purposeful with Prose, Fidgety with Fame”, Los Angeles Times 26 June 2000. 130 Mark Rozzo, “Who’s English Now?”, Los Angeles Times Book Review 7 May 2000. Cf. also Tate, The Village Voice 9 May 2000: “Imagine Charlie Parker with a typewriter, Coltrane with a laptop”. 131 Russo, Salon.com 28 Apr. 2000. 132 Quinn, The NYT 30 Apr. 2000. 133 Jane Vandenburgh, “Writing the Novel’s Future,” The Boston Globe 30 Apr. 2000.

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Snubbed by the Trinity of British Prizes I: The Orange Controversy In contrast to Atwood’s immediate immersion, White Teeth entered the race for literary prizes two months after its publication. The US coverage did not deal with the nominations in detail and only reported Smith’s award-winning novel as part of the overall interest in the book. In the UK, however, the novel was at the centre of the annual prize debate of the years 2000 and 2001, which began with the announcement of a longlist of nominated books for the all-female Orange Prize for Fiction in March 2000, peaked with the Booker and Whitbread related coverage and ended with the nomination for the 2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in November 2001. Significantly, focusing on the literary prizes which White Teeth actually won would give only a limited view of its success as Smith and her novel took up most of the media attention dedicated to literary prizes in the period of these two years. Even when she was omitted entirely or failed to win, the number of articles featuring Smith in their title, abstract or a substantiate portion of text, reveals to what extent she was an exceptional asset to be reckoned with. A second striking aspect in the media attention of White Teeth in prize coverage was the distancing of commentators in contrast to the initially almost unanimously gracious reviews. The negative press in reference to prizes can be understood against the background of the media’s difficulty in handling the marketing hype of the novel in its pre- and earlier post-publication phase where the balance already called for much argumentative persuasion. Faced with another wave of hype with the cycle of literary prizes, it became even more difficult to see the novel untainted by the industry’s efforts to push it and less likely for critics to embrace it. Significantly, this development of negative coverage based on extensive public exposure was shared by some newspapers more than others. The critique was upheld in The Times and especially in the “NB” column in The Times Literary Supplement, in contrast to a more favourably inclined evaluation of both her person and debut in The Guardian and its Sunday sister publication, The Observer. The first phase of prize coverage began in the spring with the announcement of the longlist for The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction on 26 March 2000. The Guardian greeted the inclusion of Smith’s debut as one of twenty titles with a headline dedicated to the “Young novelist on Orange list: Cambridge graduate in line for £30,000 fiction prize with multicultural celebration”.134 The Independ-

134 John Ezard, “Young Novelist on Orange List”, The Guardian 21 Mar. 2000.

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ent reported that judges that year had particularly praised a diversity of books about “clashes of culture”.135 The list – which alongside the “critically acclaimed” debut author also included “such literary heavyweights as Anita Desai and AL Kennedy”136 – was introduced in newspaper coverage along with a survey conducted by Orange on the differences of gender-specific marketing of books. The results of the survey, which proved that men seldom read books by women writers inspired the following year’s dual jury experiment (cf. chapter 4.1). Placing such emphasis on gender questions, the Orange Prize invited critical coverage but also an active defence of women’s writing. The British feminist writer and human rights activist, Natasha Walter, saw a seismic shift in British women writing based on the strong Orange Prize competition and “Zadie Smith at the centre of the list”.137 She compared White Teeth to writing by Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis claiming that not only did Smith follow their tradition, but, in fact, proved able to “outclass the old boys in showmanship”.138 The Orange shortlist signified the beginning of a less benign coverage of Smith and her debut. In April, The Independent reported on a prematurely released shortlist of six authors “after their names were leaked to the Evening Standard” and mentioned Smith as an asset for the prize and an early favourite.139 In May, an interview with the Mail on Sunday – where she came off as unimpressed with her nomination, proclaimed that she had no intention of attending the gala dinner and, more so, challenged a member of the jury to “kiss my behind” – proved disastrous for Smith’s media image at this point. Her dismissal of one of the judges, Ffion Hague, wife of the Conservative Party leader, William Hague, came after the politician’s derogatory remarks about asylum seekers but it was the author rather than the judge who came under fire, particularly in the “NB” column of The TLS, which had cast the young writer as a hypocrite: “Now Ms Smith is claiming that she was misquoted, and is ‘completely devas-

135 Jojo Moyes, “Orange Judges Reveal 20 Women Fighting for £30,000 Fiction Prize,” The Independent 21 Mar. 2000. 136 Moyes, The Independent 21 Mar. 2000. 137 Natasha Walter, “At Last: Real Women, Real Writing,” The Independent 27 Mar. 2000. 138 Walter, The Independent 27 Mar. 2000. 139 Jojo Moyes, “Newcomer Gives Literary Prize Some Teeth,” The Independent 19 Apr. 2000.

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tated’. The Mail’s mischief-making has upset everyone around her. ‘I don’t ever want to do another interview’, she told the Bookseller, in an interview.”140 When the Orange Prize announced its winner in June, it was not Smith’s White Teeth – the “hot favourite”141 – but Linda Grant’s novel about a young woman’s life in Israel, When I Lived in Modern Times (2000) which proved successful. Before the media caught wind of the story of Grant’s alleged plagiarism, Smith and her dispute with Ffion Hague, as well as the spectacular deal for a TV adaptation, were very much the focus and her debut was discussed in The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph and Publishers Weekly. Susan Barwick in The Telegraph wrote that Smith was “passed over” despite her status as “favourite” on her own doing and the jury only “obeyed her advice to look elsewhere”.142 The literary editor of The Independent, Boyd Tonkin was particularly glad to see another writer take the prize after it was discovered that Penguin had prematurely printed stickers announcing Smith’s triumph and at least one bookshop had attached them to copies of the book.143 Harsh criticism of the Orange Prize and Zadie Smith was particularly noticeable in the aforementioned “NB” column in The TLS where the prize was called “segregationist”, Smith was cast as “pretentious” and the explanation of her decision to place the adaptation of her novel with BBC1 rather than in the hands of US filmmakers or the BBC2 where “it could become isolated […] as a ghetto show” was presented as puzzling.144 This first, somewhat muffled, shot at prize recognition in the UK did not diminish the interest in Smith in the US. She was interviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday and The Los Angeles Times, and her book was paid attention to in a short review in The New Yorker. Also in June, White Teeth entered The New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction at #14 and remained there for three weeks leaving at #16. It was also taken up by the Publishers Weekly bestseller list at #13. The novel was recommended by Michiko Kakutani

140 J.C., The TLS 21 Jan. 2000. 141 Jojo Moyes, “Grant Takes Prize for Women’s Fiction in Surprise Win,” The Independent 7 June 2000. 142 Sandra Barwick, “Outspoken Novelist Misses out on Prize”, The Telegraph 7 June 2000. 143 Boyd Tonkin, “Booker Judges Stick to the Well-Told Story of Pretenders and Conspicuous Absentees”, The Independent 6 Oct. 2000; cf. also The Literator, “Cover Stories”, The Independent 10 June 2000; cf. also Jojo Moyes, “Books That Won Awards Are Failing to Win Readers,” The Independent 1 July 2000. 144 J.C., “NB”, The TLS 9 June 2000.

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in her summer-reading-collection in The New York Times and then reviewed in The New Republic, The Yale Review and the lay Catholic journal Commonweal. One of the many summer evaluations of White Teeth stood out not only in its length but also its scope: In an essay in The New Republic, James Wood, who had acquired a strong reputation as acclaimed critic already in the early 1990s and whose first book of “humanist criticism”, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief appeared in early 2000, wrote a most detailed critique of the debut as part of a new genre for which he coined the term “hysterical realism”.145 In its detail, Wood’s criticism showed much appreciation despite his rejection of this and other novels which he saw united in the same manner of following Dickens’s lessons in characterisation but lacking his “immediate access to strong feeling”: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and David Foster Wallace’s Infite Jest (1996).146 In contrast to her predecessors, he placed much hope in Smith who was “more naturally gifted” at making her characters “human” than, for example, Rushdie, “more likely to ‘get the balance right’ than any of her contemporaries”, but for all her “natural comic gift” found her “a frustrating writer” when she proved “willing to let passages of her book descend into cartoonishness and a kind of itchy, restless extremism”.147 In his diagnosis of White Teeth’s dual nature – combining “two literary modes”, one which “dare[s] a picture of life” and one which “just shout[s] a spectacle” – and Smith’s “curious shuffle between sympathy and distance, affiliation and divorce, brilliance and cartoonishness, astonishing maturity and ordinary puerility”, Wood took up many of the previous observations made in more benevolent assessments.148 His deconstruction of the novel marked the beginning of a long discussion which lasted for many years and was to occupy his colleagues as much as nurture an exchange with the author. Snubbed by the Trinity of British Prizes II: No Booker but a Slice of Whitbread In the early autumn, another very dense period of media attention and novel promotion began for the young author and her debut. The TLS reported of Smith’s presence at two festivals: The Word in end-September and The Times

145 James Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman”, The New Republic 24 July 2000. 146 Wood, The New Republic 24 July 2000. 147 Wood, The New Republic 24 July 2000. 148 Wood, The New Republic 24 July 2000.

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Cheltenham Literary Festival in mid-October. In September, her debut was reviewed by the editor of the London Review of Books. Daniel Soar’s essay recalls James Wood’s criticism as he, too, saw the first part of the book as more developed than its ending, more attentive to detail and her characters, and less rushed and less compressed to the latter “fast-forward” mode. He was similarly both drawn to the “beautiful” writing and repelled by a seeming flight from the world, “a frequent Harry-Potterish deflation of tension”, a fictional world “without rules”, in which “anything was possible”.149 Her writing did not seem tidy enough and the author’s lack of taking responsibility was met with a negative assessment of her novel as not yet ‘serious writing’. Most of all, however, the autumn came with a string of prize nominations and in each of these instances of prize coverage, commentators were aware of past snubs and future possibilities, referring to triumphs and failures in an intercalated narrative of several events in quick succession. In late-August, White Teeth was one of ten titles to be longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award. Only in its second year, the award was judged by “the geneticist Steve Jones, the novelists Julian Barnes, David Baddiel and Toby Litt, the broadcaster Kirsty Young and the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger” and “headed by the Guardian’s literary editor, Claire Armitstead”.150 Each longlisted title was introduced in a separate article and a book extract in The Guardian. In mid-September, Smith’s White Teeth was described as having “arrived on the literary scene with […] an explosion” and, in reference to the first prize contact ominously predicted upcoming success: “Oranges are not the only fruit: Smith is certain to win some prize or other before this year is out”.151 The first selection was judged by several reading groups in collaboration with book retailer Borders152 and the shortlisted five titles were announced in October – after the news spread that White Teeth had not been nominated for the Booker Prize. Smith’s novel was particularly pitted against another young writer’s debut, with whom she had been compared earlier, Dave Eggers’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of

149 Daniel Soar, “Willesden Fast-Forward”, LRB 21 Sept. 2000. 150 John Ezard, “Zadie Smith Wins Guardian First Book Award”, The Guardian 8 Dec. 2000. 151 “In Brief: White Teeth”, The Guardian 15 Sept. 2000. 152 After Borders had gone out of business (2008-2009), Waterstones not only took over its bookshops but also the partnership with The Guardian First Book Award.

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Staggering Genius. The two were pronounced “locked in combat” for a joined reading at an event at the ICA in London” in mid-November.153 When the winner of The Guardian First Book Award was finally announced in early December, the newcomer prize became the first major award success for White Teeth. Although her triumph was also reported in The Telegraph and The TLS it was mainly celebrated in the paper behind the prize. The Guardian’s John Ezard emphasised that this was “Smith’s first British award” – though she had been nominated for the Orange Prize and was a Whitbread finalist at the time – and that the book was loved by its lay and professional readers.154 The former drew on Jane Austen for comparison while one of the jury members, the novelist Julian Barnes, in particular, expressed his awe for the debut which gave him “a burn of envy as a fiction writer”: “The judges praised White Teeth for its ‘muscular prose style’ and ‘beautifully drawn characters’, calling it a ‘sensationally good novel’, which was ‘feisty, funny, satirical, and tender’”.155 Later, in an article about prize rules and huge numbers of submissions which judges have to comb through when whittling down nominated titles, Claire Armitstead remembered just how close this triumph was, not only due to Smith’s immediate runner-up, Naomi Klein’s No Logo, but because of an almost-oversight: “Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, the highest profile book ever to win the Guardian first book prize, was technically a call-in because it was only the second year of the prize and Penguin forgot to submit”.156 Although Smith did not make the Booker Prize shortlist – a longlist was only introduced the following year – her name accompanied that year’s Booker coverage from early speculation to the announcement of the winner. In early October, White Teeth was widely believed to be “the strong favourite, despite some recent negative criticism although it is questionable whether it will be the choice among booksellers, who generally prefer titles which have not already sold 24,000 copies in hardback to gain the prize and the subsequent sales boost”.157 After the shortlist was announced, Smith was named – in one breath with Julian Barnes and Michael Ondaatje, though generally accompanied by longer comments reserved for the more established writers – among the “conspicuous ab-

153 Maev Kennedy, “Writers Grit Teeth for a Literary Battle”, The Guardian 3 Nov. 2000. 154 Ezard, The Guardian 8 Dec. 2000. 155 Ezard, The Guardian 8 Dec. 2000. 156 Claire Armitstead, “Just How Many Books Should You Read to Judge an Award?”, guardian.co.uk 16 May 2008. 157 Guardian.co.uk 3 Oct. 2000.

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sentees”,158 the “host of heavyweights”159 and the “more eminent novelists”160 who were snubbed that year. The London Book Review called her omission “a shame”.161 The Guardian reported of rumours according to which her novel and Barnes’s Love, etc. apparently “almost” made it.162 After Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin was announced as the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, The Guardian mentioned the debut novelist in a long chain of left-behind stars: “Other eminent or famous novelists whose new books failed even to reach this year’s shortlist include Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, JG Ballard, Julian Barnes, Fay Weldon, AS Byatt, Michael Ondaatje and Zadie Smith”.163 In fact, the chair of judges of the 2000 Booker Prize praised Smith’s novel on several other occasions. In the end-of-year reviews, White Teeth was described it as “funny and sad” in The Observer.164 Only one day after the news about her omission from the Booker list, Smith was shortlisted for the inaugural International Ebook awards in one of four categories, each worth 10,000 USD. In the category of fiction originally published in hardcover and converted to e-format, Smith competed against two other debut titles, Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season and Michel Houellebecq’s Extension du domaine de la lute (French ed. 1994, trans. as Whatever by Paul Hammond, 1998).165 The international ebook awards had been criticised for their financial dependency on Microsoft when a controversy came up “over the exact criteria for the nominations” and the prize received further coverage with Smith’s nomination.166 The Independent used the news to stomach the “shock factor” omission on the Booker shortlist and saw the new “e-Booker” as an opportunity to make

158 Tonkin, The Independent 6 Oct. 2000. 159 Nigel Reynolds, “The Mystery Writers on Booker List”, The Telegraph 6 Oct. 2000. 160 Ezard, The Guardian 6 Oct. 2000. 161 James Francken, “Short Cuts”, LRB 2 Nov. 2000. Ironically, these were the exact same words which ended Daniel Soar’s mixed review of the novel in a previous issue of the literary magazine. 162 Ezard, The Guardian 6 Oct. 2000. 163 Ezard, The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000. 164 “Pump up the Volumes”, The Observer 26 Nov. 2000. Three years later, in the “little night reading” series in The Sunday Times, Jenkins revealed that he liked Monica Ali’s Brick Lane even better than Smith’s debut, cf. “A Little Night Reading: What Simon Jenkins Has on His Bedside Table”, The Sunday Times 19 Oct. 2003. 165 “Frankfurt Ebook Award Nominations Announced”, guardian.co.uk 6 Oct. 2000. 166 guardian.co.uk 6 Oct. 2000: “Microsoft paid for these awards, and it’s pretty obvious they rely on big publishers to provide content for MS Reader.”

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up to the “literary wunderkind” who was placed in opposition to the other “bestselling authors”.167 Smith was pronounced winner of the Ebook award on 23 October, the last day of the 2000 Frankfurt Book Fair.168 In mid-October, Smith was longlisted for the New Talent category of the newly scaled up and popularised WH Smith Book Awards.169 She was shortlisted in late-February alongside, though not in direct competition to, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which was up against Joanna Trollope and Maeve Binchy in the Fiction category. The final winners were judged by the public “in a poll which attracted 65,000 votes in high streets and on the internet”, and the winners of the popular awards were announced in late April 2001 with Maeve Binchy for Fiction, JK Rowling for Children’s, Jamie Oliver for Home and Leisure and Zadie Smith for New Talent.170 In mid-November, Smith’s White Teeth was reported on the shortlist for the Whitbread Book Awards First Novel category. The reaction focused on the two established novelists, the two contestants for the Booker Prize, Kazuo Ishiguro and Matthew Kneale, whose novels were topped by Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, as well as on surprise omissions (JK Rowling) and inclusions (Will Self). The Independent conceded, however, that Kneale and Ishiguro “will not go unchallenged”: “Zadie Smith, whose failure to be shortlisted for the Booker caused a stir in literary circles, appears on the Whitbread shortlist for best first novel, for her highly acclaimed White Teeth.”171 In The Telegraph, Will Self was introduced as having stolen the nomination from JK Rowling and the limelight from other authors, and Smith was hence presented as “another of London’s angry young writers”.172 When the newcomer prevailed in her category in early Janu-

167 Jojo Moyes, “Novelists Online for New ‘E-Booker’ Prize”, The Independent 9 Oct. 2000. 168 Books Unlimited staff, “Inaugural Ebook Awards Honour Veteran Mcbain and FirstTimer Smith”, guardian.co.uk 23 Oct. 2000; Calvin Reid, “Frankfurt E-Book Awards”, PW 30 Oct. 2000. 169 Cf. also Atwood’s nomination for the WH Smith Book Awards (chapter 4.1). 170 John Ezard, “Wizard Yarn Tops Readers’ Poll”, The Guardian 27 Apr. 2001. In WH Smith’s first year to admit American authors, the literary award – the ninth and only category to be voted for by a panel of judges – went to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. 171 Jojo Moyes, “Ishiguro and Kneale on Whitbread Shortlist”, The Independent 15 Nov. 2000. 172 Nigel Reynolds, “Judges Rule Harry Potter out and Former Addict’s Novel In”, The Telegraph 15 Nov. 2000.

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ary, judges praised her debut as a “landmark first novel”: “not only the best first novel we’ve read in ages but one of the best novels we’ve ever read, and perhaps the best novel about contemporary London”.173 Her success in the first stage was also reported in The Independent and The Telegraph, where it made headlines, and somewhat derogatorily in The TLS, where J.C. quoted Smith’s overwhelmed, and very similar, reactions to her triumph in the Whitbread First Novel Award (“the prize every first-time scribbler hopes for”) and the Guardian First Booker award (“the prize I really wanted to win”) to end on an ironic note in depicting the Whitbread overall prize as the one she “really really wants to win”.174 The announcement of Matthew Kneale’s The English Passengers as the winning title of the 2000 Whitbread Book of the Year was simultaneously reported as an announcement of Smith as the loser. The arts correspondent for The Telegraph detected a series of such ‘losses’ after her ‘failure’ to secure the Orange and the Booker: It is the third time that White Teeth, a comic novel about multi-cultural life in modern London, has been snubbed for one of Britain’s major literary prizes. Smith was shortlisted for the Orange women’s prize but did not win and did not even make the shortlist for the Booker Prize.175

Despite the lush praise which judges reserved for White Teeth as category winner, it was Lorna Sage’s memoir Bad Blood, rather than Smith’s debut which was disclosed as the runner-up. More so, The Telegraph revealed that one of the judges said the book had “got ‘nowhere near’ the final round of judging”.176 Kneale’s victory and Sage’s position as second in the race came as a surprise because it was Smith who was deemed the “hot favourite”177 or the “popular favourite”,178 though The New York Times only mentioned her among other “com-

173 John Ezard, “Double First for Novel Newcomer Zadie Smith”, The Guardian 4 Jan. 2001. 174 J.C., “NB”, The TLS 12 Jan. 2001. 175 Nigel Reynolds, “Whitbread Judges Split over Kneale”, The Telegraph 24 Jan. 2001. See also coverage in The Independent, where Smith is referred to as having been “denied again” (David Lister, “Casting Vote Gives Kneale the Whitbread Book Prize,” The Independent 24 Jan. 2001); or only used as comparison to Jamila Gavin’s novel Coram Boy (Boyd Tonkin, “Writers Tackle the Brutish Truth Behind the British Empire,” The Independent 24 Jan. 2001). 176 Reynolds, The Telegraph 24 Jan. 2001. 177 Lister, The Independent 24 Jan. 2001. 178 Amanda-Jane Doran, “News Shorts”, PW 29 Jan. 2001.

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petitors”.179 In a commentary on the Whitbread contestant, The Independent’s Literary Editor, Boyd Tonkin, noted that “winning writers tackle the brutish truth behind the British Empire” but chose Kneale’s novel and Jamila Gavin’s children’s book winner Coram Boy to elaborate on his hypothesis rather than Smith’s White Teeth.180 This second phase of prize coverage from autumn 2000 to spring 2001 spanned a period of over half a year, encompassed Christmas, turn of the year coverage, and even the UK paperback launch. In October, Smith’s novel was reviewed in Black Issues Book Review and Women’s Review of Books. In November, it was presented as one of the Top 10 First Novels in Booklist. The TLS reported of another antagonistic exchange, this time between Smith and Julie Burchill, who had called the young author an “over-educated novelist” and to which Smith had responded asking if Burchill meant “overeducated for a working-class black girl” – a tit-for-tat which the “NB” columnist called “playing the race card”.181 In December, Smith was interviewed in The Guardian after she had won the paper’s First Novel Award. In conversation with the features writer Simon Hattenstone, Smith was said to have had “an extraordinary year” but her repeated rejection of false comparisons came off less sympathetic and more exasperated than before: “She says it may be well intended, definitely a compliment, but racist nonsense none the less. She yawns. ‘I think I have brown people in my book, and so does Salman, and so does Hanif Kureishi. So it’s a genre, don’t you see that?’”182 The dense prize coverage brought Smith’s novel to the attention of reviewers of other writers’ works and raised her profile in end-of-year recommendations. In addition to Jenkins’ endorsement in The Observer, the New Statesman’s Hugo Barnacle picked White Teeth as his “favourite novel” of the year.183 The editors of The New York Times recommended it as “the perfect John Rocker Christmas gift”.184 It featured on the TIME magazine’s 5 Best Fiction Books and on Newsweek’s “Best Books”. The Independent was more restrained in its opinion with Boyd Tonkin declaring that it “showed vast promise more than polished

179 Sarah Lyall, “Whitbread Prize Goes to a Novel”, The NYT 25 Jan. 2001. 180 Tonkin, The Independent 24 Jan. 2001. 181 J.C., The TLS 21 Jan. 2000. 182 Simon Hattenstone, “White Knuckle Ride”, The Guardian 12 Dec. 2000. 183 Staff Blogger, “Books of the Year”, New Statesman 27 Nov. 2000. 184 “Editors’ Choice”, The NYT 3 Dec. 2000. John Loy Rocker is a retired baseball player notorious for his controversial comments on the many “foreigners” in New York.

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achievement”.185 His colleague, Tom Sutcliffe, too, was of the opinion that both Smith and another millennial debutant, the American Beauty author Sam Mendes, “may yet turn out to be apostles of something better still” but generally acknowledged that both could stand their respective man or woman faced with the harsh middle position between publishing industry’s hype and “the braced cynicism of professional readers, already tensing their muscles against the practised enthusiasm of the publicists”.186 In that sense, the novel’s first year after its publication could be seen as a constant struggle not to outshine itself: the package was under the permanent suspicion of promising more than the content, or what the reviewers perceived as its quality, could deliver. “The ultimate marketable author”: Critics’ Reactions to the UK and US Paperbacks The first half of the year 2001 was marked by the launch of paperback editions of White Teeth which were scheduled for January in the UK and June in the US. Both publications triggered interest in reviews and interviews and were accompanied by additional prize coverage. The second half of the year brought the recognition from prestigious awards with less media appeal and commentary on other issues for which the novel lend itself on behalf of its topic or other, extraliterary criteria. Interestingly, and as was the case with Rushdie’s mentoring earlier on, Smith continued to be endorsed by bigger, literary authors such as Peter Carey and Martin Amis. This last, longer phase which stretches throughout the entire year 2001 is more bulky and difficult to be presented in smaller, selfcontained segments. As was the case with the hardcover edition, the UK paperback was prepared by interviews and references to Smith’s ‘marketability’. Even before the paperback came out, Smith was interviewed in The Telegraph where her history as ‘published’ author and first contacts with literary accolades were revealed going back much longer than the pre-publication stage of White Teeth: “By the age of eight she had won a national writing competition (‘Michael Rosen gave me the prize’); at 12 she was published in ‘some feminist magazine’ – a short story called Holy High Heels, ‘about God being a woman and squashing all these little

185 Boyd Tonkin, “A Touch of Magic Lights up the Book World,” The Independent 29 Dec. 2000. 186 Thomas Sutcliff, “From Convincing Triumphs to Conceptual Pretzels,” The Independent 29 Dec. 2000.

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men’.”187 Referencing the seeming paradox which reviewers tackled with White Teeth when they tried to decide if the book was good despite the overwhelming marketing campaigns, Suzi Feay, literary editor of The Independent on Sunday, first described her astonishment at Smith’s change of outer appearance (“looking more like Cher than the ‘George Eliot of multiculturalism’”) but then concluded that it was the book that secured Smith’s acclaim rather than her position as “the ultimate marketable author”.188 She encouraged the writer to take time off from the media hype and continue writing. On a less positive note, the Guardian’s arts correspondent, Fiachra Gibbons, introduced seven literary newcomers under 40 as “the Bliggers” and claimed that Smith’s “beauty has not been a hindrance” to launching her literary career.189 In fact, interviewers and commentators continued to shift between good wishes and a less sympathetic treatment. The New Statesman, for example, first described Smith as the literary equivalent to Tiger Woods or Bob Beamon in reference to the difficulty of following up on an unusual early achievement.190 Such concern did not prevent the magazine to publish a feature on contemporary literature from the continent which allegedly had more bite, more “fury” than contemporary British writing, including Smith’s White Teeth or Martin Amis’s novels, only two months later.191 The UK paperback was published almost simultaneously with the final announcements for the Whitbread Book Awards (cf. previous section), with the publication of an edited volume of erotic short stories,192 and marked the beginning of another prize cycle.193 Most importantly, Smith was awarded in the Best

187 Mick Brown, “Precocious? Moi?”, The Telegraph 13 Jan. 2001. 188 Suzi Feay, “More Than Just White Teeth,” The Independent on Sunday 14 Jan. 2001. 189 Fiachra Gibbons, “Meet the Bliggers – Brit Lit It Girls (and Boys)”, The Guardian 28 Mar. 2001. 190 Jason Cowley, “The Tiger Woods of Literature?”, New Statesman 29 Jan. 2001. 191 Francis Gilbert, “Commentary – Afflicted by the Stiff Upper Lip”, New Statesman 5 Mar. 2001. 192 At the beginning of 2001, Smith was completing her time as writer in residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London during which she had commissioned erotic short stories and written an introduction for a collection entitled Piece of Flesh. These (anti-) pornographic stories were preceded by a profile of their editor in The Independent and followed by a short note in The TLS’s “NB” column. 193 Smith had been nominated for the 2001 Southbank Show Award for Literature but lost to Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography in late January 2001. She succeeded

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Newcomer category at the British Book Awards,194 the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize,195 and two prizes by The Society of Authors: The Sunday Times Young writer of the year Award and the £6,000 Betty Trask Award for writers under 35 and for non-experimental, traditional or romantic fiction.196 The media coverage for these awards again recollected moments of previous prize defeat.

at the WH Smith Awards and won a nomination for the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, sponsored by the Folio Society, which went to Brian Clarke’s The Stream. 194 The TLS reported that Smith would be attending the commercial “Nibbies”, the British Book Awards among other “celebrity” authors, cf. J.C., The TLS 12 Jan. 2001. At the end of February, Smith won their Best Newcomer prize but media reports focused on Nigella Lawson, winner of the Author of the Year award, cf. David Lister, “Domestic Goddess Beats Boy Wizard for Book Award,” The Independent 23 Febr. 2001; Nigel Reynolds, “Harry Fails to Charm the Judges”, The Telegraph 23 Feb. 2001. 195 She won Best First Book at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and her success was reported in The Telegraph and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. In fact, Smith was praised by the other Commonwealth Writers’ Prize champion, the winner of its Best Novel category, Peter Carey for his True History of the Kelly Gang, which was later to be chosen the 2001 winner of the Booker Prize. Carey described White Teeth as “an astonishingly attractive debut novel”, cf. Jade Garrett, “‘Green’ Novel Deprives Smith of Hat-Trick,” The Independent 27 Apr. 2001. Smith was later reported to have donated her prize money to an Accra school, cf. Judith Palmer, “A Week in Books: A Good Read in Africa”, The Independent 4 May 2001. 196 Several years later, when Smith published a critique of literary prizes and received some backlash in the press for her alleged hypocrisy, one of the judges for the Betty Trask Award, who was part in rewarding her book, revealed her unfavourable stance towards the novel’s success: “In 2001 I chaired the Betty Trask Award on behalf of the Society of Authors. It is not a branding exercise but the legacy of out-of-print romantic novelist Betty Trask. The judging panel were [sic] surprised that Zadie Smith’s White Teeth had been entered, as it was already a bestseller and on several other awards shortlists. White Teeth, although flawed, was one of the first big multicultural books, and was on a more epic scale than many other entrants. It was, therefore, difficult to judge alongside simpler although in some cases slightly better written works. The other authors all really needed both the money and the publicity, and as Smith was rumoured not to approve of literary prizes, we suggested via her publicist that she withdraw White Teeth to give them a better chance. This was refused.” (“Poor Show, Zadie”, The Sunday Times 17 Feb. 2008.)

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In the US, the launch of the paperback was long prepared for and the span of almost half a year similarly accompanied by prize coverage and references to the book as a marketing success. The trade magazine Publishers Weekly published their first preview already in January. The same month, Smith was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Awards in which the 24-year-old was pitted against the 92-year-old Jacques Barzun.197 In February, Michiko Kakutani reviewed an anthology of short stories, which included Smith’s “I’m the Only One”, was edited by Nick Hornby and published as a fundraising effort for the TreeHouse School for children with autism. Her debut was reviewed the same month in The New York Review of Books. After the paperback edition was published in June, the book was reviewed in The New York Times and entered the Publishers Weekly bestsellers list at #10 where it stayed for five weeks. A month after the publication, trade media discussed the publishing strategy behind White Teeth whose 150,000 hardcover copies in circulation were credited to independent bookshops and another 180,000 paperback copies which were being promoted to reading groups.198 From the summer on, Smith was frequently mentioned in the next cycle of awards as a previous winner or shortlistee, or even almost-nominee but she also continued to harvest attention for new prizes. In the New Statesman, Andrew Holgate from The Sunday Times nominated Smith for the Best of Young British (aged 35 and under) in the category of literature. She was announced Fiction Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize leaving behind other contenders: Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Lawrence Norfolk’s In the Shape of a Boar. At the ceremony in November, Smith took part in a podium discussion with Martin Amis, who had won the Biography Award for his memoir Experience, and was applauded by her “idol” who decided after reading the first pages of her novel that “she’s got it”.199 In November, Smith was nominated for the 2000 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, along with Julia Leigh’s The Hunter, Roddy Lumsden’s The Book of Love, Ben Rice’s Pobby & Dingan, Cole Moreton’s Hungry for Home Leaving the Blaskets: A

197 AP, “Book Critics Pick Finalists for Awards”, The NYT 30 Jan. 2001; Cf. also Staff, “RH, Knopf, HM Lead NBCC Finalists”, PW 5 Feb. 2001. Jim Crace’s Being Dead ended up winning that year’s award for “the finest books and reviews published in English” in May. Smith’s book was later mentioned in a review of Crace’s novel, cf. Adam Begley, “A Quiet Brit’s Loud Talent: Jim Crace’s Corpse Comedy”, The New York Observer 12 Feb. 2001. 198 Daisy Maryles, “More Bubbly for Zadie”, PW 2 July 2001. 199 Kevin Barry, “Sinking Their Teeth into Fiction ” The Irish Times 30 Nov. 2001.

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Journey from the Edge of Ireland, and the final winner Edward Platt’s Leadville. Novelist AN Wilson derided the judges for their final choice: DJ Taylor, a clever journalist, but as yet an unsuccessful novelist; Paul Bailey, known to us all as Pearl Barley, who is, or was, a brilliant novelist, but who has never had the success he deserved; and Margaret Forster, who must by now realise, at 65, that she is never going to write a good novel, though she has been gallantly trying all her adult life.200

He claimed that they “made slight charlies of themselves” by not giving due credit to White Teeth, “a magnificently intelligent novel on a monumental scale”.201 The same month, Smith was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for which she and Michael Ondaatje each received nine nominations and were close on Margaret Atwood’s heels who garnered eleven nominations by public libraries worldwide.202 Throughout the year 2001, White Teeth was brought up on a number of other occasions – not always related to literary matters. The Telegraph mentioned her novel in a feature on collectors of first editions. In The TLS, Smith’s book and its success with sales of over 250,000 copies were presented as a counterargument to the old narrative of the dead or dying novel form, and she was mentioned as having offered a blurb to Beryl Kingston’s Only Young and Only Human. Smith chose her own holiday picks on Guardian.co.uk and was mentioned as part of the beach reads in The Telegraph: “ten books to be seen with and what they say about you”. In September, Smith along with Margaret Atwood and other authors took part in a charity event at which the highest bidders would find their names in subsequent works of those involved.203 In October the first in a series of articles used White Teeth as advertisement or point of departure to discuss housing and other property related topics in and around North London.204 In December, Smith’s novel was reviewed in the South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection. At the turn of the year 2001 and 2002, White Teeth was frequently picked up in the end-of-year and pre-Christmas reviews as well as in sales reviews of its

200 A N Wilson, “World of Books”, The Telegraph 12 Nov. 2001. 201 Wilson, The Telegraph 12 Nov. 2001. 202 The Loafer, “Back to School”, The Guardian 24 Nov. 2001. 203 Sandra Laville, “Highest Bidders Brought to Book”, The Telegraph 10 Sept. 2001. 204 Caroline McGhie, “Where to Push the Boundaries”, The Telegraph 24 Oct. 2001; Cf. also Oliver Bennett, “Moving on Up”, The Telegraph 3 Apr. 2002; “Comment: Ferdinand Mount”, The Sunday Times 21 Sept. 2003;

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paperback edition. It was recommended in The New York Times and in Book, where it was particularly endorsed for book clubs. It also featured in a Publishers Weekly focus article on the German Book Market where Smith was reported to have sold 30,000 copies since September.205 Looking back at the year 2001, The TLS reported of Alex Hamilton’s paperback bestseller analysis in The Guardian in which Smith scored as “the fourth-highest-selling new paperback” with 791,000 copies sold in the UK: “Of the top fifty, only The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (no 12), When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (23), Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (35) and English Passengers by Matthew Kneale (49) can claim to belong to the genre, ‘serious lit’.”206 Smith’s bestselling status was nuanced in a follow-up to the good news when the same columnist revealed the novel was not included on the Public Lending Right list of UK’s most borrowed titles: “White Teeth by Zadie Smith sold almost 800,000 copies last year, but not enough library-users borrowed the book to make the merest impression on the PLR list.”207 Publishers Weekly added that Smith’s and Dave Eggers’s Vintage reprints have helped the publishing imprint “capture a younger market” at the beginning of the 2000s.208 The literary debut evidently also proved a bestselling success and this proved as newsworthy as the rise of a new literary star. White Teeth: Debate and Profile Summary The discussion of Smith’s novel was intricately linked to the buzz which surrounded its publication. The hype was what challenged most reviewers from the very beginning and demanded a statement on where the critics stood in questions of marketing and publicity – questions based on trust put into the book market as Alex O’Connell’s recommendation to his readers indicated: “Believe the Hype”.209 Once the reference was made, critics needed to decide whether or not the buzz was substantiated. In a positive outcome, critics argued that Smith lived up to or even topped expectations. Her success was then presented as either because of or despite the marketing hype. In a negative outcome, Smith was shown as either victim of another empty publicity stunt or responsible for her own

205 Later, PW mentioned the novel’s similar success in other countries and book fairs, cf. e.g. “Barcelona: The Translation Market in Spain’s Trade Capital”, PW 9 Dec. 2002. 206 J.C., The TLS 4 Jan. 2002. 207 J.C., “NB”, The TLS 8 Feb. 2002: 16. 208 Judith Rosen, “Hip-Lit 101 ”, PW 4 Feb. 2002. 209 Alex O’Connell, “Believe the Hype”, The Times 29 Jan. 2000.

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downfall. Significantly, however, with the announcement of literary prizes and especially the accompanying controversies, media commentators could put their finger on the hype around her person and lucrative welcoming by the industry. In consequence, Smith was forced to position herself under these conflictual circumstances and was not only more exposed but also more vulnerable to accusations. In the first two years of its profile, White Teeth and its author have also been indirectly positioned as literary – contradicting the classification as pure marketing hype – via comparisons and in competitive constellation with a number of writers and their work. Alongside Dave Eggers,210 whom Smith had befriended in the course of these first years of literary stardom, she was frequently positioned along with other young writers such as Ali Smith. White Teeth was mentioned in comparison in reviews of Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai (2000) as part of the “class of flamboyantly ambitious novelists [such as Zadie Smith, Dave Egger, Michael Chabon] whose adventurousness spins out on an epic scale”211; Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place, a novel about Maltese immigrants in Wales which was included on the 2000 Booker longlist when Smith was not; and another tale of immigrant lives, Linda Grant’s Orange Prize-winning When I Lived in Modern Times. Moreover, she was positioned along and in contrast with the 1983 Granta class: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, and other male literary big-hitters, mainly Hanif Kureishi, who was one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists in 1993, and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Pynchon. The African-American culture critic Greg Tate pointed out references to postcolonial writers and critics, such as Ishmael Reed, David Foster Wallace, William Gibson, Paul Gilroy and Gayatri Spivak.212 On top of this, her writing and representation of London was frequently discussed in the light of nineteenth-century realism in general,213 the author was announced “the ‘George Eliot of multiculturalism’”,214 and her portrayal of the capital and its Dickensian citizens, not least by James Wood, with whom Smith engaged in conversation in the following years.215 In contrast, the comparison with Margaret Atwood’s The

210 Cf. Shania Ahmad, “Heartbreaking Geniuses”, New York Observer 7 Oct. 2002. 211 Janet Maslin, “Books of the Times; Mother and Son on an Intellectual Quest”, The NYT 11 Dec. 2000. 212 Tate, The Village Voice 9 May 2000. 213 Russo, Salon.com 28 Apr. 2000. 214 Feay, The Independent on Sunday. 14 Jan. 2001. 215 In October 2001, Smith replied to James Wood’s criticism of her and other post-9/11 fiction and took up what was to become an at times strenuous but overall surprising-

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Blind Assassin was never played out on the basis of the books’ content but on their simultaneous competition for attention by reviewers and prize juries.

4.3 “L ONG SERVICE , GOOD CONDUCT ”? T HE 2000 B OOKER P RIZE The year 2000 presented a double challenge for the Booker Prize. The administration was under pressure to produce a paradigm shift and handle its own sponsorship crisis. In early October 1999, Management Today reported that the sponsor of the Booker Prize was reconsidering its involvement with the literary award. The Booker’s chief executive Stuart Rose disclosed that the company did not see enough returns for its investment: “I’m here to put the company back on its feet – not to be a patron of the arts. […] If we agree the Booker Prize is an asset, we have to ask ourselves what we can obtain from such an asset without detracting from the prize’s core values.”216 Towards the end of the century, a long history of apparently altruistic sponsorship was giving way to new management, which was “from a different mould than that which produced the patrician Taylor and his colleague the late Sir Michael Caine”, and all sides were seeking to ensure the change would best benefit their concerns.217 The Booker Prize management hoped for highest possible independence, the sponsors for more authority, more immediate and more commercial revenue, and more recognition for their cash & carry activity: “It is early days yet and there’s a lot of discussion still to be had, but I would hope that by next year’s prize we’ll have something more relevant in train.”218

ly productive relationship with one of the most acclaimed contemporary literary critics. In 2012, Wood finally endorsed Smith’s fourth novel, NW and recommended the writer’s performance in her fourth novel to the readers of The New Yorker: “underneath the formal experimentation runs a steady, clear, realistic genius”. Wood favourably compared her latest achievement to her debut: “It is an even more intensely English novel than ‘White Teeth’ … and a better one, the best novel she has yet written”, cf. “Books of the Year”, The New Yorker 18 Dec. 2012. 216 Al Senter, “UK: Booker’s Prize Headache”, Management Today Oct. 1999. 217 Senter, Management Today Oct. 1999. 218 Senter, Management Today Oct. 1999. “We could use the prize as a catalyst for other community activities more relevant to our customers. We could expand into adult or children’s literacy work and develop ideas to encourage young people to read and go into writing themselves.”

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A few weeks after the news about a possible loss of sponsorship, the 1999 Booker Prize went to J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. Coetzee became the first author in Booker’s history to be recognised twice by Booker judges after he had already won in 1983 for Life and Times of Michael K. “It remains the ultimate prize to win in the English speaking world”, he said in a letter which was read at the Guildhall ceremony by his editor at Secker & Warburg.219 His success should have been reassuring for a prize in distress. The first such repetition in Booker’s history fell on a worthy author, a recluse and therefore respectable man of letters, an academic and novelist at the zenith of his career. In fact, the choice received a stamp from the only higher institution in the world of literary prizes when Coetzee received the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years later in 2003. Under these circumstances, the winning author and his eighth novel were everything a prize could wish for to substantiate its position as Britain’s premier literary event. How else could a literary prize hope to be “more relevant”? And yet, in a Booker year in which the shortlist failed to excite the judging panel, the booksellers, let alone the readers if one of the judges’ accounts is anything to go by, the choice also had the taste of compromise.220 In fact, the announcement evidently even failed to excite Coetzee himself, “the old crosspatch”, who did not show up for the award ceremony.221 John Sutherland, who had been on the judging committee which was chaired by the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman and included Boyd Tonkin, Natasha Walter and the Scottish novelist Shena MacKay, revealed the clinical precision with which the verdict had been accomplished. It was a year which lacked in literary debate and for this absence of passion, the judge proclaimed that Coetzee had won “a lottery not a literary competition”.222 Sutherland who had come out of the closet as a fervent combatant for a book which did not even make the shortlist – Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet – revealed that there were particular reasons why jury members blocked other judges’ favourites in “over-my-dead-body” reactions: they were too intricate, too womanly, too anti-Zionist.223 Andrew O’Hagan’s debut Our Father was refused serious consideration at the finish line because “there remains a long service, good conduct aspect to the prize […] [a]nd fiction

219 Fiachra Gibbons, “Absent Coetzee Wins Surprise Second Booker Award”, The Guardian 26 Oct. 1999. 220 “The Booker Turns a New Leaf”, The Guardian 26 Oct. 1999. 221 The Guardian 26 Oct. 1999. 222 The Guardian 26 Oct. 1999. 223 The Guardian 26 Oct. 1999.

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is not a young person’s game”.224 In the end, Coetzee’s novel surfaced as the one “[e]veryone admired, no one passionately liked”.225 The end-of-century Booker climate did not fail to influence the first round in the new millennium. When the judging panel for the 2000 Booker Prize for Fiction was announced in March that year, the constellation had clearly been well mixed so as to ensure debate among the jury: “a wide range of literary, journalistic and academic skills and expertise”.226 The journalist and London’s historian Simon Jenkins was to preside a jury which encompassed Roy Foster, Professor of Irish History and Caroline Gascoigne, the Literary Editor of The Sunday Times, but also the TV-presenter Mariella Frostrup (Britain’s ‘sexiest voice on TV’) and the best-selling, Booker shortlisted and previous judge Rose Tremain. In May 2000, Booker merged with Iceland and the news was inserted in a new “Booker the Business” page on the Booker website which met Stuart Rose’s earlier stated concerns that the corporation was not immediately recognised by the public as the sponsor of the literary prize. The introduction to “the largest cash & carry company in the UK” explicitly picked up on this: “The Booker Prize is one of the most famous and widely discussed literary prizes in the world, yet despite this notoriety, surprisingly little is known about Booker the business”.227 The website also reserved space for a “gossip” column and quoted from different media comments on the different stages from the choice of judges to the excitement before the final announcement of the winner, entitled “Every year The Booker Prize never fails to get people talking”.228 In its thirty-second year, the Booker Prize did not present a longlist yet. But even before the announcement of the shortlist, speculation about the chosen six hit the headlines. Zadie Smith was handled as “the strong favourite”, Margaret Atwood only as among those “in the general vicinity of the shortlist”.229 By then, White Teeth had been out for the better part of the year, been fought for and against, been through the first series of controversies, not least including one of Booker’s competing awards, the Orange Prize for Fiction. The Blind Assassin, in contrast, had only just been published to favourable reviews in the UK but a mixed response in the US.

224 The Guardian 26 Oct. 1999. 225 The Guardian 26 Oct. 1999. 226 Cf. Judges Announced for the Booker Prize 2000, The Booker Prize, Mar. 2000. 227 Cf. Booker the Business, The Booker Prize, 2000. 228 Cf. Every Year The Booker Prize Never Fails to Get People Talking, The Booker Prize, Oct. 2000. 229 Guardian.co.uk 3 Oct. 2000.

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The shortlist was announced on 5 October as “an eclectic mix of established and new writers who between them offer a challenging spectrum of contemporary writing” and the six titles were Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (Bloomsbury), Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place (Picador), Michael Collins’s The Keepers of Truth (Phoenix House), Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (Faber & Faber), Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (Hamish Hamilton) and Brian O’Doherty’s The Deposition of Father McGreevey (Arcadia).230 The revelation of the shortlist triggered some surprise among those covering the award. Smith’s absence welcomed agitated whispering. Although she was not included in the shortlist announcement for the 2000 Booker Prize, her failure to make it on the list was regarded just as newsworthy as the nomination of other authors, or even more, until and at times even including the announcement of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as the winner in November. The omission of established writers and acclaimed books causes an uproar in the annual Booker debate, but Smith’s case was striking as her status was still one of a debutant though the treatment she received was on a par with the likes of Michael Ondaatje and Julian Barnes. The judges’ selections were almost unanimously perceived as “eccentric”.231 The combination of Mariella Frostrup’s presence on the judges’ panel, her alleged promotion of “books with strong storylines”232 and statements made by the chair of judges, Simon Jenkins, additionally baffled commentators. Jenkins announced the shortlist as full of “narrative energy, imaginative treatment and original voices from unpredictable quarters”,233 and observed “a certain revival of the well-told story”.234 The award’s godfather Martyn Goff envisaged “a completely open field” for that year’s prize.235 In fact, the main topic in the immedi-

230 Cf. Booker Prize for Fiction 2000 Shortlist, The Booker Prize, Oct. 2000. 231 Reynolds, The Telegraph 6 Oct. 2000. 232 Books Unlimited staff, “Heavyweights and New Names Make up This Year’s Booker Shortlist”, guardian.co.uk 5 Oct. 2000. 233 Books Unlimited staff, guardian.co.uk 5 Oct. 2000. 234 Tonkin, The Independent 6 Oct. 2000. Boyd Tonkin added that Jenkins had also remarked that not all “leading authors” performed at their best: “Not all of them produced their best novels this year”. 235 Ezard, The Guardian 6 Oct. 2000; cf. Reynolds, The Telegraph 6 Oct. 2000 (“Booker insiders said that this year’s prize … was the most open for years”); The Observer 8 Oct. 2000 (“No Spark, no Lessing, no Ballard, but the Booker Prize short list leaves the race wide open for a dark horse”); The Observer 5 Nov. 2000 (“In the

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ate response to the shortlist was the prevalence of “new names”,236 “obscure authors”237 or “mystery writers”238. Commentators expected a year of “the middlebrow ‘good read’”.239 Critics were well aware of the attraction of the Booker and the annual attention with which they were expected to endow it: “The shortlist for the evercontroversial Booker Prize was announced this morning and is likely to create the usual speculation and debate”.240 The Booker cycle was received as familiar and not without the promise for conflict: “The first Booker Prize shortlist of the new millennium arrived yesterday with a now-familiar recipe of established stars, younger pretenders, startling surprises – and the whiff of internecine warfare.”241 In addition, questions of book marketing, less prominent in usual reviews, were highlighted in Booker coverage. John Ezard emphasised “the importance of literary prizes in pump-priming the dismally low demand for quality modern novels” backing up his statement with comparatively low sales figures: “By last week Atwood’s recently published novel had sold 1,069 copies, according to high street figures from Whitaker BookTrack. Azzopardi had sold 227, Collins 184, Ishiguro 8,408, Kneale 1,120 and O’Doherty 142.”242 Meanwhile, Boyd Tonkin detected winners (Arcadia Books) and losers (Jonathan Cape at Random House) among the publishing houses. He was also aware of national rivalries stating that “half the shortlisted authors for Britain and the Commonwealth’s premier fiction prize live in North America” and remarked that “only two of the six titles (Atwood and Azzopardi)” could be easily acquired at “central London’s biggest bookshop, Waterstone’s in Piccadilly”.243 Margaret Atwood was quickly referred to as one of the two established authors along with Kazuo Ishiguro, the “highly-tipped big-hitters”,244 “two of the literary book world’s bigger established names”,245 “[the shortlist’s] most fa-

most open field for years, it is anyone’s guess who will win Britain’s most glittering prize”). 236 Books Unlimited staff, guardian.co.uk 5 Oct. 2000. 237 Ezard, The Guardian 6 Oct. 2000. 238 Reynolds, The Telegraph 6 Oct. 2000. 239 Tonkin, The Independent 6 Oct. 2000. 240 Books Unlimited staff, guardian.co.uk 5 Oct. 2000. 241 Tonkin, The Independent 6 Oct. 2000. 242 Ezard, The Guardian 6 Oct. 2000. 243 Tonkin, The Independent 6 Oct. 2000. 244 Books Unlimited staff, guardian.co.uk 5 Oct. 2000. 245 Ezard, The Guardian 6 Oct. 2000.

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mous (and widely predicted) names”,246 “the only two big literary names”247. Atwood and Ishiguro had shared a Booker shortlist on previous occasions. In 1986, both were surpassed by Kingsley Amis but in 1989 Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day prevailed over Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. In the meantime, Atwood and Smith were both announced as part of the competition for the new WH Smith Book Awards, a counter-event to the “elitist” Booker Prize and Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. The final announcement was made on 7 November. The awards dinner in London’s Guildhall was broadcast by Channel 4 in an hour long programme presented by Melvyn Bragg. Simon Jenkins, the chair of judges, praised the winning title as “a complex book that works on many different levels. Far reaching, dramatic and structurally superb, it demonstrates Atwood’s immense emotional range, as well as her poet’s eye for both telling detail and psychological truth.”248 The choice was congruent with a public vote which was gathered at The Times Booker Prize Debate in the British Library a week before the final announcement, in which Atwood had garnered a clear victory at 43%.249 The immediate response put emphasis on Atwood’s triumph at the fourth attempt with three out of the four big newspapers in the UK highlighting the series of nominations and the final success in their headlines.250 The contest was deemed “the most wide open for years with the judges divided strongly and saying that the decision had not been reached unanimously”.251 Many voiced their suspicions of a “lifetime achievement award”.252 Atwood’s victory was not without support. Reviewers endeavoured to show how the book chimed with the zeitgeist and pointed out – more clearly than before – the implications of Atwood’s historicising novel for contemporary readers. Boyd Tonkin assigned the Canadian author the role of “an incomparably gifted guide through the savage landscapes of modern life”.253 John Ezard embedded “Atwood’s spiritual detective story about love, betrayal and violence in a

246 Tonkin, The Independent 6 Oct. 2000. 247 Reynolds, The Telegraph 6 Oct. 2000. 248 Cf. Margaret Atwood Wins the Booker Prize for Fiction 2000, The Booker Prize, Nov. 2000. 249 Cf. The People’s Booker, The Booker Prize, Nov. 2000. 250 Cf. Ezard, The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000; Tonkin The Independent 8 Nov. 2000; Reynolds, The Telegraph 8 Nov. 2000. 251 Reynolds, The Telegraph 8 Nov. 2000. 252 Ezard, The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000; cf. also Reynolds, The Telegraph 8 Nov. 2000. 253 Tonkin, The Independent 8 Nov. 2000.

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Toronto industrial and political dynasty” within his idea of the shortlist’s common features: they all “carry the clearest hallmarks of millennial literary fashion in novel writing”, such as “interior monologues”, “flashbacks and almost constant time lapses”, “detective story devices to unravel the sources of a trauma or acts of violence”.254 He especially linked “two out of the three north American novels” as in both Collins’ and Atwood’s books “the central figure is the grandchild of a dominating businessman whose successors have presided over the deindustrialisation of their cities and the advent of a consumerist fast-food civilisation which is haunted by its own emptiness”.255 But the Booker year did not go down in blissful harmony either: the assembly of judges offered as much grounds for controversy as the chosen novels’ financial success (or lack of it). Miles Kingston criticised the chair of judges, Simon Jenkins, for his representation of the 2000 Booker choices, accusing him of suffering from “[a]n overdose of novels”, pointing out the judge’s hubris for claiming that “a nagging cultural agene induces me to plough through the Booker shortlist”, an incomprehensible description of Atwood’s story as “a wry tale of life’s accidence”, and irrelevant statements on fiction seeing that “all novels are journeys through time” and not just those on this year’s shortlist.256 Mariella Frostrup, the most controversial member of the 2000 judges’ panel, looked back at her work and the critique she faced when accused of not having the credentials for judging an important cultural event. She commented favourably on the collaboration with the chair of judges and her other colleagues and described the pains of reaching a democratic decision and ending up with “a regular Booker name stealing the prize” rather than seeing her own favourites make the race.257 Despite an ironic tone in her statement, Frostrup was particularly keen on coming across as a person of high taste (“my fears that we were never going to find one good book, let alone a shortlist of six”), and proving that whilst she was never accepted by the media, she was quickly embraced as partner in debate by her fellow panellists, “members of intelligentsia”.258 While The Independent made fun of “Iceland (Booker’s new owners)” and their attempts to present themselves in a better light during the ceremony at Guildhall,259 a Guardian arti-

254 Ezard, The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000. 255 Ezard, The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000. 256 Miles Kington, “Beware the Assassins of the Book World”, The Independent 10 Nov. 2000. 257 Mariella Frostrup, “Blonde and Proud”, The Observer 12 Nov. 2000. 258 Frostrup, The Observer 12 Nov. 2000. 259 The Literator, “Cover Stories”, 11 Nov. 2000.

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cle chimed in with the afore-described “Booker-bashing” as “favourite pastime of literary journalists in need of a safe story” claiming that this time “there is some truth to the latest round of carping”.260 The critique was pointed at the low sales which this year’s shortlist attracted with “only two titles – Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place – hav[ing] sold more than 1,000 copies since the shortlist was announced”. Apparently, booksellers and publishers were each accusing the other party of taking fault at this with the former complaining “of difficulties in getting hold of some of the titles on the list” while the latter “have been disappointed by the promotion the shortlisted titles have received in some shops”.261 The Booker coverage had immediate effects on the discussion of both the winner Atwood and the omitted Smith. Towards the end of the year, journalists summed up the literary production and made judgments on the fertility of the market. Both options – of a very good and a very bad year – were represented in the media and led to different results in Christmas recommendations. Overall, the degree of self-referencing was quite remarkable, as was the consciousness of a literary debate cycle which included the vast impact of literary awards and especially that of the Booker Prize. Alex Clark saw a “decisive retort to the pessimist’s claim that the novel is languishing in the doldrums” pointing to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth as much as the Booker selection with a common denominator of interest in the historical, “most notably, perhaps, in Booker winner and finalist respectively, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin […] and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans”.262 In contrast, Robert McCrum showed little enthusiasm looking back at a “year of damp squibs”.263 He saw that Smith had ultimately failed to live up to the expectations, though not based on her performance, but that of the major literary prizes, the Orange and Booker mainly, which failed to recognise her, to convince with literary arguments, and to “ignite much of a debate about the state of English language fiction”.264 Despite a surprising shortlist, the literary editor of The Observer remarked that the Booker opted for a predictable winner: “Having taken this leap into the dark, the jurors then equipped themselves with Very lights and parachutes, bumping down to

260 “Book Trade News”, The Guardian 14 Nov. 2000. 261 The Guardian 14 Nov. 2000. 262 Alex Clark, “After the Turkey, the Crackers”, guardian.co.uk 24 Nov. 2000. 263 Robert McCrum, “Literary Fireworks? Just a Few Sparklers and a Lot of Damp Squibs”, The Observer 26 Nov. 2000. 264 McCrum, The Observer 26 Nov. 2000.

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earth with the predictable, and disappointingly conventional, choice”.265 Boyd Tonkin arrived at a similar verdict despite his sympathetic reaction to the Booker winner. The Literary Editor of The Independent saw established authors, “nabobs of the novel”, at their low and the Booker opting for a safe choice rather than a breakthrough discovery: “The Booker judges turned up the heat with a nicely eccentric shortlist; then cooled things down with a fine but predictable victor”.266 The criticism pointed at established writers was counterbalanced in international verdicts. Time magazine, for example, praised the productivity of established names with “extraordinary output of new fiction from big-name veteran authors, all producing energetic work at age 60 or older”, including Margaret Atwood and her tenth novel, “part family saga, part social history, part suspense tale and altogether captivating”.267 The end of the year was marked by many articles in which writers recommended their favourite reading and in which they mentioned both competitors. In The Guardian, Nick Hornby chose Zadie Smith’s debut as his favourite while Deborah Moggach spoke in favour of The Blind Assassin’s “breadth and scope” despite being “marred by a cod villain”.268 This trend of looking back at the year’s highlights was commented upon by Robin Stummer, editor of Cornerstone architecture magazine, who made fun of the once “low-key affair” which “has swollen into a huge literary love-in” and which in 2000 took place much earlier than usual, inspiring Christmas presents.269 More so, Stummer observed that the literati engaged in an intricate process of recommending some and ignoring others and thus “offer what amounts to a unique insight into the real ins and outs of the book world, in its way far more telling than the results of a Booker, Orange or Whitbread”.270 He compiled a survey of best books by counting the recommendations in The Independent on Sunday as well as in rival publications, and arrived at a list which figured Martin Amis as first, Zadie Smith as second and Margaret Atwood – despite the Booker win – as the fifth most advocated author of the year.

265 McCrum, The Observer 26 Nov. 2000. 266 Tonkin, The Independent 29 Dec. 2000. 267 Anthony Spaeth, “The Best & the Worst”, Time South Pacific (Australia/New Zealand edition) 18 Dec. 2000. 268 “What Were You Looking At?”, The Guardian 16 Dec. 2000. 269 Robin Stummer, “Amis Comes Top in Annual Literary Love-In,” The Independent on Sunday 10 Dec. 2000. 270 Stummer, The Independent on Sunday 10 Dec. 2000.

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Winning the Booker had long-lasting effects for Atwood’s tenth novel and its resulting media attention. Throughout the year 2001 The Blind Assassin was mentioned as previous Booker winner in the next cycle of Booker coverage, particularly concerning a new set of judges271 and changes to the TV broadcast as the BBC took over from Channel 4, and later that year in anticipation and celebration of the new winner, Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000).272 Such reminiscence took place regularly for the next couple of years as The Blind Assassin was mentioned in coverage in the Booker years 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, particularly in 2008 in reference to the Booker of Bookers for which it was not shortlisted, and again in 2009 when Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall proved victorious. Commentators generally agreed that it was “a pity” Atwood had not won with another novel, one which would have been better suited to combat the likes of Coetzee and Rushdie.273 The effect of Smith’s Booker omission is more difficult to establish but it can nevertheless be traced when explicitly mentioned. Her ‘failure’ to catch the Booker’s attention was repeated throughout the coverage of her novel and especially in any comment of other literary distinctions. Like Atwood’s win, Smith’s loss was repeated in Booker Prize coverage over the years. Not least did Olivia Laing compile a list of “The Booker prizewinners that never were” in the year of its fortieth anniversary 2008, on which White Teeth featured alongside John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).274 Laing’s list invites speculations on what could have been: Had White Teeth fared better in the eyes of the judges of the 2000 Booker Prize, would she have proven the better long-time choice? Would she have been the more likely candidate to de-throne Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, to follow into its large Booker footsteps? Maybe her book came too early in Booker’s history. It may have done better a few years in, under the new sponsorship. Or maybe the thought experiment can be turned

271 Emma Yates, “Booker Judges Announced”, guardian.co.uk 15 Feb. 2001; David Lister, “Kenneth Baker Will Chair This Year’s Booker,” The Independent 16 Feb. 2001. 272 Oliver Poole, “BBC to Revamp Booker Prize for Younger Viewers”, The Sunday Telegraph 25 Feb. 2001. 273 Charlotte Higgins, “Sun Never Sets on Booker’s Six Best”, The Guardian 12 May 2008. 274 Olivia Laing, “The Booker Prizewinners That Never Were”, The Observer 14 Sept. 2008.

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around. Maybe the Booker spared her and did not put her under additional pressure which could hardly be higher with a first novel as big as White Teeth. At the 1999 dinner gala, the chair of judges called the winning title “a millennial book […] because it takes us through the 20th century into a new century in which the source of power is shifting away from Western Europe”.275 Was Smith’s novel not made of the perfect material to carry the Booker into the twenty-first century, to complicate the notion of shifting power, of a monolithic West vs. East, North vs. South divide? The argument in favour of either a worthy “millennial” book was raised by their critics. At the time of the vote, Atwood proved the more secure winner. In fact, all four turn-of-the-millennium Booker winners from 1998 to 2001 – Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang – had an element of Sutherland’s “long service, good conduct aspect”. McEwan and Atwood had both been selected at the fourth time of asking, Coetzee and Carey had both won twice, for their third and eighth novels respectively. In her acceptance speech, the author explicitly noted the long history of the Booker which reaches into the past and future of literary history. She recognized the Prize’s importance for herself as much as for the future of literature: “This is not just about one book. Somewhere out there is an unknown writer who will write the next Booker prize winner.”276 The time for these as yet unknown writers would come soon – under new sponsorship, with a new administration and a new set of problems.

275 Sara Lyall, “South African Writer Wins Top British Prize for Second Time”, The NYT 26 Oct. 1999. 276 Allison, The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000.

5. Literary Outsiders and Odd Titles: A New Era of the Booker Prize

The change of sponsorship in the year 2002 – from Booker plc to the Man Group – was widely perceived as a new era in the Prize’s history. The first years of the new Man Booker Prize for Fiction were under particular scrutiny on the part of commentators. Would the Booker continue to launch literary careers, would it continue to praise authors of high literary status, would it continue the practice of rare distinction with repeated victories? The decision in favour of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi in the first year after the change of sponsorship was met with much applause on the part of booksellers but less so on the part of those who regarded the Prize’s responsibility as recognising ‘serious’ literature. The announcement triggered two kinds of fears, which were fomented by the news about a possible widening of the rules of eligibility to include US-American authors and by statements made in favour of widening its targeted audience. Commentators feared an ‘Americanisation’ and a ‘popularisation’ of the Booker – fears which also touched on other controversial issues from Bloomsbury’s success with the Harry Potter series to Amazon’s steady rise to power. If the turnof-the-century winners bore the responsibility of leading fiction into a new millennium, it was up to the first years of the Man Booker winners to lead the Prize into a new era – either by approved recipe or through surprise. The choices made in the year 2003 suggest a continuation of the surprising element. Both the 2003 Booker-winning novel and its main rival present a particularly unusual pair of debuts. DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and their teenage narrator-protagonists beating-the-odds were seen in the tradition of a general Harry Potter mania. This was, after all, the “golden age” of crossover novels.1 Both were in the midst of a discussion of a new trend: adults reading children’s or 1

Squires, Marketing Literature 163, 277.

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young adult books. Both were discussed as novels with profound nonfiction hooks: high school shootings and autism respectively. Both were subjected to a close examination of their authenticity: the protagonists’ voice, the accuracy of representation, the authors’ legitimacy in introducing the respective issue to a bigger audience. Most of all, they were particularly successful on the 2003 and 2004 literary prize calendars. They could even be said to have dominated the award cycles in the UK in those years even though both authors were also perceived as ‘quirky’ or ‘odd’. After their respective nomination for the 2003 Booker Prize and towards the final announcement of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in early 2004, news reports sent the two 41-year-old authors and their 15-year-old protagonists into a race for attention and documented a “run-off between this pair of dysfunctional teens”.2 The focus was on the young narrators and their function of holding up a mirror to society.3 The year 2003 was even hailed as one of the “stroppy male teenager”.4 Some argued that the Booker had better been placed in Haddon’s than in Pierre’s hands.5 And, vice versa – when Haddon’s novel was voted the Whitbread Awards’ Book of the Year, his success was presented as the other writer’s loss.6 At the time of their respective publications in January and May 2003, Pierre and Haddon were perceived as newcomers to the market of literary novels. A year later, both were in the midst of media coverage. In addition to their narrator-protagonists, the profiles of the novels show staggering parallels but also substantial differences. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was a success in public debate (if controversially, even pejoratively so), not so much, or not yet in academic debate. Haddon’s Curious Incident was a downright crowd-pleaser, a crossover success, instigating a wide discussion ranging from psychology to math journals and a similarly diverse interest in academic literary criticism.

2

The Literator, “Cover Stories: Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Whitbread Prize, Paperback Battle; Ink”, The Independent 14 Nov. 2003. Cf. also Louise Jury, “Teenage Life Inspires Rivals for the Whitbread Prize”, The Independent 7 Jan. 2004.

3

Cf., for example, Boyd Tonkin, “A Week in Books: Judging Adolescents”, The Independent 30 Jan. 2004: “In the courts and the classrooms, we judge adolescents. In much of today’s bestselling fiction, they judge us.”

4

David Robson, “Always Expect the Unexpected”, The Sunday Telegraph 28 Dec.

5

Louise Jury, “Women Lead the Line-up on a Booker List with Novelty Value”, The

6

Reynolds, The Telegraph 28 Jan. 2004.

2003. Independent 17 Sept. 2003.

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Vernon God Little was the first of (as of 2017) four novels written by DBC (“Dirty But Clean”) Pierre, born as Peter Warren Finlay in South Australia in 1961. Finlay aka Pierre grew up in Mexico and Texas, worked at an advertising agency in Trinidad, returned to Australia where he collapsed after a long period of drug abuse and moved to London where he wrote the manuscript for his first novel in the late 1990s. Published by Faber and Faber in 2003, Pierre’s debut won an award for comic novels, one for debut novels and, most effective for publicity, became the winner of 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Following the Booker, Vernon God Little shot to the fourth place on the best-sellers list on amazon.com. It sold 600,000 copies in paperback and was circulated in 40 languages before the publisher Faber and Faber requested two more books by the author in 2005. The novel was very successfully adapted for theatre: first by Andrea Hart, directed by Kenny Miller and performed in 2004 at The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow; later by Tanya Ronder and directed by Rufus Norris for the Young Vic in London where it was initially staged from April to June 2007, and then returned from January to March 2011. Early on, it was reported to be adapted for film by producer Aimee Peyronnet and director Pawel Pawlikowski with the backing of British company FilmFour.7 In 2012, it was announced that German film director Werner Herzog took up the film project which was to be written by Andrew Birkin.8 The Internet Movie Database has advertised a film version ever since 2005 and it is currently categorized as ‘in development’. At the time of the book’s publication, Pierre settled in Ireland where he wrote three more novels: Ludmila’s Broken English (2006), Lights Out in Wonderland (2010) and Breakfast with the Borgias (2014).9 None of his following books could match the success of the first, although each met with a wide range of reviews. Together the first three novels constitute The Endtimes Trilogy – a trilogy “in the presence of death” as the subtitle suggests. Pierre also published a short story with Hay Festival Press, “Suddenly Dr Cox” (2009), the profits of having gone to Oxfam. A limited edition of his short stories – some of which have been published previously in various periodicals – appeared in September

7

Cf. Nev Pierce, “Movies”, BBC Home 17 Dec. 2003.

8

Andrew Pulver, “Werner Herzog to Bring Vernon God Little to the Big Screen”,

9

Pierre read from his third novel, Lights Out in Wonderland, as early as 15 December

guardian.co.uk 22 Oct. 2012. 2008, cf. Katie Allen, “DBC Pierre Offers Book Preview”, The Bookseller 1 Dec. 2008. The rights for the two novels completing the trilogy were bought already in 2005 by his editor at Faber & Faber, Lee Brackstone, cf. “Faber in U.K. Buys Two DBC Pierre Novels”, Book Standard 14 Mar. 2005.

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2013 under the title Petit Mal. In 2016, he published his memoirs cum writer’s advice, Release the Bats. Four months after Pierre’s debut, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was launched as a major publishing event. It was the first of so far three (adult) novels written by Mark Haddon, born in 1962 in Northampton, England. Previously, Haddon wrote the Agent Z series, which comprises five books published between 1993 and 2001, as well as a non-fiction handbook and eleven picture books. Since The Curious Incident Haddon published a collection of poems and stories each, another picture book and two novels: A Spot of Bother (2006), which was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008, featured as number nine on The Guardian Bestseller List Top 100 in 2007, and was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards in 2006; and The Red House (2012). His first stage play, Polar Bears, about a man’s struggling relationship with a children’s author who suffers from bipolar spectrum disorder, opened to mixed reviews at the Donmar Warehouse, London in April 2010.10 The Curious Incident was the first book to have been published simultaneously by two imprints – one for children and one for adults. The crossover appeal was instrumental for sales, media attention and prize recognition. The book was published in 36 languages and within one year sold a quarter million hardback and over a million paperback copies. It was awarded seventeen literary prizes for children, young adult and adult fiction. Film rights were secured almost a year before the novel’s publication by Warner Brothers, Heyday Films and Plan B Productions, with Brad Pitt and Harry Potter producer David Heyman expressing interest as early as July 2002.11 In 2011, director Steve Kloves was reported to be working on the adaptation after the production of the last Harry Potter film.12 A play from the novel was adapted by English playwright Simon Stephens and premiered at the Royal National Theatre in 2012. It was an instant success harvesting as many as seven Olivier Awards. In the following, I will present the attention profiles of the two novels competing for attention in 2003 and 2004 to show how the two books became two different types of prize bestsellers and how their rivalry extended beyond the competition on diverse prize lists to one between their teenage protagonists and two authors who, similarly, embarked on a rite of ‘literary’ passage with their re-

10 Leo Benedictus, “What to Say About … Polar Bears”, guardian.co.uk 8 Apr. 2010. 11 Cf. Staff, “Brad Pitt Seeks Rights to British Novel”, guardian.co.uk 1 Aug. 2002. 12 David Gritten, “Harry Potter Scriptwriter Adapts Mark Haddon”, The Telegraph 23 Apr. 2011.

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spective ‘debut’ novels. I will then elaborate on the specific situation of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003, its second year of existence under the new sponsorship and describe in what ways the books were perceived as successors to the previous Booker winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and how this has influenced the course of their debate.

5.1 F EIGNING F ICTION ? DBC P IERRE ’ S V ERNON G OD L ITTLE DBC Pierre’s first novel Vernon God Little was the author’s literary lottery ticket. Not only did he go from a rejected writer to a Faber author, from dark horse to Booker winner, but the success virtually enabled him to pay the debts he had contracted in a former life as conman and drug-addict. The story of a bad boy made good was an asset in media coverage and it ensured a vital debate about his legitimacy, his literary status and the question of whether the habitual liar turned to telling truthful stories or if he had continued the con and also feigned his fiction. Pierre’s manuscript was rejected by a dozen literary agencies before he tried the newly established Conville and Walsh, where it was fished out from a slush pile and within a week sold foreign rights to several publishers. In the UK, Pierre’s agent Clare Conville, a former editor, quickly sealed the deal with Lee Brackstone from Faber and Faber on 11 September 2001, an eerie coincidence which Pierre later evoked in interviews. The UK edition was scheduled for 20 January at first printing of 35,000 copies. In contrast, as a dark satire set in the aftermath of a Texas high school massacre, the book was not surprisingly difficult to sell to a publisher in the US. Conville had more luck convincing the Scottish publishing house Canongate – still riding high on the Booker success with the previous winner of the Prize, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – to take it on for the US market and distribute the book with Grove/Atlantic.13 The US hardcover edition appeared simultaneously with the Booker Prize announcement in midOctober 2003 at first printing of 15,000 copies. The UK advance reader’s copy came without endorsements or publicity plans. Vernon God Little was presented to reviewers and booksellers as a “21st century comedy in the presence of death” and a “riotous adventure story which

13 Phil Miller, “Scots Publisher’s US Gamble Pays Booker Dividends”, The Herald 18 Oct. 2003.

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cuts a satirical swathe through the heart of contemporary America”.14 The potential for controversy was laid out from the start: Pierre was making fun of death, criticised an America “[p]eopled by a cast of freaks, obese law enforcement officers, cold-blooded chattering housewives” and focused on “one very special adolescent with an unfortunate talent for being in the wrong place at the right time”, a cursing 15-year-old in trouble: “Boy, when fate opens up it opens up with both barrels. See what happens now I’m in trouble? See the awesome power of trouble. Trouble fucken rocks.” With a front cover of a toddler in a cowboy hat, waving the American flag underneath two rows of cross-out stick figures, the image of a contentious debut in need of attention was completed. In the UK, the book was initially perceived as a satire on contemporary America, while in the US, it made signs of going unnoticed at first. The Booker success and the heightened relevance which Vernon God Little received with it, however, called upon US critics to position themselves vis-à-vis a novel which was critical of their nation and, more so, was embraced by a British institution. The backlash which was not only directed at the novel and its author but also at those who had endorsed it, in turn, invited a reaction from UK commentators. Did they get it wrong? Was the book, in fact, a satire on European stereotypes about America rather than on America itself? And how much did it matter for the evaluation of the novel? The Booker’s effect on the course of the debate around Vernon God Little was exceptional but what it did not change was the novel’s status as an odd book and Pierre’s position as a ‘quirky’ author. The writer repeatedly referred to himself as an outsider of the literary realm and he was positioned as one by critics and prize judges alike. While critics often emphasised the incredible journey of the “[c]onman turned Booker-winning novelist”,15 his story was not one from zero to hero. Instead, Pierre came with a set of characteristics which were not perceived as the usual material for a literary newcomer, and although he did win one of the biggest literary accolades in the UK, his position was not resolved once and for all, nor was it negotiated without controversy. Nevertheless, and perhaps more than any of the other case studies, DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little can be said to have been made by the Booker. In comparison to most debut novels, Pierre’s book received an incredible amount of coverage around its publication. Compared to other Booker books, or even the respective rivals, however, the story of a teenager on the run developed slowly throughout the first half year after its launch and only came to fame with the announcement of the Prize. Accordingly,

14 Cf. appendix, 3a. 15 Cf. Paul Mardles, “DBC Pierre”, The Observer 19 Mar. 2006.

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the attention profile for Vernon God Little is the most ‘erratic’ among the case studies, though, it, too, can be divided into five phases: (1) attention in UK general media around its January publication (November 2002 to March 2003); (2) media coverage on behalf of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize in May and a real resurgence of attention with the Booker coverage cycle (August to November 2003); (3) a phase of post-publication and mainly post-Booker US media coverage (August to October 2003); (4) attention bestowed in The Guardian First Book, the Whitbread and British Book Awards cycles (October 2003 to March 2004); and (5) a conciliatory reaction to the paperback publication on both sides of the Atlantic and the hint of a promising ‘afterlife’ as a theatre play. The Debut of an Outcast: UK Media Coverage The UK reviewers responded to Pierre’s novel as an unknown entity. Vernon God Little was reviewed widely but not excessively. There was some interest in the author as an odd debutant manifested in the form of interviews and speculation around the writer’s background and national belonging. Most of all, reviewers needed to find out the nature and relevance of what was largely perceived as a satire on contemporary American culture. Pierre’s novel was first given attention in the media with an anonymous prepub teaser review in The Times which contained a short synopsis and three endorsement quotes by fellow Faber authors Andrew O’Hagan and Joseph Connolly, as well as artist Harland Miller.16 The three endorsements set the stage for the book’s cult appeal, its claim as a literary novel and a British comedy about America. Andrew O’Hagan, whose debut competed for the Booker Prize with Coetzee’s Disgrace in 1999 but who was deemed too young at that time and whose second novel, Personality, was published only three months after Vernon God Little, laid the grounds for a string of pop culture comparisons: “It’s like the Osbournes invited the Simpsons round for a root-beer, and Don DeLillo dropped by to help them write a new song for Eminem.” At the same time he held the literary ladder up high: “Vernon God Little is a novel so alive it makes the work of Jonathan Franzen and his pals look sedated.” Joseph Connolly, whose eighth novel was coming out that same April and who had published a biography of P.G. Wodehouse (1979), emphasised the novel’s dark humour: “This is a strange vibrant thing with its own unique voice; thoroughly seductive, and deeply, darkly, comic.” Harland Miller, performance artist and author of the “unconventional rites of passage novel” Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty (2000), made the com-

16 “Hot or What? D. B. C. Pierre”, The Times 16 Nov. 2002.

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parison with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and started a long series of comparisons between Vernon and Holden Caulfield. The reviewers sought to establish Pierre’s legitimacy, his status and biographical data. They emphasised the ‘coolness’ of this contentious debut and its nonconformist author. On the weekend before its publication, positive prepublication reviews of Vernon God Little included a short anonymous review in The Times, as well as two medium-length reviews in The Guardian and The Observer. The Guardian’s arts production editor Carrie O’Grady praised its authentic “Texas twang” and especially the “satisfying finale” which ended with a “clinching image […] of the cover of Time magazine, featuring, literally, crap”.17 The Observer’s literary editor Jonathan Heawood presented Pierre’s novel as an American debut with verve: “his first novel may not be the most balanced book to emerge out of America this year, but it must be one of the most driven”.18 The emphasis was on the book’s authenticity and its US origin. Two pre-publication interviews were conducted by arts interviewer Jasper Rees for The Telegraph and photography critic and general feature writer Sean O’Hagan for The Guardian, who later that year received a British press award for his profiles. The first emphasised the oddness of a first novel by a writer who was over 40 years old and no longer eligible for Granta’s 20 best British Writers, who “had never previously put pen to paper” apart from cartoons which were published in Playboy magazine, and whose nationality cannot be easily pinned down. Rees “was expecting an American” but found that the writer whose “real name is Peter Finlay […] was born in Australia to British parents but spent most of his first 23 highly privileged years in Mexico City”, sounded South African and “recently repaired to County Leitrim”.19 In the second profile, his book was described as “jinxed” when its publishing deal coincided with the World Trade Center attacks: “Ever since, I feel like there’s some dark destiny swirling around the book”, Pierre said.20 After its publication, the novel was mainly tested in reference to its qualities as a comedy. In late January to late February, Vernon God Little was reviewed in The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement and The Sunday Times. One of the first media reactions was a parody piece in The Guardian’s G2 supplement series “Digested Read” written by feature writer John Crace who saw the joke on

17 Carrie O’Grady, “Lone Star”, The Guardian 18 Jan. 2003. 18 Jonathan Heawood, “Growing up with Jesus”, The Observer 19 Jan. 2003. 19 Jasper Rees, “An Heir for Holden Caulfield”, The Telegraph 10 Jan. 2003. 20 Sean O’Hagan, “You’ll Die Laughing”, The Observer 19 Jan. 2003.

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the US-penalty system.21 Crace’s column came with the usual satirical bashing but also had positive effects: it placed Pierre alongside other contemporary literary and canonical authors. Book reviewer Marianne Brace introduced Vernon for the first time to The Independent readers as “A Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem Generation” and very favourably described the book as “funny and touching as it rain-checks contemporary America”.22 The two Telegraph reviewers were divided in their opinion. Sam Leith was very sceptical as to whether Vernon God Little succeeded as a satire. His colleague in the Sunday edition, David Robson, was adamant that it did: “Simply as an indictment of American justice, Vernon God Little is chilling and hilarious. But the novel is much, much more than that. It is a showcase of superb comic writing, every sentence turned with loving care.”23 The first wave of UK reviews started and ended with coverage in The Times and its sister publications: freelance journalist Nick Seddon discussed the book very positively for the Times Literary Supplement praising Pierre for lending “social outcasts a voice”.24 Hugo Barnacle in The Sunday Times ended his assessment on a positive note, though he made a cautious remark on the difficulty of satirising high school massacre and asked if the book presented truly “fresh points”.25 In the spring and for most of the summer, the UK media withdrew their attention from and may not have returned to the book had it not been for its prize success. From ‘Comic Novel’ to Booker Winner: Positioning Pierre in Prize Coverage The gap between UK and US media attention was filled with prize and festival coverage, for the most part in UK media. There was only momentary coverage between the publication and the attention induced by the Booker nomination, and it was exclusively linked to two events: Pierre’s win of a prize for comic novels in May and his attendance of the Edinburgh literary festival in August. With the announcement of the Booker longlist began a resurgence of attention for the dark horse in the race which culminated in a veritable peak when it was announced as the winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize in the autumn.

21 John Crace, “Digested Read: Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre”, The Guardian 1 Feb. 2003. 22 Marianne Brace, “Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre,” The Independent 3 Feb. 2003. 23 David Robson, “Who Dies? You Decide”, The Sunday Telegraph 23 Feb. 2003. 24 Nick Seddon, “D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little”, The TLS 7 Feb. 2003. 25 Hugo Barnacle, “Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre”, The Sunday Times 23 Feb. 2003.

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In May, Vernon God Little topped a fierce competition and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic novels, which was presented at the Guardian Hay Festival and reported in The Guardian. The other nominated novels included Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It, India Knight’s Don’t You Want Me and Lucy Ellman’s Dot in the Universe. The winning novel was identified as “black comedy” and its author described, in this own words, as an “outsider”:26 he was from Australia, the article mentioned, but raised in America and Mexico, produced the debut in London and recently moved to Ireland. In short, Pierre was presented as intangible. In contrast, and only a few months later, Pierre appeared with fellow writer, Irish Keith Ridgway, at The Edinburgh International Book Festival, sponsored by and reported in The Times, where he was mentioned among the American visitors to the festival.27 The Booker longlist was published on 15 August 2003 and covered widely but Vernon God Little was only mentioned in The Guardian and The Observer. Pierre was counted among the many first-time novelists on the list, so unknown to the literary circles that “even the Booker organisation cannot get their name right: DBC Pierre, first-time author of Vernon God Little, was billed in the press release as DCB Pierre”.28 He was at best included as one of the “other outsiders with a good chance”,29 though not necessarily mentioned in all articles which focused on the many “promising newcomers”.30 Nevertheless, the relevance of occupying a place on the Booker longlist – even if largely unnoticed – was influential for the coverage of The Guardian First Book Award longlist which Vernon God Little made in late August. The simultaneous appearance on both lists pushed the debut to the front and it was henceforth mentioned prominently alongside the co-Booker-longlisted and much-hyped Brick Lane by Monica

26 Michelle Pauli, “Black Comedy Debut Takes Wodehouse”, guardian.co.uk 27 May 2003; Cf. also Alex Clark, “Hay Diary: Prize Sausages”, The Guardian 31 May 2003. 27 Anna Burnside, “Festival”, The Sunday Times 10 Aug. 2003. Another festival which Pierre visited but which was not covered widely by the media was the March 2004 Oxford Literary Festival. 28 John Ezard, “Amis Survives Hatchet Job on Day of the Long Knives for Other Star Writers”, The Guardian 16 Aug. 2003. 29 Robert McCrum, “Anyone Can Win, Including Amis”, The Observer 17 Aug. 2003. 30 Robert McCrum, “Crossing the Great Divide”, The Observer 13 Sept. 2003.

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Ali.31 An extract of Pierre’s book was uploaded on Guardian.co.uk. After his experiences with the long search for an agent, he was quoted in an article in The Telegraph, which investigated how authors stomach rejections of their manuscripts by agents and publishers.32 With the appearance of the Booker shortlist on 16 September, which for the first time in the history of the Prize featured four female authors and three firsttime novelists, chances shifted in favour of Pierre, not least because of how media interest was drawn to reporting on this attractive newness. While on the longlist, he was given a 25/1 chance by Ladbrokes, but the shortlist put him up at 4/1, only behind Monica Ali and Margaret Atwood.33 The book was mentioned in The Guardian and The Observer, The Telegraph, The Independent on Sunday, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. The coverage was still restrained, with the occasional mention as “yet another first novel”,34 half-convinced mention as “extremely funny” but “a little wearing after a while”,35 or no mention at all.36 Pierre only made headlines in Australian coverage. The Age identified him as “Australia-born” and pinned its hopes on this writer “on the verge of entering Australia’s literary elite”.37 Angela Long interviewed Pierre for The Sydney Morning Herald, where he was portrayed very much as a citizen of the world but asserted strong Australian roots: “I did grade one [in South Australia]. I marched around the schoolyard and saluted the flag, and all that. I had my Vegemite sandwiches – that is a taste you get for life.”38 Increased interest in Vernon God Little in the UK started with an article in The Telegraph where the novel was described as “the class horse in the race, the one which picks you up and takes you careering

31 Sophie Arie, “From Watford Striker to Top Novelist – but Only the Name’s the Same”, The Guardian 28 Aug. 2003. Cf. also “Ali and Pierre up for Guardian Award”, The Bookseller 29 Aug. 2003. 32 Tom Payne, “However, Thank You for Your Interest”, The Telegraph 25 Aug. 2003. 33 For longlist odds, see “Our Pick of the List…”, The Observer 17 Aug. 2003. For shortlist odds, see “Booker Shortlist Springs Surprises”, BBC News 16 Sept. 2003. 34 Stephanie Merritt, “Beginner’s Luck or a Past Master?”, The Observer 21 Sept. 2003. 35 “Heart-Stoppers and Lite Bites”, The Independent on Sunday 21 Sept. 2003. 36 Cf. Fiachra Gibbons, “Snubbed Unknown Sweeps Giants Off Shortlist”, The Guardian 17 Sept. 2003; and Robert McCrum, “Professor Carey Has Come up Trumps”, The Observer 21 Sept. 2003. 37 Paul Mulvey, “Finlay Short-Listed for Prize”, The Age 17 Sept. 2003; and “Rookie on Booker Shortlist”, The Age 18 Sept. 2003. 38 Angela Long, “Pierre Pressure”, The Sydney Morning Herald 20 Sept. 2003.

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breathless towards the winning-post” in a selection of favourites compiled by David Robson, who had previously reviewed the book very positively.39 The placement on the shortlist also resulted in a first review in The Spectator, whose critic Venetia Ansell positively contrasted Pierre’s novel with Booker rival Clare Morrall’s much spoken about Astonishing Splashes of Colour.40 Yet, the breakthrough was really only achieved with a longer piece in The Guardian, an interview in which Pierre spoke openly about his past and revealed a history of drug addiction, gambling and fraud. Not only was his novel described as “award-winning Rabelaisian black comedy” but he was also – no doubt to draw more attention to the scandal revealed – tipped off as “Man Booker favourite” in the sub-title.41 In another article, the same Guardian journalist spoke of the author “unmasked”, as he “confessed to betraying and fleecing his friends in a manner that even Byron would have blanched at”, and emphasised the sudden fame by recalling that “his name was misspelt on the Man Booker longlist”.42 This eccentric author image was underlined in the only sentence in which his book was mentioned, with the result of stressing the author’s character rather than the novel’s content: “a darkly comic morality tale set in Texas about a boy who lies his way into very deep trouble”.43 For the first time, Vernon God Little was reported to have attracted attention by film producers, and a possible autobiography was hinted at as well. Finally, Pierre took the Man Booker Prize for Fiction on 14 October 2003 and it was this success which guaranteed sales and instant attention in the media. With the Prize in his pocket, Pierre entered The Times’ paperback fiction bestseller list at #10, climbed to #8 in its second week but did not hold on for Christmas season. The day after the announcement, The Times published as many as five articles on the winner: an earlier review of the novel by Hugo Barnacle was reprinted, a new review was written by their literary editor Erica Wagner, Dalya Alberge spoke to Pierre about his success and together with Chris Johnson commented on Pierre’s debts to the artist Robert Lenton, and finally, the first chapter of Pierre’s debut was printed. In The Telegraph, Sam Leith needed to rethink his previous harsh judgment of the book and settled for a

39 David Robson, “Who Should Win”, The Telegraph 22 Sept. 2003. 40 Venetia Ansell, “Recent First Novels”, Spectator 11 Oct. 2003. 41 Fiachra Gibbons, “Novelist Dirty Pierre Comes Clean: I Was a Conman”, The Guardian 11 Oct. 2003. 42 Fiachra Gibbons, “Unmasked: The Murky Past of Booker Author”, The Guardian 11 Oct. 2003. 43 Gibbons, The Guardian 11 Oct. 2003.

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critique of the prize rather than the winner, whom he deemed “odd” and, at least, not predictable: “He does not […] answer to the classic description of the north London aesthete we expect to win the Booker”.44 His Telegraph colleague, Nigel Reynolds reported on the awards ceremony in which the “virtually unknown author” surprised everyone with his success and his speech, confessing his past sins and confusing the crowd as to his nationality: “Pierre was born in Australia, brought up in Mexico but said yesterday he was British.”45 A positive, if surprised, comment by literary editor Boyd Tonkin in The Independent included a review and an excerpt. With the announcement, Pierre for the first time found his way into the pages of The New York Times. For the next ten days, and in addition to the papers already mentioned, Pierre’s Booker triumph was referred to in The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent on Sunday, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sydney Morning Herald, Publishers Weekly and The Boston Globe – all of which in the light, or shadow, of the author’s past. The articles following the Booker concentrated on the questions of debt instalments and possible damage to the Booker Prize image: both because of Pierre’s crime revelations and his allegedly “American” novel.46 Soon, information about his paying off debts became more newsworthy than his literary achievement, one which was often assigned to this past: “Crime pays”.47 An avalanche of story-making set in concerning the origins of the book – an exemplary case of ‘prize mystique’ (cf. chapter 3.3). A fellow novelist claimed to have discovered the manuscript in a slush pile.48 Pierre’s sister explained the moment of Pierre’s character change with a car crash.49 Rowan Pelling, British journalist and broadcaster and a friend of Pierre’s agent, praised the Booker’s choice in a diary-style euphoric comment as a “welcome return for literary bad

44 Sam Leith, “Ex-Gambler and Gold Prospector Blows Apart Image of the Booker”, The Telegraph 15 Oct. 2003. 45 Nigel Reynolds, “Reformed Cocaine Addict Is £50,000 Booker Winner”, The Telegraph 15 Oct. 2003. 46 Boyd Tonkin, “A Week in Books,” The Independent 17 Oct. 2003. 47 “The Week That Was: Britain”, The Times 18 Oct. 2003. 48 Grant Stewart, “I Spotted the Booker Winner in a Slush Pile. Why Didn’t I Just Keep Quiet?”, The Observer 18 Oct. 2003. 49 “Profile: DBC Pierre: Booker Winner Is No Stranger to Fiction”, The Sunday Times 19 Oct. 2003.

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behaviour”.50 In an interview, Faber’s chief executive, Stephen Page, was described as “still riding high on the glory of publishing the winner” as he commented on the boost publishers get from getting-it-right: “You feel smart, you feel great for the writer and the agent and you believe so much more in yourself”.51 This narrative-building was rounded off with a long article in The Bookseller, in which Lee Brackstone, the Faber editor under whom Vernon God Little was published, and Rachel Alexander, publicity director at Faber, recalled the first steps of discovering and promoting the novel.52 The Booker’s effect was particularly visible in Pierre’s case and the author took part in a re-positioning of himself and his novel in a long line of interviews and profiles in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sunday Times, and The Austin Chronicle in October, The New York Times in November, and again in The Sunday Times in December. The main topic in the interviews was his dubious former lifestyle and his Booker success. His talent for fiction writing was, again, linked to his career as a conman: “After years of kidding himself on a daily basis, Pierre saves his imaginings for the novels”.53 The author traced the beginnings of the novel to an inspirational TV moment, when he saw footage of a pre-Columbine school shooting, which lent an auspicious talent to the author and his novel, every so often situated in “Columbine-style” tradition.54 The eligibility rules of the Booker Prize added fuel to the discussion of Pierre’s nationality. Commentators needed to establish his right to the accolades: “Even though he was born in Australia, grew up in Mexico and lived in Texas, Spain, Washington DC and Australia, he was allowed to enter the literary award for Commonwealth and Irish writers because he has a British passport.”55 In another interview, Pierre described himself as having “a real sense of cultural homelessness”,56 in yet another he was revealed as not “officially an Aussie”:

50 Rowan Pelling, “This Is the Life: A Welcome Return for Literary Bad Behaviour”, The Independent on Sunday 19 Oct. 2003. 51 Andrew Stone, “Enterprise Network: Faber Aims for the Write Stuff”, The Sunday Times 23 Nov. 2003. 52 Nicholas Clee, “The Man Booker Prize”, The Bookseller 5 Dec. 2003. 53 Emma Brockes, “How Did I Get Here?”, The Guardian 16 Oct. 2003. 54 Ciaran Byrne, “Ireland: Interview: Ciaran Byrne Meets DBC Pierre”, The Sunday Times 7 Dec. 2003. 55 The Sunday Times 19 Oct. 2003. 56 Brockes, The Guardian 16 Oct. 2003.

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Born in South Australia, to an Australian father and British mother, he spent most of his formative teenage years in Mexico, followed by London and now Ireland. In his travels, his Australian passport has been rescinded. If they want him, the Brits can count him as one of theirs. But still his voice, look and nickname, betray his Australian roots. Asked by the Herald where his heart lies, he replied: “I dunno, it lies often times in Australia, it depends when you talk to me. It depends if the cricket is on. My life story has been about trying to be accepted somewhere.”57

A man working at his local post office in Leitrim finally bore testimony to Pierre’s assertions of having found a home in Ireland: “He is our local hero now. Not many people around here will know him, but we will all lay claim to him. He’s one of ours now.”58 Although Pierre may have finally found the place where he was accepted, literary commentators were not going to take him up on that quite so eagerly as the postman. The Booker win also endowed Pierre with the attention of the London Review of Books in mid-November. Literary critic James Wood used a critique of the winner to deconstruct Booker decisions since the sponsorship take-over by Man Group. It was a crucial moment for the discussion of the 2003 Booker Prize but also for the debate of crossover titles and such appealing to more popular audiences. But it was also a moment, which John Dugdale presented in a different light alluding to the possibility that Wood’s repeated plea for more seriousness in literature was not without stakes on the part of the critic: Good to see the LRB finally getting round, 10 months after publication, to reviewing the Man Booker winner Vernon God Little. And even better to find the reviewer is James Wood, who pronounces a mixed verdict on D B C Pierre’s debut (“in some ways remarkable”, but also “limited, cartoonish”), reserving the full force of his trademark snootiness for the fiction prize’s supposed shift away from ‘seriousness’. Oddly ignored in the LRB’s notes on its contributor’s own 2003 debut, eligible for the prize but absent from the longlist.59

It is hardly the negative judgment – the Times’ literary editor Erica Wagner, for example, had taken issue with Vernon God Little earlier on – but the belated recognition of the book’s relevance and Wood’s own investment which called

57 Peter Fray, “Writing for Columbine”, The Sydney Morning Herald 16 Oct. 2003. 58 The Sunday Times 19 Oct. 2003. 59 John Dugdale, “Diary”, The Sunday Times 28 Sept. 2003.

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for Dugdale, media editor of the Guardian and regular contributor to The Sunday Times, to question the other critic’s judgment. A Conspiracy of Dunces? US Media Coverage Although Pierre was noticed in the US as early as May 2003, when Canongate pushed the title from his stand at the 2003 Book Expo America in Los Angeles,60 US coverage of Vernon God Little only really started in trade media in the early autumn of 2003, long after its UK publication and only shortly before the scheduled US market entrance. The first reaction was very unfavourable but picked up a little until Pierre’s Booker Prize success. In Kirkus Reviews, the novel was criticised for lacking suspense and a vision of its own, and Publishers Weekly caricatured the author’s name calling him “DBC Perry”.61 The first positive review picked up where the negative criticism started and, almost surprisingly, recommended the book to young as much as mature audiences.62 Barnes & Noble’s Book magazine introduced Pierre as one of the fall’s debutants and disclosed another detail from Pierre’s past, who was allegedly “[o]nce caught trying to smuggle a Trans Am into Mexico.”63 A later article in the Library Journal for the first time referred to Vernon God Little’s “critical acclaim in England”, and explicitly referred to its scandalous potential and warned to carefully select its audiences: “Purchase only for libraries with sophisticated readers, far away from Texas.”64 In fact, a post-Booker PW article took up the strand emphasising its controversial standing in comparison to previous winner Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and quoting a scandal-conscious David Graham, Canongate’s managing director: “I am well anticipating some people taking offense at someone from the outside seeming to criticize the United States.”65 The positive tone of the article aimed at the lucky independent publishing house, rather than the novel which was referred to at a distance and the earlier PW review recalled somewhat softened as “mixed”.66

60 “Working the Floor: BEA Exhibitor Listing C-E”, PW 5 May 2003. 61 “Vernon God Little by D. B. C. Pierre”, PW 25 Aug. 2003. 62 Joanne Wilkinson, “Vernon God Little by Pierre, DBC”, Booklist 1 Sept. 2003. 63 “Debuts from a Former New Yorker Staffer, Carl Sagan’s Son and a One-Time Car Smuggler”, Book 1 Sept. 2003. 64 Andrea Kempf, “Vernon God Little by Pierre, DBC”, LJ 1 Oct. 2003. 65 Karen Holt, “Small Publisher Wins Big with Booker”, PW 20 Oct. 2003. 66 Holt, PW 20 Oct. 2003.

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The dust jacket of the US hardcover edition sported the same image on its front cover as the UK ARC and hardback editions but it came with different endorsements. The novel’s coolness and its appeal to a predominantly male audience were manifested in blurbs from the men’s magazines Esquire and GQ. The former claimed that “[t]his post-modern picaresque tale has everything”; the latter emphasised what was soon perceived as a major insult: “a raucous, tragic satire on contemporary America.”67 On its back cover, a comparison with John Kennedy Toole’s 1980 Pulitzer-Prize winning picaresque novel and modern US classic A Confederacy of Dunces was highlighted to match the book’s title and emphasise the comparison. Apart from the quote on its front, the back cover only featured praise for the book found in UK media, including Andrew O’Hagan’s early praise. The launch was not accompanied by pre-publication reviews and profiles as the UK publication saw it happen. In general media, Pierre was first mentioned in Booker Prize coverage in The New York Times where he was introduced as a former criminal and drug-addict. The hardback edition flashed up at #34 on The New York Times bestseller list in early November only to leave it immediately thereafter. US reviewers reacted only a good week after the Booker announcement and the US hardback publication. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that without the prize, the book would not have found any or much attention in US papers and magazines. Due to the attention after the Booker, Vernon God Little was reviewed in the dailies San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Washington Post, as well as in literary and news weeklies Salon.com, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, the TIME, Newsweek and Prospect magazine. A series of very negative reviews was framed by a few positive takes at Vernon God Little. American author Joyce Carol Oates situated the book within a US literary tradition calling the narrator a “Holden Caulfield on amphetamines”, and praised the author as a “dark-horse Booker Prize winner”.68 In The New York Times Book Review, journalist and dining editor Sam Sifton took up the comparison with J.D. Salinger’s protagonist on drugs: “Holden Caulfield would have liked Vernon Little, especially if he’d had access to a stash of Ritalin”.69 Sifton also identified the novel as “five acts of tragicomedy” and a Shakespearean tragic flaw in Vernon’s inability to produce an alibi.70 In The

67 Cf. appendix, 3d. 68 Joyce Carol Oates, “Showtime”, The New Yorker 27 Oct. 2003. 69 Sam Sifton, “Holden Caulfield on Ritalin”, The NYTBR 9 Nov. 2003. 70 Sifton, The NYTBR 9 Nov. 2003.

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Boston Globe, Madison Smartt Bell used the book as a platform to point out the ease with which children can obtain weapons in the US.71 Malcolm Jones from Newsweek caught himself laughing at jokes which resembled something someone “carved into a park bench”: “But as we all know, there are some mighty funny things carved into park benches”.72 Taking delight in Pierre’s book was evidently mischief – but enjoyable mischief nevertheless. Even so, negative evaluations seemed to prevail in US coverage. Perhaps not surprisingly, when bearing in mind a satirical take on the magazine in the novel’s finale which describes a TIME cover displaying the alibi object, i.e. a pile of poop, the American weekly was particularly keen on seeing both author and novel discredited at one fell swoop: “You don’t have to dig deep to find the link between writing novels and conning people out of lots of money: both involve making stuff up”.73 The question of (in)authenticity of language was brought up as a major weakness in The New York Times, Salon.com and The Christian Science Monitor. In the literary ezine, Laura Miller added that not only was the book not authentic but Pierre was not legitimised to criticise the US.74 Ron Charles explained this weakness on a literary, rather than national level. He conceded that fiction, “particularly sharp-eyed satire, can puncture the membrane of self-satisfaction that keeps us from seeing our own flaws and pathologies” but hastened to deny Vernon God Little such potential.75 The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani based her negative assessment on a mix of the literary and the national argument, highlighting the Booker judges’ choice as more revealing

71 Madison Smartt Bell, “A Wickedly Astute View of the Horror of Adolescence”, The Boston Globe 26 Oct. 2003. 72 Malcom Jones, “Finding Humor in the Crudeness”, Newsweek 23 Nov. 2003. 73 Lev Grossman, “Writer Wrong”, TIME 3 Nov. 2003. Grossman is an acclaimed critic for the TIME magazine and a best-selling author of four novels. But he, too, has some experience with “making stuff up”. When his debut novel – Warp (1997) – experienced a rather slow start and received very unfavourable reader reviews on amazon.com, Grossman, “[h]ungry for feedback” but unable to cope with the negative criticism, wrote positive reader reviews of his own novel using different pseudonyms, which he later unveiled in a long apologetic article on Salon.com, cf. Lev Grossman, “Terrors of the Amazon ”, Salon.com 2 Mar. 1999. 74 Laura Miller, “Furriners Go Nuts for Gun-Totin’ Yanks!”, Salon.com 6 Nov. 2003. 75 Ron Charles, “Columbine Dominates Europe’s Concept of US”, Christian Science Monitor 4 Nov. 2003.

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“about British attitudes toward the United States than about literary taste”.76 The reviewers emphasised that they did not see anything original in the portrayal of America, or as a matter of fact, the topic of media criticism, and although they all acknowledged the possibility of literary comparisons, the actual similarity was dismissed. As was the case in TIME magazine, the latter critics, too, showed a tendency to dismiss the book and its protagonist alongside with the author, characterising Vernon and Pierre alike.77 Most of all, US critics blamed the UK recognition system for producing the scandalous novel. It was not so much Pierre, but “Booker judges” who “have erred if they hoped to convey that message”: The pervasive horror at American violence may be the only explanation for the Booker committee’s bizarre decision to choose this grotesque satire as the best novel in the British Commonwealth. Pierre was reportedly shocked to have won, and having read it, I share his astonishment.78

They saw that British critics failed in their analogies and followed fashionable, worse, even French, trends, in comparison to the US reception which may have worked slowly but for good reasons so: “the system worked”.79 Commentators often become conscious of what they say in relation to books chosen by other institutions but rarely does the national aspect of literary interaction become as visible as in Booker Prize coverage. Uncertain about the merits of his books, interviewers at least enjoyed the company of the bon-vivant. Pierre was on tour in the US after the Booker triumph and he was interviewed along with his tour companion, fellow Faber author Dan Rhodes, in The Austin Chronicle where he was characterised from the perspective of the London literati as “a mysterious, larger-than-life outsider, a ne’er-do-well working up wonderfully funny books in a coke-infused frenzy” and one who was now “as close to instant myth – not to mention star-power – as contemporary practitioners of literary fiction get”.80 A month after the book’s

76 Michiko Kakutani, “Deep in the Heart of Texas (Via Australia)”, The NYT 5 Nov. 2003. 77 Cf. Miller, Salon.com 6 Nov. 2003: “Any teenage boy – an Australian growing up in Mexico, say – might suffer such travails”. 78 Charles, Christian Science Monitor 4 Nov. 2003. 79 Miller, Salon.com 6 Nov. 2003. 80 Shawn Badgley, “Doubt and Caution at All Time”, The Austin Chronicle 31 Oct. 2003.

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publication in the US, The New York Times’ arts reporter Jesse McKinley spoke to the author on “a night out”.81 McKinley pointed out the polarising reactions to Pierre’s novel on the two sides of the Atlantic: “In Britain, it was praised for a ‘coruscating’ view of America, while some American critics have been cooler. (Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that it read ‘like Beavis and Butt-head trying to do Nathanael West’)”.82 Warming up towards the author, interviewers displayed a different kind of coolness about his success, and a more generous evaluation of the book. The Peak of Rivalry at the Turn of the Year Meanwhile, the UK literary calendar featured more awards in the autumn of 2003 and Pierre continued the lucky streak. The shortlist for the Guardian First Book Award was announced on 30 October, the category shortlist for the Whitbread Book Awards on 13 November, and the shortlist for the British Book Awards in March 2004. Each triggered a separate cycle of coverage and the discussion of Pierre in the light or shadow of his competitors. Most significantly, Vernon God Little’s rivalry with The Curious Incident came to a peak in the course of Whitbread coverage when Mark Haddon prevailed in what was perceived as a “run-off” between the two and beat Pierre in direct competition for the Whitbread Book of the Year. The 2003 Guardian First Book Award was given the touch of a “generation shift” and “a refusal to be fettered by the parochial” – a clear attempt to distance it from the Booker Prize and its alleged emphasis on the “regional” that year, a category which seems hardly reconcilable with that year’s final choice.83 Vernon God Little was presented as the controversial rival to a unison positively received Brick Lane. However, The Guardian’s take on its prize only quickly referred to Ali’s book in contrast to Pierre’s novel, which was dedicated a whole

81 McKinley was moved to make the observation that “[Pierre] smokes and drinks like a champ”, cf. Jesse McKinley, “A Night out With: DBC Pierre; Mr. Sunset to Sunrise”, The NYT 16 Nov. 2003. Years later, another interviewer, who had lunch with the author included the menu which the two enjoyed at the Mestizo, “his favourite Mexican restaurant”, in her profile of Pierre, cf. Suzi Feay, “Lunch with the FT: DBC Pierre”, Financial Times 27 Aug. 2010. 82 McKinley, The NYT 16 Nov. 2003. 83 John Ezard, “From Bethnal Green to the Himalayas: A Literary Challenge to the Parochial”, The Guardian 30 Oct. 2003.

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paragraph, including further mention of the author’s debts.84 The award finally went to Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane amidst speculation about the divergent response which Ali’s novel received among critics as opposed to a Bangladeshi London community group which felt heavily misrepresented by her book.85 Although he did not feature on the favoured spot for the Whitbread, Pierre was also the biggest asset for this award’s coverage. His nomination was presented in The Telegraph as “warming news to the many creditors” in a tonguein-cheek report which quoted his publishers insisting that he “used his Booker winning to pay off some debts”.86 The Independent listed Anne Donovan’s Buddha Da as favourite for the First Novel Award and concentrated on Haddon’s bestselling The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Times, favourite for the Novel Award, but gave considerate space for the recent Booker Prize winner.87 Finally, the literary editor in The Times gave Vernon God Little devastating grades, expressed her sincere hope that it failed this time, called it “dreadful” and quoted Michiko Kakutani’s unfavourable review from The New York Times.88 In spite of her crushing verdict, Erica Wagner started her report with this most media-prone book, hence drawing attention to the dreaded Vernon God Little rather than any of her favourites, most of all Haddon’s crossover book.89 The five Whitbread category winners were announced on 6 January 2004 and the media immediately picked up the rivalry between Pierre and Haddon. The Booker winner was mentioned in The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. The Guardian printed extracts from all Whitbread category winners, including Vernon God Little. Pierre and Haddon, the winners of the first novel and the novel category, shared media attention while the children’s book, poetry and biography winners were mostly only mentioned with their name and book title. In fact, the nomination of both Pierre’s Vernon God Little and Haddon’s Curious Incident was soon discovered as a leitmotif for Whitbread coverage. The Inde-

84 Ezard, The Guardian 30 Oct. 2003. 85 John Ezard, “Mountain Man Wins Guardian Book Prize”, The Guardian 5 Dec. 2003. 86 Nigel Reynolds, “Prize Double Will Settle Author’s Score with Creditors”, The Telegraph 13 Nov. 2003. 87 Louise Jury, “Whitbread Judges Whittle Down Record Children’s Book Entry”, The Independent 13 Nov. 2003. 88 Erica Wagner, “Literary Judges Overlook Booker Nominees”, The Times 13 Nov. 2003. 89 Wagner, The Times 13 Nov. 2003.

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pendent promoted the rivalry between the two authors and their novels throughout the process of shortlist selection to the announcement of the final winner in articles about “a run-off”90 between this pair of “rivals”91 and “judging adolescents”92. The idea of a duel between the two authors and their protagonists was also taken up by other newspapers. The Telegraph, for example, described the year 2003 as “that of the stroppy male teenager”.93 Another “curious contest” which the papers discovered in the course of Whitbread coverage was between Pierre and DJ Taylor, “author of the highlypraised George Orwell biography” and “one of the judges who awarded him the Booker Prize”.94 Taylor himself called the coincidence an “added piquancy”.95 In an article in which Taylor bid another man for forgiveness – he had negatively reviewed a writer’s novel, changed his mind, written the writer to apologize, then discovered that said writer was on the Whitbread judging panel, and finally felt bad for looking like a hypocrite – he also mentioned Pierre’s magnanimous reaction: “DBC Pierre, greeted with slight wariness (a newspaper having revealed that I was the Booker judge who voted against his prize-winning Vernon God Little last October), turns out to be hugely affable and requests a signed copy of my book.”96 Taylor did not disclose whether he had apologised this time.97 Finally, Haddon’s Curious Incident was announced as the Whitbread Book of the Year on 28 January 2004. Although the choice was reported to have been a close result between the novel and the poetry category winner, The Telegraph gave Pierre’s failure more space than that of the immediate runner-up, poet Don Paterson: “[Haddon’s] victory denied his rival, the colourful D B C Pierre […] a

90 Literator, The Independent 14 Nov. 2003. 91 Jury, The Independent 7 Jan. 2004. 92 Tonkin, The Independent 30 Jan. 2004. 93 Nigel Reynolds, “Bad Lad of Publishing Set to Make It a Double”, The Telegraph 7 Jan. 2004. 94 Reynolds, The Telegraph 7 Jan. 2004. 95 DJ Taylor, “On Being Judged”, guardian.co.uk 22 Jan. 2004. 96 DJ Taylor, “Diary – D J Taylor ”, New Statesman 2 Feb. 2004. 97 Taylor, who was also one of the judges of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize whom AN Wilson did not esteem for passing over Smith’s White Teeth in favour of a lesser book (cf. chapter 4.2), gave some additional thought to DBC Pierre that year, when he used his inclusion on the Booker shortlist to reflect about authors and their use of initials, cf. DJ Taylor, “DJ on DH, TS, FR, EM, and Now DBC”, The Guardian 18 Sept. 2003.

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unique double. Pierre had already won the Man Booker Prize and he would have become the first author to scoop the country’s top two literary prizes for the same book in the same year”.98 The Booker winner was also prominently mentioned in celebrations of the Whitbread winner in The Independent, The Times, The New York Times and USA Today. The transition from the year 2003 to 2004 gave room for a review of the literary year and Pierre figured high in this coverage helped by the post-Booker and in-the-midst-of-Whitbread presence in the papers. Pierre was re-reviewed and/or recommended in Guardian.co.uk, The Times, The Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, the New Statesman, The New York Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. Michelle Pauli’s retrospective literary calendar for 2003 had Pierre – not his novel – take up more space in the October column than the Nobel Prize winner, JM Coetzee, and described the Booker winner as “the oddest and most controversial character on the list”.99 David Robson reported Vernon God Little as one of the most recommended books of 2003, following Mark Haddon and Monica Ali.100 A few days later he observed a change for truly good newcomers – DBC Pierre among Mark Haddon, Zoe Heller, Monica Ali and Damon Galgut – as opposed to hailed young writers from the years before who failed to meet expectations: “the year buzzed with the thrill of the new”.101 Before the year was over, an article in The Times hinted at a film adaptation of Vernon God Little.102 The Booker and Whitbread winners were again positioned together and against each other in the first half of 2004. The award cycle was rounded off for Pierre with a double nomination at the British Book Awards. On 11 March 2004 Pierre was shortlisted for the DHL Author of the Year and the Virgin Books Newcomer of the Year; his novel, however, was not put up for the Book of the Year award. The coverage for these commercial awards was not particularly

98

Reynolds, The Telegraph 28 Jan. 2004.

99

Michelle Pauli, “From Pepys to Peaks …”, guardian.co.uk 29 Dec. 2003. Most dailies and weeklies look back at the passing year and produce calendars with the most important events, on which the respective Booker winner features regularly.

100 David Robson, The Telegraph 22 Dec. 2003. 101 Robson, The Sunday Telegraph 28 Dec. 2003. 102 A few weeks later, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that “Finlay met producer Aimee Peyronnet and director Pawel Pawlikowski in London today to discuss a film which he said would be at least a couple of years away from reaching cinemas”, cf. AAP, “Vernon God Little ... The Film”, The Sydney Morning Herald 23 Jan. 2004. Four years later the project was mentioned as an “upcoming adaptation”, cf. Phelim O’Neill, “Film Preview”, The Guardian 14 June 2008.

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wide, and Pierre (not his book) was only mentioned as that year’s Booker Prize winner.103 In contrast, Haddon had been nominated in a record five categories. In April, both writers appeared at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, which was put in a nutshell for The Sunday Times readers and emphasised the newsworthy couple: “From John Carey’s opening talk with Man Booker winner D B C Pierre to the closing interview with Whitbread winner Mark Haddon, it was a triumphant celebration of all that’s most exciting in our literary culture.”104 In July, Pierre was mentioned as the Booker winner in a Sunday Times profile of Mark Haddon.105 Before the paperback edition was reprinted in the UK and launched in the US, Pierre’s debut was used in comparison with other authors’ works. In The New York Times, Stephen Metcalf admitted that Jim Shepard’s 2004 novel Project X “arrives in the wake of ‘Vernon God Little,’ which surprised the literary world by winning Britain’s Man Booker Prize last fall” and that the precursor was an “undeniably clever” book but claimed that Shepard’s “novel should not be dismissed as an afterthought to ‘Vernon God Little’ because it is, in every particular, a considerably better book”.106 His colleague Hugo Lindgren mentioned Vernon God Little in reference to the very low sales of Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog and the particular difficulty of his novel to gain ground on the US market.107 In The Times the novel was mentioned in comparison with “Gus Van Sant’s superb film, Elephant”,108 a reference which was made repeatedly in the coverage of the book and particularly negatively in the US. His teenage protagonist was mentioned in comparison with other fictional teenagers (for example,

103 Guardian Unlimited Books staff, “Curious Book Racks up yet Another Nomination”, guardian.co.uk 15 Mar. 2004. 104 “Festival: The Oxford Literary Festival”, The Sunday Times 4 Apr. 2004. 105 “Mark Haddon”, The Sunday Times 18 July 2004. 106 Stephen Metcalf, “Tales from the Black Lagoon”, The NYT 25 Jan. 2004. 107 Hugo Lindgren, “Publishers, Note: Novelist Available”, The NYT 11 Mar. 2004: “According to Nielsen BookScan, through the first week in March ‘Yellow Dog’ has sold 10,200 copies in the United States, a figure that trade-book editors say is very low for a writer of Mr. Amis’s stature. Even the long-shot winner of last year’s Booker Prize, DBC Pierre’s ‘Vernon God Little,’ a scathing satire of America considered by many in publishing to be a hard sell here, has a Nielsen BookScan total of 18,700. (Nielsen BookScan measures about 60 to 70 percent of total sales, people in the industry say.)” 108 Rod Liddle, “Too Much Bloody Reality”, The Times 7 Feb. 2004.

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David Storey’s Thin Ice Skater109) as well as with a non-fictional critique of modern ‘teen-aging’ of adult life, Forever Young by Marcel Danesi.110 The positioning via comparison was largely made in topical context and seldom as a compliment to Vernon God Little’s literary status. Re-Positioning Pierre: Post-Booker, Post-Whitbread, Post-Paperback Coverage The aftermath of the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Awards and the paperback publication of Vernon God Little in the UK and the US showed a steady if less vital coverage. In fact, there was some re-positioning among critics on both sides of the Atlantic. UK reviewers showed not quite so eager to fully endorse the novel while US reviewers offered reconciliation. By the end of 2004, Pierre was not only listed among writers who made it in the literary marketplace but also showed signs of a possible ‘afterlife’ with a successful theatre adaptation. The UK paperback – out in mid-May – was received far less favourably than the hardback but it sustained the discussion about Pierre’s maverick success. It appeared shortly on The Times’ paperback fiction bestseller where it entered at #8 but disappeared immediately. It was followed up in The Times, The Sunday Times and twice in The Independent. In an overview of paperbacks, the Bookerwinning book was given a mixed response: “Pierre’s debut takes aim at a stupid, fat, bigoted America constructed from the shadows thrown across the Atlantic by trash TV and lowest-common-denominator cultural stereotyping. This unrelentingly monotone vision is where both the triumph and failure of the novel reside.”111 Trevor Lewis selected it for The Sunday Times’ Pick of the Week column where he deemed it a long shot from Salinger and Twain but attested the novel an own “singularity” and “memorable medley of images that linger beyond the final page.”112 Boyd Tonkin, The Independent’s literary editor, chose Vernon God Little as June’s book of the month, questioned the need for authentic representation and offered an understanding of Pierre’s achievement as an expression of what others think about the US rather than what it might be in its

109 Robert Macfarlane, “Fiction: Thin-Ice Skater by David Storey”, The Sunday Times 22 Feb. 2004. 110 Celia Brayfield, “Forever Teenagers”, The Times 17 Feb. 2004. 111 “Paperbacks”, The Times 1 May 2004. 112 Trevor Lewis, “Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre”, The Sunday Times 2 May 2004.

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own eyes.113 His colleague John Walsh, in a similar spirit and within the same frame, commented on June’s book and admitted that Vernon God Little may have been over-estimated by the Booker judges but that it presented a “close-up” on modern America which was “sui generis”.114 In contrast, the US paperback – launched in June 2004 by Harcourt Books, under the Harvest imprint – was received better than the original publication. It was given a paragraph in The New York Times’ “New & Noteworthy” column, which recalled Sam Sifton’s positive review and presented the book as treading in “audacious territory for tragicomedy”.115 Much later into the year, in October, Vernon God Little was reviewed in Texas Books in Review and given an almost surprisingly positive evaluation. Lee Norment, a student in Texas State’s MFA fiction program, applauded its “wilful messiness” and Pierre’s creation of “situations [which] are both believable and absurd” but found a weakness in the book’s ending, which “wraps up too prettily”: “I wish Pierre could have found some way to make the conclusion equal the energy and originality of the rest of the novel”.116 What becomes evident in both UK and US response to the paperback is the commentators’ awareness of its originality, which can have positive or negative consequences for the overall judgment. Later articles on DBC Pierre and his first novel mentioned him as a previous Booker winner, especially in terms of Booker induced sales boosting, and among the few chosen ones. Literary agent Simon Trewin saw the publication of Vernon God Little as one of the big events in publishing: “if you are a Zadie, a Monica, or a DBC with large advances that really focus a publisher’s mind, your book will be the publishing event that everyone craves”.117 Self-declared mid-list author Susan Johnson called for compassion for the likes of her surrounded by starauthors: “Every literary punter knows about Martin Amis’s teeth and Will Self’s heroin and DBC Pierre’s bad debts. But with the big names blocking out the light, the little names need all the help they can get.”118 Pierre was quickly rec-

113 Boyd Tonkin, “Independent Book Group: Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre”, The Independent 4 June 2004. 114 John Walsh, “Not Worthy of a Booker Win, but One of a Kind”, The Independent 2 July 2004. 115 Scott Veale, “New & Noteworthy”, The NYTBR 13 June 2004. 116 Lee Norment, “A Boy in Trouble”, Texas Books in Review 31 Oct. 2004. 117 Simon Trewin, “Pile ‘Em High… Then Let ‘Em Die,” The Independent on Sunday 20 June 2004. 118 Susan Johnson, “Don’t Ignore the Mid-List”, The Guardian 23 Oct. 2004.

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ognised as one of the ‘star-authors’ but the status as ‘literary’ author was not applied to his name with quite the same ease. In the second half of 2004, DBC Pierre triggered attention with the theatre adaptation at the Citizens’ theatre in Glasgow (2004), which was reviewed in The Sunday Times in July and in The Independent in October. In a review of the 100 bestselling paperbacks in 2004, compiled by Alex Hamilton, Pierre figured on #74, far behind Haddon’s Curious Incident (in the top 10) but ahead of another 2003 Booker shortlistee, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake at #97.119 Clearly, Pierre could not take up the fight with Mark Haddon in terms of sales but he did accomplish an incredible task of not only making it to the best-of-2004 list but also leaving behind the ‘big hitter’ Atwood and her follow-up novel to the millennial Booker winner. Vernon God Little: Debate and Profile Summary DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little came a long way from the slush pile at a literary agency to winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Depending on the stage at which reviewers dedicated their attention to the novel, they had to assess a very different book. At first, and for the reviewers in the UK, DBC Pierre and the novel were largely unknown objects for discussion. Had it not been for the scarce interest which the book triggered by its first award (Wodehouse Bollinger) and festival presence (Edinburgh), Pierre would have most probably withdrawn entirely from the papers until late summer with the Booker Prize coverage. Hence, the discussion of the 2003 Booker understandably treated him as an outsider with the longlist, a surprise with the shortlist and an odd winner with the final announcement. Contrary to the first responses in the UK, the reviewers in the US encountered Pierre as an author who had already acquired some notoriety due to his dubious past and Vernon God Little as the winner of the Booker Prize – an accolade granted by a UK institution for a book which criticised the US. The aftermath coverage dedicated Pierre more space due to the Booker success and the controversial reception both in the UK and the US – at this stage, critics asked if the book was a worthy winner and adjusted their previous stance accordingly. From the beginning, there were two big unknowns for the critics: the book’s literary status and its author’s national belonging. The grid of questions applied to Pierre’s novel included a positioning within certain literary traditions and an

119 Alex Hamilton, “Fastsellers of 2004 Decoded”, The Guardian 1 Jan. 2005. The numbers were also discussed by J.C. in “NB”, The TLS 7 Jan. 2005.

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evaluation of its authenticity and originality. But reviewers also explicitly debated how much it mattered for the judgment if Pierre’s book was an authentic representation and if so, what it was that it represented: the real Texas, a picture of America’s populace as perceived in the media, a sum of stereotypical imaginings which Europeans harboured about contemporary life in the US? Whatever answers could be given to those questions, it became clear that the ‘intangible’ Pierre hit the right nerve with his contentious debut in a Booker year which directly followed upon the controversially discussed plan of including USAmerican authors as eligible for the Prize.

5.2 A C ROSSOVER “G RAND S LAM ”: M ARK H ADDON ’ S T HE C URIOUS I NCIDENT D OG IN THE N IGHT -T IME

OF THE

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has been described as a curious incident of a book: the story of a young boy in Swindon which became an international bestseller, a children’s book which was also an award-winning adult novel, and one that was loved equally by booksellers, critics and readers.120 On top of this, Mark Haddon, who had been known to the market for ages as a children’s writer, was celebrated as a newcomer to adult fiction but one whose status as ‘literary’ novelist was still to be determined. In the typology of authors, Haddon ticked the boxes for all three categories: established, debut and odd. Accordingly, his novel – which simultaneously appeared in a children’s and an adult imprint and with only a month between the UK and US publications – can also be termed a curious incident of a public and critical attention profile. Almost a year before its publication, and even before advance reader’s copies were being circulated, Mark Haddon’s novel was picked up in trade media reports, or trade reports in daily newspapers. The deal between Haddon’s agent and publishing houses in the UK, the US and other European countries caught the attention of the “Hot Deals” column in Publishers Weekly as early as July 2002. Haddon’s agent Clare Alexander from Gillon Aitken agency (now Aitken

120 For a publishing profile of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and other crossover novels, see Squires, Marketing Literature 161-171. For a discussion of the novel’s itinerary with an emphasis on book awards, see Monica Girard, “The Curious Phenomenon of the Award-Winning Novels: The Case of Mark Haddon”, Pre- and Post-Publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English, eds. Vanessa Guignery and François Gallix (Paris: Éditions Publibook Université, 2007).

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Alexander Associates) sold the UK rights to both Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape and David Fickling at David Fickling Books. In the US, the deal was made with Bill Thomas at Doubleday, and subsequently with Maya Mavjee at Doubleday Canada. The focus was immediately put on the author’s experience in working with autistic children and his novel described as a Sherlock Holmes story with very topical family issues.121 Shortly after, UK general media reported that a new novel – not yet in book form – had found bidders not only among two imprints at Random House but also with a new Warner Brothers company led by Brad Pitt and in cooperation with Harry Potter producer David Heyman.122 And even before the news about a remarkable deal was circulated, publishers seem to have been awaiting this very book without knowing when it would appear or who would write it. In “The Bookseller” column for The Guardian, Nicholas Clee revealed that publishers had been in search for more crossovernovels after the success of the Harry Potter series. Random House was said to have found two potential gold mines with Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident and Jonathan Stround’s Bartimaeus Trilogy. The publication of The Curious Incident with two imprints came with two diverse lists and hence two different realms for comparison. The double publication in the UK saw the novel positioned with Philip Pullman on the children’s side, and Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson and Irvine Welsh on the adult side, said Clee. Two early success lines can be traced on top of the already established “crossover” label for books, “apparently written for children but appealing to adults as well”: its international appeal and its appeal to a multitude of market segments and audiences.123 When the two – children’s and adult – advance reader’s copies finally appeared they could already build on the buzz which was created previously and purely on the basis of hearsay. The adult Jonathan Cape ARC showed a little boy hiding and lurking behind a big black poodle.124 The caption on the back cover presented it as “a truly remarkable novel about an autistic boy” and the description of the book further defined the 15-year-old protagonist’s condition as “Asperger’s, a form of autism”. As “an author, illustrator and screenwriter who has written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs”, Mark Haddon was credited with a “moving […] funny and utterly convincing” depiction of the boy’s character. The key points described the book as an international success

121 John F. Baker, “Obsessed by Sherlock Holmes”, PW 1 July 2002. 122 Cf. Agencies, guardian.co.uk 1 Aug. 2002; and also The Literator, “Cover Stories,” The Independent 2 July 2002. 123 Nicholas Clee, “The Bookseller”, The Guardian 20 July 2002. 124 Cf. appendix, 4a.

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with “rights sold in 15 countries”, a “major film deal”, a “massive publicity and marketing campaign”, and most importantly, “simultaneous publication with David Fickling”. Fickling’s ARC came in a plain orange cover without illustrations.125 It quoted the first lines from the book, described the content as a detective story with references to the protagonist’s fondness for science, math and Sherlock Holmes, and prepared its readers for a suspenseful mystery. In addition to its crossover status, Haddon’s book became an immediate event on both sides of the Atlantic as well as with foreign rights (cross-nation) and one which was picked up with enthusiasm in trade, general and specialist, both literary and non-literary, outlets (cross-media). And this all-encompassing appeal demanded attention from all sides of the media spectrum. Because of the overwhelming attention in trade and general media, the novel’s profile can be arranged according to these settings. There are two long phases of trade media presence, which present a frame to the attention which the book was bestowed in general publications: a phase in which trade reports positioned the book before and after its publication (phase 1: January to August 2003) and a closing one in which trade insiders attempted to get to grips with its success (phase 6: most of the year 2004). Between those, the four phases in general media can be summarised as follows: (2) critical reactions to the book in pre- and post-publication coverage on both sides of the Atlantic (April to July 2003); (3) attention due to a series of prizes on all three levels as children’s, young adult and adult novel which includes the nomination for the Booker Prize (July to October 2003); (4) the Whitbread Book Awards prize coverage cycle and Christmas recommendations (turn of year 2003 and 2004); and (5) media presence after the paperback publications (first half of 2004). Trade Media: Positioning Haddon’s Book in Three Early Stages The first phase of initial positioning of Haddon and his book in trade media can be further organised into three stages. At the very beginning of the year, Haddon was presented as an experienced writer and was allowed to steer the positioning of his book against a clear-cut definition as an issue book. But even before the book’s publication, the categories seemed to change: Haddon was repeatedly introduced as a newcomer and his book a debut with the emphasis on the protagonist’s classification as an autistic genius. When the book was finally available, its label as ‘crossover’ could be tested against the actual sales and the first differences surfaced between UK and US reactions.

125 Cf. appendix, 4b.

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In early 2003, UK and US commentators observed and nourished “a buzz building behind Mark Haddon’s new novel”, a “[c]onsiderable buzz abroad”.126 At this early stage, he was presented as an established writer, an “Oxfordeducated children’s author” and his book in Harry Potter’s footsteps.127 Throughout this early coverage, Haddon opposed the many attempts to position him as an expert on autism and tried to clear the book from possible criticism in advance, stating that he did not want The Curious Incident to become “an ‘issue’ book”, and indicated that he “deliberately did almost no research” and that there was “no secret knowledge” behind it.128 His modest perspective at the setting of the book motivated a more plot-driven outset and made for a good advertisement for the reading: “Very few people are going to be interested in reading about a teenage boy with Asperger’s in Swindon – I’d better make the plot as enticing as I can.”129 Haddon identified with his protagonist and particularly invited male readers to join in by pointing out that “[m]ost of Christopher’s enthusiasms are my enthusiasms as well”, in fact, “most people, especially most men, have a part of their brain that works exactly like Christopher’s.”130 The emphasis on the plot was taken up in descriptions of the book as “a breathless whodunit” but the wellmeaning response may have backfired in parts: “his novel is so memorably idiosyncratic that it may be difficult for him to deliver a follow-up”.131 It is striking that this fear was expressed even before the first book was published. The second stage of trade media interest, directly preceding publication, shifted the book’s positioning and emphasised its status as a “debut”132 and its author as a “first-time novelist”133. The book’s “freshness” was described as surprising, with an air of difference: “[s]ometimes profound characters come in unassuming packages”.134 And when Haddon was presented as a “literary” author, this position was coupled with ‘uniqueness’: his was “a unique and compelling

126 “A Young Detective Obsessed by Detail”, The Bookseller 24 Jan. 2003; “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, PW 7 Apr. 2003. 127 Adam Langer, “The New Harry Houdini: Mark Haddon”, Book 29 Feb. 2003. 128 The Bookseller 24 Jan. 2003. 129 The Bookseller 24 Jan. 2003. 130 The Bookseller 24 Jan. 2003. 131 Langer, Book 29 Feb. 2003. 132 Kristine Huntley, “Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime”, Booklist 1 Apr. 2003; PW 7 Apr. 2003. 133 PW 7 Apr. 2003. 134 David Hellman, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, LJ 1 May 2003.

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literary voice”.135 The author’s adamant rejection of the categorising of his book as issue writing was overruled by commentators who repeatedly presented Christopher as “an autistic math genius”,136 “a kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism”,137 and the book as both “a fascinating case study” and a “revelatory novel”138. The audience was clearly designated in some media as “YA [Young Adult]: Teenage Christopher’s unique perspective will draw YAs to the mystery”.139 In other sources, the ambiguity of classification was based on its adult appeal: “[t]he novel is being marketed to a YA audience, but strong language and adult situations make this a good title for sophisticated readers of all ages.”140 The third stage of trade and marketplace related coverage was an answer to the book’s early sales success, which was primarily seen due to its crossover appeal. Nicholas Clee informed The Guardian’s readers in “The Bookseller” column that the book sold three times as many adult as children’s editions (approximately 1800:600).141 The definition of crossover as “written for a young audience but with appeal to readers of all ages” seemed somewhat stretched when the book’s “appeal” outdid the claim of who it was “written” for.142 Its uniqueness was emphasised on both sides of the Atlantic with the slight difference that UK reactions drew on a US literary tradition and, for example, described it as “an unclassifiable work, like The Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird”.143 No such comparisons were made in the US at this stage where the book was described as standing entirely on its own: “I’ve never read another book quite like this one, in which so many risks are taken to such singularly fine effect”.144 Instead, more emphasis was placed on giving the author “credit” for an authentic representation of Christopher “as a true character, not a type”.145 The author was emphasised as the maker behind the success, one who has powers over the read-

135 PW 7 Apr. 2003. 136 Huntley, Booklist 1 Apr. 2003. 137 “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, KR 15 Mar. 2003. 138 PW 7 Apr. 2003. 139 Huntley, Booklist 1 Apr. 2003. 140 Hellman, LJ 1 May 2003. 141 Nicholas Clee, “The Bookseller”, The Guardian 10 May 2003. 142 Clee, The Guardian 10 May 2003. 143 Clee, The Guardian 10 May 2003. 144 Beth Kephart, “Little Sherlock”, Book July/Aug. 2003. 145 Kephart, Book July/Aug. 2003.

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er, “making them want to protect the boy”.146 Haddon’s status began to shift between established auteur and the gifted creator of a one-off success. Original, Odd or One-Off? Pre- and Post-Publication Reviews in UK and US General Media The UK adult hardback edition displayed three endorsement quotes which had a great impact on the initial reactions to the book.147 The first praise for Haddon’s The Curious Incident came from fellow writers Ian McEwan, author of Amsterdam and Atonement (1998/2000, both published by Jonathan Cape, Random House); Arthur Golden, author of the Memoirs of a Geisha (1997, published by Knopf, Random House); and British-American neurologist, psychologist and writer Oliver Sacks. Former Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan refrained from using the medical term “autism” and instead praised “Mark Haddon’s portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind” as “a superb achievement”: “He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.” US author Arthur Golden, whose international bestseller triggered a rights controversy and was made into an Academy Award-winning film, saw Haddon’s novel and particularly its narrator as one of a kind: “I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon’s funny and agonisingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won’t want to lend yours out.” The last testimonial voice came from Oliver Sacks, “who knows as much about autism as anyone”,148 and who took a big part in the book’s media coverage – in person and via blurbs. These debate teasers and the publisher’s descriptions were welcome invitations for reviewers and other media coverage to engage in discussing Haddon’s literary credentials as well as the comedy and empathy of his book. They also foreshadow some of the very personal responses to the novel on the part of a large variety of readers. The debate of Haddon’s book was first taken up in a short critical response and two longer interviews before the double publication in May 2003. The Curious Incident was anonymously reviewed in The Times and discussed in interviews in The Observer, conducted by Kate Kellaway, staff writer and children’s’ books editor, and The Times, where Haddon spoke to the Arts & Entertainment editor Tim Teeman. The very positive Times review – “[it] isn’t simply the most original novel I’ve read in years […] it’s also one of the best” – took up the

146 Kephart, Book July/Aug. 2003. 147 Cf. appendix, 4d. 148 Kate Kellaway, “Autistic Differences”, The Observer 27 Apr. 2003.

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book’s foil, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, and concentrated on Haddon’s display of empathy and yet lack of sentimentality.149 These notions were fully developed in the longer Times and Observer pieces: Haddon was said to be “so empathetic it is almost a problem”; his all-round artistic talent apparently made him “preposterously versatile”.150 Even when Haddon presented his career as a literary outsider and hinted at the possibility to enter these circles with his latest work – “I felt for years that I had my little cold face pressed to the windowpane of the House of Literature and they were all in there” – the interviewer was not prepared to give him the satisfaction that he belonged to the literary circles, even if it was meant to stress his uniqueness.151 Haddon’s originality had its price. The challenge of a book which promised to be all-encompassing in terms of market segments and audiences was to be judged from all corners of reviewing and satisfy the different criteria used in them. After its publication, the book immediately made The Sunday Times bestseller list in May and The Times hardbacks fiction list in June, which it entered at #4 and where it remained for the rest of the summer, then bounced back with Christmas sales until the paperback edition replaced it in April 2004. The Curious Incident met with a wide range of reviews in national newspapers and weeklies. Negative evaluations of the novel made up the smaller part of the overall reactions. These came in the form of negations of the aforementioned questions: was the account of the autistic boy authentic and could the result be called a work of literature? In fact, the only very negative review – one which was capable of denying hitherto advocated claims of authenticity and legitimacy based on the author’s own legitimate claims – was written by Nicholas Barrow for The Spectator. Barrow, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s, found the book “patronising, inaccurate and not entertaining”.152 The reviewer found few convincing parts but conceded a certain practical purpose: “it could definitely help untrained staff in schools and care homes”.153 Yet, Barrow was not the only one to express a critical judgment. Hugo Barnacle, literary critic for The Sunday Times and the author of two novels, Promise (1989) and Day One (1998), concluded an other-

149 “The Spectrum Within”, The Times 23 Apr. 2003. 150 Kellaway, The Observer 27 Apr. 2003. 151 Kellaway, The Observer 27 Apr. 2003. 152 Nicholas Barrow, “It Ain’t Necessarily So”, The Spectator 17 May 2003. 153 Bereft of these positive aspects, The Spectator article sounds much harsher in a shortened version re-printed in The Guardian on 7 June 2003. “Good Questions, Wicked Answers”, The Guardian 7 June 2003.

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wise rather positive review on a negative note in pointing out that Haddon’s book risked supporting “two most pervasive and falsely cute received ideas about the condition”: neither was autism limited to children, nor was it necessarily accompanied by “extraordinary talent”.154 Also, Barnacle was less prepared to grant overly praise for the book’s originality perceiving “the usual boy-genius approach” and a “rather good old-fashioned plot”.155 The description of the book’s weaknesses was an exception in a series of very supportive assessments but the need to establish credibility was also evident from more enthusiastic critics. In The Guardian, Charlotte Moore, mother of two autistic sons and author of a book about her experience with autism, acknowledged that “Mark Haddon’s study of the condition is superbly realised”, adding that she would “love to know what a reader with Asperger’s thinks of this book” but stressed that “this is not simply a novel about disability”.156 In The Telegraph, Carol Ann Duffy, Scottish poet and playwright, and later the first Scot, the first woman and the first openly LGBT person to hold the post of poet laureate, presented the book as a children’s book, rather than an adult novel. Duffy evaluated the children’s edition as a “double mystery” and “a rite of passage”, concluding that Christopher was “a new kind of hero”, the representation was “believable” and “authentic”, and the result a “moving education in difference”, a “humbling instruction […] that the best lives are lived where difference is cherished”.157 With its main themes of love and beauty, the book was lauded as “suited for 11-year-olds and upwards”.158 The novel was definitely shown the green light in the children’s section. US media coverage came in three stages of pre-publication interest, postpublication coverage and post-Today-Show-publicity. It began with prepublication reviews on Salon.com, in The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review. Post-publication reviews were printed in late June and July in San Francisco Chronicle, Star Tribune and the alternative weekly tabloid, The Village Voice. The New York Times review was accompanied by a book extract. After the book’s publication, the review span was exceptionally long and overlapped with recommendations for summer reading and prize coverage in the UK.

154 Hugo Barnacle, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon”, The Sunday Times 18 May 2003. 155 Barnacle, The Sunday Times 18 May 2003. 156 Charlotte Moore, “Just the Facts, Ma’am”, The Guardian 24 May 2003. 157 Carol Ann Duffy, “The Boy Who Could Not Tell a Lie”, The Telegraph 20 May 2003. 158 Duffy, The Telegraph 20 May 2003.

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The reason for this prolonged attention was a spectacular introduction of Haddon’s book to US audiences via the NBC’s Today Show and its book club format in which a well-known author selects a book by a lesser known writer. The Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling American author and columnist Dave Barry chose The Curious Incident and met Haddon for an interview with host Katie Kouric which was broadcast on 31 July 2003. The book’s new status as a Today Show Book Club book #13 steered an impressive amount of attention. Doubleday released a new hardback edition with 130,000 copies in print which entered The New York Times bestseller list at #11 and the Publishers Weekly list at #8, and held on to both from early August to late-October. The book was positively reviewed throughout summer and fall in national and regional, daily and weekly media (among others, The Washington Post, St Petersburg Times and Newsweek). It received four stars in Barnes & Noble’s Book magazine in a review by Beth Hart, American author of non-fiction, poetry and young adult fiction for adults and teens. Finally, and adding another boost to sales and attention, Haddon was interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition in October. His explanations of how he came to write the book and discovered that Christopher’s voice was “gold dust” were interspersed with Oliver Sacks’s appraisal, who again vouched for its authenticity and explained its psychological appeal: “the book is at a very deep level about coming to terms with limits”.159 The US reviews were unanimously positive and shared three distinguishing points in their discussion of The Curious Incident: 1) making their ideas of what literature does, or should do, a little more explicit than their UK colleagues and applying this ‘poetics’ to their judgment, 2) discussing the seemingly inept but surprisingly effective narrator, and 3) detecting a fine line between emotionality and sentimentality and praising Haddon for walking it successfully. Laura Miller, co-founder of and staff writer for the online magazine Salon.com, explained her approach to literature as she reviewed the book. She claimed that “we have to read between the lines” as the narrator was not to be trusted, after all, he was “under the impression – perhaps erroneous? – that his mother is dead”.160 Miller depicted depth, “vast reservoirs of human suffering and courage” beneath seeming lightness, “its sprightly, peculiar surface”.161 In contrast to her later negative response to DBC Pierre’s “Celtic lilt” she was at that time prepared to explain

159 Martha Woodroof, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, NPR Weekend Edition 12 Oct. 2003. 160 Laura Miller, “‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ by Mark Haddon”, Salon.com 12 June 2003. 161 Miller, Salon.com 12 June 2003.

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some of the British English vocabulary: “garden fork (which is, I’m guessing, British for ‘pitchfork’).”162 Michiko Kakutani praised Haddon in The New York Times for his “detective story” turned “bildungsroman” and for handling “big issues of love and mortality and loss without sounding maudline or trite”.163 Her colleague, Jay McInerney, novelist and screenwriter, first explained his concept of genre and literary fiction and then described The Curious Incident as belonging to both traditions: “it eschews most of the furnishings of high-literary enterprise as well as the conventions of genre, disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect”.164 In the San Francisco Chronicle, Kate Washington, a freelance food and travel writer, editor, and co-founder of a small literary publisher, saw Haddon perform in a genre which she defined as firmly rooted in sentiment: “The imaginative leap of writing a novel – the genre that began as an exercise in sentiment – without overt emotion is a daring one, and Haddon pulls it off beautifully”.165 In the line of positioning Haddon in what the critic may perceive as a literary achievement, Nani Power, the author of three novels and a food memoir, evoked a dialogic communication between author and reader: The essence of good writing is a sort of cataloguing, if you will, with the author supplying the details of the world he wants to evoke and the reader supplying the nuances of interpretation. Thanks to the brilliance of Haddon’s prose, this back-and-forth works extremely well in The Curious Incident.166

Film editor and critic Dennis Lim found himself immersed in the book and emphasised the importance of Christopher’s peculiarity in a review which was peppered with numerous quotations and references and finished praising the boy’s logical criticism as “head-butting the bulwark of religion”.167 His article came with a picture of Haddon whose caption reversed the voice-lending which had been praised throughout the book’s reception,168 and put Christopher’s self-

162 Miller, Salon.com 12 June 2003. 163 Michiko Kakutani, “Math and Physics? A Cinch. People? Incomprehensible”, The NYT 13 June 2003. 164 Jay McInerney, “The Remains of the Dog”, The NYTBR 15 June 2003. 165 Kate Washington, “Detached Detective”, San Francisco Chronicle 22 June 2003. 166 Nani Power, “Feeling His Way,” The Washington Post 10 Aug. 2003. 167 Dennis Lim, “Auto Focus”, The Village Voice 22 July 2003. 168 Cf. e.g. Washington, San Francisco Chronicle 22 June 2003; and later reviews after the Today Show: John Freeman, “An Autistic Mind Unleashed”, St Petersburg Times 2 Sept. 2003; David Noonan, “Allowed to Be Odd”, Newsweek 7 Sept. 2003.

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description in the author’s mouth: “I can’t do chatting: Curious author Mark Haddon”.169 Haddon’s public persona was becoming more and more linked to his ‘quirky’ protagonist. Children’s, Teenage and Adult Appeal: Summer Reading, The Booker and other Prizes The spring and summer dates of publication meant that UK and US responses to the hardback edition were interspersed with reviews of the audio format and summer reading recommendations. The Curious Incident met the award cycle coverage in July 2003 – after its publication in both the UK (May 2003) and the US (June 2003) and after it achieved bestseller status. There were two main exceptional points with Haddon’s success when it came to literary prizes: his book was nominated for children’s, teenage and adult awards, an “unprecedented literary triple”,170 and he was awarded prizes for newcomers as well as for established writers. Reviews of the audio format, printed in The Times, The Observer and The Guardian, joined the reactions to the book format in positioning the author. In addition, they also predicted how listeners would feel about Christopher. In The Guardian, Sue Arnold lined up with the literary contextualisation and saw Haddon’s narrator join other fictional adolescent boys – David Copperfield, Tom Brown, Holden Caulfield, Adrian Mole and Harry Potter – whose co-presence would be recognised by “a literary audience”.171 She added another prognosis anticipating the listener’s feelings: “Infuriating as he is, you cannot help loving Christopher as much as his estranged parents clearly do.”172 Arnold broke with the hitherto more or less explicit practice to hold back suspenseful parts of the plot and revealed the secret that the mother “has actually run off with another man”, insinuating that her review and the book targeted an adult rather than children’s audience.173 The audio edition, also published by Random House, was

169 Lim, The Village Voice 22 July 2003. 170 John Ezard, “Curious Incident of Writer’s Literary Hat Trick”, The Guardian 13 Nov. 2003. 171 Sue Arnold, “Child’s Play”, The Guardian 12 July 2003. 172 Arnold, The Guardian 12 July 2003. 173 Arnold, The Guardian 12 July 2003.

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awarded “the annual Oscars of the audiobook industry, the Spoken Word Awards” in September 2003.174 Haddon’s book proved a very popular beach read. It was recommended in summer reviews in The Sunday Times, The New York Times, TIME magazine and The Independent. The first three articles were only a paragraph long and gave short summaries of a funny and original novel. The only longer summer review was also the first reaction to the hardback edition in The Independent. Christopher Fowler, a British thriller writer, elaborated on some of the points made by colleagues previously: the idea that Christopher appeared as anything but “the ideal person to investigate a mystery”, the originality of this “unique novel”, Haddon’s understanding and “insight”.175 But Fowler also noticed that “we’re not reading a mystery novel at all” and that this was in fact “Haddon’s best trick”, so good that the reviewer could only hope it was not a one-off: “[o]ne can only pray that Haddon finds a way to write a sequel”.176 The first award, for which The Curious Incident attracted press coverage, was the 2003 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize with the longlist announced on 5 July, the shortlist on 9 September and the winner on 2 October 2003. As much as The Guardian itself promoted this category prize alongside its first book award, other newspapers hardly commented on it. The few pages dedicated to the award were dominated by Haddon’s book which was compatible with both points of observation about the longlist as noted by Julia Eccleshare, chair of the judges: “the preponderance of first-person narratives, especially of boys aged between 10 and 15” and “the stories of people who would once have been left out of fiction (and life) on the grounds of their ‘differences’: Down’s syndrome, synaesthesia and autism have all made an appearance.”177 The shortlist announcement was accompanied by a series of young readers’ reviews, which were in line with the many testimonials of the novel’s crossover appeal offered by adult reviewers but came with added legitimacy. By the time Haddon’s novel was announced as the winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the media had already discussed that he had missed the Booker Prize shortlist to the surprise of that year’s chair of judges. This piece of news was commented upon by Claire Armitstead with a tongue-in-cheek remark

174 Christina Hardyment, “Audiobooks: The Curious Incident of the Dog in NightTime”, The Times 20 Sept. 2003. 175 Christopher Fowler, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon,” The Independent 7 July 2003. 176 Fowler, The Independent 7 July 2003. 177 Julia Eccleshare, “New Voices, Different Lives”, The Guardian 5 July 2003.

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in reference to the other judging panel: “There was no such bad blood between the judges of the Guardian’s prize, all of whom are distinguished children’s authors”.178 The Guardian’s literary editor positioned Haddon as an established author; after all, The Curious Incident was “the 40-year-old writer’s first novel but he has produced 14 picture books for children”, who was well known to The Guardian’s readership having previously collaborated with the paper on “the cartoon strip Men – A User’s Guide on the Guardian’s women’s page”.179 The chair of judges, Julia Eccleshare, praised the novel for being “one of the few titles for which the ubiquitous claim of ‘crossover’ is not a gimmick”.180 Winning the children’s prize endowed Haddon with further coverage, most prominently a long interview conducted by Armitstead, in which the author of The Curious Incident followed up on his earlier interview with The Telegraph, stressing the points of how he came up with the idea for the novel, that he did very little research for it, that he identified with Christopher’s math fascination and the shame for his previous attempts at novel writing. Haddon’s cooperation with translators and foreign edition publishers showed the author in discussion with other participants in literary interaction. He expressed his pride over the fact that, apart from the Dutch edition, “there is no bowdlerisation of the text” in the UK children’s edition which included the same amount of swear words as its adult counterpart.181 One day after the announcement, John Crace, better known for his satirical take on books rather than serious value judgments, included The Curious Incident as a positive example of “the holy grail of children’s publishing”, “reaching both boys and girls” in addition to its appeal for both adult and children: “It avoids the twee and worthy, and never fudges the issues, while letting the central character, Christopher John Francis Boone, drive the narrative.”182 The candour of the novel succeeded in stipulating a benevolent response even from the most acerbic critics. In the meantime, and as already hinted at in the first Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize cycle, Haddon was mentioned in the media after his book’s inclusion on the Man Booker Prize for Fiction longlist on 15 August 2003. From among the longlisted titles, Haddon was reported with odds at 20/1, far behind

178 Claire Armitstead, “Mystery Narrated by Autistic Boy Wins Guardian Prize”, The Guardian 3 Oct. 2003. 179 Armitstead, The Guardian 3 Oct. 2003. 180 Julia Eccleshare, “A Captivating Winner”, The Guardian 3 Oct. 2003. 181 Claire Armitstead, “Plots, Puzzles and a Punctured Poodle”, The Guardian 4 Oct. 2003. 182 John Crace, “Teenage Kicks”, The Guardian 4 Oct. 2003.

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Coetzee, Amis or Atwood, but better than the eventual winner, DBC Pierre who was handled at 25/1 by betting offices William Hill and Ladbrokes. In the course of the nomination coverage, Haddon was often listed together with Pierre among the “outsiders with a good chance”,183 as “[a]nother surprise inclusion”,184 and “[o]ne unusual choice”.185 Claire Armitstead classified him, along with Pierre, as an “emerging talent” but clarified that The Curious Incident was “a first novel for older readers, though not a first book from a 41-year-old with a string of television credits and children’s books to his name”.186 The staff with The Observer picked it among their favourites to make the shortlist and applauded the author for having “pull[ed] off something extraordinary”,187 as did Erica Wagner in The Times and the “NB” columnist in The Times Literary Supplement: “Our predictions for the shortlist […] are: Brick Lane by Monica Ali, Turn Again Home by Carol Birch, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon and Heligoland by Shena Mackay, in addition to Coetzee and Swift.”188 Yet, paradoxically, it was with the announcement of the actual shortlist in mid-September 2003 and his absence from it, that Haddon managed to tease out more Booker attention than with the inclusion on the longlist. With JM Coetzee and Graham Swift also omitted from the narrower selection, John Carey, chair of judges, was quoted throughout the papers with a much better advertisement for Haddon than he could have hoped for (unless, presumably, had he won): “We have several clashes of opinion among the judges […] but I found Haddon’s book about a boy with Asperger’s syndrome breathtaking. It is an extraordinary thing that these educated people don’t agree.”189 With Carey’s praise, the interest in Haddon’s book can be said to have been raised despite the fact that his Booker hopes were officially over. The inclusion on the longlist alone and the discussion which ensued after he was not kept in the pool of nominees for the shortlist, secured wider interest online and offline throughout September and October. Most of all, The Curious

183 McCrum, The Observer 17 Aug. 2003. 184 Justine Jordan, “Booker Longlist Includes Amis, Snubs Carey”, guardian.co.uk 15 Aug. 2003. 185 Ezard, The Guardian 16 Aug. 2003. 186 Claire Armitstead, “Accent on Passionate Preferences for Regional Voices”, The Guardian 16 Aug. 2003. 187 The Observer 17 Aug. 2003. 188 J.C., “NB”, The TLS 22 Aug. 2003. 189 Gibbons, The Guardian 17 Sept. 2003; cf. also McCrum, The Observer 21 Sept. 2003.

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Incident found its way into the London Review of Books where it was very positively reviewed by Eleanor Birne, editor and critic, who introduced the book with an anecdote about her uncle with Asperger’s Syndrome and ended on a slightly different note than previous commentators: “This is the parents’ story – it’s always the parents’ story.”190 John Dugdale in The Sunday Times noted Haddon’s Booker miss but predicted more accolades in store: Haddon’s debut could still achieve a remarkable treble. It won the children’s over-6 prize (and two others) in last week’s Spoken Word Awards for audiotapes[…]; it is shortlisted as teen fiction in the Booktrust Teenage prize; and its publisher has entered it as an adult novel, rather than in the children’s category, in the Whitbread awards – making a unique all-age grand slam a real possibility.191 Dugdale was to be proven right. On 7 November 2003 Haddon won the 2003 inaugural Booktrust Teenage Prize. Although the prize did not draw much media attention, it was mentioned in later coverage of Haddon’s novel proving that prizes, too, profit from the selection of an author with a high profile. The Whitbread’s Recognition: The Curious Incident as a Literary Adult Novel With the added attention from prize coverage and its bestseller status, Haddon’s book figured strongly in end-of-year reviews for 2003. Among others, his novel was mentioned in The Sunday Times as part of “The Top 5” fiction titles, in The Times Literary Supplement as part of the “Books of the Year”, and in The New York Times as part of the “Notable Books”. David Robson from The Telegraph reported that Haddon’s book led that year’s Christmas recommendations.192 Over the Christmas break, The Curious Incident won the attention of a new audience through two reviews in psychiatry journals, The American Journal of Psychiatry and Psychiatric Services. The publication of the audio format in the US was prepared for in trade media, first in the Booklist, later in the Library Journal. Before the year’s end, the novel was used as comparison in reviews of both fiction and non-fiction with similar themes (e.g. Jill Dawson’s Sceptre, a novel about a boy who was raised by wolves and who was educated by a young doctor in Paris,193

190 Eleanor Birne, “Doing Chatting”, LRB 9 Oct. 2003. 191 Dugdale, The Sunday Times 28 Sept. 2003. 192 Robson, The Telegraph 22 Dec. 2003. 193 Amanda Craig, “Fiction – the Changeling”, New Statesman 13 Oct. 2003.

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and with Jacqui Jackson’s Multicoloured Mayhem, the account of a mother of seven children, three of whom have Asperger’s, autism and ADHD194). Mostly, however, the turn of the year was marked by media coverage of the Whitbread Novel Award.195 The announcement of the shortlist was another opportunity to recall the Booker Prize misjudgment,196 the crossover appeal which was found in harmony with the Whitbread selection criteria in comparing books from different categories (poetry, biography, children’s book, first novel and novel),197 and the tradition of Rowling’s and Pullman’s bestselling series198. Jasper Rees – though not directly in reference to the Whitbread – reflected on the “new phenomenon, as more adults pick up books aimed at young readers” in The Telegraph and the question whether this was a good or bad development stirred the media around the turn of the year 2003 and 2004. Many critics favoured Haddon from the start. Erica Wagner, the literary editor of The Times, turned away with contempt from the other Whitbread nominee and previous Booker Prize winner, DBC Pierre, to praise Haddon and his book instead.199 John Ezard, writer and reporter for The Guardian, dedicated half of his article about the shortlist to Haddon, whose picture featured on top, and not surprisingly after the previous prize success, emphasised Haddon’s appeal for all “three audiences”: children, teenagers and adults.200 Louise Jury, arts correspondent for The Inde-

194 Nicholas Barrow, “Much More Than a Handful”, The Spectator 27 Dec. 2003. 195 Haddon’s book was mentioned in reports of the category shortlists in mid-November in The Guardian, The Times, and The Independent; the category winners in The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times; and the overall winner in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Bookseller, The New York Times and USA Today. In early January, a book extract from each of the category winners was printed in The Guardian. The prize coverage was interspersed by three long profiles in The Independent, The Times and The Sunday Times. 196 Cf. Wagner, The Times 13 Nov. 2003; also Ezard, The Guardian 13 Nov. 2003; Jury, The Independent 13 Nov. 2003; and esp. Literator, The Independent 14 Nov. 2003: “Professor John Carey, although chair of the judges, failed to secure a Man Booker shortlist place for Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which he loved.” 197 Cf. Wagner, The Times 13 Nov. 2003: “All boundaries in literature are blurred; sometimes the Whitbread, for all its peculiarities, can remind us of that.” 198 Cf. Ezard, The Guardian 13 Nov. 2003; also J.C., “NB”, The TLS 16 Jan. 2004. 199 Wagner, The Times 13 Nov. 2003. 200 Ezard, The Guardian 13 Nov. 2003.

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pendent, listed Haddon as favourite for the Novel Award.201 And yet, as the previous analysis of DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little showed, the Booker winner may not have been the favourite among critics but quickly drew media attention to his person so that the pair became a rival couple even before they were announced as category winners.202 When the five Whitbread category winners were announced in early January, the theme of adolescent boys prevailed. Pierre may have been the one who led coverage but when it came to sales, Vernon God Little could not quite contain its position, having sold only a third of the copies which The Curious Incident brought over the counter, according to Waterstones. And although the crossover bestseller had achieved bestseller status with Christmas sales, Whitbread’s choice was said to have augmented this, leading to repeated comparisons with previous Booker winner Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. The shortlist was rounded off with a long interview in The Independent, which listed the reasons how “the phenomenon, which began quietly in June last year” struck “publishing gold”.203 Haddon saw its appeal in “the pleasure principle” but the reviewer insisted that it also had ‘literary’ appeal: “a dazzling work of post-modernism”, “a subtle tradeoff between high seriousness and teenage playfulness”.204 Walsh conceded, however, that its success also relied on points of identification: “Every reader has, I suspect, been responding to both his Inner Child, his Inner Nice Guy and his Inner Smart-Alec, all at the same time.”205 The Curious Incident was announced Whitbread Book of the Year on 27 January 2004 and the decision was welcomed. The judges were quoted praising the winner for the ability “to express the voice of a child with a form of autism […] without patronising the boy’s voice”, while Haddon himself described his success as “a delusional psychotic fantasy come true”.206 All reports made references to film rights having been sold and one mentioned that Haddon turned down an offer from Broadway to stage The Curious Incident as a musical.207 The most distanced article was included in The Times, where Wagner, after a disdainful rejection of DBC Pierre in a previous report, still praised Haddon but did not warm towards it quite as much as she had then, now favouring the runner-up,

201 Jury, The Independent 13 Nov. 2003. 202 Literator, The Independent 14 Nov. 2003. 203 John Walsh, “Mark Haddon: This Year’s Big Read”, The Independent 22 Jan. 2004. 204 Walsh, The Independent 22 Jan. 2004. 205 Walsh, The Independent 22 Jan. 2004. 206 Reynolds, The Telegraph 28 Jan. 2004. 207 John Ezard, “Favourite Haddon Wins Whitbread”, The Guardian 28 Jan. 2004.

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“Paterson’s wonderful, complex verse” over the easier accessible children’s book.208 Curiously and surprisingly for the duo perceived in a close rivalry, the overall winner coverage brought poet Don Paterson and not DBC Pierre to light as Haddon’s main contestant. The judges decided to reveal the close outcome in what proved an unusually candid move: During a tough two-hour judging session, the Booker winner was dumped early and The Curious Incident had to slug it out with a collection of poetry, Landing Light, by the Scottish poet Don Paterson, before it was declared the winner. Haddon’s book had been 11/8 favourite with Ladbrokes, against 3-1 for Pierre and 5-1 for Paterson. The result was far closer than pundits expected. The last two in the ring before the judges’ meeting were only divided by a show of hands. The judges took the unusual step of insisting that their chairman, the broadcaster Joan Bakewell, should disclose at the prizegiving ceremony in London how narrow the victory was.209

A similarly “unusual” disclosure was to shake the 2008 Costa (Whitbread) Book Awards, when Sebastian Barry topped Adam Foulds (cf. chapter 6.2). Before his book was published in paperback format, Haddon was presented with the South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature on 23 January 2004. In the midst of the many accolades, his success continued to marvel journalists. The Guardian’s arts and heritage correspondent, Maev Kennedy, noted: “There was another twist yesterday in the curious incident, of the small, odd children’s book which became a runaway adult bestseller”.210 In an interview with Haddon for The Sunday Times, Amanda Craig, a British novelist and passionate champion of children’s literature, summed up the many layers of appeal: “at once a detective story, a literary triumph and a commercial success that has grown by word of mouth to beat David Beckham, Harry Potter and the Atkins diet in the bestseller list”.211 Craig mentioned especially the influence which the unofficial endorsement of the Booker’ chair of judges had in creating more attention for the novel

208 Erica Wagner, “Whitbread Hunt Ends in Curious Incident”, The Times 28 Jan. 2004. 209 Reynolds, The Telegraph 28 Jan. 2004; Cf. also Boyd Tonkin, “The Anticipated Incident: Hot Favourite Wins Whitbread Award”, The Independent 28 Jan. 2004. 210 Maev Kennedy, “Curious Incident of the Children’s Book Which Won South Bank Award”, The Guardian 24 Jan. 2004. 211 Amanda Craig, “An Unlikely Triumph for the Autistic Kid from Swindon”, The Sunday Times 1 Feb. 2004.

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but also highlighted the role of word-of-mouth recommendations – an undisputed if least reliable accelerator of sales and fame. Paperback Publications: Another Cycle of Prize Attention and Seasonal Recommendations The launch of the paperbacks was again orchestrated by two imprints if with a short delay. The UK children’s edition by Red Fox, Random House, came out in February 2004. It was surrounded by two children’s reviews in The Times in February and March. The adult paperback editions in UK and US respectively came out in April and May 2004 and were accompanied by reviews in The Observer, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, as well as the Times Higher Education. On the other side of the Atlantic, The Curious Incident was being evaluated anew in The New York Times Book Review. Paperback reviews were less reluctant to keep back plot secrets and the book read quite differently when its ending was revealed. This resulted in descriptions of a story “about lies and […] the complications of everyday life”,212 one in which simplicity was stronger than “counsels of the cunning”,213 and one which portrayed “the messy, emotionally complicated secrets of [Christopher’s] parents”.214 Completed by the story of Christopher’s search for his mother and the reason for it, the book lost some of its pastel colours as reviewers reveal that the perpetrator “turns out to be his own cuckolded father” and “Christopher then embarks on an epic trip to London, a journey into the unknown, to be reunited with his mother.”215 In the descriptions in the general media, The Curious Incident gradually turned into an adult novel. Another layer of reviewing which was to attest authenticity was presented in the weekly magazine Times Higher Education. Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development in London, read Haddon’s book along Jill Dawson’s Wild Boy and judged the former the easier, less educative read about autism. But the reviewer also specified, as did US reviewers before, the criteria according to which the value of issue books could be determined: “There are two criteria that make novels worth rec-

212 Gordon Thomson, “Shaggy Dog Story”, The Observer 14 Mar. 2004. 213 Murrough O’Brien, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon”, The Independent on Sunday 28 Mar. 2004. 214 Scott Veale, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, The NYTBR 30 May 2004. 215 Thomson, The Observer 14 Mar. 2004.

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ommending to students, teachers or parents who are seeking information on specific topics. The first is that the author has thoroughly researched the relevant domain. The second is that the author demonstrates literary talent.”216 An expert for the first rather than the second criterion, Karmiloff-Smith emphasised that Haddon’s was a literary account, not a realistic portrayal of autism and she explicitly chastised those non-scientific reviewers of the book for thinking otherwise. As for Haddon’s status as a literary author, she claimed, this could only be determined if he were to prove himself in later works: “Time will tell whether Haddon has the capacity to narrate through a multitude of other voices.”217 Her comments lent transparency to the risks which reviewers take in assessing books for the literary and topical merit and they emphasised the difficulty of ad hoc literary judgments. The period between the UK and US publication was taken up with an avalanche of awards. In a unique series of nominations, Haddon took a special position at the British Book Awards in April 2004, for which he was nominated in five categories – Author of the Year, Book of the Year, Children’s Book of the Year, the Literary Fiction Award, as well as Audiobook of the Year – and picked up the latter three.218 The Nibbies, as the awards were affectionately called in the publishing world, largely awarded for financial success, again increased sales.219 In May, the press reported “a Random double” when Caryl Phillips won the Best Book and Mark Haddon the Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.220 Without much controversial stirring but with some potential detected, Maya Jaggi, a profile-writer and critic for The Guardian, conducted an interview with the two authors whom she represented as “self-professed republicans” after they had declined to see the Queen at the prize’s reception. Phillips’ political stance on the matter was thoroughly explained, the other “refusenik” was excused on account of his writing: “ostracism of outsiders is also a theme of Had-

216 Annette Karmiloff-Smith, “Tales of Autism, with and without a Rainman Gloss”, Times Higher Education 11 June 2004. 217 Karmiloff-Smith, Times Higher Education 11 June 2004. 218 “Truss Wins Book of the Year Award”, USA Today 8 Apr. 2004. 219 “Haddon Rockets to the Top”, The Bookseller 16 Apr. 2004. 220 Cf. Squires, Marketing Literature 165: “It can only be assumed that his previous children’s books did not count as ‘Books’, a sign that … the processes of literary marketing can work in slightly devious ways by effacing the memories of previous books, as well as running counter to the narrative of the children’s market in a golden age.”

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don’s fiction”.221 The Curious Incident was rewarded with other prizes, which attracted only marginal attention in the papers: the 2004 McKitterick Prize, the 2004 Alex Awards, the 2005 Dolly Gray’s Children’s Literature; and, in addition, was nominated for the 2003 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2003 Carnegie Medal, the 2004 WH Smith Award for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The much-acclaimed novel was again widely recommended as summer reading in 2004. In August, the author attended the Edinburgh Book Festival. Haddon was also interviewed in The Sunday Times and The New York Times. Both interviewers introduced Haddon with a long list of accomplishments and an immense change in his career within one year from the summer of 2003 to that of 2004. Haddon responded to his new position with an explicit comment on the price writers and artists pay for the sake of promotion: “‘It occurs to me […] that those novelists who are famous curmudgeons are in fact wiser than we know and are happily sitting at home writing the next novel, while I’m being interviewed by the man from Dogs Today,’ an English magazine”.222 Evidently, there are two sides to succeeding in the literary marketplace. In the midst of the hype, two important media events focused on the book’s content and the author’s literary ambitions rather than its marketing and sales figures. First, Haddon wrote an article for The Observer, in which he described his own reaction to the immense success of his novel and what it felt like to be a bestselling author. More strikingly, however, and in one big sweep, he discussed many of the questions which were posed in interviews and raised in reviews and opinion columns: fears of alleged “juvenization” of our culture, the distinction between literary and genre fiction, his relationship with science and his perspective on religion.223 Secondly, John Mullan picked The Curious Incident for The Guardian’s Book Club, where it was analysed in four instalments in reference to its narrator, language and humour from late April to mid-May. Mullan’s attention in the book club series, in particular, tested its appeal for academic interest and provided the grounds which would later be taken up in the novel’s ‘aftermath’.

221 Maya Jaggi, “No Thanks, Ma’am”, The Guardian 15 June 2005. 222 Mel Gussow, “Novel’s Sleuth Views Life from Unusual Perspective”, The NYT 3 Aug. 2004. 223 Mark Haddon, “B Is for Bestseller”, The Observer 11 Apr. 2004.

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The Aftermath in Trade Media: Getting to Grips with Haddon’s Success After the first three initial stages of positioning and evaluating in the first half of the year 2003, trade media had a particular feast trying to decipher the success of Haddon’s novel throughout 2004. Along with the huge Christmas sales success and augmented interest with and after the Whitbread, US trade media reacted with another wave of attention in early 2004. Undecided upon the exact positioning, they advertised Haddon’s book in adult, young adult and children’s sections.224 Around the paperback publication in the US, media concentrated on reports of Mark Haddon’s promotional tour of his “poodlecide” novel and threw some light on its recognition in America: “a new audience can discover the unique work that was a New York Times Notable Book, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was named Whitbread Best Book of the Year and was a Today Show Book Club selection”.225 After the Whitbread coverage, The Bookseller focused mainly on explaining the reasons for its vast success. This was seen as based on the crossover publishing phenomenon, “the remarkable feat of simultaneously appearing in the original, mass-market and children’s fiction lists in Random House’s various editions”,226 the manifold literary awards and coverage of these,227 as well as the double appeal as a literary and commercial success228. A lengthy article claimed

224 The Library Journal recommended the book for the whole family and “for all collections” (Michael Adams, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon”, LJ Jan. 2004); while Booklist had an article in its Adult Books for Young Adults (Mary McCay, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, Booklist 1 Jan. 2004) and promoted it as Audio for Adults (“Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, Booklist 1 & 15 Jan. 2004). Later that year, The Curious Incident was included among its “Top 10 First Novels on Audio” (Joyce Saricks, Booklist 15 Nov. 2004.) And KLIATT described it as “traditional Bildungsroman, the novel of transition from childhood to adulthood” in its young adult section, cf. Jacqueline Edwards, “Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a Novel”, KLIATT 38.4 (July 2004). 225 Daisy Maryles, “Haddon’s Poodlecide”, PW 31 May 2004. 226 “Haddon Hits One Million”, The Bookseller 16 July 2004. 227 Cf. “The Curious Incident”, The Bookseller 13 Feb. 2004) 228 The Bookseller 16 Apr. 2004: “Popularity evokes critical suspicion; literary values evoke charges of élitism. … The book industry loves crossover books. But the in-

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that The Curious Incident benefitted from a “new climate” made possible by JK Rowling and Phillip Pullman.229 It was written in “a current fashion” which “has helped an outstanding novel to become a publishing triumph” – a claim which was substantiated with the persuasive argument that as a teenage novel alone “it would not have enjoyed such strong marketing support, or such prominent critical attention; the Booker longlisting and the Whitbread Novel victory would not have happened.”230 These trade media reports pointed out the many stations in a book’s ‘itinerary’ which would have been lost had it been only marketed as a children’s novel. The potential and actual attention profile of the book would have been dramatically different. Looking back at the publishing history and the book’s origin in several interviews with the people behind its success allowed for creating a narrative around the book. In fact, news about the book as a bestseller was spread to further advantage when reports of the “millionth paperback” were printed after Random House sold that much to retailers, rather than sales to final customers.231 Thus, in the US, reports of “1,035,000 copies” only came out about a year later.232 Dan Franklin, publisher at RH’s CCF (Children Come First) division and editor of the book, commented on the crossover appeal and particular circumstances such as the fact that the book was “initially entered for both the Whitbread Novel and Children’s Book Award”.233 In the same article, Kes Nielsen, at that time fiction buyer at WH Smith and now Amazon.co.uk’s director of book supply, expressed his hopes “to repeat the experience we had in 2003 with Life of Pi and The Lovely Bones” and complimented “RH for creating a buzz around the book”.234 Later, David Fickling, the publisher of the children’s edition, recalled the book’s double publication, “though I can’t remember who suggested it, perhaps Mark himself”235 – a narrative which was not quite consistent with Haddon’s expressed fears as to this kind of marketing. According to the UK publisher, there was minimal risk of disadvantages: “The literary novel market is so different to the chil-

dustry can also promote genre or literary books without apologising for the popularity of the former, or the elitism of the latter.” 229 “The Curious Case of the Dog That Did Bark”, The Bookseller 30 Jan. 2004. 230 The Bookseller 30 Jan. 2004. 231 The Bookseller 16 July 2004. 232 Daisy Maryles, “Poodlecide Pays”, PW 14 Feb. 2005. 233 The Bookseller 30 Jan. 2004. 234 The Bookseller 30 Jan. 2004. 235 Robert Rorke, “A ‘Curious’ Coincidence: In Britain, Young Adult Readers Read Mark Haddon’s Novel at the Same Time as Grownups”, PW 18 July 2005.

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dren’s book market here in the U.K. that they don’t intersect much.”236 The US commentator in the same article observed the difference between this “curious incident of corporate synergy” made possible in the UK, in contrast to the US market where “there was only one edition, for adults.”237 In fact, in contrast to the UK commentators, US trade media mainly spoke of Haddon’s novel as an adult book for young adults even years later when it was still marketed in this way and advertised among books “published as adult titles but […] suggested for older teen readers”,238 or “Summer Reading for Older Students”239. Inclusions of the book in columns of special interest were another reason of the book’s success. While Haddon had been reluctant to use the word autism and insisted not to have written an issue book, a US publicist traced the book’s appeal to this very topic: “Not a week has gone by that I don’t have some form of interest due to the book’s autism thread”.240 A Library Journal feature article dedicated to books about autism praised The Curious Incident for raising awareness to this topic.241 In fact, the book’s success was perceived in a particular light of special interest as it met with raised public debate, seeing that in 2003, April was chosen to be National Autism Awareness Month – just one month prior to the novel’s first publication in the UK, and two months in the US. Similarly, another topic of special interest – and equally appealing to academic studies later on – was the upgraded function of mathematics. Haddon’s novel featured high on a list of fiction for young readers in which math plays a crucial role.242 The more successful the title became, the less nuanced was its presentation in trade media. From the story about a boy in Swindon, it became the right book for the right purpose and needed to fill particular interests – math, science, autism – rather than stand on its own. The Curious Incident: Debate and Profile Summary Haddon’s novel was published as an adult and children’s book at a time when publishers had been in search for a next big crossover sensation. Haddon himself was alternately being presented as an established or a debut author. These waves

236 Rorke, PW 18 July 2005. 237 Rorke, PW 18 July 2005. 238 Stephanie Zvirin, “Core Collection”, Booklist 1 Dec. 2007. 239 Deborah Carter, “Summer Reading for Older Students”, Bookmarks May/June 2008. 240 Maryles, PW 14 Feb. 2005. 241 Sharon Kirkes, “Fiction on the Spectrum”, LJ 15 Apr. 2007. 242 Zvirin, Booklist 1 Dec. 2007.

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of applying and withdrawing pressure were especially remarkable as his previous book, the Ocean Star Express, was also reviewed in early 2003 by Kirkus Reviews. The Curious Incident was a success in trade media where it was perceived a publishing sensation long before it became a sensational sales success. The book turned out to be the perfect gift, was widely recommended by reviewers for summer and Christmas reading, as much as by librarians and booksellers. The prize cycle responded similarly pan-inclusive and Haddon reaped awards on all ends, ranging from children’s to young adult to adult accolades, from niche to prestige, from honours for debutants to established writers. The Curious Incident was reviewed in trade, general and literary as much as in special interest media – in journals for Psychiatry and Psychology as well as Mathematics. Such appeal would later also influence the academic interest, which, though not numerous, was also wide-ranging, from research dedicated to children’s books and school education material, crime and genre fiction, disability studies and the relationship between science and literature.

5.3 “A RITE OF PASSAGE ”: T HE 2003 M AN B OOKER P RIZE

FOR

F ICTION

The 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction could look back on 35 years of prize history but only on one year with the new sponsor. After Booker plc merged with Iceland and formed the Big Food Group in 2000, there was much speculation about the Prize’s future. In April 2002, it was announced that the Group made “new arrangements” and “transferred the Booker Prize, with certain safeguards, to a new registered charity, the Booker Prize Foundation (BPF), which will in future be responsible for its organization and operation and for the securing of a new commercial sponsor”.243 The next day, Man Group, a “leading global provider of alternative investment products and brokerage services” was announced as the new official sponsor, initially for a period of five years.244 The match was greeted on all sides of the deal and the Chairman of the Man Group, Harvey McGrath, especially emphasised “the long track-record” of the Prize and its “worldwide resonance, in particular in North America”.245 The specifics of the

243 Cf. The Booker Prize: New Developments, The Booker Prize, 24 Apr. 2002. 244 Cf. The Man Group Wins Coveted Booker Prize Sponsorship, The Booker Prize, 25 Apr. 2002. 245 Cf. The Man Group Wins Coveted Booker Prize Sponsorship, The Booker Prize, 25 Apr. 2002.

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Prize’s relationship with the US were to spark some controversies over the next ten years of its history and especially influenced the 2002 and 2003 Booker coverage. The first winner of the new Booker, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, announced in October 2002, seemed to carry the Prize from old to new but, nevertheless, keep some of its traditional promises. It became an immediate success, a popular title with critics and even more so with booksellers. “I have a story that will make you believe in God”, the programmatic sentence pronounced in Life of Pi caused few reviewers of the book to wholeheartedly embrace the invitation. Instead, most reviewers chose to understand Martel’s “Author’s Note” literarily rather than literally and applied the call for conversion to fiction rather than metaphysics. As outrageous as it struck the reviewers that a religious conversion should take place based on the reading of the book, it seemed perfectly plausible that “it is instead a story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction and its human creators, and in the original power of storytellers like Martel”.246 His alleged “original power” of storytelling was soon seriously questioned. Only two weeks after the Booker win and just when the media seemed to calm down from evaluating its winner and sinking their teeth into a controversial premature disclosure of the winning book on the Booker website, Martel found himself facing a plagiarism scandal based on accusations of having copied his plot from Max e os Felinos, a 1981 novel by the Brazilian Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar.247 Whichever anxieties critics and commentators may have harboured about the post-millennial sponsorship changes, the new Man Booker would not break with the traditional controversies so well known to the literary world since 1969. Nevertheless, with the change of sponsorship from Booker plc to Man Group, the year 2002 marked a “new era”248 for the prize in at least two aspects: a possible Americanisation and popularisation of the Prize. Even before that

246 Francie Lin, “Floating on Faith”, Los Angeles Times 16 June 2002. 247 On previous accusations of plagiarism in Booker selected novels, cf. Julia Langdon, “Revealed: How Booker Prize Writer Copied Work of the Queen of the Hospital Romance: The Mail on Sunday, Solo Syndication, Sunday, 26 November 2006”, Critical Quarterly 49.2 (Summer 2007); Lady Falls Brown, “The White Hotel: D. M. Thomas’s Considerable Debt to Anatoli. Kuznestov and Babi Yar”, South Central Review 2.2 (1985); Nicki Hitchcott, “Calixthe Beyala: Prizes, Plagiarism, and ‘Authenticity’”, Research in African Literatures 37.1 (Spring 2006): 102; Kevin Pask, “Plagiarism and the Originality of National Literature: Gerard Langbaine”, ELH 69.3 (Fall 2002): 742. 248 “Booker Trouble”, The Guardian 28 Sept. 2002.

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year’s longlist could make the headlines, it was announced that the new money was to arrive with new rules. The prize money was doubled and the location of the prize ceremony moved from the old-fashioned Guildhall to the hipper British Museum.249 But what caused a proper stir was the plan to include US-American writers from 2004. The fear of an Americanisation of a British institution at core caused the 2002 Chair of Judges, Lisa Jardine, to paint a bleak future: “the Booker will become as British an institution as English muffins in US supermarkets”.250 Jardine’s fear was grounded in questions of practicability as much as a minority complex: “With someone like Roth at his best, I can’t see how an Amis or McEwan would touch them.”251 Her response triggered a controversial debate; suffice it to say that an Ian McEwan did not share the sentiment: “to argue that we shouldn’t let the Americans in because we can’t measure up to them is pathetically weak-minded”.252 What was more, McEwan questioned Jardine’s defence which he saw grounded on the notion that the Prize was awarded on account of literary quality, “the feeble assumption that the Booker Prize is bound to go to the best novel. Only fools think that. It’s a committee, and therefore a lottery, a spinning bottle.”253 The second fear which was triggered by the new sponsors, by the 2002 bestselling winner Life of Pi, and not least by the chair of judges, Lisa Jardine herself, was the choice of popular titles, appealing to a mass audience rather than the London literati.254 The ‘dumbing down’ of the Booker Prize is a fear which was repeatedly expressed concerning the prize, not least in 2011 when ex-MI5 director and Chair of Judges, Dame Stella Rimington, made “readability” her main Booker criterion. In 2002, the selection of Life of Pi caused a stir about lit-

249 Cf. The Man Booker Prize Makes a Move. The Booker Prize, 22 May 2002. 250 Angelique Chrisafis, “US Authors’ Entry to Booker Prize Seen as Betrayal”, The Guardian 22 May 2002. 251 Chrisafis, The Guardian 22 May 2002. 252 John Mullan, “Prize Fighters”, The Guardian 23 May 2002. 253 Mullan, The Guardian 23 May 2002. Cf. Margaret Atwood on stable and unstable committees in Emma Brockes, “Do Keep Up”, The Guardian 12 Apr. 2004. 254 On the new, popular Booker novel, cf. Squires, “Book Marketing and the Booker Prize” 76:“English’s argument concentrates on the media and publicity impact of prizes, whereas Todd’s looks more broadly at the marketing environment in which literary fiction is published. Both these studies, though, refer to an environment in which literary fiction has intersected with concepts of the ‘popular’, be it either as having popular appeal, receiving popular acclaim or being widely known, or, in other works, subject to popular knowledge.”

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erary quality (bestselling mass popularity vs. high-brow literary claims), and crossover books which appeal to children as much as to adults. Was its success a consequence of Jardine’s ideal of a popular novel, “a winner who fitted her agenda”?255 Did the Booker Prize disgrace itself by consecrating a book with a popular appeal? Shortly after the announcement of Martel’s win, it was revealed that John Carey was announced to preside over the judging panel for the 2003 prize. The writer and critic was the first person in the history of the prize to have been appointed the chair of judges twice. Rather than with a repeated accolade for a novelist – as was the case in 1999 for JM Coetzee and in 2001 for Peter Carey – the 2003 Booker could be said to have ensured continuity via the judging panel. John Carey’s previous directory of the jury in 1982 resulted in the selection of one of the most successful Booker winners, Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark. Carey had acquired a reputation for being fierce in his literary judgments and, somewhat ironically from the position as a professor at Oxford, in his opinions against literary elitism. Upon his appointment, Carey said he was “not interested in abstract standards” and that it was his wish “to find novels that people will be eager to read and eager to share with friends when they’ve read them.”256 His fellow judges were announced in March 2003 as “A.C. Grayling, writer, academic and critic; Rebecca Stephens, MBE, record-breaking mountaineer and journalist; Francine Stock, novelist, broadcaster and presenter; and D.J. Taylor, novelist, biographer and literary critic”.257 Carey humorously hinted at this wide range of expertise: The Man Booker judging panel should reflect the widest possible range of experience and taste, compatible with wanting to read 150 books very fast. I think we meet those requirements pretty well – better than last time I was in the chair, when we lacked both a philosopher and mountaineer.

The judges were not spared the large reading workload which in that year amounted to 117 submitted and called-in entries. When the jury decided upon a longlist of 23 titles in August – the longlist had not yet been cut to its annual size of thirteen known as the Booker dozen

255 Robert McCrum, “The Booker Revolution”, The Observer 27 Oct. 2002. 256 Cf. John Carey Announced as Chair of Judges for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, The Booker Prize, 11 Nov. 2002. 257 Cf. The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2003: The Judges, The Booker Prize, 7 Mar. 2003.

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since 2007 – the selection was deemed so diverse that critics had difficulties to name a trend. The only common topic which made headlines was Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog having caused speculations about its possible inclusion on the longlist even before the judges’ decision. An early article in The Times – which the Martin Amis website disclosed as having had a feud with the author since the mid-1990s – was rubbing its hands in anticipation of another failure by the author whom they saw as “mocked for his bad teeth and declining talent” and replaced by a new generation: “Fans hoped for a return to form of such Amis successes as The Rachel Papers, Money and London Fields – a market taken over by female novelists like Zadie Smith and Monica Ali.”258 DBC Pierre was another contender to the “bad lad of publishing” throne and his book was indeed later compared with Amis’s. At the time of the longlist announcement, however, Pierre’s and Haddon’s books were only detected among the many outsiders on the list. The announcement of the shortlist in mid-September was accompanied by comments on two absentees – more predictably on the part of Martin Amis, less so on Mark Haddon’s – but was generally received with much approval. It consisted of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor, Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, Clare Morrall’s Astonishing Splashes of Colour and DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little. Despite the omission of Amis and other ‘big-hitters’, the shortlist was greeted favourably. Robert McCrum in The Observer praised the Booker judges for having successfully “extracted themselves out of a very tight place” and helped the prize “back to the real world with a magically fresh short list that not only upheld the finest traditions of the prize but can also plausibly be said to represent a new generation of British and Commonwealth fiction”.259 The only other omission which caused a stir was Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident, which had not been discussed at large when it was included on the longlisted but which the chair of judges had specifically singled out as a title he would have liked to see in the race a bit longer. John Carey’s appraisal of the “breathtaking” novel was repeated in the media’s comments on the shortlist and for the first time sparked comparisons between The Curious Incident and Vernon God Little. Haddon’s omission from the shortlist inspired the first murmur about a possible rivalry between them but it wasn’t until the announcement of the Whitbread Book Award shortlists that the word of a competition between them was in full swing. Ap-

258 James Diedrick, “Down, Yellow Dog: Times Tries to Pre-Empt Booker Listing”, The Martin Amis Web. 259 McCrum, The Observer 21 Sept. 2003.

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proaching the finish line, however, it was Ali’s Brick Lane which was deemed most likely to take the Booker. The novel was widely acclaimed but had inspired some controversy over its portrayal of a Bangladeshi community in London.260 As a second Booker victory for Atwood, so close after her triumph in 2000, was viewed unlikely, the contest was largely seen among the newcomers. Still, when Vernon God Little was announced as the winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the consternation could not have been greater – despite the anticipation of an outsider.261 Even Martyn Goff was taken by surprise: “Four of the five judges jumped at Pierre and the fifth was not unhappy. I am absolutely shocked myself by the speed of it. Maybe they felt sorry for him because of his debts.”262 Just how much Pierre was out of touch with the rituals of literary recognition became most evident when he received the accolades at the festive dinner in the British Museum: JOHN CAREY: The winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize for fiction is DBC Pierre for Vernon God Little. (applause) PETER FINLAY: As Lloyd Bridges famously said, “I think I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.” (laughter) If Vernon was here he’d remember that movie that has all of these men dressed in sperm costumes. Do you remember that? And they’re all in this big erect tunnel ready to jump out of the hole, and in the midst of them all massing there’s one black one and I feel a little bit like that today. Thank you very much. JOHN CAREY: Congratulations.263

260 Matthew Taylor, “Brickbats Fly as Community Brands Novel ‘Despicable’”, The Guardian 3 Dec. 2003. In a letter to The Guardian and the Booker Prize administration, a group of Bangladeshi residents who felt misrepresented compared the book to Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Later, one of the Booker judges disclosed that the letter had not influenced the panel against Ali’s novel. 261 The UK reviewers’ backing of Pierre’s novel (which can only be perceived as such in comparison to the much harsher critique it received in the US), did not extend to other participants. Booksellers, for example, were appalled: “after Vernon God Little won the 2003 Booker Prize there was a rash of returns up and down the country in protest at DBC Pierre’s expletives”, cf. Ann Morgan, “Côte D’ivoire: If You Are Easily Offended, Keep Reading”, A Year of Reading the World (2012). 262 Fiachra Gibbons, “Bizarre Twist to Strange Tale as Repentant Rogue Wins over Booker Prize Judges”, The Guardian 15 Oct. 2003. 263 Linda Mottram, “Booker Prize Goes to First Time Oz Author”, ABC 15 Oct. 2003.

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Pierre was undoubtedly a dark horse though not necessarily the shade of dark which some members of the jury had been hoping for. The only judge who did not vote for Pierre, DJ Taylor, was also the one who had called for an outsider to win even before the longlist was announced. In August, Taylor revealed his sentiment about the year’s output and his preferences: “Without giving anything away, one of my sincerest wishes is that we can give the prize to someone – and some publishing firm – outside the London glamour circuit.”264 Though the judge’s description of an ideal winner from the ‘outside’ of the literary ‘in-scene’ did not apply to either of the two competitors’ publishing houses, both Pierre and Haddon were positioned as evident outsiders to the close circle of London literati. Despite the accolades from Britain’s two biggest book prizes – Booker and Whitbread – critics did not easily apply the label of literary fiction to either of them, if for different reasons. To recall some of the points made in the above analysis of The Curious Incident’s attention profile, reviewers did, in fact, formulate their ideas of literature and the literary, made comparisons to what the author did and then concluded in favour or against his inclusion onto the pedestal.265 They attested originality and uniqueness but also a certain oddity. The novel was advertised as a children’s book with appeal for adult readers and as an adult book for young adults. It was a mass-market sales success and professed, somewhat paradoxically, and ahead of its time, to have become a “literary classic […] to be read on every Mediterranean beach towel this summer”.266 Haddon’s novel was re-written in reviews by applying particular grids of comparison, using different literary precursors (e.g. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes, and particularly the adventure of The Hound of the Baskerville; other narratives with “children as observers”, such as What Maisie Knew267 and To Kill a Mockingbird268; other “successful examples” of firstperson narratives portraying an “unfamiliar disability”, a sub-genre which allowed for the rather remarkable juxtaposition of the novel with “Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, with its protagonist suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome, and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which explores hermaphrodit-

264 DJ Taylor, “Novel Solutions”, The Guardian 14 Aug. 2003. 265 Cf. McInerney, The NYTBR 15 June 2003; Wagner, The Times 28 Jan. 2004; Washington, San Francisco Chronicle 22 June 2003; Power, The Washington Post 10 Aug. 2003. 266 Walsh, The Independent 22 Jan. 2004. 267 Moore, The Guardian 24 May 2003. See also: Wagner, The Times 28 Jan. 2004. 268 Moore, The Guardian 24 May 2003. See also: Clee, The Guardian 10 May 2003.

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ism”269, even “the repressed butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Remains of the Day’ – a novel that this one resembles in its elegant economy of means”270) and a selection of literary genres (mostly “detective fiction” or “murder mystery”271) – a mixture which allowed for association with other titles on the one hand, and depiction of uniqueness on the other. Difficult to pin down, The Curious Incident created an opportunity for reviewers to become creative with their lines of comparison and genre definitions. Underlining this back and forth between ascribing the book to a tradition and emphasising its difference, the US reviewers were especially prone to capturing its essence with a series of genre ascriptions. It contained “elements from the diverse genres of coming-of-age novel, autobiography and, above all, detective fiction”,272 “a journey of self-discovery,”273 “a novel of manners”, “a murder mystery, a road atlas, a postmodern canvas of modern sensory overload, a coming-of-age journal”274. Michiko Kakutani bade her reader to imagine a book which blended fictional and non-fiction accounts: “think of ‘The Sound and the Fury’ crossed with ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and one of Oliver Sacks’s real-life stories”, “a minimalistic narrative – not unlike a Raymond Carver story”, in short, “detective fiction” gone “bildungsroman”.275 Later, the novel was presented as “a rare cross-generational literary success story”, “a peculiar thing – a kind of James Joyce for kids – but a genre-busting gem, nevertheless”.276 Its status as “strangest bestseller to hit the nation’s shelves” was mentioned in one breath with Flaubert’s Parrot as much as “the early days of JK Rowling”.277 However, these ascriptions were, more often than not, linked to the book’s difference.

269 Power, The Washington Post 10 Aug. 2003. 270 McInerney, The NYTBR 15 June 2003. 271 Cf. Miller, Salon.com 12 June 2003; Washington, San Francisco Chronicle 22 June 2003; Power, The Washington Post 10 Aug. 2003. 272 Washington, San Francisco Chronicle 22 June 2003. 273 Power, The Washington Post 10 Aug. 2003. Cf. The Curious Incident as “voyage of [self-]discovery” in Fowler, The Independent 7 July 2003. 274 Power, The Washington Post 10 Aug. 2003. 275 Kakutani, The NYT 13 June 2003. The first mention of Catcher in the Rye appeared in the Bookseller column of The Guardian, cf. Clee, The Guardian 10 May 2003. Dennis Lim saw The Curious Incident in a tradition with “precursors like The Sound and the Fury and Flowers for Algernon”, cf. Lim, The Village Voice 22 July 2003. 276 Thomson, The Observer 14 Mar. 2004. 277 Walsh, The Independent 22 Jan. 2004.

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The ‘othering’ of Haddon’s book was visible on all levels – and not necessarily perceived as a bad thing. The odd status was, in fact, a form of advertisement as became evident from the publisher’s choice of paperback endorsement: “it isn’t simply the most original novel I’ve read in years […] it’s also one of the best”.278 The Curious Incident was described as “a peculiar thing”,279 as “unlikely”,280 said to portray “the many oddities of the world”281 and its protagonist presented as “a believable, oddly loveable character and a moving education in difference”,282 “one of the strangest and most convincing characters in recent fiction”,283 “one of the oddest and most original narrators to appear in years”284. After all, the book’s main oddity – its diverse appeal for children, teenagers and adults – was also the main reason for its success in two ways: not only did it sell in all these markets but its crossover status already functioned as an advertisement for the book. Even reviewers used the double status to include personal information and often cited their children as a further testimonial of this phenomenon.285 Eventually, however, the fine line between original and odd was crossed too often for some reviewers, even if their assessment was positive. As unproblematic as the crossover publication was presented by its publicists and editors,286 and as much as it called for the attention reserved for adult, and especially, literary novels (particularly visible with the diverse appeal for prizes and the mass of reviews), as much did it also present a moment of consternation and uneasiness. No matter how often Haddon expressed his joy over entering the world of serious literature, critics were repeatedly unwilling to grant him entrance. The Whitbread’s decision to push it as an adult novel by an established (not first-time)

278 The Times 23 Apr. 2003. Cf. Reynolds, The Telegraph 28 Jan. 2004: “The Curious Incident is one of the most unusual and talked-about books of the year.” 279 Thomson, The Observer 14 Mar. 2004. 280 See, for example, descriptions as “an unlikely murder-mystery investigated by an autistic boy” (Wagner, The Times 28 Jan. 2004), which “evolves from this unlikely starting point” (Alex Clark, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon”, The Sunday Times 28 Mar. 2004). 281 Kephart, Book July/Aug. 2003. 282 Duffy, The Telegraph 20 May 2003. 283 McInerney, The NYTBR 15 June 2003. 284 Walsh, The Independent 22 Jan. 2004. 285 Nani Power, for example, wrote for The Washington Post: “My 11-year-old son found my review copy, and we had to bargain back and forth for it” (10 Aug. 2003). 286 Cf. Rorke, PW 18 July 2005.

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novelist did not change this difficulty. Had the Booker held on to Haddon a little longer or even crowned him the best novel of the year, could this have ended the debate surrounding his literary status? Such outcome would be rather unlikely. After all, the Prize presents other participants in literary interaction with a strong offer to debating the literariness of its winner but it does not end such negotiations. The 2003 Booker winner DBC Pierre, too, was regarded as an odd debutant and his book an odd debut – and not just after his acceptance speech. He was deemed too old for a literary newcomer.287 Like Haddon, he was frequently referred to as an outsider, who came “from nowhere to win the 2003 Man Booker prize”,288 even called himself an “intruder in the literary world”289. The administrator of the prize, Martyn Goff, remembered his entry at the gala ceremony as peculiar even several years later.290 Pierre was depicted as a speaker for the likes of him, who gave “social outcasts a voice”.291 And it did not help much that his nationality could not be ultimately agreed on or that he was declared “homeless”.292 Like The Curious Incident, Vernon God Little invited a strange mix of comparisons and classifications. The first pre-publication reviews took up the first strands of pop culture (from South Park to Big Brother), black comedy and satire, as well as comparisons with Salinger’s cult novel and other US-authors, mostly Mark Twain and John Kennedy Toole. Within the realm of pop culture, the novel was situated with other cultural phenomena which portrayed and satirised contemporary Americana: The Onion’s sketches,293 Michael Moore’s 2002 motion picture Bowling for Columbine,294 an imaginary “vintage episode of South Park” written by “Harmony Korine”,295 and reality TV from Jerry Spring-

287 Rees, The Telegraph 10 Jan. 2003. 288 Tonkin, The Independent 4 June 2004. 289 O’Hagan, The Observer 19 Jan. 2003. 290

“I did find DBC Pierre odd, to say the least. So hard to arrange things with. His whole attitude on the night he won [with Vernon God Little in 2003] was ‘What’s all this about?’ when he should have been damned glad to win enough money to pay the debt he owed to the old friend he defrauded.” (John Walsh, “Martyn Goff: Secrets of the Booker King”, The Independent 27 Apr. 2006.)

291 Seddon, The TLS 7 Feb. 2003. 292 O’Hagan, The Observer 19 Jan. 2003. 293 Wilkinson, Booklist 1 Sept. 2003. 294 O’Hagan, The Observer 19 Jan. 2003. 295 O’Hagan, The Observer 19 Jan. 2003.

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er to Big Brother296. Darkness and comedy featured prominently among the genre ascriptions. Comparisons with Salinger ranged from situating Pierre within this particular tradition – with Vernon as “[a]n heir for Holden Caulfield”, “a descendant of Salinger’s Ur-teenager”297 – to kidnapping the protagonist and spicing him up as “a modern Holden Caulfield”,298 “a Holden Caulfield on amphetamines”,299 or optionally “on Ritalin”300. A similarly ‘blasphemous’ process can be observed with comparisons to Mark Twain, when Vernon was described “[l]ike a Huck Finn tanked up on six-packs” and “[a] Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem generation“.301 It is striking that both US and UK reviewers compared Pierre and Vernon with almost exclusively US authors and protagonists. Yet, while few UK reviews rejected this lending from the US canon all negative US reviews guarded their literary stars.302 Thus when the Mail on Sunday compared Pierre’s book to “John O’Toole’s masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces” on the US hardback edition, the TIME reviewer questioned this ascription and categorically objected to this notion.303 The appropriation or rejection of Vernon God Little was closely linked to the problematic positioning of its author. In an interview with the Bookseller, Faber editor Lee Brackstone braggingly looked back at the reception wave, claiming that “[i]t seemed that almost every country in the world had claimed him as their own”.304 But the results of my analysis show that, to the contrary, and one could argue almost analogically to the reception of his book, nobody – apart from the post-office clerk from Leitrim – seemed to claim DBC Pierre as their national writer. US reviewers spoke of him as British, the British viewed him as Australian, while the Australians, who really had an argument on their side, referred to the author as “first-time British novelist”, and what was more argued that the

296 Brace, The Independent 3 Feb. 2003. 297 Rees, The Telegraph 10 Jan. 2003. 298 O’Grady, The Guardian 18 Jan. 2003. 299 Oates, The New Yorker 27 Oct. 2003. 300 Sifton, The NYTBR 9 Nov. 2003. 301 Brace, The Independent 3 Feb. 2003. 302 One of the few UK sceptics claims that “comparisons to Salinger and Twain are tenuous at best…” (Lewis, The Sunday Times 2 May 2004). In contrast, US reviewers were fervently taken aback, cf. Kakutani, The NYT 5 Nov. 2003; Miller, Salon.com 6 Nov. 2003. 303 Grossman, TIME 3 Nov. 2003. 304 Clee, The Bookseller 5 Dec. 2003.

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novel’s mood was British, too.305 Pierre was at times considered “half-Australian, half-Mexican”,306 even Canadian.307 Part of these national ascriptions was based on expectations, another part on a desperate search for legitimacy. From the very beginning of its coverage, Vernon God Little’s scandalous potential was shown to work for a US, not so much for a UK readership. The high school massacre, “that keynote event of contemporary American culture”, was immediately presented as a possible taboo topic for US audiences.308 Only few UK reviewers expressed a somewhat uncomfortable feeling which was coupled with the notion that Pierre did not present any new or original points rather than the choice of topic per se.309 His failure of adding to the debate was a point taken up by US critics, one which allowed moving beyond a rejection based on national pride.310 In fact, even positive US reviews questioned the media hype and perceived the novel as “not very original”.311 Based on these questions of positioning and classifying, reviewers tried to identify Pierre with his work, and vice versa. The search for his literary and national affiliation was reflected in the question of legitimacy. Did Pierre have the authority to be writing about his chosen topics? Apart from the fact that Pierre was rejected as a non-insider, authenticity was presented and rejected on levels of narration (character and plot credibility)312 and language (idiomatic speech).313 But contrary to the many decisive pro and contra authenticity voices, some reviewers also saw the lack of authenticity as conscious and as a means to express

305 Andrew Laing, “Vernon God Little”, The Sydney Morning Herald 15 Mar. 2003. 306 The Telegraph 7 Jan. 2004. 307 Ezard, The Guardian 30 Oct. 2003. 308 Heawood, The Observer 19 Jan. 2003. 309 Cf. Barnacle, The Sunday Times 23 Feb. 2003. 310 Cf. Kakutani, The NYT 5 Nov. 2003, and esp. Miller, Salon.com 6 Nov. 2003: “If school shootings arise from some particularly dark vein in American culture, only someone who actually understands America can trace it to its source.” 311 Oates, The New Yorker 27 Oct. 2003. 312 Questions of the narrator’s reliability were posed both, to prove the story’s suspense (O’Grady, The Guardian 18 Jan. 2003) and to show its irrelevance (Kakutani, The NYT 5 Nov. 2003). 313 The major part of the (in)authenticity battle was fought on the grounds of language and style, cf. Power, The Times 18 Jan. 2003; O’Grady, The Guardian 18 Jan. 2003; O’Hagan, The Observer 19 Jan. 2003; Seddon, The TLS 7 Feb. 2003; Barnacle, The Sunday Times 23 Feb. 2003; Oates, The New Yorker 27 Oct. 2003; Grossman, TIME 3 Nov. 2003); Miller, Salon.com 6 Nov. 2003.

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critique of both, US stereotypes and their construction.314 In terms of positioning DBC Pierre and Vernon God Little, the ascriptions of literary and national identity were as important as the ping pong game surrounding the scandalous potential of the book, and the style in which the reviewers referred to both author and novel. It is striking that positive reviews often took on Pierre’s style,315 and that interviewers tended to emphasize the good time they had with the writer, including detailed lists of what they ate and drank together. If for different reasons, Haddon’s and Pierre’s novels were evidently seen as successors of Yann Martel’s 2002 Life of Pi whose victory in the first year of the new Man Booker Prize for Fiction reverberated in media coverage of the second. Long after the Booker success, Life of Pi continued to sell exceptionally well even as the debate turned towards the next cycle of production and reception, and the book found itself replaced by other objects of debate. In some respect, the novel found its thematic successor in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident. In conversation with Haddon, one interviewer kept comparing the appeal of both books and concluded that “[t]he reason that both novels connect with readers of different ages is that they tell simple but powerful stories and they pose the biggest puzzle of all: What is life all about?”316 Haddon’s Curious Incident was also seen as its follower in terms of sales. When the new title was not included on the Booker shortlist in September 2003, Martin Higgs, the literary editor of Waterstones, expressed his disappointment with the decision: The books by Monica Ali, Zoe Heller and D B C Pierre were all good […] but they are at the challenging end of the Booker. To some extent we’ve been spoilt by just how well last year’s winner, Life of Pi (by Yann Martell [sic]), has done. It’s been the bestselling Booker book for years.317

He added that Haddon’s would have been an attractive winner for the prize, “a popular choice with the public for a prize often criticised as producing impenetrable winners”.318

314 Cf. e.g. Tonkin, The Independent 4 June 2004: “Perhaps Vernon’s backwoods hell of Martirio, Texas has its real life in foreign nightmares, not in native dreams.” 315 Cf. e.g. Power, The Times 18 Jan. 2003; O’Grady, The Guardian 18 Jan. 2003. 316 Sandra Martin, “First-Time Novelist in His Literary Prime”, The Globe and Mail 15 July 2003. 317 Jury, The Independent 17 Sept. 2003. 318 Jury, The Independent 17 Sept. 2003.

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In the end, it was not Haddon but the seemingly less hopeful and certainly less beloved DBC Pierre with his Vernon God Little who stepped into Martel’s footprints of Booker glory. His succession of Martel did not have the same appeal to booksellers, it was edgier and not without a battle. In spring 2003, Pierre beat Martel – along with the other favourite, Zadie Smith – to The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing.319 In autumn that year, he overtook not only Haddon, but also the likes of Martin Amis, JM Coetzee and Margaret Atwood, and won the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Like Martel, and like Haddon, Pierre chose a teenage protagonist to narrate his story, which was suspicious enough for some critics, most prominently James Wood, to have scented a “shiny new populism […] under the new regime” of the fresh Man Booker sponsor’s.320 But in the light (or shadow) of the previous debate of a possible widening of Booker eligibility to US authors, Pierre also carried on the second discussion from the previous year, the fear of Americanisation, and gave it an interesting spin.321 With his satire about a US high school shooting, Pierre was suspected to be something of an ‘ersatz’ American: American enough for UK reviewers and the Booker jury to judge his book a “coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm but also our fascination with America”,322 but not American enough for US reviewers who instead viewed him as a spy smuggled into an institution which had not opened its eligibility criteria to more ‘legitimate’ USAmerican authors – or at least, hadn’t yet.

319 Pauli, guardian.co.uk 27 May 2003. 320 James Wood, “The Lie-World”, LRB 20 Nov. 2003. Wood’s insinuation that the judges were influenced by the sponsors in these decisions – “so far the judges have concurred” – got him in trouble. Both the 2003 Chair of Judges, John Carey, and the Booker administrator, Martyn Goff, responded with outrage to the idea that the new sponsors were in any way complicit in the decision-making process, cf. John Carey and Martyn Goff, “Letters”, LRB 18 Dec. 2003. 321 Cf. also Benjamin Markovits, “Prize Fight”, The NYTBR 6 Mar. 2005. 322 “Author Pierre Wins Booker Prize”, BBC News 15 Oct. 2003.

6. 40 Years of Booker Choice: Between “Freshness” and “Literary Magic”

The year 2008 presented yet another transition in the first decade of the new century: the celebration of the Booker’s fortieth anniversary demanded a winner which would take up its forty-year long tradition and carry the Prize into the new decade. Salman Rushdie’s victory in the celebratory 2008 Best of the Booker, after he had already scooped the accolade in 1993, may not have been the reason for choosing an annual Booker winner to live up to Rushdie but it certainly influenced the discussion of that year’s coverage cycle. On top of Rushdie’s continued predominance, the year saw a discussion of a possible generation shift. Would the ‘old boys’, the big established writers, who had come to their position not least through their recognition by the Booker and were also known as the 1983 Granta cohort (Amis, Boyd, Ishiguro, McEwan, Rushdie, among others) continue to dominate literary debate? How much room was there for debut authors? The relationship of the rivalling pair in the year 2008 could be linked to all these topics for discussion and not only marked the Prize’s rivalry with the Costa (Whitbread) Book Awards but also paid tribute to the remarkable perseverance of British independent publishing houses at a time of publishing conglomerates. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture were both published in the spring of 2008 and therefore in direct competition for sales and attention. The two novels competed for a series of awards, most notably for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. More explicitly than in other years, their rivalry was revealed by the chair of judges. Barry’s status as runnerup to Adiga’s win became a talking point for over a year. Their competition presented those who discussed and evaluated them with an opportunity for selfpositioning. This was most evident with the selection of Barry’s novel for the Costa Book Awards. In fact, the 2008 Costa provoked a parallel discussion of the second-in-the-running as their chair of judges made a similar revelation

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about a very close outcome in the selection process. But the relationship between the novels also worked on another level. Through the Independent Alliance they were united by cooperation between their respective indie publishing houses, Canongate and Faber & Faber – and hence any media-savvy competition between them ultimately benefitted both. Adiga’s and Barry’s was a relationship between a newcomer and an established author – very much like Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood in 2000. But more explicitly than the 2000 pair, the 2008 novels were handled as opposites in prize coverage and in reviews. While the two did not inspire thematic comparisons like the 2003 books by Mark Haddon and DBC Pierre, their writing was handled as two diametrically opposed ways. In hindsight, Barry and his novel had more in common with Atwood’s, while Adiga and his debut shared some similarities with Smith’s. Barry was not of the same literary star calibre as Atwood but he, too, was known to a larger audience and had been previously nominated for the Booker. The Secret Scripture is also narrated by an elderly female protagonist whose story is mainly set in the 1920-30s but whose life spanned most of the twentieth century. Like Atwood, Barry was described as his nation’s historian. He did not have to prove his literariness, but rather demonstrated an effortless handling of literary endeavours. Adiga, too, may not have had the same literary debutant status as Smith but his novel was also accompanied by a premature buzz. Like White Teeth, The White Tiger was seen in a Rushdie tradition and like the other young author, Adiga also had to carefully negotiate such comparisons. And yet, the 2008 pair was discussed more often together and shared a larger portion of their attention profile and in this resembled the 2003 case studies more than the more loosely bound millennial novels. Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in India, attended school in Australia and studied in New York and at Oxford. He worked as a journalist for The Financial Times and as South Asia correspondent for TIME magazine. His first novel was pushed at the 2007 London Book Fair and got much attention by booksellers and trade media long before its publication in March 2008. But the course of a promising talent and a buzzed debut changed drastically when The White Tiger was awarded the 2008 Man Booker. In the week before the announcement, approx. 400 copies of the novel were sold, in the week after over 8,000.1 In the UK, sales reached the mark of 165,000 within one year, helping the publisher, Atlantic Books, to a rise of 20%.2 In the US, the novel was catapulted onto The New York

1

Cf. Philip Stone, “Booker Bounce for Adiga”, The Bookseller 21 Oct. 2008.

2

Cf. Tom Tivnan, “Rising Tide”, The Bookseller 12 Mar. 2009. And this, in turn, helped the Alliance: “Astonishingly, the Alliance has had two of its biggest years in

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Times bestseller list where it remained for over half a year. At the age of 33, he became the second youngest recipient of the prize and the fourth novelist from India to be so distinguished after Salman Rushdie (1981), Arundhati Roy (1996) and Kiran Desai (2006). After the Booker success, Adiga changed agencies and has since been represented by David Godwin who also manages the interests of Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth. In addition to the Booker, the novel was also nominated for several other awards and Adiga was crowned Author of the Year at the 2009 British Book Awards. The White Tiger has been translated into over 30 languages and was announced to be made into a film by Oscar-nominated writer and director Todd Field.3 Since his debut success, Adiga published three other books: Between the Assassinations (2008), a collection of short stories, or as its subtitle reads A Novel in Stories, and two full-length novels, The Last Man in Tower (2011) and Selection Day (2016), each first published in India respectively by Picador India; Fourth Estate India, and HarperCollins India, and later – with the exception of the last one – acquired by Atlantic. Compared with other short-story collections, the second book was a sales success for Atlantic with 66,000 units shifted to date, but the sales of 20,000 copies for the third book, though better than average for a novel, remain rather low for a writer who had been on bestselling territory before.4 Though none came close to the heights of the first novel, the follow-up books met with substantial attention in reviews. Between the Assassinations was shortlisted for The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009 and The Last Man in Tower was longlisted for The Economist Crossword Book Award in 20115 and the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Prize.

2008 and 2009 despite the overall market contracting, its sales rising 12.5% and 20.5% year on year respectively, thanks in large parts to hits from Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize winner The White Tiger (Atlantic), Sebastian Barry’s Costawinning The Secret Scripture (Faber), Canongate’s two Barack Obama titles and Quercus’ Stieg Larsson trilogy”, cf. Tom Tivnan, “United They Stand”, The Bookseller 1 July 2010. 3

In June 2012, the project was seen in jeopardy after the Indian financier accused Field and the two US production companies, Smuggler Films and Ohio Films, of not fulfilling their part of the contract, cf. Eriq Gardner, “Producers Fight over Movie Rights to Prize-Winning Novel ‘The White Tiger’”, The Hollywood Reporter 6 June 2012.

4

Tom Tivnan, “In Depth: Man Booker and the Bookshops”, The Bookseller 23 Sept.

5

IBNlive.com, “The Economist Crossword Award’s Longlist”, IBN Live 12 June 2012.

2013.

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In contrast, by the time The Secret Scripture was launched in May 2008, Sebastian Barry, 20 years Adiga’s senior, born and educated in Dublin, had been a published writer since the 1980s. He had published four collections of poetry, a children’s book, and with over a dozen published and staged plays had established himself as a leading contemporary Irish playwright. His most acclaimed play, The Steward of Christendom (1995), was an international success and won him a Writers’ Guild Award. His third novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) was published with Picador before he moved to Faber and Faber with Annie Dunne (2002). His fifth and previous novel, A Long, Long Way, was a breakthrough in his career as a novelist. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005 but topped by fellow Irishman John Banville’s The Sea. The Secret Scripture, his sixth novel, was published and met as next in line in the oeuvre of a well-established writer. After the Booker shortlist, it went on to win the 2008 Costa Book Awards Novel Prize and the Costa Book of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Independent Booksellers’ Adult Book Prize. At the Irish Book Awards 2009, it scored a double award for Book of the Year and Novel of the Year. In 2010, it was also nominated for the Irish Book of the Decade. Outside the UK and Ireland, Barry’s novel was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) and the French Prix Fémina Etranger. The Secret Scripture was adapted for the screen by writer Johnny Ferguson and director Jim Sheridan in a 2016 film starring Rooney Mara and Vanessa Redgrave. Since the publication of The Secret Scripture, Barry wrote four plays and published three other novels, On Canaan’s Side (2011), The Temporary Gentleman (2014) and Days Without End (2016). The latest brought him a historic second Costa win. In the following, I will present Adiga’s and Barry’s public and critical attention profiles, the problems which their novels raised in critical discussion and the interplay between the reception of the two novels and the celebration of Booker’s fortieth anniversary. With only two months apart in their publication date, the 2008 novels were the closest rivals for attention after the 2000 and 2003 pairs. Also, they were Booker rivals on the level of shortlist instead of just linked through Booker coverage or united by a nomination for the longlist. And they were regarded as two clear opposites, which fuelled a comparison between an edgy debut by an Indian newcomer with a contemporary topic and a historical novel by an established Irish writer. The opposition of two writing traditions was made fruitful in the course of the novels’ media presence and especially in the coverage cycle for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

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6.1 A R AGS - TO -R ICHES S TORY : ARAVIND ADIGA’ S T HE W HITE T IGER The fate of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger changed drastically with the recognition of the Man Booker Prize in the autumn of 2008. In contrast to the 2003 winner Vernon God Little, however, it also succeeded in drawing the attention of a wider variety of participants in the course of its short-term cycle. This success relied on an interplay between these participants rather than being the product of a single-handed effort. The novel quickly caught the attention of trade and general media with its highlighted presence at the 2007 London Book Fair and was heavily promoted by the retailer Waterstones around its publication in the early spring 2008. While recognition was not exclusively favourable, critics on both sides of the Atlantic gave it much consideration. By the summer of 2008, The Sunday Times spoke of it as “the debut of the year”. When Adiga made the Man Booker Prize longlist shortly after, he was treated as one of the lesser known newcomers but not exactly as an outsider, as was the case with DBC Pierre. In hindsight, bearing in mind Salman Rushdie’s impact on the year of the Booker’s fortieth anniversary, Adiga’s win looks almost inevitable. It was, of course, no such thing. The choice in favour of Adiga was received as a daring move and while mostly applauded in UK and US papers, it was received with contention in Indian media. The tension which ensued, arising from a suspicion that Adiga had been exploitatively appropriated by the Booker, added to the discussion of an already ‘problematic’ novel. The main debates which occupied the discussion of the book were touched upon by two writers who fully endorsed the novel and whose quotations were placed on the cover of the UK advance reader’s copy of The White Tiger.6 The essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra praised the novel on the front cover for the subject matter and the young novelist’s treatment of his characters: In the grand illusions of a “rising” India, Aravind Adiga has found a subject Gogol might have envied. With remorselessly and delightfully mordant wit The White Tiger anatomises the fantastic cravings of the rich; it evokes, too, with startling accuracy and tenderness, the no less desperate struggles of the deprived.

6

Cf. appendix, 5a; as well as the discussion of the different editions of Adiga’s novel in chapter 2.1.

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The other quotation, later used for the US paperback edition, was by American writer Gary Shteyngart who applauded Adiga for raising the topic of contemporary India: An exhilarating, side-splitting account of India today, as well as an eloquent howl at her many injustices. Adiga enters the literary scene resplendent in battle dress and ready to conquer. Let us bow to him.

Both asserted that Adiga set out to uncover a truth about India and that his account was truthful. Both also claimed that his endeavour was explicitly literary – even Gogol might have envied him – and that the debut was his entrance onto the literary scene. Even without Shteyngart’s prompt to “bow to him”, both assertions presented a challenge to the critics. In addition, the ‘advanced’ readers were immediately presented with the promise that the novel would be submitted for the Booker and could be a potential candidate for the 2008 Booker. The two problems of literariness and truthfulness, or authenticity, were introduced differently on the covers for the general reader. With the book’s publication and the next covers of the hardback and paperback editions, the two threads for discussion became more materially evident: (1) Adiga was a journalist who offered a fictional account of India, and (2) He was Indian but not only was his novel published in the UK, but he was also later endowed with the Man Booker Prize – another sign of British appropriation.7 In the media, both problems were discussed as a question of truth in the first instance and a question of literary quality in the second. Reviewers asked if the text was ‘true’ as an account of India and as a literary text. The question of truth – how truthfully had Adiga portrayed India – was one which resulted in a verdict of literary quality and which could be answered in compliance or contrast with the first judgment. In addition, commentators asked if Adiga was a legitimate representative of an India, which he had left at the age of ten to become educated in the West, and whether he was a legitimate author, worthy of the comparisons with writers of Gogol’s standing. The answers to both problems depended very much on the respective critic’s notion of the relevance of authenticity for the judgment of the book. For some critics, the truth needed to go hand in hand with literary achievement, for others there was no binding connection between the two. Both problems – Adiga’s double-position as journalist and novelist and as Indian author appropriated by UK institutions – became manifest with Adiga’s

7

Cf. appendix, 5c and 5d; as well as the discussion of the different editions of Adiga’s novel in chapter 2.2.

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repeated involvement in the discussion of both India’s politics and literary matters and with the additional interference of the Man Booker Prize. The attention profile for The White Tiger can be divided into five phases: (1) trade interest on behalf of Adiga’s presence at the London Book Fair which preceded publication in the spring of 2007 and accompanied its first post-publication steps in the spring of 2008; (2) pre- and post-publication criticism in the spring and early summer of 2008; (3) an acute phase of media presence due to the Man Booker Prize nominations and win in the autumn of 2008 and subsequent end-of-year attention; (4) a pre- and post-publication phase for the paperback edition in the first half of 2009; and (5) reactions to an early follow-up, which was perceived as part of the first book’s cycle rather than standing on its own in mid-2009 and which provoked renewed attention in the end-of-year and end-of-decade coverage. Tiger at Fair: Trade Coverage from Manuscript to Published Novel The White Tiger’s presence at the world’s biggest book fairs – mostly London Book Fair (LBF), but also Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) and Book Expo America (BEA) – played a decisive role in trade but also in general media’s pre- and postpublication coverage in the years 2007, 2008 and even 2009. In April 2007, almost a year before its first publication, reports of the LBF included a feature on the “schmoozing”, trust-building and buzz-making among agents, publishers, distributors and booksellers.8 Aravind Adiga’s agent Cathryn Summerhayes from William Morris Agency was heavily invested in pushing the title. Trade news in the UK and US offered further information about early acquisitions by publishing houses in Italy and the Netherlands, about competition for rights among publishers – Atlantic vs. Bloomsbury and Fourth Estate in the UK and Free Press vs. Spiegel & Grau and Grove in the US – and first parts of a narrative which would go into the book’s mystique. Ravi Mirchandani – who had become publishing director at Atlantic that year after leaving Heinemann – made his first acquisition with The White Tiger. His response to the pitch was performed in the manner of the novel’s protagonist.9 The book was scheduled for

8

Alan Riding, “Less Reading, More Schmoozing at London Book Fair”, The NYT 18

9

Cf. Alison Bone, “Mirchandani Grabs Tiger Tale”, The Bookseller 4 May 2007.

Apr. 2007. Mirchandani used a letter addressed to Adiga’s agent as “President Summerhayes”

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publication with Atlantic Books for spring 2008. In the US, Jay Mandel from William Morris sold the novel to The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. The US hardcover edition was scheduled for late April 2008 – after the LBF but preceding the BEA in Los Angeles. The immediate circumstances of the debut’s publication (even its publication date) were influenced by an early – pre-publication – endorsement by the book retailer Waterstones. In January 2008, the news was spread that Adiga was selected by Waterstones as one of 12 authors for its New Voices campaign. The distinction was part of the bookseller’s “Writer’s Year” promotion and was to be launched in time for World Book Day.10 The UK publication of The White Tiger thus profited from a promotion which saw “the titles [feature] prominently instore and in window displays, with special pushes on Waterstones.com and in its Books Quarterly magazine”.11 The retailer’s early choice shows the participation of many representatives and their institutions in the ‘making’ of this book. The buzz from book fairs and early promotion as a dark political novel was also acknowledged in pre-publication reviews in UK and US trade media, even if with different results. In a review for the Bookseller, an assistant manager at Waterstones admitted that the novel was “causing a bit of a buzz ahead of its publication” and praised its “humour and flashes of excellent writing” but concluded with a negative judgment of its protagonist, who failed to trigger the reviewer’s empathy, and its structure, both of which “get in the way of the sto-

and some rupees in pretend-bribe to show his understanding of and commitment to the manuscript. 10 The UK is an exception in celebrating World Book Day on the first Thursday of March so as not to clash with St. George’s day on 23 April when the rest of the world celebrates books. 11 Cf. Graeme Neill, “Waterstone’s Picks Voices of the Future”, The Bookseller 31 Jan. 2008. The bookseller’s credo that “the authors were likely future winners of literary prizes” was to be rewarded in Adiga’s case. Early investment in this author came in handy when Waterstone’s itself came under fire at the end of the decade for its allegedly destructive effect on publishing and for alienating customers as well as the world of “the literati” (Jeffries, The Guardian 10 Nov 2009). In a response to Stuart Jeffries’s accusation of the high street giant’s lost soul, the managing director of Waterstone’s Gerry Johnson referred to the bookseller’s participation in bringing debut writers such as Adiga “to a massive audience” long “before they received any media or awards attention” (“Yes, We’re Big. But Waterstone’s Is Still Passionate About Books”, The Guardian 12 Nov. 2009).

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ry”.12 In the US, in contrast, the book was received with star reviews in Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal. In Publishers Weekly, the protagonist of the novel, Balram Halwai, was described as “clever and resourceful […] with a witty and sarcastic edge that endears him to the readers”.13 The reviewer in the LJ emphasised the successful structure: “[e]ven more surprising is how well the narrative works in the way it’s written as a letter to the Chinese premier, who’s set to visit Bangalore, India” and recommended acquiring it “for all libraries”.14 Even though Kirkus Reviews, the third US trade publication which picked the book for pre-publication reviewing, was less immediately taken by this “undisciplined debut” for focusing too much on contemporary India and too little on the development of the character, it nevertheless described it as “one with plenty of vitality”.15 Analogously to the pre-publication coverage, post-publication trade coverage started with media reports about the 2008 London Book Fair. The 2007 risktaking was alluded to in 2008 when a month after its publication The White Tiger had not yet shown signs of returning the favour with only 342 copies sold until mid-April.16 The problem of high advances for much-hyped novels which do not necessarily translate into sales had become known as “the Londonstani-effect”, a term coined after the first novel by Gautam Malkani which was bought by Fourth Estate for allegedly over half million pounds but failed to win readers after its publication in 2006, and was used in coverage to remind of the dangers which might also apply to The White Tiger. Yet, while she acknowledged the danger, Adiga’s agent, Cathryn Summerhayes, showed great confidence in her client, declared that she had “editors dragging at [her] ankles” and “likened the book to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, a Penguin book, which had been shortlisted for the Booker in 2007, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and whose author had blurbed on the first edition of Adiga’s novel.17 Bookfairs continued to play a major role in the debut’s attention profile. Later that year, when Mirchandani’s deal turned out fruitful, Adiga was also re-

12 Callum Pownall, “Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger”, The Bookseller 11 Jan. 2008. 13 “The White Tiger ”, PW 14 Jan. 2008. 14 Evelyn Beck, “Adiga, Aravind: The White Tiger”, LJ 15 Feb. 2008. 15 “Adiga, Aravind: The White Tiger”, KR 15 Feb. 2008. 16 Cf. Alison Flood, “LBF: Assessing the Risks: Big Cat Fight”, The Bookseller 11 Apr. 2008. 17 The Reluctant Fundamentalist was frequently used in comparison with The White Tiger in later coverage, cf. e.g. Flood, The Bookseller 11 Apr. 2008.

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membered as the star of the 2007 Frankfurt Fair.18 By the time India became the market focus of the 2009 London Book Fair, Adiga was promoted among the leading literary stars the country had on offer and – along with his fellow countryman Vikas Swarup whose debut Q&A became not only an international bestseller but was adapted into the Oscar-winning box-office hit Slumdog Millionaire – was celebrated in a year which was deemed particularly strong for Indian writers.19 Before Adiga was put in such company, The White Tiger had already persuaded critics and prize juries. General Coverage: Adiga’s Active Participation There was not much critical interest in The White Tiger prior to its publication. In fact, before reviewers could begin with their evaluations, it was the author who wrote himself into the discussion – a move which the experienced journalist used throughout the coverage of his novel. Before The White Tiger was picked up by daily newspapers in the UK, The Independent printed an article written by Aravind Adiga about the experience of reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) in a college dorm in New York.20 This ‘testimonial review’, underneath which the author was credited with his debut novel, revealed less about the book than its impact on Adiga and his opinions about interracial relationships. He identified with the anger of the black protagonist and pondered upon the many invisible men in India who might fight back at some point. It was an important analogy to the story of his protagonist, and was later taken up by his reviewers. Throughout the coverage of his novel, Adiga remained active as a spokesperson and critical opinions of his work were interspersed with extracts from his fictional writing as much as features about India, globalisation and terrorism. For example, after the first reviews appeared, but before the news about his Booker Prize longlist, Adiga reported on a recent murder case for The Sunday Times which again bore connections to his novel.21 Reviews in the general media appeared after the book’s publication in the UK while in the US only a review in The New Yorker was published before its launch. Some main dailies and weeklies did not pick up the novel immediately after publication and only followed suit with the nomination or win of the Book-

18 Cf. “The Browser”, The Observer 19 Oct. 2008. 19 Cf. Tom Tivnan, “Eastern Promise”, The Bookseller 17 Apr. 2009. 20 Aravind Adiga, “Book of a Lifetime”, The Independent 28 Mar. 2008. 21 Aravind Adiga, “Author Aravind Adiga Revelas [sic] the Class War Simmering beneath India’s Boom”, The Sunday Times 29 June 2008.

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er Prize: The Telegraph and the London Review of Books in the UK, or The New York Times Book Review in the US are examples of such belated coverage. The topics discussed in reviews were the new economic powers India and China; the emergence of a New India, as well as what constitutes the ‘real’ India. The media also covered the representation of crime, ethics and morality, both in terms of the new middle class and the alleged sublimation of the common man (which is said to be questioned in Adiga’s novel). Underlying these ideas were the replacement of a caste system in favour of a class system with a new demarcation line based on economic rather than religious ideas and the role of the family in keeping up a status quo, which Adiga describes with the ‘rooster coop’ metaphor. In the UK, the initial critical response to The White Tiger was mostly favourable. The New Statesman’s reviewer, Nakul Krishna, Rhodes scholar at Oxford and contributing editor at the Oxonian Review, came to the conclusion that Adiga’s criticism of the current political and economic situation in India, his “manifesto”, was exactly “what the new India needs but isn’t getting enough of” in order to secure “economic freedom […] which was the foundation of progressive change in the west”.22 Writing for The Sunday Times, Adam Lively, author of Blue Fruit (1988, Simon & Schuster) and one of the 1993 Granta Best of Young British Novelists, spoke of the many lessons the reader may draw from the story and its protagonist but insisted that the novel was in no way “a didactic exercise in ‘issues’, like a newspaper column” but written by “a real writer – that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision”.23 In The Independent, Soumya Bhattacharya, Indian journalist and author, emphasised the factuality of Adiga’s “riveting, razor-sharp debut novel” which “explores with wit and insight the realities of these two Indias”, and in which there was a truth to be discovered in the plot, one which “is as shocking as it is fantastic”, and one of far-reaching consequences to the public: “His is a novel that has come not a moment too soon”.24 Reading the novel for The Financial Times, Adrian Turpin, director of Britain’s bi-annual Wigtown Book Festival, embedded the central paradox of the novel in the character of its protagonist. As the reader attempted to pin down Balram as “just another thug in India’s urban jungle or a revolutionary and ideal-

22 Nakul Krishna, “Getting and Spending”, New Statesman 27 Mar. 2008. 23 Adam Lively, “The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga”, The Sunday Times 6 Apr. 2008. The reviewer here defends Adiga’s work with the same argument which Mark Haddon used as an author to protect his novel from false categorisation (cf. chapter 5.2). 24 Soumya Bhattacharya, “The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga”, The Independent 11 Apr. 2008.

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ist”, Turpin opined that it was “a sign of this book’s quality, as well as of its moral seriousness, that it keeps you guessing to the final page and beyond”.25 The Telegraph reviewer, Neel Mukherjee, an Indian writer and contributing editor to the Boston Review, predicted a great future for the writer and also emphasised the reality and truth in his novel: “What Adiga lifts the lid on is also inexorably true: not a single detail in this novel rings false or feels confected”.26 The same emphasis on reality was made in a short but very positive review for The Times by Kate Saunders, author, actress and journalist, who presented Balram and his “cynical, gleeful voice” as apt representative of “modern India”: “no nostalgic lyricism here, only exuberant reality”.27 In The Independent on Sunday, David Mattin, a freelance journalist and broadcaster saw potential in a book which told a rare story, that of India’s “underbelly” and “explodes the clichés” so popular in other novels about the country but predicted possible grounds for controversy: “Arch-defenders of India’s claim to be truly democratic, evenhandedly prosperous and corruption-free (and these must be few outside of the Indian cabinet) might balk at The White Tiger. Everyone else, surely, will be seduced by it.”28 Contrary to these supporting voices, the reviewers of The Guardian, The Observer and The Times Literary Supplement each found some fault with the book and their more sceptical approaches exposed some of the points which pervaded the criticism of The White Tiger. In The TLS, Sameer Rahim, Assistant Books Editor at The Telegraph, pointed out the novel’s “lack of subtlety” and its “cynicism” but found that it has some, not literary, but social worth: “it is a useful counter to optimistic tales of India’s roaring economy”.29 The Debut Fiction columnist for The Observer, Francesca Segal, was of the opposite opinion. She found the narrator’s voice “engaging” but Adiga’s approach, in her opinion, left something to be desired:

25 Adrian Turpin, “The White Tiger”, Financial Times 19 Apr. 2008. 26 Neel Mukherjee, “Exposing the Real India”, The Sunday Telegraph 27 Apr. 2008. 27 Kate Saunders, “Pandora in the Congo, The White Tiger, This Charming Man”, The Times 1 May 2008. 28 David Mattin, “The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga”, The Independent on Sunday 11 May 2008. 29 Sameer Rahim, “The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga”, The TLS 15 Oct. 2008.

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there’s little new here – the blurbs claim it’s redressing the misguided and romantic Western view of India – but I suspect there are few to whom India’s corruption will come as a surprise. As social commentary, it’s disappointing, although as a novel it’s good fun.30

It is striking that the reviewer refers explicitly to the book’s cover to disagree not only with the novel but also those who have previously endorsed it. In the most crushing review, printed in The Guardian, author and journalist Kevin Rushby raised hopes for Adiga’s future, detecting an “interesting talent”, but did not believe in his take on a new India: “My hunch is that this is fundamentally an outsider’s view and a superficial one”.31 In these examples, the question of the book’s literariness was separated from its worth as a source of information. The initial reviewing success showed when The White Tiger made it into the Bookseller’s “Most Reviewed” column which summarised the attention bestowed upon books in the preceding weekend and Sunday papers. This success was not as yet overwhelming: the novel was either mentioned last of the pack or as an extra, not among the most reviewed but mentioned along with other books to watch out for.32 That said, the inclusion on the list could already be seen as a major accomplishment. In the US, all reviewers, with the exception of one sceptical response in The Washington Post, reacted positively to the debut and invoked a canon of writers and thinkers to position Adiga and his debut. Deirdre Donahue, book critic at USA Today, was the most straightforward in her description of this “amazing and angry novel about injustice and power” which she thought “one of the most powerful books I’ve read in decades” and which “hit me like a kick to the head – the same effect Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man had.”33 Both Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times book critic since 1998 and author of four novels, and writer Lee Thomas, in a review for The San Francisco Chronicle, emphasised Adiga’s training as a journalist which explained his interest in “Indian inequality and instability”34 and “lends the immediacy of breaking

30 Francesca Segal, “When the Eternal Allure of India Wears Thin”, The Observer 13 Apr. 2008. 31 Kevin Rushby, “His Monster’s Voice”, The Guardian 19 Apr. 2008. 32 Cf. Anna Richardson, “Most Reviewed”, The Bookseller 21 Apr 2008; cf. also same column on 30 June 2008. 33 Deirdre Donahue, “Roundup: Debut Novels”, USA Today 23 Apr. 2008. 34 Michael Upchurch, “In These 3 Striking Debut Novels, Homicidal Characters Bring Life to Varied Settings”, The Seattle Times 27 Apr. 2008.

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news to his writing”35 but they also agitated for its literary worth. Thomas highlighted the novel’s “passages of startling beauty” and compared “his richly detailed storytelling” and the careful balance of “fable and pure observation” to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) and, like Donahue, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940).36 Upchurch categorised the book as a “fierce and funny novel”, a “satire as sharp as it gets”.37 Writing for The New York Sun, Scott Medintz, a business magazine journalist and editor of Upstart, a magazine for and about young entrepreneurs, used his professional background to read Adiga’s novel as “a fascinating glimpse beneath the surface of an Indian economic ‘miracle’”, “a meticulously conceived allegory of the creative destruction that’s driving globalization”, and praised the Indian writer for “brilliantly invok[ing]” Nietzsche.38 The comparison with and allusion to such names added to Adiga’s worth of consideration and further justified the commentator’s attention. The question of how well Adiga succeeded in the balancing act between describing the public and the private also pervaded the US responses. The first, tentatively positive reaction in The New Yorker noted that “Adiga’s message isn’t subtle or novel, but Balram’s appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling”.39 Vikram Johr, a writer from Delhi, in a review published in Florida-based St. Petersburg Times, attested authenticity to Adiga whose claim of representation could easily be questioned because of “his upper-class bearing” but who nevertheless penned “a remarkably authentic portrayal of the life of the underdog – a representative of the many millions of Indians who live and die in mind-numbing deprivation”.40 The writer of a literary column for the Boston Sunday Globe, Katherine A. Powers perceived Balram as struggling with the many forces that exert oppression upon him and, in comparison to Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, saw his personal fate in the centre of the story rather than social commentary: “In the end, this is no more a novel whose subject is social and economic injustice than the subject of ‘Crime and

35 Lee Thomas, “White Tiger: When Life Is to Eat or Be Eaten”, San Francisco Chronicle 27 Apr. 2008. 36 Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle 27 Apr. 2008. 37 Upchurch, The Seattle Times 27 Apr. 2008. 38 Scott Medintz, “India’s Native Son: Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’”, New York Sun 29 Apr. 2008. 39 “The White Tiger”, The New Yorker 14 Apr. 2008. 40 Vikram Johri, “Adiga’s ‘White Tiger’ Explores the Bloody Rise of the Outcast”, Tampa Bay Times 14 May 2008.

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Punishment’ is urban violence. It is the story of a man’s soul”.41 In contrast, novelist and short story writer Tony D’Souza felt disappointed at a novel which set out “to tell the story of contemporary India” but ultimately “offers something less than it might have achieved”.42 But even the one negative US postpublication review acknowledged the importance of its topic, which was facilitated by the novel’s structure and “allows Adiga to weave the two most ascendant subjects of our day: India and China”.43 The discussion provided with The White Tiger showed signs of potential controversy for both ‘East’ and ‘West’. One month into the publication of the book, Adiga was interviewed by Scott Simon on NPR. The interview showed a writer who was not afraid of raising controversy: “It was important for me that this book should both entertain and disturb the reader so that he or she will keep thinking about some of the issues raised here.”44 The host’s repeated reference to Balram as “killer” and “psychopathic protagonist” was not alleviated by the author’s insistence that his character “isn’t without remorse” and created room for rubbing Indian listeners up the wrong way when Adiga later referred to Balram as “much like modern-day Indians”, or “the voice of a poorer, slightly unusual, but not atypical Indian”.45 This potential was nourished by the passage which Adiga chose to read out about hierarchies, a concept reduced to the size of belly and the question of eating or being eaten up. As the reading was framed by the interview passage, the opinions of the protagonist were compounded with the views of the author. But his stance was not limited to critiquing India. In a TIME magazine article on science and religion, the writer played with the moment of indecision on whether to decry science scepticism in America or whether to silently ignore it in the hope that one day it will be the foggy-brained ‘Westerners’ who will serve the more technologically and scientifically progressed population of the, as yet, so-called ‘Third World’.46 However, most of the controversial potential was perceived in Indian media. The more positive reviewers attested Adiga’s success in both his literary and social endeavour. Editor-at-Large of India Today, the essayist and critic S.

41 Katherine A. Powers, “Ratcheting Down the Suspense”, The Boston Globe 27 July 2008. 42 Tony D’Souza, “Changing Lanes”, The Washington Post 8 June 2008. 43 D’Souza, The Washington Post 8 June 2008. 44 Scott Simon, “In White Tiger, Killer Exploits India’s Caste System”, NPR Weekend Edition Saturday 17 May 2008. 45 Simon, NPR Weekend Edition Saturday 17 May 2008. 46 Aravind Adiga, “Mystical Mischief in New York”, TIME 16 July 2008.

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Prasannarajan praised Adiga as “a storyteller who strikes a fine balance between the sociology of the wretched place he has chosen as home and the twisted humanism of the outcast” and pronounced a great future for a writer whose creation was as rare and individualistic in life as it was in fiction.47 Similarly, Pratik Kanjilal, co-editor and publisher of The Little Magazine, qualified Balram as “a natural hero of popular literature in the Asian century”, whose story served as “a parable for the liberation of the third world”, and Adiga as a welcome counterexample to the emergence of a new genre of “self-congratulatory India Shining literature”.48 The less persuaded critics regretted the absence of either one or the other, if not both sides of the undertaking of a political novel. In a review for FEER, Ben Frumin, a freelance journalist based in Delhi, acknowledged the author for drawing attention to an important topic and judged the book positively even though, in his eyes, Adiga failed as a literary writer:49 In that vein, Arash Vafa Fazli judged The White Tiger as a disappointment from a literary point of view but attested its immense importance: “despite its faults, the novel makes an impact because of the brutal candour with which it holds up a mirror to an India that many of us would rather not see”.50 The reviewers explicitly discussed the novel’s controversial potential but chose to react to it differently. In a very negative review, Manjula Padmanabhan, disclosed disappointment at the book’s promise, again by referring directly to the novel’s cover: “I found the book a tedious, unfunny slog, but the back-cover blurb says it is ‘compelling, angry and darkly humorous’”.51 The critic also had difficulties detecting similarities between Adiga and those who he had been compared with – Kiran Nagarkar, Allan Sealy and Salman Rushdie – and accused the young novelist of a scandalous de-scandalisation of his positioning: “The tone of the writing is breezy-absurd, which means we can’t hold the writer

47 S. Prasannarajan, “Driving out of Darkness”, India Today 17 Apr. 2008. 48 Pratik Kanjilal, “Springing Servant, Crouching Master”, Hindustan Times 5 May 2008. 49 Ben Frumin, “The White Tiger”, Far Eastern Economic Review 31 May 2008: “Despite these literary stumbles, Mr. Adiga’s caustic wit and scathing commentary on the sort of morality that wins in modern India reveals the burning hypocrisies, inequities and antediluvian social skeleton that riddle the world’s largest democracy. These hard truths form part of the foundation for India’s recent economic success, and pose some of its largest challenges for sustaining itself in the future.” 50 Arash Vafa Fazli, “India in Unflattering Light”, The Hindu 6 July 2008. 51 Manjula Padmanabhan, “Bleached House Cat”, Outlook / india.com 5 May 2008.

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accountable for anything that happens in the book. […] There’s no accountability in the breezy-absurd school of literature!”52 In contrast, to the negative assessment of a consciously contentious novel, Nigel Collett, author of the biography The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (2005), understood the scandalous potential of Adiga’s novel as a portrayal of “India from the bottom up”, as “not a comfortable novel, nor a picture of the state of India which the country’s tourist board would wish to see in its glossy literature”, but defended Adiga’s look with attesting the writer a genuine “love” for his country.53 He summarised the novel in a blurb-like manner and, as other propagators of the novel have done, put his hope in the writer’s future: “It is sharp, sassy and very funny. This reviewer for one hopes that we will soon see his second.”54 Indeed, Adiga’s next book would soon follow but, first, he was to reap the fruits for the first. “An unlikely winner”: Booker Prize Coverage, US Paperback and Turn of the Year The White Tiger made a significant impression on reviewers throughout April and May. Even though critical interest in the book slowly ebbed away in June and July with the last big UK review in mid-May, by the end of June The Sunday Times praised the novel in its summer reading recommendations as the “debut of the year, a coruscating black comedy, full of unflinching satire, about one man’s rise from the gutter in modern India”.55 In the US, Adiga’s own article in TIME magazine drew attention to his novel, as did a review of the audio format in Publishers Weekly which praised the author for writing “like a seasoned professional”.56 Nevertheless, sales did not pick up after the spring and were, in fact, dying away before the 2008 Booker nominees were announced and things changed drastically for Adiga’s first novel. With the announcement of the 2008 Man Booker longlist began the rise to what would become Adiga’s peak in media presence. In consequence of the nomination, The White Tiger drew the additional attention of such papers which it had already stirred and such which paid attention to the book for the first time

52 Padmanabhan, Outlook / india.com 5 May 2008. 53 Nigel Collett, “The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga”, Asian Review of Books 9 July 2008. 54 Collett, Asian Review of Books 9 July 2008. 55 Adiga, The Sunday Times 29 June 2008. 56 “The White Tiger”, PW 30 June 2008.

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– not least the literary magazine London Review of Books. The coverage of the Booker Prize and Adiga’s presence in the papers reached most of the media which had already picked up the novel in the reviewing cycle and went beyond the territory which it had already claimed with responses to its respective publication. At the beginning of the 2008 longlist coverage,57 Aravind Adiga was not mentioned at all,58 or only included as part of the announced list59. Mainly, he was referred to as one of the many debut novelists, along with Tom Rob Smith60 and/or Steve Toltz61. Adiga was also acknowledged as part of the Indian block along with Ghosh and, “of course”, Rushdie.62 In this role as national representative, he was mentioned as evidence for the international selection of nominees from India, Australia and Pakistan.63 Apart from national and geographic positioning, Adiga’s novel was placed explicitly alongside other longlist contenders. In comparison with Smith’s Child 44, Michelle Pauli regarded The White Tiger

57 Adiga was mentioned, at times repeatedly so, in longlist reports and comments in the UK in The Bookseller, The Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Daily Mail, The Birmingham Post, The Herald in Scotland, as well as in The Financial Times; in the US in The New York Times, The New York Observer, The New York Sun, The New Yorker and LA Weekly; and in Australia in The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald. 58 Cf. Stephen Adams, “Sir Salman Rushdie Heads Booker Prize Long-List”, The Telegraph 29 July 2008; Claire Armitstead, “Booker Longlist: ‘A Profound Eccentricity About Literary Prizes... It’s Just Nice When You Win’”, guardian.co.uk 30 July 2008; Lex Hall, “Two Aussie Writers Make Booker List”, The Australian 30 July 2008; Phil Miller, “Rushdie in the Running Again for 2008 Man Booker Prize”, The Herald 30 July 2008; Liz Thomas, “Salman Rushdie among the Favourites for Man Booker Prize after Being Nominated a Third Time”, Mail Online 29 July 2008; Laura Barton, “Booker: The Novel That Made Thrillers Respectable”, guardian.co.uk 31 July 2008. 59 Cf. Julie Bloom, “Booker Prize Names Announced”, The NYT 30 July 2008. 60 Mark Brown, “Booker Prize Longlist: From an Enchantress to Exploding Mangoes: Judges Draw up Longlist”, The Guardian 30 July 2008. 61 Lara Ellington-Brown, “Rushdie in the Running for Booker Prize”, Financial Times 30 July 2008. 62 Eileen Battersby, “An Irishman’s ‘Great American Novel’ Early Favourite to Win Booker Prize”, The Irish Times 30 July 2008. 63 Cf. Dalya Alberge, “Booker: Social Worker Gaynor Arnold Makes Longlist”, The Times 30 July 2008; and Sameer Rahim, “Man Booker Prize Long List”, The Telegraph 29 July 2008.

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as “a more traditional Booker choice”.64 One of the first critics to have expressed explicit praise for the judges “who have spotted the strength and subtlety behind Aravind Adiga’s dissection of India’s economic boom in The White Tiger”, Boyd Tonkin, also included the young writer among The Literary Editor’s Choice, along with Berger, Grant, de Kretser, O’Neill and Rushdie.65 The announcement of the shortlist – and especially the parting from Rushdie’s nomination – changed the relations among the nominees.66 Adiga emerged as a candidate worthy of consideration as one of two first-time novelists,67 one of two Indian authors and the youngest writer on the list68. His book received backing from several figures outside and inside the decision-making process. Amazon’s head of books buying, Kes Nielsen, deemed The White Tiger a “fantastic read”69 and likened its bestseller potential to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi rather than an Ian McEwan. His trade colleague, Janine Cook, fiction buyer for Waterstones was similarly smitten: “I’d love to see White Tiger win – it’s a fascinating story told with a fresh voice, as much a page-turner as any thriller but with so much going on in its pages”.70 In fact, Michael Portillo, the chair of the judging panel, was reported to be a huge fan of both debuts and Adiga’s in particular: “two

64 Michelle Pauli, “Booker Longlist Boost for First-Time Novelists”, guardian.co.uk 29 July 2008. 65 Boyd Tonkin, “Lost Dogs and Enchantresses Make for a Strong Booker List, but Where Is Kelman?”, The Independent 30 July 2008. For similar praise for the judges on behalf of their appreciation of Adiga’s debut, cf. William Skidelsky, “In Search of Winning Words”, The Observer 3 Aug. 2008. 66 In the course of the shortlist coverage, Adiga was mentioned in the UK in The Bookseller, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and The Observer, as well as in The Daily Mail, The Financial Times and The Times Literary Supplement; in the US in The New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, The New York Observer and The New York Sun; and in India in the Hindustan Times, Newstrack India, India Today, Mumbai Mirror, The Statesman and Times of India. 67 Cf. Michelle Pauli and Alison Flood, “Rushdie ‘Not Good Enough’ for Booker Shortlist”, guardian.co.uk 9 Sept. 2008. 68 Cf. “Two First-Timers among Booker Picks”, USA Today 9 Sept. 2008; Arifa Akbar, “First-Timers Beat Rushdie to Booker Prize Shortlist”, The Independent 9 Sept. 2008; Amber Pearson, “2008 Man Booker Prize Shortlist”, Daily Mail 9 Sept. 2008; “Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga in Booker Prize Shortlist”, Reuters 9 Sept. 2008. 69 Alison Flood, “O’Neill Is Hottest Tip in Booker Race”, guardian.co.uk 9 Sept. 2008. 70 “Salman Rushdie Is Snubbed on Booker Prize Shortlist”, The Sunday Telegraph 31 Aug. 2008.

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books which absolutely blow your cobwebs away. […] In a way you can tell these are debut novels, not because of any deficiencies but because of their freshness”.71 The judges collectively (and explicitly) supported Adiga for this very newness: “So a new voice is as welcome, and as rare, as a fine ending. Which is why all five judges wanted Aravind Adiga’s first novel to be on this year’s shortlist […]”.72 It was Adiga’s newness and the freshness of his debut which seemed to persuade at this stage. Put in context with other candidates, Adiga was often presented with more coverage or with a highlighted position. In comparison to Amitav Ghosh, his standing evidently improved when he was used as a reference for the more established writer rather than the other way round, and at this stage, even in the Indian press, it was Adiga, not Ghosh, who led coverage. In addition to several news agencies that gave more space to Adiga than Ghosh,73 Kate Saunders in The Times considered Adiga as one of her favourites, emphasising his advantage in comparison with Amitav Ghosh, as the “other Indian contender”.74 In addition to the many references in Booker coverage, the nominations also instigated further coverage of each nominee, new reviews and attention in other media – literary magazines, blogs and critics were very aware of the additional weight attached to the novels. Peter Robins reviewed The White Tiger for The Telegraph and spoke very favourably of its wit and determination, yet delivered a small blow against the Booker claiming that the novel “won’t win any prizes for subtlety. But it hasn’t been nominated for one of those”.75 In his annual blog accompanying the Booker period, Sam Jordison reviewed each Booker nominee, which he started with a “Judging by Cover” column, in which he evaluated the novels’ outer appearance. Jordison was at first sceptical towards Adiga’s novel based on a blurb by Mohsin Hamid, whose debut and Booker-nominated novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, he regarded as “a cynical study in issue-fiction”

71 Pauli and Flood, guardian.co.uk 9 Sept. 2008. 72 “His Master’s Voice”, The Economist 11 Sept. 2008. 73 Cf. e.g. AFP, “Australian Toltz Makes Booker Prize Shortlist”, ABC News 10 Sept. 2008; cf. also ANI, “Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger in Man Booker Prize 2008 Shortlist”, Newstrack India 9 Sept. 2008. 74 Kate Saunders, “There’s Not One Stinker in 2008 Man Booker Shortlist”, The Times 10 Sept. 2008. 75 Peter Robins, “The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga”, The Telegraph 9 Aug. 2008. Significantly, Robins reacted less than happy with the Booker judges’ choice of shortlisted writers and spoke harsher of Adiga’s novel at a later stage of the Booker cycle, cf. “On the Man Booker Shortlist”, The Telegraph 9 Sept. 2008.

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but found praise for The White Tiger’s outer beauty: “Nice paper, simple but eye-catching cover design and fine ruby red flyleaves. I’m looking forward to reading it already”.76 His second look perceived several problems with the novel but was genuinely positive even if the prophecy did not accommodate Adiga with the winning team and considered it “an unlikely winner”.77 Similarly to Jordison, yet shortly before the announcement of the final decision, Charlotte Higgins referred to the judges’ emphasis on the novel’s “breathtaking modernity” but did not consider it “a really first-rate novel”, or for that matter a serious candidate.78 Another Guardian routine was also bestowed upon Adiga and his novel. In his tongue-in-cheek critical column, John Crace summarized all six shortlisted nominees. In this satirical take, The White Tiger read like a selfconscious post-Rushdie novel in the style of Guy Ritchie.79 As the final decision approached reviews were updated and uploaded in several online versions of the papers.80 In the AFP news coverage, Adiga received a prominent first place in presentation and his novel was the only one with a comment which went beyond pure mentioning: “Indian writer Aravind Adiga, who at 34 years old is the youngest novelist and one of two debutants among the six authors short-listed, was nominated for ‘The White Tiger’”.81 The emphasis on his junior status made for an even grander surprise at the award ceremony. The announcement of the young novelist’s triumph as Booker winner on 14 October was disseminated widely through national and international press.82 The massive media impact of the Booker Prize also translated into sales figures. Adiga’s novel jumped to #1 of ten fiction titles on the Hindustan Times bestseller

76 Sam Jordison, “Judging the Booker by Its Covers (Again)”, guardian.co.uk 19 Aug. 2008. 77 Sam Jordison, “Booker Club: The White Tiger”, guardian.co.uk 22 Aug. 2008. 78 Charlotte Higgins, “If I Were Judging the Booker Prize”, guardian.co.uk 14 Oct. 2008. 79 John Crace, “Digested Reads”, The Guardian 10 Sept. 2008. 80 See, for example, Kevin Rushby, “The White Tiger”, The Guardian 15 Oct. 2008. 81 “Authors Face Off for Prestigious Booker Prize”, AFP 14 Oct. 2008. 82 The announcement of The White Tiger as the winner of the 2008 Booker Prize was shared in the UK in The Bookseller, in The Guardian and The Observer, The Times, The Telegraph and The Independent; in the US in The New York Times, USA Today, in the Star Tribune, in Publishers Weekly, TIME magazine, The New Yorker, Salon.com and The Daily Beast; in India in The Hindustan Times, The Statesman, Mumbai Mirror, Nagaland Post, The Pioneer, The Business Line and Outlook India. In addition, the press release was disseminated through news agencies AFP and Reuters.

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list in India already after the announcement of the shortlist. In the UK and the US, he was catapulted onto both The New York Times hardcover and trade paperback lists as well as onto a striking position in The Sunday Times where he entered the top fiction hardbacks at #4 only after the Booker win. The financial impact, thus, was evident as was the sheer quantity of media response but how did the Booker success change the verdict and discussion of the book? The rising significance of Adiga’s book in literary debates and media coverage led to a recapitulation of the book’s quality, its “truth” and Adiga’s status. The more the author was drawn into a position of spokesperson and his novel a reference point, the more the questions of his legitimacy were drawn into the centre of debate. Journalists presented the winner in view of his youth (as the second youngest Booker Prize winner), his status as debutant and his nationality. But mainly, they were under pressure to establish if Adiga was, in fact, “a worthy winner”.83 The Booker choice was a challenge for the critics and called for the second round of renewed positioning. Most critics were taken by surprise84 and found themselves in a difficult position having to re-think their first impression and either stick to the initial assessment or find good reasons to change their minds. Sam Jordison, for example, braved a 180 degrees turn: I’m annoyed and embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t really considered the White Tiger as a contender. […] Now that my initial disappointment that my favourite hasn’t won has faded slightly, I’m even starting to consider The White Tiger a daring choice. […] It could even be said that this decision marks a suitably provocative end to a very interesting year.85

Jordison positioned Adiga against previous Booker winners – other than just his contemporary contenders – when comparing the “real” Adiga success with the “compromise” decision for Anne Enright in 2007.86

83 John Sutherland, “Aravind Adiga Wins Booker Prize: A Worthy Winner?”, guardian.co.uk 14 Oct. 2008. 84 Cf. e.g. Charlotte Higgins, “Out of the Darkness: Adiga’s White Tiger Rides to Booker Victory against the Odds”, The Guardian 14 Oct. 2008: “Adiga, 33, is a surprise winner: at long odds he batted aside the claims of veteran writers on the shortlist such as Sebastian Barry and Amitav Ghosh.” 85 Sam Jordison, “How Did the White Tiger Capture the Booker?”, guardian.co.uk 15 Oct. 2008. 86 Jordison, guardian.co.uk 15 Oct. 2008.

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Most significantly, the young winner from India was seen in a tradition with Salman Rushdie and, depending on the critic’s stance, considered an apt, worthy or less so successor. Erica Wagner from The Times judged the novel not only a fitting winner but a fitting portrayal of contemporary India: “a compelling portrait of modern India, The White Tiger, that takes his country – and the reader – into the present day, a follow-up to the moment of a country’s conception that Rushdie portrayed”.87 As a “follow-up” it was attached to Rushdie’s ‘prequel’. This observation was extended to a continuous interest in Indian writing, which the literary editor of The Independent detected as a traditional characteristic of the Booker but which he also shared with the Prize: The Mumbai stock market may have been plunging over recent days, but in the global marketplace for fiction the mantra of ‘Invest in India’ remains a safe long-term bet. Only two years after Kiran Desai took the prize for The Inheritance of Loss, Aravind Adiga last night confirmed that subcontinental stories have a peculiar power to seduce Man Booker judges. […] That Indian truism about the nation as a shotgun marriage of ancient and ultra-modern may have bags of literary life left in it.88

With his Booker success, Adiga’s first novel was not so much perceived as a debut but as a subsequent novel in a long history of Indian state-of-the-nation novels – a history which promised a bright future. Critics made predictions as to the future of the novel’s sales and the author’s success. Where sales figures were concerned, numbers made for persuasive prognosis: “The online bookseller amazon.co.uk predicted The White Tiger would see a sales uplift of 700 per cent.”89 In reference to literary prospects, forecasting tended to be dodgier and critics were unsure of what would become of the author even if they acknowledged the Booker as a promising step: “Will Adiga come to be ranked alongside them [Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alan Paton]? This is his first novel, so it is a bit too soon to tell. But the Man Booker Prize is a good start.”90 Such predictions to the author’s future position indicated the critic’s perspective on the Booker Prize as an author-centred award

87 Erica Wagner, “Aravind Adiga Wins Man Booker Prize with the White Tiger”, The Times 15 Oct. 2008. 88 Boyd Tonkin, “Boyd Tonkin: A Beguiling Tale That Speaks Volumes About Our Predicament”, The Independent 15 Oct. 2008. 89 Stephen Adams, “Man Booker Prize Won by First Time Indian Author Aravind Adiga”, The Telegraph 15 Oct. 2008. 90 Wagner, The Times 15 Oct. 2008.

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– one which could make careers rather than just help an individual novel come to the attention of others. The focus was re-directed not only from the other contenders to Adiga but also from his novel to his person. The book and its author were presented in a series of interviews and profiles. It is significant that Adiga really became interesting as a person, or rather as an author, after his Booker success. In The Independent, Arifa Akbar positioned Adiga along with Rushdie and Arundhati Roy and mainly focused on the question of the young author’s legitimacy to present a “searing portrait of Indian poverty”, his travels to India and journalistic assignments.91 In The Guardian, Stuart Jeffries introduced the controversy behind the Booker Prize winner and questioned Adiga about his legitimacy to write about the poor, his “nerve” to tackle a subject which cannot be grounded in experience for this “enviably bright young thing, a middle-class, Madras-born, Oxfordeducated ex-Time magazine correspondent”.92 More than just a question of the book’s authenticity, the discussion turned to Adiga’s legitimacy. Adiga was at first reluctant to step into this debate but when he finally opened up, he used the argument of fiction as the vehicle for a higher truth to strengthen his position. He compared his undertaking to what “writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens did in the 19th century and, as a result, England and France are better societies”: “That’s what I’m trying to do – it’s not an attack on the country, it’s about the greater process of self-examination.”93 And this was a challenge to the existence of an India which those who admired the novel as much as those who criticised it heavily sought to prove: a democratic India and one which did not shun from introspection. Asked by Premankur Biswas about the intentions and messages behind his book, Adiga vehemently reminded the interviewer that “The White Tiger is a novel – not a social or political treatise; I hope the readers remember that. It’s meant to be fun, and engaging, and provocative”.94 In the same interview, the author also explained the significance of the Man Booker Prize for Indian writers and raised an issue which was not only important for self-positioning but also significant for the understanding of literary vs. genre authorship: “It’s very important, as literary writers (as opposed to mass-market writers) still have to struggle to find readers – in any country. The

91 Akbar, Arifa. “Debut Author Wins Booker with Searing Portrait of Indian Poverty.” The Independent 15 Oct. 2008. 92 Stuart Jeffries, “Roars of Anger”, The Guardian 16 Oct. 2008. 93 Jeffries, The Guardian 16 Oct. 2008. 94 Premankur Biswas, “The White Tiger Is Meant to Be Fun and Engaging: Adiga”, The Indian Express 17 Oct. 2008.

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award confers glamour and recognition upon serious writers – which helps a serious book get wide attention.” 95 Despite his stance as an outsider to London’s literary circles, Adiga wanted to be regarded as a serious literary writer. In the meantime, a small controversy arose after the announcement of Adiga’s success when news spread that the author had left his literary agent Cathryn Summerhayes at William Morris Agency. A Telegraph article mainly presented the agent’s side “who has been widely credited with helping Adiga win the £50,000 prize”, while the author, in contrast, was introduced as controversial and self-assured and said to be unavailable for comment.96 Adiga’s response was published in an interview with Amit Roy in The Telegraph (Calcutta). The author insisted that the break with Jay Mandel, at the US base of William Morris, “came in November 2007, before the book was published”, that he was “unhappy with how [he] was represented”, that his Booker success had little to do with “Ms Summerhayes” who “was never [his] principal agent”, in fact, they had never met, he said.97 Despite the claims that Adiga was non-responsive, he sustained communication and took part in the discussion. On the one hand, the fresh Booker winner constantly found himself in a place of defence, claiming even that there were other participants, “travel writers ‘who have a vested interest in perpetuating a romanticised and ahistorical view of India’”.98 On the other, he proved aware of the potential for controversies, more even, as their instigator: “The tone of it was meant to be provocative and even a bit nasty at times […] It’s meant to get people thinking.”99 He was also present as spokesperson and reference point, made comments on India’s situation and globalisation in interviews, essays and short stories. In the two months between his Booker success and Christmas, two of his short stories were printed in The Times and The Sunday Times, a third in The Guardian.100 Two articles by the writer, an opinion piece about the election of Barack Obama and a report on the Mumbai attacks, appeared in The Times, and

95

Biswas, The Indian Express 17 Oct. 2008.

96

Richard Eden, “Ambitious Booker Winner Aravind Adaga [sic] Sacks Agent of His

97

Amit Roy, “Split with Agent: Adiga Speaks Up”, Telegraph Calcutta 27 Oct. 2008.

98

Mark Brown, “Decision Day for Booker Hopefuls”, The Guardian 14 Oct. 2008.

99

“At-a-Glance: Booker Shortlist 2008”, BBC 14 Oct. 2008.

Success …”, The Sunday Telegraph 25 Oct. 2008. Cf. also “Adiga Denies He Sacked His Agent”, Mumbai Mirror 28 Oct. 2008.

100 Aravind Adiga, “The Sultan’s Battery”, The Guardian 18 Oct. 2008.

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a third on India’s corruption in The Guardian. 101 After the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, he was repeatedly sought after as spokesperson.102 In November, Adiga’s novel was attested relevancy from high-up the consecration ladder. A team of poverty researchers from The University of Manchester and the London School of Economics published a report of their study claiming that literary fiction fulfilled an important role in educating the public about international development. In “The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge”, the researchers singled out Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger for their accounts of global issues like poverty and migration.103 The report was taken up in trade and general media and further stimulated the discussion of the novel’s accuracy and its literariness.104 Indeed, the idea about fiction as communication and the author as spokesperson permeated the post-Booker coverage of Adiga’s novel. Literary references were relatively rare. Mainly, Adiga and his novel were spoken about when journalists tackled questions of the current situation and changes in India. This production of the author as a spokesperson was embraced by Adiga whenever he took stance on such issues but others, too, charged his position with this authority. The Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting used The White Tiger as an example of a literary voice in the midst of her critique of the International Monetary Fund and its impact on India’s economy. She referred to other authors who have had the power of stirring up consciousness to questions of economy and politics and repudiated negative criticism of the Booker winner based on this quality.105 In a

101 Aravind Adiga, “Indians’ Worst Fear: The Honest Politician”, guardian.co.uk 30 July 2008. 102 He was interviewed in the UK for BBC Radio 4’s “PM” programme (“Invasion of Mumbai”, BBC 28 Nov. 2008), as well as in the US for NPR’s news-talk format (“Select Sites Targeted in the Mumbai Attacks”, NPR: Talk of the Nation 2 Dec. 2008). 103 “Take Novels Seriously, Urge Poverty Experts”, The University of Manchester 2008. 104 Cf. Stephen Adams, “Novels ‘Better at Explaining World’s Problems Than Reports’”, The Telegraph 6 Nov. 2008; Cf. also Philip Jones, “Books Explain World’s Problems”, The Bookseller 7 Nov. 2008. 105 Madeleine Bunting, “A Crisis Sparked by the World’s Rich Will Have the Poor Paying the Highest Price”, The Guardian 20 Oct. 2008: “The critics have been sniffy, referring to [Adiga] with discernible disdain as a former journalist. … But he won precisely … because, despite its possible shortcomings as a novel, his book

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Q&A session with Independent readers, Adiga was made an expert for diverse issues ranging from politics to economics to sports, and particularly to the new US president Barack Obama.106 In one article he was even named as one of the factors, alongside the work of charities, why India started considering questions of inequality.107 In early November, Adiga was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, an award for young Commonwealth writers under 35, sponsored and administered by Booktrust. The 2008 award was judged by Henry Sutton (Chair, author and books editor of the Daily Mirror), Joolz Denby (author and poet) and Sarah Hall (author and winner of the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize). The “maleonly”108 list comprised three books of non-fiction, two novels and a narrative poem by Adam Foulds (who later competed against Sebastian Barry for the Costa Book Award, cf. chapter 6.2). The White Tiger led the headlines during nominations and even after its defeat later that month by Henry Hitchings’s academic history of the English language, The Secret Life of Words (2008, John Murray), was mentioned prominently as a significant contestant, a Booker book. In fact, Hitchings’ victory was presented as all the more glorious for having left behind such renowned competition.109 After the Booker win, Adiga’s novel was for the first time analysed in two literary review publications and harshly criticised in both. Neither Sanjay Subrahmanyam in the London Review of Books nor Akash Kapur in The New York Times Book Review found that the book adequately captured India’s reality. Kapur concluded that Adiga failed to depict “the nation that is in reality caught somewhere between Adiga’s vision and the shinier version”.110 Subrahmanyam purported that Adiga claimed “to have produced a realistic text” but “seems to have no access” to his protagonist’s voice.111 The question of authority was soon

nails the myth of a benign US economic hegemony that has ‘lifted’ millions out of poverty across Asia.” 106 Aravind Adiga, “Aravind Adiga: You Ask the Questions”, The Independent 10 Nov. 2008. 107 Andrew Buncombe, “Cover Story: Slavery’s Modern Face”, The Statesman 28 Dec. 2008. 108 Alison Flood, “Booker Winner Squares up to Narrative Poem for John Llewellyn Rhys Prize”, guardian.co.uk 3 Nov. 2008. 109 Alison Flood, “Rare Victory for Non-Fiction Book in John Llewellyn Rhys Prize”, guardian.co.uk 24 Nov. 2008. 110 Akash Kapur, “The Secret of His Success”, The NYTBR 9 Nov. 2008. 111 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Diary: Another Booker Flop”, LRB 6 Nov. 2008.

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turned against the critics: who has the legitimacy to pronounce whether or not Adiga’s version is truthful? Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s assessment of alleged falsities in Adiga’s novel came under attack when Pankaj Mishra, who had endorsed the book for the ARC cover, pointed the magazine’s readers to the reviewer’s own shortcomings. In a letter to the editors, Mishra discussed some of the presumed weaknesses and asserted that it was the critic, not the novelist who was too distanced from North India to know about the “millions of speakers of Hindi, or Hinglish, improvise such commonplace idioms daily, too prodigiously, perhaps, to be archived at the American university where Subrahmanyam teaches history.”112 The reviews of the year with Christmas recommendations and a look back at the year’s most important events presented Adiga first and foremost as the 2008 Man Booker Prize winner. In the UK, The White Tiger featured prominently in all four main national papers and The Times Literary Supplement. The Observer even reserved some space for another profile article and gave Adiga yet another chance to speak about India’s situation, the book’s aim in stirring debate, and to disclose the use of the Booker cheque, which he donated to a large degree to his old school in Mangalore.113 With an emphasis on his residency in Mumbai, he positioned himself not only outside of the Western world but also outside of the literary world.114 Robert McCrum recommended the novel in several of his endof-year reviews. In one of these, he presented ten novels of the year and, tonguein-cheek, made transparent the degree of his relationship to the respective author, and praised the Booker winner as “a remarkable debut, taking the reader into the world of contemporary India”.115 Despite the Booker-induced attention, Adiga did not win the most pre-Christmas recommendations in the media. A Booktrust analysis of 2,000 end-of-year recommendations showed that the most mentioned

112 “Letters”, LRB 20 Nov. 2008. 113 Indian media reported on the joy on the part of Adiga’s former school in Mangalore, cf. Deepthi Shridhar, “Alma Mater Celebrates Adiga’s Win”, Bangalore Mirror 15 Oct 2008; cf. also “Winning Was a Habit with Adiga”, Mumbai Mirror 16 Oct. 2008. 114 Rachel Cooke, “The Booker Prize Winner: Aravind Adiga”, The Observer 21 Dec. 2008: “I am not a part of the literary world so I didn’t know until afterwards that it was so close, that Sebastian Barry [whose novel, The Secret Scripture, was hotly tipped to win] was the one who lost. A few moments stand out in life, and this is one of them, but I am insulated [from all the fuss] here [in Mumbai].” 115 Robert McCrum, “My Books of the Year, with All Relationships Disclosed”, guardian.co.uk 9 Dec. 2008.

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title with seventeen nominations went to another Booker nominee, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Other Booker contestants, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 and the main rival to the Prize, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, both of which received eight nominations, also came before The White Tiger, with ‘only’ seven mentions.116 In addition, Christmas sales figures disclosed that the Booker winner lingered behind JK Rowling, and “the highest literary fiction title in the charts”, The Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year 2008, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splending Suns.117 There were other participants whose influence outrivalled even that of the Booker Prize. First Half of 2009: UK Paperback Publication and More Literary Distinctions The year 2009 continued with reviews of the events and books of the previous year and some of the topics which were hinted at before Christmas – news about a follow-up and film adaptation, another set of awards, old and new rivalries and comparisons – but most of the first half of the year was dedicated to the paperback edition. The US paperback had been published simultaneously with the announcement of the Booker win in mid-October resulting in a double presence of the book on The New York Times bestseller list for hardcover and trade paperback.118 The UK paperback edition was scheduled by Atlantic for January 2009 along with the audio edition. In January, the novel was mentioned in an audio round-up in The Observer and reviewed positively in The Sunday Times and The Guardian. In June, it was chosen as one of Audiobook Publishing Association’s (APA) audiobooks of the year. In the US, the audio book was promoted with the “Listen Up Awards” in Publishers Weekly in January,119 and later at the 2009 BEA in New York City.120

116 Tom Gatti, “An Heroic Round-up Reveals the Real Books of the Year”, The Times 19 Dec. 2008. Cf. also Alison Flood, “Netherland Tops League of 2008 Critics’ Picks”, guardian.co.uk 6 Jan. 2009. 117 Alison Flood, “JK Rowling Bewitches Christmas Book Charts”, guardian.co.uk 24 Dec. 2008. 118 Cf. “Hardcover Fiction”, The NYT 24 Oct. 2008. 119 Kevin Howell, “The Listen up Awards: The Best Audios of 2008”, PW 5 Jan. 2009. 120 “S&S, Gospoken to Offer E-Titles for Mobile Phones”, PW 17 Apr. 2009. Cf. also Parul Sehgal, “Bookexpo America 2009: ‘The Graveyard Book’ Takes Audiobook of the Year”, PW 30 May 2009.

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Despite the earlier date scheduled, there were several indications that the UK paperback was only available in March that year when it was listed in its first week as a bestseller in both The Bookseller (#9) and The Sunday Times (#7). In February, The White Tiger was brought up again in reports of Waterstones 2009 New Voices campaign where it was mentioned along with Sadie Jones’s The Outcast as examples of the bookseller’s good choice in the previous year. The two debuts “have gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies between them” and with the Costa First Novel Award and the Booker Prize were said to have scooped the most important awards in the UK.121 The paperback edition of Adiga’s debut was reviewed extensively. A review of reviews in The Bookseller summarised opinions of the “most reviewed” title over the weekend as “divided” with positive accounts in The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times, and less thrilled responses in The Times and especially The Telegraph, where Philip Womack, a literary critic and children’s writer, downgraded the book claiming that it “adds up to little more than a sharp, stylish and blackly humorous thriller”.122 One week later, the “zesty debut” was evaluated positively in The Financial Times.123 The paperback edition successfully conquered bestselling charts and held this position along with Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture for several weeks.124 News about a possible film adaptation arrived in April in The Times of India and were later also taken up via the Hollywood Reporter by The New York Times and The Daily Beast. In the spring of 2009, Adiga was again present as spokesperson and reference point. The author’s reading from his debut novel and a discussion about his Booker success at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival was previewed

121 Katie Allen, “Waterstone’s Picks New Voices 2009”, The Bookseller 23 Feb. 2009; cf. also Alison Flood, “Waterstone’s Champions 12 ‘New Voices’ for 2009”, guardian.co.uk 23 Feb. 2009. 122 Philip Womack, “Pick of the Paperbacks, Reviews”, The Telegraph 19 Mar. 2009; “Eye of the Tiger”, The Bookseller 27 Mar. 2009. Unfortunately, the reviews in The Telegraph and The Sunday Times could not be obtained. The other reviews were Natalie Sandison, “Paperback of the Week: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga”, The Times 20 Mar. 2009; Alfred Hickling, “The White Tiger”, The Guardian 21 Mar. 2009; Stephanie Cross, “White Tiger”, The Observer 22 Mar. 2009. 123 James Urquhart, “The White Tiger”, Financial Times 30 Mar. 2009. 124 John Dugdale, “The Week in Books”, The Guardian 16 May 2009.

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early on in The Sunday Times.125 At the festival, he was interviewed by Andrew Holgate who was to endorse Adiga at several instances throughout the year.126 In March, the author wrote a feature on India’s political situation for The Times.127 Two of his articles were published in The Daily Beast: one in April on the elections in India,128 and another in May on fighting terrorism129. His novel was mentioned in diverse reports on India: from spa and health to Mumbai’s book-party scene. A Shillong Times article used the novel as a metaphorical vehicle for political criticism.130 Poorna Shetty made use of “the rooster coop” concept for pointing out the difficult position of divorce in India.131 On a very different note, Adiga was mentioned in a copyright infringement fight, led by JK Rowling and her lawyers, against the free-books-site Scribd.132 In an interview in The Guardian, Lionel Barber, the editor of The Financial Times, recommended The White Tiger along with A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif.133 The three realms of international criticism were divided and while the UK and the US reactions were predominantly welcoming, Indian commentators continued a distanced if not hostile attitude. In the US, Adiga’s novel was reviewed positively in Bookmarks Magazine where it was given three and a half stars after it had received enough coverage on both sides of the Atlantic to be included in the New Books Guide; in Books & Culture whose critic was undecided about her judgment of a book which read so pleasurable that the reader quickly forgot its

125 “Book Now for the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival”, The Sunday Times 25 Jan. 2009; “The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival”, The Sunday Times 22 Feb. 2009. 126 “Aravind Adiga Interviewed by Andrew Holgate”, The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 4 Apr. 2009. 127 Aravind Adiga, “An Inept Government May Be India’s Best Choice”, The Times 23 Mar. 2009. 128 Aravind Adiga, “The Unstoppable Gandhi”, The Daily Beast 23 Apr. 2009. 129 Aravind Adiga, “Fighting Terrorism at Too High a Price”, The Daily Beast 4 May 2009. 130 Lumjingshai Kharlyngdoh, “Of Rhetoric and Reality (Letters to the Editor)”, The Shillong Times 6 Jan. 2009. 131 Poorna Shetty, “India Learns the Meaning of Divorce”, guardian.co.uk 25 Feb. 2009. 132 Alison Flood, “JK Rowling Leads Fight against Free Books Site Scribd”, guardian.co.uk 30 Mar. 2009. 133 Janette Owen, “My Media”, The Guardian 13 Apr. 2009.

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details;134 and by Steve Coll, staff writer on issues of intelligence and national security for The New Yorker, whose evaluation of the novel was tainted by his understanding of Balram’s character as “a construction of the conscience of a privileged Indian” rather than “an authentic representation of India’s impoverished Darkness” but who was nevertheless positively pre-disposed on behalf of the Indian writer’s possibility to speak up, to criticize his home country, something which he claimed would be impossible in China. In the UK, The White Tiger was taken up in recommendations for summer reading in The Telegraph by Vince Cable, a British Liberal Democrat politician, and as part of Best Fiction in The Sunday Times. In India, however, another wave of negative criticism surfaced as the controversy of accurate and legitimate representation was found anew. Critics found that the book read too much like “the byline of a cover story in some big newspaper”135 and advised that a novel should “not inform” but instead “inspire and excite”136. More so, the author was accused of having “exposed his ignorance of India when he described, in the aftermath of 26/11, that five-star hotels are places ‘where people of all economic backgrounds go for a coffee’”.137 In the early spring, Adiga was also bestowed new prize recognition with several award nominations. In February, he was shortlisted for The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the South East Asia and the South Pacific region for both the Best First Book Award with The White Tiger and the Best Book Award for Between the Assassinations. In this context, Adiga was regarded as Australian and therefore did not directly compete with previous Booker rivals, Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency, who were shortlisted in the Europe and South Asia category.138 In addition to his own triumphs, the first half of the year, The White Tiger was repeatedly mentioned in The Bookseller in reference to the immense successes of the Independent Alliance despite a very difficult time for publishing and a financial crisis in full swing. The Alliance had several books in the running

134 Jane Zwart, “Captive Audience”, Books & Culture May/June 2009, 37. 135 B. Jeyamohan, “News Is the Inspiration”, express buzz 23 Jan. 2009. 136 Martin Kämpchen, “Poverty Porn”, The Statesman 1 May 2009. 137 Meena Kandasamy, “Let’s Not Be in Denial of the Reality”, express buzz 23 Jan. 2009. 138 In March, it was announced that Adiga was overtaken by Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap (Best Book) and Mo Zhi Hong’s The Year of The Shanghai Shark (Best First Book). The overall winners – The Slap (Best Book) and Mohammed Hanif for A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Best First Book) – were revealed in May 2009.

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for awards and media attention which were particularly lucky: “As an Alliance, we can’t expect to have two Richard and Judy picks, a presidential election, a Booker-winner and a Costa-winner every season”.139 Therefore, some of the comparisons and rivalries involving Adiga’s novel and titles by other independent publishers – Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber) and Barack Obama’s memoirs (Canongate) – need to be seen in a positive light for the Alliance overall. For example, in March 2009, Adiga was nominated in the Author of the Year category of the Galaxy British Book Awards, along with Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope (Canongate), Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End (Granta), Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber), Rose Tremain’s The Road Home (Vintage) and Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga (Atom). Media coverage focused on the rivalry between the Booker Prize winner and the US president during the period of nominations.140 The Booker winner came out ahead but the rest of the nominated authors – four of the six titles were books published by members of the Alliance – profited from additional promotions.141 Adiga’s novel was also mentioned in the course of another writer’s success but this time because of a common topic, setting and background rather than a prize competition. The young author was mentioned in features, interviews and reviews in reference to Vikas Swarup’s success with his novel Q&A.142 The book had already been published in 2005 but its film adaptation to Slumdog Millionaire did not only become a box office hit in late 2008 but also won eight Oscars at the 81st Academy Awards in March 2009. Robert McCrum favourably compared The White Tiger with Swarup’s hit in an Observer review as the “more subtle version of Indian modernity”.143 In contrast, Vinod Mehta deemed both novels as problematic in terms of “Indian poverty being showcased to ‘foreigners’ for awards”.144 By the end of March, both were placed on the BAA Travel Awards shortlist,145 in which Swarup got ahead of Adiga. Swarup was also cho-

139 Catherine Neilan, “Indie Alliance Swells Sales 50%”, The Bookseller 5 Mar. 2009. 140 Cf. e.g. Alison Flood, “Obama Battles Vampires for Galaxy Prize”, guardian.co.uk 10 Mar. 2009. 141 Philip Jones, “Borders Rolls out Galaxy Promotion”, The Bookseller 13 Mar. 2009. 142 Stephen Adams, “Slumdog Millionaire Sparks Wave of National Pride across India”, The Telegraph 14 Jan. 2009. 143 Robert McCrum, “Robert McCrum on Books”, The Observer 1 Mar. 2009. 144 Vinod Mehta, “A Slum Is a Slum”, Outlook India 9 Mar. 2009. 145 Philip Jones, “BAA Launches Travel Awards”, The Bookseller 31 Mar. 2009.

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sen to review Adiga’s follow-up book, Between the Assassinations, for The Guardian in July 2009. Second Half of 2009: Follow-up, Booker Revival and Turn of the Decade Adiga’s second book, Between the Assassination was published in India in November 2008 and, although it was not due in the UK for another half year, news about this early second publication engaged journalists in the discussion even before Christmas.146 It did, after all, succeed the first publication rather quickly. In the US, Publishers Weekly informed that Amber Qureshi from The Free Press also acquired rights for Adiga’s second book in December 2008.147 In the UK, Adiga’s debut was mentioned in March previews of the Atlantic edition of Between the Assassinations to be published in June in The Bookseller and Guardian.co.uk.148 In July, the first book was compared with the second in its mostly positive reviews in The Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and The Bookseller. The publication was accompanied by an interview with the author in The Times, as well as articles which were written by Adiga himself. In The Independent, the author remembered his childhood and growing up in India, his early bond with libraries and the reading which would influence his writing and ideas.149 Contrary to his own estimate of having matured as a reader, the writer continued to be viewed as a youngster in literary circles. In the summer and fall, The White Tiger was repeatedly referred to in the 2009 Booker Prize coverage as the previous year’s young winner. In the midst of this Booker revival, the book was reviewed negatively in The Bookseller by Judith Charlesworth, co-owner of Caxton Books & Gallery in Frinton-on-Sea, but it also featured in a report of Atlantic’s presence at the 2009 Frankfurt Book

146 Stuart Evers, “Aravind Adiga Makes His Debut ... Again”, guardian.co.uk 18 Dec. 2008; Cooke, The Observer 21 Dec. 2008. 147 Matthew Thornton, “Deals: Week of 12/8/2008”, PW 8 Dec. 2008. Cf. also Lynn Andriani, “Catching up with Some Rising Stars”, PW 22 Dec. 2008. 148 Philip Jones, “Atlantic Brings out Adiga Follow-Up”, The Bookseller 10 Mar. 2009; Alison Flood, “Aravind Adiga Plots Speedy Booker Follow-Up”, guardian.co.uk 11 Mar. 2009. 149 Cf. Aravind Adiga, “How English Literature Shaped Me”, The Independent 17 July 2009.

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Fair,150 and in news about a third book, Last Man in Tower151. Adiga’s debut was nominated for The Times WH Smith Paperback of the Year in September,152 and in November was placed fifth in a shortlist of twelve.153 Only one year after his debut took that spot, his collection of stories was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.154 As the year drew to an end, The White Tiger was embraced in end-of-year and end-of-decade reviews. In the end-of-year reviews, “the most readable and passionate of novels” was again favoured by the Sunday Times Literary Editor Andrew Holgate and recommended as Christmas present in audio and book format.155 In reviews of the decade, it was included among the “100 Best Books of the Decade” in The Times, one of “the best books of the decade” in The Sunday Times, and mentioned as one of the decade’s Booker winners on Guardian.co.uk. The Bookseller reported that the novel was named one of Blackwell’s top 10 titles of the decade and that it took a ninth position among bestselling prize winners.156 The short-term attention profile of Aravind Adiga’s debut came to an end with the turn of the decade. The White Tiger: Debate and Profile Summary The easy narrative of the novel’s reception would be to claim that Adiga was reviewed favourably in the UK and US and unfavourably in India. But the story seems more complicated than that. For one, and as shown above, the question of whether one could trust Adiga’s version of the New India could also be directed to anyone who judged the book: can we trust the critics to know whether or not

150 Liz Thomson, “Frankfurt Book Fair: Entrekin Selling Portion of Stake in Grove Atlantic London”, PW 13 Oct. 2009. 151 Benedicte Page, “Mirchandani Buys New Adiga Novel”, The Bookseller 2 Nov. 2009. 152 Katie Allen, “Times Reveals Top 50 Paperbacks”, The Bookseller 18 Sept. 2009; “The Times Picks the 50 Best Paperbacks of 2009”, The Times 26 Sept. 2009. 153 Caroline White, “The Times WHSmith Paperbacks of the Year, 2009: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga”, The Times 14 Nov. 2009. 154 Alison Flood, “Doctor’s Notes in Running for John Llewellyn Rhys Prize”, guardian.co.uk 27 Oct. 2009; Richard Lea, “Bookseller’s Debut Novel Wins John Llewellyn Rhys Prize”, guardian.co.uk 30 Nov. 2009. 155 Andrew Holgate, “Stocking Fillers”, The Sunday Times 20 Dec. 2009. 156 Victoria Gallagher, “Blackwell Names Top 10 Titles of the Decade”, The Bookseller 15 Nov. 2009.

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what Adiga wrote was true? A second complication arose with the presence and the awareness of others, particularly the Man Booker Prize. Before The White Tiger was chosen for the literary prize, critics could view the novel as social commentary, as raising important issues without the need to clarify its literariness.157 With the distinction as the “best novel of the year” not only was the literary claim made explicit but it was also made by a problematic participant. The relevance and the wish to distinguish Adiga as a legitimate or illegitimate representative were forthwith intensified. Despite the difficulty of ascribing authenticity and legitimacy, critics drew on a wide range of literary comparisons to describe Adiga and his novel, at times borrowing from the author’s own allusions and those on the book’s cover, but the canons against which and with which they judged were nationally specific. While UK and US critics often drew on British and American comparisons, complemented with authors and texts with ‘world literature’ status, Indian critics not only had the same canonical lists to draw from but, in addition, also had access to the history of Indian literature. In UK and US criticism, The White Tiger was repeatedly compared with Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), a comparison shared and fuelled by Adiga. The author was compared to Chuck Palahniuk, but also Dickens and Balzac, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Gogol and Hrabal. Indian critics used authors writing in English for comparison as well as specifically Indian authors; these ascriptions differed, however, depending on the national context in which they wrote. Writing for the New Statesman, Nakul Krishna showed familiarity with both sides of cultural influence: [The novel] sends up the neo-Thatcherite vocabulary of the new rich, their absurd extravagance and gaudy taste, but manages to do it tenderly and with understanding. In a turn of phrase that recalls the early V S Naipaul, it understands fully this world of “half-baked cit-

157 Before the Booker Prize announcement, Pratik Kanjilal could state that “The White Tiger makes no high literary claims, but it is very competently written and brings India Unlit into mainstream literature”, cf. Kanjilal, Hindustan Times 5 May 2008. Before the Booker, Kevin Rushby was free to determine that the novel is “fundamentally an outsider’s view and a superficial one” and still opine that “Adiga is an interesting talent” cf. Rushby, The Guardian 19 Apr. 2008. After the Booker’s intervention, however, it became more difficult to argue that the novel made no literary claims or that the author was only an ‘interesting talent’.

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ies, built for half-baked men”. Adiga’s style calls to mind the work of Munshi Premchand, that great Hindi prose stylist and chronicler of the nationalist movement […]158

In contrast, Indian critics in Indian media tended to make more allusions to an English-language history of literature where the familiarity with anglophile culture endowed more recognition.159 Through comparisons and contrasts, critics not only positioned the book and its author, they also positioned themselves and made statements of inclusion and exclusion, of appropriation and authenticity. And the Booker presented an additional incentive to take a position.

6.2 T HE S ECRET F LAW : S EBASTIAN B ARRY ’ S T HE S ECRET S CRIPTURE In contrast to Aravind Adiga’s debut, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture was presented as the next in line in a rich oeuvre by an established novelist and an internationally renowned playwright. His novel was a continuation of the Irish history theme which permeated his fiction and it was a personal story because the protagonist was created in the image of Barry’s great-aunt who had been put away into an asylum and was never spoken of in the family. The credentials of the Irish author could hardly be questioned. If there was a problematic side to his book, it was the ending which was widely perceived as melodramatic and the poetic writing which was at times understood as too consciously a literary effort. What was remarkable about this allegedly ‘flawed’ literary novel was that it was nevertheless almost unanimously regarded as a beautiful book, one with a strong and memorable protagonist, and in this way ‘better’ than Adiga’s Booker-winning The White Tiger. If Adiga’s novel was repeatedly presented as ‘fresh’, Barry’s was oftentimes deemed to be the book more likely to convince in the long run. The layout and information on the UK advance reader’s copy serve as an index of Barry’s status.160 The author’s name is printed in large black capital letters against a light blue and grey background and the title of the novel is set underneath in smaller type in white. Between this essential data, the reader is in-

158 Krishna, New Statesman 27 Mar. 2008. 159 Cf. e.g. Kanjilal, Hindustan Times 5 May 2008: “Sounds far-fetched, writing to the inscrutable Chinese? Well, people routinely do weirder things in pop fiction. If you remember your Alice Walker, they even write letters to God.” 160 Cf. appendix, 6a.

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formed that this was the work “from the bestselling author of A Long Long Way”. The lower half of the page features a woman’s bust in black and white. To the left runs a quotation from the protagonist’s diary, the secret scripture of the title: “I once lived among humankind, and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold, and yet could mention the names of three or four that were like angels. I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us […]”. On the back, the publisher’s description introduces the relationship between the two alternating narrator-protagonists Roseanne McNulty, an elderly patient at the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital, and her psychiatrist Dr Grene. It prepares the reader for an “exquisitely written” story, “told through their respective journals”, of Roseanne’s life in 1930s Sligo and promises a tale of “love, passion and hope” despite her memories of a past of “terrible maltreatment and ignorance”. This book was framed as a “follow-up” to a very successful previous novel which was “shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC Prize, and winner of the Kerry Group Prize for Irish Fiction” and was praised by critics in The Times and The Independent as an unforgettable masterpiece. The publishers revealed that they planned a “[l]ead publicity campaign with events and coverage across the media” and reminded the insider of another reason for the author’s heightened profile: “The Dublin ‘One City, One Book’ initiative recently catapulted Barry to even greater success.”161 The UK hardcover edition closely resembles the advance reader’s edition with the same background colours and picture and almost the same publisher’s description on the inside flap.162 The back of the jacket, however, only features one endorsement, penned by Irish playwright and poet Frank McGuinness: “The Secret Scripture is written in voices lonely as the caoin, the most haunting of all laments for loss, echoing through the ages of the novel, giving it its courage, its strangeness, its raw, rough beauty. Sebastian Barry’s fiction is unique and it is magnificent.” The quote emphasizes the book’s Irishness. The description as “caoin”, an Irish song of lamentation,163 encompasses both parts of the narration

161 Barry’s A Long Long Way had been selected by the Dublin City Council initiative, led by Dublin City Public Libraries, as the second book after Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds to “encourage everyone to read a book connected with the capital city during the month of April every year”, cf. “A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry.” Dublin: One City, One Book 2007. 162 Cf. appendix, 6b. 163 Cf. “keen, n”, Oxford English Dictionary: “An Irish funeral song accompanied with wailing in lamentation for the dead.”

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– Roseanne’s memoir and Dr. Grene’s notebook entries. McGuinness’s poetical language emphasized the novel’s “beauty”. It was made clear from the beginning that this is an Irish novel, a novel by an established writer and one in a long line of similar works. The profile of The Secret Scripture can be divided into four phases: (1) pre- and post-publication attention in trade and general media in the UK and US (December 2007 – June 2008); (2) a long phase of Booker coverage which peaked with the revelation of his position as runner-up in the autumn of 2008; (3) the turn of the year with a heightened interest on behalf of his nomination for and winning the Costa Book Awards with an ensuing discussion of the judges’ bittersweet evaluation; and (4) attention around the publication of the paperback format in early 2009 and a final string of award coverage until the end of the year and decade. Herstory and ‘National Allegory’: Pre- and Post-Publication Reviews Unlike Adiga’s entrance into the papers (or, in fact, any of the previously discussed cases), there was no news about buzz-making activity at book fairs and no accounts of the exact nature of the publishing history of Barry’s novel in the trade media. Instead, The Bookseller was instantly interested in him as a writer and interviewed the author four months before the book’s publication. Barry discussed the novel’s creation and revealed his close bond with the protagonist. He also disclosed his familiarity with the media’s attention to the book: The Observer recently mentioned The Secret Scripture in a preview of upcoming books. They had printed her name – ‘This is the story of Roseanne McNulty’ – just the printing of her name, even though it’s a fictional name, because I don’t know her real one, made me go very quiet for a while.164

In the general media, too, reviewers and commentators had already been waiting for the publication of the novel for half a year. The Secret Scripture was previewed in The Irish Times, the Irish Independent and The Observer as early as late-December. In February, it was evaluated in a short review in The Guardian. In April, another profile of the writer appeared in The Observer, where Barry again put emphasis on and directed the interviewer’s attention to Irish history as

164 Benedict Page, “Sebastian Barry”, The Bookseller 22 Jan. 2008.

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his family’s history. The Independent on Sunday included an extract of his book.165 The core critical response in the UK and Ireland were printed from late-April to late-May. Pre-publication reviews were published in Ireland in The Irish Times and the Evening Herald, outside of Ireland in The Economist. On the day of its publication, The Secret Scripture was reviewed in The Times and the Literary Review, a day later in The Telegraph by two different reviewers, then in The TLS, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, the New Statesman, The Guardian, as well as The Daily Mail. A week after the launch, the already published reviews were discussed in The Telegraph and The Guardian. In mid-May, Barry was also interviewed on Mariella Frostrup’s “Open Book” programme for BBC Radio 4.166 In the US, trade reviews appeared three months prior to publication in Publishers Weekly, two months in Kirkus Reviews, one month in Booklist, two weeks again in Publishers Weekly, and three days after publication in the Library Journal. In mid-June, a review in The Boston Globe was published alongside an interview in which Barry spoke from his home in Wicklow, Ireland. Also in June, the book was reviewed in The New York Times and Salon.com, and in July in the Star Tribune and The Seattle Times. From a preview note in The New York Times, we learn that Barry was on the East Coast at the time of his novel’s US publication, where he was to give a reading at an independent bookstore in Madison, Connecticut on 23 June 2008.167 The first responses to the book concentrated on Barry as a historian of his nation, the book’s treatment of memory, its literariness, style and ending. From previews to post-publication reviews, from Irish to UK to US coverage, critics agreed that Barry’s main subject was “the history of his native land, Ireland”168 and that Roseanne’s memoirs “shed light on the troubled history of her island nation”169. In analogy with the US cover, published by Viking (Random House), which portrayed an averted woman clad in a winter coat and the wings of an an-

165 Sebastian Barry, “Book Extract: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry”, The Independent on Sunday 27 Apr. 2008. Apart from the book extract in The Independent on Sunday, no reviews or interviews could be found in The Independent at this stage. 166 “Open Book: Sebastian Barry”, BBC Radio 4 18 May 2008. 167 “Events in Connecticut”, The NYT 22 June 2008. 168 Dinitia Smith, “Old Battles Are Burnished by Time”, The NYT 23 June 2008. 169 Olivia Laing, “2008 Will Be 007’s Year”, The Observer 30 Dec. 2007.

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gel,170 US reviewers put more emphasis on the religious undertones of the title and combined their interpretation of the main themes with this other concept of scripture. Margot Livesey, writing for The Boston Globe, for example, noticed that the book contained “[s]everal angels”, but for her the most important angel was one not mentioned explicitly, namely “Walter Benjamin’s angel of history”.171 In fact, and along with many of her colleagues, she spotted the main theme of the novel in the nature of memory, in “the belief that the past can be known only imperfectly”.172 Barry was immediately recognised as an established playwright, whose latest book “furthers his reputation as a great novelist as well”.173 In fact, throughout this first set of coverage, critics felt called upon to display different grades of familiarity with Irish history, with Barry’s previous works, as much as with literary precursors. As if to prove a rule by exception, one critic disclosed her ineptitude as a reader claiming that she did not know enough about Irish history but which did not hinder her enthusiasm for the novel and its characters.174 Barry’s legitimacy, the truth of Irish history as portrayed in The Secret Scripture was never doubted. The author’s family and his ancestors’ past were shown to be inherently interwoven with a national past which the author exposed by lending a voice to those who had been neglected in official accounts. This legitimacy was passed on to the truth of his protagonists. Even a description of Roseanne giving birth was credited with authenticity. Where critics strayed from the author’s vision was the book’s ending. While the reviewer for The Economist praised the delightful final twist, as “the two lives […] begin to coalesce, to the utter surprise of both the characters and the reader”, other critics were less lenient, if with different consequences for the overall judgment.175 Some held that the “daft potboiler sit-ups” and “big twist at

170 Cf. appendix, 6d. 171 Margot Livesey, “Twice-Told Tales”, The Boston Globe 15 June 2008. 172 Livesey, The Boston Globe 15 June 2008. 173 Linda Grana, “Galley Talk”, PW 26 May 2008. Cf., also Charlotte Bailey who refers to Barry as “playwright-turned-novelist”. (“Sebastian Barry Is Booker Prize Favourite”, The Telegraph 14 Sept. 2008.) 174 Livesey, The Boston Globe 15 June 2008: “I should confess that I occasionally felt like a less than ideal reader … . Several of the plot runs involve two aspects of twentieth-century Irish history with which I am less familiar than I would wish: the vexed relations between Catholics and Protestants, and the power of the priests.” 175 “The Unremembered”, The Economist 24 Apr. 2008.

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the end” spoiled the novel,176 and thus perceived it as “marred by a selfconsciously literary quality”177. These negative voices suspected that “[t]here are literary conceits at work” and that, in short, “we are on bestseller territory”.178 At this stage, however, most were willing to forgive the melodramatic turn on behalf of Barry’s creation of “one of the most memorable narrators in recent fiction”.179 In several reviews, in which Barry’s literariness was judged positively, the beauty and art of his work were associated with his nationality, his Irishness. According to Dinitia Smith the book was written “in language of surpassing beauty”, and resembled “a song, with all the pulse of the Irish language, a song sung liltingly and plaintively from the top of Ben Bulben into the airy night”.180 The most positive voices recommended the novel for other participants’ attention and challenged the Booker to follow suit: “Barry was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker with A Long Long Way and, if there is any justice, can expect an equally strong showing this year”.181 This challenge recalls a similar move in Atwood’s coverage – but Barry’s should prove a more thorny way to prize recognition. Second Attempt at the Booker: Barry’s Position as Runner-Up Despite the many descriptions as a former Booker nominee in 2005 and the predictions for coming Booker success, the initial interest in Barry and his novel after the publication of the 2008 Man Booker Prize longlist was comparatively low but picked up with the discussion of the shortlist and mostly when he was revealed the runner-up. As a longlistee, Barry was mentioned as one of the contestants in the UK in The Bookseller, The Independent, The Times, The Telegraph, The Observer, Guardian.co.uk, as well as The Scotsman, the Irish Independent and The Daily Mail; and in the US in The New York Times and The New York Observer. Neither Boyd Tonkin in The Independent nor Julie Bloom in The New York Times chose Barry among their wish list for the shortlist.182 The first longer reference to his novel was included in Erica Wagner’s response to the

176 Hugo Barnacle, “The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry”, The Sunday Times 11 May 2008. 177 Robert Hanks, “Fools and Madmen”, New Statesman 22 May 2008. 178 Barnacle, The Sunday Times 11 May 2008. 179 David Robson, “A 100-Year-Old Memory”, The Telegraph 2 May 2008. 180 Smith, The NYT 23 June 2008. 181 Robson, The Telegraph 2 May 2008. 182 Tonkin, The Independent 30 July 2008; Bloom, The NYT 30 July 2008.

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longlist which she coupled with musings about summer reading in The Times and where each contender was presented with a short summary. The Secret Scripture automatically became part of Sam Jordison’s Booker Club where it was initially dismissed as another Irish misery book (“Ireland, blight, mistreatment”) in his “Judging the Booker by its covers” column in August.183 In early September, when Jordison discussed the book’s contents, he revised his first impression, forgave the “unlikely […] plot twist”, emphasised its successful “emotional rather than academic” approach to history, and gave Booker judges the thumbs up for having chosen this “enjoyable page-turner”.184 With the announcement of his nomination, Barry’s book met with additional interest in various media. The Secret Scripture found new readers with the inclusion in the women’s monthly O, The Oprah Magazine where it was reviewed positively two days after the news. In addition, the novel was referenced in an article on blurbing in The New York Times, where JM Coetzee was profiled as an avid blurb writer having described Barry’s book as “a deeply moving story of courage and fidelity”.185 In the meantime, Faber’s 80th anniversary prompted some coverage for the Faber author in The Telegraph. During the Edinburgh Book Festival in mid-August, The Scotsman very positively reviewed Barry’s reading from The Secret Scripture at the “Spiegeltent”.186 The author was asked questions about his cultural preferences in a Q&A in The Independent. Shortly before the next round, Barry was finally picked as part of a wish-shortlist by The Observer’s Browser. Less promisingly, his novel was revealed the worst on a sales list having sold only 281 copies in the five weeks following the longlist announcement.187 With the omission of many of the more established writers, Barry was pushed to the foreground with the announcement of the shortlist on 9 September 2009.188 He was mentioned among the “biggest names” along with Linda Grant

183 Jordison, guardian.co.uk 19 Aug. 2008. 184 Sam Jordison, “The Secret Scripture”, guardian.co.uk 5 Sept. 2008. 185 Donadio, The NYTBR 15 Aug. 2008. However, the journalist wrongly prescribed Coetzee’s quote to Barry’s The Secret Scripture. The South African writer’s endorsement was printed on the Irish novelist’s 2005 book A Long, Long Way. 186 David Robinson, “Book Festival: Lost Souls Revisited as Past Sins Are Unearthed and Redeemed”, The Scotsman 22 Aug. 2008. 187 His sales were far behind Netherland (2,369 copies), Child 44 (1,747) or The Enchantress of Florence (1,621), cf. Flood, guardian.co.uk 9 Sept. 2008. 188 Articles which mentioned Barry and his novel were printed in The Bookseller, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Times, The Times

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and Philip Hensher, or respectively among the “four established writers”, including Amitav Ghosh.189 The Independent’s Literary Editor summarised the list as “ambitious but reader-friendly” with “narratives that set private lives afloat on the tides of history”.190 The Observer’s Deputy Books Editor praised the readable selection which she saw preoccupied “with families and a desire to make sense of the last century through the lens of personal relationships”, “passionately concerned with how the traumas of the past inflect the present”.191 Similarly, Barry was easily recognised in a shortlist of “quite epic stories”, as described by chair of judges, Michael Portillo,192 but missed out on a big part of Booker coverage which concentrated on the rejection of Rushdie and the success of young debutants, i.e. Adiga and Toltz. All in all, the announcement was greeted with grace but not much enthusiasm. It was “the least starry shortlist for a long time”,193 with comparatively low sales, even though, thanks to the Booker boost, “the Barry, Adiga, Grant and Hensher titles all shift[ed] five times more copies than the previous month”194. Compared with the sales of his contestant, however, The Secret Scripture remained a slow seller accounting “for only 3% of Amazon’s shortlist sales”.195 As part of the shortlist, Barry’s book quickly became one among a long history of Irish novels, in fact, the recent predominance of Irish writers on the Booker’s list of winners – after Banville in 2005 and Enright in 2007. The Secret Scripture was satirically taken apart by John Crace in his “Digested Read” column as an “Oirish […] over-wrought melodrama with a ridiculous ending”.196 Two profiles of the author appeared in The Guardian – one in September, the

Literary Supplement, as well as in the Daily Mail, The Scotsman, the Irish Independent, The Irish Times, USA Today, The New York Times, The New York Observer and the Hindustan Times. 189 Charlotte Higgins, “Booker Judges Give ‘Patchy’ Rushdie the Thumbs Down”, The Guardian 10 Sept. 2008; Dalya Alberge, “Salman Rushdie Snubbed by Man Booker Prize Judges”, The Times 10 Sept. 2008. 190 Boyd Tonkin, “Boyd Tonkin: Selection Explores Life on a Pre-Thatcher Mars”, The Independent 10 Sept. 2008. 191 Olivia Laing, “Of Course a Few Will Get Away…”, The Observer 14 Sept. 2008. 192 Portillo, qtd. in Higgins, The Guardian 10 Sept. 2008. 193 Brown, The Guardian 14 Oct. 2008. 194 Alison Flood, “Poor Sales for Star-Free Booker Shortlist”, guardian.co.uk 13 Oct. 2008. 195 Flood, guardian.co.uk 13 Oct. 2008. 196 Crace, The Guardian 10 Sept. 2008.

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other in October – and one in the Daily Mail. Jo Adetunji described Barry as “one of the new generation of Irish writers” for whom “reclaiming lost family voices and using them to explore facets of Irish history and troubled pasts is a recurring theme”.197 Speaking to Nicholas Wroe, Barry admitted to portraying his own family in his work, especially stories his mother told him, and even to using some of the characters featuring in his mother’s account of her childhood in Sligo which she wrote shortly before her death.198 Wroe speculated that should Barry win, he would be the third Irish author in four years to be awarded the Booker, a fact, which Charlotte Higgins perceived as hindering rather than helping the fate of a “depressing” book.199 In a report of Sebastian Barry’s Dallas Sweetman as the first play to be staged at Canterbury Cathedral after 80 years, journalist Jasper Rees explained the potential change to such one-sided public perception of the author if he were to prove the odds-makers right: “The Irish writer is best known for his devastating memory piece, The Steward of Christendom, which toured the world in the 1990s, although that may change if his novel The Secret Scripture, the bookies’ favourite, wins this year’s Man Booker Prize.”200 For the most part and especially towards the final announcement, bookmakers handled Barry as the favourite to win at 2/1, “attracting over 50% of all bets in the week prior to the announcement”.201 In fact, it was not least on behalf of the odds-makers that Barry featured more prominently in the papers than he might have otherwise. Among others, The Independent mentioned him as “the bookmakers’ favourite” and The Guardian positioned him as “the odds-on favourite to win”.202

197 Jo Adetunji, “He Is a Greatly Admired Figure and, Unusually in Ireland, I Haven’t Met Anyone Who Doesn’t Like Him”, The Guardian 12 Sept. 2008. 198 Nicholas Wroe, “As Our Ancestors Hide in Our DNA, So Do Their Stories”, The Guardian 11 Sept. 2008. 199 Higgins, guardian.co.uk 14 Oct. 2008. 200 Jasper Rees, “Dallas Sweetman: Magnificent Canterbury Tale”, The Telegraph 22 Sept. 2008. 201 Philip Jones, “Booker Sales Down on 2007”, The Bookseller 14 Oct. 2008. 202 Arifa Akbar, “Rushdie Shelved by Booker Judges,” The Independent 10 Sept. 2008; Adetunji, The Guardian 12 Sept. 2008.

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When Aravind Adiga finally emerged as the Booker’s winner in midOctober 2008, Barry was mentioned in the other writer’s celebratory coverage.203 It was immediately disclosed that Barry was handled as second in the running. Most articles referred to the close outcome and set The Secret Scripture apart from among the other nominees. The judges engaged in these discussions and openly debated the process of reaching a final decision and their personal preferences. Louise Doughty commented on the “impassioned and, at times, tearful debate”, the difficulties to arrive at one, rather than two winners, and praised Barry’s “beautiful novel about an old lady in an Irish asylum reflecting back on her life”.204 Another judge, Alex Clark, also pronounced difficulties in having dismissed her “out-and-out favourite” but gracefully admitted to having arrived at “a fair vote”, even if she insisted that The Secret Scripture was the better book and Barry the better author based on his chances to make future literary history: To me, it is not simply a beautifully written book but also one that most subtly and cleverly engages with our understanding of what storytelling can be, how we can find truth in fiction and evasions in the historical record. I have read it four times straight through and more in part, and it has increased in power each time, strengthening my belief that Barry will emerge as one of the most significant and enduring of contemporary writers.205

Michael Portillo, the chair of judges really brought this debate to boil with controversially transparent references to the winner and the immediate rival nominee. Portillo repeatedly praised the latter as the more “beautiful” book, in fact, “most beautiful” on the shortlist.206 Even the winner could not live up to the second placed “heights of literary magic”, “a glorious piece of writing with not a word misplaced”.207 The positioning as number two had its consequences and by the end of the month, the narrow miss of Booker success was mirrored on The Bookseller’s bestseller list: “Sebastian Barry’s Man Booker-shortlisted and

203 The Secret Scripture was referred to in The Bookseller, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Scotsman, the Irish Independent, The New York Times, USA Today, The Daily Beast and TIME magazine. 204 Louise Doughty, “The Week in Books”, The Guardian 18 Oct. 2008. 205 Alex Clark, “How I Judged the Booker and Lived to Tell the Tale ”, The Observer 19 Oct. 2008. 206 Higgins, The Guardian 22 Oct. 2008; Alison Flood, “Who Came Runner-up in the Booker Prize?”, guardian.co.uk 23 Oct. 2008. 207 Higgins, The Guardian 22 Oct. 2008; Flood, guardian.co.uk 23 Oct. 2008.

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bookie’s favourite The Secret Scripture narrowly misses out”.208 To some degree, the decision in favour of Adiga over Barry was perceived as focused on a short-term rather than a long-term outcome. No Sense of an Ending: Stingy Applause for the Winner of the Costa Book of the Year In November, Barry’s luck returned. Faber’s CEO, Stephen Page, recommended The Secret Scripture along with other titles on Amazon.co.uk’s Inside Publishing web page.209 Although the publishing house was suffering losses, Barry’s sales tripled over Christmas. In Ireland, the book was very positively judged in the Dublin Review of Books. More importantly, still, the novel was placed on the shortlist for the Costa Book Awards novel category on 18 November 2008. News about Costa’s selection mentioned Barry’s book in The Bookseller, The Independent, The Times, The Telegraph and Guardian.co.uk. The coverage of the Costa shortlists in five categories was divided between Barry as the recent Booker contender and the 90-year-old former editor Diana Athill in the running for the biography prize. The novel category raised discussion of gender with four “white, male and middle-aged” nominees, as Barry’s novel was positioned alongside Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand, Louis de Bernières’s A Partisan’s Daughter and Patrick McGrath’s Trauma.210 This Costa-related coverage highlighted Barry’s profile before Christmas causing more attention in the end-of-year coverage. The Secret Scripture was suggested as a Christmas present in The Sunday Times and in Guardian.co.uk and was personally recommended by Paul Muldoon,211 Antonia Fraser and Jonathan Coe,212 as well as by Jeremy Paxman213. The novel was included in turn of the year reviews in The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Observer and The Bookseller; and it was mentioned in review comments in The Independent, The Times, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. It was mostly noticed on account of its Irishness, for example in the category of “Books of Irish interest” in The TLS, and the unfavourable decision by the Booker judges, which was crit-

208 “Top 20 Fiction Heatseekers”, The Bookseller 24 Oct. 2008. 209 “Faber in Amazon.co.uk Push”, The Bookseller 7 Nov. 2008. 210 Claire Armitstead, “A Cutting-Edge Shortlist for the Costa Book Awards”, guardian.co.uk 18 Nov. 2008. 211 “TLS Books of the Year 2008”, The TLS 26 Nov. 2008. 212 Ginny Hooker, “Season’s Readings”, The Guardian 29 Nov. 2008. 213 “Here Are the Ones They Just Couldn’t Put Down”, The Observer 30 Nov. 2008.

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icised heavily by those who personally recommended the book.214 In an “alternative awards” round-up, The Times humorously presented Barry with “The You Woz Robbed, Mate award”.215 This end-of-year interest in Barry was confirmed in a Booktrust analysis which showed that Barry made up in pre-Christmas popularity and even put behind the Booker winner, Adiga’s The White Tiger.216 In January 2009, Barry’s book was voted the Costa Book Awards Novel Prize Winner. For the entire month, he was positioned alongside other category winners in the media: Sadie Jones’s The Outcast for the First Novel Award; Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End for the Biography Award; Adam Foulds’s The Broken Word for the Poetry Award; and Michelle Magorian’s Just Henry for the Children’s Book Award. On the day of the announcement, an extract of Barry’s book was released on Guardian.co.uk. Reports of Barry as novel category winner were printed in The Bookseller, The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Times. The Costa Book Awards prize cycle presented Barry with a new set of rivals. Although the nonagenarian memoirist Diana Athill led headlines, Barry was considered favourite for the overall prize. But he warned the bookies of premature anticipation with an anecdote about his grandfather, who had apparently “lost four fortunes backing favourites”.217 The two were not only compared in reference to odds but also in terms of their topic as both “focused on history and old age”.218 Barry reacted with “surprise”,219 and both were reported to “have been strenuously competing to lower their expectations of scooping Costa’s palm”.220 Speculations as to why either should finish first saw Athill profit from

214 Cf. McCrum, guardian.co.uk 9 Dec. 2008: “Actually, this is the novel that should have won the Booker prize.” Cf. also Antonia Fraser, qtd. in Hooker, The Guardian 29 Nov. 2008. 215 “The Books Alternative Awards 2008”, The Times 19 Dec. 2008. 216 Flood, guardian.co.uk 6 Jan. 2009. 217 Mark Brown, “Nonagenarian Diana Athill Leads Costa Book Award Winners”, guardian.co.uk 5 Jan. 2009. 218 Arifa Akbar, “Unflinching Athill Lands Costa Book Award at 91”, The Independent 6 Jan. 2009. 219 Kaya Burgess, “Editor Diana Athill Wins Award for ‘Perfect Memoir of Old Age’”, The Times 6 Jan. 2009. 220 Robert McCrum, “You Can Tell a Lot About a Tyrant from His Bedside Reading”, The Observer 11 Jan. 2009.

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“antiquity”221 and sheer need for money222 and Barry from his second time as Booker “bridesmaid”223. Costa’s “ambition to rival the Booker” became part of the reports on rivalling books and authors.224 Just before the publication of the paperback edition in the UK, The Secret Scripture was announced as the 2008 Costa Book of the Year on 27 January 2009. Barry was celebrated in The Bookseller, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Times, The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker. The distinction was a great push for the novel which found attention in the press until mid-February even though the announcement was tainted with a close resemblance to the Booker’s end-evaluation. But rather than just praising the second in the running, the Costa Chair also decided to point out the winner’s faults. Matthew Parris explained that the winning title was flawed, and particularly criticised its ending. The judge openly admitted to Adam Foulds’s second position in the running for the book award which won the poet much space in the coverage of the winner and put him in a similar position in which Barry had found himself after the Booker announcement. The explicit doubts about the final winner led to a small controversy in columns and opinion pieces in Irish, UK and US press. Some commentators welcomed the unusual candour; others were shocked at the insult. In his Telegraph column, James Dellingpole used the topic to pen a comment on canonised literature and freeing oneself from the feeling that one had to read certain books.225 It was discussed if the description as a flawed book could have negative consequences for sales or, in fact, a positive added curiosity resulting in more readers.226 Similarly to the after-Booker-debate, the Costa’s transparent treatment of a first and second choice called upon those involved with the Award – this time

221 Charlotte Higgins, “Who Will Win the Costa Book of the Year Award Tomorrow?”, guardian.co.uk 26 Jan. 2009. 222 McCrum, The Observer 11 Jan. 2009. 223 Brown, guardian.co.uk 5 Jan. 2009; See also Higgins, guardian.co.uk 26 Jan. 2009 on “Barry’s double failure”. 224 McCrum, The Observer 11 Jan. 2009. In addition to this Costa coverage, The Secret Scripture was positively reviewed by Art Winslow, former literary and executive editor of the Nation, who referred to the book as a Man Booker finalist rather than a Costa category winner (“Ordinary Madness”, The NYTBR 18 Jan. 2009). 225 James Dellingpole, “Whisper It: You Don’t Need to Have Read John Updike”, The Telegraph 30 Jan. 2009. 226 “How Much Does the Ending Matter?”, The Observer 1 Feb. 2009; Boyd Tonkin, “The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry”, The Independent 6 Feb. 2009.

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Costa judges and their chosen author – to correspond publicly. Matthew Parris elaborated on the transparency of his announcement in The Times, where he insisted on the flaws of the chosen book but softened them with a comparison to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which, he said, had its flaws, too. Asked about his stance on the judge’s lecture, Barry assured that “quite frankly the book is absolutely as good as I could make it”.227 Two other judges came to Barry’s rescue. Lisa Jewell, a popular British author, defended Barry and his allegedly flawed novel in The Telegraph claiming that “[a]ll literature is flawed, everything creative is by its nature flawed” but that their chosen winner “was about more than structure and research and calling the doctor by the right name, it was about the essence of a good book”.228 Jewell’s co-panellist, the comedian Alexander Armstrong claimed that Parris’s criticism was “irresponsible” for both the bruised winner and Adam Foulds for knowing just how close he had come.229 In an interview for The Guardian, Barry compared the ending of his book with the journey to Ithaca described in an eponymous poem by Constantine P. Cavafy: “Cavafy said that if you’re disappointed in Ithaca, you shouldn’t be – because it was Ithaca that gave you the journey” and concluded that “[w]ithout that ending, which some have found melodramatic, there wouldn’t have been a novel”.230 Parris again explained himself in The Times and added another reason for choosing Barry over Foulds when the judges were split between the two authors and the Chair did everything to avoid a lesser outcome: “I’m a Tory, I believe in first past the post; and have sat on too many committees that finished up with a compromise candidate that would have been nobody’s first choice.”231 A few days later, Barry described his immediate response in The Sunday Times as temporary dismay until he had the chance of speaking on the same BBC news spot with another judge who was in high praise for his writing skills.232 Finally, Parris had the last word. He repeated the comparison of the weaknesses of The Secret

227 Ben Hoyle, “Secret Is Out: Sebastian Barry’s Irish Tale Wins Costa”, The Times 28 Jan. 2009. 228 Lisa Jewell, “Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scriptures [sic]: It’s Not Flawed – It’s a Gem”, The Telegraph 29 Jan. 2009. 229 Armstrong, qtd. in Henry Deedes, “Pandora: Soul Singer Proves She Is in Vogue”, The Independent 29 Jan. 2009. 230 Stuart Jeffries, “Interview: Sebastian Barry Reveals the Secrets of His Costa Prize Win”, The Guardian 29 Jan. 2009. 231 Matthew Parris, “How Chairing the Costa Book Awards Rekindled a Childhood Love Affair”, The Times 31 Jan. 2009. 232 Sebastian Barry, “My Week: Sebastian Barry”, The Sunday Times 1 Feb. 2009.

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Scripture to those in The Tempest but most of all demanded “a bit of freedom of information”: “I’m sick of awards ceremonies in which everything and everyone is a total triumph, no fault is found and superlatives pile upon superlatives like sugared guano.”233 The debate of Barry’s allegedly flawed novel quickly turned into discussions of literary value and the contingency of literary evaluation. The Joys of a Lovely Natural Life: Paperback Publications and More Prize Recognition The UK paperback edition of The Secret Scripture was published on 29 January 2009 and immediately profited from the Costa Book Award coverage – visible from the paperback cover, the development of sales numbers, and the additional round of reviews. What is more, Barry was to harvest more undivided praise in a series of award nominations in the spring and autumn and the renewed relevance of his book helped to garner even more attention in the end-of-year and end-ofdecade recommendations. The paperback paid tribute to the success of the 2008 prize cycle. The front cover showed a less Victorian, younger looking woman’s profile against a red background.234 On the top, the book was advertised as “shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize”, on the left it had a round sticker and logo announcing that it was the Winner of the 2008 Costa Book Awards. Underneath the prize straplines, The Guardian’s reviewer, the Irish novelist and journalist Joseph O’Connor, praised the novel as “magnificent and heart-rending”. The lower part of the page showed the book’s title in gold and the author’s name in capital white letters. The Bookseller provided figures which underlined this positive conflation of prize recognition and paperback publication: “Faber has doubled the paperback print run” after the Costa success and “Barry has made several TV appearances since the win was announced, including BBC ‘Breakfast’, ‘Sky News’ and various radio programmes”.235 Angus Cargill, Barry’s editor, commented on the “lovely momentum” of the book: “It has had a lovely natural life. You can never manufacture something like that.”236 The paperback entered The Sunday Times bestseller list in February where it remained for three months until May. The Bookseller reported a fourth and twelfth position in its revenue chart in April and

233 Matthew Parris, “I’ll Make No Secret of This Scripture’s Faults”, The Times 5 Feb. 2009. 234 Cf. appendix, 6c. 235 The Bookseller 30 Jan. 2009. 236 The Bookseller 30 Jan. 2009.

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a leading position among independent booksellers already in February. In fact, the book’s sales were described as having had “an erratic history” with sales jumps after the Booker Prize, the Costa Awards and “a traditional Christmas peak”.237 With the paperback publication, critics re-read The Secret Scripture, took into account the fierce competition of the last half year, its post-Booker and postCosta discussions, and related their judgment to the opinions which had been pronounced before.238 In The Times Tom Gatti stood by his initial praise though not without admitting to some of its weaknesses: “The Costa judges are right about the flaws. […] It seems mean, though, to pick over the book’s failings. Its achievement – the rich, enduring voice of Roseanne – is remarkable.”239 In The Observer Stephanie Cross found two reasons in favour of Barry’s novel with which she stood out from previous evaluations but went hand in hand with Alex Clark’s prophesy of the book’s potential to endure. For one, she said, Barry’s novel “not only withstands, but demands, revisiting.” 240 Secondly, and overturning most of the descriptions of the novel as miserable and depressing, she claimed that “this is one of the few brave novels to insist on the contrary persistence of joy”.241 This uplifting rather than depressing impression of Barry’s book was shared by Nicola Barr in The Guardian.242 In the spring, Barry was positioned alongside already familiar and new competitors. He was shortlisted for the Borders Author of the Year category at the Galaxy British Book Awards along with Barack Obama, Aravind Adiga, Diana Athill, Rose Tremain and Stephenie Meyer.243 In May, his novel competed with some of its former Booker rivals in the Irish Book Awards: with Netherland by Joseph O’Neill for The Novel of the Year and with The White Tiger for The Tubridy Show Listeners’ Choice Award. This time Barry beat his contestants and won in both categories. In June, Barry figured on the Independent Bookseller Book Prize shortlist where he was again positioned against Adiga and

237 “No Secrets in This Scripture”, The Bookseller 6 Feb. 2009. 238 Reviews of the paperback edition were published throughout February in The Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, and in March in The Telegraph. 239 Tom Gatti, “The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry”, The Times 6 Feb. 2009. 240 Stephanie Cross, “The Secret Scripture”, The Observer 8 Feb. 2009. 241 Cross, The Observer 8 Feb. 2009. 242 Nicola Barr, “The Secret Scripture”, The Guardian 14 Feb. 2009. 243 Cf. the description of Aravind Adiga’s nomination for the same prize in chapter 6.1.

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Athill among others and then topped his competition in the adult category in September. In the meantime, the US paperback edition came out on 28 April 2008. The Penguin book featured the same cover image as the Viking hardcover with an added Man Booker strapline and a quote from O, The Oprah Magazine which described it as “luminous and lyrical”.244 It was preceded by reviews of the audio format in Publishers Weekly, Booklist and the Library Journal. The Secret Scripture was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction but was defeated by Marilynne Robinson’s Home in late-April.245 The book was part of The New York Times Paperback Row in June and was included in the May/June Bookmarks magazine with the marker “excellent”.246 In the UK, too, more critical and topic-related coverage followed both the paperback and the new prize recognition and led the novel into the summer reading recommendations. Throughout March and April, The Secret Scripture was taken up by John Mullan for the Guardian Book Club, the prestigious four week review series which included another account in which the author explained the origins of the book. On a different occasion, Mullan also read it along with Tristram Shandy and David Copperfield in a column on best literary representations of births. The Secret Scripture was used in an article on “madness”.247 Barry disclosed that he used to share his manuscripts with his wife first but that he came to rely on his agent and editor in a feature on authors and their most trusted friends.248 In an “In Depth” article in The Bookseller Barry figured high in an overview of a vibrant Irish literary culture and a publishing industry which was battling the influence of big international players.249 The book was applauded by booksellers in positive reviews in The Bookseller in early and late July. It was included in The Sunday Times’ 100 best holiday reads and The Guardian’s summer reading recommendations. Barry was mentioned in a feature about The Edinburgh Book Festival in The Telegraph, where he was previewed to discuss his favourite Faber books together with biographer John Carey in celebration of

244 Cf. appendix, 6e. 245 Jessica Garrison, “Prizes Kick Off the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books”, Los Angeles Times 25 Apr. 2009. 246 “Bookmarks Selections”, Bookmarks 30 June 2009. 247 Christina Patterson, “Christina Patterson: Madness: A Great Metaphor, Not Such a Great Life”, The Independent 31 Jan. 2009. 248 Alison Flood, “The Trusted Friends Who Steer Novelists Away from Cliche”, The Guardian 17 Feb. 2009. 249 Tom Tivnan, “Pluck of the Irish”, TheBookseller.com 19 May 2009.

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the publishing house’s 80th birthday. In early August, as the next lot of Booker nominations was discussed in the papers, the author reviewed his nomination in the previous year in an article in The Observer, in which, he remembered comforting those around him – his wife, his agent, his publisher – and, quoting Bob Dylan, came to the conclusion that despite the loss “it’s all good”.250 His motto – or an even more positive assessment of the situation – proved accurate for the rest of the year. Barry had been shortlisted for the £10,000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in May and was hailed the winner of the Fiction prize on 21 August 2009 at the Times-sponsored Edinburgh Book Festival. In consequence, The Times had a particular interest in professing “longevity” to Barry’s book and reminding their readers that their reviewer had already been “impressed” with the novel when it was first published.251 Barry shared the distinction and headlines with the Biography prize winner, Michael Holroyd whose wife, Margaret Drabble, had won the prize over forty years before. As a “classical prize” and “the oldest book awards in Britain”, the James Tait Black distinction added to Barry’s literary credibility. In October, The Observer profiled Barry in reference to his upcoming play, Tales of Ballycumber at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and this gave the author another chance to look back at the Booker and Costa “circus” with “delight” and remember the difficult writing process for The Secret Scripture in the course of which he had to patiently wait for Roseanne’s voice to come to him.252 In November and December, Barry was mentioned in features about Ireland and its literary culture in The Sunday Times: as #9 on the most borrowed titles list in Irish libraries,253 and as Ireland’s best-selling novel of the decade despite “stern competition from chick-lit and other mass-market books”254. Before the year ended, Barry featured in additional prize coverage and finally in the reviews of the year 2009 as well as the entire first decade of the new millennium. The Secret Scripture was included in The Times WH Smith 50 Paperbacks of the Year – again along with Aravind Adiga and Sadie Jones. It was also longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Prize, “the world’s richest – and most ec-

250 Sebastian Barry, “Losing the Booker? It’s All Good”, The Observer 2 Aug. 2009. 251 Mike Wade, “Sebastian Barry Wins James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the Secret Scripture”, The Times 22 Aug. 2009. 252 Euan Ferguson, “This Much I Know: Sebastian Barry”, The Observer 4 Oct. 2009. 253 Eithne Shortall, “Economic Slump Boosts Ireland’s Libraries”, The Sunday Times 15 Nov. 2009. 254 Jan Battles, “PS, UK Loves Irish Chick-Lit”, The Sunday Times 20 Dec. 2009.

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lectic – literary prize”,255 alongside Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and Marilynne Robinson’s Home, to name only those which have seen his competition on other occasions. In a review of the year, Lorna Bradbury mentioned Barry as one of the many novels which have “had an eye on the past”.256 In round-ups of the decade, the novel was mentioned as one of the best books of 2008 in Guardian.co.uk and at #41 of The Times’ 100 Best Books of the Decade (which positioned The White Tiger at #80).257 Throughout the year 2009, Barry and his book were used for comparison in reviews of other writers’ books as well as his own writing. Irish novelist Joseph O’Connor detected “echoes of Sebastian Barry’s Costa-winning The Secret Scripture” in Josephine Hart’s The Truth about Love.258 Professor Catriona Kelly opined that Barry described early twentieth-century Ireland “with far greater subtlety” than Thomas Keneally’s treatment of a Russian adventure in The People’s Train, another World War I tale.259 The Secret Scripture was also mentioned in reviews of Barry’s plays, The Pride of Parnell Street260 and Tales of Ballycumber261. With two opinion pieces – describing his Costa success and reminiscing the Booker loss – and one review of William Trevor’s Love and Summer which he penned for The Guardian in August, Barry’s own activity in the papers differed largely from Adiga’s often political positioning. The Secret Scripture: Debate and Profile Summary Barry’s sixth novel was presented and welcomed as a follow-up to his fifth, A Long Long Way and as a sequel to his overall oeuvre, most explicitly The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, not only because of the thematic parallels, simi-

255 Alison

Flood,

“Aravind

Adiga

Heads

IMPAC

Dublin

Prize

Longlist”,

guardian.co.uk 2 Nov. 2009. 256 Lorna Bradbury, “Novels of the Year”, The Telegraph 28 Nov. 2009. 257 Cf. “The 100 Best Books of the Decade”, The Sunday Times 14 Nov. 2009. The same list places The Curious Incident on 25 and White Teeth on 20 but does not include The Blind Assassin nor Vernon God Little. 258 Joseph O’Connor, “Is It an Island I’m On?”, The Guardian 7 Feb. 2009. 259 Catriona Kelly, “Thomas Keneally’s Australian Reds”, The TLS 23 Sept. 2009. 260 Ben Brantley, “Theater Review: The Pride of Parnell Street”, The NYT 9 Sept. 2009. 261 Lyn Gardner, “What to See: Lyn Gardner’s Theatre Tips”, guardian.co.uk 2 Oct. 2009; Benedict Nightingale, “Tales of Ballycumber at the Abbey, Dublin”, The Times 13 Oct. 2009.

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lar time setting and even overlapping characters, but also in reference to his previous novels’ attention profile. A Booker contender in 2005, his repeated nomination did not surprise, nor did it draw much attention at first. Only when the more established writers dropped out and particularly when he was officially announced as the runner-up, did Barry’s novel come to the foreground. With the selection of The Secret Scripture as the Costa Book of the Year, his status as second in the running was both made up for and emphasised – all the more so, when he, too, was presented as having won by a hair’s breadth. The mingling of appreciation and critique, the assessment of the ending of the book as “flawed”, sparked a long discussion about the novel’s quality as much as literary recognition overall. Despite the public scolding, Barry’s novel was universally acknowledged as poetical and beautiful and when it was criticised, it was for being too deliberately literary rather than lacking in literary credentials. What it may have lacked in freshness it made up for, as supporting critics claimed, with beautiful writing, a memorable protagonist and the long-term promise of becoming “one of the most significant and enduring of contemporary writers”.262

6.3 “D OES IT KNOCK MY SOCKS OFF ?” T HE 2008 M AN B OOKER P RIZE FOR F ICTION In 2008, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction celebrated its fortieth year of existence. It was a particularly busy year for the Man Booker administration. The Foundation instigated a collaborative project with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, a special celebration of “The Booker at the Movies”: four screenings of Booker books made into movies in June and discussions about adapting literature into film. In August, news broke that the shortlist was to be announced via mobile phones, with audio extracts and additional information about the nominees.263 The Prize was celebrated with an exhibition at the V&A Museum from September 2008 until May 2009, at which the literary agent and Booker archivist, Peter Straus, showcased a “1,000-strong personal collection of Man Booker-winning and shortlisted first editions”.264 The Booker invested heavily in the promotion of the 2008 shortlist with full-page ads in The Times for each nomi-

262 Cf. Clark, The Observer 19 Oct. 2008. 263 David Barnett, “The Booker Moves onto Mobile Phones”, guardian.co.uk 21 Aug. 2008. 264 Charlotte Cripps, “The Write Stuff: The V&A Celebrates the Man Booker Winners from the Past 40 Years”, The Independent 4 Sept. 2008.

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nated title.265 In contrast to the usual single-prize format, press releases were reporting as many as three Booker awards throughout the year: the Best of the Booker, the Man Booker International Prize and the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In the year of Booker’s fortieth anniversary, Salman Rushdie was to play a vital role. For the second time in its history, the Booker Prize announced a “Best of the Booker” award to “honour the best overall novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded on 22 April 1969”.266 The first such “Booker of Bookers” – awarded in 1993 for its twenty-fifth anniversary – went to Rushdie’s 1981 Booker-winning novel Midnight’s Children. In May 2008, four judges – Victoria Glendinning (biographer, critic and novelist), Mariella Frostrup (journalist and TV presenter) and John Mullan (Professor of English) – announced a list of six nominees to battle for the second all-time Booker Prize. This time, a public poll was to decide the fate of the list which comprised J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). Rushdie’s victory was repeated. In early July 2008, it was announced that 36% of the 7801 voters chose Midnight’s Children. At the award ceremony at the Southbank Centre, the writer’s sons received the custom-made trophy for their father who was on tour promoting his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence. Only a few days later, the book which Rushdie was busy promoting and which prevented him from collecting his “Best of the Booker” award in person was longlisted for the regular 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The previous distinction may or may not have influenced the judges’ nomination of Rushdie’s latest work but how should they proceed? Commentators agreed that the new judges could hardly push Rushdie to another peak and risk the accusation of recognising this and only this author over and over again.267 The “eclectic line-up of judges” for 2008 had work to do if they did not want to appear under a Rushdie spell. Over the next weeks, they eliminated The Enchantress of Florence with the announcement of the shortlist in September and finally voted for Aravind

265 Victoria Gallagher, “Booker’s ‘Best’ Shortlist Promotion”, The Bookseller 10 Sept. 2008. 266 Cf. The Best of the Booker, The Man Booker Prizes, 21 Feb. 2008. 267 Cf. e.g. Suzan Abrams in a comment for Gallagher, The Bookseller 10 Sept. 2008: “I’m not surprised that Rushdie is out of the running. Does he expect to win every Booker prize there is … on the year he happens to come on the scene?” Cf. also Clark, The Observer 19 Oct. 2008.

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Adiga’s The White Tiger in October – a choice which has been debated as difficult yet comprehensible for several reasons. Chaired by Michael Portillo, former MP and Cabinet Minister, the panel consisted of Alex Clark, literary journalist; Louise Doughty, novelist; James Heneage, founder of Ottakar’s bookshops and Hardeep Singh Kohli, TV and radio broadcaster.268 By the end of July, they had cut the initial 112 books, nine of which they had called in themselves and the rest were submitted by publishers,269 to a longlist of 13. The famous “Man Booker Dozen” comprised Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, John Berger’s From A to X, Linda Grant’s The Clothes on their Backs, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency, Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 and Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole. The chair of judges revealed that the panel was “pleased with the geographical balance”, “happy with the interesting mix of books” on a longlist which “covers an extraordinary variety of writing”. Portillo emphasised two qualities of the year’s selection: “large scale narrative and the striking use of humour”.270 The question of geographical and national balance was the biggest asset for the discussion in the press. Not surprisingly, Irish newspapers focused on Sebastian Barry and Joseph O’Neill,271 Welsh papers on Gaynor Arnold,272 Australian newspapers on Steve Toltz and Michelle de Kretser,273 in parts also on Aravind Adiga when he was described as “an India-born, Australian-educated Time jour-

268 Michael Portillo to Chair 2008 Man Booker Judges, The Man Booker Prizes, 18 Dec. 2007. 269 Cf. Man Booker Longlist Announced, The Man Booker Prizes, 29 July 2008; Cf. also Miller, The Herald 30 July 2008. 270 Man Booker Longlist Announced, The Man Booker Prizes, 29 July 2008. 271 Cf. Battersby, The Irish Times 30 July 2008. 272 Cf. “Tindal Street Press Author Gaynor Arnold on Booker Prize List”, Birmingham Post 29 July 2008. 273 Cf. Hall, The Australian 30 July 2008: “Two Aussie writers make Booker list”; Rosemary Sorensen, “Novelist Steve Toltz in Best Company for Man Booker”, The Australian 31 July 2008; Clare Morgan and Jason Steger, “Australia’s Booker Double-Entry Bid”, The Sydney Morning Herald 31 July 2008.

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nalist”,274 or when his nationality was conveniently identified as Australian, rather than Indian.275 Mostly, however, Adiga was considered Indian (no such questions arose in Indian papers concerning Rushdie and Ghosh), and the question of his legitimacy as the representative of a country in which he did not reside for a long time would chant into discussions of national belonging. Nationally-specific interest in the selected few continued with the announcement of the shortlist. The chair of judges described the list as “both ambitious and approachable” and emphasised the titles’ readability and page-turning qualities.276 In the media, mainly Australian277 and Indian278 coverage prevailed. The national significance was particularly strong when not only authors were established as, for example, Indian, but also their topics were considered of such national importance, as was the case with both Ghosh and Adiga.279 With many first-time novelists considered and some established writers left out completely – most acutely Salman Rushdie and Peter Carey – another topic of the 2008 Man Booker Prize coverage was the question of age and experience.280 The debate was particularly dedicated to questions of a generation

274 Julia May, “Aussie Upstarts Beat Winton, Garner to Booker List”, The Sydney Morning Herald 30 July 2008. 275 Sorensen, The Australian 31 July 2008. 276 Cf. Man Booker Prize 2008 Shortlist Announced, The Man Booker Prizes, 9 Sept. 2008. 277 Cf. Robert Wainwright and Jason Steger, “Australian Makes Booker Shortlist”, The Age 10 Sept. 2008; Robert Wainwright, “Australian Debutant on Booker Shortlist”, The Sydney Morning Herald 10 Sept. 2008. 278 Cf. “Indian Pair, Debutants Make Booker Prize Shortlist ”, AFP India 9 Sept. 2008. 279 TNN, “Indian Pair Makes It to Booker 2008 Shortlist; Rushdie Dropped”, The Times of India 10 Sept. 2008. Adiga was alternately considered Australian or Indian resulting in reports of either one or two Australian writers on the shortlist, cf. “Aussie makes Booker shortlist” Couriermail.com.au 10 Sept. 2008; Lauren Wilson, “Aussies make Booker shortlist” The Australian 10 Sept. 2008. 280 Just how the market is structured – from a critical perspective – and which role the Booker Prize plays can be deduced from a Vulture critic’s list of different niches for novels and authors: “usual mix of superstar Brit-lit studs (Salman Rushdie), acclaimed debut novelists (Aravind Adiga), and a welcome dark horse (thriller writer Tom Rob Smith)”, cf. “Booker Prize Long List Announced; Can Anything Beat ‘Netherland’?”, Vulture 29 July 2008. Other papers also distinguish between “firsttime novelists” (Adiga, Arnold etc) and “[e]stablished writers” (Grant, Hensher etc.), cf. Birmingham Post, 29 July 2008; “[t]he biggest names” (Barry, Grant,

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change and the comparatively large number of newcomers.281 This continued with two debut writers on the shortlist and the respective comparison with other Booker years which led to the commentary of an “unusually” young year.282 The absence and presence of some authors offered a convenient possibility to express shock, surprise or delight.283 Even the length of books – another recurrent debate – triggered some interest among the critics.284 Each year, one or more authors and their novels become particularly attractive for the press and 2008 was already introduced as a Rushdie year.285 In a year, in which his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children had already been named The Best of the Booker, his nomination for The Enchantress of Florence received extensive coverage. John Sutherland, who had earlier repeatedly backed Rushdie’s

Hensher) and “[t]he others” (Ghosh, Adiga, Toltz), cf. Higgins, The Guardian 10 Sept. 2008. 281 “Booker longlist boost for first-time novelists”, cf. Pauli, guardian.co.uk 29 July 2008; “The rise of the first novel”, cf. Claire Armitstead, “Booker Prize: Shock of the New”, The Guardian 30 July 2008. 282 Cf. e.g. Bloomberg News, “Debut Authors Highlight Booker Short List”, New York Sun 10 Sept. 2008. A generation change was reported when several of the established writers were omitted. Rushdie and Berger were especially prone to figure in this coverage, cf. e.g. Carolyn Kellogg, “Man Booker Shortlist Bypasses Rushdie and Berger”, Los Angeles Times 9 Sept. 2008. 283 Literary Correspondent for The Irish Times, Eileen Battersby, for example, showed outrage at the selection of Linda Grant over such omitted writers like James Kelman, Rob Raison, David Parks, Damon Galgut and Nadeem Aslam (The Irish Times 30 July 2008). The Independent Literary Editor Boyd Tonkin was shocked at James Kelman’s absence (30 July 2008). Jamie Byng cried out against the inclusion of Child 44 and the absence of Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (cf. Stephen Bates, “People”, The Guardian 31 July 2008). 284 It was argued that so-called “thickies” (Ghosh, Hensher, Arnold) replaced the previous year’s “shorties” (most prominently Ian McEwan’s 160-page slim On Chesil Beach whose inclusion had prompted a discussion about what distinguishes a novel from a novella). The length of the book also had consequences for sales: the shorter the novel the higher the sales numbers, cf. Flood, guardian.co.uk 13 Oct. 2008. 285 Another popular Booker choice in the 2008 media coverage was Gaynor Arnold, a Welsh social worker, whose late debut at sixty-three became a sensation. Joseph O’Neill attracted a lot of US coverage for his post-9/11 novel about baseball when Barack Obama revealed that it was part of his reading list, cf. Staff Reporter of the Sun, “Rushdie, O’Neill Lead Booker Long List”, New York Sun 30 July 2008.

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novels (cf. chapter 4.3) ignited the debate around the author with a bet which he pronounced in a review of his latest work long before even the longlist was announced: “If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.”286 The 2008 coverage headlines were, in fact, more often than not dedicated to Rushdie.287 What is more, Rushdie led coverage even after his omission from the shortlist.288 His absence from the shortlist was either reported as compensated for with the presence of two other Indian authors, or, less conciliatory, as induced by his fellow countrymen and the younger generation. Others again showed a humorous perspective on why Rushdie may have been left out. Jonathan Jones, for example, traced his “Booker snub” to the ahistorical use of “polenta” in his novel.289 A third strand of the 2008 Man Booker media coverage, alongside the interest in nationalities and literary generations, and equally tied to the overarching theme of Rushdie’s impact, was a self-referential discussion of literary judgments. The Booker Prize gave the incentive to discuss the institution of literary prizes in general290 and to make self-referential comments regarding the book market, literary debates and the agents involved – an incentive of which the critics were very often aware.291 Prize coverage, positive and negative, led to reflec-

286 John Sutherland, “Of Medicis and Mughals”, Financial Times 5 Apr. 2008. This empty promise led to an own path of media coverage. Some critics showed disdain at Sutherland’s failure to stand by his word (Edward Champion, “Booker Shortlist Announced, John Sutherland Dinner Date in Works?”, Filthy Habits 9 Sept. 2008); others were simply amused (“Aravind Adiga Wins the Booker Prize”, Vulture 15 Oct. 2008). 287 “Booker Prize Legend Rushdie on 2008 Longlist”, AFP 29 July 2008; Adams, The Telegraph 29 July 2008; Miller, The Herald 30 July 2008. 288 Cf. Peter Aspden, “Rushdie out of Booker Prize Shortlist”, Financial Times 10 Sept. 2008. Cf. also Pauli and Flood, guardian.co.uk 9 Sept. 2008; The Sunday Telegraph 31 Aug. 2008; Higgins, The Guardian 10 Sept. 2008; Akbar, The Independent 10 Sept. 2008. 289 Jonathan Jones, “The Real Reason Behind Rushdie’s Booker Snub”, guardian.co.uk 12 Sept. 2008. 290 See, for example, a Guardian conversation with Salman Rushdie in Armitstead, guardian.co.uk 30 July 2008. 291 Stephen Bates reported on the comments almost simultaneously with the first responses: “No sooner was this year’s Booker prize longlist published yesterday than the whingeing started”, cf. Bates, The Guardian 31 July 2008. Olivia Laing, too, observed a “predictable” cycle of Booker reactions and defended the choice (The

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tions about what it is that the critic does and which structures underlie the many processes involved in the production and reception of novels. The genre debate around Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 and the question whether as a thriller it deserved a Booker nomination, led to a discussion of high vs. mass-market literature. This debate peaked with James Byng’s dismissal of the book, not so much as a thriller but as a mediocre work of fiction, and his conclusions about the longevity of literature and critics’ (including prize judges’) role in attaining it: One has to be philosophical about these things and as a publisher particularly so as you come to realise what a lottery these prizes are. Rilke once wrote, “Nothing affects a book as little as words of criticism” and regardless of what a panel decides the book is the book and time will tell which of these books are still being read in ten years time [sic].292

The tradition of annual controversies and literary scandals was discussed quite consciously in this respect: “With one angry publisher condemning the inclusion of a thriller in the longlist and the judges’ chairman appearing to favour ‘balance’ more highly than literary merit, this year’s Man Booker prize seems destined to be as controversial as usual […] ”.293 The judges’ descriptions of the nominated titles and the fact that there were no academic critics on the judging panel in 2008 reinforced the discussion of readable vs complex literature. Peter Robins referred to Michael Portillo’s description of the “intensely readable”, “page-turning” and “approachable” shortlist as a turn for less literary and instead more commercial choices.294 Lee Rourke criticised the Booker for its lack of innovation and a philosophy which would lead to stagnation rather than change.295 In contrast, Mark Brown was surprised that the 2008 list was particularly free from canonised authors, and being “the least starry shortlist for a long time” confused rather than confirmed the usual cycle of responses, including the bookmakers.296 The communication be-

Observer 14 Sept. 2008). Hillary Frey even responded to the Booker with an appeal to ignore it, cf. “Booker Shortlist Announced”, New York Observer 9 Sept. 2008. 292 Byng’s comment was published on the forum pages of the Booker website and later in Jamie Byng, “Bothered by the Booker”, The Bookseller 30 July 2008. Cf. also Barton, guardian.co.uk 31 July 2008. 293 Skidelsky, The Observer 3 Aug. 2008. 294 Robins, The Telegraph 9 Sept. 2008. 295 Lee Rourke, “Has Bad Philosophy Killed the Booker Prize?”, guardian.co.uk 13 Oct. 2008. 296 Brown, The Guardian 14 Oct. 2008.

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tween jury and commentators worked both ways and judges also answered to discussions raised in the media. Alex Clark reported on her Booker journey, the pressures of reading over 100 novels and the disappointment by the media interest in Rushdie’s omission rather than the inclusion of Adiga and Ghosh: “But Rushdie’s shock omission appears every year, more or less, whether he has written a novel or not; a Martian might imagine that the entire literary establishment exists purely to provoke him.”297 When Aravind Adiga was announced as the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, many of the problems raised and created throughout the year came home to roost. Adiga’s The White Tiger was largely part of these recurring and specific threads of media debate. In contrast, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture triggered its own media interest but it was neither part of the speculation around an alleged new generation taking over established writers nor was it linked to the theme of Rushdie’s spell over the Booker. This is not to say that Adiga’s success stood in the shadow of Rushdie’s predominance but to trace the way the Booker’s own history was used by judges and commentators to explain the choices of that year’s competition. Indeed, Michael Portillo and his fellow judges repeatedly declared the close outcome had fallen along these lines. The chair of judges immediately disclosed that the panel “found the decision difficult” but that Adiga’s novel “prevailed because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure”.298 In a blog on the Booker website and later in an interview for The Economist, Portillo praised the beauty of Sebastian Barry’s novel but explained that his judging team had great difficulties with the book’s ending.299 The choice for Adiga was also a choice against Barry. If Barry was repeatedly referred to as the more “literary” writer in direct comparison with Adiga, with a more “accomplished” style, so much so that comparisons of the winner with his main rival “could only be unfavourable”,300 why was he not chosen? One reason, discussed by judges and commentators, was that there had been too many Irish novelists on the Booker front in the recent past: There was a feeling among the judges, apparently, that after Anne Enright’s victory last year, that was enough Irish literature for a while, thank you very much; there were also problems with Barry’s plot, which depends on a humungous coincidence near its close.301

297 Clark, The Observer 19 Oct. 2008. 298 Man Booker Prize 2008 Winner Announced, The Man Booker Prizes, 14 Oct. 2008. 299 The Economist 22 Oct. 2008. 300 Jeffries, The Guardian 16 Oct. 2008. 301 Higgins, The Guardian 22 Oct. 2008.

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A second reason was that Barry’s novel posed “more questions”, and was less “convincingly told” than Adiga’s.302 Finally, it was less “fresh”, less gripping.303 The fate of the two competitors was thus explicitly linked to previous Booker years in the discussion. Had Barry won, he would have been the third Irish writer to win almost in a row, with John Banville’s The Sea announced as the winner of the Booker Prize in 2005 and Anne Enright’s The Gathering in 2007.304 Adiga, in contrast, offered an extension of “The Booker Prize’s Passage to India”305: “In awarding the prize to first-time novelist Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger, the judges are continuing a tradition of promoting fresh, first-rate fiction from the Indian subcontinent.”306 Ultimately, Adiga may have been the choice that better connected to ongoing discussions and presented more topical problems to inspire

302 Flood, guardian.co.uk 23 Oct. 2008. 303 Oates, The New Yorker 27 Oct. 2003. 304 “Sebastian Barry’s shortlisted The Secret Scripture is a far better book [than Adiga’s White Tiger which ‘did not convince’], but having given it to Anne Enright last year, perhaps the Booker judges didn’t want to give it to another Mick”, cf. “How Should We Rate 2008?”, Prospect 17 Jan. 2009: 27. 305 This argument was made repeatedly, cf. e.g. Peter Stothard, “The Booker Prize’s Passage to India”, The Daily Beast 15 Oct. 2008. Writer Jaishree Misra explained the importance of the Booker as a way for Indian authors writing in English to gain respect but also accused the Prize of distorting the picture, cf. “Someone Like Me”, The Bookseller 29 June 2009. What Misra then added to the argument followed the rhetorical resignation as expressed later by other Indian commentators who felt that they had to succumb to the Booker’s recognition: “When in India, I am often asked: ‘So when are you going to win the Booker?’. I reply that this is unlikely because I write commercial, not literary, fiction. ‘Chick lit’ they respond, with what I think is a sneer. I respond by saying that commercial fiction is a broad church, rattling off a string of respectable names: Kate Atkinson, Joanna Trollope, Marian Keyes. But, in India, I get blank looks. ‘Yes, but have any of them won the Booker?’ I carry on, undaunted, explaining that there are prizes reserved for various popular fiction genres too. But no one’s heard of them because they aren’t like the Booker which caught the Indian imagination for being colonised so successfully by the country’s literary fiction brigade years ago. Last year was particularly exciting as India’s two biggest publishing houses (Penguin and HarperCollins) each had their own contender, Amitav Ghosh and Aravind Adiga, and the mutual sniping added greatly to the general merriment.” Misra’s critique hints at another reason for an Indian winner: India’s interest in the Booker exceeded that of any other Booker-eligible nation. 306 “Prize Tiger,” The Independent 15 Oct. 2008.

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debate, but the Booker-induced competition between the two books and their authors was an additional trigger of attention and, in the end, profitable for both their public and critical attention profiles and their publishing houses with recurring media references to The Independent Alliance.

7. Beyond “the end of its natural ‘front list’ life”: The Booker and the Afterlife of Novels

The public and critical attention profiles of novels are in no way limited to what publishers and other industry insiders call a book’s ‘natural life’ (cf. chapter 3.3). To the contrary, novels continue to be mentioned in different contexts many years beyond the main 1-2 year span of their initial media presence. There are many reasons for this. A successful follow-up book, for example, can result in revising previous works and past discussions. Literary prizes, especially those which generate a history that is remembered in the media, create another pertinent rationale for prolonging a book’s attention profile. In particular, being awarded the Booker ensures that the title will be mentioned as a previous winner in the following years. In addition, the vast amount and variety of media coverage, which the Booker success promises, allows for larger-scale post-Booker ‘connectivity’ – be it on the basis of topicality, seasonal appeal or other events (cf. chapter 2.4). This is illustrated most prominently by the recurrent competition between the Man Booker and the Whitbread (Costa) Book Awards. Other prizes, as well as other institutions – literary festivals, book clubs or bookshops – eagerly participate in the already ongoing discussion of a prominent (Booker) book and utilise the recognition factor in their choice for readings and discussions, for promotions and for advertising an author’s forthcoming and past titles. The case studies in chapters 4, 5 and 6 only allowed for a focus on short-term attention profiles, but taking the entire first decade of the twenty-first century into account invites another perspective on the selected novels. While the end of the decade coincides with the end of the ‘natural life’ of the 2008 pair of rivals, the extension of an analysis of media attention until the end of 2009 allows for a glimpse at a much longer profile for the 2003 and 2000 books. A recapitulation of these novels’ attention profiles and the debates which they offered and for which they were used provides an additional opportunity to strengthen description of the Booker Prize made in the third chapter and thus for a more focused

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dialogue with the first part of this study. Specifically, this allows for a review of my claims on the Booker’s ‘problematicness’ (its ability to trigger attention by generating problems, cf. chapter 3.1) and its interest in ‘problematic’ novels (which will instigate debate) as well as its involvement in negotiations over literary quality (and the question of how various participants use novels) in shortand longer-term perspectives (cf. chapter 3.2). Whereas the short-term assessment of literary value largely depends on the evaluations by journalistic critics, in the longer run, academic criticism takes over. Although this may not work in full accordance with the ‘trickle-down’ model as used in sociological research on the three layers of criticism (cf. chapter 3.3), academic critics – particularly in analyses of contemporary fiction – do take into consideration short-term negotiations, and they share an interest in debating these problems, including questions of quality and literary history. The Booker’s short- and long-term effect, therefore, affects both discourses, journalistic and academic. In the following, I will take another brief look at the 2008 titles and focus on the problem-related media attention of the Booker, then proceed in reverse chronology with the years which allow for a longer perspective and emphasise particular questions of quality (2003) and literary history (2000).

7.1 T HE D ISCURSIVE P OWER OF P ROBLEMS : ARAVIND ADIGA’ S T HE W HITE T IGER AND S EBASTIAN B ARRY ’ S T HE S ECRET S CRIPTURE (2008) The 2008 rivalry between Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, one in which the debut overtook the novel by an established writer in the race for the Booker, demonstrated the most overlap in their attention profiles of the novel pairs discussed here. They were both published in the spring of 2008 – by members of The Independent Alliance, Atlantic Books and Faber and Faber respectively – only two months apart and were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The assessment of their rivalry and Adiga’s Booker success was closely linked to Rushdie’s ‘problematic’ legacy (cf. chapter 6.3). The winner’s advantage lay in presenting problems which triggered more debates and continued narratives which were perceived as relevant at the time: The White Tiger drew immediate attention from various participants and institutions (cf. chapter 3.1), among these the London Book Fair, Waterstones, the Booker judges and a range of other literary prizes, interviewers and editors of newspapers and radio programmes who engaged the author in literary, social and political discussions.

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The competition between Adiga and Barry had little to do with the content of their novels but was instead based on common events on their ‘itinerary’ and the subsequent attention which they received with simultaneous nominations for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, the 2009 Galaxy British Book Awards, the 2009 Irish Book Awards, the 2009 Independent Bookseller Book Prize, The Times WH Smith 50 Paperbacks of the Year 2009 and the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Prize. In addition, and this is where the ‘attention profile’ goes further than the ‘itinerary’ of a novel (cf. chapter 3.3), they were jointly discussed in the end-of-year 2008 coverage with references to their respective publishers and The Independent Alliance, and they were both referenced in each other’s interviews, paperback reviews, and sales figures reports, as well as in articles in which they reminisced about the high water mark of the award season in the autumn of 2008. Significantly, The White Tiger was even mentioned in the media coverage of the Costa Book Awards although Adiga was never nominated: he was mentioned as the author who beat Barry to the Booker throughout the award’s media coverage, which raised both books’ attention profile at the turn of 2008 and 2009. Adiga’s and Barry’s respective books were treated as two opposing ways of going about the construction of a novel, having little more in common than their use of first-person narration. The White Tiger presents the account of a young male climbing rapidly India’s economic boom, who also becomes a murderer, and it examines globalisation, the rising economies of India and China, and the negative side of the high-tech rush on the subcontinent. By contrast, The Secret Scripture is narrated by an elderly female patient in a mental institution who was wrongly hospitalised on moral grounds, and who looks back at the religious and political situation in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. While the former was described as fresh, topical and shocking, the latter was declared as beautiful, melancholy and poetical. Whereas Adiga’s literary status needed to be negotiated, Barry saw his novel come under suspicion for being too consciously literary. Some of the ‘problems’ which the books raised were discussed in reference to literary quality and the novels’ potential longevity, particularly after the revelation of the tight decision in the 2008 Man Booker Prize when critics sided with one or the other. The White Tiger was largely given attention on a short-term scale. It was primarily compared with other recent novels from the subcontinent and was mentioned a lot in reference to its topic – Adiga was very engaged in bringing his debut into the discussion by writing about topical events which were thematically linked to the novel. In contrast, The Secret Scripture was treated as a book with good prospects to being canonized. Not only did Barry already come with a list of previous works which contributed to the discussion but the support for the novel also ensured that it would not end up in the last place, securing at-

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tention for subsequent books. He was repeatedly referred to as an important Irish author and one who had already secured his place in Irish literary history. In addition, while The White Tiger was not chosen for John Mullan’s Guardian Book Club, which often works as an early scale of a book’s suitability for analysis and interpretation, The Secret Scripture was read in this series for its poetic language and its narrative structure. Barry was also given space to discuss his protagonist and the case of lost women in that period of Irish history. The difference in their early positioning shows not only that participants make immediate evaluations but that these assessments also take into account the question of lasting judgments. In fact, the notion that a novel needs to be of a lasting quality becomes part of the criteria which inform the immediate judgment of literary value. Contrary to early estimates of The White Tiger as a short-term title with barely a hint of promise for long-term success, however, Adiga not only proved the more fortunate in catching the attention of a wider range of literary prizes than Barry but he also attracted more academic interest. The latter can be linked not so much to the effect of the Booker per se but to the common focus on ‘problems’ and ‘connectivity’ to certain debates. The academic interest in The Secret Scripture with only four entries as of early 2017 in the MLA database seems unusually low for a writer of Barry’s critical acclaim. The White Tiger, by contrast, has 43 entries and on such diverse topics as capitalism, globalism, medical humanities, urban and rural life, identity and metaphors. It is the novel’s ‘connectivity’ to postcolonial studies – with the continuation of an interest in Rushdie (either as a similar or new type of India novel) and with the potential of political interpretations (either as conservative or liberal) – where Adiga’s novel generates most academic articles. In this line, the Booker can be said to have chosen ‘correctly’ in 2008 by investing in The White Tiger – a novel which offered both, problems for immediate debate (though Barry, too, secured discussion with the ‘flawed ending’) and a ‘usable’ narrative for academia (despite Barry’s potential contribution to, for example, memory studies), and thus triggered both short- and long-term attention. Neither 2008 novels’ ‘attention profiles’ came to an end with the arrival of the new decade as they continue to be discussed to this day.1 In fact, Barry could

1

The White Tiger’s media presence continues to this day, particularly in reference as previous Booker winner but also with the publication of Adiga’s follow-up novels, his journalistic writing (now almost exclusively in Indian publications), and in comparison with other books (for example, with Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 2013). The continuing interest in Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture is mostly indebted to his previous awards triumphs and his subsequent publications.

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still win the Booker with a future novel and thus change the narrative about his ‘failure’ to secure the Prize with The Secret Scripture. The question of whether a judgment is considered right or wrong is aligned with the anticipation of future debates and the short-term evaluation can take a very different turn from a longterm perspective.

7.2 Q UALITY AS A Q UESTION OF U SE : DBC P IERRE ’ S V ERNON G OD L ITTLE AND M ARK H ADDON ’ S T HE C URIOUS I NCIDENT (2003) The relationship between DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was the one couple among of the three pairs most explicitly perceived as competitive. Although they were published four months apart (hence overlapping less in the first half of 2003) and were only longlisted side-by-side for the Booker Prize, their subsequent simultaneous nomination for the Whitbread Book Awards in the respective categories of First Novel and Novel at the turn of the year 2003 and 2004, as well as their later race for the British Book Awards in the spring of 2004, heightened the attention to them as a pair of rivals. These comparisons were enlivened by similarities between their teenage protagonists. Contrary to their apparent comparability at first sight, however, Haddon’s and Pierre’s ‘attention profiles’ in fact showed major differences. What they did have in common was the difficulty with which critics negotiated their literary status (cf. chapter 5.3). The different use to which the two novels were put by diverse participants at various stages of their profiles can be tied to the reflections on literary quality as aimed-at-use: the evaluation of their quality appears to be more conclusive about those who make the assessment than it reveals about the novels (cf. chapter 3.2). The publication of DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little happened with few preliminaries. The entire story of its pre-publication life was told many months after its initial reception, and most of it was only revealed in the context of its Booker nomination and final success. Apart from its accolades as a comic novel in the spring of 2003, it was the Booker win and his competition against Mark Haddon for the Whitbread which secured the author the most attention. The main phase of its coverage ended with the first of two theatre adaptations in the second half of 2004 and sales news at the turn of the year. In the course of the decade, Pierre wrote two more novels completing the loose trilogy and secured additional atten-

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tion for the first instalment.2 Mainly, however, Vernon God Little was mentioned every time the central issue of the novel – high school shootings – became sadly topical,3 in particular with reference to the other and very successful theatre adaptation in 2007.4 The novel continues to be mentioned as a previous winner in Man Booker coverage and as the first and main work by a dark horse in literary circles, but it did not secure sustained media attention for his author. In contrast, Mark Haddon’s novel caught the attention of trade publications and trade news in the general media almost a year prior to its spring 2003 publication and apparently met a need which publishers had identified before the novel was even conceived. The Curious Incident came to more public attention in autumn and winter 2003-2004 with its failed attempt to make it to the Booker shortlist, the distinction as the winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize,

2

The publication of Pierre’s second novel, Ludmila’s Broken English in March 2006 and its mixed reception among critics was almost ironically framed by two features on the difficulty of writing a follow-up book. From February to May, Vernon God Little was mentioned in a string of interviews, and even more reviews in reference to the follow-up published on both sides of the Atlantic. While one of the few fervent admirers of the book, Melissa McClements, praised Pierre’s second book as much as his first and attempted at dissipating any accusations of the author as a “one-hit wonder” (“Farce with a Dark Heart”, Financial Times 10 Mar. 2006), most reviewers were either disappointed with the new book or have seen their aversion to the first confirmed.

3

The novel was mentioned in comparison with other books, most notably of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, published in the US in 2003, and whose portrayal of a high school shooting critics (including Shriver herself) held in better esteem than Pierre’s; cf. e.g., Helen Brown, “Murder in Mind”, The Sunday Telegraph 20 Mar. 2005; Cameron Woodhead, “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, The Age 14 May 2005.

4

The popularity of the stage adaptation of Vernon God Little for The Young Vic in London partly derived from the tragic coincidence of another shooting in the US in April that year. “The Virginia Tech massacre” engaged the media strongly as can be seen in an article by Mark Lawson. He mentioned Vernon God Little and Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin as important representations of school shootings in an article in The Guardian and pleaded against censorship of the novels despite the sad coincidence with real events (“Sentimental Censorship.” The Guardian 20 Apr. 2007.) One week after the tragedy, Pierre was interviewed for The Independent on Sunday in reference to both the “Virginia shootings” and his novel which “prophesised” them, cf. Liz Hoggard, “DBC Pierre: Road to Redemption”, The Independent on Sunday 22 Apr. 2007.

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and its double Whitbread success. Throughout 2004 and indeed long after, it dominated bestseller lists and trade reports. After this first concentrated period of coverage, Haddon’s first adult novel profited from comparisons with his own subsequent publications and especially through comparisons with the works by other authors. The crossover novel’s many plot elements – from the theme of autism and disability to the idiosyncratic protagonist and intertextual references to Sherlock Holmes – proved highly relatable for various debates and continue to be the source of many references in the coverage of other books.5 Media interest in The Curious Incident also continues due to its subsequent re-publications and adaptations, most importantly the eponymous play which has been in performance in London’s West End since 2013. The difference between the two is most visible from a long-term perspective and most specifically in the interest which they received in academic criticism,

5

Throughout 2004 and later, The Curious Incident was mentioned repeatedly in reviews of The Fit, a 2004 funny novel about an indexer written by Philip Hensher; Carry Me Down, a 2006 novel about a young boy who can detect lies written by M. J. Hyland; Matthew Kneale’s When We Were Romans, a 2007 novel written from the point of view of nine year old Lawrence, and The London Eye Mystery, a 2007 children’s mystery novel by Siobhan Dowd. It was also compared with or referred to in reviews of The Terminal Man by Sir Alfred Mehran, a memoir of an Iranian refugee who spent seventeen years at Charles de Gaulle airport, with On Beauty by Zadie Smith, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby, as well as Darkness Visible by William Golding and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. It was named in reference to other books with young protagonists, e.g. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen, The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi, Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver, Invisible by Pete Hautman, Pigtopia by Kitty Fitzgerald; The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne, Daniel Isn’t Talking by Marti Leimbach, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen; particularly in books about autism, including memoirs (Michael Blastland’s Joe: The Only Boy in the World; Chris Mitchell’s Glass Half Empty, Glass Half Full), non-fiction (The Science and Fiction of Autism by Laura Schreibman, Send in the Idiots, or How We Grew to Understand the World by Kamran Nazeer) and fiction (The Language of Others by Clare Morrall); other forms of disability, e.g. Electricity by Ray Robinson; as well as with films (The Incredibles), TV-series (Numb3rs) and children’s graphic novels (Fungus the Bogeyman). It was also mentioned as part of John Mullan’s How Novels Work and its writing style was – humorously – compared to publishing legend Tom Maschler’s in a review of his memoir, Publisher. In addition, Haddon’s novel was used by publishers to describe and market books which they deemed similar on several occasions.

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but – and in comparison with other novels – a glimpse at their academic profiles also reveals their main connection: indecisiveness among critics as to how to position the respective author and his work. At first glance, The Curious Incident seems to clearly win the struggle for ‘connectivity’ in academic circles: it led to three times as many references in the MLA and LRC databases as Vernon God Little. Upon taking a closer look at the type of criticism which they triggered, however, it becomes clear that neither novel has found its way into the literary academic ‘mainstream’. Haddon’s novel piqued academic interest with reviews in special interest magazines and journals such as Disability Studies Quarterly, Autism: The International Journal of Research and Practice, Intervention in School and Clinic and Disability & Society. These reviews overlap with academic criticism in very diverse fields of study. In addition to literary journals, The Curious Incident was mostly analysed in the growing field of disability studies, but also semiotics, stylistics and EFL. With only sparse interest in its representation of mass media, music and identity, Vernon God Little did not prove an immediate success with academic critics.6 The difficulty which critics experienced in ascribing literary quality to either of the two 2003 novels became evident in the many references to their writers and protagonists as ‘odd’ and ‘quirky’, the strong suspicions raised in their commentary that they were ‘one-off’ success titles, and their inclusion in narratives which questioned their ‘value’ as serious literature rather than solidifying it (cf. chapter 5.3). They were both treated as part of the crossover phenomenon of adults reading children’s or YA books, continuing along a path paved by JK Rowling and Philip Pullman, and as direct successors to Yann Martel’s ‘popular’ 2002 Booker win Life of Pi. The Booker’s 2003 decision in favour of Pierre’s rather than Haddon’s or any other nominated novel was hardly discussed as the ‘right’ choice. Instead, the analysis of their rivalry gives insight into the negotiations of ‘literary quality’, a discussion which is given particular urgency with their presence in the media attention for the Booker Prize. Despite the almost universal bias among immediate commentators in favour of The Curious Incident as opposed to the much more controversial response to

6

The inclusion of Pierre in the English classroom (particularly in ELT studies) promises ‘connectivity’ with future research. Cf. e.g., Stefania Ciocia, “Vernon God Little: A Future Crossover Classic?” Brave New Worlds: Old and New Classics of Children’s Literatures, ed. Elena Paruolo, Recherches comparatives sur les livres et le multimedia d’enfance (Bruxelles et al: Lang, 2011).

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Vernon God Little (particularly, if not solely, in US review media),7 the latter shows promise for future debates of literary value. Interestingly, John Mullan, whose attention in The Guardian’s book club series can be said to test the appeal of contemporary fiction for essayistic and academic interest, discussed both novels in reference to the protagonists and their voices as well as to their respective qualities of humour. The Curious Incident was the subject of Mullan’s book club earlier in the course of its profile, directly after it was published in paperback in April 2004. Vernon God Little was only analysed after the paperback publication of Pierre’s follow-up novel in November 2006. And yet, the latter was under inquiry regarding its genre and poetic justice – two topics which have the potential to instigate the interest of academic critics. While longevity was at times prophesied for Haddon’s novel, it was mainly seen as a ‘beach read’ classic. In contrast, Pierre’s novel’s contestability had the power to prove it similar to previous ‘outsider’ novels which were not regarded as ‘literary’ at the time of their initial reception, but which forced critics to discuss whether or not they were literary, and were eventually granted academic attention and thus an entrance in long-term debate. When the immediate discussion of a novel’s inclusion or exclusion as ‘literature’ turns into a scholarly exploration of its literary qualities, the work assumes all qualities of the ‘literary’ through a performative act.

7.3 H ISTORY , OR W HICH N OVEL C AN P ASS THE T EST OF T IME : M ARGARET ATWOOD ’ S T HE B LIND A SSASSIN AND Z ADIE S MITH ’ S W HITE T EETH (2000) The 2000 rival pair presented a reversal of the year 2008 – this time the established novelist came in ahead of the newcomer in the race for the Booker Prize. But Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth are also a more extreme example of the ‘established’ vs. ‘debut’ competition: At-

7

See, for example, the harsh criticism of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, in which the two 2003 novels are used in comparison to different ends: “[it] reads at times like a cross between Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and John Fowles’ The Collector (both Vintage), but re-written by DBC Pierre”. (Philip Stone, “A Foul Taste of Book…”, The Bookseller 15 Oct. 2008.) By the end of 2009, Vernon God Little was mentioned as both among “The 5 Worst Books of the Decade” (The Times 14 Nov. 2009), as well as among the best picks of the decade (Alison Flood, “Books of the Decade: Your Best Books of 2003”, guardian.co.uk 26 Nov. 2009).

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wood surpasses Barry as an even heavier big-hitter and Smith was arguably an even louder first-time novelist than Adiga. Atwood’s and Smith’s novels were published nine months apart and their ‘itineraries’ showed very little overlap. Smith was not even officially nominated for the Booker but brought into discussion by critics who speculated about possible candidates early on. The competition between the two was barely triggered by content. Instead, their relationship was based on the rivalry for overall space in the debate about the state of the novel at the turn of the millennium and the question of which author to back: an internationally renowned literary star with a long backlist of already canonical works or a potentially future international literary star with a long list of ideas for subsequent titles. While Atwood’s literary position was fixed, Smith’s still needed to be established (cf. chapter 4.3). However, when it came to the particular books in competition for attention in the year 2000 (i.e. without taking into account Atwood’s secure backlist and Smith’s promised future list), the question was whose novel would be more likely to pass the test of time and who would be able to ‘foresee’ (future) literary history (cf. chapter 3.2). Margaret Atwood is by far the most prominent of the six authors examined in this study and hence the media response to her novels can be expected to be farreaching. The profile of her book and the distribution of critical, public and academic attention best reflects a new work in a line of great novels by an established author: early preview and pre-publication attention, almost parallel attention on both sides of the Atlantic, early attention in literary magazines, an important presence on the bestseller lists, substantial and diverse attention in prize and festival coverage and in academic publications in particular. Like all Booker-winning novels in the case studies, The Blind Assassin received a large proportion of its media attention due to prize coverage and most of that was due to the Booker Prize itself. Yet, despite winning the main literary award in the UK, the number of award coverage articles it received in total is slightly lower than those which covered White Teeth. In addition to the Booker, The Blind Assassin received diverse accolades from other prestigious prizes (Orange), prizes from the industry (by librarians and booksellers), prizes for it genre (crime) and other awards – but not in the same quantity and variety as Smith’s book. In contrast, the prize coverage for White Teeth shows an exceptionally wide range of awards. Smith received or was nominated for ‘prestige’ awards (mainly Whitbread and Orange but also the smaller if no less reputable James Tait Black, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Samuel Johnsons), industry (publishing, booksellers), media (Guardian, Granta, TIME, Sunday Times) other awards. Although she was not nominated for the Booker, the young author was nevertheless mentioned in the course of the 2000

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Prize cycle. From a longer-term perspective, part of the award coverage for both novels is also due to later success with subsequent publications. Smith, for example, was longlisted for the Booker in 2002 and shortlisted in 2005, and some of her coverage refers to these later nominations in the course of which her first novel was still referred to. White Teeth was only her first entrance into the literary world, but due to the immense marketing success, it drew a similar number of critical responses in the papers to an established author’s tenth novel. The editors showed more interest in the young author as a person with Smith having been interviewed almost twice as often as Atwood. Similarly, the debut was used more often in comparison with other writer’s works and particularly with her own later works. Not least due to the surprise factor, which only a debut novel can foster, it drew more attention in seasonal coverage, with reference to its topic, as well as to matters of the literary marketplace. White Teeth was also a literary success and particularly drew the attention of literary magazines and academic publications. In short, Smith’s White Teeth presented itself as a rather atypical example of a very successful first novel. As for its long-term perspective, The Blind Assassin was launched as a millennial book but its profile spans the entire first decade of the twenty-first century and it still continues to be mentioned today. After the publication of the book was received almost simultaneously by all participants involved, the first main phase of coverage ended with its nomination for the IMPAC prize. When a feature writer spotted several copies of The Blind Assassin in a pile of books waiting to be shredded in early 2002, he was not very surprised – it was, after all “at the end of its natural ‘front list’ life”.8 But although the very concentrated phase of coverage for the title may have ended in the spring of 2002, it continued to be mentioned on numerous occasions in general media over the next years and with 296,616 copies of the Anchor paperback edition having been sold by March 2002 similarly refused to lose its attraction for trade publications.9 Other types of media which are less bound to the immediate attention pattern only started to take an interest in the novel several years after publication. The subsequent coverage for Atwood’s tenth novel profited from mentions referring to its literary appeal which translates into reviews and essays in literary media, to later prize successes, to her status as a spokesperson (mainly in references to Canadian literature and culture) and as a public persona (for example, as the inventor of LongPen, a device which would enable authors to give auto-

8

Stephen Moss, “Bookends”, The Guardian 19 Mar. 2002.

9

Daisy Maryles, “The Paperback Game”, PW 18 Mar. 2002.

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graphs without their presence required), as well as to her later novels.10 Moreover, Atwood was mentioned throughout the decade in annual Booker coverage as a former winner, and she enjoyed the attention as a possible candidate for the Man Booker International in the years 2005 and 2007. And yet, The Blind Assassin is only one of many Atwood novels which can be referred to in terms of topic or for the sake of comparison with other books.11 Nevertheless, the 2000 Booker winner continues to secure media attention, be it with the publication of the final instalment of the MaddAddam trilogy in 2013, in diverse discussions of science and speculative fiction, and with the latest changes in Booker eligibility in fa-

10 The Canadian writer’s own follow-up projects continue to be compared with The Blind Assassin or the Booker triumph inserted as reference and sign of credit: In March 2002, Atwood’s lecture series on contemporary writers’ positions in the literary world was published in book form as Negotiating with the Dead. In May 2003, McClelland, Doubleday and Bloomsbury teamed up for the publication of Atwood’s follow-up novel, the first part of her MaddAddam trilogy, Oryx and Crake. In February 2005, Atwood published Writing with Intent, which was previewed in Publishers Weekly where the earlier book featured as a sign of her fame and distinction. In May that year, her Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing 1970-2005 appeared. In October, Atwood’s novella Penelopiad came out as part of Canongate’s Myth Series. In January 2006, The Tent, a collection of very short fiction came out. Half a year later, another collection of stories, Moral Disorder, was published. In October 2008, Atwood put out a book about the nature of debt, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. The publication of the second instalment in her MaddAddam trilogy, The Year of the Flood followed in September 2009. The turn of the decade also coincided with Atwood’s seventieth birthday on 18 November 2009. For this occasion, her books were re-issued with new covers published by Virago in August and by Vintage in November 2009. 11 That The Blind Assassin lends itself to comparison is shown by several such references in general and literary media. It is striking that the comparisons were made almost exclusively in the genre of literary fiction. In 2001, Atwood’s novel was mentioned in a review of Elaine Feinstein’s Dark Inheritance in The Telegraph, Anita Brookner’s The Bay of Angels in The TLS and Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection in The Guardian; in 2002 in a review of Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass in The Independent and Ian McEwan’s Atonement in The New Yorker; in 2005, in a review of Robert Lepage’s play The Dragon’s Trilogy in The Guardian; and in 2008, Frank Kermode presented it as part of the material analysed in Derek Hughes’s Culture and Sacrifice in the LRB.

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vour of US and other international authors beyond the UK and Commonwealth territories. The other millennial novel, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, was prepared for months before its January 2000 publication with profiles, previews and excerpts of her writing on both sides of the Atlantic. After the first concentrated phase of coverage which, similarly to Atwood’s but continuing for more time in total, ended with the turn of the year 2001-2002, White Teeth profited from a TV adaptation,12 a wide interest in the author as a personality, and it seemed to lend itself brilliantly in comparisons with other novels and their authors. But it also continued to garner attention on its own merits, was included in moments of recognition for which the first novel played a major role,13 and featured in the credit line of Smith’s journalistic writing.14 In addition, her debut gained attention in refer-

12 Any adaptation of a novel into another format is a good reason to take up discussion of the original but film adaptations are by far the most lucrative. The first news about a BBC mini-series adaptation of White Teeth appeared as early as May 2000 when Smith was still in the running for the Orange Prize. The commissioning of rights by Channel Four was disclosed in November 2000. The first of the four instalments was scheduled to start on 17 September 2002 but the first previews appeared already in the summer. White Teeth was at the centre of a Guardian interview with Sarah Ozeke, who played the part of Irie Jones but it was also mentioned later in reference to some of the other main cast actors whose careers have thereafter taken off, Archie Panjabi, Naomie Harris and James McAvoy, as well as to director Julian Jarrold. The following year, the TV adaptation was broadcast in the US on PBS. Later, Smith wrote an article about the experience of seeing her novel “in the flesh”, cf. Zadie Smith, “White Teeth in the Flesh”, The NYT 11 May 2003. In addition, it was included in TIME magazine’s “Top 10 Everything 2003”, cf. James Poniewozik, TIME 8 Dec. 2003. 13 Most importantly, Smith was voted one of twenty writers on Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” list (cf. Sunder Katwala, “The Class of 2003”, The Observer 5 Jan. 2003), whose work was then included in Granta magazine’s spring issue. Smith was introduced as “[t]he literary superstar of her generation” and her name also featured in the short profiles for her fellows Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru and Susan Elderkin. The judges for the third Granta list (after the influential 1983 and 1993 lists) were Ian Jack, Robert McCrum, Hilary Mantel, Nicholas Clee and Alex Clark. The list was reported on widely and White Teeth mentioned explicitly in both UK and international media. 14 Among other pieces, Smith wrote against the invasion of Iraq, feature articles on E.M. Forster and Nick Hornby, interviewed her brother, the rapper Doc Brown, and was reported to be writing a musical about Kafka.

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ences to Smith’s later novels,15 and subsequent prize nominations – even those which she was never awarded, particularly in later Booker years. In contrast to Atwood’s novel, which is only one among a very long list of works, White Teeth is still mentioned almost every time the author’s name hits the papers. Like Atwood’s tenth novel, Smith’s first remains of interest to the media beyond the first decade of the new millennium, on behalf of her subsequent novels, her activism for humanitarian issues (women’s rights, refugees and asylum seekers) and her repeated inclusion in Granta’s list of 20 best young authors (in 2003 and 2013, and a large array of public appearances and readings; for example, alongside Ian McEwan). What both the short- and long-term profiles of the two 2000 novels show is that they were handled as ‘literary’ titles early on. Although this is less surprising in the case of Atwood than it is for Smith, both their novels were immediately picked up by diverse participants not only with the purpose of short-term evaluation of their quality but also with the aim of endowing them with the mark of long-term significance. The way in which they were both taken up by John Mullan for the Guardian is telling for this early depiction of the works as novels which would write literary history. The Professor of English at University College London had already selected Smith’s debut for the Guardian Book Club in the autumn of 2002. In the standard four instalments, he analysed the text based on the topics of length, satire, history and post-colonialism. Throughout his criticism, Mullan displayed his awareness of various participants responsible for the ‘making’ of the book. He noticed that even its length had been presented as a sign of quality by its publishers. In the final part of the series, he speculated whether or not the novel would lend itself to the field of post-colonial criticism. Such sounding out of literary appeal throughout his short essays very explicitly became a test of the books’ potential to undergo academic analysis. Atwood’s The Blind Assassin was reviewed for the Book Club in November 2003 (coinciding with the promotion of her next novel). In four consecutive weeks, Mullan discussed the book’s representation and handling of recollection, omission, novels-within-novels and

15 Even before the first episode of White Teeth was screened, Smith’s follow-up novel The Autograph Man was published in September 2002 in the UK and in October in the US. Smith’s third novel, On Beauty was published in the UK and US in September 2005 and her first novel participated in its attention pattern. Finally, her collection of criticism, Changing My Mind, was launched in November 2009 but it was prepared for much earlier. Smith’s first novel was frequently mentioned in previews, reviews and prize coverage of these and subsequent books.

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newspaper articles. Moreover, Atwood’s novel was discussed for the second time in 2013.16 In addition to John Mullan’s testing of the waters of academic interest, the 2000 pair found numerous links to the media’s – particularly The Guardian’s – participation in creating a canon of contemporary literature. The Blind Assassin was repeatedly acknowledged in The Guardian’s “10 of the best” series. In 2006, Mary Watson picked the novel as one of her favourite “books about maverick women”.17 In 2008, David Barnett chose the novel-within-the-novel as one of “the best books that never existed”.18 In 2009, John Mullan selected Atwood’s book among the “[t]en of the best novels about novelists”.19 White Teeth was also selected for an article in this series when Alex Preston chose to present one of the protagonists as part of his “top 10 literary believers” list.20 On numerous occasions, both texts were presented as works which lend themselves to a scholarly inquiry (cf. chapters 4.1. and 4.2). Eventually, both novels triggered much attention among academic critics. With 110 academic references in the MLA database, White Teeth is the most frequently referred to of the entire range of novels presented in the case studies. Smith’s debut was first taken up for academic interest from the autumn of 2000 – initially in the form of reviews in Black Issues Book Review, Women’s Review of Books or Wasafiri – and two years later emerged in criticism proper. Her novel was mostly discussed under the auspices of multiculturalism and postcolonialism. It was read through the lens of feminist and black studies and covered as part of a wide range of topics from identity to metaphoric language to ethics. The other 2000 novel, The Blind Assassin, is the runner-up in the academic interest stakes with 69 such articles. Beginning in the year 2002, Atwood’s successful novel found its way into academic journals by way of reviews – in Americas, World Literature Today and Southern Humanities Review – before it was taken up in academic articles. It was read as feminist literature, from the perspective of memory studies, myth studies, and through narratological categories such as the

16 Cf. John Mullan, “John Mullan on the Blind Assassin – Guardian Book Club”, The Guardian 16 Aug. 2013. 17 Mary Watson, “Mary Watson’s Top 10 Books About Maverick Women”, guardian.co.uk 18 July 2006. 18 David Barnett, “Which Are the Best Books That Never Existed?”, guardian.co.uk 15 Oct. 2008. 19 John Mullan, “Ten of the Best Novels About Novelists”, The Guardian 25 July 2009. 20 Alex Preston, “Alex Preston’s Top 10 Literary Believers”, guardian.co.uk 1 Feb. 2012.

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unreliable narrator and the complex narrative structure. While many of these topics and approaches correlate with the short-term discussion in journalistic criticism they also add new layers. The profiles of the two novels and their respective debates give insight into the Booker’s immense influence but they also show – particularly in Smith’s example – that other participants are an active and empowered force in the competition for producing narratives. White Teeth was brought into the discussion as a possible Booker candidate in the general media before the Prize had made any decisions, and it has been taken up in academic criticism like no other of the novels from the case studies. It was positioned early on as a literary novel – not least through Salman Rushdie’s pre-publication endorsement – but it also allowed for negotiations of its literariness. In consequence, the question of whether it was wrong for it not to have been chosen in the year 2000 can be rephrased: did the Booker’s decision inspire debate as a result of Atwood’s recognition and Smith’s omission? It did, and when Rushdie won the 2008 Best of the Booker Prize, commentators even speculated if Smith might have been the better candidate to de-throne the Indian writer (cf. chapter 4.3). Her non-inclusion secured her a place alongside other titles which did not win the Prize, not least Rushdie’s own The Satanic Verses (1988) and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and thus inspired the continuation of another set of narratives and another line of debate.

Conclusion

This study sought to inquire what it is that the Booker prizes and to gauge the effect of the Prize’s impact on a novel’s ‘attention profile’. I chose to focus on a specific period in the Booker’s history to highlight its relationships with other participants and to analyse the mechanisms by which it recognises novels which trigger debates (Part II), in addition to how it itself becomes the object of such debates (Part I). In the following, I will focus on some of the results of my research. In my analysis, I have come to describe the Booker as an attentiongenerating mechanism. Attention can be drawn to a book by a poster as much as a literary article. In a novel’s life-cycle, there are certain events – such as the novel’s publication or the award of a literary prize – which call for the attention of critical and public responses. The conferral of the award opens up a discursive space for debate – how much and what kind depends on the novel and its context. Seen from the perspective of the Booker, it is the Prize that is granted attention whenever ‘its’ novels are mentioned as Booker novels – at any time of their attention profile. It is a characteristic of the Booker that it relies on problems to generate attention – among those are questions of literary quality and literary history. Problems demand a particular kind of attention and they can give rise to debate. The Booker can, therefore, be described as a problem-driven attentiongenerating mechanism. Based on the case studies and the comparison of the novels’ attention profiles, I propose that the potential attention rhythm for Booker-eligible novels can be divided into roughly five phases: a first phase of pre-hardback-publication, post-hardback-publication, prolonged attention in seasonal or prize coverage (e.g. Booker), a post-paperback-publication, and finally a phase of interest in the novels due to their specific ‘connectivity’ to topical and literary debates. The actual critical and public attention profiles of the six novels analysed in the case studies varies based on their different itineraries and how each of the events in

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their ‘life-cycle’ draws attention in the media. In addition, any changes to the anticipated attention profile feed the discussion: tensions between the potential and the realized profile become part of the debate and further enhance the makingvisible of processes of literary interaction during Booker coverage. In analysing the material found in the case studies, I found that several factors influence the particular Booker-related quantity and quality of debate: (1) The constellation of other attention-generating events such as the proximity of the publication-related coverage to the media attention on behalf of the Booker Prize; (2) the involvement of other participants (such as newspaper commentators) and their evaluation of both the novel and its relation to the Booker; (3) the career status of the author and his or her novel’s categorisation as debut, established or odd; (4) the novels’ own offer of problems and their ‘connectivity’ in media coverage; (5) a mix of particular or recurring problems discussed in reference to the Booker and the novels’ assigned place in the longer tradition of Booker-specific debate. In fact, each year’s winner is discussed based on particular problems, based on the question of their literary quality and their potential to enter future literary history. Although it is impossible to single out one particular problem which played a role in the discussion of the chosen novels; in the case studies, I have focused on the example of general Booker problems for the analysis of the 2008 novels, on quality for those in 2003, and on history for those published in the year 2000. I have shown how annual and recurring problems are folded into the debate of Booker books on the example of the 2008 Booker Prize: The publication of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger already presented reviewers with particular problems: (a) Adiga was a journalist who offered a work of fiction; (b) Adiga had left India at an early age to be educated in the West where he enjoyed a privileged upbringing and lifestyle. The conferral of the Booker Prize emphasized these two points. Indian reviewers expressed the suspicion that the author had been not only exploitatively appropriated by the Prize but that the Booker’s interference was a form of endowing his contested perspective on contemporary India with a legitimacy which the Prize was not itself justified to confer. More so, when Adiga’s won against Barry’s novel, it was announced that the latter was perceived as the more ‘beautiful’ book but that the final winner emerged as the ‘fresher’ choice. It was the chair of that year’s judging panel, Michael Portillo, a former MP, who had pushed his choice against other judges. In addition to these two problems, the winner was discussed as a choice based on yet another political consideration: the judges had themselves claimed that they could hardly let Barry win because he would be the third Irish author to win in a row. The avoid-

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ance of this problem brought on another one: in just the same year, the winner of the celebratory 2008 Best of the Booker Prize was Salman Rushdie and Adiga was immediately perceived as yet another Indian writer if representing a new generation. The discussion in the media, in combination with an analysis of the Booker’s structure and history, allowed me to formulate several problems which are based on frictions caused on the outside and inside of the literary field. In the case of an international outside of the literary field, the Booker puts other nations in question under pressure: should they rejoice in ‘their’ representative’s success, or withhold attention from such a renewal of imperial imposition? When this outside takes place in a clash with the economic or political field, the Booker puts all those under pressure who claim that the literary field needs to remain autonomous from such influences. There is a pendant economic problem on the inside – a struggle between the influence of the publishing and retail industry vs. critics and academics, as much as the Booker’s past decisions which feed into the discussion of its judgments. The Booker’s ‘problematicness’, including its relationships with other participants in literary interaction, is not necessarily hindering; it calls for problem-solving, for the founding of alliances, and for repeated demonstrations of objectivity or legitimacy. The biggest problem which the Booker poses is its value claim: The Booker’s claim challenges all commentators to think about the value claims they make, about the contingency of literary evaluation, and the criteria involved in making such assessments. After all, though each participant has different stakes in the matter, they each make value judgments in the answer to the question: what makes for a good book? I focused on the question of quality in my analysis of the year 2003 when DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little won the Booker and when he was repeatedly discussed alongside Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Pierre’s novel had been reviewed fairly positively in the UK as the debut with some controversial potential for US audiences. It did, after all, take a high-school shooting in Texas as the topic for parody. In the end, what made a clear change in the US criticism of the novel was that critics overseas were looking at a whole different book. While UK reviewers responded to a relatively unknown entity at the time after its first publication, US reviewers only met with the book after it had won the Booker and was hence charged with the stamp of a ‘best book of the year’. In fact, both 2003 books posed a particular challenge to the reviewers and were handled as odd titles. Both were repeatedly mentioned as a one-off success. In addition, both were discussed in reference to the previous Booker winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and the fears of an Americanization and popularization of the Booker and British lit-

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erature overall. This case study in particular shows in how far the Prize participates in the definition and construction of literary value. The Booker’s claim to select the best novel raises the problem of literary value and it does this on several levels. The question of whether a title is good is quickly turned into a question of whether this was the right decision, followed by the question of whether the judgment was also good for the Booker. Finally, the question if the Booker judges ‘got it right’ this year is asked on a still larger scale: is the Booker ever right? How do Booker judgments influence contemporary writing? Is it good for literature? The argument which I drew from this analysis and the comparison with other case studies was that the question of value becomes a question of use: different participants have different ‘uses’ for literature, for the Booker and for the chosen novels: the attention which a book may hope to reap depends on its ‘connectivity’. In light of the above definition of quality as a question of use, the Booker book which has the better, more lasting connectivity will prove the better book. Consequently, when Booker judges make use of a text – by selecting, appreciating, and evaluating it – they identify the quality of this text in relation to how they can use it. Such an understanding of quality as the aimed-at-use invites the conclusion that literary prizes can, in fact, recognise quality. The third concept tied to the 2000 case studies is that of literary history: Already the advance reader’s copy of Atwood’s The Blind Assassin presented the novel as a future classic. When Atwood was finally awarded the Booker Prizes (this was her fourth time to be nominated) reviewers immediately discussed the choice as a lifetime achievement award. While The Blind Assassin needed to compete against Atwood’s previous work and other Booker contenders, it also made for an interesting comparison with a very different novel, Zadie Smith’s debut White Teeth. Both were competing in a year in which critics as much as the publishing industry were on the look-out for ‘the first great novel of the twenty-first century’ – a phrase which was used in reviews and printed on both their covers. An American paper even hailed White Teeth as the novel which “has changed literature’s future”. The Booker’s 2000 choice in favour of another ‘big-hitter’ rather than a fresh start was perceived by journalists as taking part in the debate about the state of the novel around the turn of the millennium. Both 2000 novels were immediately taken on for not only short-term evaluation but also for endowing them with long-term significance. One example of such early testing of the novels’ connectivity to academic discourse is John Mullan’s series in the Guardian, in which he discusses a given novel in-depth in four instalments, and for which both Smith and Atwood were chosen. The Blind Assassin even twice. The Booker – so the argument in this study – joins other participants’ value claims and thus participates in a competition for legitimacy to pre-

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dict which novels, authors, and debates will win the test of time, and thus make (future) literary history. The link between what triggers attention in the shortand longer-term seems to lie in the range of possible connections of novels to debates and the Booker Prize plays an important role in preparing for such connections. The reason’s for a novel’s prolonged afterlife are follow-up books; literary prizes such as the Booker; and a book’s ‘connectivity’ by topic, seasonal appeal or another event. The emphasis on problems – and quality and history as part of these problems – is what I consider to be the link between the Booker Prize and literary criticism. The wider focus on short and long-term profiles enabled me to ask: how do we as literary critics arrive at out problems? Criticism, after all, makes similar claims and it, too, relies on the novel’s connectivity to a wide range of problems. As a problem-oriented mechanism involved in questions of literary quality and making statements which influence literary history, the Booker Prize shares these characteristics with literary criticism. The results of my study are based on a set of theoretical presumptions and methodological choices. The decisions made – in favour of discourse analysis as means to arrive at questions, in emphasizing the idea of literary interaction, as well as taking a double perspective on the Booker as spoken about and making statements and thus impacting on the novels’ ‘attention profile’ – were reached in conversation with an existing field of research on literary prizes and the Booker in particular. Literary critics started to see the Booker as problematic – in need of attention – from the mid-1990s. The Booker’s problem on the outside of literary communication led to market critique. In this perspective, the Booker conflates economic and aesthetic values not least in its committees which include business people, politicians, publishers and retailers alongside critics and authors. The Booker’s problem on the outside of national literary communication led to postcolonial critique. Here, the Booker exploits postcolonial literature as a source of marketable ‘otherness’. These problems led critics to see the Booker as ‘Prizing Otherness’ (Huggan) or ‘Sameness’ (Mendess), or as propagating the unadventurous kind of literature which might suit the tastes of Oxbridge-educated middle-aged white men. These perspectives on the Booker as an exclusionary mechanism have been countered with the notion of the Prize as an inclusionary mechanism: one which enriches British writing through internationalization. While previous literary critics concentrated on some of the above-mentioned problems of the Booker, I have focused on a more general idea of the Booker’s ‘problematicness’. My question aimed at finding out which particular problems are given attention. In this sense, the Booker can be seen as a problem like any event on a

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novel’s itinerary, even its publication. If the Booker is understood as creating debate, the question which followed was how it could do it, who else participated in it, and what were the stakes? Scholars in literary sociology and the history of the book – and later those who combined these with cultural or publishing studies – had been paying attention to literary prizes as part of the wider processes of production, distribution and reception of books. They agreed upon the Booker’s and other prizes’ important place among other participants in the field but not on where this important place was. Depending on the scholars’ position, the Booker has been placed in a series of positions and in different relations to other participants. Prizes in general and the Booker, in particular, have been described as consumer guides, as marketing tools, as media events or instances of literary criticism. In order to understand why the Booker was repeatedly ascribed a particular characteristic of one of the other participants rather than its own, and in a first attempt to answer James F. English’s call for a new model of the 21st century, I compared existing models of the various constellations of participants: the communication circuit, the model for the study of the book, three diagrams of the literary field, as well as models of supply chain and value chain. What I found was that each model privileges a certain perspective on what it seeks to describe by putting different emphasis on the basic elements and reasons of the respective participants’ interaction and using different terms for the object which is circulated. The two scholars whose work on the Booker and the literary field has most influenced my study, James F. English and Claire Squires, and who have paved the way for more ‘objective’ analysis of the Booker, used the communication models, particularly Bourdieu’s, in their reflection on literary prizes. They have respectively added ‘journalistic’ and ‘scholarly’ capital to the dichotomy between economic and symbolic capital alluding to (or explicitly claiming) a certain ‘dependent independency’ between the Booker and criticism. Building on their concepts, I argued that it is not only the (journalistic or academic) critic who observes and therefore needs to be taken into account in reference to any model or description of the field as she may find it but that every participant in literary interaction observes and is observed by others and that the decisions made in literary interaction are based on both an awareness of observing and the assumption of being observed. Based on these reflections, I have not offered an own model but formulated the argument of the irreducible multi-perspectivity of literary interaction. In this literary interaction, then, participants are reciprocally aware of and observe each other; the state of mutual observation leads to cycles of attention; attention from other participants can be triggered by offering problems. This, in turn, led me to propose the argument of literary interaction as an

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‘economy of attention’, and one in which the critic takes an active part. Based on the hypothesis of literary interaction as an ‘economy of attention’, thus derives the idea that the presence of the individual novel in this discussion can be represented through its ‘attention profile’, and that this rather than the ‘itinerary’, can help study the Booker as a problem-driven attention-generating mechanism. The chosen approach has some limitations. I did not set out to answer the question whether or not the Booker chose the best book from the viewpoint of any one participant. Instead, I argued that quality is a question of use. Hence, although participants necessarily claim that their understanding of quality is universal, my study shows that value claims say more about those who make the statement rather than about the object of this statement. While it was not my intention to find out why judges in a given year may have reached certain judgments and which certain circumstances of the Booker Prize have influenced their decisions, I did, however, trace the discussion among critics and their speculation about the reasons for one book’s Booker success and another one’s failure. The choices made here also have some less desired short-comings. With its focus on ‘traditional’ print media, this study does not incorporate a number of other public platforms. I used print media and their online presence, including for example the Guardian Book Blog, but did not take into account TV and radio, literary festivals, reading groups, and a range of internet platforms. There are some reasons in favour of using newspapers and magazines: availability is one, public access, chronology and the news-character are the more pressing issues for constructing an attention profile. In a stronger defence, one might add that these points could be incorporated in future research. For example, blogs and social media – which have their own set of rules, and which, I would argue, are more a characteristic of the fifth than the fourth Booker decade – adhere to the attention pattern in print and online papers. The ‘potential attention rhythm’ might be used as a starting point for future research that will take into consideration other media, other participants and their documents of literary interaction. Taking the Booker Prize as the object for analysis allows for a range of results. The particular focus on the discursive space which the Prize creates in a novel’s profile allows for a particular range of results: the Booker emerges as an attention-generating mechanism; as one in many events of the novel’s ‘lifecycle’ in an economy of attention. The attention granted to the Bookernominated or Booker-winning novel does not simply have the consequence of a ‘double publication’ in terms of review attention. Instead, the particular type of attention is charged with the discussion about the Booker. The way in which the Booker is debated is folded into the debate of novels which are discussed in reference to the Prize, be it because they have received it, were nominated for it, or

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because they were neither nominated nor awarded the Prize and it was this very ‘negligence’ or overseeing which was discussed. Finally, the relationship between the Booker Prize and its immediate echoes in journalistic criticism, on the one hand, and academic criticism, on the other, may not be one of analogy (as was proposed in previous Booker research) but of continuity. I have shown that particular problems draw the attention of particular participants and that such problems – to some degree – continue to attract the attention literary criticism. In fact, there is a connection between the preoccupation with problems, quality and history – as described in the three steps above – during the novels’ ‘natural life’ (i.e. the first two years of their ‘life cycles’) and the similar emphasis on all three in their ‘afterlife’. Academic critics, too, turn their attention to novels which raise problems, lend themselves to discussions about literary quality, and which can be accommodated in large-scale narratives deemed suitable for the writing of literary history. In other works, literary criticism, too, prizes debate. Just as the Booker’s judgments are made in particular contexts, decisions made by literary scholars are not made in a vacuum. They, too, are the result of complex negotiations in literary interaction, in a ‘game’ which, as James F. English has observed, may not be about ‘winning’ but which nevertheless displays all the signs of competition. To understand the relationships between all the ‘players’ involved – including academic critics – as competitive, and to describe the similarities and differences of their perspectives, is to concede that they have different agendas but to leave room for common interest in debate. As a result, power in literary interaction can be described as a continuous negotiation among participants over discourse. Through an examination of the process by which we prize debate, we see that what is valued is the work that offers the best problem or, to be more precise, the work that will have one day carved out its place in literary history by connecting with debate.

Appendix

1 A: M ARGARET ATWOOD , T HE B LIND A SSASSIN (N AN A. T ALESE , 2000; ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY , UK) Front Cover Copy The Blind Assassin | MARGARET ATWOOD | ADVANCE READING COPY – NOT FOR SALE Back Cover Copy Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling new novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist. For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is both entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister’s death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura’s story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.

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Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialism of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be – but, in fact, much more. The Blind Assassin proves once again that Atwood is one of the most talented, daring and exciting writers of our time. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, it is destined to become a classic. MARKETING | Major National Print Advertising – Radio Advertising – Regional Holiday Catalog Promotion – 8-copy Floor Display 0-385-50107-2 – Reservation Board, Available One Month Prior to On-Sale, 0-385-50110-2 – Reading Group Guide 0-385-50108-0 (Packs of 10) – Extensive On-line Promotion, including www.blindassassin.com – Also available on BDD Audio Cassette 0-55352756-8 (10 Cassettes Unabridged) | PUBLICITY | National Author Tour – National Media Attention – National Review Attention | A Main Selection of the BOOKOF-THE-MONTH CLUB | Fiction – ISBN 0-385-47572-1 – TRIM: 6 1/4 – 400 Pages | Tentative ON-SALE DATE: 9/5/00 – TENTATIVE PRICE: $ 26.00 U.S./NCR | To place orders in the U.S., please contact your local Doubleday sales representative, or call Random House Customer Service, toll-free: 1-800-726-0600. Eastern States and Central States: Monday-Friday, 8:30 A.M.-5:00 P.M. (ET); Western States: Monday-Thursday, 10:30 A.M.-7:00 P.M (ET). For additional copies of this advance reading copy, call the Doubleday Marketing Hot Line: 1-800605-3406. | This is an uncorrected proof. Please note that any quotes for reviews must be checked against the finished book. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice. | NAN A. TALESE/DOUBLEDAY 1549 BROADWAY NEW YORK, NY 100361 212-345-6500

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1 B : M ARGARET ATWOOD , T HE B LIND A SSASSIN (M C C LELLAND & S TEWART , 2000, H ARDCOVER , C AN ) Front Cover Copy The Blind Assassin | Margaret Atwood Back Cover Copy By the Author of the internationally celebrated Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin is Margaret Atwood’s spellbinding new novel. It spans the decades between the First World War and the present, providing the sweep of an epic and the intimate focus of a family drama. This is Margaret Atwood at her dazzling best.

1 C : M ARGARET ATWOOD , T HE B LIND A SSASSIN (N AN A. T ALESE , 2000 H ARDCOVER , US) Front Cover Copy The Blind Assassin | Margaret Atwood Back Cover Copy With each novel, the praise for Margaret Atwood’s style and brilliance escalates. A further step is taken in The Blind Assassin. –ALIAS GRACE– “Alias Grace is a rare and splendid novel that pulls you in and won’t let you go… Diamond hard prose. Chilling images. Elusive psychological terrain. Glimpses into the nature of the male and female sensuality that can rival Flaubert…” – Washington Post “Seductive, beautifully articulated… Brilliantly conceived and executed… Atwood’s latest literary coup is, like the biblical account of Eve’s fall from grace, first and foremost a hell of a good story.” – San Francisco Chronicle

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“Atwood’s readers expect to be stimulated by provocative themes while entertained with a propulsive narrative, and her new book will not disappoint them.” – Chicago Sun-Times –CAT’S EYE– “Nightmarish, evocative, hearbreaking.” – New York Times Book Review “Atwood [is] writing at the top of her energy… Cat’s Eye is so fine that to simply observe how it works is the best praise.” – Philadelphia Inquirer –THE HANDMAID’S TALE– “Easily Margaret Atwood’s best novel to date… A taut thriller, a psychological study, a play on words. It has a sense of humor about itself. Miss Atwood has succeeded with her anti-Utopian novel where most practicioners of the Orwellian genre have tended to fail.” – New York Times “Atwood takes many trends which exist today and stretches them to their logical and chilling conclusion… An excellent novel about the direction our lives are taking. Read it while it’s still allowed.” – Houston Chronicle US $26.00

1 D : M ARGARET ATWOOD , T HE B LIND A SSASSIN (B LOOMSBURY , 2000, H ARDCOVER , UK) Front Cover Copy The Blind Assassin | A NOVEL | by Margaret Atwood Back Cover Copy ACCLAIM FOR | Margaret Atwood ALIAS GRACE | Shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize and the Orange Prize | “For twenty years I have enjoyed reading Margaret Atwood’s fiction, but she has surpassed my highest expectations in Alias Grace, a novel of extraordinary beauty. Like all great novels, it transports us to a fully-realised, self-contained world that

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beguiles and haunts us, subtly altering our views of life.” Michael Shelden, Daily Telegraph THE ROBBER BRIDE | ‘The Robber Bride is a masterpiece. It surely confirms Margaret Atwood’s standing as one of the most inventive, enthralling and accomplished authors writing in English.’ Harry Ritchie, Sunday Times. CAT’S EYE | Shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize | ‘This study of creativity and destructiveness is triumphantly wide-ranging. Its harkings-back are animated by both satire and nostalgia. Its span extends from ironic documentary to heightened and hallucinatory states of mind. It is, by turns, bleak, funny, sensuously evocative and acutely penetrating. The intellectual and the imaginative interweave, giving a rich texture to the book. Informed wit, beautiful surprising images and rough melancholy especially characterize the novel.’ Peter Kemp, Sunday Times THE HANDMAID’S TALE | Shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize | ‘Quite simply, the work of the most distinguished novelist under fifty currently writing in English. What poison tale will she tell us next?’ Patrick Parrinder, London Review of Books

1 E : M ARGARET ATWOOD , T HE B LIND A SSASSIN (V IRAGO P RESS , 2001, P APERBACK , UK) Front Cover Copy The BLIND ASSASSIN | Winner of the BOOKER PRIZE | Margaret Atwood

1 F : M ARGARET ATWOOD , T HE B LIND A SSASSIN (K NOPF , D OUBLEDAY , 2001, P APERBACK , US) Front Cover Copy INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER | The BLIND ASSASSIN | A NOVEL | WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE | Margaret Atwood | “The first great novel of the new millennium.” – Newsday

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2 A: Z ADIE S MITH , W HITE T EETH (H AMISH H AMILTON , 1999, ADVANCED R EADER ’ S C OPY , UK) Front Cover Copy UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY | WHITE TEETH | ZADIE SMITH | “AN ASTONISHINGLY ASSURED DÉBUT … IT HAS BITE” SALMAN RUSHDIE Back Cover Copy Zadie Smith’s fizzing first novel is about how we all got here – from the Carribean, from the Indian subcontinent, from thirteenth place in a long-age Olympic bicycle race – and about what “here” turned out to be. It’s an astonishingly assured début, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by WHITE TEETH, and often impressed. It has… bite. SALMAN RUSHDIE A HUGE PROMOTION FOR THIS EXCITING NEW AUTHOR | Major national press advertising campaign | National and regional radio | Selected bookshop and festival events | Will be submitted for all major prizes | Beautiful A1 window display poster | UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY | HAMISH HAMILTON ISBN: 024113997X | Format 154x234mm 480pp, £12,99 | Pub Date: January 2000

2 B : Z ADIE S MITH , W HITE T EETH (R ANDOM H OUSE , 2000, ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY (US) Front Cover Copy ADVANCE READER’S EDITION | WHITE TEETH | a novel | ZADIE SMITH Back Cover Copy A SPECTATULAR, RIOTOUSLY ENTERTAINING EPIC FROM THE BRIGHTEST TALENT THIS YEAR White Teeth is the story of two postwar London families – the Joneses and the Iqbals – whose hilarious and tortured lives capture all the optimism and absurdity of the past half-century. Archie Jones is a typical working class Brit, who

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makes life’s every major decision with the flip of a 20p coin. His best friend, a pal from the war, is a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Around these two characters, Zadie Smith weaves a funny, profound novel about a society struggling with an empire’s worth of cultural identity. Her sparkling debut plays out its wonderful and uproarious course in the Jamaican hair salons of North London, in Indian restaurants in Leicester Square, and in halal butchers and Irish pool halls, the entire cacophonous, pulsing spectacle, coming to a close sleek conference room overlooking Trafalgar Square. This is the London that has been evolving for the past forty-five years. Zadie Smith is its voice. “Zadie Smith’s fizzing first novel is about how we all got here – from the Carribean, from the Indian subcontinent, from thirteenth place in a long-age Olympic bicycle race – and about what “here” turned out to be. It’s an astonishingly assured début, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by WHITE TEETH, and often impressed. It has… bite.” – SALMAN RUSHDIE Zadie Smith is twenty-four years old and a graduate of Cambridge Universtity. White Teeth is her first novel, parts of which have appeared in Granta. Smith lives in North London. PUBLICITY | Author tour: 5-city reading tour. | ADVERTISING | The New York Times, National Public Radio sponsorship | PROMOTION | Fiction at Random promotion | May 2000 publication – 50,000 first printing – $ 24, 95 – ISBN 0375-50185-1 | ADVANCE UNCORRECTED READER’S EDITION. NOT FOR SALE. PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE FOR PUBLICATION WITHOUT CHECKING AGAINST THE FINISHED BOOK. | Random House – 201 East 50th St – New York, N.Y. 10022 – www.atrandom.com

2 C : Z ADIE S MITH , W HITE T EETH (H AMISH H AMILTON , 2000, H ARDCOVER , UK) Front Cover Copy WHITE TEETH | ZADIE SMITH | “AN ASTONISHINGLY ASSURED DÉBUT… IT HAS BITE” SALMAN RUSHDIE

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Back Cover Copy “Zadie Smith’s fizzing first novel is about how we all got here – from the Carribean, from the Indian subcontinent, from thirteenth place in a long-age Olympic bicycle race – and about what “here” turned out to be. It’s an astonishingly assured début, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by WHITE TEETH, and often impressed. It has bite.” – Salman Rushdie

2 D : Z ADIE S MITH , W HITE T EETH , (R ANDOM H OUSE , 2000, H ARDCOVER , US) Front Cover Copy WHITE TEETH | ZADIE SMITH | a novel Back Cover Copy PRAISE FOR WHITE TEETH “Zadie Smith’s fizzing first novel is about how we all got here – from the Carribean, from the Indian subcontinent, from thirteenth place in a long-age Olympic bicycle race – and about what “here” turned out to be. It’s an astonishingly assured début, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by WHITE TEETH, and often impressed. It has bite.” – Salman Rushdie “A rich, ambitious, and often hilarious delight.” – The Independent “This is a strikingly clever and funny book with a passion for ideas, for language, and for the rich tragicomedy of life… [Smith’s] characters always ring true, it is her ebullient, simple prose and her generous understanding of human nature that make Zadie Smith’s novel outstanding. It is not only great fun to read, but full of hope.” – Sunday Telegraph “A writer of mighty potential.” – The Times Literary Supplement “Poised and relentlessly funny… A major new talent.” – The Guardian

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2 E : Z ADIE S MITH , W HITE T EETH (P ENGUIN , 2001, P APERBACK , UK) Front Cover Copy WHITE TEETH | ZADIE SMITH | WINNER OF THE 2000 WHITBREAD FIRST NOVEL AWARD | “FUNNY, CLEVER … AND A ROLLICKING GOOD READ” INDEPENDENT | “THE OUTSTANDING DEBUT OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM” OBSERVER

2 F : Z ADIE S MITH , W HITE T EETH (V INTAGE , 2001, P APERBACK , US) Front Cover Copy WHITE TEETH | ZADIE SMITH | NATIONAL BESTSELLER | A NOVEL | “White Teeth just may be the first great novel of the new century.” | – San Francisco Chronicle

3 A: DBC P IERRE , V ERNON G OD L ITTLE (F ABER F ABER , 2002, ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY , UK)

AND

Front Cover Copy VERNON GOD LITTLE | DBC PIERRE | ff Back Cover Copy A 21ST CENTURY COMEDY IN THE PRESENCE OF DEATH 15-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble. And it has something to do with the recent massacre of 16 students at his high school. Soon the quirky backwater of Martirio, barbecue capital of Texas, is flooded with wannabe CNN hacks keen to lay the blame at Vernon’s feet. Eulalio Ledesma, in particular, sniffs out his opportunity to make good at Vernon’s expense and as the net tightens and desire for a scapegoat reaches fever-pitch, Vernon decides to leave town. With the LSD diluted in the ginseng and essential travel funds procured from a distasteful trade-off with old Mr Deutschmann, he succumbs to the workings of Fate and

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takes off for Mexico and a date – or so he hopes – with the divine Taylor Figueroa. Peopled by a cast of freaks, obese law enforcement officers, cold-blooded chattering housewives, and one very special adolescent with an unfortunate talent for being in the wrong place at the right time. VERNON GOD LITTLE is a riotous adventure story which cuts a satirical swathe through the heart of contemporary America. ‘BOY, WHEN FATE OPENS UP IT OPENS UP WITH BOTH BARRELS. SEE WHAT HAPPENS I’M IN TROUBLE? SEE THE AWESOME POWER OF TROUBLE. TROUBLE FUCKEN ROCKS.’ | 20 January 2003 205x145mm hardback 0571215157 £12.99 | Export paperback 0571216420 £10.99 | This is an uncorrected proof copy NOW

3 B : DBC P IERRE , V ERNON G OD L ITTLE (C ANONGATE , 2003, ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY , US) Front Cover Copy VERNON GOD LITTLE | DBC PIERRE | ADVANCE READING COPY | PUBLICATON: SEPTEMBER 2003 Back Cover Copy “Not since first reading John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, have I laughed so much, or felt such sheer delight at the discovery of a wholly fresh comic voice.” – Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday (U.K.) “A satire brimming with opprobrium for [the] demi-culture of reality television, fast food and speedily delivered death… a bulging burrito of a book. “ – The Times (U.K.) “You want to know what this terrific book is like? It’s like the Osbournes invited the Simpsons round for a root beer, and Don DeLillo dropped by to help them write a new song for Eminem.” – Andrew O’Hagan, author of Missing and Our Fathers “Read Vernon God Little not only for its dangerous relevance, but for the coruscating wit and raw vitality of its voice, which recalls maybe Flannery O’Connor

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on an overdose of amphetamines and cable television.” – Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn “Vernon himself is a brilliant comic creation.” – Guardian (U.K.) “One of the most engaging first-person narrators since Holden Caulfield.” – Daily Mail (U.K.) ADVANCE READING COPY | PUBLICATION: SEPTEMBER | CLOTH $ 23 | 1-84195460-8 | DISTRIBUTED BY PUBLISHERS GROUPT WEST

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Front Cover Copy VERNON GOD LITTLE | DBC PIERRE Back Cover Copy ‘A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY COMEDIY IN THE PRESENCE OF DEATH’ | The truth is a corrosive thing. It’s like everybody who used to cuss the dead, is now lining up to say what perfect angels of God they were. What I’m learning is the world laughs through its ass every day, then just lies double-time when shit goes down. I mean – what kind of fucken life is this?

3 D : DBC P IERRE , V ERNON G OD L ITTLE (C ANONGATE , 2003, H ARDCOVER , US) Front Cover Copy VERNON GOD LITTLE| DBC PIERRE | “This post-modern picaresque tale has everything.” ESQUIRE

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Back Cover Copy UK PRAISE FOR VERNON GOD LITTLE “Not since first reading John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, have I laughed so much, or felt such sheer delight at the discovery of a wholly fresh comic voice.” MAIL ON SUNDAY “Read Vernon God Little not only for its dangerous relevance, but for the coruscating wit and raw vitality of its voice.” JONATHAN LETHEM, author of Motherless Brooklyn “One of the most original and seriously funny narrative voices in recent times.” OBSERVER “A satire brimming with opprobrium for … [the] demi-culture of reality television, fast food and speedily delivered death… a bulging burrito of a book.” THE TIMES “A dazzling debut… a raucous, tragic satire on contemporary America.” GQ “You want to know what this terrific book is like? It’s like the Osbournes invited the Simpsons round for a root beer, and Don DeLillo dropped by to help them write a new song for Eminem.” ANDREW O’HAGAN, author of The Missing and Our Fathers. ISBN 1 8419540 | $ 23 US

4 A: M ARK H ADDON , T HE C URIOUS I NCIDENT OF THE D OG IN THE N IGHT -T IME (J ONATHAN C APE , 2003, ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY , UK) Front Cover Copy the curious incident of the dog in the night-time | MARK HADDON | A Jonathan Cape Uncorrected Proof

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Back Cover Copy a truly remarkable novel about an autistic boy The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger’s, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down. Christopher is a brilliant creation, and Mark Haddon’s depiction of his world is deeply moving, very funny and utterly convincing. Mark Haddon is an author, illustrator and screenwriter who has written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs. He lives in Oxford. Already an international sensation: rights sold in 15 countries | Major film deal about to be announced | Massive publicity and marketing campaign | Simultaneous publication by David Fickling | PROVISIONAL PRICE AND PUBLICATION DETAILS May 2003 | £10.99 | Book: 0224063782 | Proof: 0224064029 | PAGE EXTENT 288pp | PAGE SIZE 216x153 mm | Jonathan Cape is an imprint of Random House Group Ltc. 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA – tel 0207840 8400 020 7828 6681 (Home Sales) – 020 7932 0077 (Publicity) – +44207408408 (International Sales) – or Trade Dept. TBS Ltd. Frating Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester, Essex CO7 7DW – tel 01206255678 – fax 01206 255930

4 B : M ARK H ADDON , T HE C URIOUS I NCIDENT OF THE D OG IN THE N IGHT -T IME (D AVID F ICKLING B OOKS C HILDREN , 2003, ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY , UK) Front Cover Copy BOOK PROOF | the curious incident of the dog in the night-time | mark haddon | David Fickling Books

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Back Cover Copy the curious incident of the dog in the night-time It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes, but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on his neighbour’s lawn, he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery becomes … David Fickling Books | Oxford – New York | FICTION | 272pp | ISBN 0385 | £10.99 (prices subject to change at time of publication) | Publication date: May 2003 | David Fickling Books | David Fickling Books | 31 Beaumont Street | Oxford, OXI 2NP | An imprint of Random House Group Ltd. www.kidsatrandomhouse.co.uk | ADVANCE GALLEY – NOT FOR SALE

4 C : M ARK H ADDON , T HE C URIOUS I NCIDENT OF THE D OG IN THE N IGHT -T IME (D OUBLEDAY , 2003, ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY , US) Front Cover Copy ADVANCE READING COPY – NOT FOR SALE | THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME | MARK HADDON | “Mark Haddon’s portrayal on an emotionally disassociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.” – IAN MCEWAN, AUTHOR OF ATONEMENT AND AMSTERDAM

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Back Cover Copy EVERY

SO OFTEN YOU COME ACROSS A BOOK SO RISKY AND EMOTIONALLY

RESONANT THAT IT PERMANENTLY ALTERS YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THINGS. THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME IS ONE OF THOSE BOOKS. Narrated by a fifteen-year-old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, this dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions. Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries in the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7057. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. At fifteen, Christopher’s carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbor’s dog Wellington impaled on a garden fork, and he is initially blamed for the killing. Christopher decides that he will track down the real killer and turns to his favourite fictional character, the impeccably logical Sherlock Holmes, for inspiration. But the investigation leads him down some unexpected paths and ultimately brings him face-to-face with the dissolution of his parent’s marriage. As Christopher tries to deal with the crisis within his own family, the narrative draws readers into the workings of Christopher’s mind. And herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of a narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotions. The effect is dazzling, making for a novel that is deeply funny, poignant, and fascinating in its portrayal of a person whose curses and blessing are a mind that perceives the world literally. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is one of the freshest debuts in years: a comedy, a tearjerker, a mystery story, a novel of exceptional literary merit that is great fun to read.

MARK HADDON is a writer and illustrator of numerous award-winning children’s books and television adaptations. As a young man, Haddon worked with autistic individuals. He currently teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and at Oxford University. He lives in Oxford, England. MARKETING AND PUBLICITY | National Print Advertising | Fiction for the Rest of Us Promotion | On-Line Promotion | Newsletter Coop | National Author Promotion | National Media Attention | FOREIGN RIGHTS SOLD TO UK | Italy | Finland | Denmark | Holland | Brazil | France | Sweden | Norway | Spain | Japan | Greece |

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FILM RIGHTS HAVE BEEN BOUGHT BY HEY DAY (MAKERS OF HARRY POTTER) TOGETHER WITH BRAD GREY (PRODUCERS OF THE SOPRANOS) AND BRAD PITT IN THEIR FIRST ACQUISITIONS FOR WARNER BROS. | Advance Reading Copy – Not for Sale | 5 ½” x 8 1/4“ – 224 pages – ISBN 0-385-50945-6 | Tentative On-Sale Date: 6/17/03 – Tentative Price: U.S. $22.95

4 D : M ARK H ADDON , T HE C URIOUS I NCIDENT OF THE D OG IN THE N IGHT -T IME (J ONATHAN C APE ADULT , 2003, H ARDCOVER , UK) Front Cover Copy THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME | MARK HADDON | “Mark Haddon’s portrayal on an emotionally disassociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.” – IAN MCEWAN THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME Back Cover Copy “I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon’s funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won’t want to lend yours out.” ARHTUR GOLDEN, author of Memoirs of a Geisha “A delightful and brilliant book. Mark Haddon shows great insight into the autistic mind… I found it all very moving, very plausible and very funny.” OLIVER SACKS FICTION

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5 A: ARAVIND ADIGA, T HE W HITE T IGER (ATLANTIC B OOKS , 2007, ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY , UK) Front Cover Copy UNCORRECTED BOUND PROOF | THE WHITE TIGER | Aravind Adiga | Meet Balram Halwai, the ‘White Tiger’: servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer … | ‘In the grand illusions of a ‘rising India, Aravind Adiga has found a subject Gogol might have envied. With remorselessly and delightfully mordant wit The White Tiger anatomises the fantastic cravings of the rich; it evokes, too, with startling accuracy and tenderness, the no less desperate struggles of the deprived.” | PANKAJ MISHRA Back Cover Copy Meet Balram Halwai, the ‘White Tiger’: servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of an absurd chandelier, Balram tells his story. | Born in a remote Indian village, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. As he breaks coals and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape. | When a rich village landlord hires him as a chauffeur for his son and daughter-in-law, Balram’s reeducation begins: from behind the wheel of a Honda, Balram comes to Delhi. In the capital, trapped between his instinct o be a loyal son and servant, and his desire to better himself, he discovers a new morality at the heart of a new India. Gradually, Balram comes to see how the Tiger might escape his cage…| Balram’s journey is a brilliantly irreverent, blackly comic, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable tour de force. The White Tiger is one of the most hotly anticipated novels of 2008. | A sensational debut novel which reveals a wholly contemporary, unromanticized view of India – a land of superstition and poverty, teeming with entrepreneurs. | The White Tiger will be one of Atlantic Books submissions for the Man Booker Prize 2008 | Aravind Adiga is a 32-year-old writer of huge talent. He will be in the UK for publication. | ‘The novel that set the London Book Fair buzzing’ (Bookseller), rights have already been sold in 13 countries. | Adiga’s narrator Balram, is a great literary creation: amoral, cynical, unrepentant yet deeply endearing. His voice grips from the start. | ‘An exhilarating, side-splitting account of India today, as well as an eloquent howl at her many injustices. Adiga enters the literary scene resplendent in battle dress and ready to conquer. Let us bow to

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him.’ Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook April 2008 – Fiction – £12.99 Hardback/£10.99 Paperback – 210x148mm – 336pp – HB ISBN: 978 1 84354 7204 – TPB ISBN: 978 1 84354 721 1 | Atlantic Books, Ormond Hous, 26-27 Boswell Street, London, WCIN 3JZ | Tel: 020 7269 1610 Fax: 020 7430 0916 Email: [email protected] | Publicity enquiries: Karen Duffy | Tel: 0207269 1621 Fax: 020 7430 0916 Email: [email protected] | Sales: Joanna Lord | Tel: 020 7269 1618 Fax: 020 7430 0916 Email: [email protected] | A note to reviewers: Please remember that this proof is uncorrected and changes may be made before the book is printed. If any material from the book is quoted in a review, please check it against the text in the final bound edition, which will be sent to you when it becomes available.

5 B : ARAVIND ADIGA, T HE W HITE T IGER (F REE P RESS , S IMON & S CHUSTER , 2008, ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY , US) Front Cover Copy ADVANCE READER’S EDITION | A NOVEL | The White Tiger | ARAVIND ADIGA Back Cover Copy NO SARIS – NO SCENTS – NO SPICES – NO MUSIC – NO LYRICISM – NO ILLUSIONS | THIS IS INDIA NOW. Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life – having nothing but his own wits to help him along. Born in a village in the dark heart of India, Balram gets a break when he is hired as a driver for a wealthy man, two Pomeranians (Puddles and Cuddles), and the rich man’s (very unlucky) son. Through Balram’s eyes, we see India as we’ve never seen it before: the cockroaches and the call centers, the prostitutes and the worshippers, the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds of cages that escape is (almost) impossible, the

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white tiger. And with a charisma as undeniable as it is unexpected, he teaches us that religion doesn’t create morality and money doesn’t solve every problem – but decency can still be found in a corrupt world, and you can get what you want out of life if you eavesdrop on the right conversations. Sold instantly in fourteen countries around the world, The White Tiger recalls Absurdistan, Bangkok 8, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and The Death of Vishnu in ambition, scope, and narrative genius. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation – and a startling, provocative debur. COMING IN APRIL 2008 FROM FREE PRESS | NATIONAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN National author publicity | National television and print publicity | National and local radio interview campaign | National advertising in The New York Times and The New Yorker and on ShelfAwareness.com and PublishersLunch.com | Newsletter coop promotion | Online promotions and features | Simonsays.com fiction e-newsletter | Feature title on BookClubReader.com and in e-newsletter | Reading group guide available online | Giveaway at regional trade shows. | ISBN-10: 1-4165-6259-1 | ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6259-7 | U.S $24.00/CAN $28.00 | 5 5/8”” trim | 304 pages | Fiction | Uncorrected proof Advance Reader’s Edition | Not for sale | Please do not quote for publication without checking against the finished book | Property of Simon & Schuster

5 C : ARAVIND ADIGA, T HE W HITE T IGER (ATLANTIC , 2008, H ARDCOVER , UK) Front Cover Copy THE WHITE TIGER | ARAVIND ADIGA Back Cover Copy ‘Unlike almost any other Indian novel you might have read in recent years, this page-turner offers a completely bald, angry, unadorned portrait of the country as seen from the bottom of the heap; there’s not a sniff of saffron or a swirl of sari anywhere… The Indian tourist board won’t be pleased, but you’ll read it in a trice and find yourself gripped.’ ANDREW HOLGATE, SUNDAY TIMES

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‘Compelling, angry, and darkly humorous, The White Tiger is an unexpected journey into a new India. Aravind Adiga is a talent to watch.’ MOHSIN HAMID, AUTHOR OF THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

5 D : ARAVIND ADIGA, T HE W HITE T IGER (ATLANTIC , 2009, P APERBACK , UK) Front Cover Copy Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008 | THE WHITE TIGER | ARAVIND ADIGA | ‘A MASTERPIECE’ THE TIMES | ‘BLAZINGLY SAVAGE AND BRILLIANT’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH Back Cover Copy MEET BALRAM HALWAI, ‘THE WHITE TIGER’: SERVANT, PHILOSOPHER, ENTREPRENEUR, MURDERER … ‘Dazzling… With The White Tiger, Adiga sets out to show us a part of [India] that we hear about infrequently: its underbelly… Welcome… to an India where Microsoft call-centre workers tread the same pavement as beggars who burn street rubbish for warmth… It’s a thrilling ride…’ David Mattin, Independent on Sunday ‘[An] extraordinary and brilliant first novel… At first, this novel seems like a straightforward pulled-up-by-your-bootstraps tale, albeit given a dazzling twist by the narrator’s sharp and satirical eye for the realities of life for India’s poor… But as the narrative draws the reader further in, and darkens, it becomes clear that Adiga is playing a bigger game…’ Adam Lively, Sunday Times ‘Blazzingly savage and brilliant… What Adiaga lifts the lid on is also inexorably true: not a single detail in this novel rings false or feels confected. The White Tiger is an excoriating piece of work [that] also manages to be suffused with mordant wit, modulating to clear-eyed pathos.’ Neel Mukherjee, Sunday Telegraph Cover illustration by Petra Borner/Dutch Uncle | Cover Design by Ghost

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6 A: S EBASTIAN B ARRY , T HE S ECRET S CRIPTURE (F ABER AND F ABER , 2008), ADVANCE R EADER ’ S C OPY , UK) Front Cover Copy SEBASTIAN BARRY | From the bestselling author of A Long Long Way | The Secret Scripture | ‘I once lived among humankind, and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold, and yet could mention the names of three or four that were like angels. I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us…’ Back Cover Copy The extraordinarily moving follow up to Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way – shortlisted for the Man Booker Proze and the IMPAC Prize, and winner of the Kerry Group for Irish Fiction. Nearing her one-hundreth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she’s spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene. This relationship, guarded but trusting after so many years, intensifies and complicates as Dr Grene mourns the death of his wife. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges, of Roseanne’s family in 1930s Sligo – is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne’s story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland. Exquisitely written, it is the story of a life blighted by terrible maltreatment and ignorance, and yet still marked by a flame of love, passion and hope. Praise for A Long Long Way: | “[It] grips, shocks and saddens; but most importantly refuses to be forgotten.” The Times | “A small masterpiece.” Independent Lead publicity campaign, with events and coverage across the media | The Dublin ‘One City, One Book’ initiative recently catapulted Barry to even greater success | May 2008 | Royal Hardback| 978 0 571 21328 7 | £16.99 | Export Trade Paperback | 978 0571 2 3964 | £12.99 | THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED PROOF AND IS NOT FOR SALE OR QUOTATION

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6 B : S EBASTIAN B ARRY , T HE S ECRET S CRIPTURE (F ABER AND F ABER , 2008, H ARDCOVER , UK) Front Cover Copy Author of the bestselling A Long Long Way | SEBASTIAN BARRY | The Secret Scripture Back Cover Copy ‘The Secret Scripture is written in voices lonely as the caoin, the most haunting of all laments for loss, echoing through the ages of the novel, giving it its courage, its strangeness, its raw, rough beauty. Sebastian Barry’s fiction is unique, and it is magnificent.’ FRANK MCGUINESS

6 C : S EBASTIAN B ARRY , T HE S ECRET S CRIPTURE (F ABER AND F ABER , 2009, P APERBACK , UK) Front Cover Copy SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE | COSTA BOOK AWARDS Winner 2008 | ‘A magnificent and heart-rending novel.’ Joseph O’Connor, Guardian | The Secret Scripture | SEBASTIAN BARRY | 3for2 at Waterstone’s | Offer applies to stickered items only.

6 D : S EBASTIAN B ARRY , T HE S ECRET S CRIPTURE (V IKING , 2008, H ARDCOVER , US) Front Cover Copy The Secret Scripture | a novel | Sebastian Barry | Author of the Man Booker finalist A Long Long Way

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6 E : S EBASTIAN B ARRY , T HE S ECRET S CRIPTURE (P ENGUIN , 2009, P APERBACK , US) Front Cover Copy SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE | The Secret Scripture | a novel | Sebastian Barry | Author of the Man Booker finalist A Long Long Way | “Luminous and lyrical.” – O, The Oprah Magazine

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Battles, Jan. “PS, UK Loves Irish Chick-Lit.” The Sunday Times 20 Dec. 2009. Beck, Evelyn. “Adiga, Aravind: The White Tiger.” Library Journal 15 Feb. 2008: 89. Begley, Adam. “A Quiet Brit’s Loud Talent: Jim Crace’s Corpse Comedy.” The New York Observer 12 Feb. 2001. Bemrose, John. “Margaret’s Museum.” Maclean’s 11 Sept. 2000: 54. Benedictus, Leo. “What to Say About ... Polar Bears.” guardian.co.uk 8 Apr. 2010. Bennett, Oliver. “Moving on Up.” The Telegraph 3 Apr. 2002. Bethune, Brian. “Queen of the Booker.” Maclean’s 20 Nov. 2000: 158. Bhattacharya, Soumya. “The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga.” The Independent 11 Apr. 2008. Birne, Eleanor. “Doing Chatting.” London Review of Books 9 Oct. 2003: 14. Biswas, Premankur. “The White Tiger Is Meant to Be Fun and Engaging: Adiga.” The Indian Express 17 Oct. 2008. Bloom, Julie. “Booker Prize Names Announced.” The New York Times 30 July 2008. Bloomberg News. “Debut Authors Highlight Booker Short List.” New York Sun 10 Sept. 2008. Bone, Alison. “Mirchandani Grabs Tiger Tale.” The Bookseller 4 May 2007: 19. Booker Prize for Fiction 2000 Shortlist. The Booker Prize. Oct. 2000. Booker the Business. The Booker Prize. 2000. Bosman, Julie. “Booker Prize Shortlist Is Announced.” The New York Times 9 Sept. 2008. Brace, Marianne. “Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre.” The Independent 3 Feb. 2003. Bradbury, Lorna. “Novels of the Year.” The Telegraph 28 Nov. 2009. Brantley, Ben. “Theater Review: The Pride of Parnell Street.” The New York Times 9 Sept. 2009. Brayfield, Celia. “Forever Teenagers.” The Times 17 Feb. 2004. Brockes, Emma. “Do Keep Up.” The Guardian 12 Apr. 2004. Brockes, Emma. “How Did I Get Here?” The Guardian 16 Oct. 2003. Brookner, Anita. “Artfully Administered Shocks.” The Spectator 7 Oct. 2000: 50. Brown, Helen. “A Writer’s Life: Kate Grenville.” The Telegraph 3 June 2006. Brown, Helen. “Murder in Mind.” The Sunday Telegraph 20 Mar. 2005. Brown, Mark. “Booker Prize Longlist: From an Enchantress to Exploding Mangoes: Judges Draw up Longlist.” The Guardian 30 July 2008.

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Brown, Mark. “Decision Day for Booker Hopefuls.” The Guardian 14 Oct. 2008. Brown, Mark. “Nonagenarian Diana Athill Leads Costa Book Award Winners.” guardian.co.uk 5 Jan. 2009. Brown, Mick. “Precocious? Moi?” The Telegraph 13 Jan. 2001. Bunce, Kim. “The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood Read by Lorelei King.” The Observer 19 Nov. 2000. Buncombe, Andrew. “Cover Story: Slavery’s Modern Face.” The Statesman 28 Dec. 2008. Bunting, Madeleine. “A Crisis Sparked by the World’s Rich Will Have the Poor Paying the Highest Price.” The Guardian 20 Oct. 2008. Burgess, Kaya. “Editor Diana Athill Wins Award for ‘Perfect Memoir of Old Age.” The Times 6 Jan. 2009. Burnside, Anna. “Festival.” The Sunday Times 10 Aug. 2003. Byng, Jamie. “Bothered by the Booker.” The Bookseller 30 July 2008. Byrne, Ciaran. “Ireland: Interview: Ciaran Byrne Meets DBC Pierre.” The Sunday Times 7 Dec. 2003. C., J. “NB.” The Times Literary Supplement 4 Jan. 2002: 14. C., J. “NB.” The Times Literary Supplement 7 Jan. 2005: 14. C., J. “NB.” The Times Literary Supplement 8 Feb. 2002: 16. C., J. “NB.” The Times Literary Supplement 9 June 2000: 16. C., J. “NB.” The Times Literary Supplement 12 Jan. 2001: 16. C., J. “NB.” The Times Literary Supplement 16 Jan. 2000: 14. C., J. “NB.” The Times Literary Supplement 16 Jan. 2004: 14. C., J. “NB.” The Times Literary Supplement 21 Jan. 2000: 16. C., J. “NB.” The Times Literary Supplement 22 Aug. 2003: 12. Campbell, Lisa, Graeme Neill, and Charlotte Williams. “Trade Greets End of Waterstone’s 3 for 2.” The Bookseller 1 Sept. 2011. Carey, John, and Martyn Goff. “Letters.” London Review of Books 18 Dec. 2003. Carter, Deborah. “Summer Reading for Older Students.” Bookmarks May/June 2008: 12. Cartwright, Alice. “Victory by Stealth.” The Guardian 9 June 2001. Cassy, John. “Harry Potter and the Money Mine.” The Guardian 29 Mar. 2001. Champion, Edward. “Booker Shortlist Announced, John Sutherland Dinner Date in Works?” Filthy Habits 9 Sept. 2008. Charles, Ron. “Columbine Dominates Europe’s Concept of US.” Christian Science Monitor 4 Nov. 2003: 14. Charters, Mallay. “A Budding Crop of First Fiction.” Publishers Weekly 10 Jan. 2000: 33-34.

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Chisholm, Anne. “Post-Racial Conflicts.” The Sunday Telegraph 16 Jan. 2000. Chrisafis, Angelique. “US Authors’ Entry to Booker Prize Seen as Betrayal.” The Guardian 22 May 2002. Clark, Alex. “A Novel Idea.” The Guardian 22 June 2001. Clark, Alex. “After the Turkey, the Crackers.” guardian.co.uk 24 Nov. 2000. Clark, Alex. “Hay Diary: Prize Sausages.” The Guardian 31 May 2003. Clark, Alex. “How I Judged the Booker and Lived to Tell the Tale.” The Observer 19 Oct. 2008. Clark, Alex. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.” The Sunday Times 28 Mar. 2004. Clark, Alex. “Vanishing Act.” The Guardian 30 Sept 2000. Clee, Nicholas. “The Bookseller.” The Guardian 10 May 2003. Clee, Nicholas. “The Bookseller.” The Guardian 20 July 2002. Clee, Nicholas. “The Man Booker Prize.” The Bookseller 5 Dec. 2003: S4. Collett, Nigel. “The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.” Asian Review of Books 9 July 2008. Cooke, Rachel. “The Booker Prize Winner: Aravind Adiga.” The Observer 21 Dec. 2008. Cowley, Jason. “And the Winner Is?” The Observer 22 Oct. 2006. Cowley, Jason. “The Tiger Woods of Literature?” New Statesman 29 Jan. 2001. Crace, John. “Digested Read: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.” The Guardian 17 Nov. 2000. Crace, John. “Digested Read: Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre.” The Guardian 1 Feb. 2003. Crace, John. “Digested Read: White Teeth by Zadie Smith.” The Guardian 28 Jan 2000. Crace, John. “Digested Reads.” The Guardian 10 Sept. 2008. Crace, John. “Teenage Kicks.” The Guardian 4 Oct. 2003. Craig, Amanda. “An Unlikely Triumph for the Autistic Kid from Swindon.” The Sunday Times 1 Feb. 2004. Craig, Amanda. “Fiction – the Changeling.” New Statesman 13 Oct. 2003. Cripps, Charlotte. “The Write Stuff: The V&A Celebrates the Man Booker Winners from the Past 40 Years.” The Independent 4 Sept. 2008. Cross, Stephanie. “The Secret Scripture.” The Observer 8 Feb. 2009. Cross, Stephanie. “White Tiger.” The Observer 22 Mar. 2009. D’Souza, Tony. “Changing Lanes.” The Washington Post 8 June 2008. Deedes, Henry. “Pandora: Soul Singer Proves She Is in Vogue.” The Independent 29 Jan. 2009.

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Dellingpole, James. “Whisper It: You Don’t Need to Have Read John Updike.” The Telegraph 30 Jan. 2009. Denes, Melissa. “The Sexiest Man in Cricklewood.” The Telegraph 15 Jan. 2000. Diedrick, James. “Down, Yellow Dog: Times Tries to Pre-Empt Booker Listing.” The Martin Amis Web. Dietrich, Alicia. “Two Ransom Center Authors Long Listed for 2011 Man Booker Prize.” Harry Ransom Center, Cultural Compass 27 July 2011. Donadio, Rachel. “He Blurbed, She Blurbed.” The New York Times Book Review 15 Aug. 2008. Donadio, Rachel. “Promotional Intelligence.” The New York Times 21 May 2006. Donahue, Deirdre. “Roundup: Debut Novels.” USA Today 23 Apr. 2008. Doody, Margaret Anne. “Royal Classic Knitwear.” London Review of Books 5 Oct. 2000: 27-29. Doran, Amanda-Jane. “News Shorts.” Publishers Weekly 29 Jan. 2001. Doughty, Louise. “The Week in Books.” The Guardian 18 Oct. 2008. Dowling, Tim. “How to Pick a Great Gift.” The Guardian 23 Nov. 2000. Duffy, Carol Ann. “The Boy Who Could Not Tell a Lie.” The Telegraph 20 May 2003. Dugdale, John. “Diary.” The Sunday Times 28 Sept. 2003. Dugdale, John. “The Week in Books.” The Guardian 16 May 2009. Dutt, Vijay. “2 Indians on Man Booker Shortlist.” Hindustan Times 9 Sept. 2008. Eccleshare, Julia. “A Captivating Winner.” The Guardian 3 Oct. 2003. Eccleshare, Julia. “New Voices, Different Lives.” The Guardian 5 July 2003. Eden, Richard. “Ambitious Booker Winner Aravind Adaga [sic] Sacks Agent of His Success ….” The Sunday Telegraph 25 Oct. 2008. Edwards, Jacqueline. “Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a Novel.” KLIATT 38.4 (July 2004): 18. Eichler, Leah. “CBA Confab in Transition.” Publishers Weekly 26 June 2000. Ellington-Brown, Lara. “Rushdie in the Running for Booker Prize.” Financial Times 30 July 2008. Evers, Stuart. “Aravind Adiga Makes His Debut … Again.” guardian.co.uk 18 Dec. 2008. Every Year The Booker Prize Never Fails to Get People Talking. The Booker Prize. Oct. 2000. Ezard, John. “Amis Survives Hatchet Job on Day of the Long Knives for Other Star Writers.” The Guardian 16 Aug. 2003.

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Ezard, John. “Curious Incident of Writer’s Literary Hat Trick.” The Guardian 13 Nov. 2003. Ezard, John. “Double First for Novel Newcomer Zadie Smith.” The Guardian 4 Jan. 2001. Ezard, John. “Favourite Haddon Wins Whitbread.” The Guardian 28 Jan. 2004. Ezard, John. “Fourth Time Lucky for Atwood in Booker Prize.” The Guardian 8 Nov. 2000. Ezard, John. “From Bethnal Green to the Himalayas: A Literary Challenge to the Parochial.” The Guardian 30 Oct. 2003. Ezard, John. “Mountain Man Wins Guardian Book Prize.” The Guardian 5 Dec. 2003. Ezard, John. “Obscure Authors Make Booker History.” The Guardian 6 Oct. 2000. Ezard, John. “Wizard Yarn Tops Readers’ Poll.” The Guardian 27 Apr. 2001. Ezard, John. “Young Novelist on Orange List.” The Guardian 21 Mar. 2000. Ezard, John. “Zadie Smith Wins Guardian First Book Award.” The Guardian 8 Dec. 2000. Fazli, Arash Vafa. “India in Unflattering Light.” The Hindu 6 July 2008. Feay, Suzi. “Lunch with the FT: DBC Pierre.” Financial Times 27 Aug. 2010. Feay, Suzi. “More Than Just White Teeth.” The Independent on Sunday 14 Jan. 2001. Ferguson, Euan. “This Much I Know: Sebastian Barry.” The Observer 4 Oct. 2009. Flood, Alison. “Aravind Adiga Heads IMPAC Dublin Prize Longlist.” guardian.co.uk 2 Nov. 2009. Flood, Alison. “Aravind Adiga Plots Speedy Booker Follow-Up.” guardian.co.uk 11 Mar. 2009. Flood, Alison. “Booker Winner Squares up to Narrative Poem for John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.” guardian.co.uk 3 Nov. 2008. Flood, Alison. “Books of the Decade: Your Best Books of 2003.” guardian.co.uk 26 Nov. 2009. Flood, Alison. “Doctor’s Notes in Running for John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.” guardian.co.uk 27 Oct. 2009. Flood, Alison. “JK Rowling Bewitches Christmas Book Charts.” guardian.co.uk 24 Dec. 2008. Flood, Alison. “JK Rowling Leads Fight against Free Books Site Scribd.” guardian.co.uk 30 Mar. 2009. Flood, Alison. “LBF: Assessing the Risks: Big Cat Fight.” The Bookseller 11 Apr. 2008.

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Flood, Alison. “Netherland Tops League of 2008 Critics’ Picks.” guardian.co.uk 6 Jan. 2009. Flood, Alison. “O’Neill Is Hottest Tip in Booker Race.” guardian.co.uk 9 Sept. 2008. Flood, Alison. “Obama Battles Vampires for Galaxy Prize.” guardian.co.uk 10 Mar. 2009. Flood, Alison. “Poor Sales for Star-Free Booker Shortlist.” guardian.co.uk 13 Oct. 2008. Flood, Alison. “Rare Victory for Non-Fiction Book in John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.” guardian.co.uk 24 Nov. 2008. Flood, Alison. “The Trusted Friends Who Steer Novelists Away from Cliche.” The Guardian 17 Feb. 2009. Flood, Alison. “Waterstone’s Champions 12 ‘New Voices’ for 2009.” guardian.co.uk 23 Feb. 2009. Flood, Alison. “Who Came Runner-up in the Booker Prize?” guardian.co.uk 23 Oct. 2008. Foley, Stephen. “Company Bumf Dip Hits St Ives.” The Independent 10 Oct. 2001. Fowler, Christopher. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.” The Independent 7 July 2003. Francken, James. “Short Cuts.” London Review of Books 2 Nov. 2000: 20. Fray, Peter. “Writing for Columbine.” The Sydney Morning Herald 16 Oct. 2003. Freely, Maureen. “Gender Is Still the Crudest Agenda in Town.” The Independent 21 May 2001. Freeman, John. “An Autistic Mind Unleashed.” St Petersburg Times 2 Sept. 2003. Frey, Hillary. “Booker Shortlist Announced; Griping Begins.” New York Observer 9 Sept. 2008. Frostrup, Mariella. “Blonde and Proud.” The Observer 12 Nov. 2000. Frumin, Ben. “The White Tiger.” Far Eastern Economic Review 31 May 2008. Gallagher, Victoria. “Blackwell Names Top 10 Titles of the Decade.” The Bookseller 15 Nov. 2009. Gallagher, Victoria. “Booker’s ‘Best’ Shortlist Promotion.” The Bookseller 10 Sept. 2008. Gardner, Eriq. “Producers Fight over Movie Rights to Prize-Winning Novel ‘the White Tiger’.” The Hollywood Reporter 6 June 2012. Gardner, Lyn. “What to See: Lyn Gardner’s Theatre Tips.” guardian.co.uk 2 Oct. 2009.

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Garrett, Jade. “‘Green’ Novel Deprives Smith of Hat-Trick.” The Independent 27 Apr. 2001. Garrett, Jade. “Brit Stars Secure Deal to Turn Atwood’s Booker-Winner into a TV Mini- Series.” The Independent 23 July 2001. Garrison, Jessica. “Prizes Kick Off the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.” Los Angeles Times 25 Apr. 2009. Gatti, Tom. “An Heroic Round-up Reveals the Real Books of the Year.” The Times 19 Dec. 2008. Gatti, Tom. “The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry.” The Times 6 Feb. 2009. George, Lynell. “Author Purposeful with Prose, Fidgety with Fame.” Los Angeles Times 26 June 2000. Gibbons, Fiachra. “Absent Coetzee Wins Surprise Second Booker Award.” The Guardian 26 Oct. 1999. Gibbons, Fiachra. “Bizarre Twist to Strange Tale as Repentant Rogue Wins over Booker Prize Judges.” The Guardian 15 Oct. 2003. Gibbons, Fiachra. “Male Perspective for Orange Prize.” The Guardian 27 Mar. 2001. Gibbons, Fiachra. “Meet the Bliggers – Brit Lit It Girls (and Boys).” The Guardian 28 Mar. 2001. Gibbons, Fiachra. “Novelist Dirty Pierre Comes Clean: I Was a Conman.” The Guardian 11 Oct. 2003. Gibbons, Fiachra. “Sexes Clash on Orange Prize.” The Guardian 19 May 2001. Gibbons, Fiachra. “Snubbed Unknown Sweeps Giants Off Shortlist.” The Guardian 17 Sept. 2003. Gibbons, Fiachra. “Unmasked: The Murky Past of Booker Author.” The Guardian 11 Oct. 2003. Gilbert, Francis. “Commentary – Afflicted by the Stiff Upper Lip.” New Statesman 5 Mar. 2001. Grana, Linda. “Galley Talk.” Publishers Weekly 26 May 2008: 6. Gritten, David. “Harry Potter Scriptwriter Adapts Mark Haddon.” The Telegraph 23 Apr. 2011. Grossman, Lev. “Terrors of the Amazon.” Salon.com 2 Mar. 1999. Grossman, Lev. “Writer Wrong.” TIME 3 Nov. 2003. Gussow, Mel. “Novel’s Sleuth Views Life from Unusual Perspective.” The New York Times 3 Aug. 2004. Haddon, Mark. “B Is for Bestseller.” The Observer 11 Apr. 2004. Hall, Lex. “Two Aussie Writers Make Booker List.” The Australian 30 July 2008. Hamilton, Alex. “Fastsellers of 2004 Decoded.” The Guardian 1 Jan. 2005.

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Hanks, Robert. “Fools and Madmen.” New Statesman 22 May 2008: 57. Hardyment, Christina. “A Word in Your Ear.” The Independent 8 Sept. 2001. Hardyment, Christina. “Audiobooks: The Curious Incident of the Dog in NightTime.” The Times 20 Sept. 2003. Hardyment, Christina. “Spoken Word.” The Independent 18 Nov. 2000. Harry Ransom Center Holds Archive of 2008 Costa Book of the Year Award Winner. Harry Ransom Center. Hartley, Jenny. “Gender on the Jury.” guardian.co.uk 4 June 2001. Hattenstone, Simon. “White Knuckle Ride.” The Guardian 12 Dec. 2000. Haynes, Natalie. “Confessions of a Booker Judge.” The Independent 22 May 2013. Heawood, Jonathan. “Growing up with Jesus.” The Observer 19 Jan. 2003. Hellman, David. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Library Journal 1 May 2003: 198. Hickling, Alfred. “The White Tiger.” The Guardian 21 Mar. 2009. Higgins, Charlotte. “Between the Lines of the Booker Prize.” The Guardian 22 Oct. 2008. Higgins, Charlotte. “Booker Judges Give ‘Patchy’ Rushdie the Thumbs Down.” The Guardian 10 Sept. 2008. Higgins, Charlotte. “If I Were Judging the Booker Prize.” guardian.co.uk 14 Oct. 2008. Higgins, Charlotte. “Out of the Darkness: Adiga’s White Tiger Rides to Booker Victory against the Odds.” The Guardian 14 Oct. 2008. Higgins, Charlotte. “Sun Never Sets on Booker’s Six Best.” The Guardian 12 May 2008. Higgins, Charlotte. “Who Will Win the Costa Book of the Year Award Tomorrow?” guardian.co.uk 26 Jan. 2009. Hite, Molly. “Tongueless in Toronto.” The Women’s Review of Books 18.6 (March 2001): 1. Hoare, Liam. “Why the Man Booker Prize Is More Necessary Than Ever.” The Daily Beast 15 Oct. 2012. Holgate, Andrew. “Stocking Fillers.” The Sunday Times 20 Dec. 2009. Holt, Karen. “Small Publisher Wins Big with Booker.” Publishers Weekly 20 Oct. 2003: 7. Hooker, Ginny. “Season’s Readings.” The Guardian 29 Nov. 2008. Hoover, Danise. “White Teeth.” Booklist 1 Apr. 2000: 1436. Houppert, Karen. “The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.” Salon.com 12 Sept. 2000.

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Howell, Kevin. “The Listen up Awards: The Best Audios of 2008.” Publishers Weekly 5 Jan. 2009. Hoyle, Ben. “Secret Is Out: Sebastian Barry’s Irish Tale Wins Costa.” The Times 28 Jan. 2009. Hughes, Kathryn. “One Assassin after Another.” The Sunday Telegraph 17 Sept. 2000. Huntley, Kristine. “Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime.” Booklist 1 Apr. 2003: 191. IBNlive.com. “The Economist Crossword Award’s Longlist.” IBN Live 12 June 2012. Jaggi, Maya. “In a Strange Land.” The Guardian 22 Jan. 2000. Jaggi, Maya. “No Thanks, Ma’am.” The Guardian 15 June 2005. Jeffries, Stuart. “How Waterstone’s Killed Bookselling.” The Guardian 10 Nov 2009. Jeffries, Stuart. “Interview: Sebastian Barry Reveals the Secrets of His Costa Prize Win.” The Guardian 29 Jan. 2009. Jeffries, Stuart. “Roars of Anger.” The Guardian 16 Oct. 2008. Jewell, Lisa. “Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scriptures [sic]: It’s Not Flawed – It’s a Gem.” The Telegraph 29 Jan. 2009. Jeyamohan, B. “News Is the Inspiration.” express buzz 23 Jan. 2009. John Carey Announced as Chair of Judges for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The Booker Prize. 11 Nov. 2002. Johnson, Gerry. “Yes, We’re Big. But Waterstone’s Is Still Passionate About Books.” The Guardian 12 Nov. 2009. Johnson, Susan. “Don’t Ignore the Mid-List.” The Guardian 23 Oct. 2004. Johri, Vikram. “Adiga’s ‘White Tiger’ Explores the Bloody Rise of the Outcast.” Tampa Bay Times 14 May 2008. Jones, Jonathan. “The Real Reason Behind Rushdie’s Booker Snub.” guardian.co.uk 12 Sept. 2008. Jones, Malcom. “Finding Humor in the Crudeness.” Newsweek 23 Nov. 2003. Jones, Philip. “Atlantic Brings out Adiga Follow-Up.” The Bookseller 10 Mar. 2009. Jones, Philip. “BAA Launches Travel Awards.” The Bookseller 31 Mar. 2009. Jones, Philip. “Booker Sales Down on 2007.” The Bookseller 14 Oct. 2008. Jones, Philip. “Books Explain World’s Problems.” The Bookseller 7 Nov. 2008. Jones, Philip. “Borders Rolls out Galaxy Promotion.” The Bookseller 13 Mar. 2009. Jones, Philip. “Edna O’Brien to Receive Irish Award.” The Bookseller 5 May 2009.

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Jordan, Justine. “Booker Longlist Includes Amis, Snubs Carey.” guardian.co.uk 15 Aug. 2003. Jordison, Sam. “Booker Club: The White Tiger.” guardian.co.uk 22 Aug. 2008. Jordison, Sam. “How Did the White Tiger Capture the Booker?” guardian.co.uk 15 Oct. 2008. Jordison, Sam. “Judging the Booker by Its Covers (Again).” guardian.co.uk 19 Aug. 2008. Jordison, Sam. “The Secret Scripture.” guardian.co.uk 5 Sept. 2008. Judges Announced for the Booker Prize 2000. The Booker Prize. Mar. 2000. Jury, Louise. “Teenage Life Inspires Rivals for the Whitbread Prize.” The Independent 7 Jan. 2004. Jury, Louise. “Whitbread Judges Whittle Down Record Children’s Book Entry.” The Independent 13 Nov. 2003. Jury, Louise. “Women Lead the Line-up on a Booker List with Novelty Value.” The Independent 17 Sept. 2003. Kakutani, Michiko. “Deep in the Heart of Texas (Via Australia).” The New York Times 5 Nov. 2003. Kakutani, Michiko. “Math and Physics? A Cinch. People? Incomprehensible.” The New York Times 13 June 2003. Kakutani, Michiko. “Three Stories Woven into a Suspenseful Design.” The New York Times 8 Sept. 2000. Kakutani, Michiko. “White Teeth: Quirky, Sassy and Wise in a London of Exiles.” The New York Times 25 Apr. 2000. Kämpchen, Martin. “Poverty Porn.” The Statesman 1 May 2009. Kandasamy, Meena. “Let’s Not Be in Denial of the Reality.” express buzz 23 Jan. 2009. Kanjilal, Pratik. “Springing Servant, Crouching Master.” Hindustan Times 5 May 2008. Kapur, Akash. “The Secret of His Success.” The New York Times Book Review 9 Nov. 2008: BR13. Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. “Tales of Autism, with and without a Rainman Gloss.” Times Higher Education 11 June 2004. Katwala, Sunder. “The Class of 2003.” The Observer 5 Jan. 2003. Kellaway, Kate. “Autistic Differences.” The Observer 27 April 2003. Kellman, Steven G. “The Old Maid’s Tale.” San Francisco Chronicle 3 Sept. 2000. Kellogg, Carolyn. “Man Booker Shortlist Bypasses Rushdie and Berger.” Los Angeles Times 9 Sept. 2008.

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Kelly, Catriona. “Thomas Keneally’s Australian Reds.” The Times Literary Supplement 23 Sept. 2009. Kempf, Andrea. “Vernon God Little by Pierre, DBC.” Library Journal 1 Oct. 2003: 118. Kennedy, Maev. “Curious Incident of the Children’s Book Which Won South Bank Award.” The Guardian 24 Jan. 2004. Kennedy, Maev. “Writers Grit Teeth for a Literary Battle.” The Guardian 3 Nov. 2000. Kephart, Beth. “Little Sherlock.” Book July/Aug. 2003: 76. Kharlyngdoh, Lumjingshai. “Of Rhetoric and Reality (Letters to the Editor).” The Shillong Times 6 Jan. 2009. Kington, Miles. “A Sorry Saga of Disparaging Literary Labelling.” The Independent 20 Feb. 2007. Kington, Miles. “Beware the Assassins of the Book World.” The Independent 10 Nov. 2000. Kinsella, Bridget. “A Season of Steady Buzzes.” Publishers Weekly 19 June 2000. Kirkes, Sharon. “Fiction on the Spectrum.” Library Journal 15 Apr. 2007: 132. Krishna, Nakul. “Getting and Spending.” New Statesman 27 Mar. 2008: 59. Laing, Andrew. “Vernon God Little.” The Sydney Morning Herald 15 Mar. 2003. Laing, Olivia. “2008 Will Be 007’s Year.” The Observer 30 Dec. 2007. Laing, Olivia. “Of Course a Few Will Get Away ….” The Observer 14 Sept. 2008. Laing, Olivia. “The Booker Prizewinners That Never Were.” The Observer 14 Sept. 2008. Langer, Adam. “The New Harry Houdini: Mark Haddon.” Book 29 Feb. 2003: 43. Laville, Sandra. “Highest Bidders Brought to Book.” The Telegraph 10 Sept. 2001. Lawson, Mark. “Sentimental Censorship.” The Guardian 20 Apr. 2007. Lea, Richard. “Bookseller’s Debut Novel Wins John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.” guardian.co.uk 30 Nov. 2009. Leith, Sam. “Ex-Gambler and Gold Prospector Blows Apart Image of the Booker.” The Telegraph 15 Oct. 2003. Lewis, Trevor. “Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre.” The Sunday Times 2 May 2004. Liddle, Rod. “Too Much Bloody Reality.” The Times 7 Feb. 2004. Lim, Dennis. “Auto Focus.” The Village Voice 22 July 2003.

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Lin, Francie. “Floating on Faith.” Los Angeles Times 16 June 2002. Lindgren, Hugo. “Publishers, Note: Novelist Available.” The New York Times 11 Mar. 2004. Lister, David. “Casting Vote Gives Kneale the Whitbread Book Prize.” The Independent 24 Jan. 2001. Lister, David. “Domestic Goddess Beats Boy Wizard for Book Award.” The Independent 23 Febr. 2001. Lister, David. “Kenneth Baker Will Chair This Year’s Booker.” The Independent 16 Feb. 2001. Literator, The. “Cover Stories.” The Independent 2 July 2002. Literator, The. “Cover Stories.” The Independent 10 June 2000. Literator, The. “Cover Stories.” The Independent 11 Nov. 2000. Literator, The. “Cover Stories: Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Whitbread Prize, Paperback Battle; Ink.” The Independent 14 Nov. 2003. Lively, Adam. “The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.” The Sunday Times 6 Apr. 2008. Livesey, Margot. “Twice-Told Tales.” The Boston Globe 15 June 2008. Loafer, The. “Back to School.” The Guardian 24 Nov. 2001. Long, Angela. “Pierre Pressure.” The Sydney Morning Herald 20 Sept. 2003. Longmore, Zenga. “Fairy-Sweary-Land.” The Spectator 29 Jan. 2000: 47. Lottman, Herbert R. “Barcelona: The Translation Market in Spain’s Trade Capital.” Publishers Weekly 9 Dec. 2002. Lyall, Sara. “Margaret Atwood Is the Winner of Britain’s Top Fiction Award.” The New York Times 8 Nov. 2000. Lyall, Sara. “South African Writer Wins Top British Prize for Second Time.” The New York Times 26 Oct. 1999. Lyall, Sarah. “Whitbread Prize Goes to a Novel.” The New York Times 25 Jan. 2001. Macfarlane, Robert. “Fiction: Thin-Ice Skater by David Storey.” The Sunday Times 22 Feb. 2004. Mallon, Thomas. “Wheels within Wheels.” The New York Times 3 Sept. 2000. Man Booker Longlist Announced. The Man Booker Prizes. 29 July 2008. Man Booker Prize 2008 Shortlist Announced. The Man Booker Prizes. 9 Sept. 2008. Man Booker Prize 2008 Winner Announced. The Man Booker Prizes. 14 Oct. 2008. Man Booker Prize Announces Global Expansion. The Man Booker Prizes, 18 Sept 2013. Mardles, Paul. “DBC Pierre.” The Observer 19 Mar. 2006.

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Margaret Atwood Wins the Booker Prize for Fiction 2000. The Booker Prize. Nov. 2000. Markovits, Benjamin. “Prize Fight.” The New York Times Book Review 6 Mar. 2005. Mars-Jones, Adam. “Where Women Grow on Trees.” The Observer 17 Sept. 2000. Martin, Sandra. “First-Time Novelist in His Literary Prime.” The Globe and Mail 15 July 2003. Maryles, Daisy. “Behind the Bestsellers.” Publishers Weekly 18 Sept. 2000: 24. Maryles, Daisy. “Haddon’s Poodlecide.” Publishers Weekly 31 May 2004: 22. Maryles, Daisy. “How They Landed on Top.” Publishers Weekly 19 Mar. 2001. Maryles, Daisy. “More Bubbly for Zadie.” Publishers Weekly 2 July 2001. Maryles, Daisy. “Poodlecide Pays.” Publishers Weekly 14 Feb. 2005: 14. Maryles, Daisy. “The Paperback Game.” Publishers Weekly 18 Mar. 2002. Maslin, Janet. “Books of the Times; Mother and Son on an Intellectual Quest.” The New York Times 11 Dec. 2000. Mattin, David. “The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga.” The Independent on Sunday 11 May 2008. May, Julia. “Aussie Upstarts Beat Winton, Garner to Booker List.” The Sydney Morning Herald 30 July 2008. McCay, Mary. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Booklist 1 Jan. 2004: 44. McClements, Melissa. “Farce with a Dark Heart.” Financial Times 10 Mar. 2006. McCrum, Robert. “Anyone Can Win, Including Amis.” The Observer 17 Aug. 2003. McCrum, Robert. “Crossing the Great Divide.” The Observer 13 Sept. 2003. McCrum, Robert. “Literary Fireworks? Just a Few Sparklers and a Lot of Damp Squibs.” The Observer 26 Nov. 2000. McCrum, Robert. “My Books of the Year, with All Relationships Disclosed.” guardian.co.uk 9 Dec. 2008. McCrum, Robert. “Professor Carey Has Come up Trumps.” The Observer 21 Sept. 2003. McCrum, Robert. “Robert McCrum on Books.” The Observer 1 Mar. 2009. McCrum, Robert. “The Booker Revolution.” The Observer 27 Oct. 2002. McCrum, Robert. “You Can Tell a Lot About a Tyrant from His Bedside Reading.” The Observer 11 Jan. 2009. McGhie, Caroline. “Where to Push the Boundaries.” The Telegraph 24 Oct. 2001.

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McGrath, Charles. “The Way We Live Now: The Gray American Novel.” The New York Times 22 Oct. 2000. McGuigan, Cathleen. “As the Pages Turn.” Newsweek 18 Sept. 2000: 82. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA et al.: Harvard UP, 2009. McInerney, Jay. “The Remains of the Dog.” The New York Times Book Review 15 June 2003. McKinley, Jesse. “A Night out With: DBC Pierre; Mr. Sunset to Sunrise.” The New York Times 16 Nov. 2003. Medintz, Scott. “India’s Native Son: Aravind Adiga’s ‘the White Tiger’.” New York Sun 29 Apr. 2008. Mehta, Vinod. “A Slum Is a Slum.” Outlook India 9 Mar. 2009. Menon, Suresh. “Keep Your Socks On.” Mumbai Mirror 24 Oct. 2008. Merritt, Stephanie. “Beginner’s Luck or a Past Master?” The Observer 21 Sept. 2003. Merritt, Stephanie. “She’s Young, Black, British – and the First Publishing Sensation of the Millennium.” The Observer 16 Jan. 2000. Metcalf, Stephen. “Tales from the Black Lagoon.” The New York Times 25 Jan. 2004. Meyer, Carla. “Atwood as Complex as Her Latest Novel.” San Francisco Chronicle 20 Sept. 2000. Miller, Laura. “‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ by Mark Haddon.” Salon.com 12 June 2003. Miller, Laura. “Furriners Go Nuts for Gun-Totin’ Yanks!” Salon.com 6 Nov. 2003. Miller, Phil. “Rushdie in the Running Again for 2008 Man Booker Prize.” The Herald 30 July 2008. Miller, Phil. “Scots Publisher’s US Gamble Pays Booker Dividends.” The Herald 18 Oct. 2003. Misra, Jaishree. “Someone Like Me.” The Bookseller 29 June 2009. Moore, Charlotte. “Just the Facts, Ma’am.” The Guardian 24 May 2003. Morgan, Ann. “Côte D’ivoire: If You Are Easily Offended, Keep Reading.” A Year of Reading the World (2012). Morgan, Clare, and Jason Steger. “Australia’s Booker Double-Entry Bid.” The Sydney Morning Herald 31 July 2008. Moss, Stephen. “Bookends.” The Guardian 19 Mar. 2002. Moss, Stephen. “White Teeth by Zadie Smith.” guardian.co.uk 26 Jan. 2000. Mottram, Linda. “Booker Prize Goes to First Time Oz Author.” ABC 15 Oct. 2003.

388 | PRIZING D EBATE

Moyes, Jojo. “Books That Won Awards Are Failing to Win Readers.” The Independent 1 July 2000. Moyes, Jojo. “Grant Takes Prize for Women’s Fiction in Surprise Win.” The Independent 7 June 2000. Moyes, Jojo. “Ishiguro and Kneale on Whitbread Shortlist.” The Independent 15 Nov. 2000. Moyes, Jojo. “Just Another Face in the Crowd?” The Independent 18 Apr. 2000. Moyes, Jojo. “Newcomer Gives Literary Prize Some Teeth.” The Independent 19 Apr. 2000. Moyes, Jojo. “Novelists Online for New ‘E-Booker’ Prize.” The Independent 9 Oct. 2000. Moyes, Jojo. “Orange Judges Reveal 20 Women Fighting for £30,000 Fiction Prize.” The Independent 21 Mar. 2000. Mukherjee, Neel. “Exposing the Real India.” The Sunday Telegraph 27 Apr. 2008. Mullan, John. “John Mullan on the Blind Assassin – Guardian Book Club.” The Guardian 16 Aug. 2013. Mullan, John. “Prize Fighters.” The Guardian 23 May 2002. Mullan, John. “Ten of the Best Novels About Novelists.” The Guardian 25 July 2009. Mulvey, Paul. “Finlay Short-Listed for Prize.” The Age 17 Sept. 2003. Mulvey, Paul. “Rookie on Booker Shortlist.” The Age 18 Sept. 2003. Murray West, Rosie. “St Ives Has £100m Fund for Acquisitions.” The Telegraph 11 Oct. 2000. Neilan, Catherine. “Indie Alliance Swells Sales 50%.” The Bookseller 5 Mar. 2009. Neill, Graeme. “Independent Booksellers Book Prize Shortlists Unveiled.” The Bookseller 1 June 2009. Neill, Graeme. “Waterstone’s Picks Voices of the Future.” The Bookseller 31 Jan. 2008. Ng-See-Quan, Danielle. “2008 Man Booker Prize Shortlist Announced.” Quill & Quire 9 Sept. 2008. Nightingale, Benedict. “Tales of Ballycumber at the Abbey, Dublin.” The Times 13 Oct. 2009. Noonan, David. “Allowed to Be Odd.” Newsweek 7 Sept. 2003. Norment, Lee. “A Boy in Trouble.” Texas Books in Review 31 Oct. 2004: 23. O’Brien, Murrough. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.” The Independent on Sunday 28 Mar. 2004. O’Connell, Alex. “Believe the Hype.” The Times 29 Jan. 2000.

W ORKS C ITED | 389

O’Connor, Joseph. “Is It an Island I’m On?” The Guardian 7 Feb. 2009. O’Grady, Carrie. “Lone Star.” The Guardian 18 Jan. 2003. O’Hagan, Sean. “You’ll Die Laughing.” The Observer 19 Jan. 2003. O’Neill, Phelim. “Film Preview.” The Guardian 14 June 2008. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Showtime.” The New Yorker 27 Oct. 2003: 104. Owen, Janette. “My Media.” The Guardian 13 Apr. 2009. PA. “First-Timers Beat Rushdie to Booker Prize Shortlist.” The Independent 9 Sept. 2008. Padmanabhan, Manjula. “Bleached House Cat.” Outlook / india.com 5 May 2008. Page, Benedict. “Sebastian Barry.” The Bookseller 22 Jan. 2008. Page, Benedict. “Trewin: ‘Fewer, Better Man Booker Entries’.” The Bookseller 25 Oct. 2013. Page, Benedicte. “Mirchandani Buys New Adiga Novel.” The Bookseller 2 Nov. 2009. Palmer, Judith. “A Week in Books: A Good Read in Africa.” The Independent 4 May 2001. Parris, Matthew. “How Chairing the Costa Book Awards Rekindled a Childhood Love Affair.” The Times 31 Jan. 2009. Parris, Matthew. “I’ll Make No Secret of This Scripture’s Faults.” The Times 5 Feb. 2009. Patterson, Christina. “A Willesden Ring of Confidence.” The Independent 22 Jan. 2000: 9. Patterson, Christina. “Christina Patterson: Madness: A Great Metaphor, Not Such a Great Life.” The Independent 31 Jan. 2009. Pauli, Michelle, and Alison Flood. “Rushdie ‘Not Good Enough’ for Booker Shortlist.” guardian.co.uk 9 Sept. 2008. Pauli, Michelle. “Black Comedy Debut Takes Wodehouse.” guardian.co.uk 27 May 2003. Pauli, Michelle. “Booker Longlist Boost for First-Time Novelists.” guardian.co.uk 29 July 2008. Pauli, Michelle. “From Pepys to Peaks….” guardian.co.uk 29 Dec. 2003. Payne, Tom. “However, Thank You for Your Interest.” The Telegraph 25 Aug. 2003. Pearson, Amber. “2008 Man Booker Prize Shortlist.” Daily Mail 9 Sept. 2008. Pelling, Rowan. “This Is the Life: A Welcome Return for Literary Bad Behaviour.” The Independent on Sunday 19 Oct. 2003. Phillips, Caryl. “Mixed and Matched.” The Observer 9 Jan. 2000. Pierce, Nev. “Movies.” BBC Home 17 Dec. 2003.

390 | PRIZING D EBATE

Poniewozik, James. “Top 10 Everything 2003.” TIME 8 Dec. 2003. Poole, Oliver. “BBC to Revamp Booker Prize for Younger Viewers.” The Sunday Telegraph 25 Feb. 2001. Power, Chris. “The Accused.” The Times 18 Jan. 2003. Power, Nani. “Feeling His Way.” The Washington Post 10 Aug. 2003. Powers, Katherine A. “Ratcheting Down the Suspense.” The Boston Globe 27 July 2008. Pownall, Callum. “Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger.” The Bookseller 11 Jan. 2008: 13. Prasannarajan, S. “Driving out of Darkness.” India Today 17 Apr. 2008. Preston, Alex. “Alex Preston’s Top 10 Literary Believers.” guardian.co.uk 1 Feb. 2012. Pulver, Andrew. “Werner Herzog to Bring Vernon God Little to the Big Screen.” guardian.co.uk 22 Oct. 2012. Quinn, Anthony. “The New England.” The New York Times 30 Apr. 2000. Rahim, Sameer. “Man Booker Prize Long List.” The Telegraph 29 July 2008. Rahim, Sameer. “The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.” The Times Literary Supplement 15 Oct. 2008. Rees, Jasper. “An Heir for Holden Caulfield.” The Telegraph 10 Jan. 2003. Rees, Jasper. “Dallas Sweetman: Magnificent Canterbury Tale.” The Telegraph 22 Sept. 2008. Reid, Calvin. “Frankfurt E-Book Awards.” Publishers Weekly 30 Oct. 2000. Reynolds, Nigel. “Bad Lad of Publishing Set to Make It a Double.” The Telegraph 7 Jan. 2004. Reynolds, Nigel. “Booker Prize for Atwood at Fourth Attempt.” The Telegraph 8 Nov. 2000. Reynolds, Nigel. “Curious Tale About Dog Wins Prize by a Whisker.” The Telegraph 28 Jan. 2004. Reynolds, Nigel. “Harry Fails to Charm the Judges.” The Telegraph 23 Feb. 2001. Reynolds, Nigel. “Judges Rule Harry Potter out and Former Addict’s Novel In.” The Telegraph 15 Nov. 2000. Reynolds, Nigel. “Prize Double Will Settle Author’s Score with Creditors.” The Telegraph 13 Nov. 2003. Reynolds, Nigel. “Reformed Cocaine Addict Is £50,000 Booker Winner.” The Telegraph 15 Oct. 2003. Reynolds, Nigel. “The Mystery Writers on Booker List.” The Telegraph 6 Oct. 2000: 11.

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Reynolds, Nigel. “Whitbread Judges Split over Kneale.” The Telegraph 24 Jan. 2001. Rich, Motoko. “Shortlist Unveiled for ‘Lost’ Booker Prize.” The New York Times 25 Mar. 2010. Richards, Linda L. “Brilliant Tapestry.” January Magazine Oct. 2000. Richards, Linda L. “Cilantro Prose.” January Magazine 2003. Richards, Linda L. “Margaret Atwood.” January Magazine 15 Nov. 2000. Richardson, Anna. “Most Reviewed.” The Bookseller 21 Apr 2008. Richardson, Anna. “Most Reviewed.” The Bookseller 30 June 2008. Riding, Alan. “Less Reading, More Schmoozing at London Book Fair.” The New York Times 18 Apr. 2007. Robins, Jane. “New Books Prize to Be Judged by Public.” The Independent 13 Oct. 2000. Robins, Peter. “On the Man Booker Shortlist.” The Telegraph 9 Sept. 2008. Robins, Peter. “The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.” The Telegraph 9 Aug. 2008. Robinson, David. “Book Festival: Lost Souls Revisited as Past Sins Are Unearthed and Redeemed.” The Scotsman 22 Aug. 2008. Robson, David. “A 100-Year-Old Memory.” The Telegraph 2 May 2008. Robson, David. “Always Expect the Unexpected.” The Sunday Telegraph 28 Dec. 2003. Robson, David. “Who Dies? You Decide.” The Sunday Telegraph 23 Feb. 2003. Robson, David. “Who Should Win.” The Telegraph 22 Sept. 2003. Robson, David. “Who Was the Chosen One?” The Telegraph 22 Dec. 2003. Rorke, Robert. “A ‘Curious’ Coincidence: In Britain, Young Adult Readers Read Mark Haddon’s Novel at the Same Time as Grownups.” Publishers Weekly 18 July 2005: 164. Rosen, Judith. “Hip-Lit 101.” Publishers Weekly 4 Feb. 2002. Rourke, Lee. “Has Bad Philosophy Killed the Booker Prize?” guardian.co.uk 13 Oct. 2008. Roy, Amit. “Split with Agent: Adiga Speaks Up.” Telegraph Calcutta 27 Oct. 2008. Rozzo, Mark. “Who’s English Now?” Los Angeles Times Book Review 7 May 2000. Rushby, Kevin. “His Monster’s Voice.” The Guardian 19 Apr. 2008. Rushby, Kevin. “The White Tiger.” The Guardian 15 Oct. 2008. Russo, Maria. “The Flower of Cities All.” Salon.com 28 Apr. 2000. Sandhu, Sukhdev. “Excremental Children.” The Times Literary Supplement 21 Jan. 2000: 21.

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Sandison, Natalie. “Paperback of the Week: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.” The Times 20 Mar. 2009. Saricks, Joyce. “Top 10 First Novels on Audio.” Booklist 15 Nov. 2004: 607. Saunders, Kate. “Pandora in the Congo, The White Tiger, This Charming Man.” The Times 1 May 2008. Saunders, Kate. “There’s Not One Stinker in 2008 Man Booker Shortlist.” The Times 10 Sept. 2008. Seaman, Donna. “Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin.” Booklist 1 June 2000: 1796. Seaton, Matt. “The House That Harry Built.” The Guardian 10 Apr. 2006. Seddon, Nick. “D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little.” The Times Literary Supplement 7 Feb. 2003: 22. Segal, Francesca. “When the Eternal Allure of India Wears Thin.” The Observer 13 Apr. 2008. Sehgal, Parul “Bookexpo America 2009: ‘The Graveyard Book’ Takes Audiobook of the Year.” Publishers Weekly 30 May 2009 2009. Senter, Al. “UK: Booker’s Prize Headache.” Management Today Oct. 1999. Shetty, Poorna. “India Learns the Meaning of Divorce.” guardian.co.uk 25 Feb. 2009. Shortall, Eithne. “Economic Slump Boosts Ireland’s Libraries.” The Sunday Times 15 Nov. 2009. Showalter, Elaine. “Virgin Suicide.” New Statesman 2 Oct. 2000: 53. Shridhar, Deepthi. “Alma Mater Celebrates Adiga’s Win.” Bangalore Mirror 15 Oct 2008. Shridhar, Deepthi. “Winning Was a Habit with Adiga.” Mumbai Mirror 16 Oct. 2008. Sifton, Sam. “Holden Caulfield on Ritalin.” The New York Times Book Review 9 Nov. 2003: 9. Simon, Scott. “In White Tiger, Killer Exploits India’s Caste System.” NPR Weekend Edition Saturday 17 May 2008. Skidelsky, William. “In Search of Winning Words.” The Observer 3 Aug. 2008. Smartt Bell, Madison. “A Wickedly Astute View of the Horror of Adolescence.” The Boston Globe 26 Oct. 2003. Smith, Ali. “Saga That Goes Straight to the Heart of the Century.” Scotsman 15 Jan. 2000. Smith, Dinitia. “Old Battles Are Burnished by Time.” The New York Times 23 June 2008. Smith, Stephen. “The Blind Assassin.” Quill & Quire 31 Aug. 2000. Smith, Zadie. “White Teeth in the Flesh.” The New York Times 11 May 2003.

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Soar, Daniel. “Willesden Fast-Forward.” London Review of Books 21 Sept. 2000: 30-31. Sorensen, Rosemary. “Novelist Steve Toltz in Best Company for Man Booker.” The Australian 31 July 2008. Spaeth, Anthony. “The Best & the Worst.” Time South Pacific (Australia/New Zealand edition) 18 Dec. 2000: 73. Staff and agencies. “Brad Pitt Seeks Rights to British Novel.” guardian.co.uk 1 Aug. 2002. Staff blogger. “Books of the Year.” New Statesman 27 Nov. 2000. Staff Reporter of the Sun. “Rushdie, O’Neill Lead Booker Long List.” New York Sun 30 July 2008. Staff, Books Unlimited. “Heavyweights and New Names Make up This Year’s Booker Shortlist.” guardian.co.uk 5 Oct. 2000. Staff, Books Unlimited. “Inaugural Ebook Awards Honour Veteran Mcbain and First-Timer Smith.” guardian.co.uk 23 Oct. 2000. Staff, Guardian Unlimited Books. “Curious Book Racks up yet Another Nomination.” guardian.co.uk 15 Mar. 2004. Staff. “Fiction in September 2000.” Library Journal 1 May 2000. Staff. “Prepub Best Sellers.” Library Journal 15 Oct. 2000. Staff. “RH, Knopf, HM Lead NBCC Finalists.” Publishers Weekly 5 Feb. 2001. Stewart, Grant. “I Spotted the Booker Winner in a Slush Pile. Why Didn’t I Just Keep Quiet?” The Observer 18 Oct. 2003. Stoddard, Katy. “Man Booker Prize 2011: Sales for All the Booker Prize Winners, Including Julian Barnes.” TheGuardian.com 26 Oct. 2011. Stone, Andrew. “Enterprise Network: Faber Aims for the Write Stuff.” The Sunday Times 23 Nov. 2003. Stone, Philip. “A Foul Taste of Book….” The Bookseller 15 Oct. 2008. Stone, Philip. “Booker Bounce for Adiga.” The Bookseller 21 Oct. 2008. Stothard, Peter. “The Booker Prize’s Passage to India.” The Daily Beast 15 Oct. 2008. Stuhr, Rebecca A. “Smith, Zadie. White Teeth.” Library Journal 1 Apr. 2000: 132-33. Stummer, Robin. “Amis Comes Top in Annual Literary Love-In.” The Independent on Sunday 10 Dec. 2000. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Diary: Another Booker Flop.” London Review of Books 6 Nov. 2008: 42-43. Sutcliff, Thomas. “From Convincing Triumphs to Conceptual Pretzels.” The Independent 29 Dec. 2000.

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Sutherland, John. “Aravind Adiga Wins Booker Prize: A Worthy Winner?” guardian.co.uk 14 Oct. 2008. Sutherland, John. “Of Medicis and Mughals.” Financial Times 5 Apr. 2008. Tate, Greg. “Fear of a Mongrel Planet.” The Village Voice 9 May 2000. Taylor, DJ. “Diary – D J Taylor.” New Statesman 2 Feb. 2004. Taylor, DJ. “DJ on DH, TS, FR, EM, and Now DBC.” The Guardian 18 Sept. 2003. Taylor, DJ. “Novel Solutions.” The Guardian 14 Aug. 2003. Taylor, DJ. “On Being Judged.” guardian.co.uk 22 Jan. 2004. Taylor, Matthew. “Brickbats Fly as Community Brands Novel ‘Despicable’.” The Guardian 3 Dec. 2003. Teather, David. “Bloomsbury Set.” The Guardian 25 Nov. 2000. The Best of the Booker. The Man Booker Prizes. 21 Feb. 2008. The Booker Prize: New Developments. The Booker Prize. 24 Apr. 2002. The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2003: The Judges. The Booker Prize. 7 Mar. 2003. The Man Booker Prize Makes a Move. The Booker Prize. 22 May 2002. The Man Group Wins Coveted Booker Prize Sponsorship. The Booker Prize. 25 Apr. 2002. The People’s Booker. The Booker Prize. Nov. 2000. Thomas, Lee. “White Tiger: When Life Is to Eat or Be Eaten.” San Francisco Chronicle 27 Apr. 2008. Thomas, Liz. “Salman Rushdie among the Favourites for Man Booker Prize after Being Nominated a Third Time.” Mail Online 29 July 2008. Thomson, Gordon. “Shaggy Dog Story.” The Observer 14 Mar. 2004. Thomson, Liz. “Frankfurt Book Fair: Entrekin Selling Portion of Stake in Grove Atlantic London.” Publishers Weekly 13 Oct. 2009. Thornton, Matthew. “Deals: Week of 12/8/2008.” Publishers Weekly 8 Dec. 2008. Thorpe, Vanessa. “BBC Set to Turn Debut Novel into £5m Serial.” The Observer 28 May 2000. Tivnan, Tom. “Eastern Promise.” The Bookseller 17 Apr. 2009. Tivnan, Tom. “In Depth: Man Booker and the Bookshops.” The Bookseller 23 Sept. 2013. Tivnan, Tom. “Pluck of the Irish.” TheBookseller.com 19 May 2009. Tivnan, Tom. “Rising Tide.” The Bookseller 12 Mar. 2009. Tivnan, Tom. “United They Stand.” The Bookseller 1 July 2010. TNN. “Indian Pair Makes It to Booker 2008 Shortlist; Rushdie Dropped.” The Times of India 10 Sept. 2008.

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Tonkin, Boyd. “A Touch of Magic Lights up the Book World.” The Independent 29 Dec. 2000. Tonkin, Boyd. “A Week in Books.” The Independent 17 Oct. 2003. Tonkin, Boyd. “A Week in Books: Judging Adolescents.” The Independent 30 Jan. 2004. Tonkin, Boyd. “At the Fourth Time of Asking, Atwood’s ‘Narrative Energy’ Snares Booker Prize.” The Independent 8 Nov. 2000. Tonkin, Boyd. “Booker Judges Stick to the Well-Told Story of Pretenders and Conspicuous Absentees.” The Independent 6 Oct. 2000: 12. Tonkin, Boyd. “Boyd Tonkin: A Beguiling Tale That Speaks Volumes About Our Predicament.” The Independent 15 Oct. 2008. Tonkin, Boyd. “Boyd Tonkin: Selection Explores Life on a Pre-Thatcher Mars.” The Independent 10 Sept. 2008. Tonkin, Boyd. “Independent Book Group: Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre.” The Independent 4 June 2004. Tonkin, Boyd. “Lost Dogs and Enchantresses Make for a Strong Booker List, but Where Is Kelman?” The Independent 30 July 2008. Tonkin, Boyd. “The Anticipated Incident: Hot Favourite Wins Whitbread Award.” The Independent 28 Jan. 2004. Tonkin, Boyd. “The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry.” The Independent 6 Feb. 2009. Tonkin, Boyd. “Writers Tackle the Brutish Truth Behind the British Empire.” The Independent 24 Jan. 2001. Trefgarne, George. “The Questor Column.” The Telegraph 30 Mar. 2001. Trewin, Simon. “Pile ‘Em High… Then Let ‘Em Die.” The Independent on Sunday 20 June 2004. Trubek, Anne. “Canon Fodder.” The Atlantic 6 Feb. 2012. Turpin, Adrian. “The White Tiger.” Financial Times 19 Apr. 2008. Upchurch, Michael. “In These 3 Striking Debut Novels, Homicidal Characters Bring Life to Varied Settings.” The Seattle Times 27 Apr. 2008. Updike, John. “Love and Loss on Zycron.” The New Yorker 18 Sept. 2000: 14245. Urquhart, James. “The White Tiger.” Financial Times 30 Mar. 2009. Vandenburgh, Jane. “Writing the Novel’s Future.” The Boston Globe. 30 Apr. 2000. Veale, Scott. “New & Noteworthy.” The New York Times Book Review 13 June 2004: 28. Veale, Scott. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” The New York Times Book Review 30 May 2004: 16.

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Viner, Katherine. “Double Bluff.” The Guardian 16 Sept. 2000. Wade, Mike. “Sebastian Barry Wins James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the Secret Scripture.” The Times 22 Aug. 2009. Wagner, Erica. “Aravind Adiga Wins Man Booker Prize with the White Tiger.” The Times 15 Oct. 2008. Wagner, Erica. “Literary Judges Overlook Booker Nominees.” The Times 13 Nov. 2003. Wagner, Erica. “Whitbread Hunt Ends in Curious Incident.” The Times 28 Jan. 2004. Wainwright, Robert, and Jason Steger. “Australian Makes Booker Shortlist.” The Age 10 Sept. 2008. Wainwright, Robert. “Australian Debutant on Booker Shortlist.” The Sydney Morning Herald 10 Sept. 2008. Walsh, John. “Mark Haddon: This Year’s Big Read.” The Independent 22 Jan. 2004. Walsh, John. “Martyn Goff: Secrets of the Booker King.” The Independent 27 Apr. 2006. Walsh, John. “Not Worthy of a Booker Win, but One of a Kind.” The Independent 2 July 2004. Walter, Natasha. “At Last: Real Women, Real Writing.” The Independent 27 Mar. 2000. Warner, Marina. “Eyes Wide Open.” The Globe and Mail 2 Sept. 2000. Washington, Kate. “Detached Detective.” San Francisco Chronicle 22 June 2003: M-3. Watson, Mary. “Mary Watson’s Top 10 Books About Maverick Women.” guardian.co.uk 18 July 2006. Wells, Matt. “Multiculture Awards Honour Mandela, Ali G and Guardian.” The Guardian 23 May 2000. White, Caroline. “The Times WHSmith Paperbacks of the Year, 2009: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.” The Times 14 Nov. 2009. Wiegand, David. “A Tale of Two Families.” San Francisco Chronicle 7 Mar. 2000. Wilkinson, Joanne. “Vernon God Little by Pierre, DBC.” Booklist 1 Sept. 2003. Wilson, A N. “World of Books.” The Telegraph 12 Nov. 2001. Wilson, Lauren. “Aussies Make Booker Shortlist.” The Australian 10 Sept. 2008. Winslow, Art. “Ordinary Madness.” The New York Times Book Review 18 Jan. 2009: 5(L).

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Womack, Philip. “Pick of the Paperbacks, Reviews.” The Telegraph 19 Mar. 2009. Wood, James. “Books of the Year.” The New Yorker 18 Dec. 2012. Wood, James. “Human, All Too Inhuman.” The New Republic 24 July 2000. Wood, James. “The Lie-World.” London Review of Books 20 Nov. 2003: 25. Woodhead, Cameron. “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” The Age 14 May 2005. Woodroof, Martha. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” NPR: Weekend Edition Sunday 12 Oct. 2003. Wroe, Nicholas. “As Our Ancestors Hide in Our DNA, So Do Their Stories.” The Guardian 11 Sept. 2008. Yagoda, Ben. “Michiko Kakutani: A Critic with a Fixation.” Slate 10 Apr. 2006. Yates, Emma. “Atwood Heads the Orange Shortlist.” guardian.co.uk 10 May 2001. Yates, Emma. “Booker Judges Announced.” guardian.co.uk 15 Feb. 2001. Zvirin, Stephanie. “Core Collection.” Booklist 1 Dec. 2007. Zwart, Jane. “Captive Audience.” Books & Culture May/June 2009: 37.

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