10 worst prize-winning American novels of all time

I’ve compiled so many list of best books—best Jewish books, best New York books, best baseball books, best Reagan books, best literary histories, best memoirs—that I am in danger of losing touch with my inner literary grouch. Here, then, is something to irritate even the politest of readers: a list of the ten worst prize-winning American novels of all time. (Or, well, at least since 1950.)

( 1.) Jerzy Kosinski, Steps (National Book Award, 1969). The first “experimental” or “postmodern” novel to win a major literary award in the U.S., except that Steps was neither. The book is a random collection of episodes of brutality. The Painted Bird had been overlooked four years earlier. This award was compensation for the oversight.

( 2.) Paul Harding, Tinkers (Pulitzer Prize, 2010). “Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets.” The novel’s 192 pages feel like four times that self-indulgent length upon reading. Rejected (with good cause) by every major publisher to whom it was submitted, Tinkers was eventually published by Bellevue Literary Press. The award was widely viewed as a consolation to small publishers.

( 3.) Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (National Book Award, 2011). If there were an award for best novel for grammar school readers, Salvage the Bones still would not have deserved it, even though Ward’s book is written for ten-year-olds, as Janice Harayda discovered. Adult readers were able to endure it only for the sake of what Ron Charles celebrated as literary history.

( 4.) William Faulkner, The Reivers (Pulitzer Prize, 1963). A pattern is emerging: literary prizes are always a mistake (I could end my sentence there, but I’ll go on)—always a mistake when they are awarded for some other reason than to honor a book. The Pulitzer Prize committee ignored The Sound and the Fury, honoring Oliver La Farge’s paleface-writes-redskin Laughing Boy instead; singled out Margaret Ayer Barnes’s immortal manners-of-the-rich novel Years of Grace instead of As I Lay Dying; preferred T. S. Stribling’s Reconstruction novel The Store to Light in August; and pushed Absalom, Absalom! away to get to Gone With the Wind. Even with the garlanding of A Fable in 1955, the neglect had not been rectified. The Reivers was not only Faulkner’s last book; it was likely his worst. But he had died on July 6, 1962, and when the opportunity arose to honor him posthumously, the prize committee could not resist.

( 5.) William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (National Book Award, 1980). A “flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey.”—Martin Amis. Sophie’s Choice indicts an entire generation of American Jews on “the charge of advancing the ‘racist and violence-provoking’ ideology of Jewish exclusivism. The Jews stand accused of collective amnesia, effacing the memory of other peoples’ suffering.”—“Jews Without Memory.”

( 6.) E. L. Doctorow, The March (National Book Critics Circle and PEN/Faulkner Awards, 2005). Sherman’s March to the Sea becomes an analogue or metaphor for the Iraq War. Or something. Not even those on Doctorow’s political side have any desire to reread this tendentious yawner.

( 7.) William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (National Book Award, 1994). Even the Gaddis faithful were saying hosannas when his fourth book weighed in at just under 600 pages. Once again the novelist declines to punctuate speech or identify speakers, which might be effective in a story or short novel (although I am still trying to figure out the artistic purpose of making things hard for the reader), but is wearying in such a long novel. Supposedly a satire on the law, the novel also includes tortuously reasoned legal decisions, in full tortuous detail, which are longer than most Supreme Court decisions, including the dissents. A Frolic of His Own is a great unmovable monument to tedium. What a thing to be remembered for!

( 8.) Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (National Book Award, 1997). Usually it is the Pulitzer Prize committee that mistakes a huffing middlebrow bestseller for a serious novel. Perhaps the NBA jury was cross-eyed from reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Little else can explain passing over Cynthia Ozick’s Puttermesser Papers or Ward Just’s Echo House for this romance in the guise of a historical novel. The lesson for prize juries: leave Civil War novels alone.

( 9.) Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song (Pulitzer Prize, 1980). Everybody praised Mailer for abandoning his typical rhetorical hypertrophy for the simple declarative sentences of this book. What nobody ever says is that a thousand pages of these flat sentences (“Gary was kind of quiet. There was one reason they got along. Brenda was always gabbing and he was a good listener. They had a lot of fun. Even at that age he was real polite”) are enough to make you want to swear off reading forever. Add that no one in the book is anyone you’d ever want to spend ten minutes with in extraliterary life, and you have the best explanation why, if this is his best, Mailer is already nearly forgotten.

(10.) John Updike, The Centaur (National Book Award, 1964). His first novel after Rabbit, Run was an experiment for him—his Ulysses, his rewriting of Greek myth in contemporary terms. As such the novel is ham-fisted and obvious. Neither myth nor Updike’s own story gains anything from the parallels. A shame too, because the story itself, stripped of the classical allusions, is quietly affecting. The main character, a high school teacher, is based upon Updike’s father. What might have been a son’s loving portrait disappears into the novel’s claptrap. Luckily for him and for us, Updike never tried such a thing ever again.