Forget the awards. Just give me a good read(National Post October 19,2007)

Hard on the heels of the controversial Nobel Peace Prize for Al Gore comes news of the more modest, but -- according to some critics --equally inappropriate Man Booker Prize awarded Oct. 16 to Dublin writer Anne Enright, for her book The Gathering. Her novel is described in Wednesday's Post (rather tautologically, if you know anything about Irish literature) as "a desperately bleak Irish family saga featuring a suicide and sexual abuse." Since publication five months ago, The Gathering has sold about 3,000 copies.

I have not read The Gathering, nor will I, for two reasons: first because I long ago overdosed on a literary surfeit of drunken, inbred, squirrelly Irish families (I think Brian Moore's 1979 The Mangan Inheritance -- alcoholism, incest, people living in unforgettably filthy conditions -- was the final straw for me) and second, because I place as little faith in so-called prestigious literary awards as I do in Nobel peace prizes.

In fact, just as Nobel peace prizes often go to those least deserving -- Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, KofiAnnan, to name a few --Nobel literary prizes often go to the obscure and the politically correct: The worthy Doris Lessing just received hers 40 years late, while literary nullity Elfriede Jellinek in 2004 and rabid Bush-hater Harold Pinter in 2005 both got theirs for ideological reasons.

I can remember the exact moment when the Booker Prize (as it was then known) fell off its pedestal for me: It was 1984, and the soi-disant experts on the panel awarded the prize to the derivative and anemic Virginia Woolfwannabee Anita Brookner, whose Hotel du Lac, the novel for which she won the prize, "teeters," as one waggish critic put it, "under the puniness of its ideas."

If it were only a question of my personal disdain for Brookner's gossamer-thin themes and plots (a generous euphemism for the endless, solipsistic reveries her dilettantish spinster alter egos entertain on whether or not to marry some two-dimensional man or other), I probably would have forgotten all about it.

But what made the moment memorable was that in choosing Brookner, the committee passed over the brilliant and magnificently talented novelist/critic David Lodge, a true giant of letters. Moreover, Lodge's stylistically polished novels not only sparkle with wit, and glow with profound humanity, they are-- you know -- readable? That is to say, you actually want to keep turning the pages while reading. Not because you have been told by an incestuous group of mutually grooming ivory-tower, culturally navel-gazing aesthetes that you should want to turn them. No, unlike certain prize-winning Canadian writers whose longeurs render you somnolent, Lodge's writing has you fighting off sleep to find out what happens next, and laughing out loud with the acuity of his social and cultural observations.

I'll hazard a guess as to why Lodge didn't get the prize. The target of his satire in books like Small World in 1984 and Nice Work, for which he was again short-listed for the Booker in 1988, is academia, specifically the increasingly meaningless and near-irrelevant postmodern humanities (about which he knows plenty since he taught literature at the University of Birmingham from 1960-87, after which he retired to write full time).

Lodge created fictional worlds that will live on in the annals of satire, such as "Rummidge," a thinly disguised version of the University of Birmingham, and "Plotinus," a hilarious doppelganger for the uber-liberal and narcissistic Berkeley. Morris Zapp, his cigar-chomping American Jane Austen guru, has more vitality and authenticity in his little finger than all of Anita Brookner's characters combined.

I think it's fair to say that when you expose in your writing the hypocrisies and pretensions of the very people who for the most part make up the juries on literary prizes, you reduce your chances of winning. Literary juries are very keen on "literary" subjects, which nowadays seems to mean, in Canada at any rate, lugubrious novels in which very little happens, but much is brooded over at poetic but tedious length, and which suspiciously often involve people sitting on rocks gazing out to sea or on porch steps over prairies, stoically ruminating on the lost opportunities imposed by their hardscrabble life, or falling through ice and almost drowning, after which fatalistic mental paralysis sets in and nothing ever gets better.

I've been burned with terminal boredom too many times trying to read artistically written, but bloodless, depressingly leaden novels, lured by the fact that they'd won a literary prize. I've learned my lesson. A bold medallion on a book announcing it as "Winner of the ?" is my cue nowadays to walk right on by.

As for Oprah's Book Club, don't even get me started.

bkay@videotron.ca
© National Post 2007