Pulitzer Winners

Had the idea to do this in 2019. Only read a few and then stopped. Now I’m that I’m back in the swing of things, I’m planning on reading/rereading all of the winners of the novel/fiction category. As I go I’m going to rate and rank them here.

1. The Late George Apley 9.5/10
2. The Age of Innocence 9.5/10
3. The Magnificent Ambersons 8/10
4. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 8/10
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 5.5/10
6. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder 5.5/10
7. The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson 4.5/10
8. Less by Andrew Sean Greer 3/10

 

I just finished the bridge of San Luis Rey and I’m so happy it was only 100 pages. So slow

 

Wasn’t my cup of tea

I started age of innocence after I finished San Luis Rey last night and 70 pages in I’m a big fan so far

 

All right. I’m actually going to do this now. My plan is to read all of them and rank them as I go. So far I’ve read 3 this year, and my reviews are in the books I’ve read in 2023 thread. I just finished The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I enjoyed Oscar Wao, but it’s not because I particularly cared about any of the characters. Oscar Wao is a nerdy, overweight, girl-obsessed teen that lives in New Jersey. To be honest, he’s kind of a creep with women, and it’s hard to really care about a character like that. The subject characters sort of bounce around between Oscar, his sister, his mother, and his sisters boyfriend. They’re all mildly interesting characters, but none are captivating.

The narrator is the sisters boyfriend, Yunior. And the best part of the book is the prose. It’s narrated just like a teen/early 20s Dominican immigrant would talk, with Spanish slang. And a lot of it was hilarious (about Dominican dictator Trujillo in a footnote: they say he was on his way for some ass that night. A consummate culocrat to the end). Diaz has a gift for language, and parts of the book were laugh out loud funny. If the characters were just tightened up a little bit, this could’ve really been *great.* As it is, I think it will probably be like a lot of other Pulitzer winners: largely forgotten in fifty years

 

This was a reread-I first read The Magnificent Ambersons three years ago. It’s a really interesting book. It tells the story of both the Amberson family as well as a town called Midland, based on Indianapolis, during a ~25 year period from ~1890-1915 or so. Themes include how the automobile competed changed towns in the Midwest as well as how capitalism changed who the important families are.

The Ambersons are the leading family in Midland. The patriarch is a Civil War Major. His grandson, George, is basically a little shit about town. Most of the people in the town are rooting for his comeuppance. The Morgan’s were a minor family in Midland, and one of their sons moves back to town and starts an auto manufacturing business. While the fortunes of the families change, there is something of a love story as well between the children and the adults in the two families.

I really enjoyed this. It really shows the impermanence of importance and that things can change radically due to things people couldn’t even comprehend less than a decade prior.

Tarkington is great. He’s sort of faded from the nations consciousness, but in his time he was the bestselling author in the country.

 

The Able McLaughlins does not have a lot going for it. The prose is not interesting, the characters are not well developed, and the story isn’t that interesting. The only thing it does have going for it is the setting: 1860s rural Iowa during and after the Civil War.

The McLaughlins live in a rural Iowa farming settlement among a small number of Scottish immigrants. They all own between 100-900 acres. The men farm. The women do house chores. It was cool being transported back to that time period.

I seriously doubt anyone else is going to read this book, so I will spoil the plot a little bit. A civil war veteran returns home and marries the girl next door (next door being a couple miles away) and then learns she is pregnant. She was raped a few months before. And is mostly blamed for the rape. Having that hanging over 2/3 of the book made me glad it was 260 pages of large print that went by in a few hours.

I don’t recommend and I have no idea how this book won a Pulitzer. It’s not surprising that it’s one of the Pulitzer winners that is difficult to find and largely out of print.

 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey would be a lot better if it was about 100 pages longer. At the center of the story is a bridge collapse in 1714 in colonial Peru. It’s about a 100 page novela. Five people died when the bridge collapsed, and about twenty pages of the book are dedicated to telling each of their stories. All of the stories end with them being on the bridge and it collapsing.

The themes of impermanence and free will and “gods plan for us” run throughout the book. It seems like something kids should read in school to learn to look deeper than the prose when reading to see if there is a deeper meaning than a book worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. When I say it would be better if it was 100 pages longer I mean that the stories of each person would be better developed and more rich. When you just learn about a character in 15-25 pages and then just move on to someone else, it’s difficult to care about them.

And that’s pretty much what I took away from this. A bridge collapsed, people died, and I didn’t care about any of their deaths.

 

To Kill a Mockingbird is still a really good piece of fiction. The characters are vivid, the place they're in feels real, and it also really does not hold up well at all in 2023. I cannot believe this is basically required high school reading for the entire country.

I read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, like I'm guessing most of us did. I did not remember a ton of it other than a white lawyer defended a black dude who was accused of something. Ok. Interspersed in that plot idea are approximately 300 n-bombs, a bunch of drivel about how black people are dumb, and that there is nothing worse than a white dude taking advantage of a black dude.

I think the ultimate goal of this book was to make white people feel good that they wouldn't falsely accuse a man of rape and know that he was going to get sentenced to death because we aren't *that* racist. And that we would never take advantage of a dumb black family. So we are morally superior to the people in Shithole, Alabama.

It reminded me a lot of people who go into Teach for America. I'm going to teach some poor brown kids to make me feel better about myself before going into corporate America. This is the fiction version of that. I'm going to read this and feel better about myself because I'm not as racist as a jury in South Alabama. Frankly a lot of it is just pretty gross.