The Fix is In! 2008 National Book Award to Old Coot Peter Matthiessen
We all know I’m stalking Alec Baldwin, but what we don’t all know (or didn’t know) is that I’ve been stalking novelist Peter Matthiessen, too, in The Hamptons. My eyes lit up when I first saw him about six years ago at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, NY at one of those pay-$25-and-meet-the-author get togethers. It was a really crowded event with the authors sitting behind long tables with tidy stacks of 
books and the public lined up three deep to get autographed copies of books written by the best selling authors.
When someone pointed out Peter Matthiessen among the authors, I was beside myself, desperate to tell him how much I liked his trilogy, how I couldn’t put down Killing Mr. Watson (1990) and how I had been breathless to get hold of Lost Man’s River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999) to find out what had happened to Watson’s children. But I couldn’t get close to Matthiessen because he was completely swamped by people jockeying for position in front of his table. A lot of chitchat was going on, but no one was mentioning his fabulous trilogy. I began to elbow people out of the way until I was standing directly in front of him. When I got my opportunity I smiled and said, “I see a freshly painted, stark white house in the middle of the Florida Everglades.” Matthiessen stood up (he’s very tall), smiled charmingly and said, “Killing Mr. Watson.”
His original manuscript of 1500 pages was divided into the three volumes that have now been recombined and condensed into Shadow Country. Is Shadow Country a better read than the original separate volumes? You’ll have to be the judge because I’m happy with the three separate volumes.
I’m also happy that Peter Matthiessen, at 81, has received the 2008 National Book Award in Fiction for these under-read books — even though I’m not sure the condensed version of three previously published books would normally meet the criteria for the award.
I saw him about a year ago at a Sunday brunch given by a prominent family in East Hampton. The only book of his on display was his 1986 nonfiction book, Men’s Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork. It’s a charming historical picture book, and just one of the 22 nonfiction books and ten fiction books he has cranked out since 1959. (Hey, a guy’s got to make a living.)
You know I’m not a book reviewer, so I’m not telling you anything about the storyline of Shadow Country. Just know that I’ve got the three volumes on my shelf and I’m not lending them out.
Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing: Check out my revamped Web site for my 
bestseller, The Cure for Jet Lag. I’m exhausted from working on the site, but I wanted to get it ready in time for the holidays. I’ve added lots of information about how the info in the book can improve your vacation, listed jet lag symptoms, torn a page from the actual book, and added a blog feature! You’ve got about TEN DAYS to order the book for your globetrotting friends if you want them to receive it in time for Christmas. Remember, the book is not available in bookstores or online at B&N or Amazon.
November 22nd, 2008 at 1:41 pm
The only good thing about The National Book Award is that it isn’t the Nobel Prize, which seems to be reserved for politically correct terminuses of one of the major bodily tracts that pertains to items like foie gras and morels. Some of the NBA winners are actually readable.
Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing (TM): The Curmudgeon’s goal (obsession!) was to read every novel that won the Booker since its inception in 1968. Mission accomplished. He is now working on the shortlists.
November 22nd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
He’s a Buddhist Priest ya know.
November 22nd, 2008 at 4:39 pm
This sounds like a book I want to read. Gonna get it from the library.
Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing (TM): Funny you should say you are going to the library and not the bookstore. The last time I was out in The Hamptons, I ran into a local librarian who said the library is swamped with people who don’t want to buy books now because of the stock market crash and lousy economy. “It’s as busy as during August,” she said.
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Where is all the publishing world factoids we depend on? Economics first, heck with the Hamptons.
Clancy
Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing (TM): Hi, Clancy: So glad you dropped by. It’s been a while. I’ll be weighing in on the state of book publishing shortly in a later posting. [Clancy - born 1926 - is an American novelist and screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for the 2002 Salma Hayek film Frida.]
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:37 am
Cheers, Clancy. Frida would have been a great movie, even without La Salma.
Ah, yes, the Hamptons, where the elite meet. But let’s cut the WW a little slack — you write about what you know.
I say huzzah for Matthiessen’s rewrite. Here’s a writer who lived long enough to get a do-over. We should all be so lucky. In spite of the pre-award strafing this potential winner got from the tight-collars. But now I’ve gotta decide whether to buy three books or one. (Maybe PM was just prescient — going Back2Press with a Depression-proof trilogy.)
November 23rd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
In these days when reviewers seem much hipper than the actual writers they review, there was a case below where the reviewer was not quite so, even if he himself was a premier novelist. Here is a gem from John Updike’s speech when Mr. Updike received his second National Book award in 1998:
When I was told of this handsome honor, my mind flicked back to the two other times when I have been so fortunate as to be summoned by the National Book Awards. The first occasion, on March 10, 1964, was immortalized by a young reporter for the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune who signed himself Tom — as distinguished from Thomas — Wolfe. His coverage began with these two paragraphs:
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“No sensitive artist in America will ever have to duck the spotlight again. John Updike, the Ipswich, Mass., novelist, did it for them all last night, for all time. Up on the stage in the Grand Ballroom of the New York Hilton Hotel, to receive the most glamorous of the five National Book Awards, the one for fiction, came John Updike, author of The Centaur, in a pair of 19-month-old loafers.
“Halfway to the podium, the spotlight from the balcony hit him, and he could not have ducked better if there had been a man behind it with a rubber truncheon. First he squinted at the light through his owl-eyed eyeglasses. Then he ducked his head and his great thatchy medieval haircut toward his right shoulder. Then he threw up his left shoulder and his left elbow. Then he bent forward at the waist. And then, before the shirred draperies of the Grand Ballroom and an audience of 1,000 culturati, he went into his Sherwin-Williams blush.”
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Well, On Canadian television, John Irving was reported to snort when the name. Tom Wolfe came up.
“He can’t write. He can’t **ing write.!
I rest my case.
November 25th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I was with you during that breathless encounter at the Elaine Benson Gallery and yes, your eyes did light up!
You’ve written a fine tribute to PM.