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.

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.)

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.]

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.

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.