Gay vs. gay won the day as Adam Mars-Jones took home The Omnivore's Hatchet Job of the Year Award for his sharp review of Michael Cunningham's novel By Nightfall [Kindle]. The Golden Hatchet prize is sincere and based on literary merit. One of the four judges, Sam Leith, praised the winner, saying, “Mars-Jones’s review of Michael Cunningham had everything a reader could hope for in a hostile review. It was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny … Every one of his zingers – ‘like tin-cans tied to a tricycle;’ ‘it seems to be the prestige of the modernists he admires, rather than their stringency;’ ‘that’s not an epiphany, that’s a postcard’ – is earned by the argument it arises from. By the end of it Cunningham’s reputation is, well, prone.”
Readers will recall that, in a very respectful review, Alan Hollinghurst also was disappointed by Cunningham's book, "a slender donnée has been bulked up to make a novel" and the "slight air of factitiousness in the novel, of an author very capably treading water."
Read the Hatchet award's full Manifesto, which says in part, it "aims to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote honesty and wit in literary journalism. Newspaper book pages are on borrowed time. Readership is dwindling, review space is shrinking, reviewers are paid half what they were twenty years ago. The professional critic has yet to draw his last breath, but there’s no mistaking the death rattle."
Mars-Jones' review is free at the Guardian. Among the eight shortlisted finalists were Geoff Dyer on Julian Barnes and David Sexton on Carol Ann Duffy.
Disappointing to see such a sour and persnickety review of such a robust and multilayered book rewarded with a prize.
Posted by: K.M. Soehnlein | February 15, 2012 at 10:26 AM