DEI at the National Book Awards

Bret Stephens contemplates the ten finalists for the National Book Award in fiction:

Hannah Lillith Assadi’s novel, Paradiso 17, is “inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father.” Kimberly Blaeser, a poet, is the “founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets.” Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American writer whose novel Dèy reflects on “the many forms of mourning experienced through immigration, gentrification and diasporic identity.” Julián Delgado Lopera’s novel Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You, set in 1990s Bogotá, “explores Colombia’s queer underground community.” Louise Erdrich, the highly acclaimed author of Python’s Kiss, is identified in her N.B.F. biography as “a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.” Marlon James’s novel The Disappearers is a “queer epic” set in Kingston, Jamaica. Valeria Luiselli is a writer born in Mexico whose Beginning Middle End spans “continents, languages and four generations.” Kenan Orhan is a Turkish American writer; his first novel, The Renovation, is a story about a family migrating from Istanbul to Italy. Morgan Thomas’s book Mad Eden is about “a trans health care worker” who has been diagnosed with autism.

Oh, there’s also Alexander Maksik’s novel Passengers, a father-daughter story set in an airport. Maksik, who is Jewish, is, to my knowledge, white, male and straight — details that, in a sane world, should have no bearing on whether his book deserves to make the longlist. In this world, sadly, it makes him the lucky token.

My reaction to this is ambivalent. On one hand, I am myself far more likely to read a serious novel or memoir by someone who is not an ordinary white American. I am frankly bored by the world I inhabit and get more insight into it than I want just by skimming the news. Unless the story is set in some other world, as in science fiction or fantasy, I would rather read work by someone with a very different perspective. Marlon James is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and two of his novels (A Brief History of Seven Killings and The Book of the Night Women)  would be on my list of the fifty best post WW II books. I have probably about as many serious novels by Asians like Haruki Murakami and Arundhati Roy than white North Americans. I have no particular attraction to gay fiction, but James Baldwin was amazing and I like Marlon James so much that I may give This Disappearers a try.

But on the other hand, this list points to the fundamental problem with wokeness: the obsession with who people are rather than what they can do. It is, to me, demeaning to Louise Edrich to identify her as a Native American writer; I don't fundamentally care where she comes from. She usually writes about Native Americans, but she is a product of Dartmouth and various writing programs, thoroughly trained in the craft of modern fiction, besides being married to a white anthropologist who was one of her undergraduate professors and living in Minneapolis. As I have noted here several times, modern novel writing is a tradition about as far removed from Native American storytelling as it is possible to be. Edrich is very good at the kind of psychologically intense writing that this tradition values, and that gets attention from the National Book Awards.

Books are not good because their authors are marginalized. Most books by people from marginal communities are, in fact, bad. Just like most books by white New Yorkers are bad.

Writing talent is a rare and wonderful thing, and a brilliant novel is a treasure like any other magnificent work of art. That is what awards should celebrate, not anything to do with where the author happened to be born.