Year in Review 2005: literature

Encyclopedia Britannica Year in Review 2005: literature

Literature

For Selected International Literary Awards in 2005, see Table.

The death on April 5, 2005, of Saul Bellow (see Obituaries), one of the giants of modern American literature, precipitated accolades by Herbert Gold and Philip Roth, among many others. For half a century Bellow had stood at the forefront of American letters and set the highest standard for 20th-century American prose and serious thought about life and culture in the U.S.

Roth himself was singled out during the year as a major living American writer; he became one of three writers (Eudora Welty and Bellow were the others) whose work was published during his or her lifetime in the admirable Library of America series—the U.S. version of France's “Pléiade” editions. Two volumes of Roth's work—which included short stories, his first novel, Letting Go, his still-audacious novel Portnoy's Complaint, and other early work—appeared between the covers of the distinctive Library of America binding.

Veteran novelist E.L. Doctorow scored again in 2005 with The March.

© Jerry Bauer

Far and away the best new novel of the year came in the fall when E.L. Doctorow published The March, his fictionalized version of Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's 1864 march across the South.

And, as they watched, the brown cloud took on a reddish cast. It moved forward, thin as a hatchet blade in front and then widening like the furrow from the plow. It was moving across the sky to the south of them. When the sound of this cloud reached them, it was like nothing they had ever heard in their lives. It was not fearsomely heaven-made, like thunder or lightning or howling wind, but something felt through their feet, a resonance, as if the earth was humming.…The symphonious clamor was everywhere, filling the sky like the cloud of red dust that arrowed past them to the south and left the sky dim, it was the great processional of the Union armies, but of no more substance than an army of ghosts.

John Irving used his own childhood and adolescent experience of sexual transgressions as the basis for his weighty new novel Until I Find You, the story of a Hollywood actor in search of the father who abandoned him. California octogenarian Oakley Hall issued the entertaining Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots. Jim Harrison delivered to his faithful following of readers another trio of novellas, under the title The Summer He Didn't Die. Mary Gordon's novel Pearl featured a mother-daughter struggle, and Francine Prose drew a portrait of an American neo-Nazi in A Changed Man.

Paul Theroux carried readers into the Amazon jungle in Blinding Light, and Michael Cunningham, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, straddled New York City's past and future in Specimen Days; neither book met with complete acclaim, however. Rick Moody's The Diviners, his first novel in seven years, worked as an uproarious send-up of the world of television and film, though it did not win the credit it deserved. Although another decidedly experimental work, Europe Central by William T. Vollmann, an 811-page novel about the rise of Nazism and the Russian front, did not garner much initial praise, it won the National Book Award for Fiction.

In his much-praised novel The Hummingbird's Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea beautifully combined family and Mexican history.

Mexico was too big. It had too many colors. It was noisier than anyone could have imagined, and the voice of the Atlantic was different from the voice of the Pacific.… The east was a swoon of green, a thick-aired smell of ripe fruit and flowers and dead pigs and salt and sweat and mud, while the west was a riot of purple. Pyramids rose between llanos of dust and among turgid jungles. Snakes as long as country roads swam tame beside canoes. Volcanoes wore hats of snow. Cactus forests grew taller than trees. Shamans ate mushrooms and flew.

David Anthony Durham went all the way back to the Punic Wars for his successful novel Pride of Carthage, the story of Hannibal and his civilization. The German Officer's Boy by Harlan Greene used the Third Reich as the background for a story of thwarted sexuality and corruption. New York City and the construction of the Empire State Building put its special stamp on Thomas Kelly's Empire Rising.

A number of authors borrowed everyday themes for their works. In his second novel, Drives like a Dream, Porter Shreve, the author of The Obituary Writer, sprinkled auto-industry gossip in a story about a woman's quest to lure her grown children home. Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close took its cue from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York City. In the background of Wounded, Percival Everett's new novel, there is a hate crime taken almost directly out of the newspaper headlines. Marc Estrin's quirky coming-of-age novel, The Education of Arnold Hitler, chronicled the life of the protagonist as he moves from a Texas high school fraught with racial tensions to antiwar demonstrations at Harvard University to encounters with Al Gore and Leonard Bernstein, among others, in a quest for meaning.

Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann drew on personal history. Nancy Rawles's My Jim played off traditional fiction and told the story of the escaped slave Jim, a character from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Among numerous first novels there were a number of standouts: Music of the Mill by Luis J. Rodriguez, The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller, and The Lake, the River & the Other Lake by Steve Amick.

It was a good year for short-story offerings. James Salter, one of the few reigning American masters of short fiction, published Last Night, a new collection of short stories, in which he melded sharp observation with lyric intensity in the service of deep characterization. Several other elder statesman published short-story collections, including San Francisco octogenarian Leo Litwak with Nobody's Baby and Other Stories and Chicago craftsman Richard Stern with his collection of short fiction under the title Almonds to Zhoof. Ann Beattie and Roxana Robinson, both in the middle of their careers, issued new collections, Follies and A Perfect Stranger and Other Stories, respectively. John Edgar Wideman signed in with God's Gym, Amy Hempel with The Dog of the Marriage, and Edith Pearlman with How to Fall. New collections also came from Florida writer John Dufresne (Johnny Too Bad) and New York writer Jay Neugeboren (News from the New American Diaspora and Other Tales of Exile), and there was some experimental new work from National Book Award nominee Christine Schutt (A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer).

A number of younger writers came out with first or second books, including Daniel Alarcón (War by Candlelight), Elizabeth McKenzie (Stop That Girl), William Henry Lewis (I Got Somebody in Staunton), Judy Budnitz (Nice Big American Baby), and Thomas McConnell (A Picture Book of Hell and Other Landscapes). Perhaps the most extraordinary debut of the year was that of Chinese émigré and California resident Yiyun Li, whose collection of stories titled A Thousand Years of Good Prayers was set in both modern China and the contemporary U.S. The book drew numerous laudatory reviews.

The year in nonfiction prose had a number of highlights, beginning with Joan Didion's starkly told and remarkably moving The Year of Magical Thinking, her 2005 National Book Award-winning memoir of life in the wake of the death in 2003 of her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut published a group of brief contrarian essays under the title A Man Without a Country. Jonathan Harr's The Lost Painting garnered great attention with a beautifully turned narrative about a quest for a lost Caravaggio: “The Englishman moves in a slow but deliberate shuffle, knees slightly bent and feet splayed, as he crosses the piazza, heading in the direction of a restaurant named Da Fortunato.” Harr's book reads like a novel and wears rather lightly its scholarship about the world of art history and the restoration of masterpieces. Award winner Dava Sobel attracted attention for her delightful prose in the treatment of the bodies in the solar system in The Planets.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley turned to casual literary criticism in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. Vietnam War veteran and novelist Larry Heinemann wrote in Black Virgin Mountain of his return to the sites in Vietnam that had haunted him. Novelist Howard Norman wrote a slender, delicate tribute to a long-lost friendship in In Fond Remembrance of Me, and in The Language of Baklava fiction writer Diana Abu-Jaber turned to childhood as her subject. Craig Lesley's Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood was his take on that subject. The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe by Paula Fox focused on her adventures in Europe just after the end of World War II.

Harry Mathews spoofed the genre of memoir and politics in My Life in CIA. In Uncensored: Views & (Re)views, prodigious and celebrated novelist Joyce Carol Oates showed off a fascinating miscellany of recent work. Meanwhile, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Michael Dirda showcased his work in Bound to Please.

Efforts at formal literary biography were masterly in the case of Andrew Delbanco's Melville and Lewis M. Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature. Midwestern critic and scholar Barbara Burkhardt won accolades for William Maxwell: A Literary Life. Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky wrestled with biblical scholarship and received much praise for The Life of David, his study of King David. Independent scholar Megan Marshall proved 20 years of work worthwhile in The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.

Other literary biographies that merited attention were Sherill Tippins's February House—a work that focused on the little community formed in Brooklyn in 1940 by W.H. Auden, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee—as well as novelist Jerome Charyn's Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel.

Other biographies of note included Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius by Leo Damrosch, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry by Mel Watkins, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands, and The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.

Also noteworthy in nonfiction were Peter L. Bernstein's Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, James Reston, Jr.'s Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors, Edward G. Lengel's General George Washington: A Military Life, Sean Wilentz's Andrew Jackson, historian John Hope Franklin's autobiographical Mirror to America, and A. Roger Ekirch's At Day's Close: Night in Times Past.

The late author Jane Kenyon had her Collected Poems published during the year (“I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been / otherwise”); Robert Bly offered My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (“It is not yet dawn, and the sitar is playing. / Where are the footsteps that were so clear yesterday?”); and W.S. Merwin signed in with Migration: New & Selected Poems. Other books of verse included Lorna Dee Cervantes' Drive: The First Quartet, Charles Simic's My Noiseless Entourage, and two collections by Lawrence Joseph (Into It and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993). Also appearing were MacArthur Fellowship winner Campbell McGrath's Pax Atomica (2004), Kevin Young's Black Maria (“He loves me slow / as gin, then's out / light-switch quick”), and A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Maley. “Maud went to college. / Sadie stayed at home. / Sadie scraped life / With a fine-tooth comb”: the voice of the late Gwendolyn Brooks took on new strength as the Library of America's American Poets Project issued The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Alexander.

Poet Laureate Ted Kooser wrote The Poetry Home Repair Manual, a textbook on the writing of poems. His book seemed part of a burgeoning new subgenre, the writing-instruction memoir. Other works in that vein included Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life by Bret Lott and From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction by Robert Olen Butler.

The 2005 Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for works that appeared in 2004. The Pulitzer for fiction was awarded to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and the history prize went to David Hackett Fischer for Washington's Crossing. The Pulitzer biography winners were Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan for De Kooning: An American Master. Kooser took the Pulitzer for poetry for Delights & Shadows. Merwin won the National Book Award for poetry. Ha Jin, winner in 2000 of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for his novel Waiting, collected the prize for a second time—for his novel War Trash.

Besides the deaths of Bellow, historian Shelby Foote, poet Richard Eberhart, and authors Mary Lee Settle, Frank Conroy, Judith Rossner, Larry Collins, and Andrea Rita Dworkin (see Obituaries), other losses in American arts and letters included those of poet Philip Lamantia, author Max Steele, and screenwriter and biographer Gavin Lambert, best known for his novel Inside Daisy Clover (1963) and its screenplay.

Alan Cheuse