Thunderclaps and late blooms

Gotham glitterati gathered on 20th November for the National Book Awards, the closest America gets to the Man Booker Prize. Gala it is, complete with compère Steve Martin bringing some Hollywood to the Hudson, and $1,000-a-plate dinner money going to support the good works of the National Book Foundation.

But the Booker it isn't, which is why US writers would be more than a little pleased to find themselves among the contenders in a hands-across-the-ocean Booker Prize. Forget the $10,000 winner's purse, the real difference is that the NBA, unlike the Booker, is no guarantee for the bestseller list. In some cases its effects are barely visible at the till.

On my academic sabbatical last year, I studied the last quarter century's best books versus bestsellers. It's clear that where the NBA counts most is with the neophyte or less established name in fiction—think 1999 winner Ha Jin's Waiting (Pantheon). The same holds true for the Pulitzer, whether it was 1981 and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (Louisiana State University Press), or 2000 and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin).

By that logic, the fiction finalists this year were all apt choices, even though not the choices pundits had predicted. Donna Tartt, Jonathan Safran Foer, Alice Sebold and Jeffrey Eugenides were conspicuous by their absence. Instead we had Mark Costello's Big If (Norton) and Adam Haslett's You Are Not a Stranger Here (Nan A Talese/Doubleday) as the favourites, along with Martha McPhee's Gorgeous Lies (Harcourt), Brad Watson's The Heaven of Mercury (Norton), and Julia Glass' Three Junes (Pantheon).

The surprise was genuine when Ms Glass won, a win that should be of more than passing interest to British publishers. Her novel, portraying three summers in the transatlantic lives of a Scottish family, is not yet spoken for in the UK. The rights reside with Pantheon, which would be perfectly happy for that to change.

Julia Glass' agent, the redoubtable Gail Hochman, and her Pantheon editor—poet and former New Yorker staffer Deb Garrison—were extremely energetic in talking up the book early on. When Three Junes was published in May, the print run was 25,500. Another 100,000 copies were added in September when the novel was chosen by the Good Morning America book club, one of the many who have rushed in to fill the Oprah breach (let us not forget that the void was created in part by the fallout from last year's NBA fiction winner, Jonathan Franzen, who wanted to eat his Oprah cake but not have her seal of approval on every copy of The Corrections). The day after Glass won the award, Pantheon went back to press for 18,000 more copies.

Miracle babies

When Bob Shacochis, chair of the fiction judges, introduced the finalists, he said the panel had "robbed the cradle". "The year has produced an astonishingly rich crop of new American voices . . . 2002 is the year of the thunderclap début," he enthused. These were "miracle babies, an artillery barrage, a new generation of brilliant writers for the new American century". Clearly George W Bush-speak is infecting even the writers among us.

Did this cradle-robbing start with that ace self-publicist Dave Eggers? It certainly seems as though more young authors—web savvy, blessed with a modicum of telegenicity, and not averse to performing in public—are being anointed as worthy of being "made" on publishers' lists. Writers such as Eggers and David Sedaris are packing ticket-paying readers into events as though they were latter-day rock stars.

But the youthful-looking Ms Glass begged to make one small correction. "Two years ago at age 44 and vastly pregnant with a second child I asked myself, 'Who am I that I can think I can have a first book published when I'm this old?' This is for everybody who blooms late in life, because you never, never know."

As for the non-fiction prize, it was always viewed as Robert Caro and the rest, so it was no surprise that it went to Master of the Senate, the third volume in Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. After three trips to press, Knopf has 219,000 copies in print.

Experience also counted for Nancy Farmer, winner of the young people's literature award for The House of the Scorpion (Atheneum), and even more so for Ruth Stone, who at 87 won the poetry prize for In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon) and declared that, "You probably gave it to me because I'm old." Her win brought not only glory, but relief to Stone's publisher. The National Book Foundation requires every publisher of a nominated book to pay $1,000 to help the NBF publicise it, which can be hard for a small press to recoup if the book doesn't get a sales boost by winning.

Free American

Philip Roth, after being presented with the NBF's medal for distinguished contribution to American letters, used his speech to complain about the ghettoising of American writers. "I have never thought of myself as an American Jewish writer anymore than Cheever or Dreiser thought of themselves as Christian American writers. I think of myself as a free American," he declared.

There were those in the audience who thought he did protest a tad too much. True, the academic habit here of labeling and politicising is counterproductive; but perhaps we shall next be asked to stop thinking of Faulkner as a southerner.

We are safe enough, though, in thinking of Gabriel García Márquez as Colombian and Hispanic, and a good example of how the Spanish-language market is growing apace in America. Knopf is set to publish the Nobel laureate's memoir, Vivir para Contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), in Spanish, a first for the publisher. It is rushing 50,000 copies into print for December, but already bootleg copies of Latin American editions are on sale.

Finally, looking forward to Christmas—many are not—Barnes & Noble has reportedly expressed real concern in recent meetings, not surprising given the sale signs all over New York and the flat retail environment all across the land.

To try to get a jump on the online competition, B&N.com has taken out pricey double-page spreads in the New York Times, declaring that "Bigger Means Faster, OK?" and comparing their million titles to Amazon's 375,000.

"The difference is on the shelves," the ads conclude. But for B&N, Amazon, and everybody else, the real difference will be measured at the till this Christmas.