Congratulations to the Pulitzer Prize Winners!
The 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction has been announced!
The 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced just a few moments ago! As readers of this blog know, I am slowly but surely working my way through every winner of the prize dating back to its founding in 1948, so the announcement of the awards each year feel like my Oscars. I have been eagerly anticipating the reveal of the 2023 award and am excited to announce that this year not one, but two, books won in the fiction category!
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (I predicted this win last night!)
“A masterful recasting of ‘David Copperfield,’ narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise, unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse - and his efforts to conquer them.” From the Pulitzer announcement
Trust by Hernan Diaz
“A riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through linked narratives rendered in different literary styles, a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king.” From the Pulitzer announcement
These are two beautiful books that perfectly encapsulate “distinguished fiction by an American author” dealing with American life. I’m also excited to add the finalist, The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara to my list, as well as the history winner, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power by Jefferson Cowie. Below are my reviews for this year’s winners. You can check out the winners in every category by clicking this link.
2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
Demon Copperhead is the story of one boy growing up in Virginia’s southern Appalachia region as the opioid epidemic gets its legs. Born to a teenage mother in a trailer with no other family, Demon is forced to be resourceful from a young age. His mother’s stints in and out of rehab give him experience with Virginia’s child protective services, but his mother’s ultimate overdose when he is ten-years-old catapult him headfirst into the perils of the foster system. His adolescence is marked by child labor, hunger, a brush with glory as a member of the football team, and a long struggle with addiction. His story is not particularly different from that of those around him and is punctuated by increased access to opioids that flood the region.
The book is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperhead, which focused on institutional poverty and its impact on children in 19th century England. Barbara Kingsolver, a masterful writer, has tackled the themes from Dickens’ book with impressive skill and finesse. Given the nature of the subject matter, Demon Copperhead is definitely a sad story but it is not without its redemptive qualities. Although I wished Demon would make different choices I was also rooting for him the entire time, and felt that the singularity of voice breathed into this character was an example of writing at its finest.
Trust - Hernan Diaz
Trust is a unique story about a wealthy 1920s financier told in four distinct parts. Part one is a novel within this larger novel titled “Bond,” about a wealthy investor and his reclusive wife. The protagonist’s uncommon success makes him the talk of the town, particularly after he shorts the market in the lead-up to the Great Depression. At the same time, however, his wife, an appreciator of the arts and a philanthropist, is beginning a slow descent into madness. As the title suggests, this book is all about trust and, as an extension, perception. The layers of the story that readers are exposed to in part one are slowly peeled back in part two, with excerpts of an autobiography of the financier that “Bond” is based on. Part three includes a memoir by the woman who ghostwrites the aforementioned autobiography and part four is the journal entries of the financiers wife. I won’t go into detail about what parts two through four reveal, but suffice to say as the story unfolds whatever perceptions that were created with “Bond” as the foundational text are quickly unraveled and readers are forced to consider the perspectives that influence history. The skill required by Diaz to write four unique sections, each with their own voice and structure, reflects Diaz’s talents as an author.
2023 Pulitzer Price for Memoir
Stay True - Hua Hsu
As a first-generation 18-year-old Taiwanese American in the early 1990s, Hua Hsu arrived at Berkeley with a very specific understanding of himself as an individual; his likes and dislikes, his music preferences, his style choices. His first impression of Ken, a Japanese American student whose family has been in the United States for generations, is warped. Ken seems mainstream, a member of a fraternity with a simplistic view of the world. But as the two spend more time together, Hsu and Ken grow close, developing the tight bond so easily developed as college students. One night, almost three years after they met, Ken is unexpectedly murdered in a carjacking, throwing Hsu’s life into disarray. Hsu struggles to understand how this happened and what, if any, role he could have had in preventing it.
Stay True is Hsu’s attempt to reckon with the loss of his friend in the thirty-years since his death. It is important to note that this book is not the story of Ken’s life. Although there are elements of eulogy, it is more a reflection on friendship and adolescence and the ability to grow amidst tragedy. Hsu, now a writer for the New Yorker, writes with grace and beauty, effortlessly weaving together his past with current reflections.
Bonus! 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Netanyahus - Joshua Cohen
Set in upstate New York in the late 1950s, The Netanyahus follows Ruben Blum, a taxation historian at the fictional Corbin College, as he shepherds Benzion Netanyahu through the search and interview process for an academic position at the institution. Blum has been selected for this role not because he holds any overlapping academic expertise with Netanyahu, but because he is also Jewish, and in the late 1950s, as the only Jewish professor on the campus, he is deemed the most-qualified person to connect with and assess Netanyahu.
Ruben Blum and his family members are exceptionally dynamic characters who humorously tackle big questions of anti-Semitism, Jewish-American identity, and academia writ-large, and I believe the story would have been interesting even without the addition of the Netanyahus. What makes the story exceptional, however, is the introduction of Benzion Netanyahu, father of future Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and the rest of the family who arrive unexpectedly in tow with Benzion and make themselves (too) comfortable in the Blum's home. The three boys are raucous, the mother is vocally discontent with the conditions of their current life, and Benzion is insulted by his reception at Corbin College. The situation is certainly fictionalized, but also has roots in a real encounter that the author, Joshua Cohen, came across and brought to life stupendously. I’d like to brag for a second that I read and loved this book before it won the Pulitzer Prize in May and at a time when it felt like this book was going to fly completely under the radar. This book deserves to be read (and is particularly good on audio), as it is one of the most interesting and entertaining books that I have read in a long time.