The Booker Prize Winner is Announced

For example, while we were in Southampton, collapsing in bed at the Jury’s Hotel (conference-type huge hotel like a Hilton) after a long day of meeting people at the university, we got the telly tuned to the live
coverage of the Booker Prize dinner and announcement.  They did culture-vulture kind of interviews with literati about the short-listed authors and books and agreed with everyone we’d been reading in the
press that
--Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go’ was the likely winner, even though he has already won for “The Remains of the Day,” and therefore probably theprize should go to
--Julian Barnes for “Arthur & George" (about Arthur Conan Doyle and a man he tried to save from a miscarriage of justice), because he didn’t win for “Flaubert’s Parrot” years back and probably should have, yet
--Ali Smith just might get it as a dark horse for “The Accidental.”  Of course,
--Zadie Smith shouldn’t feel bad about not getting it because she is so young and “White Teeth” got so much good press and sales already, and
--Sebastian Barry was surely too harsh and sad with his “A Long, Long Way,” about Irish soldiers’ suffering in World War I, and his compatriot
--John Banville would never win, no matter how many times he was nominated, because his work is just too intellectual and elegantly crafted, and in particular “The Sea” has no plot and wouldn’t engage the
judging committee, however unfair it was that Banville’s “The Book of Evidence,” a fabulous book, lost out to Ishiguro’s “The Remains of theDay” in 1989.

Well you probably heard that John Banville did win.  I whooped and almost danced on the bed.  Michael too was happy, though not so wildly demonstrative.  We both are fond of Banville because he was so kind as to give a reading—from “The Sea”-- for Michael’s summer class in Dublin at Trinity two summers ago, and he went out to the pub with us and was as courtly and restrained as he was in all the press coverage of the Booker.  I love him particularly, having been a fan for years, and having forced numerous grad students to read him.  I am about to write to two, who wrote on him in their dissertations, to get those chapters out as articles, because the Banville market is hot.  He IS a little difficult.   Banville dropped out of school before completing high school and is an auto-didact and loves to parade his knowledge, always
playfully.  Anyhow, we celebrated mightily and cheered for the Irish.