Inside the List
By
GREGORY COWLES
Julian Barnes
BIG DADDY BARNES: As literary prizes go, nothing beats the Pulitzer for securing a
novel’s place on the best-seller list: 9 of the last 10 fiction winners have
spent time here. (The exception is Geraldine Brooks’s “March,” which won in
2006 but never cracked the list.) What about the Man Booker Prize in Britain?
It’s almost as powerful. Seven of the last 10 winners have gone on to become
New York Times best sellers, including this year’s pick, “The Sense of an
Ending,” by Julian Barnes, which has logged five weeks thus far and is still
lurking on the hardcover extended list at No. 18.
The title of Barnes’s novel is lifted from the
critic Frank Kermode, which should surprise nobody: throughout 14 works of
fiction, Barnes has sampled other writers so much he’s like a literary version
of Big Daddy Kane. Sometimes his borrowings are clear, as in “Flaubert’s
Parrot” (about a man whose obsession with Flaubert masks his grief for his
marriage) or “Arthur & George” (a mystery about the real-life Arthur Conan
Doyle). Sometimes they’re less so. For a long time, my favorite Barnes line
came from the protagonist of his first novel, “Metroland,” who sums up his
youthful aestheticism this way: “Some people say that life is the thing, but I
prefer reading.” Then I learned he was actually quoting the early-20th-century
critic Logan Pearsall Smith. Come to think of it, the decision to have this
character hide behind somebody else’s obscure (to me), slightly fusty words is
so appropriate, and so revealing, that it may still be my
favorite Barnes line, even if Barnes didn’t write it.
For an obscure, slightly fusty sentence that Barnes
did write — but pretended not to — see Geoff Dyer’s Reading Life column in the
Dec. 18 issue of the Book Review.
ANCILLARY BENEFIT: Another prize winner to hit the list this year was “The Swerve,”
Stephen Greenblatt’s history of Lucretius’ poem “On the Nature of Things.” The
book, which spent four weeks on the hardcover nonfiction list before capturing
a National Book Award in November, has had an unexpected side effect: suddenly,
people are buying Lucretius. At press time, “On the Nature of Things” was the
No. 5 best-selling poetry title at Amazon, and for a time this fall it held the
top spot in that category. Did I mention it’s a poem about particle physics,
from the first century B.C.? “The spike in the sales of Lucretius’ great poem
is absolutely thrilling,” Greenblatt said via e-mail. “I first became aware of
it when Penguin, the publisher of one of the English translations, called my
publisher. For a moment at least I could feel like a modest version of Poggio
Bracciolini, the book hunter who returned Lucretius to circulation in 1417.”
THE POETRY LIST: Amazon isn’t the only organization to track poetry sales. On its
Web site, the Poetry Foundation divides best sellers into four categories:
contemporary, anthologies, children’s and small presses. That means Lucretius
doesn’t make the cut — and intentionally so. “The contemporary poetry
best-seller list is meant to reflect the current market for new poetry,” the
foundation explains in its small print, “and so excludes translations and new
editions of classical works.” What does make the cut? The week before
Thanksgiving, the top five books on the contemporary list were (1) “The Best of
It,” by Kay Ryan (Grove); (2) “Horoscopes for the Dead,” by Billy Collins
(Random House); (3) “Songs of Unreason,” by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon); (4)
“Evidence,” by Mary Oliver (Beacon); and (5) “Head Off & Split,” by Nikky
Finney (Triquarterly). Prizes matter here, too: Ryan won the Pulitzer in poetry
this year, and Finney the National Book Award.
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