British Author Recipient Of National Critics Award

For a year where seemingly every major U.S. writer was attempting the Great American Novel, the country’s critics gave top honors to a major British author.

In a surprise choice Tuesday night, the National Book Critics Circle gave Penelope Fitzgerald its 21st annual fiction prize. The 81-year-old Fitzgerald, cited for the historical novel “The Blue Flower,” became eligible this year when the NBCC voted to allow non-U.S. citizens to compete.

Fitzgerald’s competition included some of the most acclaimed American fiction of 1997: “American Pastoral,” by two-time NBCC winner Philip Roth; “Underworld,” the epic-length Cold War novel by Don DeLillo; and “Cold Mountain,” the Civil War novel by first-time author Charles Frazier that was both an unexpected bestseller and winner last fall of the National Book Award.

“I was on the losing side of the argument for fiction,” NBCC president Art Winslow said after Tuesday’s ceremony. “It was a very, very, very difficult choice.”

Just as many famous American writers who published last year failed even to get nominated, among them Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, John Updike and Thomas Pynchon, whose massive novel “Mason & Dixon” was thought by some to be his best.

Fitzgerald is one of Britain’s most beloved writers and a natural choice, in a sense, for the NBCC prize. A critic for decades, she was in her 60s before she started publishing fiction. Several of her books have been nominated for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize and the novel “Offshore” won that award in 1979.

“The Blue Flower” is set in 18th-century Germany. It tells the story of a young artist, later to become the poet-writer-philosopher Novalis, and his romance with a 12-year-old girl.

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa received the criticism prize for “Making Waves.” James Tobin, author of “Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II,” won for biography and autobiography.

The general nonfiction prize went to Anne Fadiman for “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” a chronicle of an Asian-American family and their epileptic daughter. Charles Wright’s “Black Zodiac” was the poetry winner.

Two honorary prizes were awarded. Leslie Fiedler, author of “Love and Death in the American Novel” and other critical works, received a lifetime achievement award. The author and critic Thomas Mallon won for excellence in reviewing.