Pen/Faulkner Award Finalists Named

It’s been a good seven days for Gina Berriault and her publisher, Washington’s Counterpoint Press. Last week came an unexpected National Book Critics Circle prize for “Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories,” which brought no cash but modest recognition.

Now she’s one of five nominees for the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction. This is a higher-impact award that supplies the winner with $15,000 and the four runners-up with $5,000 each. It is administered by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

All this is an abrupt change for Berriault, who has labored for four decades in persistent obscurity. It’s also a good boost for Counterpoint, which set up shop here in the fall of 1995 with an avowed commitment to serious works of fiction and nonfiction.

The other nominees include two veteran writers, Ron Hansen for “Atticus,” his contemporary reworking of the Prodigal Son story, and Jamaica Kincaid for “The Autobiography of My Mother,” about a woman’s search for the mother who died giving birth to her. Both novels were finalists for other awards during the past few months.

Rounding out the list are two first novels, “St. Burl’s Obituary” by Daniel Akst, about the adventures of a 300-pound journalist, and “The Book of Mercy” by Kathleen Cambor, about a psychiatrist and her father, who has an obsessive interest in alchemy.

“Stylistically there’s quite a variation here, but the main characters in these books are all utterly memorable,” said novelist Howard Norman, one of this year’s judges. “It takes a while to shake them.”

All told, it’s a representative PEN/Faulkner list of serious writers doing serious work, none of whom yet have the mass appeal of, say, David Guterson. He won the PEN/Faulkner two years ago for his first novel, “Snow Falling on Cedars,” which has gone on to sell 2 million copies in this country and maybe another million elsewhere.

It’s hard to say how much the prize was responsible for Guterson’s massive success but it provided the spark, at least. In a forest of fiction, a prize makes the right book stand out.

Case in point is Berriault’s “Women in Their Beds.” Counterpoint was just printing its 5,000-copy paperback edition when the Critics Circle award was announced. Two thousand copies had been ordered earlier by stores; within three hours, another 1,500 went. By Friday, a reprint was in the works.

“Fiction is the most difficult, most vulnerable part of the marketplace,” said a pleased Counterpoint Editor in Chief Jack Shoemaker. “It’s a place you can make a lot of money but lose more in a hurry.” This time, at least, the odds broke in his favor.

The PEN/Faulkner judges this year, as every year since the prize was created in 1980, were three fiction writers. In addition to Norman, Leslie Marmon Silko and Ursula Hegi read some or all of about 300 novels and short story collections from 88 publishing houses. It was a larger dose of contemporary fiction than even the most committed reviewers can scan in a year.

Norman said he found the experience mostly pleasurable, but had some caveats. “My general feeling is that the gap between terrific and mediocre is very wide, and there’s not a lot in between. There were a lot of very poorly edited novels. They would have been stronger if someone had cajoled or required the authors to use the best parts as a model for the whole thing.”

His other complaints were “an awful lot of novels in the ‘When in doubt murder somebody’ school. It’s what you get in films, too - murder as a form of action.” And finally, “there’s a disturbing tendency toward ignorance of those 19th century principles of fiction such as plot, as well as things like the mechanics of getting a character from one room to the next. There’s an assumption that the reader can visualize everything.”

For Hegi, a professor at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, reading all that fiction was just business as usual. “Most of what I read is contemporary fiction and I teach contemporary literature, so I always read for several hours a day. The only difference was, instead of going out and getting the books, they came to me on a weekly basis.”

At the moment, the contemporary fiction that a lot of people are reading is Hegi’s own “Stones From the River,” which was a PEN/Faulkner finalist two years ago. Oprah Winfrey chose it as the fifth title in her on-air book club for a show that will air next month. In the past five weeks, Simon and Schuster has printed 1.2 million copies of the novel about the Nazi era as seen through the eyes of a German dwarf. All of which explains Hegi’s first reaction when she hears a reporter is on the phone: “I’m sorry, you’ll have to call my publicist.”

She had no particular assessments to offer about the year in fiction. “When I’m not acting as a judge and simply read for myself, there are many more books I don’t finish than ones I do. What I like is when I disappear into a book, not even aware that I’m turning pages, and emerge hours afterward. That was the way I read when I was a kid, and that’s what I look for now.”

In a couple of weeks, Hegi and her two colleagues will make a final decision about the 1996 work of fiction that best offers that sort of reading experience. On May 17, the judges, the winner and the runners-up will all gather in a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library.