[In the following essay, Sahn comments on the characteristics and purpose of book awards in general, and on the National Book Awards in particular.]

The recent surprise win of the National Book Award for Fiction by Larry Heinemann, author of Paco's Story, has made us think once more about the whole philosophy and purpose of book awards. The flurry of astonishment caused by Heinemann's win, in the face of such contenders as Toni Morrison and Philip Roth, was perhaps understandable, but hardly flattering to Heinemann, whose book was a remarkably eloquent evocation of the hideous legacy of the Vietnam War. And although the Fiction judges very wisely kept their own counsel about their deliberations, the impression was certainly left, willy-nilly, that the prize had been given this time not so much to the obvious “best book”—judged in terms of review accolades, that would certainly have been Morrison's—but rather to encourage a comparatively new writer who had written a striking book at a pivotal moment in his career.

There are, in fact, these days a number of remarkably generous grants and awards designed to do just that: in addition to the well-known MacArthur so-called “genius awards,” there are the much newer Whiting Writers' Awards, which recently gave $25,000 each to 10 young writers for the third year in a row, and the even more lavish Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings, which give writers a quarter of a million dollars annually for five years. In contrast to these, the $10,000 for each of the two NBA [National Book Awards] winners, and $1000 each for all the nominees, is comparatively lean pickings.

The difference about the NBA, of course, is that it is an award made publicly, and chosen by a publicly known group of jurors. Sometimes, over the years, these jurors have made the obvious choices—and the list of NBA winners is a highly impressive one, including in this decade such writers as Styron, Updike and Doctorow; sometimes, like this year, they have seemed deliberately to flout expectations. So how do they see their role? None of the judges we spoke to on the subject would agree that they ever thought of anything but rewarding what they considered to be the best book of the year—though there was some reluctance to single out fellow writers, as exemplified by winner E. L. Doctorow's comment last year that literature “is not a horse race” and judge Gail Godwin's sad observation, also last year, that “we took three winners and created a winner and two losers.”

The organizers of the NBA, which includes a blue-ribbon board of top publishing people and an able and energetic director, Barbara Prete, see their function essentially as drawing more national attention, and customers, to books.

They crave better and wider coverage—and in fact the decision in the past couple of years to make the winners known only on the night, in Academy Awards style, is a deliberate attempt to create more news value—and openly aspire to the commercial heft of Britain's Booker or France's Goncourt prizes.

Sometimes, however, the simultaneous desire for quality and hope for greater sales can be an uneasy mix. On more than one occasion Britain's booksellers have openly grumbled about the Booker winner, being clearly much happier when it has served to reinforce sales of an author who would have sold well anyway rather than to send customers after a book they might not, in the end, enjoy.

The clout of the NBA—or indeed of any major book award, including the Pulitzer and the Nobel—is not exactly hearty in America's bookstores, and perhaps never will be; the country is too big, unwieldy and heterogeneous for that. So perhaps the best service the NBA judges can render is to go ahead and make their choices without regard to whether the winning books are likely to win wide readership; neither to deliberately seek out dark horses nor shy away from bestsellers, but to pursue, as they swear they do, the best book, regardless.

As to how the occasion can be made more newsy, in a country where books are rather low on the scale of cultural priorities, it is noteworthy that the two most-discussed of the recent Booker occasions have both been ones on which feisty authors have stood up and spoken out frankly about the current publishing scene: Fay Weldon four years ago and P. D. James this year. While it may seem tough on publishers to ask them to pay $200 a seat to hear their dirty linen aired, there's no doubt that it makes news editors sit up. So in future, rather than such brilliant but airy exercises as William Gass engaged in last month, how about finding an eloquent, well-known author who has a broad vision of what publishing is and should be? (Philip Caputo, at a recent AAP [American Association of Publishers] symposium, was just such a speaker, and made the day.)

Perhaps no one will ever devise a way of giving book awards that can support the expectations everyone brings to them; in the meantime, the best the judges can do is look only for the best, without fear or favor, and let the publicity come as it may.