The 2007 Championship
presented by
CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH
The Road
v. Absurdistan
Judged by Jessica Francis Kane & All ToB Judges
BRADY UDALL: Did I or did I not, in my capacity as solemnly-ordained Tournament of Books judge, already decide against Absurdistan? And now some group known as “the readers” has voted to bring the book back into contention? This is exactly why I’ve always been suspicious of democracy.
Absurdistan still doesn’t work for me. The Road is the best book I’ve read in five years. My decision, and let it be final: The Road.
MARCUS SAKEY: Gary Shteyngart writes with intelligence and grace. He’s funny—not fall-out-of-your-seat funny, not relate-it-to-your-wife funny, but funny. If I were the sort to have dinner parties, I’d save him a chair.
Cormac McCarthy would beat him to death with one.
McCarthy is arguably the first man of American letters. The Road may not be his very best work (I favor Blood Meridian), but it’s still his A-game, and poor Absurdistan doesn’t stand a chance.
SARAH HEPOLA: Absurdistan is a funny book, but I kept thinking, in terms of a laugh-per-minute ratio, I’d be better off watching The Office. (Or 30 Rock. Have you seen it lately? It’s gotten good.) The Road, on the other hand, is unsettling and strange and powerful, and I don’t love it so much as I appreciate it deeply. This is great writing. So it’s no contest for me: The Road wins.
MARIA SCHNEIDER: Absurdistan reminds us that the streets of the former Soviet republics, far more than America’s, are paved with satire. And Shteyngart’s author photo kills—if I ever write a book, I’ll use his photo instead of mine. But look, I spent several endless, insomniac nights reading The Road, and it’s still giving me a concussion. I’m sorry, it’s unfair, brutal and wrong, but The Road runs over Snack Daddy’s khui with a shopping cart. Oprah agrees.
KATE SCHLEGEL: I’d never read any McCarthy before and don’t like post-apocalyptic tales. This pairing was Shteyngart’s to lose. And 150 pages into Absurdistan, with no plot and precious little non-potty humor to be found, he lost. I admit, it improved in the final hundred pages. It had, finally, an active plot! But the first half of the book was its fatal flaw. My vote goes to The Road.
COLIN MELOY: McCarthy on the Post-Apocolypse? Sign me up! And how! That was one of the few page-turners I’ll read this year. I literally could not put it down. Shteyngart’s Soviet-kitschy romp, on the other hand, took a little more time to digest. I hated it for the first 40 pages or so but then something changed (the writing? My mood? My dinner that evening?) very drastically and within a page I was really enjoying it. This is a tough one, but I’ll have to go with Absurdistan, if only for that fact it was able to sway me so impressively.
DAN CHAON: I’ll go for The Road, at least in part because it includes some excellent recipes.
ANTHONY DOERR: I admit, I had to look up “catamite.” As in, “…and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.” I almost wish I hadn’t. The Road is a mother of a book, enthralling, relentless, devastating. Absurdistan is funny in so many places and I love that Shteyngart is willing to take the kinds of risks he takes. But my vote goes to McCarthy.
JESSA CRISPIN: Sending Absurdistan up against The Road for a duel just seems unfair. Shteyngart is armed with a pillow and McCarthy a gun.
MARK SARVAS: I’m a fan of Gary Shteyngart’s work and I loved Absurdistan—the novel is as funny, wise and big-hearted as its 325-pound protagonist. Any other year, Shteyngart would have something to crow about in this final round. But The Road is a masterpiece. It’s the kind of book writers dream of writing, a career capper, a deeply moving, affecting and—yes—important book. I have to choose The Road. No, wait, Absurdistan. No. The Road. Damn, wait. Absurdistan… No. The Road. That’s my final answer.
MAUD NEWTON: The Road left me depleted and unsteady, feeling as though one of the roving gangs in McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world tied me down and sucked the marrow from my bones. Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan is a very smart, funny book—one I’ve praised more extensively elsewhere—but McCarthy, after the disappointment of last year’s No Country for Old Men, is at the top of his game. The Road may even surpass Blood Meridian. I have to cast my vote for McCarthy.
SAM LIPSYTE: What a killer showdown—the funniest book of the year and the best parenting manual in recent memory. These are brilliant novels by an old bastard with a masterpiece behind him and a young bastard with one in his future (guaranteed). With the contest this close, my vote begins to wilt with sentimentality. It is by no more than the singed hair on a spit-roasted baby that the winner is The Road.
ELIZABETH GAFFNEY: Absurdistan is funny.
The Road changed me—artistically, politically, emotionally. It’s one of the most harrowing and important books written in years. It has everything a book should have (except of course the one thing Absurdistan is drowning in: humor).
And though I firmly believe that American fiction needs more humor, there’s no contest here. The Road wins by approximately 3,000 miles.
SASHA FRERE-JONES: Absurdistan: Don’t love the Clever Boots School—Safran Foer, Franzen, Shteyngart—where narrative is dressed up in and often strangled by hilarious vernacular, current-events references, and impressively improbable plot convulsions. That said, many of the routines in this book got stuck in my head. I’d like to evict a few of them but, hey, that’s baseball. Or fiction.
The Road: Love the old, silky backbreaking sentences. Love the new, steel-bullet sentences. Had the same McCarthy experience I always have. One hour after finishing the book: “Man, can he write.” One month after reading the book: “Which one was that?”
So, Absurdistan.
ANDREW WOMACK: Absurdistan is hilarious, and Shteyngart gets my vote as a writer I’m going to watch. But it’s The Road that was the more affecting of the two books, and that makes it the winner for me.
ROSECRANS BALDWIN: It’s a stunner! Loved it! Because you’ll never eat rotisserie chicken again: The Road.
JESSICA FRANCIS KANE: Last night I stood a long time by my son’s crib watching him sleep. New parents do this a lot, but I am not a new parent. A little later I went downstairs and watched my daughter sleep. After she and her brother are in bed I’m usually so grateful for the respite that most nights the last thing I want to do, much as I love them, is watch them sleep.
Most nights I have not just finished reading The Road.
I tried to resist this book. I’d seen some of the reviews; I knew the subject matter. I slogged through the opening pages thinking, “Really? Is this going to work?” Then I hit page 16, the man remembering a summer evening in a theater with his wife: “Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.”
I read furiously after that, couldn’t put the book down. Only I had to, had to make dinner and put my children to bed—just the simple stuff of life we take for granted and The Road shows us we’re fools to do. Fools.
Good God, where did this book come from? It seems to me terrifyingly good, and not good as in “masterpiece” or “instant classic,” but good as in “future sacred text.” The world’s slow dimming. Civilization dying. The ingenious decision to set the story some years after the cataclysm, whatever it was. It’s wrenching to read the time placers: the early years.
“Once in those early years he’d wakened in a barren wood and lay listening to flocks of migratory birds overhead in that bitter dark. …He never heard them again.”
Where I live in Virginia the cherry trees are blooming. Today it will be warm and the air seems soft and pink with promise. I, however, feel sick. Flashes of McCarthy’s burned-out land keep coming to mind, obliterating all of it. It’s awful and wonderful. I haven’t been so affected by a book in a long time.
Mr. Shteyngart, I haven’t said anything about Absurdistan. I intended to because I read and enjoyed it. The problem is that your book exists somewhere up in the stratosphere where the sun is still visible, while after The Road I’m post-apocalypse, down on the ground, stumbling around, wondering what the hell to do. Usually I’m glad if a book I’ve read stays with me. This time, frankly, I’m praying for the cloud to lift a little. It’s hard to breathe.
My decision: The Road
Final: The Road (15), Absurdistan (2)
This year’s champion:
The Road
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
GUILFOILE: Whoa! An unprecedented lopsider in the three-year history of the event, although there was certainly much praise given to Absurdistan. It’s funny to think, given our discussions the past couple weeks, that the man who, at this moment, is America’s premier literary star, the man who is about to be buried under awards far more prestigious than this one, the man who will make his moving pictures debut on Oprah next month, is an unabashed genre writer. Much more so even than Kate Atkinson, who received all the genre attention from the judges and from us.
WARNER: “Awards more prestigious than this one,” the hell you say! What could be more prestigious than winning a weeks-long battle to the death against 15 other books? Just about every other award I suppose, but only our Tournament of Books and the Orange Prize (where cases of citrus fruit are donated to high school marching bands to be sold door-to-door in the name of the winner) has foodstuffs involved. (Though I’ve heard a rumor that the Swedes are going to substitute chocolate wrapped in gold foil for krona for the next Nobel winner.)
GUILFOILE: I received a lot of mail after our commentary on the Sasha Frere-Jones judgment (and read Sasha’s response to it, as well). One of those was from a writer who commented that once a genre writer reaches a certain level of success and sales and some critical mass of critical praise, the establishment no longer considers him genre. In addition to McCarthy he cited Dennis Lehane and Pete Dexter and others. I’d add Larry McMurtry. I think that’s right, but I also think that only happens to a writer who’s paid his dues—I think a genre writer who achieves huge financial success right out of the box will always fight for respect.
And boy has McCarthy paid dues. Has anyone built a career the way McCarthy has built his? That respect is earned, man. Bleak and violent novel after novel after novel.
Good for him.
WARNER: As someone predicted (OK, it was me), this was indeed a runaway rout, but I’d be hard-pressed to find a book that could’ve taken more than five of our judges off The Road. Half of a Yellow Sun had its admirers, and One Good Turn won its share of bouts (though often by default), but neither of them would’ve given The Road much of a tussle. This was Mike Tyson in his prime taking on a troop of Girl Scouts, and not even all of the Girl Scouts at the same time, but instead stepping forward one at a time for their beating. (No offense to Gary Shteyngart or the Girl Scouts; I’m just sayin…)
Thanks to the Rooster and the Oprah, McCarthy has gone from big to massive. He’s blowing up, as the kids say, which seems appropriate given his milieu. It seems like only a matter of time until we see a Saturday Night Live skit with a baby being roasted over a fire.
GUILFOILE: I suspect McCarthy may be the first winner of the Tournament of Books who might actually know what to do with a live rooster if we sent him one. I’m pretty sure he could break its neck and roast him on a spit if nothing else. Nevertheless, we will be making a donation in his name to Heifer International, which will use the money to buy flocks of chicks for indigent farmers in Africa.
(I’m pretty sure they mean baby chickens. I think Amnesty International would have sent me a mailer about that if they didn’t.)
Well done, Mr. McCarthy. With fingers crossed, your invitation to the annual Tourney after-party is in the mail.
WARNER: Thanks once again for inviting me into the commentary booth. It keeps me from being homeless for at least one month out of the year. Maybe next year a guy could get a space heater.
GUILFOILE: Thank you, John. And the final word of congratulations goes to the Book Bloggers’ Office Pool winner, Powell’s own Brockman, and the reader he was playing for, Michelle Dreher of San Francisco. Michelle wins a copy of every book in this year’s competition courtesy, appropriately enough, of Powell’s.
Hey, this just occurred to me, but did Brockman know what books were being shipped to the judges before he made his picks?
Just trying to stir up a little scandal to keep the Hot Stove fires burning until next year. Cock-a-doodle-do, everybody.