Michael Cunningham, one of the three fiction judges for the Pulitzer Prize this year, wrote a fascinating and insightful two-part article for The New Yorker discussing the judges’ experience selecting three books to send to the Pulitzer committee and responding to the committee’s decision not to award a fiction prize this year. If you haven’t already, read this article. It’s much more interesting and worthwhile than anything I have to say here in my blog. But, if you’ve already read it, I do have some thoughts about why, perhaps, the committee didn’t award the prize this year.

In the article, Cunningham describes the three books the fiction judges selected to send to the committee: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and Karen Russell’s debut novel, Swamplandia! Though Cunningham argued that each of these books contained its own sort of brilliance, in his discussion of them, he did seem to be anticipating the possible objections the committee may have had to each book.

The Pale King was unfinished when David Foster Wallace died. Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch deserves much of the credit for how the book turned out. This fact alone was perhaps problematic to the Pulitzer committee. Should they award the prize to The Pale King, who would really have earned the prize, Wallace or Pietsch? Furthermore, I can understand the committee’s possible hesitance in general at awarding the prize to a novel that was unfinished at the time of the author’s death.

Train Dreams poses its own set of problems. Technically, though sold separately as its own book, it’s not a novel or short story collection but a single novella. Johnson originally published Train Dreams in The Paris Review in 2002. Okay, the fact that it was originally published in a journal ten years ago shouldn’t bar it from serious consideration for the Pulitzer; after all, short story collections are usually filled with stories that were previously published in journals. However, the fact that it’s a novella might have given the committee members pause. The Pulitzer is supposed to go to a complete book. I could see it being argued that Train Dreams shouldn’t count.

The other book the judges selected, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, is the least obviously problematic. Karen Russell completed the book herself and is still alive and thriving, working on her next book (a short story collection, which is scheduled to come out next year), and the book is 400+ pages long. Yet reading Cunningham’s defense of the book kind of made me wonder. Cunningham himself acknowledged that the book has problems, but he felt it was impressive . . . for a debut novel. Should a book that wins the Pulitzer need to be qualified in that way?

I did some sleuthing myself (actually because I was trying to decide whether to read Swamplandia!) and found that, though the book is critically acclaimed, MANY readers feel that it’s little more than a showcase for Russell’s elegant prose. On the sentence level, Amazon review after Amazon review notes, Swamplandia! is breathtaking, but the story falls flat in many, many ways. Most everybody seems to agree that Russell is at the beginning of a bright and exciting career, but this particular book—beautiful though the writing is—is good for a debut novel. (NOTE: I did end up deciding to read Swamplandia! and am in the middle of it right now. I’ll reserve my opinion until the end, but perhaps I’ll post about it once I’ve finished and made up my mind about it.)

Who knows the reasons the committee decided not to award a fiction prize this year? All we can do is speculate. However, based on the three books the fiction judges selected as finalists, I think I can at least understand how this might have happened. Still, like Cunningham argues in his article, not awarding a prize is “shortsighted” and “offensive.” Fiction is selective, Cunningham points out, and had there been three different judges this year, they may have selected three different books as finalists. Had that happened, Cunningham further acknowledges, the committee may have selected one as a winner. But ultimately, the committee could have contacted the fiction judges and asked for additional choices. They didn’t have to not award the prize at all.

But since there’s no undoing what’s been done, we can, instead, take this as a valuable reminder of how little (let’s be honest) these kinds of awards really mean. The three fiction judges feel any of the three books they selected as finalists would have deserved the prize. The committee disagreed. And as it is, the finalists only read 300 of the who knows how many books that were actually published last year. Three different judges may have felt one of the other 300 deserved the prize, while you or I may feel one of the countless books that weren’t even being considered deserved it. For a book to win the Pulitzer, it certainly has to have merit, but to say that any book is the best book of the year is sort of ridiculous. You can’t objectively judge something as subjective as literature.