Newsarama’s blog drew my attention to this post by Wired writer Tony Long, who was considering the shortlist nomination of Gene Yang for a National Book Award (as reported here earlier) for his American Born Chinese graphic novel. Most commentators have been pretty delighted at this development (although admittedly most, including myself, are keen supporters of graphic novels), but not Tony it seems:
“I have not read this particular “novel” but I’m familiar with the genre so I’m going to go out on a limb here. First, I’ll bet for what it is, it’s pretty good. Probably damned good. But it’s a comic book. And comic books should not be nominated for National Book Awards, in any category. That should be reserved for books that are, well, all words.
This is not about denigrating the comic book, or graphic novel, or whatever you want to call it. This is not to say that illustrated stories don’t constitute an art form or that you can’t get tremendous satisfaction from them. This is simply to say that, as literature, the comic book does not deserve equal status with real novels, or short stories. It’s apples and oranges.
If you’ve ever tried writing a real novel, you’ll know where I’m coming from. To do it, and especially to do it well enough to be nominated for this award, the American equivalent of France’s Prix Goncourt or Britain’s Booker Prize, is exceedingly difficult.”
Okay, I can see where he is coming from on this front and understand the thrust of his argument. I also think he is, in my opinion, totally wrong. To start with, ‘apples and oranges’ is a flawed comparison: most books on awards shortlists are already quite different from each other, with different narratives, different styles and approaches. Michel Faber is quite different from Margaret Atwood. Sorry, Tony, but they aren’t all apples or oranges, they are all different already, which rather renders your comparison redundant in my view. And what do you mean by ‘real novel’? Is that any prose novel at all, or only certain types of novel such as those judged by critics to be of literary merit?
The fact that graphic novels have (sometimes slowly and grudgingly) become more accepted in the mainstream bookstores, libraries and awards is not just because they sell more but because there is some challenging work out there which deserved to be read. The word ‘read’ in that last statement is crucial: we read graphic novels just as we read prose books. Does including pictures invalidate this as a book as he seems to suggest? If so then it must also invalidate any children’s illustrated book (which is a large amount of them) and what about art books? Text with many pictures – does that mean they aren’t proper books?
Should Jimmy Corrigan not have won the Guardian First Book Prize a few years back? Didn’t that win do exactly what a good book prize should do and open the minds of new readers to something they may never otherwise have picked up and read? If it had been restricted only to a comics industry award would it have sold to so many different people? No, it wouldn’t; I know, because I sold a lot of copies to people who had never heard of graphic novels before and had to explain the medium to them. Quite a few came back looking for more and went away with Transmetropolitan, Sandman and more. It did that thing that books do probably better than any other medium in human cultural history: they opened minds and fired imaginations. Does it matter if some had more words than others or that some had pictures? Are my old copies of Alice in Wonderland not proper books because they have Tenniel’s illustrations in them? Isn’t this a quite arbitrary distinction he is making here?
As someone who has sold a lot of books and graphic novels and spent a lot of time reviewing and recommending both (equally) to readers this attitude seems quite retrograde to me. I’m a heavy reader and a longtime bookseller and I have no problem in equating the best graphic novels with their prose counterparts, quite the reverse. This sort of attitude is closely related to the attitude which keeps some excellent books from some of the highest literary awards (why don’t you see a good crime or SF book on the Booker, no matter how well it was written?) and as such it is damaging to books, damaging to creators and damaging to readers. Just celebrate good storytelling, because, ultimately, that’s what a good novel, graphic or otherwise, is doing.
Related posts:
- Cast your vote for the annual SFX Awards Voting is now open in the annual awards from Blighty’s...
- Nebula and Tiptree awards announced Kevin at SF Awards Watch has news of this year’s...
- Arthur C Clarke awards shortlist Tom Hunter tells us that with word beginning to leak...
- Shirley Jackson Awards shortlist The shortlist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, given for “literature...
- LA Times Book Prize nominees Chris Staros from the excellent indy comics publisher Top Shelf...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
October 30th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
I think it’s more basic than this. If an award is for a novel, it should go to a novel. If it’s for a graphic novel, it should go to a graphic novel. A novel will never win or be a finalist for a graphic novel award, so why should a graphic novel be a winner or finalist for a novel award? It’s wo different forms. It’s not that one is better than another. It’s that they’re different. It would be like saying that a book without a lick of SF or fantasy or any discussion of science should be eligible for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
That’s my only beef with it.
Cheers,
JeffV
October 30th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Erm – not to derail a good rant, but Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell was a favourite to win the Booker at one stage. I’d say that was SF.
Attitudes are changing, slowly. You’ll always get people who don’t like change, but they’ll all be dead soon because they don’t believe in all this medicine nonsense and are busy applying leeches.
October 31st, 2006 at 10:58 am
Gareth, you are quite right, Cloud Atlas did have some SF elements (in fact we did that for the SF Book Group I’m in), but the point is it was not perceived as SF by the literary establishment or critics. Similarly with Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (another one we discussed at the Group), which even the author initially denied was SF although a year or so later she relented and confessed it did have some SF motifs. My point in mentioning the SF books was really to say that books published as SF&F generally won’t find their way onto mainstream awards, not even the Booker longlist, regardless of how astonishing a work they are.
October 31st, 2006 at 11:20 am
Jeff, I can understand your point, but worry that too many seperate awards leads to increased ‘gehtto-isation’ of genres and styles. Arguably this has happened already in the case of crime and SF for examples; ignored often by the mainstream they created their own awards. Now one of the arguments I hear for not having SF&F in a mainstream list is that they have their own awards, something of a circular argument… I worry that ghetto-isation makes a field less accessible and open to new readers.
Of course GNs have their own awards, but I still think they should be eligible for mainstream awards too, especially given the huge growth in readership among mainstream audiences and in mainstream bookstores. I suspect events like Jimmy Corrigan winning the Guardian First Book Award contributed to this growth in awareness of the medium, with many readers of it never having been near a traditional comics store.
And yes, you are quite right that a book with no SF wouldn’t make it onto an SF awards shortlist, but the SF shortlists have proved to be far more flexible and open that their mainstream counterparts in defining what they will accept, hence books like Cloud Atlas and Never Let Me Go appearing on shortlists, despite their publishers not putting them out as SF. If a mainstream award has a GN category then that’s fine to put them in there, but if it lacks one then I think the GN should be eligible to be considered for the ‘normal’ award. In the case of American Born Chinese is it in a younger reader’s category and reflects the fact that libraries and bookstores are finding GNs a good way of interesting more children in reading (something I’ve had personal experience with, advising a couple of school libraries on the subject, with success). And although GNs do indeed do literally (sorry, no pun intended) what a prose author does with words, the creation of images, it still engages the imagination of the reader to fill in the gaps between the frames to give flowing life to the events portrayed, be they for younger readers (already brought up with picture books from the youngest age) or mature readers.
Of course, I could now have a rant about SF convention awards often ignoring GNs
Nah, save that for another day! Still, it’s got people talking about books and GNs, which is rarely a bad thing. And one last note here for anyone else reading: I know Jeff is not only a good writer and keen reader, he also likes graphic novels and supports them as he does other literary works, so I know he isn’t having a go here, just making a point.