Well, obligatory Pulitzer post, we meet at last. Let’s begin by allowing that people smarter than I have already cleared a good deal of the dust that the Pulitzer Prize Board kicked up with its decision not to single out a tome of the fictional variety (my thoughts are perhaps best captured by better minds here and here, and to a lesser extent here). What I have to say regarding this hoopla—what I indent by way of contribution to this debate—is that, at the end of it, I pitch my tent with the camp that thinks this more cause for concern than anger.

Most card-holding members of the club who write on things of this nature agree that there are only two real explanations for the board’s decision not to pick a winner: either they were too conflicted over the finalists to agree on one book, or there wasn’t enough enthusiasm for any of the nominees to put them over the top. It is distinctly the latter, not the former, that worries me.

You see, while it hurts to see the literary world I love so dear losing precious sales, and to watch the likes of Denis Johnson, Karen Russell, and David Foster Wallace—all authors whose work I’ll carry with me to the grave—get the nose-thumbing treatment, what keeps me up in the wee hours is not that idea that the board was so passionately at odds over the likes of Train Dreams, Swamplandia!, and The Pale King, that they couldn’t pick a winner, but that they took a look at these three volumes and decided none of them could bear the weight of the prize. What troubles me is the notion that what the literary world thinks of as good (and all three of these works reared their heads on enough critics’ end-of-year lists to meet that criteria), has gotten so far away from what the reading public, as represented by Pulitzer & Co., is looking for, that the two can no longer even hold hands and pretend to smile for the camera at the family reunion once a year. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the thing that worries me more than e-readers, and SparkNotes, and cell-phone literature, and revised editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a shrinking literary market, and decreasing book sales, is the idea that the literary world and the public are growing estranged from one another. The thought that what is said in our literature won’t echo through our culture, or that what happens in our culture won’t find it’s way into our books, is downright disturbing to me.