A Guide to the Folio Prize 2015
Ahead of the 2015 Folio Prize Fiction festival, Joe Lloyd fills you in on why it's such an important award and who should win this year.
The Folio Prize has an unenviable mission. Set up an antidote to the Man Booker Prize - which, in 2011, drew heavy criticism for a shortlist largely consisting of books that ‘zipped along’, to the exclusion of more strenuous work – it must forge its reputation against one of the most well-established literary awards in the world. Initially distinguished by its openness to all writers in English, the Booker soon followed suit, robbing the Folio of its uniqueness before it was first awarded.
Academic, democratic and open
Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that the Folio deserves a permanent place in the prize firmament. For a start, whilst Booker entries are publisher-nominated the Folio longlist is largely selected by an ‘Academy’ of over a hundred authors and critics. This eighty-strong set is then made public, adding a transparency to the process that most literary prizes lack. And, most significantly, it is open to both novels and short story collections, collapsing a hierarchical genre system that now seems hopelessly outdated. When George Saunders won the inaugural Folio last year with Tenth of December, it was a victory for a form so often ghettoized by prize committees.
A diverse and versatile shortlist
There are no short story collections on this year’s shortlist, which still demonstrates an admirable versatility on several levels. Only one title, Ali Smith’s Costa Novel and Goldsmiths winner How to be Both, is shared with the Booker shortlist. There is work from Britain, Ireland, India, Kenya, Canada and the US, by five women and three men.
Although there are trends – several/three of the titles, for instance, star what appear to be fictionalized versions of their own writer – they cover a broad thematic range. As head judge William Fiennes has put it, they are books about “time, lost, belonging, war, solitude, marriage and family, the making and the mystery of art.” In short, then, about almost everything.
Big names and newcomers
So how does the shortlist weigh up? Beyond Smith’s excellent How to Be Both, there are works from established figures on both sides of the Atlantic. Rachel Cusk’s Outline has been heralded as her finest work to date, while Colm Toibin’s Nora Webster sees this most heterogeneous novelists craft an emotive tale of 1960s Ireland. Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill, antomises domestic life into a series of intellectually-charged vignettes, and Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows weaves a humane character study around suicide.
Rachel Cusk
The less familiar names include the Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Ouwer, who took eight years to craft her debut Dust, a mystical journey through her country’s violent recent history. And Family Life, the second novel by Ahkil Sharma, is a grief-suffused dissection of the American dream.
The standout work from a rising star
Among these variegated entries, however, there is one that stands out as particularly intriguing. Ben Lerner’s 10:04 neither tells a grand cultural narrative or confines itself to an intimate family setting. Rather, it follows about a year in the life of ‘Ben’, a narrator whose status, background and concerns are very similar to Lerner’s.
10:04 Plot
Like Lerner, Ben is a poet and creative writing teacher, whose first novel has landed him a massive advance on the second. Over thr course of the novel, Ben is diagnosed with a potentially life-ending heart condition, agrees to donate sperm to allow his best friend to have a child, teaches both university students and an eight-year old, witnesses two hurricanes, dates an artist, works in a co-op, endures numerous awkward social encounters and takes a writer’s retreat to Texas.
Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner themes and structure
What story there is ordered around ideas and themes. 10:04 is a book about time, about morality in twenty-first century America, and about the process of writing and being a writer. Although Ben’s wanderings, both internal and external, are never less than compelling, it is the latter that makes the strongest initial impression.
The novel includes poetry and literary criticism, both seamlessly absorbed into the whole; one section presents a children’s book Ben prints for his pupil, another a short story that Lerner published in the New Yorker. Mid-way through, Ben abandons plans for a concept-based novel before gradually arriving at a looser form, the form of 10:04. For many writers, this would become a self-conscious exercise in tricksy metafiction; here, it feels like an earnest, entirely natural depiction of literary creation.
As well as a novel of ideas, 10:04 is equally excellent at presenting the unique, often absurd nation of human relationships.
Ben Lerner discusses poetry
A novel for our time
Of all eight titles nominated from the Folio, 10:04 seems the most important. While many books try to anatomise society from the position of critiquing outsider, Lerner explores a swathe of contemporary America from within. In its melding of fact and fiction, of approachable intellectualism and exquisite comedy, it seems to proffer a new form for the novel. It is truly a novel for today.
On Sun 22nd March at 13:30-14:45, Ben Lerner will appear at the British Library, to discuss ‘Betrayal’ with Mohsin Hamid, Val McDermid and fellow Folio nomiee Jenny Offill.
