“There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy.”
–Walt Whitman, on New York City
There is a newcomer in the world of literary awards: the Gotham Book Prize. It was founded in 2020, and first awarded in December of that year, by venture capitalist Bradley Tusk, and Howard Wolfson, a former adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Tusk and Wolfson established the Gotham Book Prize (GBP) as the city it is meant to celebrate burned in the fire of the Covid-19 outbreak. The GBP was their attempt to celebrate, to appreciate, ultimately, to uplift New York City in one of the darkest chapters of its story. Qualification for this award is simple: produce an outstanding work about or occurring in New York City.
Covid-19 has gone from epidemic to endemic, something to be guarded against as best we can with vaccines, booster shots, and the continued wearing of masks in crowded areas. Gone, thankfully, are the days of extended social isolation, hospitals bursting at the seams, and the constant wail and echo of ambulance sirens in the steel canyons of “the city that never sleeps.” A piece of what remains is the brainchild of Tusk and Wilson, a new literary prize for “award enthusiasts” like myself to follow. It is fitting to begin this new blog with a discussion of this new award, and the two works which have thus far garnered the honor.
The inaugural winner of the GBP was Deacon King Kong, the most recent work by writer and musician James McBride. If you recognize that name, it is likely because McBride won the 2013 National Book Award with his novel The Good Lord Bird, a powerful narrative of abolitionist John Brown and the events leading up to his famous raid on Harpers Ferry. (You may also have seen the miniseries of the same name. While my personal mantra is always “the book was better,” there is no denying the sheer excellence of the miniseries. I highly recommend both it and the novel from which it was adapted.)
Deacon King Kong takes place in late 1969, in the Causeway Housing Projects of South Brooklyn. It is here that a church deacon, former Little League coach, and perpetually-inebriated man known as “Sportcoat” disturbs the fragile balance of the local social ecosystem when he shoots the resident drug dealer. (Who was once Sportcoat’s star pitcher, no less.) Residents of the Causeway fear for Sportcoat’s safety, though he has no recollection of the events and goes about his usual business. His would-be victim survives this attempt on his life, and seems inclined to forgiveness, but someone still seeks to end Sportcoat’s life. What follows in this 370-page narrative is an incredible, at times almost fantastical chain of events which leaves few members of the community unaffected.
The denizens of the Causeway are as beautiful and eclectic a collection of characters to have ever graced the pages of any novel. A mix of Black and Lantinx, immigrants and long-established families, they offer up an imperfect sense of solidarity against the outside world, including the machinations of a lonely one-man mob family and a love-sick police officer only months away from retirement. As the Causeway and the rest of New York City move ever closer to the hell of the heroin epidemic and the myriad troubles of the 1970s and 80s (Think of the 1975 Daily News and its famous headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”), the residents of the Causeway focus on the search for their missing Christmas Club money, while an ancient, longer-sought treasure rests in an unexpected spot. Magical almost to the level of a fairy tale–for, in some ways, that is what the novel is, a modern-day American fairy tale–Deacon King Kong illustrates the highs and lows of the human experience, and describes the hopes, dreams, and belief systems that anchor and uplift the human being. It is, in its own fashion, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s seminal One Hundred Years of Solitude, if with a more constricted timeline.
The second, 2021 recipient of the GBP is Andrea Elliott’s nonfiction work–expanded from an earlier collection of essays for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction–Invisible Child. This 515-page exploration of the life of Dasani Coates (“She is the embodiment of New York City–charming, fearless, tactical, brash.”) and her family as they struggle through poverty and homelessness is that rare work of nonfiction written with the eloquence and compassion of a novel. Dasani, her sister Avianna, and her mother Chanel all bear names drawn from higher-end, unattainable products, representing the most recent expression of generations’ worth of aspirations for a better life. Yet, that better life never seems to arrive, and all hopes prove ephemeral and just beyond reach. Elliott’s work is a profound exercise of the sociological imagination, linking the life of the individual, the young Dasani, with the broader social, political, educational, familial, and economic social structures which dominate her existence, even as they fail her at nearly every turn.
However, as with Deacon King Kong, the inhabitants of Invisible Child defy two-dimensionality: no one in either work can be categorized with Disney-reminiscent judgements of “good” and/or “evil.” (Well, we will allow for one exception in McBride’s novel, but you will find no spoilers here.) What we see in both books are strivers, human beings–American citizens–from whom the American Dream has been denied. In these works, we see drug dealers, brawlers, shoplifters, Mafiosos, and black marketeers at their best and their worse, but there is not and there cannot be any castigations of these people and their choices. What we see in these works is survival, plain and simple.
For a prize centered around Whitman’s exultant city, the first two recipients of the GBP are interesting choices, as neither pulls its punches in their chastisements of a metropolis in which great wealth and desperate poverty exist side-by-side. The Causeway Housing Projects stand only a few hundred yards from the industrial decay of extinct New York City manufacturing, even as the Projects’ location in South Brooklyn affords its residents a spectacular view of the Statue of Liberty. In real life, Dasani and her mother struggle with homelessness as the areas of NYC in which their grandparents–only one or two generations removed from the Great Migration, the journey of millions of Southern Blacks in search of better lives out of the Jim Crow South–once owned homes and businesses. Seemingly overnight, expensive new stores have replaced the established stores and bodegas in which Chanel can find affordable food for her children. Deindustrialization in Deacon King Kong, gentrification in Invisible Child: both have proven to disproportionately affect People of Color like Dasani and the residents of the Causeway. Both works hold nothing back, putting the spotlight on these exercises in economic disenfranchisement.
It is no wonder, then, that both works are also demonstrations of the individual’s yearning to control some element of their lives. Most of the Black residents of the Causeway Projects spend the novel searching for their lost Christmas Club savings, skillfully hidden by Sportcoat’s deceased wife, who, despite returning in ghost form to berate him for his drinking, does not see fit to share the secret location with him. Finding this money takes on elements of the quest for the Holy Grail, and why should it not? As Sister Gee so eloquently explains to a bemused outsider, “That Christmas Club money is all we can control. We can’t stop these drug dealers from selling poison in front our houses. Or make the city stop sending our kids to lousy schools. We can’t stop folks from blaming us for everything gone wrong in New York, or stop the army from calling our sons to Vietnam after them Vietcong done cut the white soldiers’ toenails too short to walk. But the little nickels and dimes we saved up so we can get our kids ten minutes of love at Christmastime, that’s ours to control. What’s wrong with that?”
For Dasani and Chanel, their sense of self-worth manifests as an ironclad demand for respect from those around them. Their sheer uncompromising refusal to be judged by the world around them often leads to physical fights, which both are always prepared for. In fact, away from Dasani’s teachers and from the family’s caseworkers, Chanel encourages her daughter to engage in physical confrontations whenever necessary. With these fights, and the concomitant demand for respect, Dasani and her mother seek to control the image of themselves in a world that leaves them little else to possess. These fights, though they never improve Dasani’s situation at school and sometimes lead to criminal charges for Chanel, create for the Coates family a hierarchy of respect and value, and they will stop at nothing to be at the top of that ladder. It is, after all, the only ladder that our society has left for them to climb.
I have been reminded (or lectured to) on several occasions about how literary awards are–and you can pick your own term from this grab-bag of disparagement–useless, elitist, silly, ethnocentric, etc. It surprises the people sharing these opinions when I invariably agree. The Nobel Prize in Literature is far too Eurocentric for an award that is supposed to represent worldwide literature. The Booker Prize has been criticized as an expression of British cultural imperialism; though an overreaching criticism, I do not deny some merit in the accusation. In my opinion, the National Book Award for Fiction has a history of poor decision-making that continues to this day. (Larry Heinemann’s Vietnam War novel Paco’s Story should never have beaten Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In fact, I would like to know why war novels seem disproportionately represented in the list of winners.)
Alas, the criticisms of literary awards are all-too-often legitimate, and yet(!), a faithful tradition of following these awards has one incontrovertible benefit: when you promise to read a winning work, regardless of whether you would have personally chosen to do so, you have opened yourself up to new books, new authors, and new interpretations of this weird little construct we call “reality.” Despite my enjoyment of The Good Lord Bird, McBride’s latest work may well have fallen off my radar, displaced from my “To Be Read Pile” by other works and other authors. Thanks to the GBP, I have discovered in Deacon King Kong a narrative that will not soon leave my thoughts. I readily admit that, given my penchant for fictional narratives, I would likely never have read Invisible Child if not for the GBP. Now, Dasani and her family’s struggles live in and with me, guaranteeing at least one more set of eyes staring unforgivingly at the economic inequality that New York City, and our country at large, needs to fix. What we will ultimately make of the GBP remains to be seen, as two works are insufficient to illustrate a typology. Already, however, it stands out as an award willing to envelop both fiction and nonfiction, without separate categories, in its quest to accomplish its mandate: placing the spotlight on New York City and the lives of those who call it home. McBride and Elliott are both supremely worthy winners of this new award.
And we will see what is to come. The third winner of the Gotham Book Prize will be announced in December of this year.
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