And you thought it was going to be a literary event.
Novelists sometimes behave like rogue cabdrivers, says Martin Amis. “Half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.” The Lebanese author Rabih Alameddine should know. Flag down a Beiruti taxi; the guy gestures hop in. Where exactly? There’s a family of five in the back, two kids in the passenger seat. (It’s what you get when the fare’s flat, paid per head.) So get in. Take a forced tour of the city’s laneless roads. Not infrequently you’ll scuff, nudge, bump, butt, rap, tap other cars, maybe pedestrians. Nothing serious. Shrug off the irritation like Mediterranean dust off your collar and move on. The 2025 National Book Awards ceremony was a slightly grimier and more taxing experience than that.
Alameddine won this year’s award for fiction by taking American letters exactly nowhere. The True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) might have been a fine novel about the historic absurdities of late 20th-century Lebanon, but that would’ve required the author to say something substantive and, well, novel about the historic absurdities of late 20th-century Lebanon. Or it could’ve been a fine story about comic and tragic and awkward and piercing familial intimacy among Middle Easterners, but that probably wouldn’t have won a national award. Alameddine had to attempt both.
“The Israelis didn’t enter Beirut, not at first. They sent their genocidal cronies.” This, about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, appears early in the prizewinning book. Okay. Tell me more. “That part of our history,” goes the following, unacceptable line, “as cruel and insane as it was, doesn’t much concern this story.” It doesn’t? The considerable time you spend in besieged Beirut, and the several sneering comments you read about the bloodlust of the children of Jacob, have convinced you otherwise. You might’ve also expected a mention of the 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon — and perhaps of the regular volleys across the Israeli border fired from Lebanon by the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Coastal Road massacre of that year, the gruesome handiwork of Fatah fanatics — that provoked it. Somewhat relevant, you’d think, as the protagonist Raja briefly cohabits with a fleeing PLO militiaman. (“Handsome, hirsute, and hung — very well-hung.” Such details, you may not be spared.)
All this is a distraction from the charming relationship between Raja and his mother: the novel’s heart. The journey there is too often interrupted by rogue detours intended to appeal to other parts of the reader’s anatomy. The sex is unsexy and charmless; the history and politics superficial. These are constants in Alameddine’s novel. And they were constants at the 76th National Book Awards, a thoroughly boring affair.
By the time we get to the fiction category, you’ve endured such torments as the recorded voice of Lena Dunham introducing the poetry award finalists. One of them is a collection about the “ungendered body as it ages.” The translated-literature category never stood a chance: of course these publications are urgent at a time of “closing borders” and “geopolitical unrest” and “book bans.” And of course “young people’s literature,” children’s books, must prepare kids to “stand up to bigotry and transphobia.” You can, if you feel generous, forgive these sins. But you may not forgive artists and writers who, as a result, have become consummate bores.
I want to like Alameddine. He toddles onstage childlike, skittish. And there’s that Lebanese accent, endearing and familiar. He thanks his psychiatrist and his gastrointestinal specialist. I do like him. But, detour: he must (mustn’t he?) call attention to the cruelty of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And, detour: he must mention an Israeli drone strike that took place on Tuesday on what Israel believes is a Hamas training camp in Lebanon. (“Hamas fighters in the area prevented journalists from reaching the scene,” NPR, which seems close to getting it, reports.) And, detour: he must give thanks to the Egyptian-Canadian author Omar El Akkad, who, moments earlier, looked appropriately grim and sickly as he accepted the award for nonfiction for a book he wrote “in response to a genocide.” (If the author really believes that a genocide was underway, shouldn’t he be elated about the cease-fire, about the gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza? Genocidaires do not tend to negotiate political settlements with the populations they wish to eradicate.) Are we there yet? And you thought you were going to a literary event.