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Joseph O’Neill wins PEN-Faulkner Award

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Joseph O’Neill has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for his book ‘Netherland.’ O’Neill, who lives in New York City, will take home $15,000 and bragging rights.

Actually, the PEN/Faulkner Award is designed to tone down the bragging. Other literary prizes announce a scrum of finalists from which a final victor emerges; in England, bookmakers take bets on the Booker Prize, just like they would a horse race. But the PEN/Faulkner Award announces its finalists and winner all at once, calling the top prizewinner ‘first among equals.’

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The equals for the 2009 prize are Southern California’s Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, for ‘Ms. Hempel Chronicles’; Susan Choi for ‘A Person of Interest’; Richard Price for ‘Lush Life’; and Ron Rash for ‘Serena.’ Each will get $5,000, a sum that indicates they’re more than just runners-up.

The wide-field approach means that the PEN/Faulkner Award has covered a lot of literary ground since its debut in 1981. That year, ‘How German Is It?’ by Walter Abish was the winner, and experimentation was popular. Finalists were Shirley Hazzard for ‘The Transit of Venus,’ Walker Percy for ‘The Second Coming,’ Gilbert Sorrentino for ‘Aberration of Starlight’ and John Kennedy Toole for ‘A Confederacy of Dunces.’ In the intervening years, some usual literary suspects have taken the top honor — John Updike, E.L. Doctorow (twice), Philip Roth (twice), Don DeLillo. But experimentalists like Toby Olson also have been honored, as has popular novelist T.C. Boyle.

Where Joseph O’Neill will fall in the literary spectrum remains to be seen. ‘Netherland,’ his third novel, is about a man who finds himself playing cricket in New York after Sept. 11. Our reviewer wrote:

Yes, the novel is a lucid celebration of a complex sport that is little understood here, but it’s also a book about the emotional legacies of Sept. 11, and it’s a book that takes up some deep and enduring literary themes: connection, estrangement and, not least, what it means to be American.

— Carolyn Kellogg

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