NBCC 35th Anniversary: Notes from the early years

by David Varno | Sep-12-2009

Early board members and former NBCC president Richard Locke shared legends of interacting and debating with luminaries such as Elizabeth Hardwick and John Updike, and notes on some of their favorite winners.

Richard Locke began by saying that in looking back after decades of publishing book reviews and literary essays for newspapers and magazines, he is struck by the range of styles, tastes, and hometowns of the current NBCC board members.  And on the state of review venues, he noted that “things have gotten better,” with many new smaller magazines, but “also much worse.” 

Former Pen America president Joel Conarroe spoke of Ms. Hardwick as “our own Blanche Dubois,” for once claiming that to choose between two particular books was akin to voting between “a flea and a louse.”

Morris Dickstein noted that 1983 winner William Kennedy’s Ironweed had been turned down by 17 consecutive houses, before Viking took it on.

Greil Marcus recalled that in 1984, a fellow board member put a book on the table that no one else had read, and everyone criticized for it’s “Hallmark card” cover and title.  The board member pleaded, “If you read this book it will win.”  The book was Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich.

Parnassus editor Herb Leibowitz asked, “Will bloggers replace book reviewers?  I hope not,” he said. 

Lastly, Constance Casey, after taking the time to poke fun at her sixth-grade English teacher, who complained to her mother that she was running a “literary tea party” in class, noted the privilege of conferencing with John Updike in his other role, a book critic.