Best of the Bookers

This fall, for the first time in twenty-eight years, I read only one of the books named as finalists for the Booker Prize—the most prestigious fiction prize in the United Kingdom and probably the world—the winner, Stuart Douglas's debut, Shuggie Bain. Was it the right choice, the best original novel written in English and published in the UK, the most deserving candidate among the six books on the shortlist? I have no idea. And that is a strange feeling, as I've read all the shortlisted books and all the winners since 1992. For longer than half of the fifty-two-year history of the Booker, I've been reporting and commenting on it, almost always in the pages of the Sewanee Review.

There was no reason to expect such a journey when I wrote to George Core, then editor of the Review, that I wanted to write something about the Booker Prize. At the time, I was living in England, having returned after a stint from 1988–89. In my first year there, I became fascinated by the Booker, by the vast publicity, its controversies small and large, and the live, prime-time presentation—even the evidence that people were betting large sums on the outcome. The 1988 winner was Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, but by far the most publicity went to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which was on the shortlist but (probably fortunately, for the safety of all concerned) did not win.

The 1992 prize was unusual, as it was awarded in one of three years when the prize was divided between two books: this time, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. (The English Patient would go on to be named the outstanding prizewinner of the first fifty years despite not even being chosen the outstanding novel in 1992.) Thereafter I wrote about the Booker Prize for the Review almost every year until 2019, though sometimes pressures from the magazine squeezed two years into one essay. George Core retired in 2016, and I continued under Adam Ross's new editorial team.

Looking back over those twenty-seven years, with their twentynine winners (the prize was shared again in 2019) and 161 shortlisted books, I'm impressed anew with the high quality of most of the books that won, and many of those that did not. The judges decided well, much more often than not, in what is not just a thankless but in many ways impossible task (Julian Barnes referred to the Booker as "posh bingo," but I think retired that phrase after he won it in 2011). I found myself sorting those books into categories, into mini-contests within the big competition, and now that Tara K. Menon has taken over the helm as the Review's reporter and critic on the Booker, I thought I'd share these, grouped in fives, like the shortlist.

The Worst Booker Prize-Winning Novels (in Descending Order)

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008)

Adiga's novel recounts the rise of Balram Halwai, the title's white tiger, a self-made Indian success who rises to staggering wealth in Bangalore's call-center economy. The novel's failure lies in its storytelling logic. Inexplicably, Balram addresses letters to Wen Jiabao, the premier of China, full of generalizations about India, particularly "the darkness," which stands for both the moral nightmare of modern India and deprived (and despised, by him) rural India. He is persuaded that everyone is corrupt, and in fact that any successful person has killed at least one person during their ascent to material success—a theory that helps to justify his own ruthlessness and violence.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle (1993)

Not so much a bad novel as simply not good enough to deserve the prize, Paddy Clarke here adds another volume to Doyle's mural of Irish urban life. Its characters live on the dole and drink and swear too much. Compared to his earlier Barrytown trilogy of The Van, The Snapper, and The Commitments, Paddy Clarke...