Annal:1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1983. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Ironweed: A Novel
- 1984 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1983 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 1984 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 26.34
Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers’ strike. He ran away again after accidentally—and fatally—dropping his infant son.
Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present.
- 1984 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1983 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.34
“A dozen stories that overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life…Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty…his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart.” —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
“Cathedral contains astonishing achievements, which bespeaks a writer expanding his range of intentions.” —The Boston Globe
“A few of Mr. Carver’s stories can already be counted among the masterpieces of American fiction…Cathedral shows a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance.” —Irving Howe, front page, The New York Times Book Review
“Clear, hard language so right that we shiver at the knowledge we gain from it.” —Thomas Williams, Chicago Tribune Book World
“Carver is more than a realist; there is, in some of his stories, a strangeness, the husk of a myth.” —Los Angeles Times
- 1984 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1983 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.34
At forty, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction—pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain can have been caused by his own books. And while he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers grows into an addiction to vodka, marijuana, and Percodan.
The Anatomy Lesson is a great comedy of illness written in what the English critic Hermione Lee has described as “a manner at once…brash and thoughtful…lyrical and wry, which projects through comic expostulations and confessions…a knowing, humane authority.” The third volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Anatomy Lesson provides some of the funniest scenes in all of Roth’s fiction as well as some of the fiercest.
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia
- 1983 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.33
The novel that is sweeping the country. A beautiful story of 20th-century womanhood, of Gram, the Queen of Persia herself, who rules a house where five daughters and four granddaughters spin out the tragedies and triumphs of rural life in the 1950’s.
- 1983 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.33
Organized around the idea that “you can’t know what a magnetic field is like unless you’re inside of it,” Ron Loewinsohn’s first novel opens from the disturbing perspective of a burglar in the midst of a robbery and travels through the thoughts and experiences (both real and imaginary) of a group of characters whose lives are connected both coincidentally and intimately. All of the characters have a common desire to imagine and invent rather horrifying stories about the lives of people around them. As the novel develops, certain phrasings and images recur improbably, drawing the reader into a subtle linguistic game that calls into question the nature of authorship, the ways we inhabit and invade each other’s lives, and the shape of fiction itself.
