Annal:1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Mrs. Ted Bliss

Stanley Elkin

• 1995 NBCC–Fiction winner
• Score: 10.45

In language that is “rich, musical and playful, like that of a Joyce who grew up on Yiddish” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times), Stanley Elkin offers us the extraordinary Dorothy Bliss, an eighty-two-year-old widow caught in a tragicomic world, forced to find purpose in endless card games and “Good Neighbor Policy Night” at a Florida retirement community.

Independence Day

Richard Ford

• 1996 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1996 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 1995 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 26.46

Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet he’s still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. He’s still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved along with their children to Connecticut. But Frank is happy enough in his work and pursuing various civic and entrepreneurial sidelines. He has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend: a search for a house for deeply hapless clients relocating to Vermont; a rendezvous on the Jersey shore with his girlfriend; then up to Connecticut to pick up his larcenous and emotionally troubled teenage son and visit as many sports halls of fame as they can fit into two days. Frank’s Independence Day, however, turns out not as he’d planned, and this decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge. Independence Day captures the mystery of life — in all its conflicted glory — with grand humour, intense compassion and transfixing power.

Moo

Jane Smiley

• 1995 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 6.45

Nestled in the heart of the Midwest, amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, lies Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the art and science of agriculture. Here, among an atmosphere rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upmanship, Chairman X of the Horticulture Department harbors a secret fantasy to kill the dean; Mrs. Walker, the provost’s right hand and campus information queen, knows where all the bodies are buried; Timothy Nonahan, associate professor of English, advocates eavesdropping for his creative writing assignments; and Bob Carlson, a sophomore, feeds and maintains his only friend: a hog named Earl Butz. In this wonderfully written and masterfully plotted novel, Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres, offers us a wickedly funny comedy that is also a darkly poignant slice of life.

Galatea 2.2: A Novel

Richard Powers

• 1995 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 6.45

After four novels and several years of living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers—returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he falls afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books until the machine becomes capable of passing a comprehensive exam in English literature. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.

Powers drills it in Chaucer and Austen and James, a crash course that elicits a violent reconsideration of his own literary vocation, his decade-long, failed relationship with a former pupil, and his growing obsession with the twenty-two-year-old master’s candidate against whom his cybernetic Helen is slated to compete.

The Tent of Orange Mist: A Novel

Paul West

• 1995 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 6.45

In December 1937 the city of Nanking, China, falls to brutal Japanese invaders, and thus begins a compelling drama of widespread chaos and personal courage.

Against a backdrop of burning buildings and random atrocities stands Scald Ibis, the teenage daughter of an eminent scholar, who must transform herself completely in order to survive. With her family gone, she is forced to work as a prostitute in a bordello, changing slowly and painfully from a girl into a woman. Her fortunes improve when a Japanese warlord, Hayashi, takes a fancy to her; but her greatest challenge comes with the sudden appearance of her ailing father, whose inner demons threaten both of their lives.