Let the (March) Madness End

I haven't written about the Morning News' Tournament of Books since it was announced. Truth to tell, I haven't read most of the books competing. But as the brackets dwindle down to the finals today, there's some fun snarking worth a mention.

Yesterday's match-up was Gary Shteyngart's postSoviet farce Absurdistan and the one novel on the list which I have read, Kate Atkinson's Edinburgh picaresque crime novel One Good Turn. I'll spoil it for you and say that the judge, the beautifully named Rosencrans Baldwin, hated Baldwin's novel, calling it "ludicrous." He also hated Absurdistan ("The last time I threw a book that hard, it was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I was in a crappy motel room in Paris, and I tried to throw it out the window from the bed (the window was closed)."), but he still gave it the win.

The real fun, though, was in the commentary "from the booth." John Warner said it better than I could when he wrote, "Any detective novel is going to have more than its share of coincidences. In the architecture of the story, they aren’t coincidences, but merely events that haven’t yet been revealed to the reader. Perhaps the reveal is not always as well-timed or artful as one would wish, but it seems unfair to fault a detective novel for being a detective novel."

So Absurdistan passes on to the final match, against Cormac McCarthy's Oprah-chosen, post-apocalyptic father/son novel The Road. All sixteen of the judges plus a special guest weigh in for the decision. I won't tell you how it comes out. You'll have to read it for yourself.