One Deserved to Win, the Other ...

By Lev Grossman

The five novelists nominated for the National Book Award (NBA) this year have three things in common: they are all women, they all live in New York City, and until now almost nobody had heard of any of them. In a year with books by Russell Banks, Cynthia Ozick, Tom Wolfe, John Updike and Philip Roth, the fiction committee went for five relative unknowns. That caused a hue and cry in literary circles, although, admittedly, literary types love a good hue and cry, and it doesn't take much to get them going.

There is certainly something anxiety producing about the NBA list: it adds to one's nagging fear that one isn't reading the "right" books, that there are always hidden gems out there that a more astute and observant reader would have spotted. But that isn't the judges' fault. The only motive that one can reasonably impute to them is a desire to call attention to the eventual winner, The News from Paraguay, by Lily Tuck (HarperCollins; 248 pages). Though why to that particular book, it's a little hard to see.

The News from Paraguay is the story of Ella Lynch, a lovely, lusty young Irishwoman who in 1854 meets and arouses the ardor of Francisco Solano Lopez, the cruel and debauched son of the dictator of Paraguay. Francisco--"Franco" to his friends and numerous enemies--spirits Ella off to his homeland, a half-savage tropical Eden complete with snakes and crocodiles and cannibals, oh my, where they live in conspicuous luxury until Franco (who is, like Ella, an actual historical figure) leads the country into a disastrous war with Brazil.

This is an odd book. Much of it consists of gorgeous, very precise descriptions of the hideous misfortunes that befall the people who surround Ella and Franco. They suffer diphtheria, syphilis, scalding, torture, drowning, stabbing, smallpox, gunfire and, in a couple of instances, grisly botched amputations. None of that bothers Ella and Franco much. They are like cruel children: dreamy, whimsical, pleasure loving, utterly lacking in remorse or the kind of inward reflection one hopes for from characters in novels. In one scene Franco viciously whips a dog because it resembles a dog that bit him when he was little. "Franco knew perfectly well that this dog was not the same dog that had bitten him, but he did not care. For him, justice was served."

Franco is not an implausible dictator, but he is exceptionally repugnant, and Tuck never makes clear what greater truth his repugnance conveys. As a result, The News from Paraguay remains a beautifully written but curiously cold and creepy novel. One wishes that it had not won the NBA, not because it has nothing to offer readers but because the award makes one expect something from it that it does not have: greatness. --By Lev Grossman