“Be Careful What You Wish For” would be a more descriptive title for “The Award.”
An aspiring novelist named David Trent is the antihero of Matthew Pearl’s newest book. (Pearl is the author of “The Dante Club” and its droll sequels, in which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other three-named legends solve mysteries.) Trent and his fiancée move into a too-good-to-be-true apartment in a Cambridge, Mass., home that’s already occupied by a famous novelist, Silas Hale. Trent’s plan is to befriend Hale and then use that friendship to launch himself to literary stardom. Instead, over the course of a couple years, Trent loses almost everything.
Initially, “The Award” reads like a brisk satire of pretentious literary types who blurb each others’ books and throw snobby parties to which they invite other literary types whose influence they’re hoping to exploit. Most of the characters are poor, backbite-y and eager to drink free wine. The territory may remind readers of Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure,” whose story about the hunt for a literary prize was adapted into the Oscar-winning “American Fiction.”
Pearl may be settling some scores. His evocation of the vicious, condescending Hale — who not only doesn’t want to mentor Trent but who actually turns off his apartment’s heat in an attempt to force him to move — is particularly amusing.
When Trent is informed he has won a prize for his debut novel, it seems like the two are on more equal footing but then the award is rescinded and Trent, who already has told everyone he knows that he won it, resorts to increasingly drastic measures to maintain his hold on the prize that’s earning him speaking engagements, important colleagues and decent sales.
As a bestselling author himself, Pearl undoubtedly has attended some of these parties but let’s hope he hasn’t gone to the lengths Trent does, which include betrayal, murder and refusing to do his part in shoveling sidewalks.
Readers who want a novel’s protagonist to be likable will take issue with “The Award”: Trent is compelling but, from the baseline of being a relatively decent social climber as the book opens, his behavior grows monstrous. In fact, the only character in the book readers might actually want to befriend is a fellow writer who decides the world is not for her because it’s so filled with “people who rationalize that any harm they are doing is for some higher creative or moral good they’ve designed in their heads.”
There’s not much moral good in Trent, but Pearl leaves it to us decide if it’s the literary world that screwed him up or if he was never much of a prize to begin with.
