The National Book Foundation held its annual award ceremony Wednesday night, and despite the presence of a rambling Gore Vidal, a schmoozing Dave Eggers, and an interloping James Franco, its hard not to feel let down by the whole gala. The reason for the disillusion is simple – the books that won seem dull and predictable, not the best books in their categories, but the ones most likely to receive committee approval.

In the awkwardly named “Young People’s Literature” category the award was given to Philip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin, about a courageous black teenager who refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. It may well be that this is a very good book, but, given its subject, the deep suspicion remains that it’s not the best book but the book adults think would be best for

“young people.” Keith Waldrop won the Poetry award for his collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, and maybe this book too is deserving, but maybe, you can’t help but wonder, Waldrop has just put in the most time in the close-knit world of poetry publishing and garnered slightly more name recognition than his competitors. T.J. Stiles takes the palm in Nonfiction for The First Tycoon: the Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the skepticism continues to adhere. Maybe it’s excellent, or maybe Americans love to anoint one big fat mainstream biography of an American figure per year, tailor-made for Father’s Day and Christmas.

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For me, such skepticism is originally fostered by the Fiction panel’s decision to reward Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin. I have read this book (I reviewed it in our September issue), and I can easily report that it’s nowhere near as good as the other nominees. It is, in fact, a bad book, breathlessly overwritten, manipulative, and thick with cheap ethnic stereotypes. But what’s perhaps most disappointing is that Let the Great World Spin is almost identical in its subject to last year’s PEN/Faulkner award winner, Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland. The enervating implication that readers take away is that if you write an angst-ridden, sentimental novel that makes constant, thinly-cloaked references to September 11, you are ipso facto writing great fiction. That, and the ancillary implication that the best books are the ones that the most people will approve of on paper.

–Sam Sacks