“The Award”
c.2025, Harper, $30.00, 256 pages
Congratulations, you’ve earned it. All the work paid off, the late nights and early mornings, losing your weekends, losing your mind until finally, you got recognition for your many efforts and it’s about time. As in the new novel, “The Award” by Matthew Pearl, you’ll get exactly what you deserve.
He didn’t like the apartment, not one bit.
It had become apparent, however, that David Trent wouldn’t have much to say about it: His girlfriend, Bonnie, instantly fell in love with the expensive third-floor walk-up in a tony Cambridge, Massachusetts neighborhood. Since she was paying the bills while David worked on his novel, he tried to agree but he was less-than-impressed.
Until he learned that award-winning novelist Silas Hale lived downstairs.
That energized David, and he doubled down on his writing, imagining the conversations they’d have and the advice Silas would offer. He even told a writing acquaintance that Silas was his mentor, though David had yet to meet the esteemed man. Just moving upstairs from Silas Hale was surely a sign that David’s career as a novelist was about to take off.
But then he did meet Silas, who turned out to be a brash, pompous jerk who acted like David was not worthy to be in his presence. Still, proximity made it easy to continue lying for weeks about his relationship with Silas, though lies have a way of compounding: When Bonnie learned of David’s duplicity, she moved out, leaving him in a half-furnished, unheated walk-up with a freshly published book and unfulfilled dreams of literary greatness.
The letter, then, was a shocking surprise.
He thought it was junk mail at first but when he read it, he learned that he’d won the Boston Literary Prize for Best First Novel, an award that Silas Hale had gotten years before.
Overjoyed, David imagined the accolades. He envisioned the admiration of everyone he knew. He pictured lines of avid fans at book signings.
He never imagined things would spiral out of control… Though it’s somewhat slow and a bit tedious now and then, “The Award” is a sure squirmer, almost from the outset. Author Matthew Pearl places readers on a bed of thorns, making you understand, right at the start of this dark and occasionally comic novel, that something really bad is going to happen, probably more than once.
The first clue you get is that David is deliciously deplorable, the kind of guy you don’t ever want to know. He’s a head-in-the-clouds serial liar and as selfish as they come — and Silas is really no better, nor are David’s writing “friends” from the coffee shop, all of whom are nasty cut-throats. In the midst of this wonderfully awful cast are a few people you can like, but don’t get too used to them. You’ve been warned.
Because of the occasional drag of this story, you might be tempted to put it aside here or there, but don’t. Stick with “The Award” and you won’t be sorry. Keep reading; you’ll get the kind of thriller you deserve.
— The Bookworm Sez
