It turns out there are more tropes of literary shortlists than I thought.
If you want that high-profile literary prize, it’s not enough to peddle sudden loss, grief and isolation. Alienation alone won’t cut it. Ecological uncertainty is now old-hat.
Authors now need to synthesize their Literary Experiential Explorations (that’s Worthy Books to you and me) using as many of the new and established tropes as will fit.
- Fragmented and unreliable timeline, with an historical event, memory or trauma as a catalyst.
- A single symbolic object or domestic location that represents massive systemic forces of oppression.
- A confessional, fictional memoir by an unreliable, first-person narrator in a stream-of-consciousness that wrestles with the concept of storytelling while withholding key facts.
- An intergenerational reckoning. Because it’s always the family’s fault.
- The shocking family archive of hidden truths, traumas, parentage, guilt, or past crimes.
- Immigrant histories hidden or denied by parents or grandparents.
- Social shifts including rural depopulation, industrialization, gentrification and cultural displacement.
- The individual versus the collective (extending the clash of identity and belonging).
- Burnout and inequality in the modern gig economy. This is the new class-war detailing socio-economic inequality and the imposition of social hierarchies. I have no idea what this means, either.
- The sickness or ageing of the body as a reflection of social decay.
- Meta-fiction and hybrid forms of memoir, essays, poetry that challenge the literary form of the novel itself.
And finally, the perennial favorite,
- the loss of faith in God and/or humanity and the search for meaning amid social disintegration.
Extra consideration is given to novellas under 70,000 words that cram in eight or more of these, and epics over 1400 pages that use only two or three, but spend whole chapters debating the existential nature of a table.