''Everybody has won," announces the Dodo in ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," ''and all must have prizes." Indeed! Never mind that the prizes, at least for the Dodo's constituency, were only comfits. The year of 2005 was all about prizes, it seemed, or at least about the race, with everyone dashing madly about, trying to locate the course or complaining that the winner's circle itself was suspect. When Harold Pinter won the year's Nobel Prize for literature, it was immediately and widely reported that he had recently called Tony Blair ''a deluded idiot." When William T. Vollmann won the National Book Award for ''Europe Central" -- a dark horse to at least two of the other four candidates -- there were audible gasps from press and audience alike. When Irish writer John Banville took England's prestigious Man Booker Prize, edging out Kazuo Ishiguro and four other notables, the Fleet Street grousing was so loud and contagious that it soon began reverberating from these mighty shores. (The normally dour Banville remained calm, telling a New York Times reporter that being vilified tended to cheer him up.)
Best fiction of the year
And then there were the Dodo-inspired Quill Book Awards, industry-backed and touted as the first populist literary awards. So when the winners were announced -- all 19 of them, in categories ranging from best audio book to best romance novel -- there were audible yawns from the Fourth Estate: The Dodo's comfits seemed like gimme toys from the marketing department. What, you don't think ''He's Just Not That Into You" deserved a sweet? Snob.
So the only thing missing in 2005 was the Conniption Fit Award, which might have been presented to all those proclaiming that prizes were worthless and that literature was dead. The rest of us, for better or worse, simply kept on reading, while Google roared and the Dodo fretted and some 50,000 new titles were carted into bookstores. The year in fiction was decidedly lackluster -- it is unfair to sugarcoat that news, which is hardly news at all -- but then literature is not a collective experience, at least not the writing of it, so we ought to judge our landmarks of civilization by the work itself and not by the year-end heave. There were, as always, a few exquisite contributions to the novel, a few sterling packages of short stories, a few reaches toward the ever-elusive light.