Salvage Heart

(UPDATED 01/26/07) In service to the relentless demand for local coverage, a couple of this year's National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, announced last week, bear at least a tangential connection to Portland.

First, Debby Applegate's The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, nominated in the biography category. Applegate, who maintains a home part-time in Portland, attended Clackamas High School (Class of '85! '85! '85!). Your Talk of the Book Town correspondent covered her Powell's reading last August, and turned in an endearing piece that was never posted to the OregonLive Web site (at least, not that I could find) can be referenced here.

I'm not going to reprint the entire piece here (it's not that endearing), but here is an excerpt from "The most newly famous woman in Portland" in the August 7, 2006 edition:

The scene at Powell's City of Books more resembled a reunion than a reading Wednesday evening: smiles, hugs and exclamations of surprise as Debby Applegate worked her way through a crowd of friends and family.

"Are you famous?" her 7-year-old niece, Frances, asked with a tug at her aunt's dress. "Now I am," Applegate replied with a smile.

"Now" marked the summer release of Applegate's long-awaited, 20-years-in-the-making, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. Her job this evening, Applegate told an audience of 75 that included her parents, husband, sister, niece, schoolmates and American Studies teacher from Clackamas High School was to resurrect a man once world-famous and now forgotten. Applegate, a part-time Portland resident, said the idea that Beecher is forgotten today would have been "inconceivable" in Beecher's lifetime, so great was his fame.

So congratulations to Debbie. Looking at the line-up, she just might have a shot.

Also, Kiran Desai's Man Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss, gives local Grove/Atlantic copy editor Heather Angell something to brag about at playgroup--she finally has a book to her edit-credit that people might have maybe heard of...somewhere. (Robbe-Grillet just doesn't have that same ring to it.)

The bad news is that Desai's novel bumps up against a cadre of literary giants: Richard Ford and Cormac McCarthy, Dave Eggers, and, well, just those. The fifth finalist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I'm sure meant well....

So good luck Desai. On the other hand, with 50,000 pounds prize money from beating out this longlist, maybe Ms. Kiran don't need it. Nonetheless, congrats Heather. And yes, I've heard of Kiran Desai. Wrote...uh, the Kite Runner?

(And for the record, I took a swing for the hometown team, as a NBCC voting member, by voting for something I actually reviewed.)