“The Award,” by Matthew Pearl
Harper, 2025
Stories generally draw us in when we can identify with main characters or the problem they face. “The Award,” Matthew Pearl’s December 2025 novel, focuses on an ambitious but self-doubting writer trying to make it in Cambridge, a promising subject for someone like me.
Except I disliked David Trent, the protagonist of “The Award,” from the book’s very first sentence: “If he could have known all the lives that would be wrecked, David still would have agreed to all that was to come … ” That will include two deaths, multiple homes lost, and many dreams crushed, all due to duplicity.
Most of the characters are writers, with a pecking order that puts successful literary fiction authors at the top of the ziggurat. Trent aspires to this level but has spent years failing to finish his first novel. His frustrated ambition warps his judgment, even after he completes his book and publishes it.
Almost all the writers in the book exemplify an observation one of them makes: “Writers, more than other people, are sociopaths … especially the good ones.”
Our culture prefers sociopaths to statues, which explains something of our love for Odysseus, at least the softened anti-hero version of him presented in Christopher Nolan’s recent movie. (The film glosses over the comeuppance facing Odysseus at the end of the epic poem.) Usually, we as readers will find something we associate with — perhaps a familiar insecurity we hope they will overcome — that helps us forgive their pathologies. With Trent, we hope his little lies will lead him to a place where he can reconsider his approach. Instead, he goes from foibles to felonies, and it becomes increasingly absurd to think he won’t be caught.
This is a parody, so preposterous plot elements are meant to be part of the fun. The classic journalism satire “Scoop” also has outlandish moments. In “The Award,” Trent becomes an accidental con artist, which can make for fun reading. And, since he isn’t a bad writer, he scored some pity points with me because of his position in the state of nature that is the novel’s Cantabrigian writing community: He is simultaneously chum for its bigger fish and a target of the smaller fish (think piranhas) trying to take pieces of psychic flesh anywhere they can.
Pearl, an immensely successful historical novelist, has said the book draws on his own experience but is not autobiographical. The parts of the story about Trent’s own disbelief that he could ever be a writer is similar to his own. I have had tangential interactions with Pearl (I worked at a startup in the same co-working space on Sherman Street where he wrote) and can vouch that he does not display the nasty traits of his characters.
I won’t say writers don’t behave as badly as portrayed in this novel. I know scores of writers and they (I) sometimes do. The challenge with this book is almost none of the characters are likeable, ever. One writer who is leaves the field, and the city, to work in insurance. When Trent’s kind, sensible girlfriend breaks up with him, you hope she will stay away, so as not to be consigned to the life of a writer’s spouse.
Even the city of Cambridge is at its worst. The central setting is a two-bedroom apartment, ostensibly the attic of a grand home on Observatory Hill but with an almost unclimbable staircase. It’s a steal at $3,200 a month, a price only justifiable because Cambridge is “Boston’s best-educated and haughtiest neighbor.”
That such prices are the fault of developers is a howler Pearl skewers in perhaps the truest sentence in the novel. The truth, he writes, is that “Universities gobbled up real estate, which shrank the supply for desperate renters, which led people with seemingly infinite money from around the world to buy up the remaining properties and further inflate prices. On top of that, there was nowhere new to build housing, because there was nowhere new in Cambridge.”
But for writers, there’s no place else that matters. When a playwright finds out Trent is from Michigan, she says that’s “like being from nowhere, a bit.” (Disclosure: I am from Michigan. There is a there there.)
Much of the action happens in the only spots most writers in Cambridge can afford — coffee shops. A pivotal conversation about the award that gives the novel its name takes place at the old Darwin’s on its “out-of-the-way stretch of Mt. Auburn.” We visit the late Simon’s, “a café the shape of a railroad car,” for a pick-me-up of a hot oatmeal maple scone and a London Fog. When they need power outlets, Trent and his frenemies visit more corporate cafes.
When Trent signs copies of his book at Harvard Book Store, the clerk is interested only in the famous author talking to her manager. At the Porter Square T station, identified by the bronze gloves tumbling down the length of the escalator, we are told. “Some people had left their own work gloves on the sculpture, either a tribute or to mock it.”
When not discussing impoverishing rents, we hear procrastinating writers veer into familiar exchanges around “the need for wider bicycle lanes in Cambridge.” A reference to bicycling as religion will bring a sense of moral superiority to some readers. The writers also wish for grocery stores that can fit more than one cart down the aisle. Maybe they should move to Michigan.
It turns out that in places like North Carolina, where Trent spends time as a writer-in-residence at a college, writers are nice people. But then, they aren’t in Cambridge.
Eventually, one of Cambridge’s urbanely savage scribes sees through Trent’s deceptions, where Cambridge police and the Middlesex DA of course cannot. I wasn’t sure whether to root for Trent to get his or to get away with it. His fictions had become fact. Would it be so bad if they stayed that way?
A stronger
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