Orbital v. The History of Sound
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 13 • OPENING ROUND
Orbital
v. The History of Sound
Judged by Bobuq Sayed
Bobuq Sayed is a writer, editor, and organizer. They have lived in Perth; Melbourne; Washington, DC; Istanbul; Berlin; and, most recently, New York City. Their debut novel, No God But Us, is forthcoming from Harper Books in 2026. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / bobuqsayed.com
Novels are the literary infrastructure most coherent to me. Perhaps this is because I am a novelist and consume them more frequently than any other art form. In any case, I find the porousness of poetry to be alienating, and story collections produce a reading experience that is jolted and slow, due in part to the challenge of reorienting myself to new characters and timelines. My implicit preference for the novel form is one shared by editors and the publishing industry at large. Novels are easier to sell and they generally receive more bountiful advances. Too, the slim novel is having its moment. A punchy, unthreatening text suits the contemporary attention span, atrophied by technology and social media as it is for many of us. The logic goes that, because a slim novel is easier to read, more people read and recommend them, leading to more copies sold, creating more revenue for publishers, and thus incentivizing their cultivation.
I knew, too, that Samantha Harvey’s Orbital had been longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, had since advanced to the shortlist, and, finally, resulted in Harvey receiving the world’s most prestigious prize for a single book last year. The award is institutional recognition for an indeed exquisite and existentially moving text that, in total, runs barely longer than 200 pages, a masterful feat to accomplish in such few pages. Harvey structures the book chapters by way of full orbits of the Earth that an International Space Station mission conducts from the omniscient perspectives of its six inhabitants, who originate from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan.
The astronauts and cosmonauts reflect on the Earth and their former lives on it—evaluating their own priorities and those of mankind—from the profound vantage point of outer space. It is hard not to be flabbergasted by such all-encompassing and eternal subject matter. Is there any life that has not been informed by the cruelty of borders, climatic events, and/or the loss of a loved one? Who can say they have never experienced the despair of witnessing something, or someone, inducing its own catastrophic and preventable decline? The book resonates precisely because the perspective is rare but its themes are universal. Harvey takes up the mantle of nature writing synonymous with transcendentalist writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and made popular recently by the author of H is For Hawk, Helen McDonald, in order to zoom out of regional specificity and consider what’s at stake for all life on Earth.
I was particularly impacted by the gentle meditation on post-Cold War relations between America and Russia, which led to the bifurcation of toilet facilities, exercise bikes, and food stores on the spacecraft. A sign on the door reads, “Because of ongoing political disputes please use your own national toilet.” The crew, amused, respond with humor: “I’m just going to take a national pee, Shaun will say. Or Roman: Guys, I’m going to go and do one for Russia.” Here are these giant powerful empires locked in a decades-long ideological clash that has percolated even the interior layout of a space mission where six people must share close quarters in order to survive, and yet, at the individual level, imperial rivalries become trivial.
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Harvey errs on the side of universality, rejecting a traditional plot or characters who the reader can complexly understand, instead electing to configure them by way of memory fragments or their habits on board the spacecraft. Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound goes an entirely different, but somehow parallel, approach. The book is a truly remarkable story collection set across several centuries in New England and draws on the history of the hook-and-chain, a song or poem form in which the first and last lines rhyme and contain rhyming couplets within, to organize the placement and content of stories in the collection. As the epigraph explains of the form’s inspiration, “The second half of the couplet often completes the sentence or sentiment of the first.” Where Harvey scales out to ascertain humanity, Shattuck zeroes in on the northeast of the United States. What we gain is a similarly unique vantage point. Shattuck inspects the gaps in knowledge that pervade all families and regions of the world, that which descendents must reckon with about ancestors they will never know from the detritus of their lives.
The History of Sound contends with this structural conceit in marvelous and spellbinding ways. The reader gains a fascinating speculative perspective on how large swathes of time can transform the land and the various generations of families who reside there. Buildings decay, lineages outlast mass suicide, saplings become forests, and the fresh painting of a bird from a passionate old flame turns into a neglected heirloom. What a gift it is to digest the consequences of temporality in this way, far too vast for any one of us to ever know firsthand given our own inevitably degenerating bodies and the finitude of ancestral memory. Many a novel has taken on this ambitious project before, employing the toolkit of point of view, for instance, as in the work of Isabel Allende or Gabriel García Márquez, to inspect the carryover effects of love and loss on the progeny of familial dynasties. But rarely has a story collection managed such a feat, riffing on local cultural tradition to innovate a structural form that both contains and expands the prose.
I was always going to love Orbital. Honestly, it’s hard to come away from the novel and not feel a tranquil calm wash over you about the universe and our fatefully doomed place within it. However, I selected The History of Sound as my winner. What Shattuck was able to accomplish with his story collection leaned into the structural advantages of the form rather than allowing the piecemeal quality of each story’s arrival to feel like unfortunate stillbirths. Unlike the Earth, I have no particular fondness for the region of the country that he took up, and yet I found myself voraciously invested in its cultural lore, vegetation, wildlife, and peculiar inhabitants.
Advancing:
The History of Sound
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John Warner: Kevin, my friend, I am thrilled by this outcome. For one, The History of Sound was one of my absolute favorite books of the year. As I wrote in my review at my Chicago Tribune column, I read it twice back to back because I wanted to experience the pleasure of seeing all the ways the stories were braided together that I couldn’t fully appreciate on the first read.
I was so taken with the novel I reached out to Ben Shattuck for a Q&A for my newsletter and had a chance to ask him about the structure, and his answer is too long to print here, but anyone who enjoyed the book may be interested in the way he developed the overall architecture for the book.
Not only is the overarching structure of the book compelling, the range of modes Shattuck works within, including a story formatted as the script of an episode of Radiolab, keeps the entire journey fresh the whole time. I’m practically talking myself into reading it again.
I would like to note that in this year’s tourney we have not just one, but two “linked” short-story collections, and here we have one advancing, when historically story collections have not fared well in our annual exercise. I haven’t combed the tourney archives, but I honestly can’t remember any short-story collections even winning a single match. (I’m guessing the memory of crowds of the Commentariat will help me out here.)
Kevin Guilfoile: Would you call A Visit From the Goon Squad a story collection? I imagine there will be debate about that.
John: I do call A Visit from the Goon Squad a story collection, but I think I’m in the minority. It was definitely marketed as a novel. Let us debate in the Commentariat.
Kevin: Judge Sayed notes that short novels are having a moment. Since the early days of the ToB we used to take great care to make sure that, in the opening round at least, no judge was saddled with two doorstops to plow through by the deadline. Now it hardly seems worth the trouble. The Book of Love was the only novel on the shortlist more than 500 pages. It might have been the only one over 400 pages.
John: The days of including books like Against the Day (Pynchon, 2007, 1,104 pages) or 2666 (Bolaño, 2009, 912 pages) do seem long past. I wouldn’t rule out a shift back to the long novel because these things seem cyclical, but clearly short novels are in.
Kevin: With shorter novels in demand, it seems logical that the short story might be making a comeback as well, but The History of Sound’s surprise win today notwithstanding, I’m not seeing any evidence of that. You had a great uncle who was able to forge a respectable living writing short stories for the dozens and dozens of magazines that featured them every month. Now there are so few magazines left, landing a short story in any of them seems the equivalent of winning a prize all by itself. Maybe there are just more readers like Judge Sayed.
If I wasn’t reading under the time pressures of the ToB, I might have approached Orbital like a short-story collection, dipping into it now and again for some truly lovely writing and profound musings on art and politics and nature and religion. There is almost no general topic that Harvey doesn’t touch on for a few paragraphs. I enjoyed it a lot, but I wish I wasn’t forced to read it in one day. It’s not exactly propulsive.
John: I bought my copy of Orbital in a bookstore in Edinburgh, Scotland, when I was on a trip to participate on a panel about AI in education at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. For some reason when I went to the counter to purchase the book, I blurted to the bookstore employee that it had just won the Booker Prize—which it had a couple days earlier—and she looked at me with the nicest “no shit Sherlock” look on her face that I’d ever seen.
I couldn’t say what I was thinking. Maybe I figured I would bust the stereotype of the ignorant American (we’d just reelected Trump) by showing that I knew what the Booker Prize was, but it was all a little humiliating.
As a novel, Orbital made very little impact on me, to the point I wondered why it was chosen as the prizewinner. It’s graceful and beautiful in parts, but nothing truly struck me during the entire experience. Also, it was published in a font size that my aging eyes can’t handle unless I have blazing illumination, so that was frustrating.
Kevin: Yeah that’s puzzling. One of the great attractions of the short novel should be large type.
(Man, you and I are getting old.)
Tomorrow we complete the second half of our first-ever husband-and-wife pair in the ToB as Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Percival Everett’s spouse) meets The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft. Alena Saunders will don the judge’s robe.
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Jennifer, Keiko is an American Mixed Breed who specializes in branch management.
She enjoys relaxing in her reading nook, taking long walks with interesting things to sniff, and encouraging her humans to spend less time on the computer.
Keiko's favorite Tournament of Books contestants are the weird ones, and the under-the-radar picks she otherwise would not have read.
Thank you for joining us today, Keiko!
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