The customary Booker Prize winner is, like the MFA novels battling for the laurel, a product of many compromises. On the one hand, the legacy institutions cling desperately to the remnants of their prestige during an era in which the very notion of prestige is as precarious as the production of literature itself: finding any book worthy enough to not further demean the reputation of the Prize by its bestowal is difficult enough; add to that the mutually hostile demand that it might be adored by the general public. Any consumer of contemporary literature is familiar with the end result of this compromise: small “l” literary with enough genre convention to find its way into book clubs, morally ambiguous but not so much as to obscure its political message (lest The Guardian have to think of adjectives beyond “urgent” and “important” in their praise), with prose elevated beyond the typical Taylor Jenkins Reid fare but never so much as to alienate the typical Taylor Jenkins reader. They are magical realist murder mysteries, multigenerational historical epics, Westerns and dystopians that are just anticlimactic enough to escape the “genre” label.