Yesterday, I wrote about the remarkable if agonizing experience of selecting three Pulitzer Prize nominees in fiction from over three hundred books by American writers. Today, I’d like to reflect a bit on the search for an unassailably great contemporary work of fiction, which, as I’ve learned, resembles an attempt to appreciate an entire train while you’re a passenger in one of its cars.

You can read Part One here.

We kept waiting for the Big Book.

Every few weeks, as a new shipment of books arrived at each of our different addresses, Susan, Maureen, and I slit open the carton and said to ourselves, Please, let this box contain the One.

The One would be the novel so monumental, so original and vast and funny and tragic, so clearly important, that only an idiot would deny it the Pulitzer Prize.

We wanted a foolproof book, a book about which we could be absolutely certain. Or two such books. Maybe even three.

We were glad to have been asked to be judges, but we were nervous as well. Because any jury that awards an important prize is trying to second-guess the future; to honor a book that will endure. Jury members are, or should be, trying to use their own particular passions and acumen to catch a whiff of greatness rising up off the page. Jury members aren’t just selecting their favorite books, they’re trying to stare down their personal biases, to let the books speak as themselves, and not as the books the jurors generally tend to prefer. You don’t like family sagas? Too bad, this is a great one, get over it. You think of science fiction as frivolous? Consider the possibility that this particular work of science fiction transcends what you’ve always believed to be the limits of the genre.

Jury members also, naturally, know that they’re carrying on a long-established, impossible project: the attempt to name a “best” book, as if books were cucumbers at a county fair. Even at the grandest possible level, it’s a doomed proposition. Is “The Sound and the Fury” better than “The Great Gatsby,” or vice versa? They’re both great. But is one better than the other? It depends on whom you ask.

Add in the fact that significant works of literature don’t appear on a reliable, annual basis. Some years are unusually fertile. In 1985, for instance, we saw the publication of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise,” Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” and Paul Auster’s “City of Glass.”

So. It’s 1985, and you’re a Pulitzer juror. Which of the above four titles is clearly better than the other three?

“Lonesome Dove” won the prize that year, a choice with which I have no quarrel. But the other three didn’t win. Couldn’t win. The Pulitzer board is obliged to acknowledge only a single book and declare it the best.

And, finally, one must confront the most nervous-making aspect of all the jurists’ and board’s duties: those who award prizes are wrong at least as often as they’re right. There is, for instance, the fact that Pearl S. Buck went to her grave with a Nobel Prize and Nabokov did not. That Dario Fo got one but Borges didn’t. The list of past Nobel winners is formidable—those Swedish prize-givers are sharp—but a list of non-winners would be surprising and not entirely reassuring.

Among the books that have not won the Pulitzer (which was established in 1917): “The Great Gatsby,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Sound and the Fury,” “Absalom, Absalom!,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Invisible Man,” “The Adventures of Augie March,” “On the Road,” “Catch-22,” “The Moviegoer,” “Revolutionary Road,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Deliverance,” “The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor,” “Ragtime,” “J R,” “The Collected Stories of Grace Paley,” and “Underworld.”

The list of past prizewinners, it should be noted, also includes many significant and enduring books. Still. Although it feels unseemly to name any of the less-than-stellar books that triumphed over the ones that proved to be classics, look up the list if you’re so inclined. There are some shockers. It’s true as well that a number of the authors of all those great but unselected books got the prize eventually, though most of us would agree that the prizes, when finally awarded, gave off a hint of redress, unless we believe that Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” (which won in 1953) outshines “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell to Arms,” or that Faulkner’s “A Fable” (1955) and “The Reivers” (1963) (only Faulkner, Booth Tarkington, and John Updike have won twice) leave “The Sound and the Fury” and “Absalom, Absalom!” in the Mississippi dust.

The Pulitzer board has denied a prize in fiction nine times before, most recently in 1977, when Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” was one of the candidates. The prizeless year 1974 was the year that “Gravity’s Rainbow” was eligible.

It’s shortsighted. It’s offensive. And yet…

As Maureen, Susan, and I opened box after box, cracked book after book, we found a certain number of them that we liked very much and, among those, a smaller number that contained one or more actual marvels: a great character, a powerful and original style, a remarkable theme, a few scenes that raised the hairs on our arms, or some other accomplishment that approached the miraculous.

But none of them was unquestionable, none so flawlessly and obviously great as to quell all doubts. Juries are assigned, in part, to doubt. To weigh and question, to wonder over the balance between virtue and lapse.

We were not—at least I like to believe we weren’t—saps, prigs, or pedants. We were not looking for the safe, if ever so slightly bland, option. We were looking for the new “Great Gatsby,” the “Sound and the Fury” of 2012, the book that could stand unembarrassed alongside “Invisible Man.”

So, for argument’s sake, let’s imagine that the juries and Pulitzer boards of the past were not necessarily saps, prigs, or pedants. That includes the ones that didn’t acknowledge “The Great Gatsby,” “The Sound and the Fury,” or “Invisible Man.” It includes the people who, in 1974, believed it was better to withhold the prize entirely than to give it to “Gravity’s Rainbow.”