Before the winners of the National Book Awards step forward next week, it's time for the annual examination of the national character as reflected in our literature.

The decision was prompted by word that the winner of the ersatz literary contest, the Quill "Book of the Year Award," was "Angels Fall" by Nora Roberts.

Roberts, who has a career of mass production the envy of a Chinese doll manufacturer at Christmas time (150 titles so far), has achieved the hallmark of a "great writer" because she's sold so many books -- none with much literary merit.

She won because her fans voted -- early and often, apparently -- on the contest's Web site just like you can do on "Dancing With the Stars." The writer with the most votes wins.

For obvious reasons then, the Quill honor hasn't quite the same cachet as the National Book Awards which still picks winners the old-fashioned way: The vote of judges who have read the books.

Still, the "people's choice" approach has its appeal. Take the attitude expressed by reporter Julia Keller who profiled E.L. Doctorow after he was selected for this year's Chicago Tribune Literary Prize:

"Because with Doctorow there is, unmistakably, a sense that for all of his achievements, for all of the reverence in which he is held by critics and readers, for all of the passionate admiration he elicits, he still does not garner quite the same amount of attention as do some of his more self-aggrandizing -- and, to many observers, less deserving -- contemporaries: [Philip Roth] and Norman Mailer, for instance, the naughty boys of literature, the ones who bountifully endowed with surly personas and put-up-your-dukes pomposity."

(Anyone who can diagram that sentence should get a prize from the Tribune, too.)

What I think Keller is trying to say is that Doctorow's personal reticence has hurt his chances to be a "popular," hence a successful American novelist.

In other words, he should behave like Britney Spears.

She quotes, with a tin ear for Doctorow's irony, the writer:

"It would be nice to have some sort of scandal to get off the book page and into the bold type ..."

However, the novelist is doing just fine with his collection of books that have inspired Hollywood films and a Broadway musical, and you can't get more popular than that as a writer.

It's not Doctorow's quiet life that keeps him out of the headlines, but that his novels are not the soul-bearing circuses like those of Philip Roth.

Roth has lived much of the last 20 years in an isolated cabin in the New England woods avoiding publicity. If, like the fading pop star, he forgets to wear underpants, he keeps it to himself and acts out on the page instead.

"Why else had I lived apart from people ... if not to say not one word more than was in my books?" says Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, in "Exit Ghost," his latest book.

In Doctorow's world, the lives of generals, gangsters and even the Pittsburgh pervert Harry Thaw provided the material, not his experiences. It was crazy Harry who gave "Ragtime" an infamous sex scandal, not anything from the novelist's life.

It's not news that American culture is top-heavy on celebrity, just dismaying that we want our writers to join in the national peep show.

"Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in 'the arts,' " writes Roth in "Exit Ghost" as a letter to a newspaper.

I was in a book store recently where the juxtaposition of titles about Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, and Annie Leibowitz, celebrity photographer and longtime companion of the late Susan Sontag, caught my attention.

The work of Sontag and Arendt has occasionally been compared, but most Americans today who know Sontag probably connect her to Leibowitz, thanks to the gossip columns.

The private life of Arendt, who died in 1975, was not the focus of media attention 40 years ago, only her work was.

When Oprah Winfrey seized upon the notoriously shy Cormac McCarthy this year, his timorous performance in front of millions of her show's viewers was ample evidence that writers should write and entertainers entertain.

Success as a novelist is found between the pages, not the sheets.