Are literature prizes good for fiction?

JET sent over Eyes on the prizes from The Guardian Books Section. They say Like acting, writing novels is a profession in which not to be very successful is to be very unsuccessful.

Ninety per cent of fiction is crap and deserves no medals. But 90% of everything is crap. In the top non-crap tier, the novel is the only place nowadays where one is likely to find any grown-up discussion of race. In America, that discussion is conducted by writers such as Tom Wolfe (bronze), Philip Roth (silver) and Toni Morrison (gold).