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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Best work of american fiction these past twenty five years is....

04:34 / 12.05.06

...,according to nyt,'beloved' by toni morrison

seems delillo got three or four in the short list, and phillip roth got five. where's pynchon? i'm no expert on american lit, so what do those here that are think of this?

13:03 / 12.05.06

Once again, the pool of nominees comes from a very select and elite group. No Pynchon, no Gaddis, no experimental stuff other than Delillo and he's not that experimental. However, Pynchon and Gaddis are referred to in the article (by the way, in the past 25 years, Gaddis won two National Book Awards while Philip Roth won one). I'm also glad to see Richard Ford on there, along with Raymond Carver. Both great writers.

No Franzen, no Vollmann, no Bret Easton Ellis, no Chabon, no John Irving, no nothing.

Notice however, there is no genre fiction. Simply mainstream works of literature as opposed to great works of fiction. This article stinks of New York-centric criticism, and it makes sense that it comes from New York Times, no longer considered an authority on criticism, IMO. This article represents, in another fashion, criticism's lack of respect for modern genre fiction. (In my university career, I have found that some universities embrace and push genre fiction, including Stephen King, Alan Moore, James Ellroy!)

It wasn't only one book to choose, if I could say five books were the best, then definitely Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials would go in there, as well as John Irving's The World According to Garp. And, some people might remember my love for Jonathan Franzen, here and here.

14:28 / 12.05.06

uhm...hate to be the pedant, but isn't olld Pullman a Brit?

15:24 / 12.05.06

Whoops!

09:09 / 14.05.06

i think in the end that toni morrison's 'beloved' is probably a pretty good choice, but yes agree that there is an exceedingly obvious clique-iness to it all with so many repeated names...

franzen? very good in corrections, pretty ok in 27th city (or whatever the title is, 26th something?) but haven't read anything else. recommendations? but wouldn't rate corrections over pynchon!

11:44 / 14.05.06

The World According to Garp can´t make the list, it was published in 1978.

Hydra vs Leviathan

12:27 / 14.05.06

Well, IMO Toni Morrison is, in terms of the imagery, "flow" and emotional power (without compromising intellectual depth) of her writing style, probably the greatest living novelist in the English language, and possibly in any language, and Beloved is undoubtedly her crowning glory, and i'd be quite happy to see it win any poll of the greatest American, or indeed Anglophone, novels ever, not just of the last 25 years.

However, i'm not entirely convinced it's won this poll on merit, as i've never read, nor even had recommended to me, any of the other nominees on that list, and, from the reviews, none of them look vastly interesting to me... thus, while it is, of course, unconfirmable, i have strong suspicions of tokenism (neither any other woman, nor any other African-American writer being represented on the list)...

I think i really need to read Beloved again... i must have read it at least 5 times, but the last time was probably about 5 years ago, and since then i've significantly changed several of my attitudes to literature and life in general (not least getting back into "genre" fiction, after a long period of mistakenly only reading what i narrowmindedly thought of as "proper literature", but also learning a few things about myself that i think would reflect strongly on my identification with one major character)...

Re the more general topic, i think i'm now going to be compelled to go and look thru my bookshelf to see which "American" (by which i guess they mean USian, and wouldn't include, say, Latin American novels) books were actually written within the last 25 years...

23:16 / 14.05.06

The World According to Garp can´t make the list, it was published in 1978.

Wow. I am oh for two. (28 yrs ago - I was off by three.)

23:09 / 31.05.06

Great article at Salon about the pageantry of the whole affair. Here's a nugget, or rather, the more salient bits:

Ultimately, novels are so diverse that once they attain a certain level of quality, they really can't be meaningfully ranked against one another. "Pride and Prejudice" and "Crime and Punishment" are both excellent, but very different, books, and the idea that we can decide which is better -- or "greater" -- is fundamentally absurd. That said, it's perfectly possible to decide that "Bleak House" is better than some lesser work (let's say "Oliver Twist" or "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel") or that one lesser work is better than another. Some people I discussed this with had a hard time understanding that not wanting to exert an excess of judgment isn't the same thing as refusing to make any judgment at all. I don't know why this is so difficult to grasp; it's like the difference between being decently neat and having obsessive-compulsive disorder.

...

But most important, the idea of a single best novel struck me as not only a confining choice but one that completely missed the point of what has happened in American culture in general and American literature in particular over the past 30 years. Once, maybe, people could convince themselves that ours is a monoculture and writers like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth could compete for the alpha-dog position as the novelist who best defined the "American experience." That's not the world we live in anymore; no one gets to speak for "everybody."

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the Book Review's survey is that even the frontrunner got only 15 votes out of 125. In his essay about the survey, A.O. Scott states that "sometimes cultural significance can be counted on the fingers of one hand," but to my eye, the significance here lies in how broadly the votes were distributed. Consensus, in this light, is an illusion, and while that can be confusing and disorienting at times, I say hurray. I realize that people -- or some people -- will always feel profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that some fields of excellence can't be as minutely broken down as the NCAA rankings. But get used to it.