the need for novels is less. we have huge amount of entertainment mediums that did not exist until recently. we have world news that is instant, communications around the world that is instant. we have incredible amounts of information to assimilate. i’m sure the past was filled with empty leisure time and wide spread ignorance that drove people to novels. but that doesn’t mean its some how superior because it has snob appeal.

Similarly, Cory Doctorow’s work (he’s Canadian, though) meets the wickets of current, visionary, etc.

The books and authors mentioned are all products of the literary establishment, whereas the greats of the past came from areas that were in flux – journalists, travelers, etc. In the adolescence of the internet, the great books are no longer straight fiction – those problems have been done.

The best novel in the last 25 years was either Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Dennis Cooper’s Closer.

“The Corrections transcends its many wonderful moments to become that rarest thing, a contemporary novel that will endure.”

(for that matter, Wolfe and Trevor have been published in the New Yorker as well).

Significant? I would argue, to my personal chagrin, that the most significant novel of the last 25 years was any one (take your pick) of the Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. I have not read them and have every reason to believe that as literature they are awful. But they have disseminated, in a vivid way, the end-times worldview of apocalyptic Christian fundamentalism to millions of the most politcally active people in America, people intent on turning my republic into something I would not want to live in. If you want to talk significance, there’s where you have to look, I’m afraid.

Well, periods of chauvanism, selfishness and even repression has rarely an impediment to great writing. Think Soviet Russia and the great literature it had spawned. The age of dictators in Latin American has also been the age fo great novelists.

Don’t think we can just blame the poltical climate for the lack of a great contemporary literature. I blame the education system as well as the culture of political correctness.

Very interesting thought. Here’s my take on it:

It seems that most of the recent great novels suggested by people are about previous or imaginary times or places. But I tend to think that the novels that last are those that tell us about their own snapshot in time (think Augie March, Gatsby, Tom Wolfe’s novels, e.g.). Maybe “Great” in this context doesn’t just mean “Very Good”, but instead means something more like “Seminal” or “Timely” or “Landmark”.

So maybe a Great novel written today would have to take a position on the meaning of today, and then be proven correct in that position by history.

Aside from 9/11, what do we grab onto today that defines the current time? What does or will set us on a new course (like the Roaring 20’s, the post-war suburban boom, the 60’s, e.g.) going forward? I hope it’s not perpetual war and loss of civil protections… perhaps it will be the new lifestyle imposed on us by the fight against global warming.

Not interested in genre? No problem, his novel Peace (1977) is a gem of American fiction about a rich old man who lives in a mansion built of rooms to match those of his haunted childhood. Imagine 100 Rooms of Solitude rather than 100 Years, and you’ll get the idea.

May 24, 2006

Was Beloved a political pick for the NYT top 25?

Well, duh. But that doesn’t answer whether it was good enough to be number one. Some peo [...]

Might this not also apply to fiction?

I am also struck by the characteristic American notions that there might be “THE” single great American novel. And also that somehow “greatness” is the value to be prized.

The next great American novel probably drowned in a slush pile.

My own nomination: Ruishdie’s “The Ground Beneath Her Feet.”

“Fortress of Solitude” hit me deeply because I grew up in New York in the 70’s and 80’s too, though I’m a bit younger than Dylan Ebdus. I recognized so much in that book with a deep shock that quickly turned to gratitude. He really captured the feeling of the city in that time period, and of being a child in that time and place – every aching moment of it, in painstaking detail, with the soundtrack. That book is a major accomplishment.
And then he even went and used a quote from the Brian Eno diary, as if I couldn’t love it enough already.

I also think Kate Atkinson is one of the best out there, but she’s not American, she’s a Brit. “Behind The Scenes At The Museum” was her first, and that and everything after it have been impossible to put down. I don’t know how to describe her writing. I just wish more people read her books.

Oh – and how could I forget Susan Choi’s “American Woman”? Now *that’s* an American novel – a hard look at the fallout of 60’s radicalism, through the eyes of one very strong character.

Do Canadians count here? Because Margaret Atwood is a master.

I ‘lived’ in’ Lethem’s ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ for many many weeks after I read it. It is the only book I ever remember reacting to that way. I couldn’t bear to emerge from it. Humane, loving, uniquely american, noir-ish, freakish, in rollicking language; I couldn’t get enough.

How can anyone say that there isn’t great work being written by newer writers? Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Monica Ali (OK, not American, but who cares), to name a few, are writing some of the most exciting stuff out there. Lynda Barry’s “Cruddy” also springs to mind.

And, “The Things They Carried” isn’t a significant book about Vietnam?

What do people want? Big bloviating egos, or good stories well-told? Because there are plenty of the latter going around these days.

As for the great American graphic novel, that’s easy: “Love & Rockets”. Book Twelve alone (“Poison River”) is a Great American Novel. And it ain’t genre just because it’s got pictures.