contemporary american novelists (1985-, say) whose work you've most enjoyed

but if it's entirely too boring to retread for whatever reason, that's okay too...

This thread screams for Tim O'Brien. If you haven't read "The Things They Carried" and "Going After Cacciato" - do so now.

I like Baker, too, but I always feel like I have to apologize for him: "Oh, it's just a trifle, but it's fun."

Jury's still out for me, but I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Michael Chabon yet.

W.P. Kinsella, although he's Canadian originally -- he lives in the Midwest now, though, I think. (Then again, Neil Gaiman's lived here for like ten years, I wouldn't call him Canadian. But Kinsella writes about baseball.)

Chabon. I assume he's American? I have no idea. Summerland drifts towards the end, but it's solid most of the way.

Stephen King. Well, it says "... most enjoyed," not "would recommend for the spankin new canon." The Dark Tower books are trippy, Bag of Bones knocked my socks off, It (1986, I think) is one of the only books that's ever scared me. Besides, I'm a horror writer, this one's a gimme.

Larry McMurtry, because I think Lonesome Dove is post-85, and I know Paradise is.

Steve Erickson, esp. Arc D'x and Amnesiascope.

Isaac Adamson's Billy Chaka books -- the first one, Tokyo Suckerpunch, is better.

Paul Auster, the first of the NY Trilogy (City of Glass?) and The Music of Chance especially.

Philip Roth, but I can't remember which of his stuff is post-85 (The Human Stain, surely; maybe Great American Novel).

I'm sure eight bazillion will come to mind later.

... no, obviously I wouldn't, but more to the point, I wouldn't call him American, either.

Denis Johnson is great with language. His characters are not the best but he writes with great beauty. He writes about pariahs brilliantly, especially in Angels, Fiskadoro, and Jesus' Son (really a collection of short stories, but it reads more like a novella.) I also liked In the Name of the World too. He really can raise the hairs on the back of my neck. Noone writes about America's underbelly, religious cults and junkies with such verve. Johnson is peerless in that respect. His books are like a mixing Larry Clarke's Tulsa photographs, Rainbow people, the SLA, and the Branch Davidians at Waco.

Cormac McCarthy's best body of work is really his "Tennessee" pre-Border Trilogy novels, but his best single book, Blood Meridian, dates 1985 or 86. Blood Meridian has surged in status lately due to Harold Bloom's promotion of the novel as "clearly the major esthetic achievement of any living American writer." But it is a work of genius. It is an extremely brutal yet beautiful book. It is difficult to read at times due to the archaic language and the esoteric vocabulary, but it is hard to put down. The epilogue is one of the best pieces of literature I've ever read in my life. It is as if an American Samuel Beckett wrote it. Blood Meridian actually exceeded my expectations.

Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy have bodies of work that are worth the time and effort. They are really masculine writers, but I also like Harry Crews. Machismo is a delicate vein for writers to tap into, as many fail to deliver anything of substance in that mode. But McCarthy and Crews tap into a distinctly American brand of violence and degenerecy that belongs to the national character, and their fiction represents the apocalyptic preoccupations that continually haunt our national conciousness. Johnson, McCarthy, and Crews works metaphorically foreshadowed events such as the Randy Weaver incident, the Waco tragedy, and even the Columbine shootings.

Some people may be deeply offended by Blood Meridian or Feast of Snakes, or even Jesus' Son, but there can be great beauty in scars, snakes, and the inversion of the American dream.

denis johnson! definitely been meaning to check him out. read an interview with him and he seemed like a very cool dude. wasn't aware of the subject matter he traffics in. awesome. right up my alley, i am totally fascinated by cults (who isn't?)...and am big on literature of the marginalized in america

Size of Thoughts has good and bad points. The "lumber" essay I thought just went on way too long, but the rest was pretty good. Haven't read the new one -- or the one before that.

Wallace ... eh. I read Broom of the System and thought it read like East coast Tom Robbins, but weaker. When Infinite Jest came out, I knew a lot of people who read it just to prove they could get through it, but I can't get motivated by something like that. I bought it, started reading, and just gave up -- nothing was investing me in the story, nothing was giving me any reason to read except "to say I had."

And shit, I forgot about Chuck Palahniuk.

i kind of admired his defense of himself in the interviews i've read. i remember people giving him all this shit after writing vox and fermata...like 'why are you writing all these books about sex, you fucking pervert!" i don't remember his comebacks exactly, but they struck me as being eloquent and very well-reasoned.

as far as the 'navel-lint-gazing' aspect of his writing, well, i'm a total sucker for that kind of thing. can't get enough of it. doesn't he sort of try to attribute that to updike's influence on him? i know he's a big fan of updike. it always reminded me more of some passages in proust, like when proust goes into lengthy musings on subtle aspects of social interaction that you never really bother to give much thought to...baker does that well. and though proust wasn't writing exhaustive descriptions of and doing idiosyncratic takes on straws or what have you, i think he was doing similar things with the natural world, and with memory, of course.

isn't t.c. boyle american? i'm surprised no one's mentioned him. i'm a virgin to his stuff, but i have seen the movie version of 'the road to wellness' a couple times. enjoyed it.

Yeah, he's definitely an Updike fan -- his first book (I think? maybe it was after Mezzanine) was ... U and I, I think. Haven't read it, haven't been able to find it, but it's an interview with Updike (presumably with lots of asides and anecdotes by Baker).

The Proust comparison's a good one, too. Proust's madeleines, Baker's paper straws ... :) (I just really love the paper straw bit, and I don't even know why. It just rang so true. He's really good at that thing -- he even talks about wanting to be good at it, in "The Size of Thoughts" -- where he can talk about something that's so obvious to talk about, so right in front of you, but that no one's brought up before.)

i have a friend who has that gift, actually, like he'll notice the most commonplace things and just rhapsodize about them, and make these fascinating and humorous observations. i just sit there awestruck, thinking, man, what must it be like to be inside your head...he must never get bored!

there was a passage in 'the mezzanine' about being in cvs drugstores that was really brilliant...

DeLillo's White Noise was pretty good. I liked the story and ideas more than I liked the writing. Haven't read anything else by him.

I'm most not a fiction reader.

Also, I know she's not American, but Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones was good.

a.m.homes
margaret atwood (presuming "american" includes "north american", canadians having already been included etc.)

oops! just tried to post this while other messages were being inserted...yay! we have left the twight zone!

A couple of corrections. U & I was his first book of non-fiction, and came out after the first two novels. And it's not an interview with Updike at all -- in fact, it's all about how he's sort of admired and obsessed about Updike from a distance. Which actually makes for very funny reading. There's a great passage where he recalls meeting Tim O'Brien at a New Yorker party, and O'Brien casually mentions, "You know, I play golf with Updike" -- and Baker gets all self-conscious and wonders for several pages what Updike sees in O'Brien, etc. He also makes a point not to re-read Updike while he's writing the book -- he's more interested in his memories of reading Updike than in the actual text. I guess that supports the Proustian comparison, too. Anyway, I like this book a lot -- it's a wonderful example of "autobiographical criticism." And you don't even have to be all that familiar with Updike to enjoy it, although after reading the Rabbit series last year, I did appreciate it on a new level.

He might be a complete lunatic, but I really liked James Ellroy's two books about the 1960s, "American Tabloid" and "The Cold Six Thousand". Ellroy will completely disgust you and then have you laughing, sometimes in the same page.

TC Boyle has a collection of short stories called "If the River was Whiskey" that is fun. I especially like the one called something like Modern Love.

I really liked the first two books by DeLillo that I read, which were "Americana" and "White Noise". I've read "Libra" and tried to get through "Underworld" twice, but I didn't like either one as he never gets to the point.

Auster is a good writer, but every character is such a sad sack in the couple of books I have read by him. I'll just look in the mirror if I need that kind of reminding about life.

It also doesn't really have an ending--which I suppose is the point.

Ah. Hmm. I know what you mean, but I thinking getting to the point is not always the point, if that makes sense. DeLillo is often simply about crafting social landscapes in gorgeous prose, speculating on ideas along the way. And part of the fun of Underworld, I think, is just finding the connections (both literal and metaphorical) among the dozens of characters and themes over the course of the narrative.

"If the River was Whiskey" is a collection of short stories. It seems like almost every story he picks a different classic novelist and writes a short story in their style having fun with how they write. I liked this book best of the three I have read.

"East Is East" is about a tormented Japanese gaigin that escapes off of a Japanese shipping vessel and ends up outside a hob knobby writers colony just near the Okefenokee swamp in Florida. I remember liking it at the time, but it has kind of faded since I read it in the early 90s.

"The Road to Welleville" is a loose novelization of the Kellogg family sanatarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. It is a pretty loopy story and made me laugh quite a bit. The book is a whole lot better than the movie, but that is usually without saying.

DeLillo is a very talented writer. The prose in the couple of books that I didn't like is very well written but he just goes on and on and the book just grinds to a halt. I didn't get this feeling from the first two I read. If you want to write poetry, write poetry.

I'm probably a bad critic of such things, I much prefer a more concise style based around plot and characterization than lyricism. I can't get into Faulkner, Joyce or Pynchon for the same reasons, although I keep trying from time to time. I don't know, if I am going to have to work at it, I get more out of Kafka or Dostoevski. I'd rather re-read a Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, P.K. Dick or something of that sort I haven't read.

I got some phone calls to make, Mosquito, say Ray. Why don't you go downstairs and talk to the gals till we get the people ready that you're supposed to transport.

Okay, Ray, I says. Then after I transport them me and Delgadina going to see Denzel Washington.

Say who? Deznel?

Denzel Washington. He a big movie star. You gots to know Denzel. Maybe you seen him as Malcolm X. I like him in every movie. There is better actors I have heard. But every star ain't the best actor. 'Cept Delgadina's favorite is Edward James Olmos. She comes to Deznel's movies cause I like. I mean, Denzel. You's got me saying Deznel, and I knows the man's name. He's almost as handsome as you is, Ray. Monkey Bread is still a fan of Billy Dee Williams and when us were in Covington were the president of the local Billy Dee Williams fan club. He looks like he wants to ask me some more questions about Deznel or Denzel but he don't He scratches the tip of his nose and turns the tape recorder on. Then he dials a number on the telephone. Mickey? Yeah, we were thinking if you could maybe rent a Land-Rover or something? Yeah, the people that we have can't forget the revolution. Did he say that he knows her? I didn't know your husband was in that revolution. I thought he was Mexican. Yeah, I guess a Mexican doesn't have to fight just in Mexico's revolutions. He's talking to some woman name Mickey, but looking at me, like he still thinking 'bout Deznel or Denzel, like he thinking what I favors about this Deznel or Denzel. I ain't really thinking 'bout Denzel, though.

i'm going to have to get myself a long prison sentence or something in order to find the time to investigate all this stuff...

Larrys Party is one of the few books that seems to be accurate in the loss of power that many men feel when they get older, like Roth, but with out the macho bravado, he sort of fades-the chapter Larrys Penis, with in that book, is funny but also a really wonderfully frank way of showing how much sex is part of life.

dressing up for the carnival, stone diaries, and unless are also v. v. v. v. good.

i like annie prolux's accordian music, but sometimes her prose grates.

One caveat is that I'm not sure her literary skills are up to the sweep of her themes, but the ordinariness of her language is a good match for the ordinariness of her characters.

dressing up for the carnival is almost exprimental, more fragmentary, and not nearly as clear on narrative, but yeah id recommend it next.

But he's one of the few writers I absolutely cannot put down. The Right Stuff is one of my favorite books of all time and is better than his fiction. Yes, it's outside the time period. Bonfire is more dated than A Man in Full but is probably a better book.

The first three - The Blessing Way, Dance Hall of the Dead* and Listening Woman* - are about Joe Leaphorn. The next three - People of Darkness*, The Dark Wind and The Ghostway - are about Jim Chee. After that, the two of them are brought together in the series that made him famous - Skinwalkers, A Thief of Time*, Talking God, Coyote Waits, Sacred Clowns and maybe some others I'm forgetting. I've read all of the ones I've named. The ones I remember as the best - which aren't necessarily the most expository in terms of native culture - are the ones with the asterisks above. Also, near the top is one of Talking God or Coyote Waits, but I don't remember which (sorry), and the other was a big disappointment. It may be best to begin by reading one each from the first two series (Dance Hall and People, say) and then move on to the third. But they're all worth reading, so you could just start at the beginning. I also liked one of his non-Navajo detective stories, The Fly on the Wall.

If you are interested in the Anasazi, there is some interesting discussion of them in two books of popular science by someone I know - this one and, to a lesser extent, this one.

That's it.

Helprin writes for the WSJ and was briefly a speechwriter for Bob Dole in '96--if you saw Dole's acceptance speech you could actually tell the phrases that Helprin wrote vs. those he didn't...