Best Work of Fiction of the Past 25 Years

So, uhhh
1: what about the rest of the world?
2: I need to go find out what Jesus' Son is, because I do like its company.
3: What does it mean that a woman won, but that the rest of the (multi-)nominated authors were male?
4: Why are lists like that so fascinating to me? Mmm, I love lists of books.

I can vouch for Jesus Son - I quite enjoyed it. File it somewhere between William S Burroughs and Raymond Carver.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/best-judges.html

(I'm just kidding there,
But I would love to check out.
each voter's ballot)

Where I'm Calling From > White Noise > Jesus' Son > Plot Against America

I've read nine of these. It's an okay list - not perfect by any means - but at least it's on the green. It's respectable.

it's strange that this came up today because i was intending to start a thread on women writers/male readers just this afternoon.

I've read eight of these books and "Underworld" is my favourite of the ones listed.

xposts i"ve read "Housekeeping" and can confirm that Marilynne Robinson is a woman despite Øystein's second question ;) - i think it's pretty great. it's one of Scott Seward's favourite books (as far as i know). i think her second novel "Gilead" is much better and may well be my favourite american book of this period.

Should I read Updike?

also, I have no use for John Updike.

As I said, there may have been good or bad reasons for people to vote for Beloved. A bad reason would be people thinking "I want to vote for a book written by a black woman.". Did it happen? Don't know, don't know who the judges were. A good reason would be that people who weren't white, and/or weren't male enjoyed Beloved more than they did books that were written by white males, because the white-male books were full of white-male characters acting in very white-male ways, and written in a very white-male style, and so they just weren't as interested in those books. I think that's quite likely, completely legitimate, and interesting to remark upon, and doesn't detract from the quality of Morrison's work in the slightest.

But no, Jed's probably right, and I'm just a racist misogynist fuck for even noticing that Toni Morrison is a black woman.

But if it's only one single vote, then that theory becomes less likely; I think people worry much less about that sort of thing when they only have one person on their list.

I mean, in the end, there are going to be a lot of reasons why Beloved would come out on top -- and I doubt it won by a statistically meaningful margin anyways. On a different day, a few of those who voted for Beloved would surely have chosen something else, and a few other people would surely have chosen, oh, Underworld.

(That said, anyone who, when asked by the NYTimes what the "single best American novel of the past 25 years" was, didn't laugh and hang up the phone or call the question "retarded"... well, whatever. It's just a goofy trifle after all, and lord knows you wouldn't want to NOT be on the list of people the NYTimes called up for their judgment on such a thing.)

(It would be much more interesting to have all these people list five or ten books that are woefully under-read and explain why we should be excited to read them. Run it daily, or weekly.) (Because, seriously, I've already HEARD of all of these books, and know that people like them. And this doesn't make me any more interested in reading any of them, not even the two that I own.)

I'm finding it hard to accept your apology when it comes with the rest of your reply.

Have you really never heard of the canon wars?

I find it hard to believe that after, what, 15 or 20 years at least of the race and sex of canon/"best-of" lists being politicized that anyone could submit a "best-of" list to the New York Times and not be thinking about issues of representation -- even if they ultimately ignored it and went with Updike.

I think it's ridiculous that American Pastoral is rated as Roth's best of the past 25 years, but, again, small sample size.

Again, I don't think anyone has been suggesting that it's "only" because she's a black woman.

I imagine the nearest anyone could come would be to compile a short list of six or eight books they'd read, were impressed by, and they thought might reasonably qualify as being somewhere among the best. After that, it would be human nature to pick the one they think shows them in the light they want to be seen in.

The judge who wants to be seen as daring would pick some outre title by an author on the far outskirts of the literary scene. The one who wants to be seen as a literary heavyweight will pick a serious book with academic credibility. The author who wants to be seen as popular and accessible would pick a book that sold well and was universally well-reviewed. And so it goes.

That is not choosing on merit, but a mashup of merit, self-conciousness and egotism, and it would apply to any book that was named by any of the judges. The fact that a popular and accessible book won just means that eleven of the judges didn't want to look snobbish.

I did read the article, which is why I know that the last sentence is a back-handed compliment. If you followed his argument, he is basically saying that Morrison's "ideal reader" is the kind of fuzzy-headed college sophomore who cares more about some half-baked concept of self-actualization than rigorous logical thinking.

Ah, o., I misunderstood what you meant by "it".

Anyway maybe it's just that I'm not so willing to say that a novel that brilliantly realizes/engages with the inner workings of a large segment of the population is better than a novel that brilliantly realizes/engages with the inner workings of another large segment of the population, even if I find myself in one of the segments much more than the other. I wasn't convinced the guy writing the article was making that judgment either, which I was looking for. He was debunking some of the ways people describe the book, but he still maintains throughout that the book is really well written!

I'm actually a lot more interested in Blood Meridian after seeing it so high here. I was already vaguely intrigued by it due to friends' recommendations -- but it's taken me a while to shake my long-held misconception that McCarthy was "just" a genre writer.

I've only read five of those. I think I'll see if I can get something by Marilynne Robinson out of the library after work today.

Don't understand the distaste for Confederacy--sad, sure--deliberately so--but not boring. Ignatius is a comic creation for the ages, and there are laugh out loud hysterical moments in the novel. The narrative is quite artfully woven: prismatic in that thematically it all converges on the burlesque show, after which one of the most obtuse of all American characters registers his experience, past and present, clearly for the first time, making for one of the most convincing and moving epiphanies in American long-form fiction since WWII. What an incredible novel for such a young writer. Too bad Toole offed himself.

Anyway, I loved Child of God, too, so I'm into McCarthy when he's getting into depth of character as well. I'm very excited about Suttree now... Maybe I'll go to the library at lunch!

This is an interesting Slate companion piece to the Metcalf essay discussed above.

http://www.slate.com/id/2142095/nav/tap1/

Interesting how she leaves out The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Crying of Lot 49.

The complete absence of speculative fiction in all this is somewhat nettlesome. I'm not sure that, say, Jesus' Son, or The Things They Carried are *better* than, say, Philip K. Dick's VALIS, or Sam Lipsyte's The Subject Steve.

Rockist.

Anyway I'm happy to see Chicago in the house.

Hi, Chris!

A comment on our all too easy prodding--after "thirty years of lying in wait, of losing ourselves in distraction and disillusion, of losing sight of our rhyme and reason, our deep-embedded programming, come to a grand and glorious end as we spill out of hiding and smite them high and hard, finally take it to the hole. Why shouldn't they get what's coming? I mean, what the fuck was I so afraid of?"--to turn a bombing on our shores into a war elsewhere. But it came out in February, 2001. Uncanny.

I think it's less this and more the instinctive conservatism of canon-making. ask authors who are already canonical (at least, as deep as that attribution goes when they're all pretty much still writing) which authors are the best candidates for canonicity, and they'll go with the tried and true. because there is SO MUCH FICTION PUBLISHED that it's daunting to try and imagine how this would go without a shortlist already in mind.

having said that, this list seems off to me and it seems like the current generation of writers/critcs of writing is maybe going about this canonizing process all wrong.

I absolutely hated this book. :-(

Middlesex
White Teeth
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Corrections
Gilead
Empire Falls
The March

?

Was it something it said?

A note re Pynchon, for Dr F: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973); it's been widely blogged on, that if they widened the interval of consideration a little bit, Gravity's Rainbow would clean the fuck up; I don't know if that's true, but I'd like to think so

Bloom would indeed enjoy this list

He was one of the 100+ judges.

xpost: yeah Open Secrets had all the storytelling and language Munro's known for, but for one collection she really started to play with her own conventions. I haven't read it in a while, but I remember the stories would change drastically upon reflection or re-reading. You realize the story was really going on on the periphery somewhere, or some crucial question is left unanswered -- or is answered 2 or 3 different ways -- so that the plot never finally comes to rest. It is probably the most re-readable stuff i've ever read. That's to say nothing of the often breathtaking prose, etc.