What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

The New York Times has a piece asking: What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

The article is very much worth reading, but I see I've read almost none of the books listed. Cormac McCarthy looms large; I think he's among the very worst writers of the past quarter-century...like an undertaker who puts a mound of Dream Wip, topped with a cherry, on the face of every corpse.

Philip Roth's The Plot Against America barely got on the list; it's a pretty good alternate-history yarn, but no landmark of modern fiction.

I've read Updike and Ford, and I think of them as I think of McCarthy: self-consciously good writers. They're like the kid in class who always has his hand up and the right answer about to burst out of him.

The problem for me with these writers is that they refuse to step offstage when the curtain goes up. They're always there, second-guessing their characters, taking a bow when a good line gets applause, stepping up to the footlights to explain the important bits.

It's as if they think their own characters and stories can't stand on their own unless the Great Author intercedes for them.

No doubt much of my reaction is a pure matter of taste. But I seriously doubt that many (or any) of these authors will be mentioned circa 2056 when the NYT runs a piece about the top 25 authors of the late 20th century.

After all, who remembers James Gould Cozzens, or John Dos Passos, or any of the other Big Writers of half a century ago? (Recently I tried to read Dos Passos again, remembering the USA trilogy fondly from my teens in the 1950s. Truly awful.)

Lists like these tend to express the political and esthetic anxieties of the list-makers rather than any intrinsic merit of the novels themselves. That old fascist Ezra Pound said, "Literature is news that stays news." Most "great" novels are non-news, classified ads from 1957. It may be fun to see what a three-bedroom house rented for back then, but such fiction offers no shelter for today's writers. They'll have to build their own.

Comments

[Dean]

Re ... last 25 years: I see all the hype about The DaVinci Code and wonder the same thing. The novel is poorly written and wouldn't deserve a comment except for the push to sell the movie.

[Karen]

Very astute. I agree that Cormac McCarthy is a dreadful writer. One of the best essays I ever read about contemporary lit appeared a couple years ago in Harpers. Essentially it said that most of today's acclaimed fiction is terrible...Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and Don DeLillo were described as unreadable. I laughed so hard reading this,I was crying.

[Karen]

Correction. It was "A Reader's Manifesto," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

[Crawford Kilian]

I read it too, and agreed with most of it. While it was great fun, it appears to have had zero impact on the kind of mainstream fiction that gets published.

[Ken]

I'm not fond of lists, it's just another way of compartmentalizing the world. But whether it's deserving of number one or not, Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' is an excellent novel. Insightful & lyrical it truly stands out among 20th Century novels.