Cultural Question: How many of these are really "great books?"

[BurtWorm]

I like many of these books, but I don't know if I'd say any of them are among the greatest American books ever. I'm sort of surprised this is the best anyone could for for the greatest books of the last 25 years. I haven't read Beloved, but I do think Song of Solomon is a great book. But one of the greatest? I would really have to think long and hard about that. Don DeLillo's books are very entertaining often, but great? I sort of doubt it.

One Russell Banks book I might include in a list of great American novels: Affliction.

How about the rest of you?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/fiction-25-years.html?ei=5087%0A&en=f5b37cba8d7bffb2&ex=1147665600&pagewanted=print

May 21, 2006
What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Following are the results.

THE WINNER:
Beloved
Toni Morrison
(1987)

THE RUNNERS-UP:
Underworld
Don DeLillo
(1997)

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
(1985)

Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels
John Updike
(1995)
'Rabbit at Rest'
(1990)
'Rabbit Is Rich'
(1981)
'Rabbit Redux'
(1971)
'Rabbit, Run'
(1960)

American Pastoral
Philip Roth
(1997)


THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ALSO RECEIVED MULTIPLE VOTES:

A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
(1980)

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
(1980)

Winter's Tale
Mark Helprin
(1983)

White Noise
Don DeLillo
(1985)

The Counterlife
Philip Roth
(1986)

Libra
Don DeLillo
(1988)

Where I'm Calling From
Raymond Carver
(1988)

The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
(1990)

Mating
Norman Rush
(1991)

Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson
(1992)

Operation Shylock
Philip Roth
(1993)

Independence Day
Richard Ford
(1995)

Sabbath's Theater
Philip Roth
(1995)

Border Trilogy
Cormac McCarthy
(1999)
'Cities of the Plain'
(1998)
'The Crossing'
(1994)
'All the Pretty Horses'
(1992)

The Human Stain
Philip Roth
(2000)

The Known World
Edward P. Jones
(2003)

The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
(2004)

[SeveneightyWhoa]

1. Well of course the LIEberal New York Times..

..forgot to even mention splendid fictional works by authors like Ann Coulter, Bernard Goldberg, and Richard Perle.

Books like "Slander", "Bias", and "The End of Evil" come to mind..

[jmowreader]

25. Those still don't belong on that list

It said the GREATEST fiction books of the past 25 years.

While Ann Coulter is a fiction writer, the quality of her work leaves much to be desired.

[Poppyseedman]

2. Based on book sales

The Da Vinci Code should be on the list.

It is after all, a work of fiction, unbeknown to most people who will believe just about anything put in a movie.

I do find it hard to believe this is the list of the greatest works of fiction in the last 25 years.

[Spider Jerusalem]

12. Sales are no indicator of literary merit.

More often than not there's an inverse relationship.

[Mythsaje]

15. And one should also keep in mind

that the Big Houses often buy copies of their own works to launch certain books onto the bestseller lists. Buy and DESTROY these books.

The sales figures are bogus.

[BurtWorm]

18. "Greatness" is not the same as literary meritoriousness, though.

Some of the great books of the past are great because they seeped deep into the cultural consciousness without the benefit of being superbly created works of art. Huckleberry Finn, for example, is very weak at the end, but the stuff of its greatness is in the mythic center of it.

[Poppyseedman]

19. I certainly agree.

but my main point was to bash Da Vinci Code as being presented as a work of non fiction or the movie as a documentary.

Thanks for the opportunity to do it again

[EFerrari]

3. Beloved has the title because Morrison did something

revolutionary in the novel form. She literally reinvented it -- although, you could say that that book is the culmination to the work a group of Black women authors were doing for about 20 years and that critics didn't know what the heck to do with.

The successor to Beloved is The Poisonwood Bible / Barbara Kingsolver.

And there endeth the lesson. :silly:

[catnhatnh]

4. A little elitist/artsy.....

Best 25 of the last quarter century and 3 writers get 13 slots????Of those 3 writers, I've read only two by Roth and found them slightly boring/ethnocentric....I personally would have hoped that something by John Irving would have made the list.....That said the list should be yoked to a list of the 25 best selling novels of the same time period with a discussion of whether "best" and "best selling" are related or antagonistic terms....For extra bonus points "writers,critics,editors,and other literary sages" should post and defend their definitions of the terms......

[EFerrari]

6. In my #3 above, the implicit definition is the development of

the novel as a form. :)

[BurtWorm]

10. I agree that that is one criterion, which makes you think Pynchon

should be on the list. And Saul Bellow.

A great book should also reverberate in the culture at large, whether through being bought and actually read, or being read by cultural producers who proliferate its ideas and themes.

Huckleberry Finn was not a bestseller when it first came out, for example; though I think it did eventually pick up the pace a bit, it didn't knock Innocents Abroad off the top of the Twain Best-Seller list until sometime this century. But it is so famous through being talked about and adapted, it's as though every American has read it.

[Spider Jerusalem]

13. What's Pynchon done in the last 25 years, though?

V. was published in 1963; The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966; Gravity's Rainbow in 1973; nothing in the past 25 years except Vineland (by far the worst thing he's ever written), and Mason & Dixon--which wasn't bad, but wasn't up to his first three novels, nor is it the equal of, say, Don DeLillo's work during the same period.

And the same criteria apply to Bellow (whose best work was done decades ago, and all before the cutoff date for this list).

If it were the past FIFTY years, then I'd say they should both be on it.

[BurtWorm]

17. Good point.

My math is off. ;)

But not much in the current list comes anywhere near what would be in the list of the previous 25 years, in terms of stark originality and cultural impact.

It's probably the nature of the age, where the really culturally influential work is written in electrons, not ink.

[Spider Jerusalem]

20. A shift in the nature of culture in general is at least partly responsible

Most of the writers who can be considered culturally influential in the postwar era came of age either before the war or by at the latest the early sixties; the rise in influence of television probably has something to do with the near-irrelevance of literature these days. It's kind of hard to imagine a writer today having the kind of cultural impact that someone like William S. Burroughs had in the '50's and '60's. Part of that may be due to people who WOULD have become writers in an earlier age going to film school instead thanks to living in a world where they're constantly inundated with visual imagery. And then of course there's the relative decline in social and cultural influence of the sort of urban intellectuals whose contacts in the world of the arts helped these writers become as influential as they did; I think you can't find a better sign of the relative decline of literature than the fact that in fifty years it's gone from Camus and the Beats to today's urban hipsters reading Chuck Palahniuk (who is, IMO, a very bad and tremendously overrated writer) and telling each other how edgy he is.

Of course, it COULD be that there's more distance between that postwar generation of writers and us, and we're still too close to their successors to be able to make an objective judgement (distance lends perspective, you know).

[BurtWorm]

23. Corporations now go out and co-opt what's "cool" before it has a life

of its own. "Cool" used to be something the corporate world didn't know about. Now corporations tell us what cool is, so we'll be sure to go out and buy a lot of it.

There must be something not called "cool" that is several steps ahead of corporate consciousness that is to this age what "cool" was to the culture of 50 years ago.

[EFerrari]

30. (OT, I was thinking how ironic it is that Toni Morrison's work

is named to this list when there is so little privilege in her background as a person or as a writer to facilitate placing her name and "elitist" in the same sentence. LOL -- she must think the same thing from time to time. :) )

[teamster633]

11. Roth and Updike would have to be considered...

...as 2 of the most important contemporary American writers and the selected works are probably their best efforts(although the early Rabbit novels do not fall within the 25 year time frame which was specified). I, too, think John Irving could have earned a spot for "A Prayer for Owen Meany".

[the other one]

5. No Stephen King?

I guess sales don't count for anything. Why would the number one selling fiction author have written anything worth reading?

[Spider Jerusalem]

14. No, sales don't count for anything at all here.

Nor should they. Popularity doesn't determine artistic/literary worth. If it did, then the American Film Institute would have to replace Citizen Kane with some commercial box-office blockbuster like Titanic or one of the Star Wars movies on their list of the best films. (Surely you can see how ridiculous that idea is.)

[catnhatnh]

21. I see your point but still support a dialog on the nature....

of "best".....in 1920 was the best automobile a Stutz Bearcat made for a small number of the elite or a Ford Model T that mobilized the masses???We know which one is more prized today by collectors-but which one changed the world? .....just my take...


On edit:The article's title says "best"....never mentioned artistic/literary value as being a deciding factor.....

[EFerrari]

31. Yet, Danse Macabre is one of the finest works on

fiction making I've ever read. King should get something for that and for putting together the Rock Bottom Remainders.



http://www.rockbottomremainders.com/

[catnhatnh]

32. Yes it was a good book....

...but not a novel....

[carolinalady]

7. Well! I'm miffed-my beloved Harry Potter did not make the list.

Besides the incredible imagination of the author, any book that gets millions of kids to read should be considered one of the greats--IMO.

[Lautremont]

8. I don't think those are American.

[carolinalady]

9. You're right! That explains it...Still great books, though. LOL:)

[brentspeak]

16. "A Confederacy Of Dunces" was written in the mid 60's

It was published in 1980. And "Rabbit Redux" and "Rabbit, Run" are from 1971 and 1960, respectively.

[catnhatnh]

22. Thanks....

I could have SWORN "Confederacy" was a little long in the tooth for this list but didn't have the non-gender-specific body parts to stand up and challenge it....

[El Fuego]

28. It was published posthumously.

The author of "A Confederacy of Dunces" committed suicide, maybe in part because he couldn't get his novel published. After his death, his mother convinced a publisher to give it a chance, and now it's a classic.

[Runcible Spoon]

24. well there are some funky, hip choices there but...

I was taught that the Western drive to define a corpus of classics is tied to the hegemony of the capitalist expansion of the printing press and the written word. :evilgrin: (Bourdieu, Benedict Anderson)

[JVS]

26. I've only read confederacy of dunces from that list

Generally books should sit for at least 50 years to properly age, CofD gets an exception because of the fact that it is one of only two books that its author wrote before killing himself.

[panzerfaust]

27. The Greatest fiction of the last 25 years?

That's easy: Current American Mideast Policy

Well...

Maybe Current American Energy Policy?

AH, could be Current American Civil-Rights Policy.

Then again, it might be Current American Environmental Policy.

Guess that Current American Educational Policy might be a contender.

No. More likely is Current American Science Policy.

But more important than that is Current American Religious Policy.

Should not our Current American National Health Policy, which makes us the shame of the civilized world, be the Greatest Fiction?

Durn! Guess it is not as easy as I thought.

Whatever. Amerika is GREAT! Amerika Uber Alles!!

No fiction there.

Truthfully, I have not read ANY of the books in the list. What need is there to escape from reality to fiction, when current reality is so fictionalized?

[El Fuego]

29. "Winter's Tale" and DeLillo's "White Noise" definitely get my vote.