Best American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

It is my opiniion that anyone that responds to Possum as if he/she/it were offering rational commentary is a fool.

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dyslexia wrote:

It is my opiniion that anyone that responds to Possum as if he/she/it were offering rational commentary is a fool.

You're prolly right. I just find his posts as tempting as a hanging curve; only bashing away at 'em never knocks him out of the box. He comes right back with another lousy pitch.

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I am very much afraid that Mr. Dyslexic and Mr. D'Artagnan's replies clearly show that they are unable to rebut my ideas. I do not, however, post for them. I post for those who would not get a viewpoint showing just how fraudulent Ms Morrison's novel-"Beloved" really is.

Mr.Dyslexia and Mr. D'Artagnan need not concern themselves. They need not respond to my posts if they cannot rebut the ideas in them.

I will continue to give my viewpoints for those who may wish to hear another side to the story!!!

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JoeNation -- I enjoy your posts. I will begin reading Beloved when I finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I plan to finally complete in a day or so.

I find it amazing that bernie/massa can quantify how much you know. You are a fairly new poster to me. I would never say anything as stupid as Genovese knows 46 or 47 times as much about slavery as you do. Your user name is Joe Nation, but, you could be David Brion Davis or Orlando Patterson.

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Dlowan, Dyslexic, D'art, Joe Nation -- I find bernie/massa's depictions of my uproarious! Long ago, a friend who was adored by an idiot told me how upset he was: If a fool thinks you are wise, you aren't, was the way he dismissed her admiration. I must truly threaten him! I just wish I knew who these authors are that he thinks I read. Talk about nasty.

However, I am really angry because I started a thread on which came first: religion or ethics, a favorite subject of mine. It was inspired by the Bill Moyers interview with Salmon Rushdie. The thread had to be taken down, probably because some one of little intellect launched poison on it.

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Yes, it's sad when a thread can be subverted by a one-person campaign to call attention to himself, over and over. It's the depth of egotism and immaturity.

Like the kid in grade school whose tantrums may be entertaining for a while but who is eventually so tiresome that the other kids wish he'd just stop...

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D'artagnan wrote:

dyslexia wrote:
It is my opiniion that anyone that responds to Possum as if he/she/it were offering rational commentary is a fool.

You're prolly right. I just find his posts as tempting as a hanging curve; only bashing away at 'em never knocks him out of the box. He comes right back with another lousy pitch.

Lol! Like one of those punching bags with weights at the bottom....think of resisting the troll as mental strength training.....

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Does anyone know how many entries a single person could submit to the original (ugh! sticky keyboard!) BEst American Fiction in the past 25 years?

With more and more books published all the time, it is difficult to keep up with what is fresh and literate.

I left the book group about five years ago, so I no longer keep with current fiction, but, we read so many books that showed that there is still regionalism in AMerican writing.

Lee Smith made our list at least twice. Another book that was very well received was, "Brighten the Corner Where You Are."

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Plain Ol Me has got it!!! She has found the answer!!!

quote Plain Ol Me

With more and more books published all the time, it is difficult to keep up with what is fresh and literate.
end of quote
I will state without fear of contradiction that Literature, like Cinema and other Arts has a hierarchy. No one can say that Great Literature does not exist. No one can say that Literature which is fit only for the bottom of a bird cage does not exist.

Plain Ol Me tells of her dilemma. It is a dilemma. With only so much time available what shall we read?

It is clear and will be seconded by every rational teacher of LIterature that it is better to feed one's mind on the Greats in Literature.

Novels like the pot-boiler on DaVinci and the tendentious race-carding nonsense like Beloved are a waste of precious time.

Why read junk when there is so much out there that is judged by those who know to be not only superb literature but GREAT LITERATURE?

I am sure that those who want to read the pot-boilers and the racial polemics will do so. I am also sure that no one who really knows what Literature is will say that those pot-boilers and racial polemics are in any way BETTER than Great Literature.

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To answer the question Plainoldme asked, yes, I do. They were supposed to pick one, some didn't or couldn't, they presented lists.

From A. O. Scott incisive essay about the choices: Link (may be for subscribers only- I can PM a copy- it's pages long)

Quote:

They are - the top five, in any case, in ascending order - "American Pastoral," with 7 votes; Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" and Updike's four-in-one "Rabbit Angstrom," tied with 8 votes each; "Don DeLillo's "Underworld," with 11; and, solidly ahead of the rest, Toni Morrison's "Beloved," with 15. (If these numbers seem small, keep in mind that they are drawn from only 125 votes, and from a pool of potential candidates equal to the number of books of fiction by American writers published in 25 years. Sometimes cultural significance can be counted on the fingers of one hand.)

===
Plainoldme:

I think if you read a lot of books it would be very difficult to pick one, just one, as best of all. Which is Best is as difficult a category as a mother being asked which of her children she loved the most. All of the loved ones are loved in different ways which are not always in some easily defined order. So it is with books.

E.B. White was once quoted about his favorite:

Quote:

"Walden is the only book I own, although there are some others unclaimed on my shelves. Every man, I think, reads one book in his life, and this one is mine. It is not the best book I ever encountered, perhaps, but it is for me the handiest, and I keep it about me in much the same way one carries a handkerchief - for relief in moments of defluxion or despair." (White in The New Yorker, May 23, 1953)

That's a man with a connection to a book that is real.

And yes, regionalism is still with us. I think that's a good thing. If one thread runs thick through the American novel it's the notion that you can recover the past. In a novel the characters are fiction but the places they exist in are not. If that's true, then the recovery of what it was like to be in a certain place in the past beyond the lives of the characters can be be delivered to the reader as well. Five years from now, maybe sooner, there will be a novel detailing what happened to some people in New Orleans as the water rose up through their attic floorboards, part of that book will be what was going on in the days before the storm. The people in Ohio and Kansas and elsewhere need to know.

Joe(No, I am not writing that one.)Nation

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To answer the question Plainoldme asked, yes, I do. They were supposed to pick one, some didn't or couldn't, they presented lists.

From A. O. Scott incisive essay about the choices: Link (may be for subscribers only- I can PM a copy- it's pages long)

Quote:

They are - the top five, in any case, in ascending order - "American Pastoral," with 7 votes; Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" and Updike's four-in-one "Rabbit Angstrom," tied with 8 votes each; "Don DeLillo's "Underworld," with 11; and, solidly ahead of the rest, Toni Morrison's "Beloved," with 15. (If these numbers seem small, keep in mind that they are drawn from only 125 votes, and from a pool of potential candidates equal to the number of books of fiction by American writers published in 25 years. Sometimes cultural significance can be counted on the fingers of one hand.)

===
Plainoldme:

I think if you read a lot of books it would be very difficult to pick one, just one, as best of all. Which is Best is as difficult a category as a mother being asked which of her children she loved the most. All of the loved ones are loved in different ways which are not always in some easily defined order. So it is with books.

E.B. White was once quoted about his favorite:

Quote:

"Walden is the only book I own, although there are some others unclaimed on my shelves. Every man, I think, reads one book in his life, and this one is mine. It is not the best book I ever encountered, perhaps, but it is for me the handiest, and I keep it about me in much the same way one carries a handkerchief - for relief in moments of defluxion or despair." (White in The New Yorker, May 23, 1953)

That's a man with a connection to a book that is real.

And yes, regionalism is still with us. I think that's a good thing. If one thread runs thick through the American novel it's the notion that you can recover the past. In a novel the characters are fiction but the places they exist in are not. If that's true, then the recovery of what it was like to be in a certain place in the past beyond the lives of the characters can be be delivered to the reader as well. Five years from now, maybe sooner, there will be a novel detailing what happened to some people in New Orleans as the water rose up through their attic floorboards, part of that book will be what was going on in the days before the storm. The people in Ohio and Kansas and elsewhere need to know.

Joe(No, I am not writing that one.)Nation

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Why don't you write a novel, Joe Nation, about a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals who got together on a thread like this and were so insecure about their choices in LIterature that they could not defend them. I have made my thesis clear--Great Literature drives or should drive out the crap.

No one, not one person has the intellect or the information necessary to defend the portentious political polemic called "Beloved".

I think you are not a very careful reader.Mr.Nation. You chided my for mentioning the words----Six Million and More--as a part of Morrison's propaganda piece. I obviously know more about the novel than you do. It was in the frontspiece of the book-obviously referring to the number of African-Americans killed(murdered?) by the vicious white devils.

The very beginning of the book gives the lie to Morrison. There is no proof, none, that six million were killed( murdered). Since this is political polemic at its height at the very beginning of the book, the status of the book cannot be placed above that of a political pamphlet!!!

Again, only people who are insecure about their choices in LIterature do not or can not defend a novel which they claim is magnificent!!!

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Good point, Joe, re it taking time for novels to reflect past events. Novels with 9/11 references now abound; Updike has a new one with the allure of terrorism as a theme; and Hawthorne wrote about his forebears in Salem. To name but a few.

The test, of course, is how well these works hold up over the years...

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Joe -- Your writing on regionalism was reflective and moving. I finished JS&MN, which my daughter and her husband had insisted I read. Although it had a rather dry patch about 1/3rd of the way through, it really picked up speed at page 500 -- about 200 pages before the author delivered her point.

Quite a nice piece! Susanna Clarke is a woman who obviously knows the history of the novel well, among many other things.

I returned to Bleak House -- as I said earlier, I have to read two books at once -- but I need to finish a Spanish book on European witchcraft before the summer comes to an end, so I hope to burn the midnight oil plenty of times.

--------------------

I, too, wish regionalism well in this world of rapidly diminishing individuality and reduced choices.

Regionalism may be dying simply because people move more than ever before.

When I first came to NE in 1976, I remember how people here resented immigrants, particularly those from the Midwest.

-------------------

I don't have a favorite book. While I haven't read as many as book reviewers and critics have, I have read far more than the average person.

As I have said before, I prefer reading history and science, but having had to reread some novels that were part of my early years has brought home to me more strongly than ever that there are many ways to look at a single work of fiction.

In high school, The Scarlet Letter was largely the story of a woman shunned by her community -- as well as her struggles with less than perfect men. Reading it now, I often laughed out loud at HAwthorne's screed against his own circumstances and his social commentary.

I know this a thread on American fiction and I have tried to kindle some discussion of books that I have read recently that are worthy of note, like Brighten the Corner Where You Are (reviewed in my book group by a Tufts University assistant professor of Classics -- an astute and scholarly woman).

I find I prefer Brit writers, who seem to use the language better than their American cousins. I also understand -- as I indicated obliquely above -- how difficult it is to winnow out one book, but, I would like to hear from others about notable American books they have read within the past 25 years.

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plainoldme wrote:

Long ago, a friend who was adored by an idiot told me how upset he was: If a fool thinks you are wise, you aren't, was the way he dismissed her admiration.

How totally sickening! Would Jesus Christ have done likewise?

Confused

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Is WWJD the new criterion around here?

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Of course not, Mr. Miller. It is obvious that MS Plain Ol Me has a great many "homilies" in her carpetbag. The problem, of course, is that they are mainly overgeneralized fripperies!!!!

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Looks like no one wants to discuss their favorite AMerican novels published in the past 25 years.

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"Underworld" by Don DeLillo gets my vote. The changes in American society over the past 50 years are reflected in a cast of misfits and thinkers, including some historical figures (e.g., Jay Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason). By turn, fascinating, surreal, horrifying, touching, funny. DeLillo's masterpiece.

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Good work, D'art.

Let's here from more readers.

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Best American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

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