Best American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

Funny, I thought he wrote of men and machines... Hey, this is timely for me if OT for this thread: my children and I will be going to Dresden in the next month. I am half seriously thinking of taking a copy of Slaughterhouse Five along on the off chance my 15 year old would read it... But otoh, her questions might make my SO (who is german) and his family uncomfortable. Otoh, she needs something to read on the plane, and I could reread it again also... Whaddya all think? Good idea or bad idea?

(Off to read the rest of this thread for good ideas of what to take to read while travelling roughly halfway around the world...)

From what I think I know about Vonnegut and by his new book I think he could care less about being famous. I don't think he would consider that much of a credit to himself (It is very sad to say).

I wonder what a new book by Henrey Miller would read like today? oh ****

I think that Slaughterhouse Five is a very good book. It clearly shows how the barbaric Americans bombed the innocent German civilians in Dresden for no reason.

Vonnegut points out the barbarity of war!!! I am lately incling towards pacifism. How could we have been so brutal as to use the Atomic Bomb twice on helpless Japanese civilians?

Kurt was under those bombs so he may have been somewhat resentful. It's the influence of one's point of view.

Princess, Take Beloved and write us a book review. Also we want pictures of Dresden.


I need to read a novel this month, maybe I will read Beloved and BernardR and I will compare notes.

Joe(we tried a book club here once, it went nowhere)Nation

An A2K bookclub! Now there's a thought! I may just try to get a copy of Beloved for the trip... I read it some time ago, but my daughter never did (we saw the movie when it came out; she was a little girl, some of the images scared her at the time.) I remember loving the book but I also lost a daughter who was short of 2 years old when she died (although she died from cancer, not from the situation in the book.) I was also married to a black man at the time (he didn't consider himself AA; he considered himself black) and so maybe I *got* the book in a way that BernardR didn't/couldn't... But I don't think you have to be black or a woman or any sort of enslaved person to appreciate the book... I'm trying to recall how it was written, it sort of starts out scattered (think scat music) and then tells a story ripe for the blues... Or perhaps a better analogy is that it's like a shattered tale, the way extreme grief shatters one, then, as you read, the pieces come together and by the end, you can see the whole picture of the story. I remember it as being a very good book. Yep. I'm thinking it may be a taker in the way the rabbit books wouldn't be for me or my daughter... If they have a paperback copy of Slaughterhouse Five in the used book store, I may just pick it up and slip it in. I can't read german well enough to get a newspaper article, much less a novel, so I better take whatever I plan to read for 4 weeks, and it better not weigh much at this point...

I love mysteries, which I now buy from the Mystery Book Club.

Bernard -- You are soooooo hung up on credentials. As for the Canon, what a pile! Listen. I know of a library that recently de-acquisitioned some books, including a series of reprinted author profiles/interviews published originally in the Paris Review.

I snapped them up. How nice it was to revisit the mid-20th Century. How remarkable were the names of the author-subjects. People who were the epicenter of the literary world in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Were we to do a man-on-the-street interview today, very few would recognize the names of these fallen intellectual heroes.

It is too bad that you didn't read some of the criticism levelled at The Canon when it was published.

As a conservative, you probably do not recognize change. Not all change is good -- heavens, the world is hotter, dirtier and more toxic than it was in the 1950s -- but change exists and some of it growth, positive change.

There are authors that are better than others. I was recently taken to task here on this forum for writing that when The Da Vinci Code was published, I read a review that told me I would not enjoy reading it because it wasn't literature.

I gather from statements made by people who I respect as writers that the writing in DVC is terrible.

In fact, after earning a degree in political science, I returned to school to study English because I could not find a book worth investing my time in long enough to finish.

That does not mean I wanted to blindly follow the likes of Harold Bloom. It meant I wanted to train my inherent taste and enhance my ability to recognize what is good. I don't waste my time on tripe like DVC because I am educated and an adult and I trust myself.

Your reliance on Bloom or anyone indicates that you do not trust yourself.

I am going to read Beloved, solely because you are ranting against it.

Now, as far as Richard Wright is concerned, a high school student asked me why the class couldn't read Native Son.

I would not want to take on the teaching of Native Son to just any high school class. It is a difficult book and it takes maturity to appreciate it.

Turning back to the more than 30 years since I read NS, I can't help but remember that the style was straight-forward, almost journalistic.

Could your appreciation of that novel stem from the deaths of two female characters?

Joe and AMigo -- I think some critics ARE whacked. But, in their defense, there are different reasons why they are off balance. Some have always been off, you know, the excessively artsy ones. Some are intellectual snobs and stuffed shirts, like Harold Bloom. Others become unhinged through the practice of criticism.

The brother of a friend formerly reviewed movies for the Boston Globe. Because he had to see all the movies -- good, bad, mass produced, art house releases, etc -- he flipped out. Went into criticism overload and began screaming at people. LEft his job.

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Now, during my daughter's senior year at Smith, Kurt Vonnegut was writer-in-residence. That's notice.

Whether his work is science fiction or not is a good question. The term science fiction was only coined in the 1920s. According to something I was reading yesterday, there is no good definition of the genre.

Some universities still refuse to deal seriously with science fiction and HArvard is among them

While it is true that some science fiction is not very well written, there is no denying the contribution the genre -- loosely defined and as sprawling as it is -- makes both to society and to people's awareness.

I have tried to put Vonnegut on my list for many years and still mean to.

BTW, there may be hope for genre novels: the book Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was nominated both for a Hugo and Booker! That is an achievement, and I do not take much truck with literary awards!

If high schools can't appreciate "Native Son", would they still
appreciate "To Kill A Mocking Bird?

I am very much afraid, Mr. Plain Old Me ,that you do not know what the Canon represents.

Here is a quote from Dr, Harold Bloom that it would be well for you to study:

"Contemporary writers do not like to be told that they must compete with Shakespeare and Dante, and yet that struggle was Joyce's provocation to greatness, to an eminence shared only by Beckett, Proust and Kafka among modern Western authors.

"Idealism"...is now the fashion in our schools, WHERE ALL OUR STANDARDS ARE BEING ABANDONED IN THE NAME OF SOCIAL HARMONY AND THE REMEDYING OF HISTORICAL INJUSTICE. Pragmatically, the expansion of the Canon has meant the destruction of the Canon, since what is being taught includes BY NO MEANS the best writers who happen to be women, African, Hispanic or Asian, but rather the writers who offer LITTLE but the resentment they have developed as their sense of identity. There is no strangeness( a quality Bloom states as a "sine qua non" for Canonical works) and no originality in such resentment:even if there were, they would not suffice to create heirs of the Yahwist and Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Cervantes and Joyce."

Cat's Cradle is pretty good, too. The "science" is silly, but the book is quite...

quite.



Critiqueing critics... How low have we fallen?

You have good taste, Mr. Drew Dad. Dr. Bloom does indeed mention Vonnegut in his list of the Canon. He lists only one book of his--CAt's Cradle"-the book you listed.

And as for discussing critiques? That is an old literary sport. I can give you many many entries on that score!

Look who's talking down to me. What a silly man.

This question makes no sense. Do you care to explain? Besides, who said anything about appreciation? And, since a high school is generally a building, how can it appreciate anything?

BernardR appears unable to discuss literature without dragging in his political biases. No true lover of literature would do this--it reduces writing to a didactic exercise...

Hello, again, Dart to the HEart,

I think that there is some value to declaring a body of books worth reading and representative of the culture's values, peoples, problems, triumphs.

However, those things change over time, in part, because we solve old problems and create new ones.

There is also the matter of some books fitting into a life time early on and some requiring maturity. The book group I enjoyed for 14 years discussed this many times.

I was turned off by Dickens at an early age and, frankly, he was never offered by my high school -- which was superior to a few high schools I knew of second hand, through conversations with others -- and, in graduate school, while we had the choice of which Victorian we would read (Matthew Arnold was the most sought after), I frankly don't remember whether Dickens was offered.

I began reading Bleak House because I enjoyed the PBS presentation so much and am finding the book very good. Over written, but good.

THere are books we enjoyed in our youth that appall us as mature adults.

When I taught Ethan Frome (which I loved as a teenager), the kids groaned. I asked them to tell me what the book is about and they said a man who marries a woman for the wrong reasons. Gee! I said. Do people still do that a century later? They had to admit that people do.

However, too much adherence to books from the past -- which might be worshipped sheerly for eccentric and arbitrary reasons -- is untenable.

Running out of time, will post more in two days.

Greetings, plainoldme!

I recently read "Bleak House" but I'm a sucker for Dickens.

I didn't mean to deny the political implications in a novel, but I am critical of the tendency to apply a political yardstick to a work of art. It's especially reductive to let one voice, say Harold Bloom's, determine what's worthy and what isn't...

Mr Possum/Gatos, I saddens me to read your consistent errors in judgement. First of all you omit Mr William Kotzwinkles "Elephant bangs train" secondly you place Vonnegut's "Slaughter House " above his far more intricate "Player Piano" and finally you totally omit "The Dwarf" by Par Lagerkvist which won him the Nobel because it was considered the finest novel of the 20th century (I'm not mentioning "The Glass Bead Game" By Herman Hesse because I can only assume your lack of education inhibited your reading agenda).

Plain ol me. I am afraid that you missed the quotes in my post. Those quotes showed that the main text was from Harold Bloom. You seem to disregard Dr. Bloom's pre-eminence as a critic. Do you have any evidencee that he is not, as many say, one of the premier literary critics in the USA?

So...is anyone interested in reading and discussing Beloved as a group?


(Can't believe I stuck my stupid head in THAT noose again!)






I adored Dickens as a teenager....and still value Bleak House, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Hard Times and a couple of others a great deal.......but I certainly could not read most of his novels with much enjoyment now....