Month: June 2006

Earlier this year the New York Times books editor Sam Tanenhaus sent out a short letter to American’s leading writers, critics, editors and literary sages asking them to name what they considered to be the greatest work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.

As with all seemingly innocuous applications of this kind, Tanenhaus’s letter had in the words of essayist A.O. Scott “downright treacherous” ramifications, opening a tin of highly-politicised worms about aesthetics, what makes an “American” writer American, and most drearily, what makes fiction fiction instead of some other genre, like poetry for example.

The ensuing list yielded both surprises and standards. Toni Morrison’s novel of slavery and violence in ante-bellum America Beloved came out on top, notwithstanding some authors writing letters to Tanenhaus explaining why they wouldn’t be voting for it. Runners-up included Underworld by Don DeLillo, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and the three John Updike Rabbit Angstrom novels (in no particular order): Rabbit At Rest, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit Redux and Rabbit, Run.

Other notables included Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, White Noise by Don DeLillo and The Counterlife by Philip Roth. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral also made reassuring appearances as recipients of multiple votes.

The final voting pool was a relatively small one, as it was drawn from 125 respondents and the numbers in question were likewise small–Beloved scored only 15 votes–lending, if nothing else, truth to A.O. Scott’s adage that “Sometimes cultural significance can be counted on the fingers of one hand.”

This article was published in Bookseller+Publisher in June 2006

“From carnal classics to modern romances” Playboy left yet another indelible mark on our literary culture with last month’s release (to coincide Book Expo America) of what it calls “The 25 sexiest novels ever written.”

To paraphrase the immortal words, most probably of some Internet editor on the Playboy site, if great literature is “thinking with someone else’s brain” then great erotic literature is about locating the literary mind in the groin, or rather “feeling with someone else’s body parts.”

The list was compiled by staff columnists James R. Peterson and Stacy Klein (by their own admission experts on the subject of “hot type”) and subsumes an interesting array of authors, including Henry Miller for Tropic of Cancer, Anne Rice for Interview with the Vampire Nabakov for Lolita, Erica Jong for Fear of Flying, Georges Bataille for Story of the Eye, Pauline Reage of Story of O fame, and Harold Robbins for The Carpet Baggers.

The rest of the list is composed of a variety of works, some of which might justifiably arouse interest for their “liberation” of the language in the courtroom, others that might euphemistically be called ‘tenderly frivolous.’

But the list wasn’t without an internal hierarchy of its own and perhaps expectedly Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley emerged as twin pretenders to the crown, with the former finally winning out over the latter. For all her notorious exploits, Lady Chatterley may well chafe at being bumped down a notch by an eighteenth century schoolmarm, even if Rococo is the new Modern.

Aside from emphasising the (intriguing) longevity of John Cleland and D.H. Lawrence, the list retains a certain interest by revealing a talent for sexiness hitherto unknown in English novelists.

Published in Bookseller+Publisher in June 2006