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
Alae Taule'alo 