On Friday afternoons no one wants to read another blog post about heath care reform or Iranian nuclear programs or how the nadir of Western Civilization is to be reached this afternoon at 3:32 P.M. Those things can wait till Monday.
Friday afternoons are a good time (well, as good a time as any) for having a heated, half-serious, half-cocked literary argument. So here’s one I want to throw out:
Literary critic Harold Bloom claims that the four major American novelists of our time are Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy.
Assume, for the sake of this debate, that Bloom is correct—as he usually is on almost all textual matters that don’t involve the Bible—and that you have to choose only one (and only one of these four) as the Great American Novelist. Who do you choose?
(I’m going with Cormac McCarthy for the contentious and possibly spurious reasons that (a) he is the master stylist of the age, (b) his works cover a broader thematic range than the others, (c) he’s a timeless literary genius whose works will still be read in the next century, (d) he can whip all of the these other guys (not just on the page, but—if it came down to it—in a bar fight), and (e) he’s a fellow Texan.)
What say you? Who is your choice among these Bloomian uber-writers for the title of GAN?
September 25th, 2009 | 4:16 pm
Roth–unmatched body and range of work.
September 25th, 2009 | 4:26 pm
James Roth–unmatched body and range of work.
I’ll admit that he has an impressive range of work. But I’ve never actually seen his body. Does he work out a lot? ; )
Which is your favorite novel by Roth?
September 25th, 2009 | 4:42 pm
By “greatest American novelist,” do we mean living? Is that why Updike is not one of the choices?
September 25th, 2009 | 4:51 pm
Craig: Is that why Updike is not one of the choices?
Hmm. . . Bloom made that short list a long time ago so I’m not sure why he left Updike off. I’d be curious to know why Bloom thought he didn’t make the cut.
September 25th, 2009 | 5:11 pm
Well, at any rate, given the choices, I would definitely go with the other votes: Roth.
However, I have to admit that I’m factoring in his short stories, which is perhaps not fair, since the voting is supposed to be on “novelist.”
September 25th, 2009 | 5:31 pm
NOT McCarthy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/24/cormac-mccarthy-blood-meridian-digested
September 25th, 2009 | 5:39 pm
Boz: NOT McCarthy.
Referencing The Guardian. C’mon, Boz, everyone knows the British don’t know a thing about literature. ; )
September 25th, 2009 | 9:05 pm
And, of course, it took me this long to remember that Roth has also been dead for a few years, so it couldn’t be “living” authors.
Well, since we’re talking (meaning I’m talking) about people who’ve been deceased for a while, I really like John Gardner. (Not the James Bond John Gardner, and not the business-author John Gardner. The other one; died around 1982.)
September 25th, 2009 | 9:24 pm
Roth. Aside from his sexy body, he can write a paragraph that goes on for two pages and no one complains. The Zuckerman books (does My Life As A Man count, i can’t tell?) are what Kafka would write if he were an American.
September 26th, 2009 | 12:01 am
I’d have to vote for McCarthy. I haven’t read the others! But you all seem to like Roth. McCarthy is pretty violent. I believe that’s the Devil in Blood Meridian. Speaking of literature: you should listen again to William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Man will prevail because he has a soul.”
September 26th, 2009 | 12:16 am
Craig, Roth is not dead. Not sure where that confusion is coming from. He’s alive and well – and still working.
September 26th, 2009 | 12:17 am
Oh, and my vote is Roth, hands down, though I do think Updike should be on the list.
September 26th, 2009 | 8:19 am
For a baroque prose style that at the same time sneaks up on you with a hatchet, McCarthy — but anyone who’s read “American Pastoral” knows that Roth, at his best, is still capable of telling a devastating story with characters who will haunt you. Who remembers characters from DeLillo — or story lines? (Can he even tell a story?) He writes prettily, at times, but to what end? Roth’s adolescent nihilism grates, primarily because you get the sense that he thinks outdoing five-point Calvinists in the human depravity department makes him profound (“The Human Stain,” anyone?). But no one captures the utter futility of trying to escape one’s own self-destructive impulses under one’s own steam better than Roth. Pynchon is unreadable. (Unless they’re packaging his stuff with hallucinogens these days.) Chabon had the potential to enter the ranks of the great but his vision is cramped and riddled with the politically correct pieties of his generation, undermining the power of his language arts. (Bye the bye, upon Joe’s recommendation, I picked up Fforde’s “The Eyre Affair” — a lot of fun, what an imagination (if Terry Gilliam could write novels, he’d be Jasper Fforde). As far as entertaining novelists go, not necessarily those of the first rank among artists, and who are still among the living (which is, I assume, the reason Joe picked the four authors he did), who wins among FForde, Terry Pratchett, Arturo Perez-Reverte (“The Club Dumas”!), and Tom Sharpe?
September 26th, 2009 | 9:39 am
I’m glad to know now that Roth is still alive. And now I’m shambling my way over the horizon. (I teach literature, too, so you’d think I’d keep up to date. Sheesh.)
September 26th, 2009 | 12:16 pm
Re: Bloom not mentioning Updike…
In one of his books (I think it was the one called “The Canon”), Bloom says that Updike is too controlled in his language and metaphors. I love Updike so I was interested in what Bloom was saying. Bloom went on to say that only “The Witches of Eastwick” is a “great” book because Updike cuts loose. I think Bloom also criticized him for “herding his metaphors,” rather than letting the story dictate what happens.
Also, I vote for Roth in this mix, though I’ve only read McCarthy seriously, of the other three. Got a taste of DeLillo and Pynchon and have not kept reading.
September 26th, 2009 | 6:18 pm
Re: “Got a taste of DeLillo and Pynchon and have not kept reading.”
Here’s a “percentage” comparison: “I read this author because I wanted to” / “I read this author because he was assigned in school and haven’t really looked at him since.”
I’m pretty sure Roth and McCarthy would have a much higher first number than second, mayber 80 / 20; I’m also pretty sure that the percentages for DeLillo and Pynchon would be around 10 (or lower) / 90 (or higher).
September 26th, 2009 | 11:59 pm
It can’t be Pynchon, obviously. I actually do like DeLillo but for greatness, I have to go with McCarthy. His stuff just STAYS with you. Forever.
September 27th, 2009 | 12:16 pm
Pynchon.
I like Roth a lot, but there is really no comparison with Pynchon. He is the greatest writer of the last century and probably the greatest American novelist of all time. It’s still hard to believe that ‘V.’ was only his first novel.
I understand why Pynchon has detractors, but if you ‘get it’, you can go back to any of his books again and again, always finding something new. He is not the greatest pure writer (that I would reserve for Proust or Nabakov), but his prose comes pretty damn close to perfect at times.
September 27th, 2009 | 8:05 pm
Updike ought to be on the list. Alas…
I want to go with McCarthy because I have been hooked on him since reading Blood Meridian as a seminary student. I love reading him but he is bleak.
Roth can be, for my taste too morbidly sexual (Sabbath’s Theater!). However American Pastoral is, in my mind, one of the greatest American novels of the 20th c.
September 28th, 2009 | 12:23 am
SCENE: A bar in the American West. Four men play poker at a table in the corner.
Extra cards fall out of Philip Roth’s sleeve. He appears frozen, then cries softly in an impotent defiance of his paralysis.
Don Delillo waxes whimsically on this illustration of the decay of ethics in our ridiculous postmodern era.
Thomas Pynchon intones some subtle parable about how subverting traditions like playing by the rules is the only path to true knowledge.
Cormac McCarthy just whips out a .45 and sends them all off to their Maker, cleansing the saloon in an apocalyptic ritual of blood purification.
McCarthy wins.
September 28th, 2009 | 4:28 am
Isn’t it possible that there is in fact no Great American Novelist in our time, and that as good as any one of those four guys might be, none of them could possibly fulfill that role, because the nature of our civilization has been altered in such a way as to make such a position nonexistent?
So a more interesting question might be, “Who was the last great American novelist?”
I propose Faulkner (d.1962), edging out Hemingway (d.1961).
September 28th, 2009 | 12:28 pm
I pick Gene Wolfe. Barring that, McCarthy.
September 28th, 2009 | 6:49 pm
[...] alguns dias o blogueiro da First Things, Joe Carter, fez um post com a seguinte provocação: quem seria o maior romancista americano atual? As opções eram Philip [...]
October 4th, 2009 | 5:37 pm
Cormac McCarthy, above all.
I’m not an academic, just a Common Reader.
I love the good and evil themes in his novels and the underlying Catholicism.
Roth?
Spare me – Portnoy was odious.
These days I can’t waste time on smart-guy stylists — there are too many surrounding me in real life.
November 8th, 2009 | 3:56 am
Of the four I would say McCarthy ahead of Roth but prefer Updike to both.
Also love Tobias Woolf, ‘Old School’ is a cracking read.
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