Greatest Novel of All-Time

The problem with "Moby Dick" is the pages and pages and pages of whaling minutia early on. Other than that, it's readable.

Faulkner, of course, wins the award for unreadable at first pass, but ungodly brilliant once you realize what he did. Reading a Faulkner novel, once it clicks, makes every orthodox novelist seem pedestrian by comparison. Truly.

 

Did you go to the Dickens exhibit at the Morgan? His notebooks - all this microscopic writing and overwriting - were crazy.

 

That's definitely an issue with him. Read the first chapter of "East of Eden." I dare you.

 

I'll come down pro-Steinbeck and (mostly) anti-Dickens.

Dickens could spin a yarn, but he got paid by the word, and it shows.

 

That's my point. When I called Great Expectations pulp fiction, I meant it literally. It was a serial. His books could and should all be half as long as he wrote them. He told great stories, but he wasn't a great storyteller.

 

Be more fun to make a bracket of the greatest novels no one's ever heard of. Like 'Call it Sleep,' or 'The Recognitions.'

 

No Hemingway or Twain!?!

Ye gods who are the fools running that thing?

 

Or the best novels no one has actually read?

Gravity's Rainbow, call your office.

 

Sorry, it's hard to take this seriously at all.

How do you decide what is a better novel, "To the Lighthouse" or "Crime and Punishment"? I mean, what's your point of reference?

And speaking of Dickens no list of "best novelists ever" is complete if you leave out Emile Zola. I think of him as the French version of Dickens but a far better writer---even in translation. "Germinal" is probably my favourite.

I recently re-read Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn. The former is a terrific book but doesn't come close to consideration as the Great American Novel. Finn breaks down in the last 1/3 of the book but it's still a remarkable novel.

 

I've read "Call it Sleep" Brilliant.

I started "Recognitions" but at some point had no idea what was going on and gave up