Greatest Novel of All-Time

DeLillo?

Underground is the one I'd pick.

And the Bible?

Poetry anthology.

 

That has to be it. I know it sounds culturally elitist to say this, but there is really no comparison between the two, on the merits.

 

I've read Moby Dick and liked it a great deal. The ending is one of the prettiest in all of literature. The whale genealogy stuff will bore you to death, but that's why those chapters can be easily skimmed, if not skipped altogether.

I've always found these tournament-style showdowns for art to be sort of obnoxious, as if Starbuck and Captain Ahab are trying to run the pick-and-roll on Jay Gatsby and Nick Caraway. (The Invisible Man is really tough to defend! Lolita did LeBron James one better! She even skipped high school and went straight to the pros!)

 

I wonder if it's always been this way. Obviously, people weren't as list-crazy in the 18th and 19th centuries as we are now. But certainly there was some kind of culling going on, as people had to decide what was in and what was out of the canon to begin with.

 

"Lists are a form of cultural hysteria."

- Don DeLillo


I think what's canonical and not canonical is the work of years, not lists or even mainstream critics. Has a lot to do with what gets taught, and therefore the academy, rather than a popular audience.

 

You leave Drin Hoxha out of this.

 

I like lists a lot. High Fidelity is one of my favorite novels ever. It's the supposed SHOWDOWNS! that bother me.

Yossarian can't decide if which Karamazov brother to trap in his box-in-one defense, Dmitri, Alexei or Ivan! It's a real Catch-22.

 

Lady Brett Ashley's my closer. Just saying.

 

I'm always disappointed when Babbitt isn't on these lists. Also, I will challenge to a fist fight the next one who denigrates Steinbeck. In the end, I would vote for a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel ...

 

Brett: We could've won a beautiful championship together, Jake.

Jake: Isn't it pretty to think so?

 

Cue the handshake.

 

That is certainly true, especially with American lit where you have a guy like Melville who kills his own career by writing Moby Dick (to the point he was begging Nathanial Hawthorne to ask his old college buddy the President for a government job) and yet 80 years later it was regarded as one of the greatest novels ever.
The bigger problem with the American cannon is that it was put together by Ivy League professors in the late 19th century who primarily looked at fellow New Englanders with Twain sneaking in there on the strength of living in Connecticut at the time. In the 20th century that view has been expanded by Midwesterners like Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, but prior to 1900, who are the great American writers from outside the Northeast?