Greatest Novel of All-Time

[Double Down]

I think Kitteridge is a novel, I think Winesburg, OH is a novel and I think A Visit From the Goon Squad is a novel.

I KNOW, however, that The Things They Carried, is a novel.

I'm all kinds of excited to read Diaz's new one.

 

[Zeke12]

I think Winesburg, OH is a novel.

I think Things They Carried is, too.

 

[cranberry]

Another one. 'Greatest American Novel Since WWII'?

www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/booming/21friday-booming.html?smid=tw-nytimes

"Lolita"?
"Catch 22"?
"Garp"?
Another Irving: "Owen Meany."

Are short story collections eligible? If so, there's "Cathedral" and "The Things They Carried." And, just a personal favorite, "This Boy's Life."

If The Things They Carried is a novel, then it's that.

Do we think it's a novel?

The Naked and the Dead, Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, , Mockingbird, Handmaid's Tale .....

How about The Bonfire of The Vanities?

 

[Dick Whitman]

Is "This Boy's Life" a novel?

 

[Azrael]

Huh. Ok. Maybe it's generational.

Or all that metafictional experimentation in the 60s is finally paying off and our notions of what's what are more plastic.

Not a single expression of love so far for "Old Man and the Sea"?

Scandalous.

 

[Azrael]

Is "This Boy's Life" a novel?

Given what we know about the Wolff family, and Geoff's "Duke of Deception," maybe we call it a roman a clef.

 

[Zeke12]

The Old Man and the Sea is the tightest great novel ever written.

But it still comes in third behind Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms in the Hemingway canon.

 

[Azrael]

It's got to be in the running for postwar champeen.

 

[cranberry]

Cannery Row.

 

[Azrael]

Even Winerip namechecks 'Mockingbird' for postwar favorite in that link.

Where's Roth? Where's Bellow? Gaddis? Gash? Barth?

 

[Versatile]

Read parts of most of them, but being a little too smart for my own good, I figured out early on in my academic career that if I paid attention and took excruciatingly detailed notes, I didn't have to actually read.

Hell, I took an American Lit clash in college, didn't read a single word and made an A.

I did that all the time, then would find myself reading the book after the ashignment was done. Hell, I could participate in lengthy debates on some of those books without even having purchased it.

 

[Yodel]

Gatsby and Lolita, which would probably be my 1-2 from that list, are both losing...

To Kill a Mockingbird is a fine book. Great Expectations was 19th century pulp fiction.

No