Greatest Novel of All-Time

[Dick Whitman]

I'll add Little Children to the list.

I think so, too. I want to argue for "Abstinence Teacher" or "The Leftovers," but, ultimately, I think "Little Children" is best among them.

Does "The Art of Fielding" deserve any consideration at all? "Everything Is Illuminated"? I was about to ask about "Motherless Brooklyn," but apparently it came out in the late '90s. I could have sworn ...

I'm guessing, DD, that you don't like "Freedom." Or at least less than others. It's absence is conspicuous.

 

[Double Down]

I liked Freedom a great deal as I read it. I'm mostly glad, though, that Franzen got over the fear of following The Corrections and wrote something again (he said he it took nine years to get over the anxiety of following The Corrections and one year to write Freedom).

But as I've said here a couple times, I think Freedom was more a collection of set pieces than a true "novel." I also think the gimmick of Patti writing a manuscript to deal with her feelings at the behest of her therapist was a little silly. But it had a lot of great writing within and I certainly enjoyed it.

I thought The Abstinence Teacher was one of the most unsatisfying books I've read I years. Not up to Perrotta's standards, IMO.

 

[Azrael]

I think you could make the case that if Franzen is our Tolstoy, Perrotta is our Chekhov.

Of everything we've listed so far, I feel the greatest love for 'Middlesex,' greatest affection for 'Yiddish Polieman's Union,' greatest respect for 'Cloud Atlas,' and greatest admiration for 'The Corrections.'

Still gotta be some more titles on the list.

 

[waterytart]

Tart, Cloud Atlas is unlike any fiction written in the last 50 years. Mitchell has an incredible mind. It's not really dystopian literature, so to speak. It's more of a creative writing experiment in mimicry that somehow blows your mind when it's over. The dystopian section was actually my favorite, and it doesn't occur until the middle section of the book.

A Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet might actually be a better book, if you want to give Mitchell a chance. But the experimental nature of Cloud Atlas is pretty amazing.

And the need-to-read list gets one longer ...

 

[Azrael]

'The Road' is a clean KO over 'No Country For Old Men'? Or do both belong?

 

[Double Down]

A few more candidates to the Modern canon

The Pale King
Never Let Me Go
No Country For Old Men
Pastoraila
Then We Came To the End (in retrospect this would make my original list)


Books I haven't read but have seen people argue the merrits of:

The Known World
Austerlitz
Gilead
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
2666
The Plot Against America

Books others would want that I'd argue against:

Fortress of Solitude

 

[Double Down]

I would definitely argue for The Road ahead of NCFOM. There is that preachy section in NCFOM about drugs being the cause of all the evil in the world that's a little clunky to me. I think The Road is tight and powerful and sad and hopeful all at once. You can read it in an afternoon. Watching McCarthy write in a restrained, economical style -- and arguably produce his second best book -- is impressive.

 

[Azrael]

In our 21st century category I'm going to throw in 'Train Dreams,' by Denis Johnson. And ask why no love for Pynchon's 'Against the Day'?

And as a sidebar to the best postwar American novel debate, ask this: If 'The Things They Carried' goes in as a novel, what do we do with 'Jesus' Son'?

And where's 'A Fan's Notes'? And Richard Ford? And James Salter?

 

[Double Down]

Train Dreams has been on my "to read" list for a few months. Tree of Smoke, which I thought sucked, made me a little gunshy, which is is dumb because I love Jesus' Son and liked Angels a great deal. (Meh on Fiskadoro and bored to tears by Already Dead.)

I think you could argue Jesus' Son as a novel. (Maybe.) Anytime you have a collection of stories that thread the same characters throughout them, even if they're not arranged in a linear way, I think it becomes a larger piece of work. There is a definite departure between what Johnson and O'Brien were doing and what Carver and Beattie and Munro and Wolff and others are doing.

I feel like A Fan's Notes has to be considered a memoir, even if he did make half of it up. But I love that book so much. Some of Exley's descriptions of why football matters, and why it's so romantic to him, are (to me anyway) better than all the pap anyone ever wrote about baseball.

Also, slightly related:

YouTube Commenters Book Club discuss One Hundred Years of Solitude

http://youtu.be/DQ3epkM1xBI

 

[Azrael]

LOL'd.

 

[heyabbott]

There's no answer and everyone acknowledges that. If it hasn't been put out let me say Blood Meridian was a book that when I finished I was so happy to have read and genuinely moved that someone could write that sublimely.

The Power and the Glory is a close second for me.

 

[Versatile]

Postwar American 'best' still has to be 'Lolita.' Maybe.

In what world can we take credit for Vladimir Nabokov? Do we not get to take credit for ex-Patriot works? I think of The Sun Also Rises as a very American book.