NPR's Dick Meyer has posted his list of the best 100 novels in English, and he's inviting your "comments, counterlists, other lists and mockery."
I am not a learned or prolific reader of novels. My taste is probably medium-brow, male and parochial in many ways. Tough. It's my list. I included two books that probably aren't novels: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Fabulous Small Jews. Lots of innovative, modern stuff didn't make it because I am not good at reading it.
Really not a bad list. It's particularly nice to see Dick Meyer give good representation to genre literature, particularly noir masterpieces like The Killer Inside Me.
And yet...
Wallace Stegner has not just one, but two novels on the list? Really? He was that good? Don't think so. This decision seems even sillier when you realize what great novels didn't make his list, like Gravity's Rainbow or The Golden Bowl. That Stegner can get two berths on Meyer's luxury liner, and Thomas Pynchon and Henry James get none is hard to understand or take seriously.
And please remove Humboldt's Gift immediately. Bellow was an unreadable writer, his prose a knotty, meandering quagmire of the pretentious and uninteresting.
It's also interesting to note: No erotica. Have we really been that repressed for the past century? I think not.
Posted by: Niall | May 14, 2009 at 03:51 PM
Good to see women holding their own with 6 out of 100.
Posted by: Rachael King | May 14, 2009 at 05:10 PM
Rachel,
He admits that fault ahead time...
Posted by: Jacob Williamson | May 14, 2009 at 11:50 PM
the least one can hope for with a list like this is that it contain no crap. Like Niall I couldn't stand "Humboldt's Gift", but crap it is not. I also am mystified by the cult of Philip Roth that Meyer is clearly a member of, but that's probably my problem. As for Henry James, he wrote most of his best known work pre-1900 and is thus not eligible, no?
What I like about lists like this is that they give me ideas about what to read, and this list is no exception.
Posted by: James Harrigan | May 15, 2009 at 12:20 PM
the list's obvious lack of women authors is gaining attention from a blogger at the LA Times...and Meyer may or may not have responded to the talkbacks.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/05/zoinks-100-best-books-list-from-npr-includes-just-7-women.html
Posted by: JW | May 16, 2009 at 08:17 AM
A fine pastime, putting
together lists of things
you really like. This book,
that chapter, another verse
you don't quite remember
always just beneath
the bough of breaking tastes
that go this way and that
it's all a man can do to keep up
with her latest best book
listening to a dream
recounted past good sense
we have to listen well
and you know it's not
exactly a meal
it's not actually a list
you can sit on for long either
there are ants on the way
and one has already arrived
damn but he's got a piece of paper too.
Rob Schackne
Posted by: Rob | May 16, 2009 at 10:47 AM
Wow. Underworld, Mao II or any from DeLillo aren't in the list of Meyer. No Pynchon, off course. Nicole Kraus is in the list for her american realist magic novel of jews and their inner life? Am I the only who thinks that DFW's Infinite Jest is superb?
Posted by: Alvy Singer | May 18, 2009 at 09:48 AM
Henry James published the Golden Bowl in 1902, and so should be eligible for this list.
Posted by: Niall | May 18, 2009 at 09:55 AM
Is this where I put in a plug for William Gaddis? Does anyone still read his books?
Posted by: Don | May 18, 2009 at 11:04 AM
Don, you're not alone in loving Gaddis! "The Recognitions" definitely needs to be on this list. Certainly more than anything Bellow or Stegner ever wrote.
Posted by: Niall | May 18, 2009 at 01:03 PM