Heh, I almost put Ellroy in my list of snubs, but figured “It’s genre fiction, no way they’d mention it.” Thing is, like Sparkle Hayter (hey Perkins, she’s a woman!) and George Pelecanos, it’s genre fiction that transcends the limits of the genre.
See, I was just trying to tease some other names out of you. Sparkle Hayter? I haven’t heard of her. Are you sure she isn’t a character in an adventure game?
As Trig notes, that David Foster Wallace isn’t on here is somewhat stunning to me.
Isn’t that a terrible name for a human being? Actually kudos to her for not changing it.
Anyway, she used to be a reporter for CNN, and did stints with the Mujahedinn in Afghanistan and Pakistan back in the 1980’s before deciding “This is pretty damn dangerous”.
Most of her novels feature Robin Hudson as the main character, an investigative reporter for a NY-based all news channel. Bo-ring, right? Wrong. Hayter writes like a female version of Nick Hornby, sharply observational and hip to the gills and frequently funny as hell. It ends up being lumped in with “crime fiction”, but like I said, I think it transcends the genre pretty nicely.
Oh, and I’m told by the person who first turned me on to her that Ms. Hayter is Canadian and thus not a writer of American Fiction. She does live in New York though…
Sounds like good summer reading. Thanks!
Toni Morrison? Fuck off.
Also: Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy.
Edit: Also, some of those “literary sages” clearly have trouble understanding the phrase “the single best work of American fiction” if they’re picking things like the Border trilogy and Updike’s four Rabbit books.
Is Blood Meridian one of the best american novels of the last 25 years? Absolutely. What I found so surprising in seeing it on the list of “greats” is that the usual reaction I’ve gotten when I mention Cormac McCarthy is “who?”. Not to say that I’ve read much Updike or Roth, or even Morrison, but those people are Names - someone mentions them at a party or at lunch and people have at least heard of them. So, nice to see that there are at least 8 writers out on that list who would put Blood Meridian at the top. While I remember it as being one of the most intense books I’ve read, it’s sad how much of it I’ve completely forgotten. The start of Chapter One:
[INDENT]See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
[/INDENT][INDENT]Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
[/INDENT][INDENT]The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
[/INDENT][INDENT]At fourteen he runs away.[/INDENT]
Winter’s Tale is an incredible book. Author is an interesting guy, read Refiner’s Fire for an almost unbearably hyper-mythologised version of his life-story.
RF also contains the worst sentence in the English language - our titular refinee has just had a crappy summer job and goes to the cathouse for some R&R, which is described thusly:
Oh it’s that kind of whorehouse.
Edit: Also, no love for the Baroque Cycle? I’m halfway through The System of the World and it’s slowly, surely, blowing the top of my head off.
Winter’s Tale is an incredible book. Author is an interesting guy, read Refiner’s Fire for an almost unbearably hyper-mythologised version of his life-story.
RF also contains the worst sentence in the English language - our titular refinee has just had a crappy summer job and goes to the cathouse for some R&R, which is described thusly:
Oh it’s that kind of whorehouse.
A Soldier of the Great War (Mark Helprin) is my favorite book of all time.
Just so you know.
I have no doubt that Blood Meridian can be an intense and engrossing read once you get into it, but this prose style chased me away after I read the first few pages. Perhaps I’ll give it another shot someday.