Far From Brooklyn

Is it possible that John Irving is America’s greatest living writer of fiction? 

Obviously, no. Philip Roth is the greatest living American writer.

(Slightly less obviously: No, Toni Morrison is the greatest living American writer.)

The thing is, Philip Roth has written precisely one great book in the last 30 years, and most people (myself excepted) actually found it pretty repugnant – “Sabbath’s Theater.” 

The other thing is (and I know I’m an outlier here), Toni Morrison has written only one really great book: “Song of Solomon.”  I know, I know, “Beloved” is the greatest book of the last blah blah years. I pledge to go back and read it again sometime soon.  But when I first dug into Morrison, “Solomon” was the keeper, the really shining, giant book.   

As for Roth, well, he’s gone stale. (I think I may be an outlier here, too.  His recent books keep winning awards, which baffles me.)  His springy sentences have stiffened up like a 55-year-old knee.  His howls of outrage have been replaced by lawyerly arguments.  Worse, his books have become high concept – you can imagine them germinating in a pitch session at a movie studio: “Uh, OK, what if it turns out that the narrator is black!… What about this? Let’s say the daughter was a terrorist in the ‘60s!… In a world where Charles Lindbergh is president…”

There was no studio pitch for “Portnoy’s Complaint,” that’s for sure: “Um, it’s about this guy who masturbates a lot as a kid – well, no, it’s not really…”  Same goes for his two other greatest novels, “The Professor of Desire” and “The Ghost Writer.”

So, given that Roth and Morrison seem vulnerable, can anyone topple them from the perch?

Let’s start with a consideration of the ones that preceded them, the dominant forces of postwar American writers lit, the Big Names, AKA “the once thought to be among the greatest living American authors, but unfortunately they are dead”: John Updike; Saul Bellow; I.B. Singer

While we’re at it, let’s consider another group, one I’ll call “writers who were more beloved than those once thought to be among the greatest living American authors, and yet somehow not considered quite worthy of that group, and also unfortunately dead”: J.D. Salinger; Joseph Heller; Kurt Vonnegut

The there are “the dead ones that just kind of fell out of the running for one reason or another”: Ralph Ellison; Vladimir Nabokov; Norman Mailer

For good measure: “the young dead ones”: David Foster Wallace

OK, then, who among the living can be considered a credible challenger to King Phil and Queen Toni?

“The once greatly admired, now… not so much”: Thomas Pynchon; John Barth; Don Delillo; Paul Auster

“The heirs to Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver”: Richard Ford, Ann Beattie

“The ones who are too popular and/or approachable to be considered viable candidates for ‘best living author’ awards”: Ann Tyler; Richard Russo; John Irving; E.L. Doctorow

“The great/near great writers who must not be included once we recall that they are actually Canadian”: Alice Munro; Margaret Atwood; Michael Ondaatje

“The genre artists”: Steven King, Elmore Leonard

“The great avant-garde writers”: American avant-garde writers?

“The tough guys, AKA ‘writers whose names appear to be spelled wrong’”: Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson

“Not prolific enough to make the cut”: Norman Rush; Marilyn Robinson

“Too prolific”: Joyce Carol Oates

“The younger ones (most in their 30s and 40s I guess, and mainly writers whose oeuvre is just too thin at this point to judge, even though I’m largely willing to do so)”: Jeffrey Eugenides; Dave Eggers; Aleksandr Hemon; Jonathan Franzen; Michael Chabon; Jonathan Lethem; Nicholson Baker; Gary Shteyngart; Jonathan Safran Foer

“The ones I mention just to cover my bases”: Louise Erdrich, Richard Powers

So the question is, who among those many names could realistically be called the most significant/best/greatest/etc. American novelist? Who could go one to one with Phil or Toni?

Surely no one would nominate any of the writers in the Pynchon group, including Delillo, whose enthusiastic readers now seem somewhat mystified as to what it was that they ever really liked about him – sort of the same thing you see amongst former listeners of King Crimson. And Pynchon himself seems ever less relevant (and ever more annoying).

Cormac McCarthy could be a contender, I’ll admit.  “Blood Meridian” came in third place in a New York Times survey of “greatest novels of the past 25 years” that was published back in 2006.  (Admittedly Delillo’s “Underworld” came in second – to winner “Beloved” – but I will take the position that that’s just nostalgia.)  Anyway, McCarthy has written two truly great books – “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses” – which would put him one ahead of Toni Morrison (by my admitted outlier view) but one behind Roth. The thing is, though, how many people have read those books more than once?  I was blown away by “All the Pretty Horses” when I first read it (I learned the word “guttering” from it) but whenever I pick it up again in the hopes of re-enjoying it, I grEw restless almost immediately.  And “Blood Meridian” has parallels to “Absalom Absalom” – a self-evidently great book of an almost impossibly high order, and yet one that is equally almost impossible to finish.

Of the others, I’d argue that only John Irving could possibly stand alongside P and T without being dwarfed.  “Garp” and “Widow” are not only outlandishly wonderful books but, like all the greatest books, they are written in a recognizable voice that is the author’s alone.  And, again like all the greatest books, their greatness is not so much reduced by their flaws but patina’d by them.  Yes that is not a word.

Like Morrison (less so like Roth at this point), Irving has inspired hosts of imitators (overuse of the italics is a giveaway), and like Roth (less so like Morrison), he has continued to publish novels that are widely read and commented on.

More than anyone on this list (the living ones, at least), Irving could be described as beloved.  There’s a generation of readers (and writers) who probably would never think to put Irving at the top of this kind of list, and yet would admit to loving his greatest books with adolescent ardor.  Reading his best books can feel like falling in love… the way you felt reading “Catcher in the Rye,” or “Stoptime,” or “Portnoy,” or “Slaughterhouse 5,” or any of the books that blew your heart and mind to pieces when you were a teenager thinking that all you wanted to do in life was to create one thing that was one-tenth as wonderful as that.  (By ‘you,’ of course, I mean ‘me.’)

So I don’t know.  I’m not really suggesting John Irving is our greatest living novelist.  I just wouldn’t dismiss the idea out of hand.

***Incidentally, I think Anne Carson is the greatest living author, but she’s not really a novelist and she’s not American born.  So she gets a pass here.***

Photo credit: Megan Watson on Unsplash