One More!

A friend sent me this NYT link to the so-called "Best novels of the past 25 years". I was underwhelmed to say the least! It was full of Roth and DeLillo and had almost nobody from off the East coast.

I wrote back to the group:

"Huh. I'm a bit out of the mainstream of course . Of what is here I like all of McCarthy and J K Toole's Confederacy, and am oddly fond of if equally exasperated by Rush's Mating (forgot he wasn't English). Don't like most of the rest.

"Didn't Walker Percy publish in the last 25? And I am sure there are others, even "mainstream " others, I like better...."

A thoughtful (western) writer, editor, and professor friend wrote back:

"I saw all this hoo-haw, too, since -- parked on a campus now, apparently until I die -- these kinds of things cause the ivy to tremble and buzz. Whitman College, with a new president, is currently on a Diversity rampage, so the coronation of Beloved arrives as a reaffirmation on this campus, which still tends to feel insecure about its comparison of itself to Williams, Swarthmore, et al. -- a self-comparison announced from the middle of a wheat field. What caught my attention more, however, was what A.O. Scott confirmed in his essay about this particular award: by and large, the East loves the East. I couldn't help but notice that Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (like Stegner's Angle of Repose) had never been reviewed by the
NYT. When westerners and southerners write, it's called "regional literature" (except for books like Beloved); when eastern seaboarders write, it's called "American literature" (with no apologies to Mexicans, Chileans, Brazilians....). This, too, shall not pass. It is our country's oldest literary cliché."

I wrote back:

"I did forget Robinson -- why isn't she taken as seriously as the (to put it more politely than I feel ) overrated Morrison?

"I am inordinately fond of the southerners from Faulkner and Caroline Gordon and Penn Warren and Welty to O'Connor and Percy, including "minor" rednecks like Harry Crews. (And of course Cormac McCarthy was a southern writer before he was a western one).

"And of the Catholics, who link up with the southerners. (Maybe how a Boston- born Catholic boy got interested in the South though I doubt it is that simple!)

"In the "old days" Eastern writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald (of course neither came from the East and EH never even lived there but they were accepted there) could stand as US writers. The easterners on THAT list are provincials!"

I really don't give a hoot about the Brazilians et al, but the allocation of good American writers to mere "regional" status burns my ass! Not to mention that the books on the approved list are mostly dull as dust....