Where's Pynchon on the Modern Library List?

[Ya Sam]

Friday column at the blog 'Conversational Reading'

http://www.conversationalreading.com/2006/12/friday_column_w.html#comments

"Whether panning or praising Pynchon's new novel, many reviewers have seen 
fit to adulate him as though his status as a living legend is mere common 
sense. I happen to think it is, but this critical reception is strikingly at 
odds with The Modern Library's list of the top 100 English-language novels 
of the 20th century. On that list you will not find Pynchon anywhere.

Why didn't Gravity's Rainbow make the list? One might imagine that it had to 
do with the novel's relative youth as compared to the 20th century's 
canonical works, but this turns out to not be the case. Certainly the top of 
the list is over-represented by older novels, but there are plenty of ones 
at least as youthful as GR: Midnight's Children, A Clockwork Orange, and 
Portnoy's Complaint, to name a few. The list is certainly biased toward 
older works, but this doesn't seem a sufficient reason to explain Pynchon's 
lack of inclusion. ....

Looking over the list, a certain trend becomes apparent--a trend against 
postmodern fiction. Out of the 100 novels, the only one I see that can be 
plausibly called postmodern is Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. No Don 
DeLillo. No John Barthes. No Donald Barthleme. No Gilbert Sorrentino. No 
Pynchon.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a backlash like this against postmodern 
fiction in the 1970s, but at the end of the 1990s it seems somewhat 
provincial that an entity like The Modern Library would be so loath to 
acknowledge that school of fiction's influence on 20th-century literature. 
Even worse, no one seemed to notice. For instance, while reporting on the 
list and discussing omissions (black authors, female authors, Australians), 
The New York Times didn't once mention the lack of postmodernists."

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