Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

[Dave Monroe]

May 21, 2006
TBR
Inside the List
By DWIGHT GARNER

BLUEST SKY: Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" (1987),
the book selected by 124 fiction writers and critics
in this issue as the best work of American fiction
published since 1980, was reviewed in these pages by
Margaret Atwood. "If there were any doubts about her
stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own
or any other generation," Atwood wrote, " 'Beloved'
will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a
hair-raiser." Atwood continued: " 'Beloved' is written
in an antiminimalist prose that is by turns rich,
graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous,
colloquial and very much to the point."

Morrison's novel found a popular audience as well. It
spent more than six months on the Times best-seller
list in hardcover, and nearly as long in paperback.
"Beloved" did not win the National Book Award in 1987
— that prize went, somewhat controversially, to Larry
Heinemann's Vietnam War novel, "Paco's Story."
(Michiko Kakutani, writing in The Times shortly after
Heinemann's novel was chosen, called Morrison's the
better novel and asked: "What happened?") None of
Morrison's first three novels — "The Bluest Eye"
(1970), "Sula" (1973) or "Song of Solomon" (1977) —
made the list when they were originally published. Her
breakthrough novel, in terms of this page, was her
fourth, "Tar Baby," which spent 17 weeks on the
hardcover list in 1981.

OUT OF THE BUNKER: Another novel that received a lot
of votes from our panel was Don DeLillo's "Underworld"
(1997). That novel, too, was not just a critical
success — it spent 10 weeks on the Times list in
hardcover. It was reviewed here by Martin Amis. "The
next wave of genius," he wrote, had finally arrived.
"The novelists are climbing out of the bunker. Don
DeLillo's exact contemporaries, Robert Stone and
Thomas Pynchon, seem poised for a fuller expansion.
DeLillo himself, however, suddenly fills the sky.
'Underworld' may or may not be a great novel, but
there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great
novelist." From the beginning of his career, Amis
wrote, "DeLillo appeared tricked out and tooled up,
his prose hard-edged, pre-stressed, sheet-metaled."
But after his first few novels "he was still a
turbulent tributary searching for a river." With
"Underworld," Amis suggested, he found it. But the
news in Amis's review wasn't all good. " 'Underworld'
is sprawling rather than monumental, and it is diffuse
in a way that a long novel needn't necessarily be.
There is an interval, approaching halfway, when the
performance goes awful quiet. But then it rebuilds,
regathering all its mass." The review went on: "
'Underworld' is his most demanding novel but it is
also his most transparent. It has an undertow of
personal pain, having to do with fateful
irreversibilities in a young life — a register that
DeLillo has never touched before. This isn't Meet the
Author. It is the earned but privileged intimacy that
comes when you see a writer whole."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/21tbr.html

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