DeLillo vs. McCarthy vs. Pynchon vs. Roth

[Dave Monroe]

DeLillo vs. McCarthy vs. Pynchon vs. Roth
Friday, September 25, 2009, 3:41 PM
Joe Carter
On Friday afternoons no one wants to read another blog post about
heath care reform or Iranian nuclear programs or how the nadir of
Western Civilization is to be reached this afternoon at 3:32 P.M.
Those things can wait till Monday.

Friday afternoons are a good time (well, as good a time as any) for
having a heated, half-serious, half-cocked literary argument. So
here’s one I want to throw out:

Literary critic Harold Bloom claims that the four major American
novelists of our time are Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon,
and Cormac McCarthy.

Assume, for the sake of this debate, that Bloom is correct—as he
usually is on almost all textual matters that don’t involve the
Bible—and that you have to choose only one (and only one of these
four) as the Great American Novelist. Who do you choose?

(I’m going with Cormac McCarthy for the contentious and possibly
spurious reasons that (a) he is the master stylist of the age, (b) his
works cover a broader thematic range than the others, (c) he’s a
timeless literary genius whose works will still be read in the next
century, (d) he can whip all of the these other guys (not just on the
page, but—if it came down to it—in a bar fight), and (e) he’s a fellow
Texan.)

What say you? Who is your choice among these Bloomian uber-writers for
the title of GAN?

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/09/25/delillo-vs-mccarthy-vs-pynchon-vs-roth/