Friday, May 12, 2006

Best work of fiction

Some of the illustrious blog crew - Lance Mannion, Pandagon, Rob Farley - are discussing the recent NY Times list of Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years. These kinds of lists are often rather silly since one may have very good reasons for considering a work such as (non-American) Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano great for rather individual reasons but less for public ones. Not to say that there's no objectivity to divining great literature, but I've done it with records and find that the top five or ten would have to include, for me, records that I know most other people wouldn't put in the list.

The NY Times top five, according to some 200 or so critics, if you can't stand waiting, are:

1. Beloved, Tony Morrison
2. Underworld, Don Delillo
3. Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike
4. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth

I haven't read one of them, though I've read at least something by all of these authors. I'm not particularly enamored by any of them.

But here's the problem: since writing my dissertation I've been able to read maybe one or two fiction works per year and that's it. I read all day off and on, but most of it is geared to my academic profession. When I have leisure time - whatever that is - I feel guilty if I'm not reading something that fills a gap in my understanding directly or indirectly related to my fields. The nightstand has a stack of novels to be read. The stack has grown over the past several years and not one of them has been read. When you read all day, the last thing you want to do is more reading when you're done for the day. Watching a baseball or basketball game is more like it. The last really good novel I read was John Banville's The Untouchable several years ago.

This, however, runs counter to an earlier mission gained in high school and undergrad days, which was to read the major works of every national or linguistic literary tradition. A tough project, and one involving arbitrary guidelines for the idea behind "a tradition," but I set out on it. Periods, which overlapped, included,

The Beats
The Great Russian Novels (beginning with Turgenev's Fathers and Sons)
The Great Modern Latin American Works (the obvious greats like Garcia-Marquez and Cortazar, but also somewhat lesser-known authors such as Juan Rulfo)
Italian Modern Literature (the obvious Eco and Calvino, but also Buzatti, Landolfi, Gadda, etc.)
The Great Czechs (Kafka, Skvorecky, Kundera, etc.)
Classics of Japanese Literature from Murasaki to Murakami (favorites are Tanizaki and Oe)
German Philosophical Literature (Goethe, Musil, Broch, Walser, Handke, etc.)

Then it petered out. It was unsustainable. I did an MA thesis, taught, wrote, did a doctoral dissertation, taught, wrote, teach, write. Read constantly.

Don't you find this to be the case? How do academics who aren't literature professors find the time and the ability to read fiction (of course, keeping in mind that some nonfiction works border on fiction)? I would love to be able to sit still and pay attention to a novel again. Alas, even summers are for catching up, writing anew.

And you? Have you recently read a great work of fiction aside from the orthodoxy?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well there was this thing the noted fabulist G.W. Bushterton put out recently.

Jon said...

Hell, those of us who are literature professors hardly have the time to read fiction beyond our area. Of the top five, I've only read Underworld. (Heh, though I was once in class where I was supposed to read Beloved.)

Though I do try to do so while on travelling. Read something written from the place I'm visiting. And now, based in Canada, I'm making some effort to read Canadian fiction.

And since I was about 14 I've been wanting to read Under the Volcano. I'll read it this summer if it kills me.

Finally, yes, everyone should read Rulfo.

helmut said...

I didn't know there was Canadian literature apart from Lowry.

Yeah, I also try to read literature from the place I'm in when traveling. I had a little Greek period of poetry too during a month in Greece years ago, and some other smaller periods.

Anonymous said...

I think it misses the 25 year mark by a year or two, but Sophie's Choice is certaintly worth a read.

This list is so wrong on so many levels. John Updike?! Only two women too. Song of Solomon is Morrison's best work by far.

barba de chiva said...

Yeah, part of the fun of being a lit professor is having an excuse to read fiction all the time. Still, I read out of "my area" constantly & do a pretty good job of always being in the process of reading a novel about which I'm uninterested (at least when I start) academically.

I've been reading lots of Haruki Murakami, lately (thanks to Rollo Groast's repeated insistence that I do so). That is some profoundly wonderful stuff. Specifically, I just finished Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Worth the time. Better than watching baseball. Well, better than watching professional baseball.

Another recent favorite: Kathryn Davis' The Thin Place. This one was reviewed in The Believer. It was just the kind of read you want from an author you've never heard of (but why, come to think of it?): well-written, engaging, beautiful. I loved it.

I'm with anonymous on Morrison--that Song of Solomon is a better book than Beloved . . .

helmut said...

Barba, you mean you don't get to read frivolous fiction stuff all day? What a crappy job.

MT said...

Not recently, but I loved "A Suitable Boy" by Vikram Seth. Also "Such a Long Journey" by Rohinton Mistry. Does "Of Human Bondage" count as canonical? Except I guess it's not supposed to be read after puberty. Ah well. "Middlemarch." Ondaatje's "Running in the Family." That might be everything I've read. Oh, recently I was surprised how much I enjoyed Robert Stone's "Damascus Gate." O.K.

helmut said...

A bunch of book-club friends are still talking about "A Suitable Boy" about five years after having read it. Must have been good.

I recently read Baber and Bartlett's Deliberative Environmental Politics. Paper tiger at the end.