A few respondents, not content to state their own preferences, pre-emptively attacked what they assumed would be the thinking of the majority. So we received some explanations of why people were not voting for "Beloved," the expected winner...We're not shown those explanations though!
May 11, 2006
The best work of American fiction in the last 25 years.
The NYT says it's "Beloved." As this essay explains, they asked "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages."
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41 comments:
Mario Puzo, Saul Bellow?
Peace, Maxine
Cold Mountain has to be in there somewhere!
I loved Morrison's Sula and The Bluest Eye--much more accessible and with some astonishingly beautiful prose--but cannot get through Beloved. Some day...maybe in a seminar setting.
I do think these Best of lists, as in Beloved and Underworld, are meant to be elite--it doesn't hurt if your novel is inaccessible.
Truly a damning indictment on American fiction in the last 25 years if true.
'inaccessability' (often) = complexity
of a kind that makes meaning that much richer, full of a further resonance and power that can only be equalled by the artfully simple. but simplicity is so much harder that's often beyond the scope of even the best writers.
those of us who have the ability and time to decipher 'complex' will reward that which comes closest to expressing something essentially human. often what's best is a mixture of simplicity and complexity, but we're really searching for eloquence and truth - two things rarely achieved by those without the lofty ambitions that often accompany artistic complexity
dave m. [not the same dave as above]
dave m again...
I also think that one major prejudice of these lists is [as admitted by A.O.] in favor of works that engage with something quintessentially 'American'. but I don't need the weight of history in my masterpieces...
Banksand McCarthy are white men, though, and the imperatives of affirmative action require that they not be placed at the top of the list, merit be damned.
Sure. It can't possibly be true that there are at least one or two writers who are more appreciated, and are not white men. It's a given that without PC dogma, white men would top the list.
Or not.
Have any of you read the Reader's Manifesto? In my opinion, Roth is the best writer of the past 25 years, Updike's Rabbit series is the best extended body of work. The best single novel? Hard to say. The novel I enjoyed the most was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and the novel that moved me the most was The Things They Carried.
Unfortunately, A River Runs Through It missed the cut-off by a couple of years. That's enjoyable, moving, artistic and thematically complicated. It should be read by everybody!
As for Cormac McCarthy, I must say that I don't quite see what the big deal is. One reason I didn't end up majoring in English, despite the fact that I took a bunch of courses in the major, is that the syllabi for the modern American courses always included too many writers like Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon and Anne Carson. How many times can you read Blood Meridian? Maybe, when nobody can understand what you're saying, its because you're just going over our heads. Or maybe its just a lot of BS.
I have also read a Reader's Manifesto, and I am sure that the author of that book is laughing at the Times and the "experts" (or maybe crying? hm...)
Coco,
Your haughty disdain proves my point. Watch out--Ann and her commenters watch trashy reality TV, too!
I'd say it's between Updike and Roth...if pressed I'd choose Updike. Choosing Morrison #1 was a joke.
It's interesting that a similar absurdity occurred in the last such poll, in 1965, when Ellison's mediocre "Invisible Man" won over such classics as "Lolita" and "Catch-22."
I generally don't read fiction unless the word "science" comes before "fiction" in the category.
Seven Machos, what's tripe is your analogy.
You don't need to play football to comment on it. But you probably need to watch the games and read about the history of the sport before you offer an opinion on the greatest team.
A movie or theater reviewer doesn't need to be an actor or director, but they need to watch the movie or play.
Want to comment on a CD, you need to listen to it. I can say I don't much care for Madonna, but I can't say her new CD is good or bad unless I've listened to it. I could say I probably won't like it, so why bother.
You could say I think novel B is the best ever and I doubt novel A could top it. You didn't say that.
You have not read the book, but you claim it would not be as highly regarded if written by a white male. Why? It's an interesting statement, please support it with something not approaching random bigotry.
I have not read "Beloved," so I offer no comment. I have read you--"I suspect that certain very complex issues of race and gender are invested in the assertion that a book by Toni Morrison is a great literary achievement"--and feel comfortable stating that you are talking out of your ass.
SM: I called you a bigot. I don't think anyone has called you a racist. There's a huge difference.
I have suggested that Beloved is overrated because of the author's personal characteristics. Does ANYONE disagree?
I agree that is exactly what you have suggested. What we're trying to tell you is that without reading it it's a baseless suggestion. If, by chance, you happened to be correct, you would correct by guessing. Guessing is not an argument.
Not if you are responding to the merits of the book, as opposed to the race or gender of its writer. But you can only respond to the merits if you have read the book.
I have. It is a very tedious book. Was made to read it twice in high school, for two different classes, and was left with the burning desire never to read anything by her again. Characters were flat, stilted. Dialogue and descriptions didn't awaken any sympathetic spark in me. Just words on a page.
Since I am not much impressed with the intrinsic literary worth of the work (equating my own gustibus with literary worth, for the moment - hah!) I imagine there's some other reason standing behind, for all these people to have praised this tedious novel so highly. Given the predilections and prejudices one imagines the reviewers carry around, and the White Guilt one imagines they feel, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they're giving her the nod at least as much because of the oh-so-weighty subject matter as because of any skillful or moving treatment of the same. Her being Black and Female gives her license, in our culture, to comment more freely and more credibly on the subject topics than a White Man might, however much research he did, so there's the leg up there.
In the alternative, it may be that they found the book genuinely moving, perhaps because of their particular cultural perspective. There are certain moments in human history -- American slavery being one, I think -- which look different and have different emotional meaning based on where your "identity" stands with respect to it. For those -- possibly the reviewers here -- whose family histories are tied to slavery in some sense (even merely by having been part of that enslaving society), it may have a deeper resonance with and call up other emotions, which I, at a greater distance, simply don't feel.
In any event, the novel was very blah for me. But I have difficulty thinking of a modern American author I really enjoy (who is not in the SciFi ghetto or something like that). I was going to say Salman Rushdie, only he's British and subcontinental or something, isn't he?
Oh, she got the Nobel too? Cor. I thought it was just a Pulitzer. Well de gustibus and all that. I won't say it was a rotten book, but it was dull as dust.
Incidentally, I'm not suggesting that slaves control voting anywhere -- I'm suggesting that people who feel some sense of ancestral responsibility are more inclined to vote for works that touch those bits of their memory. This is obviously not the case for Norwegians, but for a lot of the American elite, I think it is.
Re: Leibniz
But his philosophy, when it comes down to it, was tedious.
But it wasn't. That's the thing. And in certain areas (e.g. the calculus), it's kind of foundational in a way that Beloved is not yet.
Actually, much of it was a retread of Newton.
Oh? I had not known that -- I had thought they were contemporaries who independently arrived at it. But perhaps the Hun has coloured my education.
One could make the same vague criticisms of Midnight's Children that you just made against Beloved.
Well, I could specifically go through, page by page, and enumerate how the characters felt like little puppets the author was forcing to go through the motions, just to finish out the story, etc. etc. How I found the prose-style flat and uninteresting -- prose style, incidentally, is one of the things I like in Rushdie. But I don't see how that would contribute anything useful here. I read it, twice, and neither time did it make any impression on me, other than bo-ring.
If someone (independently) discovers it before you...your discovery is a retread.
This is true in one sense, but if two people independently discover something, and dissemination of that thing is retarded by limited communications technology in that time, I think there's ample reason to regard both independent discoveries as relevant to a history of ideas, and to a history of what ideas came after. But I am not familiar with the history of ideas of that time, and so I have no idea how Newton and Leibniz stand with regard to one another and the calculus -- all I know is what I put up there before: that they were contemporaries, who (allegedly) independently arrived at the calculus.
Lots of people find calculus boring. That doesn't mean calculus lacks value.
Yes, but there is, in its applications to engineering and the sciences, a clear measure of value with which we can support that assessment of value. I mean, one can say, "Calculus is dull. Ergo it lacks value," but an easy answer is to point at a computer, or a CD player, or some other non-dull thing that could not have been achieved without it. Of course, a Luddite may still find the Calculus a boring, and even an immoral thing, having enabled all these loathsome technological developments, but in general, this applicability gives us some reason to think that a hierarchy of value that ranks the calculus high is not entirely out of whack.
What is our support for the metric of value assigned a literary work? I mean, I could propose one, but even the applications of a standard (e.g. "engaging prose style," "well-developed characters," "effective plotting," "makes me feel something," "meaningful thematic development" etc.) are (A) going to be keyed to my personal predilections, which are old-fashioned, and (B) impossible for me to substantiate, in the way that a metric valuing the calculus highly can be substantiated. I might even venture that (C) -- even all these qualities put together still doesn't capture that je ne sais quois that makes a given work great.
As it is, I stated my premise before: My gustibus is my measure of literary value here, and Beloved does not agree with my gustibus. I cannot make some easier claim, such as that it is incompetently written (she's a perfectly competent writer, after all), or that it is morally abhorrent (because it is not). Nor is it incoherent, or disorganised gibberish, or anything of that sort. All I can say is that it is boring. Because it is.
I have heard people complain of Tolkien that he writes page after page after page of expertly rendered prose in a dead language of poetic epics. And that they find him dull for that reason. Well, it is pretty much the same with Morrison and Beloved. Just words on a page.
Actually, here's a fun parallel: the slang phrase Zenbei ga naita.
That's kind of what Beloved is for me. Clearly, there are people for whom it is engaging/moving/whatever, but I am not one of those people. I am inclined to attribute it to cultural differences. But maybe it is my heart of blackest coal. I do not know.
Now, most of her books stink (i.e., most people, including us, find them boring), but that doesn't mean they lack technical mastery.
I suppose that would fall under my (C) above, then:
even all these qualities put together still doesn't capture that je ne sais quois that makes a given work great.
I rate technical mastery very high, but I don't think it's enough to catapult a competently -- or even an expertly -- written book to the rank of "great."
Well, I read as much of "Beloved" as I could stand--about 100 pages--so maybe I'm not qualified to comment on the book as a whole. But when you read that much of Updike or Roth or Bellow there are whole paragraphs you want to memorize, scenes that stay with you forever. Morrison just doesn't have their gift of language or power of expression--all I remember of "Beloved" is wishing I had the time back.
Re calculus: Newton discovered it first and discovered more, but didn't publish anything until pressed by Leibniz's independent work...sort of like Darwin and Wallace. I highly recommend Gleick's short biography of Newton. And unlike scientific discoveries, a boring work of fiction can have no value.
Dave, sorry I missed your tone. There are FOUR white men in the top five, so they seem to be doing fine to me.
I'd have a hard time naming 25 best of the past 25 years. I'm not happy with what I'd call high-art fiction in that period. If I have to read another Raymond Carver short story, full of spouses with silent resentments and more bourbon on ice than anyone, anyone, can drink in an evening, well, I'll puke.
I'll put Octavia Butler's Kindred up against Beloved any day.
Seven Machos:
I don't have to have experienced her book to argue this.
I think the precondition there would have to be that her book isn't particularly good. For all you know, contra everything I've been saying, it could be a book of luminous prose, where every sentence pulls you onward through the tale, until at the end, your life is changed, and you sit there, weeping at the enormity of it all. In which case her race and gender would be entirely beside the point.
re: Critical:
For the "je ne sais quois" thing, it's just "I don't know what." I had thought it was a widespread borrowing, there with "deja vu" and RSVP and all that. You can use it like a noun, which is the appeal.
Well, "I don't know what" doesn't means anything, so it can't have any effect on the analysis.
Yes -- but my point was precisely that the analysis of technical points doesn't get you up over the lip of greatness. Or at least, it doesn't do it for me.
I bet she never read a single tome by Le Courbosier (however that is spelled). I bet she never laid eyes on St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Was she wrong?
Critical: I think you are spending too much time outside the real world.
In general, I agree with the sentiment you're expressing, but seriously: We're talking about novels. We're not talking about the real world.
I have heard people complain of Tolkien that he writes page after page after page of expertly rendered prose in a dead language of poetic epics. And yet he was recently named the greatest British writer of his century, by fellow Brits. I love Tolkein, but I found that hard to understand.
Those of you arguing about the calculus, Leibnitz and Newton, read Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. It's a relief from these "best of" arguments. That debate over who discovered what first is one of the core plots.
Merriam-Webster:
racist: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
bigot: a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices
Dictionary wars are boring. I did not call you a racist. To be technical, I did not even call you a bigot. I said your statements were "approaching random bigotry." A fine line, but there it is.
As for the rest, CriticalObserver seems to be enjoying this more than I, so I'll let him continue. Except for:
I'm saying that the people who voted gave Toni Morrison's affirmative-action boost because she, the author, is an Afican-American woman.
The question I have--and my apologies for leaving football, calculus, and Larry Bird out of my question--is why are you saying it?
Give us something, anything. You haven't read Toni Morrison, you haven't mentioned reading any of the other authors, you haven't mentioned reading any analysis that supports your view. All you are saying is that she is a black woman, therefore she isn't that good.
Back to sports: if I argue that Larry Bird gets an affirmative-action boost when people rank him as the best player ever (over Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dr. J, and Wilt Chamberlain), is my argument flawed if I have never seen him play? What if I never saw Wilt Chamberlain or Dr. J. play, either? Can I not participate in the discussion until I have watched all of the players? What level of credentials must we mere plebes have to enter your realm and offer an opinion?
You might as well be arguing that blind people can't have opinions, which is not what we're saying. To address your example, will you at least read opinions of other people? Or are you saying you should be allowed to argue in a vacuum? What I get from your statements is that if someone gave you two pieces of paper with two names you had never heard of, it would be perfectly valid for you to argue which was the best author or best basketball player?
criticalobserver: Ok, Octavia Butler is just a retread of Ursula K. LeGuin, and only has her reputation because she is a black woman. And I mean it.
I trust you have read her and thus I'll respect the fact that you stand behind your opinion. But I'll stand behind my disagreement. In any case, in Butler's work, Kindred stands apart as her best, and is in no way a retread of Le Guin. Every writer has his or her forebears, and Le Guin plays that role for Butler, perhaps; I can think of several black sci fi writers that were inspired by Le Guin's creating a multi-racial world in Earthsea, but that doesn't make them retreads of her. Nalo Hopkinson comes to mind.
joe, first comment: A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin. Hands down, no debate.
Good book. I prefer his Memoir From Antproof Case.
How are you defining greatness?
Well, I at least think a piece of art ought to make me feel something. That's back down to tastes, again. But a piece of art that provokes no meaningful reaction in the viewer (boredom doesn't count) isn't a piece of art, as I see it; it's totally inert.
A checklist of technical criteria is all very well, and if the luminaries of the literary world think that's enough, then bully for them. I'm not saying their response is obscure or anything like that -- it's in line with what's gone before, seeing as she's got all these other prizes anyhow.
I just disagree.
I'm saying their choice is wrong, because I don't remember getting anything else out of Beloved -- nothing but dry technical mastery (which doesn't really stick in my mind, either). A book that's supposed to be the best American book ought to have a bit of spirit to it, a bit of life, a bit of verve. Something that makes the reading experience a real experience, not a dutiful chore, like academic Latin.
Now, maybe the judges who voted for her got that out of it -- maybe my cultural reference frame is such that the things that move them in Beloved leave me cold. I've highlit that possibility repeatedly. And heck, maybe as technical craftsmen themselves, they're in awe over her awesome mastery of technique! Perhaps it is a delight not accessible to us down here in the laiety. Mahler and Wagner take some getting used to too.
But I'm sure we've produced something that is technically exquisite, but engaging and moving all the same. We may be the dregs of humanity, cast out for being incapable of hacking it in civilised countries, but we're not that bad. As I said, I don't know what that work would be, but I'm sure there is such a work.
I suggest that they are applying affirmative action and bestowing a benefit to Morrison's book because of her gender and ethnicity.
Why?
I'm talking about them, and their perceptions, and their desire to have a female African-American writer in the canon of great literature.
Why do you *feel* they have these perceptions? Why do you have these perceptions.?
They have overrated Beloved.
Why?
Here, you have made some very concrete statements. We're not talking about vague biases in the general population. You are accusing specific people of lying and being dishonest by selecting a book they know to be inferior. Why?
Do you believe that all white males are liars?
And I find his opinions to be wholly uninformed and without any concrete basis. In fact, they are so uninformed that I can only draw one conclusion: that is he is projecting his personal viewpoints about blacks on to the literary critics.
Er, right. Uh-huh.
Becuase he thinks a certain way he assumes all others must think that way. It is possible of course that he doesn't hold such views and just merely assumes that all polled white male writer holds such views but he certainly hasn't presented any evidence to suggest that is the case.
Well, he has that they are Americans. And he knows, I would imagine, that White Americans can be and often are awfully patronising to minorities, especially when they feel a particular minority has gotten a hard shake in some particular area. With Blacks, for example, you see (or used to, a few years ago) White news reporters draw attention repeatedly to how "well-spoken" (or whatever) Black public figures are. Very good, young man. You can speak English. Such an achievement! And all that. And then, of course, there is the demeaning "Magical Negro," trope, in Hollywood movies (or for Asians out to get offended -- the mysterious Asian spiritualist/martial arts master).
We don't see much of the negative stuff in public anymore, of course, but the "positive" stuff is there all the time, for those of us whom a University Education has equipped to go looking for the slightest hint or shadow of racial prejudice. It's only natural to wonder, when a group largely composed of probably-well-meaning white people decide that a Black woman's magnum opus is the greatest work of American literature in the past 25 years, whether those White people might not be up to the same thing again.
Now, whether or not we go beyond suspicion and actually accuse them would depend on the nature of the work itself.
For my part, I think the work is technically fine (I remember it as technically fine, at least), and artistically empty, for which reason I suspect there must be something else (although that "something else" may just be my cultural distance from "American" culture). But the suspicion can be at least aired.
Accusations of racism are terribly damaging, yes, but for the most part, they shouldn't be 100% off limits. Race prejudice and race condescension are a factor in our society, even if by most standards, we're actually extremely good about suppressing them.
For an example of a grievance monger getting worked up about a description of a Black candidate as "articulate," incidentally, see here. In general, I think the "articulate" (or "well-spoken") charge is a fairly weak one, but it's one I've heard repeatedly, as a kind of examplar of this species of racial condescension.
Except Morrison, the person, did not receive the most votes. Philip Roth received the most votes, thus destroying that theory.
Uh, how? They vote as individuals, not as a hive mind.
I think this is B implicitly calling Seven a racist. That makes the only person here not to call Seven racist, or am I miscounting?
You are. I don't see how I'm accusing him of racism; I certainly don't mean to. He's just suggesting the possibility and then you're all jumping on him for it.
You seem to be suggesting that theere was behind the scenes vote-brokering.
How on earth do you get that!? Cor. All you need is for some voters to feel on the margin the need -- conscious or otherwise -- to give a bit of a boost to a Black author. Doesn't have to be the sole determining factor, doesn't have to be all of them, and it doesn't have to involve some kind of conspiracy.
Ok, what's the justification for teh belief that it actually happened in this case?
Can you prove to me that the possibility was realized in this case? (I'm talking low burden of proof here, not 100% certainty.)
That it actually happened? Or that it's a reasonable suspicion to hold? Or -- really, precisely what do you mean, now that you're trying to grind down to burdens of proof?
Now, if I suspect that it is the case, as I do, then it's probably fair to say that I believe the proposition
"Some voters were positively affected, on the margin, in their estimation of Beloved's quality, by the personal characteristics of the author"
to be true, on balance -- the justification is, as I said above, that White people (heck, that people) do this all the time, sometimes without even realising it, so it's not unreasonable to suspect they're doing it again. Induction. And this suspicion comes into play for me (or rather, after reading this thread, it now has -- Seven Machos, you have put the idea in my mind), because frankly, I think Beloved is pretty far from a great book, and that my total lack of emotional response to it is not atypical.
On the other hand, if we're talking about justified belief here, deduced from specific articulable facts, then of course we don't have anything. How could we?
I haven't made any claims as to what the voters thought. I don't know. I know that the contest asked them to vote for what they thought was the best. Morrison won that vote. That result speaks for itself. Thet result can only be put in doubt if you presume to know what the voters thought.
Let's break this down. When you say "Morrison won that vote," and then "that result speaks for itself," andthen "that result can only be put in doubt etc." you're avoiding saying it directly, but you're plainly implying that barring countervailing evidence, the result is presumptively valid as a comparative measure of literary quality.
Does the presumptive validity of the result rest on assumptions? Of course it does. One of them is that the evaluators are competent to evaluate literary quality. Another is that in the aggregate, their individual determinations correspond to some shared metric (or that they generate a proper metric because of their collective fame or whatever). But more importantly here, it also assumes that these qualified evaluators have evaluated correctly, no?
I.e. you are implicitly claiming that:
(A) that when asked to vote for what they thought was the best (literarily), they voted for what they thought was the best (literarily), and more particularly
(B) that they did not allow themselves to be affected by the race and gender of the author in making their decision.
To which one can respond that humans are not automata. Of course people are going to be affected by the people they're voting about. What's in doubt here is really to what degree and on what grounds (and in what direction) they are affected.
And even if we formulate your implicit claims accordingly in a more reduced fashion, you're still implying a claim that they were not affected materially by concerns like the personal characteristics of the author.
7M: "There is no proof that the sun will rise tomorrow." -- Just noticing, you've referenced Hume twice today. How often does THAT happen outside of the classroom?
Critical: I don't know how you've had the energy for this discussion. Or the patience.
I'll agree on the Le Guin influence in Butler's sci-fi series, particular The Patternist, or Pattern Master (sorry, can't bring up the names). Kindred is her own masterpiece, through and through, though. I don't believe Le Guin could have written it. It's my favorite work of hers, other than the short stories in Bloodchild.
All I remember in reading Toni Morrison is that men came off rather badly and that she presents the emotional difficulties of black history in a way I find highly unsatisfying.
It's like how people talk about the horror of life before civil rights legislation, as though all was pure hell. I look at those old photos of blacks, often smartly dressed in suits, smiling, fathers with mothers and children; I am reminded that in any period of suffering and difficulty, there is also tremendous joy and hope.
Morrison sucks out the joy and hope and paints with a dark brush of misery, with no clear light shining through.
Is the book the greatest in the past 25 years? That is too subjective a question, but I would lean toward "no". I would also suggest that affirmative action could well have played a part in the choice, and yet, if so, still may not tarnish the choice itself.
People often do things for many reasons and nothing is "either/or", or "black/white".
Sippican,
Apparently you don't have to read any of them to be upset by them.
On one hand I'm excited that people are still so passionate about books that such love can spark an argument like this one. For my money, Song of Solomon is greater than Beloved, but what I find interesting is the belief shared by some of us here that if I don't like a book personally, then there's no way other readers could find any merit in it. So there must be some other reason for the choice than the quality of the work, "affirmative action" for example.
This strikes me as arrogant. It reminds me of my friend Bill who because he hated grunge assumed nobody else could possibly like it, so everybody was just trying to be cool by pretending.
Sometimes when book and reader fail to connect, the fault is the reader's not the book.
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