Who's our greatest living novelist?

Richard Powers (Creative Commons photo by Phoebe Ayers, details here.)

In his recent piece on Thomas Pynchon that I blogged about a few days ago, PQ writes, "Pynchon is arguably the greatest living novelist on the strength of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) alone ... "

This is obviously not an unreasonable opinion, but it made me wonder what other writers plausibly could be suggested. (For the sake of discussion, let's limit this to writers from the U.S.) Colson Whitehead? Don DeLillo? Anne Tyler? N.K. Jemisin? Alice Walker? Stephen King? Percival Everett? Barbara Kingsolver? Who am I missing?

My three favorite "name" writers are Richard Powers, Neal Stephenson and Tom Perrotta. Whenever any of those three issues a new book, I have to read it, ASAP. 

Powers probably would be the writer among those three with the biggest literary reputation. He won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker, the Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory and was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant. The Gold Bug Variations is another well-regarded novel, and I liked Playground, the one that came out last year. 

I actually interviewed Powers via email after another novel I liked, Orfeo, was published, here is my interview.