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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.
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3 comments:
I don't know. I love the writing of Rafi Zabor and Thomas Pynchon. I love Barry Smolin's writing. Spider Robinson's writing used to mean a lot to me.
I have not read any of William T. Vollmann's books yet, but I think he would have to be on the list.
By the way, there was this fantastic profile piece about Vollmann earlier this year, on his struggles to get his 3,000-page epic novel series on the history of the CIA into publication.
https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-last-contract
Jonathan Franzen is consistently very good. Conventional compared to what I normally like but all his works have stayed with me.
My pick would be Jonathan Lethem, though I think not all of his books are top tier. Chronic City is my favorite 21st century novel and I’ve always had the feeling that if people looked deeply enough, they would see that book describing our situation in ways others have not touched on. I seem to be pretty alone in this opinion. Too bad, chaldrons aren’t for everyone.
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