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The New York Times Book Review asked a promiment array of writers, critics, editors and other literary experts to select what they believed was the best work of American fiction in the past 25 years. Here are the results as published in their Book Review earlier this year. |
The Winner
Toni Morrison
At the center of Toni Morrison's best known novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The novel traces Sethe's journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Despite the pain, Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone's future.
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The Runners Up
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Don DeLillo
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence. Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed by the overarching conflict of the Cold War.
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Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the wild west. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
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John Updike
The first work, Rabbit, Run (1960), established John Updike as a major novelist. He introduces us to Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom during the tail end of the Eisenhower era. In each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son,
Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters collectively tell the representative American story.
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Philip Roth
American Pastoral is a portrait of how the innocence of Swede Levov - legendary high school athlete, devoted family man, hard worker, and prosperous inheritor of his father's glove factory - is swept away by the times; and how everything industriously created by his family in America over three generations is left in a shambles by a bomb explosion in his own bucolic backyard.
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Other Books Receiving Multiple Votes
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