[Larry McCaffery teaches American literature at San Diego State University
and is co-editor of the journal Fiction International.]
This is actually one of my favorite lists because the author of the list justifies each book, with mostly interesting comments. This is the list I would most likely go to after the Random House List.
1. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire (1962)
The most audaciously conceived novel of the century--and the most perfectly execute--this
is also the book whose existence could have been the most difficult to anticipate in the
year 1900.
2. Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922)
Not so much the beginning of anything as the culmination of the great 19th century
symbolic realist tradition
3. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Like Ulysses, Pynchon’s masterpiece has cast an enormous, intimidating shadow
across the entire literary landscape.
4. Coover, Robert. The Public Burning (1977)
A book controversial enough that its publisher almost immediately took it out of print
(where stayed for over 15 years), this novel featured a surprisingly sympathetic Richard
Nixon as its principle narrator and used the Rosenberg case as a means of examining just
about everything worth examining about America during the McCarthy era; excessive and
encyclopedic, dazzling in its range of styles, bitterly angry and bitingly humorous, this
is the most brilliant and original "political novel" ever published in America.
5. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Along with raising Southern gothic to an art form, this book ranks with Pale Fire
in terms of its audacious treatment of point of view and created in Jason Compson perhaps
the most memorable villain of the century.
6. Beckett, Samuel. Trilogy (Molloy 1953 , Malone Dies 1956, The Unnamable
1957).
Beckett took self-consciousness, solipsism, ultimacy, and minimalism to the brink of
silence--where he, thankfully, retreated just in time.
7. Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans (1925)
Stein’s prose is Stein’s prose is Stein’s prose. This sprawling novel is
still one of the most perceptive examinations of American life and values. Like her other
mature work, this book is rich with puns, rhythmic phrases, and word repetitions; it is
also a vibrant, breathtaking expression of Stein’s lifelong love affair with
individual words and a demonstration that the music, rhythm, and repetitive power of words
matters just as much as their representational qualities. As with Burroughs’
experiments a half century later, Stein’s methods were so truly radical that it would
take several generations before authors got around to figuring out how they might be
applied to their own writing.
8. Burroughs, William. Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine 1962, Nova Express 1964, The
Ticket that Exploded, 1967).
Space odysseys, Uranium Willy and the Heavy Metal Kid, image banks and silence viruses,
protopunk "wild boys" engaged in an apocalyptic guerrilla-warfare, body and mind
invasion, the Nova Mob matching wits with the Nova police (hampered by the corrupt
Biologic Courts) for control of The Reality Studio--these hallucinatory SF elements
interact with shards of poetry by Rimbaud, Shakespeare and Eliot (and much, much more) to
fuel Burroughs' atomic powered strap-on, which probes the asshole of society with more
glee and wicked humor than anyone since Swift.
9. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita (1955)
A richly humorous, satiric look at American life in the late 40s, a profound (and
profoundly disturbing) commentary about the ability of the creative mind to transform the
monstrous into breathtaking art, Lolita is above all this century’s most
passionate and most memorable lover story.
10. Joyce, James. Finnegans’ Wake (1941)
The greatest unreadable novel ever written.
11. Federman, Raymond. Take It or Leave It (1975)
The first--and still the definitive--poststructuralist novel written in English,
Federman’s crazed journey to chaos and erasure ranks, along with Kerouac’s The
Open Road , and Wright’s Going Native, as the greatest of all American
road novels.
12. Morrison, Toni. Beloved (1986)
A poetically rendered cry of pain and a plea for forgiveness and understanding, this book
won for Morrison a Nobel Prize (though not a place in the Modern Library List).
13. Wright, Stephen. Going Native (1994).
Robert Coover’s blurb says it all: "A sensational, prime-time novel. Imagine a
pornographic twilight zone of beebee-eyed serial killers, drug-stunned pants-dropping road
warriors and marauding armies of mental vampires, a nightmarish country of unparalleled
savagery, where there is no longer any membrane between screen and life and the monster
image feed in inexhaustible and the good guys are the scariest ones of all."
14. Lowery, Malcolm. Under the Volcano (1949)
The hell of alcoholism and the self has never been rendered more passionately or
convincingly.
15. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (1927)
The most extreme and poetic of Woolf’s treatments of the stream of consciousness
motif
16. Gass, William H.. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)
Gass is arguably America’s greatest living prose writer, and this collection includes
two stories--"The Pederson Kid" and "In the Heart of the Heart of the
Country"--which rank among the finest achievements in the short story form.
17. Gaddis, William. JR (1975)
Gaddis’s humor, his ear for the music of American idioms, his brilliant orchestration
of materials, and his sure-handed treatment of the ways capitalism controls every aspect
of our lives insures that JR will be one of the most discussed novels during the 21st
century.
18. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952)
Ellison’s blues-drenched, symbol-and-idiom rich depiction of the development of youth
into maturity, disillusionment, and self-realization not only sums up the ways that black
people have been preyed on by whites throughout American history but illuminates the
process that transforms us all into invisible people.
19. DeLillo, Don. Underworld (1997)
The best novel by the author who has produced the most significant body of work of all
post-WWII American writers, Underworld is at once a brilliant analysis of the fate
of America’s hopes and dreams as it approaches the millennium and a haunting,
lovingly presented lament for the lost lives and words the 50s.
20. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. (1926)
Employing a startlingly innovative method of rendering the lives and attitudes of a
"lost generation" of Americans seeking some sort of substitute for the values
and meanings had been destroyed by WWI, this novel would also have a decisive impact on
Raymond Carver and other American "minimalists" later in the century.
21. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Probably the most taught novel of them all, still one of the great initiation novels, and
also one of the most expressive descriptions of what all great writers must leave behind
in order to follow the muse, Portrait’s early experimentations with
stream-of-consciousness helped lay the groundwork for Joyce’s far grander forays into
human consciousness in Ulysses .
22. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (1925).
A novel whose gorgeous flights of lyricism is matched only by its ability to tease out
what is most debased about the American Dream--and what is most enduring as well.
23. James, Henry. The Ambassadors (1903).
The style found in the late-James novels was as intricate, psychologically nuanced, and
attuned to the inner workings of the mind as those developed somewhat later in the
stream-of-consciousness techniques employed by Joyce, Faulkner and others.
24. Lawrence, D.H.. Women in Love (1921)
The book where Lawrence finally achieved his goal of finding a means of rendering the
non-verbal operations determining the interactions of men and women.
25. Barthelme, Donald. 60 Stories (1981).
Barthelme’s surrealist, avant-pop treatments of life in a media-drenched Manhattan
are still unrivaled in their ability to suggest how an aesthetics of trash could
effectively conjure up a convincing vision of American life generally.
26. Vollmann, William T.. The Rifles (1993)
Vollmann leads readers into a labyrinthine, nightmarish descent into madness, cannibalism,
death, and self-confrontation--all depicted by in excruciatingly vivid and emotionally
honest detail; we also become witness to one man's ability to test what is best about
himself, to confront the personal weaknesses most people deny, and the ways that even what
is best in ourselves--our desire to seek the truth about ourselves and the world, to know
and help others--can frequently lead to unmitigated disaster for everyone concerned.
27. Gaddis, William. The Recognitions (1955)
Gaddis’ grand encyclopedic portrait of the (counterfeiting) artist quest-narrative
managed to incorporate just about all the major 20th century motifs, while also evoking
(among other things) every major era of history, as well as the history of literature,
painting and music; little read when it appeared, The Recognitions was a major
influence on the young Thomas Pynchon and thus on postmodern fiction generally.
28. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (1902).
This short, prismatically told odyssey transcends its colonial context to become one of
the century’s most compelling studies of the permeable membrane separating the
bestial from the noble.
29. Heller, Joseph. Catch 22 (1961)
More than any other book, this novel’s arrival signaled that a new generation of
innovative American authors had arrived; things were never quite the same afterwards.
30. Orwell, George. 1984 (1949).
Orwell’s prophecies concerning life under Big Brother didn’t come true by 1984,
but stay tuned.
32. Hurston, Zora Neal. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
For all those readers who were moved by the passion , brutality, and intimacy of Alice
Walker’s widely hailed The Color Purple, Hurston’s novel should be
required reading.
32. Faulkner, William. Absalom Absalom! (1936)
Faulkner combines Quentin Compson’s search for himself with a reconstruction of the
myth of the Southern past, and in the process confronts the racial hierarchy and abuse
that shapes both the actual and imagined historical South. Among other things, this novel
has been convincingly cited by critic Brian McHale as marking the dividing line between
modernism and postmodernism.
33. Delany, Samuel R.. Dhalgren (1975)
This massive (nearly 900 pages), ambitious, unclassifiable novel transfers the exoticism
of other worlds to a surreal, nightmarish urban landscape, a twisted, disrupted vision of
Harlem and America’s other decaying inner cities; part myth, part dream, part verbal
labyrinth, Dhalgren’s central character is an artist whose doomed efforts to
make sense of the chaos surrounding him become an emblem of all our similar attempts.
34. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Steinbeck’s famous novel about the migration of the Joad family from the Dust Bowl to
broken dreams, misery, and a stubborn endurance in California; what may surprise readers
today are the many innovative features Steinbeck employs to render this odyssey.
35. Ducornet, Rikki. The Four Elements Tetrology (earth: The Stain 1984, fire: Entering
Fire 1986, water: The Fountains of Neptune 1992, and air: The Jade Cabinet
1993).
Using each of the four primal elements as central controlling metaphors, this ambitious
tetrology are many different things: vivid and often hilarious portraits of malice,
depravity and evil in the tradition of Bosch or Brueghel; ecological and political
parables about the 20th century's predilection for war and mass extinction; allegories
about mankind's fear of transmutation, chaos, and death and the devastation and misery
these fears engender; deeply moving meditations about the mysteries of sex, time, and
consciousness; metafictional investigations about the perils and attractions of
fabulating, creating, and remembering.
36. Gibson, William. Cyberspace Trilogy
(Neuromancer (1984),
Count Zero (1986),
Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).
Neuromancer’s was the novel that not only launched a thousand
cyberpunk literary ships but which first found a means of metaphorizing a means of
successfully navigating through the "space" of data.
37. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer (1934).
Miller’s blend of autobiography and fiction, his refusal to indulge in
interpretations or in creating full portraits of his characters, his receptivity and
openness to experience generally--not to mention his unabashed, exuberant exploration of
sexuality--all helped open up the form and content of novelistic experimentation for
postmodernist writers in the second half of this century.
38. Keroac, Jack. On the Road (1957)
Keroac’s classic saga of youth adrift in the gray-flannel-suited America, traveling
the highways, exploring the midnight negro streets of the cities, passionately searching
the vast expanse of America in search of themselves; the novel was literally
mind-expanding and helped turn on the generation of youths who would be out on the streets
creating the counter-culture revolution of the 60s.
39. McElroy, Joseph. Lookout Cartridge (1974)
McElroy is most important of all "unknown" postmodernist American authors;
vaguely analogous to Antonioni’s Blow Up, Cartridge is a fascinating,
gigantic mystery novel that demonstrates the cross fertilization that has been recently
occurring between film and prose fiction.
40. Ballard, J. G.. Crash (1973)
The colonization and seduction of our subconscious by the mediascape, the erotic thrill of
violence, the secret satisfactions of watching machines go hay-wire, and the numbing power
of mass-produced imagery have never been presented more convincingly.
41. Rushdie, Salmon. Midnight’s Children (1981)
A grand romp across the history of that populous and multicultural Mother India, Children
draws from sources ranging from myth, to Tristram Shandy, to Bombay’s rich
film industry.
42. Barth, John. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960).
The greatest of all 18th century novels written in the 20th century, Barth’s
monumental farce is also a brilliant commentary about the slippery nature of identity.
43. Metcalf, Paul. Genoa (1965)
Metcalf invents a narrative structure--part mosaic, part history, part genealogy, part
invention--which appropriates generous selections of materials drawn from the Christopher
Columbus myth, Moby Dick, a myriad other sources to develop a narrative that
reveals a whole host of connections between the greed and blood-lust of our founding
fathers and contemporary Americans.
44. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (1932)
In this greatest of all 20th century dystopian novels, Huxley develops a chillingly
accurate forecast about a civilization which willingly gives itself over not to
preestablished human goals but to the self-augmenting, self-perpetuating needs of new
technologies which, in his words, "tend always to obey the laws of its own
logic."
45. Forster, E. M.. A Passage to India (1924)
In his last and best-known novel, Forster takes the relationships between the English and
Indians in India in the early 1920s as a background against which to erect his most
searching and complex exploration of the possibilities and limitations, the promises and
pitfalls, of human relationships.
46. Federman, Raymond. Double or Nothing (1972).
This obsessive, hilarious, sad, unreadable, wildly inventive metafictional
novel-in-the-form-of-200+ concrete-poems (i.e., every page has a different typographical
design) is also the most original Holocaust novel yet published.
47. O'Brien, Flann.
at swim two birds (1951).
This is a book about a book about a man writing a book about characters who write a book
about him; not even Borges or Nabokov ever matched the richness, preposterousness, humor,
and linguistic bravado of O’Brien’s treatment of the Chinese boxes narrative
structure.
48. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian (1965),
Rendered in a blood-stained prose style that is as unique and instantly recognizable as
that of Hemmingway’s or Faulkner’s, McCarthy’s unrelentingly horrific Sam
Peckinpah-meets-Hieronymus Bosch novel deconstructs not only the familiar Western
archetypes of cowboys and Indians but also the revisionist versions that transform white
men into villains and red men into good-guy victims.
49. Hawkes, John. The Cannibal (1949)
Nowhere has the nightmare of human terror and the deracinated sensibility been more
concisely analyzed than in this groundbreaking novel (Hawkes’ first), which helped
usher in the postmodern era of literary experimentalism.
50. Wright, Richard. Native Son (1940)
No other black author of this century took greater risks than Wright in this harrowing
novel, where he creates a protagonist (Bigger Thomas) who murders a white woman--and then
demands that we understand and even empathize with this act.
51 West, Nathaniel. The Day of the Locust (1939)
This remains the Hollywood novel, as well as one of the finest
apocalyptic/millennial works of the 20th century.
52. Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood.
In this haunting, dream-like novel, Barnes uses homosexuality as a metaphor for the
condition of the human soul.
53. Robinson, Marilynn. Housekeeping (1981).
In this haunting, lyrical ode to loss, the eruption of the past into the present and the
illusory nature of any attempt at permanence help shape the personality of one of
contemporary fiction’s most memorable narrators.
54. Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Slaughterhouse Five (1969).
Vonnegut here reinvents his own experiences, both as witness to and novelistic chronicler
of the greatest massacre in human history (the fire-bombing of Dresden). So it goes. As
much as any other novel from the 60s, Slaughterhouse Five established metafiction
as the postmodernist literary form capable of offering writers an escape from the
stifling fantasies of traditional "realism."
55. DeLillo, Don. Libra (1986)
This novel depicts the ambiguous personalities and events that culminated in the central
mythological event that lies at the heart of the mystery of postmodern America: the
assassination of Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.
56. O'Conner, Flannery. Wise Blood (1952).
O’Conner explores the twisted longings, violence, religious fervor, and derangements
of life in America’s rural South in a manner that reminds one of Kafka, Carver, and
(inevitably) Faulkner.
57. LeGuin, Ursula K.. Always Coming Home (1985).
Part initiation story, part political allegory, part philosophical mediation, this book
introduces a rich variety of cultural artifacts of an imaginary culture, including
recipes, music (some editions included an audiocassette), drama, folktales, descriptions
of native flora and fauna, and drawings.
58. Dos Passos, John. USA Trilogy (The 42nd Parallel 1930, 1919 1932, and The
Big Money 1936).
These "collective novels" depict the vast panorama of post WWI American life by
describing the destinies of the masses of men and women rather than individuals; Dos
Passos relied on an array of innovative formal devices influenced by the rise of mass
media, Camera eyes, newsreels, quick flash techniques, capsule biographies and other
mixtures of news stories, bits of song lyrics, and newspaper headlines.
59. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook (1961)?
Metafictional impulses are evident in many of this century’s great novels, and
Lessing’s is one example which demonstrates that writing-about-writing need not
preclude psychological investigation or an active engagement in politics.
60. Salinger, J.D.. The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Still holding the record for the book responsible for the most firings of American high
school teachers, Salinger’s memorable and poignant initiation novel evoked the
emptiness and phoniness of post WWII American life with conviction and humanity; it also
captured the poetry of American teenage lingo better than any book since Huckleberry
Finn.
61. Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest (1929)
The Maltese Falcon is the best known of Hammett’s work, partly due to the
great film version, but it was Red Harvest which almost single-handedly shaped the
premises of hard-boiled fiction that would be endlessly reworked by authors throughout the
rest of the century.
62. Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)
Carver writes about troubled people on the outs--out of work, out of love, out of
touch--whose confusions, turmoils, and poignancy are conveyed through an interplay of
surface detail; here he pushed this elliptical, spare style to its most extreme form--and
created a collection that would have a decisive impact on the short story form during the
last quarter of this century.
63. Joyce, James. Dubliners (1915)
These intricately intertwined stories are not only vividly drawn, meticulously accurate
sketches of turn-of-the-century Dublin but collectively allowed Joyce to come directly to
terms with the life he had rejected and the ways this rejection might be figured in art;
like his later, more ambitious books, Dubliners is also a book that transcends its
immediate focus to become microcosms, small-scale models of all human life, of all
history, and geography.
64. Toomer, Jean. Cane (1925)
Blending poetry, theater, and fiction, this landmark experimental novel of the 20s
movingly portrayed the rootlessness of black life in white America and made Toomer a
leading figure of the Harlem Literary Renaissance.
65. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth (1905)
While Wharton raises questions about American capitalism, class structure, and gender
relations that would endure throughout the century, it is her artistry--her eloquence and
control as a stylist, her nuanced employment of the comedy of manners mode that only James
rivals that makes this book, in its own time and ours, such a broad and major
accomplishment.
66. Hoban, Russell. Ridley Walker (1982)
Set in a nightmarish post-nuclear British landscape and presented in one of the most
memorable and original voices conceived in this century, this novel is also, along with
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the closest contemporary counterpart to
Twain’s Huck Finn
67. William Eastlake Checkerboard Trilogy (Go in Beauty 1955,The Bronc People
1958, Portrait of the Artist with 26 Horses 1962).
Back in the late 50s and early 60s, William Eastlake was single-handedly changing the
scope, poetic range, thematic assumptions, and treatment of character--especially that of
Native Americans--of the Western genre. His surreal, humorous, was a decisive influence on
later novelists such as Larry McMurtry and Tom McGuane.
68. Elkin, Stanley. The Franchiser (1976).
This novel perfectly embodies Elkin’s greatest literary accomplishment: the creation
of wonderfully rich and excessive language which serves to unmask the beauty and wonder
that is normally locked within the vulgar, disheartening, and ordinary aspects of
contemporary life.
69. Auster, Paul. New York Trilogy (City of Glass 1985, Ghosts 1986, The
Locked Room 1986).
Auster's Trilogy introduced a new literary figure (described by Dennis Drabbelle as
the "post-existential private-eye") and a form of storytelling emphasizing the
formal peculiarities and epistemological quandaries of the genre while simultaneously
presenting a haunting evocation of the noisy, bewildering and crowded anonymity of New
York City--the only constant character in the Trilogy.
70. Robbins, Tom. Skinny Legs and All (1986)
Robbins uses the Dance of the Seven Veils as a kind of elaborate framing device to examine
many of the most basic issues that define our existence: what is the nature of sexuality,
and what is the relationship between the male a female aspects we all share? how can
people break free of the systems (political, spiritual, social) that repress our natural
passions and sense of play, that rigidify belief into dogma, that encourage us to stop
personal exploration?
71. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest (1995).
This unwieldy but very highly engaging novel ambitiously explores themes encompassing
politics, philosophy, gender roles, and personal identity. These themes are presented
through a range of unusual and poetic voices and narrative structures designed to model
the difficulties involved in distinguishing pop-cultural appearance from reality or
establishing meaningful connections between media-generated images and their referents.
72. Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String (1996).
The first full replenishment of the language since the works of Burroughs and Gass in the
1960s and the most completely original work of fiction to appear in the 90s.
73. Mathews, Harry. Tlooth (1966).
Along with Frank Norris’ McTeague, this is the greatest of all "dentist
novels." Like his French counterpart, Georges Perec, Mathews has been heavily
influenced by his involvement in the OULIPO group of radical European avant-gardists; and
as with Perec, there is a great deal more going on here than the brilliance of his elegant
language, word play, and intricate formal design.
74. Coover, Robert. Pricksongs and Descants (1969)
The most exuberant display of innovation using the short story form of any collection of
fictions from the first wave of postmodernism, this collection ultimately had an even
greater impact on writers in the 70s and 80s than Lost in the Funhouse or
Barthelme’s Unspeakable Practices.
75. Dick, Phillip K.. The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Working as he did on the treadmill of genre SF, Dick never wrote a single work which can
be termed a "masterpiece," although this alternate world novel--with its many
surprising twists and equally surprisingly
and surprisingly subtle treatment of Asian themes--comes close.
76. Ellis, Brett Easton. American Psycho (1988)
The most notorious and widely denounced American novel of the 80s, American Psycho
is also a brilliantly inventive , wickedly funny novel whose monumentally excessive
depiction of media imagery becomes a devastating critique of the horror and banality that
characterizes an American life dominated by the cultural logic of hyperconsumer
capitalism.
77. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969).
At once a meticulously rendered Victorian novel and a metafictional deconstruction of such
novels, this work also used its 19th century materials as a means of exploring gender,
class and existential dilemmas that were as common in the 60s as they were when Charles
Dickens was writing.
78. Wolfe, Gene. The Book of the New Sun Tetrology (The Shadow of the Torturer
1980, The Claw of the Conciliator 1981, The Sword of Lictor 1982, The
Citadel of the Autarch 1982), Gene Wolfe
In this sprawling series of interrelated novels set in some distant future Wolfe conjures
up an epic adventure that unfolds as a series of sensuously rendered, fabulous
micro-quests and mock summaries of cultural artifacts reminiscent of Borges or Calvino.
79. Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Burgess invents a marvelously appropriate language to depict a nightmarish, dystopian
version of an England populated by the same sort of angry, nihilist
"ultra-violent," figures that Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols would later
celebrated during punk’s mid-70s heyday.
80. Albany Trilogy (Legs 1976, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game
1978, Ironweed 1983), William Kennedy
Kennedy’s Trilogy is a remarkable fusion of a real landscape of loud, swinging
speakeasies, all-night diners, and hobo jungles--with the landscape of his imagination,
where the dead walk side by side with the living, and a bowling alley or pool hall can
become a scene of truly epic proportions; like the Dublin of Joyce’s imagination,
Kennedy’s Albany is recreated with meticulous attention to detail but is also imbued
with a universality that allows us to recognize something of our own fears, guilt,
passions, and ambitions.
81. Gass, William H.. The Tunnel (1995)
As this monumental novel’s narrator digs into his own past, his own loves and hatred,
and that of Nazi Germany, he creates a hole driven into both language and the book’s
central theme: the fascism of the heart.
82. Gass, William H. Omensetter's Luck.
From page one until its conclusion, Gass delights and amazes by reeling off one sensuous,
loving constructed sentence after another.
83. Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky (1948)
Bowles plunges his readers into a desert landscape whose awe inspiring beauty and
indifference to humanity has never been rendered so lovingly--or so harrowingly.
84. Theroux, Alexander. Darcanonville’s Cat (1981)
Theroux uses love the way Melville used his white whale-- a metaphor to be exhausted,
improvised, played with, and otherwise endlessly explored until it eventually reveals the
utter inexhaustibility and mystery of life itself.
85. Sukenick, Ronald. Up (1968)
This wildly inventive, comic novel unfolds as collages of desperate elements: surreal
depictions of alienation in the manner of Kafka and Orwell, didactic commentaries about
politics, metaphysics, culture, and (of course) literature, flights of fantasy that
included numerous outrageous sexual episodes, and reflexive metafictional asides about the
book we’re reading and the status of the novel generally in the era of post realism; Up’s
wit and intelligence, its formal extremity--and the appropriateness of its experiments for
allowing Sukenick to investigate his own life and the larger context of the disruptions
occurring in America during the 60s--made this book among the most daring books of the
first wave of pomo innovation.
86. Reed, Ishamel. Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1972)?
Reed’s brash, hoodoo-meets-horse-opera approach to the Wild West signaled the arrival
of the first major Black voice in postmodernism.
87. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesberg Ohio (1919)
One of the first books to convincingly employ Freudian psychology to revealing the inner
workings of ordinary characters, this collection used a small-town setting as a means of
examining the neuroses and obsessions of American life in a manner that has only been
rivaled by Flannery O’Conner for sheer intensity and insight.
88. Vollmann, William T.. You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)
In the most ambitious and original debuts since Pynchon's V., Vollmann develops a
dense, sprawling novelistic "cartoon" in which bugs and electricity become
motifs used to explore the revolutionary impulses that have arisen in response to the
evils of industrialism. Moving across vast areas of history and geography, filled with
arcane information and surrealist literalizations of sexual longings and violence, and
blending together autobiography and fictive invention in a typically po-mo manner, this
book's wild flights of improvisational prose and intensity of vision signaled the arrival
America’s most gifted novelist of the century’s last 25 years.
89.Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead (1948)
As is well known, Mailer departed for WWII convinced that his experiences would provide
him with the ingredients for writing the great novel about this century’s greatest
conflagration. This novel proved him to be right.
90. Coover, Robert. The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968).
The greatest "sports novel" of the century (only Don DeLillo’s End Zone is
even in the same ‘ballpark") , The UBA used baseball as an elaborate
framing device that allows him to explore American culture, history, and politics from
various fascinating angles; along the way, he also develops an elaborate and brilliantly
conceived metaphor of the relationship of man to God and the fictional systems man has
created (myth, literature, philosophy, religion) to make sense of the world.
91.Katz, Steve. Creamy and Delicious (1971).
The most extreme and perfectly executed fictional work to emerge from the Pop Art scene of
the late 60s, this collection also includes one of the great undiscovered treasures of the
postmodern short story form, the Raymond Roussel-influenced gem, "3 Satisfying
Stories"; also notable for Katz’s success in creating po-mo’s first
successful literary analogue to "the Big Crunch"—see p. 43.
92. Coetzee, J. M.. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
Narrated by a middle-aged magistrate of an unspecified colonial outpost, this
hallucinatory allegory of imperialism poetically chronicles the interconnections existing
between power-wielders and their victims.
93. Sturgeon, Theodore. More than Human (1951)
Anyone who isn’t aware that SF has produced some great prose writers need
only go to page one of this Sturgeon classic evocation of "homo gestalt" to
educate themselves.
94. Sorrentino, Gilbert. Mulligan Stew (1979)
Sorrentino’s epic, obsessive, metafictional "tour de farce" includes bits
of detective fiction, a masque, letters (including a generous selection of the dozens of
rejection letters the book piled up), poetry, porn, and a great deal else; in the end, the
book becomes a fascinating, humorous meditation on the comic possibilities of the modern
literary imagination-- well as an angry denunciation of the ways these possibilities are
subverted in today’s publishing industry.
95. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel (1929).
In an age of hard-boiled realism, this enormous, rough edged beast of novel was a lyrical,
uncontrolled, Whitmanesque cry of yearning that remains of the most important statements
of American’s sense of hope, alienation, memory, and (above all) voracious appetite
for new experiences.
96. Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy (1925)
This novel’s significance lies partly in Dreiser’s ability to use Clyde
Griffith’s soul-hunger and eventual destruction to describe a uniquely American form
of tragedy while also suggesting something about the more universal plight of individuals
caught up in vast socio-economic forces which they are only dimly aware of.
97 Mooney, Ted. Easy Travels to Other Planets (1981).
Blending mainstream's emphasis on psychological depth with an eerie ambiance of SF (an
impending war in the Antarctic, information sickness) this haunting, lyrical novel
perfectly exemplifies the blend of the postmodern mainstream and SF to be found in the
other two novels (i.e., DeLillo’s White Noise and Gibson’s Neuromancer)
which best captured the vast, media-driven transformations at work in American life during
the 80s.
98.Erickson, Steve. Tours of the Black Clock (1989)
This novel combined Faulkner’s mesmerizing ability to explode time and space with
Marquez’s magical realist ability to magically exaggerate aspects of the familiar
until they can be seen clearly once again; the result is a haunting and grotesque
evocation of the shattered nature of 20th century life and its ongoing love affair with
fascism and violence.
99. Acker, Kathy. In Memorium to Identity (1990)
By the time this--her most moving and effective novel--appeared, Acker had already
published nearly a dozen books whose punk-influenced, demolition derby approach to writing
fiction had already had the greatest impact on writing by women of anyone of her
generation.
100. Delany, Samuel R.. Hogg (1996)
The most shocking novel published in the 20th century.
