David Foster Wallace's Top Ten List

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David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist who was known for his sprawling, innovative novels that moved beyond postmodern irony and brilliantly self-conscious works of nonfiction. His published three novels: The Broom of the System (1987), Infinite Jest (1996, which is considered by some as one of the great works of the 20^th century), and The Pale King (2011); three story collections:Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004); and several collections of essays including A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster (2005). D.T. Max’s superb biography of Wallace is titled Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.

1. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (1942). An amusing reversal of The Divine Comedy, this novel consists of letters from a senior devil (Screwtape) to his young nephew Wormword, teaching him how to tempt his first human “patient” to perdition. Lewis nicely balances theology and psychology, depicting hell as a bureaucracy with murderous office politics, and the loss of one’s soul as an imperceptible poisoning through chains of seemingly inconsequential sins.

2. The Stand by Stephen King (1978). This vivid apocalyptic tale with dozens of finely drawn characters begins with the military’s mistaken release of a deadly superflu that wipes out almost everyone on earth. The few survivors, spread out across the barren United States, are visited in their dreams by a kindly old woman in Nebraska and a sinister man in the West. They begin making their way toward these separate camps for what will prove to be a last stand between the forces of good and evil.

3. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (1981). Imitation is the most annoying form of flattery for archfiend Dr. Hannibal Lecter in this terrifying predecessor to The Silence of the Lambs. Red Dragon describes the original capture of cannibalistic serial killer Lecter and his subsequent indignation on hearing that another monster is imitating his sadistic methods. Harris skillfully leaves open who is manipulating whom when Lecter agrees to help the FBI track down the copycat, who matches Lecter eye for eye —literally.

4. The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962). Green recruits become hardened soldiers, their eyes reflecting the “thousand yard stare” of those who have seen too much, in this novel set during World War II’s battle for Guadalcanal. Narrated from the perspective of various soldiers assigned to Charlie Company, the novel reflects the complexity of war —the horror and heroism of its licensed murder —while navigating the “thin red line between the sane and the mad.”

5. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973). This iconic feminist novel of fantasy, liberation, and “the zipless fuck” kicked up plenty of dust in the early 1970s. The unpublished writer and unhappily married Isadora Wing yearns to fly free and receives her epiphany through an affair and the discovery of her own sexuality and power. Many critics dismissed Jong as a pornographer in literary clothing; her protagonist, they claimed, was as self-absorbed as the baby boomers themselves. But the book sold millions and became a touchstone for a much greater social movement.

6. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (1988). Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter is a deranged serial killer and a brilliant psychiatrist —who better to help the FBI profile psychos like Buffalo Bill, who loves peeling the skin off his lovely young victims? So the Bureau dispatches Clarice Starling, a smart, charming, slightly vulnerable agent, to Lecter’s prison cell. While playing mind games with Clarice, Lecter provides her with strange but telling clues, which she pursues against her superiors’ wishes and the clock ticking out the seconds for Buffalo Bill’s next victim.

7. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961). A counterculture favorite during the 1960s, this novel tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, who was born during the first flight to Mars. Reared by Martians, the orphan returns to Earth as a young man, where he questions the customs and values taken for granted there. Michael also learns he inherited a large fortune and the deed to Mars. As the world government tries to seize his assets, Michael forms a church preaching free love. His followers think he is the Messiah —and that spells trouble.

8. Fuzz by Ed McBain (1968). Fueled by clever plots, sharp dialogue, and vivid characters, McBain’s series of novels set in New York City’s 87th Precinct is a gold standard of the police procedural. This novel features one of the genre’s great villains, the murderous Deaf Man, who taunts and ridicules his blue-clad adversaries.

9. Alligator by Shelley Katz (1977). He’s the Moby-Dick of the Everglades —a twenty-foot-long alligator with eighty razor sharp teeth who stalks men for pleasure. Like all legendary beasts, this killer is a symbol of mankind’s weakness and a challenge to those who dream of proving their mettle. When two death-hardened adventurers vow to pursue this leviathan, the hunters become the prey in this atmospheric thriller.

10. The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy (1991). The Cold War meets the age of terror in this pulsing techno thriller. Hoping both to derail Israeli–Palestinian peace and darken U.S.–Soviet relations, terrorists smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States. Only one man can save the day, Clancy’s series hero, Jack Ryan, a CIA agent racked by personal and professional problems. Clancy brandishes his encyclopedic knowledge of the military —including plans for building a hydrogen bomb —while capturing a hero filled with doubt.

THE TOP TEN

David Foster Wallace / A brief survey of the short story

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE by Gary Hannabarger

A brief survey of the short story part 66: 

David Foster Wallace

For all its elaborate formal tricks, Wallace’s work is marked by a deep desire for authentic connection, to his subjects and to his readers

Chris Power
Monday 25 May 2015 15.00 BST

David Foster Wallace was a maximalist. His masterpiece, Infinite Jest, is a 1,000-page, polyphonic epic about addiction and obsession in millennial America. His journalism and essays, about television and tennis, sea cruises and grammar, always swelled far beyond their allotted word counts (cut for publication, he restored many of them to their full length when they were collected in book form). In a letter sent to a friend from a porn convention in Las Vegas, Wallace exclaimed that, “writing about real-life stuff is next to impossible, simply because there’s so much!” It might seem surprising that a writer like this could or should want to function within the confines of the short story, yet besides Infinite Jest it is arguably his three story collections that represent the most important part of his work.

That said, many of Wallace’s short stories aren’t all that short, and often test the limits of traditional conceptions of story. As he told Larry McCaffery in 1993: “I have a problem sometimes with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn’t call attention to itself.” In fact, Wallace’s later works would rewire this statement: in order to say what needed to be said, he found his writing had no option but to call attention to itself. To experience a Wallace story is often also to experience someone making an agonised attempt to write a story. This was nothing new, of course: the postmodernists of the 1960s were committed to metafiction, the literary technique of self-consciousness that puts the lie to realism, making the audience constantly aware that what they are reading is an artificial construct.

This approach appealed to the young Wallace, who once remarked that Donald Barthelme’s short story The Balloon was the first work of fiction to “ring my cherries”, and who subsequently found a deep affinity with the work of Thomas Pynchon. Yet by the time of his first collection, 1989’s Girl With Curious Hair, and despite the significant debts individual stories owe to postmodern writers (John Billy is a tribute to Omensetter’s Luck by William Gass, while the political epic-in-miniature Lyndon takes its lead from Robert Coover’s A Public Burning), Wallace’s relationship with postmodernism had grown more complicated. He believed that a movement that had taken shape to unmask the hypocrisies of mass culture had come to lend them an insidious power: once advertising became knowing and ironic, the postmodernist game was up. Wallace began attempting to move beyond irony towards a new sincerity, although he struggled with how to achieve this.

The novella that ends the collection, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, is a tortuously long assault on postmodernism that paradoxically satirises the strategies of metafiction by employing an encyclopaedic array of metafictional strategies – skilfully enough that it could easily be taken for a piece of metafiction itself. It is illustrative of the struggle Wallace had throughout his career with the shape and content of his fiction, that after several years of considering the story to be by far the most important thing he had written, he then disowned it: “In Westward I got trapped one time just trying to expose the illusions of metafiction the same way metafiction had tried to expose the illusions of the pseudo-unmediated realist fiction that came before it. It was a horror show. The stuff’s a permanent migraine”.

It is possible to see Wallace as an artist who grew less certain of what he was doing the longer he did it, but at the same time becoming increasingly certain that this uncertainty was where he should focus his energy. It is this decision, and the scrupulousness with which Wallace pursued it, that can make areas of his work so tricky to engage with. His second collection, for example, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999), is a brilliant book that is very difficult to enjoy. Reviewing it, the novelist Lawrence Norfolk noted the “brutal trades” one story makes “between the integrity of its rhetorical position and any pretension to aesthetic pleasure”, which is a useful way of considering much of his work from this point on: it tends to have very specific reasons for existing in the forms it does, but those forms can be rebarbative. They include extremely long and knotty sentences, monologues by obsessive bores, and a perverse love of the extreme ugliness of certain types of specialised language – marketing terminology, programmer’s English, therapy-speak, and so on. They are ouroboros-like stories that consume themselves at the same time as we consume them.

One of the best of this latter group is Octet, an exhilarating but enervating story that Norfolk found “maddening”, although he remained insightful enough to note that the story’s multiplying “reflexive knots … are not ironic reflexive gestures meant to distance the writer from the imminent implosion of his own artefact. They are Wallace’s own, sincere misgivings.” The story, a series of what Wallace calls “short belletristic pieces” that present a situation then ask the reader a question about it, collapses into itself halfway through, then proceeds to analyse the reasons for that collapse in a section that begins, “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer”. By its author’s own admission, the story becomes increasingly “dense and inbent” as successive arguments and positions are explored, expanded on, and digressed from. There is a moment in Infinite Jest when the weed addict Ken Erdedy dwells on “the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch”. In Octet, Wallace is working himself to just such a standstill.

But when Wallace’s stories devour themselves, it is not a hip trick. The misgivings catalogued and explored in Octet are, as Norfolk noted, sincere. Zadie Smith has written that “how you feel about Octet will make or break you as a reader of Wallace, because what he’s really asking is for you to have faith in something he cannot possibly ever finally determine in language … his sincerity, his apparent desperation to ‘connect’ with his reader in a genuine way”. This idea of human connection, and whether it is even possible, is present right through his work, from the early story Little Expressionless Animals onwards, but its most urgent interrogation comes in his final and darkest collection, Oblivion (2004).

In an interview he gave in 1996, referring to Infinite Jest, Wallace talked about addressing “a real American type of sadness”. It is unsurprising to note that a writer who struggled with depression from his teens, who committed suicide at the age of 46, and whose stories nearly all contain at least a passing reference to depression and/or suicide, should have returned to sadness as a theme, but it is in Oblivion that it is captured most starkly. Critics tend to focus on the stories Good Old Neon (told from the viewpoint of a suicide) and The Suffering Channel (about a man who can defecate great works of art, and, indirectly, 9/11), and both count among Wallace’s best fiction, but there is another story in the collection, The Soul Is Not a Smithy, that is at once typical of his themes and extraordinary in the way it addresses them.

The editor and critic Sven Birkets, writing about his experience of first reading this story, describes “a density that was, at every step, forbidding – those sentences, the micro-obsessiveness of the narrating voice, the slow unfolding of suggestive implication that Henry James, title-holder in this category, would have applauded”. The story operates on several different levels: as an adult, the narrator reflects on the day in 1960 when he and three classmates were apparently held hostage by an unhinged supply teacher; in fact the narrator was unaware of being a hostage, because he was deeply involved in his habitual pastime of authoring a mental comic strip, the images of which appeared in the reticulate mesh of the classroom windows. Alongside this nested story – which we are told in great detail, and which is extremely funny, violent and sad – are interspersed memories of the narrator’s childhood home, and glimpses of his life since, including a detailed, digressive investigation of a dream sequence from The Exorcist.

Then, following the description of a recurring nightmare about his father’s office, the narrator presents an extraordinary portrait of this man, an insurance actuary who “for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year … sat all day at a metal desk in a silent, fluorescent room, reading forms and making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of those calculations, breaking only to answer his telephone or meet with other actuaries in other bright, quiet rooms”. “I did not know,” the narrator says “that in mild weather he took his lunch down in the elevator and ate it sitting on a backless stone bench that faced a small square of grass with two trees and an abstract public sculpture, and that on many mornings he steered by these 30 minutes outdoors the way mariners out of sight of land use stars”. Then, devastatingly, he remarks that his father “died of a coronary when I was 16, and I can acknowledge, despite the obvious shock and loss, that his passing was less hard to bear than much of what I learned about his life when he was gone”. He means the everyday sorrow of it, the smallness of its pleasures against the vastness of its mundanity, and the fear that this is his birthright. Earlier, describing his father’s daily ritual on arriving home, he describes how “this routine … cast shadows deep down in parts of me I could not access on my own”. This account, in tandem with numerous other glancing references to disappointments and misfortunes scattered throughout the story, is the capstone to a profoundly sorrowful work of fiction.

Flipping the entropy of stories like Octet, or Adult World parts I and II – where the story begins coherently only to become more and more unconventional until it atomises – here, unexpectedly, it is mimesis that comes to dominate a narrative that for much of its length has been fragmented and surreal. For once, Wallace slips his bonds and writes through to the end without the story dissolving or blowing up in his face, and it feels as though he caught himself by surprise in doing so (which is perhaps why he described the story as “a very strange piece”). This story realises the ambition Wallace described to Larry McCaffery back in 1993, when he was willing himself to become the writer he most wanted to be: “Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you really feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.”

Wallace’s fiction contains enormous cruelty: rape, animal torture, child abuse, the severe and perhaps fatal burning of a baby. Relationships are fractured, parasitic, and often the cause for psychic pain and disturbance; sex is furtive or coercive. It can be difficult to take, even when the knots and involutions of it aren’t making it difficult to read on a purely formal basis. But it is also a deeply moral body of work. Its difficulties, and many of its cruelties, exist for specific reasons. Whether Wallace’s fraught projects are successes or failures is up to the individual, but these are judgments that all serious readers should want to make for themselves.

THE GUARDIAN

001 Anton Chekhov
002 HP Lovecraft
003 Mavis Gallant
004 Ryunosuke Akutagawa
005 Raymond Carver
006 Julian Maclaren-Ross
007 Etgar Keret
008 Robert Walser
009 VS Pritchett
010 Grace Paley

011 Katherine Mansfield
012 Heinrich von Kleist 

013 Franz Kafka

014 MR James

015 F Scott Fitzgerald

016 Donald Barthelme

017 Jane Bowles

018 Stefan Zweig

019 Ray Badbury 

020 Nikolai Gogol

021 Saki

022 Julio Cortázar

023 JF Powers
024 Lydia Davis

025 Leo Tolstoy

026 JG Ballard
027 Jorge Luis Borges
028 Vladimir Nabokov
029 Eudora Welty
030 Bruno Schulz

031 Boccaccio

032 James Joyce

033 Deborah Eisenberg

034 Ernest Hemingway

035 Tadeusz Borowski

036 Denis Johnson

037 Alice Munro

038 Isaac Babel

039 William Trevor

040 JD Salinger

041 Rudyard Kipling
042 Danilo Kiš
043 Flannery O'Connor
044 Frank O'Connor
045 John Cheever
046 Roberto Bolaño
047 Machado de Assis
048 Angela Carter
049 Guy de Maupassant
050 Ivan Turgenev

051 Sherwood Anderson

052 Juan Rulfo

053 Katherine Anne Porter
054 Dambudzo Marechera
055 Edgar Allan Poe
056 Clarice Lispector
057 Jean Rhys
058 Isak Dinesen
059 John McGaherern
060 Italo Calvino

061 Barry Hannah

062 Nikolai Leskov

063 Robert Aickman

064 John Updike

065 Varlam Shalamov

066 David Foster Wallace

067 Silvina Ocampo

068 Elizabeth Taylor

069 Lucía Berlin 

070 Samuel Beckett

071 George Saunders

072 James Salter

David Foster Wallace / Love

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

LOVE

Love is simply a word. It joins separate things.

Contemporary american novels you should read right now

25 CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELS YOU SHOULD READ RIGHT NOW

OCTOBER 31, 2013 
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By Elizabeth DiEmanuele

Contemporary American literature is subversive. It contains an element of the surreal, bizarre names, plots and consistent, biting commentary. Primarily postmodernist, these works are inherently distrustful. They not only question cultural inconsistencies, they allow such inconsistencies to naturally unfold within the narrative. As a result, contemporary American literature, arguably continues the pattern of highly-politicized fiction popularised in the 18th and 19th century, along with the thought-provoking philosophical questions of 20th century Modernist movement.

1. John Updike, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom series (1960, 1971, 1981, 1990)

Much like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Updike’s “Rabbit” series is told in a present-tense narrative, destabilizing the novel’s traditional style. Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a middle-class man who feels there is something missing from his life. The series follows Harry and his family through marriage, affairs and aging, each novel embodying the many triumphs and frustrations of the everyday American.

2. E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975)

Set in 1906, Ragtime tells the story of Harry Houdini, a famous escape artist who crashes into a telephone pole outside a family’s home. Filled with many sub-stories and plots, Doctorow captures American history as a series of random events, challenging the nature of recorded history. As a result, Doctorow subverts the traditional set-up of the novel in its intricate mixing of historical and fictional characters into a single narration.

3. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976)

As a work of, what Haley calls, “faction,” Roots tells the semi-biographical story of his ancestors. Starting with the 18th-century, Kunta Kinte, Haley’s African ancestor who was captured and sold into United States slavery, he creates a genealogy of his ancestors. Through this recount, Haley records the injustices and struggles found within the African slave trade, making it not only a great novel but also a significant document for future generations.

4. John Irving, World According to Garp (1978)

“In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

In this coming of age novel, Garp tells the story of T. S. Garp and his mother, Jenny Fields. Jenny is an extreme feminist leader and Garp is her bastard son. Although it is a dark and violent story, there are many elements of comedy that make it a bizarre approach to death, sex, radical feminism and the horrific beauty of human dysfunction.

5. Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song (1979)

Mailer’s recounting of the Gary Gilmore case, a man famous killing for demanding the death penalty during his murder trial, reveals a dark struggle between the individual and the state. Mixed with the media’s hunger for his plea, the narrative becomes a creative blend of fact and fiction (as Haley would say, “faction”) making it a stimulating critique of the American system of government and punishment.

6. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

Published posthumously, A Confederacy of Dunces is a comedic novel that takes place in 1950s, New Orleans. It follows Ignatius J. Reilly who has a master’s degree in medieval studies, no job and who lives with his mother. Like the Rabbit series and Ragtime, Toole has a collection of seemingly random stories that seduce the reader as he or she tries to tie narrations together before Toole reveals their connect at the end of the novel.

7. Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby (2002)

Using a subversive narrative style that alters the traditional linear narrative, Lullaby tells the horror-satire of Mr. Streator and how he discovers an African lullaby’s ‘lethal capabilities’ in his studies. His discovery leads him on a quest to find and destroy each copy of the book that contains the deadly song.

8. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

“All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me.” 

Walker’s novel tells the story of a young black woman in America, through a series of entries that span through 20 years of her life. Dealing with abuse, rape, racism, sisterhood, feminism and hatred, The Color Purple embodies a journey violence, beauty and self-acceptance.

9. William Kennedy, Ironweed (1983) 

Like Walker’s The Color Purple, Kennedy’s Ironweed is a novel about survival. Francis Phelan has experienced a tremendous amount of bad luck and has made poor decisions (including accidentally killing his infant son). Ironweed follows Francis and his internal struggle of coming to terms with the difficulties of his past.

10. Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

DeLillo’s protagonist, Jack Gladney, is the Chair of Hitler Studies at an expensive college. Ironically, he fails to recognize the totalitarian nature of his society—brand name consumerism and the white noise of the technology that consumes American citizens.As a result, White Noise is a satire that examines proto-fascist, paranoid urges of modern American culture.

11. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)

 

Rich with metaphors and symbolism, Blood Meridian, in its violent depiction of the Old West, American culture. The text follows “the kid” and his experiences with the Glanton gang, a group of hunters who murdered Native Americans for pleasure and later, out of obsession. McCarthy graphically enhances Old West stereotypes, subverting traditional conventions of the Western novel.

12. T.C. Boyle, World’s End (1987)

 

Another satirical, historical fiction, Boyle’s novel follows the generations of families, from the late seventeenth century to the late 1960s, specifically the van Warts, Mohonks and the van Brunts. Flipping back and forth through time, using varied prose, low humour and even fantastical images, Boyle weaves together the destinies of these three very different families.

13. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

 

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”

Dedicated to the 60 million African American lives that were lost to slavery, Morrison’s novel examines the life of Sethe and her daughter, Denver, after they escaped slavery. After Sethe attempts and fails to kill her four children before a posse tries to capture them back into slavery, the daughter she successfully killed, Beloved, physically manifests herself in her new home as a free woman. Through the concept of “rememory,” Morrison reveals the importance of giving voice to the unspeakable violence that surrounded the experience of the slave, specifically those who were forgotten after death.

14. David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

 

Philosophically rich in its use of Wittgenstein and Derridian discourse, Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, focuses on Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, a telephone operator who questions her existence, specifically, her reality. At the center of her anxiety is the notion that words, symbols, texts and so forth compose identity, rather than innate individuality. As such, the story is told through therapy sessions, television recordings and even a fictional account by another character in the novel, making it another subversive narrative in the American literary canon. A more accessible work to those intimidated by his gorilla-sizedInfinite Jest.

15. Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (1994)

 

O’Brien’s protagonist, John Wade, failed in his campaign for Senate. When he moves to Lake of the Woods, Minnesota, he realizes his wife, Kathy, is missing. Through a series of flashbacks and character statements, the novel offers a ‘court-like’ approach to the mystery surrounding her absence. In this way, the novel self-reflexively turns the reader into the ‘judge’ who must produce a final verdict.

16. Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (1997)

 

Cold Mountain tells the story of W. P. Inman, a Confederate soldier who was severely wounded during the Civil War. Desiring to return to Ada Monroe, the woman he is in love wife, he dangerously embarks on a journey to return home on foot (reminiscent of Homer’s The Odyssey and elements of Dante’s Inferno). With the narrative altering between the perspectives of Inman and Monroe, Frazier reveals his historical tale to be one of love, survival and transformation.

17. Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)

 

“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.”

Seymour Levov, a successful businessman, experiences major conflict during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, specifically through the events during and following the Vietnam War. Told through the narrative of Nathan Zuckerman, the reader learns of Levov’s tragic life, the most significant moment being when his daughter, Merry, protests force her to go into hiding after killing a bystander. By telling Levov’s story through a series of newspaper clippings, as well as Zuckerman’s encounters and interpretations, this narrative—like many of the others listed—subverts the traditional novel.

18. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998)

 

Set in 1959, an evangelical Baptist, Nathan Price, takes his family with him on his mission to the Belgian Congo, right at the heart of their fight for independence from Belgium. Narrated by Price’s wife and daughters, Kingsolver’s novel engages in a discussion of the Congo’s history and the unwillingness of other nations, including the United States, to allow the Congo’s to preserve their own culture as a nation. In this way, Kingsolver offers a critique of the destructive post-colonial ideals that are permeated within American (and European) politics.

19. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

 

Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay are two Jewish cousins who become major figures in comics before and during World War II. With the backdrop of the Holocaust, Kavalier and Clay’s hero, “The Escapist” parallels Joe’s escape from Germany. Chabon’s novel combines elements of history, romance, adventure and escape making it a modern American epic or ‘heroic tale’ of its own.

20. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001)

 

Franzen’s The Corrections is a satirical drama that focuses on the dysfunctional Lambert family. Each member has their own flaws and struggles. The father, Alfred, has Parkinson’s disease. As for the fully grown Lambert children: Gary may be depressed, Chip has lost his job, Denise may be having an affair with a married man. Despite all these complications, Enid Lambert is determined to have all her children home for Christmas. Differing from the post-modernist theme that runs through many contemporary works, Franzen’s novel delves into literary realism, making the novel more of a celebration rather than a criticism, of the ‘typically dysfunctional’ American family.

21. Richard Russo, Empire Falls (2001)

 

After 20 years, Miles Roby is still working at the Empire Grill diner. In all that time, he’s dropped college to care for his dying mother, has gotten married and divorced, looks after his alcoholic father and his disabled brother, and dotes on his daughter. Failing to follow his own dreams, Roby has spent his life caring for other people. Despite the encompassing theme of disillusionment, Russo manages offer small moments of consolation through ideas of community and family.

22. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

 

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

Tracing the incestuous and social roots of the Stephanides family all the way back to the 1920s, Middlesex tells the story of a hermaphrodite. Born as Calliope but realizing she embodied more male characteristics, she changes her identity to a “he”—Cal. Eugenides’ incorporation of history and genetics explains the how behind Cal’s struggles. In Eugenides elaborate telling of each generation, his account sets itself up as a modern epic, arguably making it the ‘founding’ novel for intersex narrations.

23. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2002)

 

As the protagonist-author, Jonathan Safran Foer is looking for the woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. With the help of Alex, a young Ukrainian translator, the two of them go on a journey together. Narrated in fragments and letters by both Jonathan and Alex,Everything is Illuminated is self-reflexive in its use of inter-narrative commentary, it jumps through time and offers many moments of confusion. But, in its fragmentation, it captures moments of friendship, grief, humour and regret, offering a unique perspective of the Holocaust.

24. Dave Eggers, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006)

 

What Is the What is based on the real life of Valentino Achak Den, one of the ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’ (a referral to the thousands of children who were displaced during the Sudanese civil war of 1983-2005). At the age of seven, Valentino became one of these ‘Lost Boys’ and traveled on foot amid the dangerous war and politics—including the militias who pursued these orphaned children for military purposes. As a work of “faction,” this novel gives voice to one of the ‘Lost Boys’, in this case, one who managed to escape and resettle in the United States.

25. Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006)

 

Set between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and period just after World War I, Against the Day examines the labour struggles of the major cities of the world. He places the reader into the sidelines of one of the major turnovers in history, making the novel more of a temporal ‘glance’ at a moment in time rather than the traditional linear, plot found within most of the literary canon. In this way, his novel employs elements of Joyce’sUlysses in its global ‘stream of consciousness narrative’ while also providing moments of hope through rich, multi-dimensional characters.

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