All literature is local
A FEW WEEKS ago, I spent an afternoon in Boston with Robert Birnbaum, who conducts interviews for identitytheory.com, and an evening with Tim Huggins, who owns Newtonville Books just outside the city. We had a great time talking about novels and writers because we are all three in love with regionalists.
Huggins was born in Mississippi and holds a fierce love for books from the South -- books by Larry Brown, whose world was Mississippi, and Tim Gautreaux of Louisiana. We talked about Lois-Ann Yamanaka, whose subject is Hawaii, and about Dorothy Allison's South Carolina, and Carolyn Chute's Maine and A. Manette Ansay's Wisconsin. And my postage stamp of soil -- Southern California, particularly Riverside.
We also talked about two of my favorite books: Leslie Marmon Silko's amazing novel of New Mexico, "Ceremony," in which the austere, lovely landscape of desert and plateau is forever altered for Native American soldiers returned from the Philippines after World War II, and Toni Morrison's "Sula," an iconic gem about a small black community outside fictional Medallion, Ohio, in which two women discover that the world lies within their friendship for each other.
That Sunday, I got home and read the New York Times Book Review, which published a compendium of results from a question sent out in a letter to 200 writers and critics: What is the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years? Not a favorite Top 10. Just one book.
I studied the results, and like everyone else, I did the math. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" won with 15 votes. Runners-up were Don DeLillo's "Underworld" (11 votes), John Updike's "Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels" (eight votes) tied with Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" and Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" (seven votes).
What was much argued was not just this short list but the titles that followed, the 17 books that received "multiple votes." Five more Roth titles, two more DeLillos and a trilogy by McCarthy. Only nine books not by these authors made it onto the list at all.
It was all very amusing and fun to read. But at the end of the process -- after I read the heated online discussions and talked about it with other writers -- I believe exactly what I believed that day in Boston: There is no Great American Novel. There is no one book that can sum us up. There are only brilliant regional versions of what we are.
I love the regionalists.
