but sometimes the canon thing makes me twitch

It never bugs me because I always see it as fluid. A kind of cultural conversation rather than a definitive list. There's no definitive list, but the exercise forces people to think about what they value and why. Who cares what the ranking is? But I love to hear the cases being made and disputed.

Speaking of Zadie Smith, she has an interesting piece on Kafka here.

I'm mulling over her claim here:

All novelists who are worth anything at all resist a version of life as it has been presented to them. What Flaubert meant by bourgeois life is not what his age meant by bourgeois life, and what Austen meant by the word "woman" was subtly at odds with the usage of that word in her time.

Slacker idealogue raging impotently against the State of Affairs while enduring a surreal job search doesn't appeal to me that much

It's not so much about the plot as the tone and the characters and the place.

I'll go out on a limb and suggest that you might really enjoy Marilynne Robinson's books. She has a lovely way with language and a stateliness that indicates (to me, natch) that her books will last.

Thanks Corwood.

The list has got me thinking, too, about the modern writers of non-genre fiction that I DO like, who don't really make any of these lists, and what they are considered-- John Irving, Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Hoffman and Tom Robbins. I also like Toni Morrison. Perhaps it is a class thing-- I don't know.

The list has got me thinking, too, about the modern writers of non-genre fiction that I DO like, who don't really make any of these lists, and what they are considered-- John Irving, Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Hoffman and Tom Robbins. I also like Toni Morrison. Perhaps it is a class thing-- I don't know.

I noticed that Irving wasn't anywhere on the list, and I'm wondering if he's lost critical cachet by being too popular/readable/something?

Alice Hoffman is also an interesting case to me. There's always been some critical resistance to her, and I do think it's because she floats in her own space that's sorta genre and plot driven and sorta literary. I do enjoy her books, though.

Alice Walker and Tom Robbins get no literary respect for differing reasons. Alice is seen as too woo woo and stridently dogmatic. Robbins is seen as sub-Pynchon for pot-heads.

You say that like it's a bad thing! I know...you don't. They do.

Robbins is seen as sub-Pynchon for pot-heads

which is funny to me because Pychon is also on my "don't like" list. Although I do tend to get him mixed up with Thomas Tryon, who wrote this really creepy book called "The Other"

Alice Hoffman strikes me as a more accessible Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Which I know is weird, but that is who her writing reminds me of.

I can't say enough good things about John Irving, and can't pinpoint why his work touches me while the others don't.

I don't read all that much in contemporary fiction, just because, when I'm behind, I prefer to work forward in order. Also, I do enjoy the orderliness of 19th C novels, how they set up pins and knock them down. I'll go for experiment in shorter forms, but if I'm going to sit down for a novel I prefer it to have a plan firmly in place.

The only Roth I've read (I know, I know) was his recent The Plot Against America, which I disliked immensely. It might have been a mistake, approaching the book with my genre-goggles on, because alternate universes do kind of have relatively serious generic rules which Roth blew right past. Then again, I think some of those rules exist for a good reason, like Don't create an alternate universe and then get to the end and say "I was just kidding" and more general rules like Don't spend pages and pages on a day and then summarize a year in four pages of newspaper extracts. It seemed like an interesting setup, and I could read the text as an indictment of modern politics -- for about the frist 100 pages. And even the second 100 pages, I tried to read as a family drama of watching your parents turn out to be just as scared and clueless as everybody else. And then I got to the end and was like, Oh honey, please figure out what your point is, and then get back to me.

I think it worked better as general fiction rather than genre-goggled alternate unvierse fiction, but, even as general fiction it didn't work well for me. (And it's very irritating, to see an SF tool used in such a non-SF way, with no knowledge of or interaction with the history of that tool's use. Like meeting a whole tribe somewhere that uses shoes only as hammers, and never wears the shoes.)

It's not so much about the plot as the tone and the characters and the place.

This is a phrase that will never win me over, I fear. There's only so much that clever wording can do to hide a great gaping lack of anything happening. It's very difficult for me to get into certain types of writing, because the writers don't give a shit about anything happening in their fiction, and it is very hard to get past the lack of anything happening. Things happening is pretty much how I understand the concept of fiction.

This may be why I tend to prefer 19th C novels and modern genre writing, because things happen a lot in both of those areas.

Libra

I've read the first chapter many times. I finally donated it when I realized I'd never, ever get past that first chapter.

There's only so much that clever wording can do to hide a great gaping lack of anything happening.

Nutty is me.

I am basically Nutty [edit: heh, and Ginger] when it comes to needing some plot in my fiction, although fascinating characters/relationships will also win me over. Although I think I'm more likely to appreciate movies that are all about interesting characters and no plot, rather than books, maybe because I can watch a movie all in one sitting, whereas with a book, I put it down and pick it up many times over the course of reading it, and I generally have to want to know "what happens next?" in order to pick it up again.