A Simple Question, Part I

"You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That finally, the door opens... and it opens outward - we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch." - David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed"

Not too long ago, Brett and I were discussing The Pale King and he mentioned how strange it felt to him to not have an easy answer to the question, 'Who is your favorite living author?' This of course set off my listmaking instinct, and I've compiled some candidates for the title of My Favorite Living Author.

Somewhat arbitrarily, I have restricted the list to American authors. Really, though, my favorite author would be American no matter what. I am American. I like to think that I am interested enough in the rest of the world to care about international events and incidents and the authors who chronicle these changes, whether in fiction or no, but as much admiration as I have for Naipaul, Walcott, Coetzee, Heaney, Saramago, I admit that their emotional impact is muted for me because I don't share their cultural sensibility and therefore lack the shorthand necessary to take an intellectual appreciation and turn it into gut-level excitement at the prospect of another book by one of those authors. It's surprising to me how much of what I enjoy in modern literature is rooted in national identity. Cormac McCarthy writes about the American West in a style that is nearly biblical. He says less about modernity than Naipaul, but because I have been to (some of) those places and understand the cultural myths that he is criticizing or outright destroying, the tangled emotions that he causes me to feel are greater and more immediate, despite Naipaul's seemingly more relevant subject matter.

So here are the candidates, in alphabetical order: Robert Caro, Don DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.

Here's why some of the other heavies of modern American literature aren't on this list: I haven't read enough Neal Stephenson; David Mamet last published something really worth reading and thinking about some 15 years ago; Jhumpa Lahiri is treading water; Jonathan Franzen has talent insufficient to his ambition; Billy Collins writes poetry, which is just about dead as an art form (writes a guy who loves writing poetry); Colson Whitehead has ambition insufficient to his talent; Junot Diaz has only published two books (though both are fantastic); Richard Price kicks a lot of ass but is rarely surprising; I haven't read enough Joan Didion.

What the answer to my simple question will be, I do not know. I suspect that in the writing of my thoughts on their work, the answer will emerge. My basic criteria for deciding on a champion will be those qualities I most loved about David Foster Wallace, as captured in the quote above: language and style, as seen in Wallace's ability to set a simple image and scenario - the door and the frustrated person outside it - and then deliver a mixture of insight, humor and a sort of pathos with just a few sentences, one of which isn't even English; curiosity and breadth of subject matter, as seen in the fact that Wallace is writing not just a paean to Kafka but a rumination on what makes Kafka not only special, but unique, how Kafka's unique sensibility makes him difficult to teach, what the limitations of Wallace's ability to teach Kafka effectively have to say about Wallace, his students and the broader culture, and finally the active moral takeaway from all this ruminating - and all of this in one essay in a collection that includes literary criticism, political commentary, food writing, and a mind-blowingly funny essay/journalistic feature on pornography - and all of this by a writer whose reputation mainly rested on his fiction; and, finally, that intangible connection that our favorite writers are able to establish, where we read their words and feel a moment of recognition, that they have somehow gained access to our thoughts and published them for us, before we realize, with a pang of envy, what a gulf of wit and articulation separates what they wrote from what we like to believe we thought first.