[lbo-talk] Contemporary authors

Jeet Heer jeet at sturdynet.com
Tue Aug 26 14:17:26 PDT 2003


From: Luke Weiger


> Read _American Pastoral_ last week. Does anyone else out there measure up
> to Roth?

As a novelist Roth is hard to beat. The string of books he's written since Sabbath's Theatre -- including especially American Pastoral and The Human Stain -- seem unmatched in contemporary fiction for their sheer scope and ferocious emotional intensity. However, if we broaden out contemporary literature from just the novel their are a few writers who might be better: I'm thinking of Alice Munro, whose short stories always seem perfect; or John Updike, who tends to range farther than Roth, writing not just novels but also a lot of good literary and artistic criticism. The question, I think, is how central is the novel....



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