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Published: Jun 11, 2006 12:00 AM

Modified: Jun 11, 2006 06:05 AM

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Books on the Tar Heel mind

32 writers of our region weigh best fiction of the past 25 years

J. Peder Zane, Staff Writer Comment on this story

What you hear depends on whom you ask. That was my first thought as I scanned a New York Times Book Review survey that asked 125 writers and critics to name the most distinguished work of fiction produced by an American in the past 25 years. On first glance it seemed that 75 percent of the judges lived within 75 miles of the island of Manhattan. Despite our state's rich literary output, the Times queried only two North Carolina residents: Allan Gurganus and Tony Early (former Raleigh resident Anne Tyler was also asked but she, alas, has long belonged to Baltimore).

It wasn't surprising that urban writers from the Northeast such as Philip Roth and Don DeLillo dominated the poll, which crowned "Beloved," Toni Morrison's 1987 masterpiece, queen of contemporary literature.

If the Times was guilty of parochialism, I figured we could do it one better by posing the same question to Tar Heel writers only.

The responses from 32 writers produced a list far different from the Times', one that suggests that for all the homogenization of American culture, Southern literature, and the Southern sensibility that creates it, is alive and kicking. Roth and DeLillo were barely whispered by our judges, who selected works by authors ignored by the Manhattan survey: Lee Smith, Charles Frazier, Lewis Nordan, Walker Percy, Ernest Gaines and Eudora Welty.

Write what you know, aspiring authors are told. The same might be said about what we read. These selections suggest that the world depicted by the Southern writers -- dominated by rural landscapes, twangy speech patterns, traditional value systems, a palpable sense of history and absence of great wealth -- resonate most strongly with North Carolina writers.

"If I lived in New York and were to write it, I would see vast differences between Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island," poet Fred Chappell said when I asked him about regional differences. "If you live in Raleigh and then head out to Climax, N.C., there are vast differences that it doesn't take a Henry James to detect. Most people are not looking for these differences which the writer is alert to and which television -- because it tries to reach a national audience -- ignores. As long as people are writing, they will write about their place, which will always have its own distinct feel and sensibility."

Of course, great literature transcends time and place, and there was overlap between The N&O and Times surveys: "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, Morrison's "Beloved," John Updike's "Rabbit" novels and "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson made both lists. And the winner of our poll, "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy, was also a favorite of the Times' judges.

I use the term "winner" loosely. The clear message of the N&O and Times polls is this: Greatness abounds. Our 32 respondents selected 25 separate titles. Perhaps there is no Great American Novel because there are hundreds of them.

Despite this happy conclusion, the Times survey aroused a squall of controversy in the weeks since its May 21 publication.

"I've always disliked the Greatness Sweepstake view of literature," critic Laura Miller wrote on the blog of the National Book Critics Circle. "Every conversation I've ever witnessed about which works or writers are 'truly great' has smacked of philistinism and the sad, threadbare pomposity of a Joseph Roth character reminiscing about the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

Those are beautiful sentences with which I couldn't disagree more strongly. Time is the only critic that matters. The newspapers' surveys provide only a snapshot of ever-changing opinion. The books we celebrate today may or may not measure up as thousands of readers validate greatness by reading or ignoring these works in the decades and centuries hence. A review of works and authors honored by Nobel and Pulitzer prizes in the 20th century reveal the graveyard of long-forgotten tomes. John Phillips Marquand's "The Late George Apley," which won the Pulitzer in 1938, is not a bad book. It just hasn't survived the immense competition for readers' time.

If anything, history's cruel culling underscores the need for Times-like surveys: We should trumpet the books that matter to us before our descendants consign them to the ash heap.

Rather than being an exercise in philistinism, selecting great books urges deep reflection about our values and tastes. Like literature itself, it helps us know ourselves. (Mysteriously, the Times granted anonymity to its judges, never telling who picked what and why. All 32 respondents to the N&O poll went on the record with their picks and reasons for them.)

Finally, lists are worthwhile because people like them. They are fun -- and important. They smarten up our dumbed-down culture, bringing attention to McCarthy, Morrison and other writers. And as we become ever suffocated by information overload, such lists provide signposts to worthwhile books.

After you've perused our survey -- and added some of the titles to your nightstand -- let me know which book you would pick and why. I'll post your selections on my N&O blog.

Book review editor J. Peder Zane can be reached at 829-4773 or at pzane@newsobserver.com. Read his blog at Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.

The contendersThe runners-up

These books received a single vote.

* "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" by Allan Gurganus (1989).

"It has the heft we think of when we think of 'great'; it contains some of the best prose in the English language this side of James Joyce; it addresses damn near all the social ills and goods we as Americans have confronted over the last 140 years, and it's a sheer joy to read." -- Randall Kenan.

* "Plainsong" by Kent Haruf (1999).

"It's a Midwestern, character-driven novel written in the most lyrical of everyday prose. I loved it so much I rationed my reading to make it last long." -- Ruth Moose.

* "Fair and Tender Ladies" by Lee Smith (1988).

"It has everything that matters in a story: heart, humor, passion, depth, wisdom and an unforgettable voice. I've read it several times and that last line still makes me bawl like a baby. 'Oh I was young then, and I walked in my body like a Queen.' "-- Pamela Duncan.

* "The Accidental Tourist" by Anne Tyler (1985).

"It is, simply put, the perfect novel. I don't think a book has to cover everything about society and the world to make a statement: It can just do one thing -- in this case grief and recovery, and the forms both can take -- very well. Tyler often gets overlooked because she does write about marriages and families and children, but to think she is only covering these topics is to miss the point. The family is representative of the world at large and its influence, and you see that relationship, again and again, her her amazing novels." Sarah Dessen.

* Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" (1980).

"A work like no other and a certain candidate for the future. My second choice: Philip Roth's 'The Counterlife' " (1986). Allan Gurganus

* "All the Pretty Horses" by Cormac McCarthy (1992).

"You see McCarthy doing what only the greatest novelists have done: create a world out of his own language. I don't just mean capturing a real place accurately but like Faulkner, Hemingway, Tolstoy, and Melville inventing a new way to talk about those matters which are crucial to human experience -- love, friendship, longing, loss, steadfastness, villainy, heroism. And the technique serves to deepen the emotional experience of the story." -- Philip Gerard.

* "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman (2001).

"When people came to the New World, they brought their gods with them -- Odin and Osirus and the African deities, and then they abandoned them as new beliefs crowded in, but the immigrant gods are still here. This story of the amalgamation of American belief sets Armageddon on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga. The novel is a cross between Joseph Campbell's ruminations on myth and an H. Rider Haggard adventure -- with maybe a little Monty Python thrown in. All the cool people that I actually like read Neil Gaiman." -- Sharyn McCrumb (who notes that Gaiman was born in Britain but lives in Minnesota).

* "Escapes" by Joy Williams (1990).

In this short story collection, Williams "consistently manages bleak hilarity and quiet devastation. ... Entropy and death are usually lurking in the margins if not front and center, but somehow I'm never depressed by her stories; the rigor of her writing and the characters it illuminates are just too buoying." -- June Spence.

* "Freedomland" by Richard Price (1998).

"How many writers could convincingly write from the points of view of a black detective, a white racist cop, an ex-junkie single mother, a stringer for a small town newspaper, a teenage hood, a middle-age suburban woman who founded an organization to find lost children, etc. -- and all in one novel? ... I can't think of any novel I've read that covers so much territory, depicts so many different characters with such depth and sympathy, and unveils the diverse machinations of a community in upheaval so completely." -- Richard Krawiec.

* "Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, and Memoir" (1998).

"Measured by my desire to reread, Welty's stories reign. ... I knew the stories in high school, and had the scary thrill of eating lunch with their sharp-witted author at college. And all these years later, I still want to go hunting for a drowned bride with William Wallace and to sit on a stile in the rain with Virgie Rainey, listening to the magical beat of the world." -- Marly Youmans.

* "Wolf Whistle" by Lewis Nordan (1993).

This fictional account of the Emmet Till murder "distinguishes itself both in subject matter -- an unflinching and unsettling investigation of the roots of American racism -- and in its technique, which manages to experiment with style, structure and form without indulgence or pretentiousness. It should be required reading for anyone interested in American literature, history or culture." -- Michael Parker.

* "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (1989) by John Irving.

"I have read and reread this novel, and continue to find it remarkably funny and remarkably moving, which is an extraordinary combination. 'Owen Meany' still haunts my dreams and my conscience. One of the great endings in modern fiction." -- Tony Abbott.

* "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien (1990).

"The most unforgettable work of fiction published in the last 25 years. That book changed the way we think about war, and about writing about war, about cultures that go to war. O'Brien follows Tolstoy, Hemingway, Jones and in that book he is their equal." -- Robert Morgan.

* "Beloved" by Toni Morrison (1987).

"I bought Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' the day it was released; took it home and read the whole thing in one sitting. That night I told a friend that it would win the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and would eventually guarantee her a Nobel Prize -- and for one simple reason: I know of no other novel published in the 20th century that carries that moral weight. ... 'Beloved' is the single most moral novel ever written, while remaining a work of unsurpassed beauty." -- Haven Kimmel.

* "The Crimson Petal and the White" by Michel Faber (2002).

"He writes for keeps. Beside this work, so much other [fiction] is soaked in easy sentiment and cliche." -- Kaye Gibbons

* "More Die of Heartbreak" by Saul Bellow (1987).

"If you ask me which book, published by American writers since 1980, I have reread the most times, it would be Saul Bellow's 'More Die of Heartbreak.' " -- Gail Godwin.

* "The Second Coming" by Walker Percy (1983).

"My vote is for almost anything by Walker Percy, especially 'The Second Coming.' ... He's my literary hero. -- Lawrence Naumoff

* "The Chin Kiss King" by Ana Veciana-Suarez (1997).

The novel "is about three generations of Cuban women, living in America, coping with the birth of a defective child. It's a beautiful, powerful, even magical tribute to the small and ordinary people among us, newcomers, some of them, their resilience, hope and bravery. 'The Chin Kiss King' will break your heart and put it back together again. Can Roth or DeLillo do that?" -- Marianne Gingher.

* "A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines (1997).

"It is tempting to go for the Big Novel which attempts to 'get' this part of our national experience (say, [Philip Roth's] 'American Pastoral.') But instead I'm picking 'A Lesson Before Dying' -- which, to my mind, is a perfect novel as well as an important statement about race, compassion, and what it means to be human." -- Lee Smith

* "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver (1983).

"Carver resurrected the short story, and the ones in this book -- echoing Chekhov and Cheever -- are as full of life as anything I've read in the last 25 years or so." -- Daniel Wallace.

These three novels received two votes each.

* "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier (1997).

Fred Chappell honors Frazier's National Book Award-winning novel of love and violence set in North Carolina during the Civil War for its "immersive prose, beautiful landscape, perceptive psychology and unerring knowledge of the rural." Tom Wicker says he would have chosen this "splendid" novel even if it hadn't been created by a Southern writer.

* "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson (2004).

Reynolds Price and Isabel Zuber chose Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel, in which an aged Iowa minister records his life and family history for his young son. Zuber says "Gilead" made her list of perfect books, "those that while they may not necessarily be the greatest or most profound are ones in which you would not change a single word."

The Rabbit Quartet -- "Rabbit, Run" (1960), "Rabbit Redux" (1971), "Rabbit Is Rich" (1981), "Rabbit at Rest" (1990)] -- by John Updike. Jill McCorkle and Peggy Payne recommend this series of novels, which use exquisite prose and pitch-perfect detail to chronicle the hope and frustrations of post-war America through the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. "Updike created such an amazing time capsule of our society within the span of those four novels," McCorkle notes.

Books on the Tar Heel mind

32 writers of our region weigh best fiction of the past 25 years

The winner

A final tossup

The contendersThe runners-up

Results of the New York Times Book Review survey:

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