May 27, 2006

The Best in Mass-Market Novels

This post from Drezner is almost a week old, but I figured I'd link to it in case you were interested in taking a stroll through the comments thread before picking out some summer beach reading. The question is what's the best mass-market paperback of the last 25 years. The commenters make a lot of suggestions that I think are quite worthy: Ender's Game, Foucault's Pendulum, Snow Crash, The Stand - though out of those listed repeatedly I'd likely pick Neuromancer. Though in terms of the best book in the entire post, I'd likely go for the first book Drezner lists among those that have grabbed him in the last several years, Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. That's one of my all-time favorites.

Any additions to the mass-market list you'd propose?

Posted by armand at May 27, 2006 07:09 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Books


Comments

i'm going to limit my answer by imbuing the category with the requirement of accessibility. that the occasional literary novel becomes popular enough to be issued in mass market paperback doesn't, in itself, qualify anything. rushdie's on the borderline, nonetheless, and there's not a book of his i wouldn't recommend under the right circumstances (my fave remains the critically reviled (at least be some) The Ground Beneath Her Feet), but eco just doesn't qualify even though Foucault's Pendulum did come out in MMPB at some point.

first, to echo some who posted at drezner, It, The Stand (i agree that it's gotta be the original, "non-bloated" version, but I think that takes it out of the last 25 years); Clancy's Red Storm Rising and perhaps others; Grisham's A Time To Kill; Coonts' Flight of the Intruder, and I'd add:

* King's The Shining, Different Seasons (four novellas from which we got the movies Stand By Me, Shawshank Redemption, and Apt Pupil),
* King and Peter Straub's The Talisman
* Straub's Julia
* Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast (which works as a literary novel as well, but definitely qualifies as a true crossover, something that's to some extent true of all his early novels, including the underrated and -remarked O-Zone, his foray into dystopian scifi / futurism)
* Several of Nelson DeMille's books including, at a minimum, Cathedral, Gold Coast, [Word or Debt, can't remember] of Honor, and Charm School
* Donaldson's entire (two-trilogy) Thomas Covenant series, some of which might post-date 1981, and which is the only thing that fits the "fantasy" mold that I've ever been able to get through

and i could go on, but it's sunday morning and i should leave my bedroom. :-)
*

Posted by: moon at May 28, 2006 11:28 AM | PERMALINK

You're starting to make me wonder why King isn't more highly respected - b/c for what they are The Stand and The Shinig are very, very good, and of course he's written other good stuff too. Is it just that he's so prolific he's written loads of pointless crap too? I suppose that's it - b/c he has, sadly.

And I'm very sad that we live in a world in which Foucault's Pendulum isn't accessible and The Da Vinci Code is. The Eco book is so much fun and so brilliantly put together.

The other things that've come to my mind since I posted this are Chabon's Wonder Boys (but then I'm a big Chabon fan) and some of Tom Robbins' books (I'm particularly partial to Still Life With Woodpecker, but several of his works are very good, and I'd think some would qualify for this list).

Posted by: Armand at May 28, 2006 02:51 PM | PERMALINK

funny, what i omitted to take up in my first comments was my thoughts regarding the new york times top 25 of the last 25, as well as some of the thoughts expressed and excerpted about same in the drezner post.

first, i think the NYT list is a bunch of tripe. if you were reading that without background knowledge, you'd think was roth was our dickens, and that's ridiculous. is he brilliant? absolutely. is he one of the most prolific brilliant authors ever? absolutely. does he deserve to fill out 20% or so of the list? absolutely not. a couple of his books are notable -- by all accounts, Goodbye Columbus, though I haven't read it; Portnoy's Complaint; Operation Shylock; The Great American Novel -- but it's silly that so many of them were listed. as for delillo and updike, could we not follow the rules and pick one novel, instead of giving credit for trilogies-plus as though they were single novels (McCarthy and Updike; oddly, they didn't treat Roth's Zuckerman novels, of which American Pastoral is a belated member, as such).

where's Oates? Powers? D.F. Wallace?

as for Chabon, i suppose you and i part ways, and this brings me into the debate, raised at Drezner, regarding long versus short novels. i have great respect for Chabon, but he tries too hard in my opinion, or at least he tries too hard with his longer novels. i liked Cavalier and Klay, it's true, but i hardly thought it magnificent or even necessarily excellent. he is, in my view, the best exemplum of what the proliferation of MFA-style approaches to writing education have given us: well-researched, ambitious, and ultimately paint-by-numbers novels, fascinating but ultimately hollow, contrived.

part of why i so adore Powers -- i wept for a solid five minutes at the end of Time of Our Singing, which is not exactly normal for me -- is that he does all of that with the seamlessness one finds in older fiction, fiction that obeys only its own rules and no one's else.

chabon, to me, still has the tone he had in the beginning, is still the safe, tame precocious kid who published a very skillful first novel at an uncommonly young age -- he still writes as though he's trying to persuade someone that he's a great novelist. he's still young, and i haven't read all of his recent stuff, so perhaps he'll grow on me as he mellows into his prominent role in American letters.

returning to the substance of your comment, i think King is grossly underrated just as Springsteen is as a poet of the commoner. it's true, familiarity breeds contempt, and i think that explains the tepid reception each gets, and of course it's entirely clear that King has lost some of his edge and inventiveness as he's grown. he hasn't expanded his horizons, and what was new when he did it in the seventies is now all too common both from his own substantial body of work and that of his many imitators. but i think his first ten novels or so pretty much all were brilliant in their way, and to those enumerated above i'd be comfortable adding Salem's Lot, Christine, The Gunslinger (Dark Tower 1), Pet Semetary, Cujo, and Firestarter. they're all excellent in their ways.

Posted by: moon at May 28, 2006 03:43 PM | PERMALINK

Ah when I was a teenager (or younger?) I loved Christine. Seriously creepy. But much more too.

I think you are largely on target with Chabon - it's remarkable the degree to which he hasn't changed. But he's - what's the right way to put it - well, become much more ambitious and honed his craft (both). And yet - well while Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys were both, in parts, absolutely terrific works, there's always a little something about his work that still seems deeply rooted in what we saw in Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I liked that bookd a lot, but, yeah, I think I get what you mean. That said, I still think Wonder Boys is vastly superior to most mass-market fiction (and of course the movie was good too). And yeah, I'll go with you and say that Powers is a better writer (and know you and I both love his work), but I didn't really think his stuff would qualify for Drezner's list.

As far as the NYTimes list goes - it was kind of inane - McCarthy, Roth and DeLillo are apparently the only American writers alive today. :) Uh, they are very talented, but c'mon. And yeah, sure, I could easily see Infinite Jest making that list in a perfect world. But at the same time I tend to think of Wallace's real strength being his remarkable short stories.

And I guess I'll close by noting I feel kind of bad for people like Auster, Atwood and Murakami - writers who've written SEVERAl truly remarkable pieces, none of which would seem to qualify for these lists (maybe The Blind Assassin on Drezner's list?).

Posted by: Armand at May 29, 2006 01:44 AM | PERMALINK

i think the way i view the list is that it didn't go for "best" so much as "most important." understood that way, the prevalence of a few stalwarts makes some sense. and while i haven't read any of updike's rabbit books, there's a reason: everything else i've read, excepting "seek my face" (which i adored), has been off-putting for whatever reason. i'm just not an updike fan.

anyway, i think the best / important distinction is important to preserve, and that the authors whose votes were solicited failed to do so.

Posted by: moon at May 29, 2006 02:32 PM | PERMALINK

I'd have to agree with the two of you (strangely enough) regarding King, and go so far as to add a few more: The Drawing of the Three, The Dark Half, and The Mist (a 100+ page offering out of Skeleton Crew). I'd definitely give the nod to Flight of the Intruder as well, Without Remorse for Clancy, as well as Blood and Gold by Anne Rice.

Posted by: Morris at May 29, 2006 10:58 PM | PERMALINK

Blood and Gold? What's that one about? Of her books my favorites (from a "best" point of view)are The Vampire Lestat (for light beach fare) and The Witching Hour (for grander fare and the construction of a whole world). But, well, neither one is something I deeply admire.

Posted by: Armand at May 30, 2006 10:07 AM | PERMALINK

yeah, i don't know Blood and Gold, but i was a devotee of the first six or eight lestat books, and those certainly qualify. indeed, i'm sort of surprised i didn't think of those already.

also, add to that turow, just generally. good stuff. and just fyi, for anyone who still does the beach reading thing, if you aren't famiiliar with Demille, he stands up even now. i occasionally buy one of his new ones hoping it'll be like his first six or eight, and it never is, but even so it's a credit to him that i keep trying / hoping.

morris, i can't agree with you about dark half, but drawing of the three was on the cusp when i was enumerating books, and skeleton crew -- all of it -- is splendid. not as good as night shift, but damned close.

there's a road here, allegheny river boulevard, that leaves the city heading northeast along the allegheny. it's a nice road to cycle on, and it's often part of our rides, but for the pervasive roadkill and the persistent smell of decay. sometimes, following the hand signal of the person in front of me, i'll dart left to avoid some little corpse or another, and i'll have only a second to identify whatever it is i've just missed. i always think of "Mrs. ????'s Short Cut," a great story from Skeleton Crew for anyone who's always looking for a quicker way from here to there.

Posted by: moon at May 30, 2006 10:16 AM | PERMALINK

Blood and Gold was Marius' story, and it had a lot of Pandora in it as well, and his turning of Armand. It was about Marius' devotion to and protection of the Queen while she was asleep.

Posted by: Morris at May 30, 2006 08:24 PM | PERMALINK
Post a comment









Remember personal info?