I have always disliked this question. I find it impossible to pick and choose between everything I have read in my lifetime in order to reduce all of my literary joys, disappointments, frustrations, and amazements to ONE best-liked read. It just can’t be done. But this is my opinion, which is apparently not shared by the New York Times who dared ask several prominent authors, editors and literary critics to select “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”
The contest caught my eye, not because of the difficultly of it’s charge (which Times critic A.O. Scott details in a long essay about the contest), but because of the winner. Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987), took first place. I was immediately pleased to see that a woman of color made it into the top 5 with all the other middle-aged white men, and intrigued because I happen to be reading Beloved right now in preparation for our forthcoming Kara Walker exhibition.
I don’t know why I avoided this novel, or this author, for so long. (This is the first Morrison book I’ve read.) But now that I am deep into the middle of it, loosing sleep to its slowly unraveling plot and haunting characters on a nightly basis, I can understand how it would make a best-of-something list. As I read and my mind draws images of Sethe, Denver, Beloved and their house in newly post Civil War Cincinatti, Walker’s crisp drawings and black paper cut-outs flitter in my imagination.
I highly recommend the book, and not just because a panel of experts decided that it is better than most other books published in the last quarter century. Until I’ve reached the end, that’s all I’ll say for now.