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In its May 21 issue, The New York Times Book Review published the results of a survey initiated earlier this year, when "the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years,'" as A. O. Scott explains in his essay.

Of the aforementioned sages, 124 responded, and their names are listed along with the results. Fifteen of them chose Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, which was enough to win. The runners-up were Don DeLillo's Underworld (11 votes), John Updike's four-novel Rabbit Angstrom sequence (8 votes), Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (also 8 votes), and Philip Roth's American Pastoral (7 votes). Five additional Roth novels, two more by DeLillo, and McCarthy's Border Trilogy were among the other 17 works that received "multiple votes" (evidently meaning more than 1 but less than 7).

Some literary types look askance at such projects, but I like them. Hats off to Sam Tanenhaus for the idea, inspired by a similar survey conducted by the literary supplement of the New York Herald Tribune in 1965. (The span in that case was the postwar era; the winner was Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.) The results—well, that's a different matter, but part of the point is to generate good arguments. I've never been a Toni Morrison fan, but I know a number of highly intelligent readers who strongly disagree. To me she epitomizes the air of middlebrow High Seriousness that apparently weighed heavily in the judging. And while Philip Roth is a superb writer, the overrepresentation of his books on the list tells us more about the culture of the judges than about the relative merits of, say, Operation Shylock (a mediocre Roth outing, I thought) and Charles Portis' Gringos (a wonderful novel that is nowhere mentioned in the survey).

Since the results were posted on the web a couple of weeks before the issue appeared, I had time to conduct a little informal survey of my own. In most cases, there was a very clear correlation between the opinion of a given "judge" and his or her ideological bent. A Catholic friend, for example, disappointed me by choosing Walker Percy's 1987 novel The Thanatos Syndrome. I love Walker Percy, but this book, while certainly worth reading, is a hit-and-miss affair. Some of my "judges," on the other hand, were unafraid to choose books categorized as "mystery" or "science fiction," entirely missing from the NYTBR results.

And of course it is easier to carp at a given choice—to roll one's eyes at the apotheosis of Morrison and the clout of the Roth Lobby—than it is not only to name but also to justify one's own. Nominations, anyone?

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

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Books & Culture Corner and Books & Culture's Book of the Week, from Christianity Today sister publication Books & Culture: A Christian Review (want a free trial issue?), appears regularly on Tuesdays at Christianity Today. Earlier editions include:

Back to the Garden | Digging in the dirt as spiritual formation. (May 16, 2006)

Words Made Flesh | Calvin College's 2006 Festival of Faith & Writing. (April 25, 2006)

Betrayed Again | The Gospel of Judas Roadshow. (April 18, 2006)

American Theocrat | Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic political ambitions, and the evangelical pawns. (April 11, 2006)

Was George Washington a Christian? | A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. (April 4, 2006)

The Mystery of the Numbers | B&C's annual baseball preview, 2006 edition. (March 21, 2006)

Passionately Ambivalent | Christians in the art world. (Feb. 14, 2006)

Worship—What We've Learned | A report from the Calvin Symposium. (Jan. 31, 2006)

Making—and Breaking—Vows | A compelling memoir from the son of a priest and a former nun. (Jan. 17, 2006)

Coming to a Bookstore Near You | Marsden and Hart, Noll and Stout, and more (Jan. 10, 2006)

Ring Out the Old Year | Some highly subjective awards for 2005. (Jan. 4, 2006)

Not Just Looking | Books for the eye. (Dec. 27, 2005)

For book lovers, our 2005 CT book awards are available online, along with our book awards for 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, and 1997, as well as our Books of the Twentieth Century. For other coverage or reviews, see our Books archive and the weekly Books & Culture Corner.

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