The Most Important Contemporary Fiction Writer (PHOTOS)

I asked these major fiction writers who they thought was the most important contemporary fiction writer, and what had been his/her influence on their own writing and on the writing of other contemporary fiction writers. I defined contemporary as either someone alive or very recently dead. What do you think of these choices? What other contemporary fiction writers would you pick as having had the most influence? Check out what Ha Jin, Mona Simpson, David Bezmozgis, Arthur Phillips, Francine Prose, and other leading writers have to say.

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Mona Simpson chooses Alice Munro

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I think I'm influenced by the writers I read, but not necessarily by the things I'd choose. When I first read Proust, I imbibed his melancholy, without gleaning the structural underpinnnings he used to manage his great orchestral circus. For many reasons, my most important living writer is Alice Munro, for her apt, stylistic genius mostly restrained (she learned from her influences, two Williams, Maxwell and Trevor). She uses time virtuosically, shuffling tenses within a paragraph to distinguish a moment from a habit. Writers everywhere study her stories to figure out just where and how they go so deep. Munro matters, too, because of her sustained fascination with female life, as the playing field, the parliament, the place where life is lived and history made. Virginia Woolf said that men write about women, in certain colors and tempers of light. We had Leopold Bloom in the bathroom, but Woolf herself never took her fictional heroines into the bedroom or the bathroom, though she did wonder about the inner life of the char cleaning public stalls. Munro writes about sex, about bathrooms, about passion and class, and the ways they tease, trick and determine each other. I often read hoping to absorb influences. Of late, I've been studying happy endings. As much for life as for art. Mona Simpson is the author of five novels, including, most recently, My Hollywood. Watch her here, here, and here.

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I think I'm influenced by the writers I read, but not necessarily by the things I'd choose. When I first read Proust, I imbibed his melancholy, without gleaning the structural underpinnnings he used to manage his great orchestral circus. For many reasons, my most important living writer is Alice Munro, for her apt, stylistic genius mostly restrained (she learned from her influences, two Williams, Maxwell and Trevor). She uses time virtuosically, shuffling tenses within a paragraph to distinguish a moment from a habit. Writers everywhere study her stories to figure out just where and how they go so deep. Munro matters, too, because of her sustained fascination with female life, as the playing field, the parliament, the place where life is lived and history made. Virginia Woolf said that men write about women, in certain colors and tempers of light. We had Leopold Bloom in the bathroom, but Woolf herself never took her fictional heroines into the bedroom or the bathroom, though she did wonder about the inner life of the char cleaning public stalls. Munro writes about sex, about bathrooms, about passion and class, and the ways they tease, trick and determine each other. I often read hoping to absorb influences. Of late, I've been studying happy endings. As much for life as for art.

Mona Simpson is the author of five novels, including, most recently, My Hollywood. Watch her here, here, and here.

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Comments

[krs41]

01:18 PM on 01/15/2011

harlan cobe, brad thor, lisa gardener

[Twinz48]

11:42 AM on 01/15/2011

The list of writers cited will not, of course, reflect the judgment of many readers. After all, the article lists a group of contemporary writers (none of whom are my favorites) and outlines those authors they think are important or who have had some influence on them and tries to provide some of the reasons why they think that. It's an interesting exercise and may inspire some readers to seek out and explore the writers cited. However, many of us will not find our favorites among those listed in the article.

[kerry1962]

09:20 PM on 01/13/2011

Munro, McCarthy, Roddy Doyle....

[elanenergy]

02:13 PM on 01/12/2011

Pat Conroy, Nick Hornby, Kurt Vonnegut (died 2007), Philip Roth.

[namewithheld]

01:23 PM on 01/12/2011

Samuel Beckett. His influence will continue to grow as our world becomes even more absurd.

[Ayn Ranaway]

08:10 AM on 01/12/2011

breezed through the picks...
these choices are null as no one picked Cormac. CASE CLOSED.

[Twinz48]

11:22 AM on 01/15/2011

Thanks you for mentioning Cormac McCarthy. "Blood Meridian" is probably one of the finest novels of the second half of the 20th Century and it certainly makes it on my "Best Of" list. You can add "All the Pretty Horses," "No Country For Old Men," and "The Road," as well.

[FlipMode]

07:05 AM on 01/12/2011

Yikes! I've got some reading to do.

[Gwen07]

10:04 PM on 01/11/2011

Atwood, Morrison, Lahiri, Patchett and Roth .

I'm just sayin'...

[krs41]

01:19 PM on 01/15/2011

but of annoying leftists

[Lane Silberstein]

08:19 PM on 01/11/2011

That was (unsurprisingly? surprisingly?) gendered: most of the guys picked guys and vice versa. I think I also have a more narrow, and therefore useless, definition of a contemporary writer: I think of younger folks, so I would have picked Nicole Krauss or her husband. Philip Roth's prime has long since passed, so has Naipaul's, and Saul Bellow is dead! No one on this list is doing their most important work right now, which is the definition clincher for me. Ozick miiiiight be, but it's a stretch (I really commend that guy for choosing her, though--she way underrated, and is one of my favorites).

[Indigo1941]

05:09 PM on 01/11/2011

I'll see you all those names and raise you one Thomas Pynchon!

[Twinz48]

11:24 AM on 01/15/2011

I agree with you 100% but I would bet for most readers Pynchon is an author much like James Joyce: More talked about than read.

[Indigo1941]

01:11 PM on 01/15/2011

It's tough to explain what Pynchon is doing but what he's doing engages my attention fully while I'm reading him. Joyce . . . I have to doublecheck what he said with Sparknotes although I can enjoy his work but Pynchon . . . it's as if he's speaking the languge in which I dream.

[bokononsmoothie]

04:50 PM on 01/11/2011

Yay! Nobody picked Johnathan "Being-Upper-Middle-Class-and-White-is-Just-SO-HARD" Franzen!!

[h1ggsboson]

04:20 PM on 01/11/2011

Thomas Pynchon

[Indigo1941]

05:08 PM on 01/11/2011

Absolutely! Fan'd & fav'd!

[Haley30]

02:50 PM on 01/11/2011

Cormac McCarthy and Doris Lessing. A new great author from the Pacific N. West is Willy Vlatin.

[TheBaffler]

01:27 PM on 01/11/2011

Jeanette Winterson.

[Galia Hannah]

12:11 PM on 01/11/2011

My favorite English-language novelists are Jim Harrison, A.S. Byatt, Joyce Carol Oates, and Pat Barker.