Nam Le, winner of the 2008 National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35 Award,” used to doubt Toni Morrison’s reputation, but changed his mind in an annual blog series.
As part of the Millions blog’s excellent Year in Reading series, the novelist Le admitted that he once criticized the NY Times for picking Morrison’s Beloved as the Best Work of Fiction in the last 25 years–he had cheered for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Don DeLillo’s Underworld for the top spot. He explained his change of heart:
“Due to no fault of its own, the book–which I’d last read in high school – sank in my sheeplike (and sheepish) estimation. Then, this year, more than two years later, I finally returned to it. What I rediscovered stunned me: Beloved was a work of incomparable moral and aesthetic focus, in which structure, the actualised “intricate patterning” toward which [F. Scott] Fitzgerald strove all his life, had elevated itself into ethical argument.”
Read more of the ongoing Year in Reading at this link.