The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

United States and Canada

UNITED STATES

In almost every nation in the world, fiction from other countries makes up a significant portion of the local market, but not so in the United States. Although English-language fiction from abroad, especially Great Britain, has a place, otherwise only a little foreign fiction is readily available or widely read. The vast annual output by American authors easily crowds out most foreign competition, and American fiction also thrives abroad, in both its most popular form—airport thrillers and the like—and more literarily demanding ones. The spread of English as the internationally most widely used language has also greatly increased the market that American authors can readily reach, and success has continued to breed success. Many foreign authors are popular in the United States and abroad, but worldwide, almost any best-seller list continues to be top-heavy with American writers.

The size and the cultural and social diversity of the United States easily support a much greater amount and variety of fiction than smaller and more homogenous countries could. Even when it is introspective, American fiction seems to have more breadth than that from more uniform cultures. The land of opportunity offers authors a wealth of material, too, to go along with its huge potential readerships. Much of the best genre fiction, from pulp thrillers to science fiction, has long come from American writers, nurtured in a supportive environment that includes large, loyal fan bases and continuity in the publishing industry. America has enjoyed an extended period of stable, democratic government, free press, and comparatively little wartime disruption on American soil, facilitating the development and continuing success of American popular fiction. In contrast, the major European, Asian, and African countries all have suffered major domestic disruptions as well as considerably greater government interference in publishing, which has, over shorter and longer periods, hampered literary production.

If not always better, American fiction certainly seems bigger than that of any other nation. Beside a seemingly limitless amount of genre fiction, it includes distinctive regional literature as well as many stabs at the “great American novel.” The sheer scale of output can also mask passing fads and occasional lulls in creativity and originality in certain areas while others continue to thrive. Beyond its popularity, contemporary American writing also has considerable depth, with a more vibrant writing culture—or several overlapping ones—than any others in the world. There is some truth to American writing’s being particularly market oriented and populist, but much of considerable value also rises out of that. Even in summary, the amount of notable American fiction is staggering.

The works by an old guard of authors, including Saul Bellow (1915–2005), John Updike (1932–2009), and Philip Roth (b. 1933), are pillars of the modern canon. Even though Updike’s and Roth’s fiction is often colored by their personal experiences, depicting WASP and Jewish life in the Northeast, it speaks as well to readers beyond ethnic or local lines in a way peculiar to American fiction. The works by authors like the underappreciated Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) or the last American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison (b. 1931), which focus more narrowly on the Jewish and the African American experiences, respectively, may not be as easy for all readers to identify with but are, by any measure, major literature.

William Gaddis (1922–1998) and William H. Gass (b. 1924), who often are confused with each other, unfortunately reach only small audiences with their more challenging fiction. Gaddis wrote just a few novels, but each of the two-time National Book Award–winner’s works is worthwhile, especially his satire of American capitalism and finance, J.R. (1977). William Gass’s major work is The Tunnel (1995), one of the peaks of American fiction from the 1990s. It is a beautifully written but horribly bleak book about confronting history, narrated by Frederick Kohler, a professor who is trying to write the introduction to his life’s work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, while also looking back on his own life.

Thomas Pynchon’s (b. 1937) Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is in the tradition of the big, complex American novels that began with Herman Melville’s (1819–1891) Moby-Dick (1851). Taking place mainly at the end of World War II, the novel centers on the German V-2 rocket project but in fact spins wildly around many subjects, characters, and themes in a true tour de force. Pynchon’s other fiction also is intriguing, but only the massive Against the Day (2006) has a similarly broad sweep.

• Raymond Carver’s (1938–1988) minimalist realist short fiction was, for a time, tremendously influential, but the lure of more intricate fiction has proved irresistible for most American writers.

• Don DeLillo’s (b. 1936) stylized postmodern works offer a variety of critical takes on contemporary America.

• Cormac McCarthy’s (b. 1933) novels of male lives in a harsh and bleak world, often set in the Southwest and full of brutality, can seem overwritten but have been popular.

Paul Theroux (b. 1941) is best known for his travel writing, but he is also a fine creative writer, the sense of humor and self-absorbedness familiar from his travel books serving him equally well in his fiction. Many of his novels draw on his own experiences, and several, such as My Other Life (1996), are clearly autobiographical. Theroux is generally least successful when straying farthest from what he is familiar with—the futuristic O-Zone (1986) is a dud—but his self-centered autobiographical novels and stories of life abroad and in the United States are almost uniformly entertaining and well written.

Many of John Irving’s (b. 1942) novels have a nineteenth-century feel, describing protagonists in unusual circumstances trying to make their way in the world. Even though his fiction contains recurring locales (New England, Austria) and quirky elements (an obsession with wrestling, unusual physical characteristics), Irving continues to be inventive in his agreeably old-fashioned entertainments. But he seems to be trying too hard to keep the quirkiness going in his most recent works. The comic novel The World According to Garp (1978), describing the life and times of T. S. Garp, is his most successful work, but other novels, such as The Cider House Rules (1985), which treats the subject of abortion, are also very good.

Much of William T. Vollmann’s (b. 1959) fiction deals with marginalized people or classes of people, prostitutes being a favorite. The continuing series of historical novels he began in 1990, Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, reconsiders significant periods and events of American history. These often weighty novels are notable for their attention to detail, though all the research that went into them is frequently too apparent.

• The sheer mass of superprolific Joyce Carol Oates’s (b. 1938) body of work is daunting, but her approachable fiction has considerable appeal.

• The exclamation-point-happy Tom Wolfe (b. 1931), a much louder author, brings his journalistic background and style to bear in fat sociocultural novels in the grand old tradition. No master of subtlety, only his first novel, the entertaining period piece The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), a tragic-comic romp set in 1980s New York City at the height of the greed-is-good era on Wall Street, looks likely to endure.

• David Foster Wallace’s (1962–2008) mammoth Infinite Jest (1996)—nearly a thousand pages of text plus almost a hundred pages of notes and errata—is another American piece of superfiction. Set in the near future, it is a digressive novel that seems to try to do it all.

• Jonathan Safran Foer’s (b. 1977) first novels have proved to be very popular.

Jonathan Franzen’s (b. 1959) ambitious, sprawling realist novels of the American condition are among the best by any author of the generation after Roth and Updike. His story of the midwestern Lambert family, The Corrections (2001), is a particularly impressive slice of contemporary Americana. Jeffrey Eugenides’s (b. 1960) more eccentric, all-American tale, Middlesex (2002), has a unique twist with its hermaphrodite narrator, Calliope “Cal” Helen Stephanides, but is the sort of novel that has been written several times too often (by John Irving, among others). Nonetheless, Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993) is a memorable and original take on adolescence and American life. Its effective use of the first person plural, with a chorus of now adult men who narrate the story, is remarkable.

Native American Fiction

Among the fine regional literature from throughout the United States, the most distinctive is that from Polynesian Hawaii, with its geographical and cultural links to the South Pacific and East Asia, as well that by Native American authors.

N. Scott Momaday’s (b. 1934) House Made of Dawn (1968) was among the first novels about the modern Native American experience of reservation and urban America to gain a larger readership, and it remains a template for much Native American fiction. Gerald Vizenor’s (b. 1934) works are playful and inventive, with his satirical novels often incorporating the Native American trickster figure. The Heirs of Columbus (1992) is a wildly imagined contemporary story in which one of the many fantastical premises is that the famous explorer had Mayan roots. In Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), Japanese culture and history are incorporated into a story about the atomic age, in which the destruction of Hiroshima and its aftereffects mirror the destruction wrought on Native Americans over the centuries.

• The younger generation of Native American authors includes Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) and Sherman Alexie (b. 1966).

Foreign-Born Writers

Foreign-born authors are not as prominent in the contemporary American literary scene as they are in Great Britain (or Canada), but several have made significant contributions here. Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) is certainly the leading example. He began writing in English only after he had already established himself as a Russian author, but he wrote his best works in this second language, with Lolita (1955) one of America’s greatest novels.

Nabokov grew up multilingual and was comfortable reading and speaking English long before he turned to writing in it, whereas English is more obviously a second language for authors such as Aleksandar Hemon (b. 1964), Ha Jin (b. 1956), and Yiyun Li (b. 1972), who learned it only later in life. Although their prose is somewhat stilted, its different feel and sound can be quite effective. Hemon, in particular, is very attentive to language and the possibilities of English, which contributes to the success of his fiction. Ha Jin’s plainer prose also suits his fiction, which focuses on the Chinese experience in both China and the United States.

As in Great Britain, a large number of foreign authors live and work in the United States but remain much more closely associated with their national literatures; the African trio of Chinua Achebe (1930–2013), Wole Soyinka (b. 1934), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (b. 1938) are prominent examples. Those who came to the United States at a very young age, like the talented British-born Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967), have been the most successful in navigating two (or more) cultures and the immigrant experience in their work.

An immense amount of popular and genre fiction, of widely varying quality, is produced by American authors. Sales and circulation figures suggest that much of it has tremendous appeal and entertainment value. Much, however, is essentially disposable and has little literary worth, and some, like Dan Brown’s (b. 1964) sensationally successful The Da Vinci Code (2003), has none at all.

Of the consistently best-selling authors, the multitalented Michael Crichton (1942–2008) at least impressed with the variety of his work and the ideas he worked into his fiction, including the implications of rapid technological innovation. The versatile Stephen King (b. 1947), best known for his horror and supernatural suspense fiction (as well as his prodigious output), is a better writer, at least in some of his books. King can be especially good on the minutiae of everyday American life, including pop and consumer culture, and uses this to good effect in his often unsettling works. More baffling is the success of legal thriller author John Grisham (b. 1955). He manages to build some suspense in his novels, but with their limited prose and barely plausible plots, they hardly stand above the many other unremarkable books in the genre, unlike Scott Turow’s (b. 1949) well-written and more credible legal thrillers.

The often serial nature of genre fiction, with a stream of books featuring the same protagonist as well as the relentless pace of production, with authors often churning out more than one book a year, can result in very uneven quality. Even though he took his time between books, Thomas Harris’s (b. 1940) Hannibal Lecter novels are prime examples: Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988) are among the best suspense procedurals of recent decades, but the subsequent novels about Lecter are inferior.

The vast expanse of American mystery and crime fiction contains a great deal of fine writing. Raymond Chandler’s (1888–1959) fiction and a few of James M. Cain’s (1892–1977) works are still the gold standard—and the most widely imitated—but much else, from the pulp fiction of Jim Thompson (1906–1977) to Charles Willeford’s (1919–1988) and Donald E. Westlake’s (1933–2008) works, is impressive as well. American crime fiction writing today has extraordinary variety, and among the most interesting authors are Elmore Leonard (1925–2013); Walter Mosley (b. 1952), with his Easy Rawlins novels; and James Ellroy (b. 1948), with his machine-gun-fire prose.

Science fiction writing can get bogged down in elaborate premises and inventions (and the efforts to explain them), but even a stylistically ragged writer like Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) can carry readers through with the audacity of his creations. Neal Stephenson’s (b. 1959) massive The Baroque Cycle trilogy (2003–2004) and the nearly thousand-page Anathem (2008) are typical of the best and worst in science fiction, fascinating in their meticulous research and intellectual reach and filled with rollicking adventures but ultimately glutted. Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash (1992) is just as richly imagined but much more manageable.

Some very good fiction has also come from authors who move between genres, like Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007). He used elements of science fiction in his classic war novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about the firebombing of Dresden, but his approachable style and mix of the jocular and the serious are what make his books so enjoyable. Steve Erickson (b. 1950) and Jonathan Lethem (b. 1964) also use science fiction as a foundation for much of their fiction while also moving beyond mere genre writing.

Popular women’s fiction, in its countless romance and chick lit iterations, obviously satisfies its large audience but is a literary minefield for those not disposed to its formulas. From Jacqueline Susann’s (1921–1974) soft-porn mega–best seller Valley of the Dolls (1966), through the works of Judith Krantz (b. 1927), Danielle Steel (b. 1947), and Nora Roberts (b. 1950) to beyond Candace Bushnell’s (b. 1958) Sex and the City (1996), these works obviously enthrall legions but are hard to regard as any more than overwritten fluff and fantasy. The use of empowered female figures, such as in Terry McMillan’s (b. 1951) fiction, may be admirable, but most of the popular women’s fiction remains largely an acquired taste.

The line between American and Canadian literature may seem blurred, especially when viewed from south of the border, but despite the considerable overlap, much Canadian fiction is distinctive. This is most obvious in what is most unnoticed in the United States: the works by Canada’s French-writing authors. The country also has an independent literary and publishing community that is not solely reliant on the U.S. market, so an important separate literary culture has developed there.

With the growing fascination with multiculturalism in recent decades, fiction by the many Canadian authors with some foreign background—from Michael Ondaatje (b. 1943) to Yann Martel (b. 1963)—has often received more attention abroad than has the CanLit by authors without such apparent international connections. Moreover, much of homegrown fiction has thus been misperceived as one-dimensional and provincial.

Anglophone Fiction

The extent to which Canadian fiction is oriented toward to the United States varies widely. Douglas Coupland’s (b. 1961) early works of fiction, such as Generation X (1991) and Microserfs (1995), are all-American tales about a new generation in which the conditions he describes arose first. His more recent fiction features Canadian settings, such as his Vancouver rewriting of the Columbine high school killings in Hey, Nostradamus! (2003) or JPod (2006), another working-geek novel. Coupland is more interested, however, in the common issues found in technology-oriented consumer societies in general than in local concerns. Michael Ondaatje (b. 1943) fixates on specific American myths and figures in his beautiful works of fragmentary and poetic storytelling, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), and Coming Through Slaughter (1976), his fictionalized life of New Orleans jazz musician Buddy Bolden. But he is equally comfortable with other settings, from Canada (In the Skin of a Lion, 1987) to Italy during World War II (The English Patient, 1992), to contemporary Sri Lanka (Anil’s Ghost, 2000).

The work of authors like Robertson Davies (1913–1995), Mordecai Richler (1931–2001), and the 2013 Nobel laureate, Alice Munro (b. 1931), is more strongly rooted in Canada but also has broader appeal. Davies’s three trilogies are wonderful entertainment. His expansive storytelling resembles that of nineteenth-century English authors, but his novels are modern in their use of symbolism and philosophical underpinnings. Comfortable in theatrical, musical, and academic milieus, Davies leads many of his characters on fascinating journeys, most memorably in the final completed trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy (1981–1988).

Whereas Davies puts together his visions in a series of connected novels, Alice Munro is a master of the short story. Her second book, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), in which the adolescent Del Jordan describes her coming of age and becoming a writer, is ostensibly a novel—her only one—but even here, Munro is more comfortable presenting her material in distinct stories. A great stylist, Munro’s many collections of short but substantial pieces are impressive indeed.

Mordecai Richler was a ferocious satirist whose work arguably occasionally descends into vulgarity. His novels about Jewish and Canadian life, from The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) to Barney’s Version (1997), are raucous and often overcrowded with incidents but also fun. Furthermore, they have been very popular beyond Canada and the United States.

One of Canada’s leading poets and novelists, Margaret Atwood’s (b. 1939) books range from realism to science fiction. She regularly depicts women in extreme situations, beginning with The Edible Woman (1969), whose protagonist eventually is unable to consume any food when her body seems to rebel against the limited, traditional roles expected of women. Atwood’s best-known work is The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a dystopian tale of a totalitarian and fundamentalist state in which women are completely subjugated. The state, Gilead, is in what used to be the United States before it was decimated by catastrophe and pollution. The book is chillingly effective because their scenarios, whether regarding the effects of pollution or laws limiting women’s rights, can be seen as extrapolations from contemporary reality.

If any single work of Atwood’s could be considered representative, it is The Blind Assassin (2000). Nesting a novel (another The Blind Assassin) within a novel, it is a complex yet satisfying work that, in its various layers, combines many of Atwood’s approaches and styles. The presentation ranges from unreliable narrators to strict newspaper clipping reality, and this nested novel contains both historical and fantastical parts in its mysteries, social commentary, and considerations of memory and storytelling.

• Alistair MacLeod’s (1936–2014) small body of work includes his excellent novel tracing a family’s history and roots, No Great Mischief (1999).

• American-born William Gibson (b. 1948) is the author of the science fiction classic Neuromancer (1984) (in which he coined the word cyberspace) as well as more mainstream novels such as Pattern Recognition (2003).

• Brian Fawcett’s (b. 1944) creative sociopolitical works, Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (1986) and Gender Wars: A Novel and Some Conversations About Sex and Gender (1994), combine fiction and commentary.

• Michael Turner’s (b. 1962) fiction includes the film novel American Whiskey Bar (1997) and the poetry-less and explicit novel The Pornographer’s Poem (1999).

Canadian Writers with an International Background

For several decades now, immigrant fiction has been a significant part of the Canadian literary scene. Michael Ondaatje, from Sri Lanka by way of England, is the most prominent of the current generation of writers born abroad, but others include M. G. Vassanji (Kenya, b. 1950), Rohinton Mistry (India, b. 1952), Neil Bissoondath (Trinidad and Tobago, b. 1955), Rawi Hage (Lebanon, b. 1964), and Hiromi Goto (Japan, b. 1966). This has resulted in a sizable body of multicultural work—both realistic and, in the case of Goto, closer to fantasy and science fiction—that is revealing about both the authors’ homelands and the immigrant experience in Canada. Yann Martel’s (b. 1963) own very international background figures less directly in his fiction, but his Man Booker Prize–winning Life of Pi (2001) with its shipwrecked Indian protagonist, Pi Patel, is replete with cross-cultural connections.

Francophone Fiction

French is the mother tongue of more than a fifth of the Canadian population, with the French speakers concentrated in a single province, Quebec. While Canada is officially bilingual, the overlap in literary cultures is limited, and many French-writing authors are oriented toward Paris. Some of the most prominent French-Canadian authors have also lived in France for extended periods. Even the works of authors like Antonine Maillet (b. 1929), who won the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, and Anne Hébert (1916–2000), whose other fiction is overshadowed by her dark love story Kamouraska (1970, English 1973), remain underappreciated in translation.

Raised in Canada and the United States before moving to France as a student, Nancy Huston (b. 1953) bridges several cultural divides, writing in both French and English and translating her own work. It can make for an odd mix, as in the talky Thanksgiving-meal novel, Dolce Agonia (French 2001, English 2001), set in New England and featuring a number of academics—and with an occasional divine narratorial intervention when God lets readers in on the characters’ fates. Its intellectual ambitions make Dolce Agonia seem like a typical French novel, but Huston also convincingly grounds it on American terrain. Her most impressive achievement to date is the four-part novel of family history presented in reverse chronological order, Fault Lines (French 2006, English 2007). Beginning in the present day and concluding near the end of World War II, each section jumps some two decades back in time and centers on a different family member at age six. Although Huston’s young narrators’ voices are not entirely realistic, their childish literalism and limitations serve exceptionally well her story of a family with many fault lines and some dark secrets.

Many of the protagonists in Jacques Poulin’s (b. 1937) fiction have a sense of wide-eyed wonder, and Poulin lavishes attention on their fascination with place and surroundings. This is especially true in The “Jimmy” Trilogy (1967–1970, English 1979), in which the central characters are, in different ways, still impressionable and young—or are literally young at heart, since the narrator of the third novel in the trilogy, Noël, has received a heart transplant from a teenage girl. Poulin’s works also contain a mix of purpose and aimlessness as he explores personal and national identity and history, most obviously in Volkswagen Blues (1984, English 1988), a quintessential road novel in which the protagonist, Jack, sets out through the United States in search of his brother.

Jacques Godbout’s (b. 1933) fiction has a playful way with language, especially in Hail Galarneau! (1967, English 1970) and its sequel, The Golden Galarneaus (1993, English 1995), but Godbout’s work is also political and often virulently satirical. Written shortly after the 1980 referendum in which Quebecers voted not to move toward secession from Canada, Godbout’s untranslated allegorical satire Les têtes à Papineau (1981), is the story of a man with two heads. His two identities, Charles and François, represent anglophone and francophone Canada. The novel builds toward the operation that is to fuse the two heads together, and a postscript, written in English, reveals that because the operation was a success, the protagonist is now unilingual. His French side has been almost entirely subsumed, as is evident even in the character’s closing signature: Charles F. Papineau.

Godbout’s An American Story (1986, English 1988) places Quebec Canadian Gregory Francoeur (with his suggestive surname) on trial in California for rape and arson, in a broad indictment of the United States that is tempered by Godbout’s sense of the absurd as well as exotic elements such as the connection to Ethiopia, where, like his protagonist, Godbout spent time teaching.

Haitian-born author Dany Laferrière’s (b. 1953) often autobiographical works are both amusing and provocative in their examination of racial issues in the Americas, as well as stereotypes of identity. They usually feature first-person narrators with a background similar (or identical) to that of the author, who recount their experiences in Haiti, Canada, and the United States. With titles like How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (1985, English 1987) and Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (1993, English 1994), many offer a mix of observation, commentary, and fictional embellishment rather than simply a straightforward story. I Am a Japanese Writer (2008, English 2010) is a particularly entertaining twist on Laferrière’s favorite themes. The narrator tries to come up with a book to go with the title that just popped into his head when his publisher asked him to describe his new project. Although the narrator struggles with the project, the idea is enough for Laferrière to go off on his usual riffs on everything from writing to identity issues.

A small amount of Canadian First Nations and Inuit fiction is available, with the anthology Northern Voices (1988), edited by Penny Petrone, providing a good historic overview of and introduction to Inuit writing in English. Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk’s (1931–2007) novel of Inuit life, Sanaaq (1984, English 2014), is the most important work originally written in Inuktitut and available in English.