WHO IS THE GOAT OF AMERICAN FICTION?

With apologies to the two other members of my NBA/literature group chat, to the players selected last week in the NBA draft, to Stephen A. Smith, and to my dearly departed high school English teachers

ISTANBUL—It’s championship season in America and the world. The Oklahoma City Thunder are now NBA champions. The Stanley Cup resides in Florida, making it the world capital of ice hockey. And in London they are playing lawn tennis. The Booker Prizes and the Pulitzers are right around the corner, and so is that big day in October when they bestow the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ladbrokes doesn’t have its odds up yet, but this year my money’s on Anne Carson or Mircea Cartarescu.

Sean Thor Conroe, the up-and-comer and author of Fuccboi, recently dropped a post on “The Reason Why Faulkner Is GOATED.” Frankly, I was surprised to see there was only one reason. And that reason is that the questions Faulkner asks are real to him, not theoretical. We are talking about questions of Good and Evil, Temptation and Righteousness, the Fall of Man, the very questions that go back to Jesus Christ and before him to the Garden of Eden, ladies and gentlemen. It’s powerful stuff, no doubt. Profound.

Yet one would think to be the GOAT you would have to be a two-way author: themes and style. Form and content. Let that sink in for a minute.

Another question: If STC is saying Faulkner is GOATED, which he is, is he saying that Faulkner is the GOAT? You might call the question semantic, but it is a matter of language, and when we are dealing with literature at the very highest levels, language is the name of the game.

If we’re talking about Faulkner we gotta talk about his main modernist peers, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. They make a trifecta, a triangle with corners in Paris, New York, and Alabama. Or Mississippi, Cuba, and Minnesota. And if you’re talking about Hemingway, you gotta talk about his mentor Gertrude Stein. And you can’t bring up Faulkner without bringing up his heir apparent, Toni Morrison. A lot of ghosts in this room now. Is one of them the GOAT?

Now maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Modernism came in the middle of American literary history, bringing new innovations such as stream of consciousness narration, just as the NBA’s merger with the ABA brought about the addition of the three-point line. Changed the game, no doubt, but there were the greats of the pre-modern era. A lot of people will say: Sure, those guys wrote great books, but their competition were cobblers and blacksmiths and seamstresses, not to mention that a good portion of the population was illiterate or enslaved. But the proof is on the page, my friends. The proof is still on the page.

Herman Melville—his masterpiece Moby-Dick drew on the resources of Homer, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. It is the tragic Odyssey of a madman bent on harpooning the whitest of white whales, not to mention a forerunner of modern queer fiction. Did anybody say Queequeg? The man had more tattoos than a Gen Z all-American. Only one problem: both of Melville’s books take place almost entirely on boats. Where are the ladies in this scenario. The man ignored half the American population, not to mention the large percentage of male land-lovers. I hate to say it, but: All boat, no GOAT. You might say, I prefer not to.

Now some of you are gonna say that if I throw out Melville I gotta throw out Nathaniel Hawthorne. Not necessarily. Some might say he was stuck in the deep past but I would say he was ahead of his time. The man wrote the definitive treatise against slut shaming in the middle of the nineteenth century. There was a lot of talk last year about how Harvard freshmen now cannot make hide or hair of the man’s prose style. Are you gonna blame that on the author or do those kids need to get their act together. Please. The man was a master, a universally recognized talent. He must have died thinking he was the GOAT and always would be.

Edgar Allan Poe died drunk in a ditch in Baltimore in somebody else’s clothes. Actually, it’s said they got him to the hospital, but they lost the death certificate. Not a good way to go out, but on the page the man was stealthy. He invented genres. The detective story. The horror story. It raises a question: Can you be a goth and also the GOAT?