Not certain about Vonnegut
--but it has been so long since I read him (and he isn't presently represented in my not inconsiderable library) that sheer lack of resolution may dim my judgment here.
Off the top of my head, and again confining my consideration to works in English from the postwar period forward, the names Nabokov, Pynchon, Bellow (each for entirely different reasons) come first to mind. John Updike will be remembered for his magnificently-crafted short stories more than for his novels (although conceivably for his criticism more than either--but no, I don't think that a successor society that values critical thinking of any sort is in the cards); Alice Munro as well, if the short story is still valued--in which case we might be able to shoehorn Tobias Wolff into literary history. If the muses are fair, then the novels of Ward Just (
Jack Gance, The Echo House) will still be in print. It would be a shame if Robertson Davies' Canadian version of magical realism did not survive another hundred years of solitude. Lawrence Durrell's ravishing
Alexandria Quartet may not make it: glittering as its surface is, it's one of those books (well, four of those books) that yields up every particle of its charm upon first reading, holding nothing back for subsequent consideration (mind you, that charm is vast:
"Clea, you should shelter."
But she only pressed closer, shaking her head like someone drugged with sleep, or perhaps by the soft explosion of kisses which burst like bubbles of oxygen in the patient blood. I shook her softly, and she whispered: "I am too fastidious to die with a lot of people in a shelter like an old rats' nest. Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world."
[We have been waiting at this point for the principals in this passage to for-god's-sake-do-the-dirty-you-fools for about 900 pages in the paperback edition]).
All this is the very surface, the windblown foam of that sea of contemporary or near-contemporary authors whose salt-scent I hope to reach the nostrils of the next century.
And of those who work below the salt, whose Grisham-like sales should not be held against them, whom posterity should forgive the size of their advances and royalty checks (adjusted for hyperinflation)? Oh, hell, we're talking a
hundred fucking years! They could think of Tom-fucking-Clancy the way we think of Anthony Trollope! Nevertheless, I'll make this prediction: if Poe has lasted to the present day, then people will still be reading Stephen King when he and we are dead and gone. Much of what he writes is not far removed from trash, but its execution consistently partakes of honest craft: he labors very carefully over his prose, never, so far as I've been able to detect, cheating or taking a dishonorable shortcut. The negative here is John Irving's 1981(?) novel
The World According to Garp, which I admit I haven't glanced at since I read it newly-published, and which was on the surface
technically impressive throughout, but which somehow oozed dishonesty from every timber.
My $2 worth (adjusted for inflation)...
cordially,
