Are there any contemporary novels as good as Proust or Faulkner?

Anne Tyler.

WG Sebald

I think you meant to write “novelists”; Marcel Proust is a person, not a book.

R3, it's metonymy

Anne Tyler is good. Alice Munro is so good she's intimidating.

Add

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Kazuo Ishiguro Remains of the Day

Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Beach

R6 has good taste. I’d also add the works of Toni Morrison and Zadie Smith.

"Was" by Geoff Ryman. Very moving. Three interwoven stories and times:

Judy Garland during the filming of TWOO

A fictionalized Dorothy Gale from the Baum book, growing up as an abused child.

A young gay man who has AIDS, c. 1995, and is obsessed with Garland.

Probably none today is as groundbreaking.

I think the answer is no. But people like Faulkner don't always make an immediate big splash. (Although Proust sort of did.)

I think Alice Munro will still have a high reputation 50 years from now, but no one else mentioned here. (Anne Tyler? Seriously?)

[quote] I find the most lauded examples underwhelming: David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen, etc. etc.

I don't think anyone other than the desperate editors of TIME Magazine eight years ago would put Franzen in the company of the others. "Freedom" is now considered overrated in terms of how it was initially received, and Franzen is pretty much considered to be a limited talent.

It's odd you left Toni Morrison off your list, since she is more highly lauded than all the others you've mentioned with the exception of Pynchon. Don DeLillo would also belong on that list too.

You're also comparing them to Proust and yet you've listed no French authors: where are Michel Houllebecq and Patrick Modiano?

Orhan Pahmuk?

Agree with you on Franzen and I'm glad to hear someone finally say it. Smarmy, smug little shit with minimal talent. I hate looking at his pinched little face. I finally tried to read one of his books after hearing all the praise and couldn't even get through half of his writing. Atlantic did a pretty good take-down of him a few years ago, I wish i could post links from this device. The funniest part about Franzen is for all of his snot nosed pretentiousness most of his sales were from suburban Frau types buying for their book clubs.

I nominate Andrew Holleran, as a novelist who's a keen and accurate observer of the lives that gay men lead, their inner thoughts and whose style is inevitably poetic, even when he's writing about something mundane . Dancer from the Dance, Nights in Aruba, The Beauty of Men, Grief..... I could gain profound insights into myself and into my gay friends from each of these. However, I don't know if these books would mean anything to a straight person.

OP of course there are contemporary novels that are as good as Proust and Faulkner. I refer you to the short list and long list of the Man Booker Prize.

And I agree with above posters about Jonathan Franzen being overrated. And add in David Foster Wallace.

I am still processing Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, extraordinary book.

And I recently reread Raymond Carver's short stories (most famous "What we talk about when we talk about love")

American minimalist at its best

Made me want to buy some whiskey and sit on my lawn (if I had one)

Tom Perrotta

If you've read Proust you know that he makes the writers on a typical Man Booker list look like amateurs. They're always very good, but Proust is out-of-this-world good - there's no comparison.

There's always good writers around. I think OP is asking about the truly amazing writers who'll be read around the world for centuries.

On a gay website nobody’s mentioning Alan Hollinghurst?

William Trevor

Ian McEwan

No author Oprah likes.

Faulkner did admire Proust

Cormac McCarthy is often accused of imitating Faulkner

The significant difference between Proust and Faulkner, for Sartre, is that where Proust discovers salvation in time, in the recovery of time past, for Faulkner time is never lost, however much he may want, like a mystic, to forget time. Both writers emphasize the transitoriness of emotion, of the condition of love or misery, or whatever passes because it is transitory in time. "Proust really should have employed a technique like Faulkner's," Sartre legislates, "that was the logical outcome of his metaphysic. Faulkner, however, is a lost man, and because he knows that he is lost he risks pushing his thoughts to its conclusion. Proust is a classicist and a Frenchman; and the French lose themselves with caution and always end by finding themselves.

- John McCormick

Joyce and Kafka

So who is this Tom Perdue character and why is everybody looking for him?

[quote] If you've read Proust you know that he makes the writers on a typical Man Booker list look like amateurs. They're always very good, but Proust is out-of-this-world good - there's no comparison...I think OP is asking about the truly amazing writers who'll be read around the world for centuries.

R19, exactly.

[quote]Cormac McCarthy is often accused of imitating Faulkner

because he does

R20, cause hes a bad writer.

Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Jose Saramago

Lots of them - have you read the Harry Potter books? A treasure of the universe !!