What I hear about pro basketball scouts is that they always draft raw athleticism over any single athletic achievement. So that's what I'm going to do: I'm going to pick the best athletes out of the couple of dozen 20th-century writers who, at one time or another, have been my beacons.
Here are my picks — five starters, plus a few for the bench.
Position: Language
John Cheever gets this one.
Saul Bellow is the alternate. Bellow's prose is of unrivaled energy (see
Augie March), but I've always felt that if you gave every writer in recent history the same 100 words, it's Cheever who would make them into the best paragraph.
Position: Story Structure
I'll have to give this one to
Alice Munro. You read her earlier work — "The Moons of Jupiter," for example — and you see that she knows how to write a perfectly brilliant traditional short story — rising action, climax, all the rest — the way Picasso in his childhood used to paint like Vermeer. Then you take a look at Munro's later work and you see that she somehow made the leap from traditional logic into dream logic, which has changed the game for all of us since. My alternate for story structure is
E. L. Doctorow. I'll never forget reading
Ragtime in a high school history class and completely missing the line, "warn the duke" — a line that changes the entire novel. One of my classmates had to point it out to me, but when I discovered what Doctorow had done to the structure with that single line, I shivered...
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