John Crowley

John Crowley has died, one of the finest and most distinctive American writers of our time and the author of Little, Big, the best fantasy novel this side of Tolkien. In fact, if I were not a Christian I would probably think that Little, Big is even greater than The Lord of the Rings, because there is no more beautiful and powerful book about the poignancy of mortality. I have read it many times and have never navigated the final pages, which go through me like a knife, without weeping. I used to teach the book sometimes but couldn’t maintain my composure while doing so, so I stopped. The best American novels of the last half-century are Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, DeLillo’s Underworld, and Little, Big. Some years ago my friend Francis Spufford commented, in an email to me, that Little, Big is “the Middlemarch of the fantastic,” and that is an exceptionally acute comment. Adam Roberts has a tribute here, Henry Farrell here. They’re both good, but if any essay has ever captured what’s so…