DeLillo vs. McCarthy vs. Pynchon vs. Roth

On Friday afternoons no one wants to read another blog post about heath care reform or Iranian nuclear programs or how the nadir of Western Civilization is to be reached this afternoon at 3:32 P.M . Those things can wait till Monday.

Friday afternoons are a good time (well, as good a time as any) for having a heated, half-serious, half-cocked literary argument. So here’s one I want to throw out:

Literary critic Harold Bloom claims that the four major American novelists of our time are Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy.

Assume, for the sake of this debate, that Bloom is correct—as he usually is on almost all textual matters that don’t involve the Bible—and that you have to choose only one (and only one of these four) as the Great American Novelist. Who do you choose?

(I’m going with Cormac McCarthy for the contentious and possibly spurious reasons that (a) he is the master stylist of the age, (b) his works cover a broader thematic range than the others, (c) he’s a timeless literary genius whose works will still be read in the next century, (d) he can whip all of the these other guys (not just on the page, but—if it came down to it—in a bar fight), and (e) he’s a fellow Texan.)

What say you? Who is your choice among these Bloomian uber-writers for the title of GAN?