The frenzied, and probably deluded, quest for the holy grail of literature, the Great American Novel, is one conducted by males. And quite macho ones at that. They are writers who marry models, run for political office, or who carry sawn-off shot guns in the front of their car. They are permanently engaged in acts of self-celebration. No other writers seem to exist, and when John Updike died, Ian McEwan declared the end, no less, of the golden age of the American novel. Except it isn't. Annie Proulx, Anne Tyler, Marilynne Robinson, Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bobbie Ann Mason and Gish Jen are eight women selected by our Review section today who can lay claim to be some of the best novelists writing in America today. They do not compete with McEwan's fastidiously literary, self-referential narratives, but Proulx's and especially Tyler's characters are all the more compelling for their limited horizons, bleak settings and crushed lives. Oates has had a prodigious output, the author of 55 novels, more than 800 short stories and thousands of pages of plays, poems, journals and critical essays. Her work has dominated each generation of her writing. Marilynne ­Robinson has published only three novels, but her latest, Home, set in the civil rights movement in 1957 is stunning. To imply that these writers lack the vision to write a novel that encapsulates the great American themes of race and redemption is to seriously undervalue their work.