You mentioned Rabbit by John Updike. There are three more books in that series if you haven’t read them already.
If you’re looking for “The Great American Novel™”, look no further than The Great American Novel by Philip Roth, a hilariously outrageous farce around baseball during World War Two. Every character is pure gold. Roth must have had a ball writing it.
Before launching into some of these recommendations (particularly McCarthy and Auster) it might be worth checking this out: A Reader’s Manifesto - B.R. Myers.
Meh. I’ve read that, and I think it’s a classic taste of someone trying to universalize their own tastes into a moral argument. I don’t love Cormac McCarthy in order to sound cool. If I did, I’d make it through Moby Dick and not make fun of it (and myself). I love McCarthy because I think he does some amazing things with his writing, because his writing, at its best, fills me with awe.
It’s fine not to like him, but it’s bullshit to question the sincerity of people who do, as that article does.
I mentioned Auster as a question, not as a recommendation.
I bought his New York Trilogy in a second-hand store a couple of years ago because I remembered hearing about him very frequently in the 90s but not so much nowadays. I thought I might as well read some of his works to see what it was all about but I keep buying books and I’ve always found something else I wanted to read first. As a result, I still don’t know whether it’s good or not. However, I really wonder why I don’t see his books mentioned as often as I used to.
I recently finished “American Pastoral” by Phillip Roth and thought it was excellent. It was published in the late '90s, won the Pulitzer Prize, and Roth is still living, so that ought to count.
Roth is very well represented on this list, from The New York Times: What is the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years?
“The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen is another contender.