Trainspotting -- Irvine Welsh (posits the end of post-colonialism)
All the King's Men -- Robert Penn Warren (how power corrupts and destroys)
Atonement -- Ian McEwen (how only art can atone for the past)
The Corrections -- Jonathan Franzen (the power family holds on the individual)
Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov (a european discovering america, in a psychosexual sort of way ... actually gets to a lot of the source of trans-Atlantic tensions)
Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon (a text as every bit touched by the hand of God as the Bible)
I Married A Communist/American Pastoral/The Human Stain -- Phillip Roth (a loose trilogy about what might now be considered essential notions of American-ness, and when taken together, they add up to something astouding, hearbreaking ... why, pray tell, wasn't this man given the Nobel this year?!?!?!)
The Remains of the Day -- Kazuo Ishiguro (the sun setting on the British Empire, the rise of the United States)
What's the Matter With Kansas -- Thomas Frank (why people don't vote in their economic best interests)
Love Undetectable -- Andrew Sullivan (gorgeous, often self-indulgent, memoirs of coming out and falling in love in the age of AIDS)
The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (here it is, the Great American Novel ... the last paragraph is unsurpassed in all of American literature, and its notions about The American Dream are as relevant today as ever)
goodness ... so many more ...