Best Books of The 21st Century

 Since I am cheap, I have been avoiding The New York Times. The NYT recently published a list of the best books, so far, of this century. This I have not read, but the email has sent me two people who have read the list. 

Ted Gioia wrote The Best Books of the 21st Century. Mr. Gioia is someone who I have come to respect. He gives the top ten. 

(10) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
(9) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
(8) Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
(7) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
(6) 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
(5) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
(4) The Known World by Edward P. Jones
(3) Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
(2) The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
(1) My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrant

I have not read the Bolano. Jones, or the Wilkerson novel. While I admit to an anti-Franzen bias, that is a pretty good top ten. I like seeing Colson Whitehead there. 

More importantly, he goes on to write about My Brilliant Friend. I cannot recall when I read Ferrante - it was while I was in prison, let us say within the 10 years. Gioia points out what struck me most about the Neapolitan novels, a view into a different world than I see in American novels:

The image of success is almost more important than any financial measures of its magnitude. We have now left the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story far behind. Instead we merely exchange today’s rags for tomorrow’s more expensive looking rags.

This sense of a constraining destiny is especially evident in the novel’s secondary characters—and these play a prominent role in the book. Ferrante even provides a guide to the nine different families involved in her tale, as well as other parties who help propel the narrative forward. The conflicts and rivalries will dominate the book, and though many of these friends and neighbors have dreams and ambitions, their freedom to act is limited at every hand.

Most people I know have given up on sticking-to-itness. I know I did, that was part of my depression - finding out that no matter how hard I worked during my fifties, I was not going to get where I wanted to go. Most people I know feel they are stuck. No, some did not attempt to further their education. Substance abuse got in the way of others. Some found success did not matter as much as attending the right schools. Many believed that corporate America would return with the jobs our parents had. Ferrante's world had none of our American examples; her go-getters resemble the people I have known.

Lincoln Michel plunged into a more detailed criticism of the list with his Three Thoughts on the NYT Top 100: Missing Millennials, Fading Autofiction, the Genre-Bending Era. Here are the issues he raises.

The biases toward American novels (and political and historical nonfiction) and against translated literature, poetry, story collections, graphic novels, and essay collections is notable but also expected. Americans simply don’t read much poetry or translated literature. Similarly, the bias toward big press books instead of indie press books. One thing I spent yesterday discussing with another writer that was surprising—at least to me—is the lack of younger writers. The list is heavily weighted toward writers over 65. There is not a single author under 40. Unless I missed someone, there are only two millennials on the entire list: Fernanda Melchor and Torrey Peters. If you move the cutoff to 1980 births, Justin Torres would also count. Still, only 2-3 titles out of 100 for the generation most of this century? There are no zoomers and even Gen X is underrepresented. This is a list of boomer authors, largely. (Generations are fake of course, but an easy shorthand.)

Being 64, I suppose that I should not mind this, but I do. KH and I were talking recently about bands/singers that should give up performing. They are not giving room for new talent, for new styles. I feel the same way about writing.

I think one can make an easy argument that the biggest trend in the literary fiction world has been, in fact, genre fiction. Or rather “genre-bending” work that bridges literary fiction style and themes with genre fiction tropes and concepts. Like autofiction, this is a fraught term. Both are labels people can claim are hardly new at all. There have always been books that blurred literary style and genre tropes, and however you define autofiction there are precedents stretching back centuries. But labels can be useful for thinking about larger trends in culture. And anyway, what’s the point of a literary newsletter but to dissect such hobbyhorses?

This trend I figured out in prison when I decided to start writing again and began reading as widely as I could. I find it silly not to look back at the 19th Century and see that many great novels did not fit into any genre. I have come up with answers to my question of why literature disdained genre: 1) the apprenticeship of American writers in journalism (although Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is a crime novel); and 2) publishers paid attention to marketing experts.

Check out the original essays, please. 

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