For longtime readers of American book journalism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s just-published list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century will summon dim memories of many a once-unignorable critical fuss. At one time or another over the past 25 years, some of us felt as if we could hardly consider ourselves literate unless we’d read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, say, or A Visit from the Goon Squad, or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or seemingly anything by George Saunders — all of which have placed on the Book Review’s list, the product of surveying “hundreds of literary luminaries,” some of whose ballots have been made available for public viewing.
As a reminder of how deep we are into this century, more than a few of the authors of these noted books — Denis Johnson, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Hilary Mantel — have already shuffled off this mortal coil. Roberto Bolaño, whose The Savage Detectives and 2666 placed at numbers 38 and 6, respectively, was already dead when both of those novels first appeared in English translation.
Some selections may cause despair over the health of literature itself: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, for instance, whose rapturous reception critic James Wood once memorably described as “further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”
But then, everyone will have their objections, which is the point behind these lists as much as behind literary prizes like the Nobel, works by whose laureates from Toni Morrison to Han Kang have placed among the top 100. I note the omission of Saul Bellow and J. M. Coetzee, whose Ravelstein and Elizabeth Costello would’ve easily made my ballot were I luminary enough to vote. In any case, these standings are hardly likely to look much the same in a few decades’ time. Imagine a list of the best books of the twentieth century composed in 1924, when even The Great Gatsby hadn’t come out — or indeed, a list of the best books of the nineteenth century from 1824, thirteen years before the publication of the first novel by a certain promising young scribbler named Dickens.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
