Are We Living Through a Great Age for the Novel? Would We Know If We Were?

Thoughts on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

The New York Times asked me and ~500 other people to choose their ten best books of the 21st century. They then compiled and collated the responses and transmogrified them into a top-100-of-the-millennium list, which they’re posting here in daily clumps of 20: nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best…

Like many of the 500 Chosen Ones, I have thoughts!

There was an option to publish my own personal top-10-of-the-millennium list in the Times; for reasons that I no longer clearly remember, I chose not to. I think I didn’t want to be pinned down and vexed with a choice that was ultimately just a little bit arbitrary. As I tell my children way too often, comparisons are invidious.¹ Though that doesn’t stop me from making them.

For what it’s worth my list included two books by Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall and The Mirror and the Light, and The Known World by Edward P. Jones. I put on two fantasy novels, A Storm of Swords and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and two graphic novels, Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, and Here, by Richard McGuire. And Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.

None of my choices have shown up so far in books 100 through 61 (which is Demon Copperhead), though both Mantel and Jones have other books on the list. Also it’s worth noting that non-fiction books are also eligible; I didn’t choose any because I didn’t feel qualified.

Invidious or no, it was definitely a worthwhile exercise in trying to get perspective on what has happened in the past 25 years, literarily speaking, and how much of it feels like it will ultimately endure. I will admit that I didn’t feel spoiled for choice when I made my list, and I ended up wondering, as I often have, what it must have been like to live through a decade like the 1920s, which saw the publication of Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, The Waste Land, Swann’s Way, A Passage to India, The Weary Blues, The Great Gatsby, Passing, Winnie-the-Pooh, Agatha Christie’s first mystery The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, The Trial, The Age of Innocence … all these (and more!) are fixed stars that we as a culture, and I personally as a human, still steer by.

How many fixed stars were born 2000-2024? I would guess a lot fewer than a hundred. Some moments in history must put people under a certain kind of pressure, and afford them a certain clarity, that allows for the production of masterpieces. It’s probably not hugely pleasant to be inside it, but it certainly leaves a mark. I wonder if we’ll leave much of one.

Not that I would necessarily know. The Great Gatsby was a flop on publication, and only entered the canon after it was distributed cheaply to soldiers during World War II. (I solemnly recommend The Bright Sword to the Armed Forces in the coming galactic conflict of 2099.) History isn’t like us. Even though we make it, it values different things than we do. It’s entirely possible that the greatest novel of the millennium was instantly remaindered.

1. I have never once used the world invidious in any other context than this