The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far): An Introduction

Best of the Millennium Notable Articles
September 21, 2009 | 15 books mentioned 77 5 min read

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Ah, 1999… We laughed along with Chandler and Phoebe, invested our surplus Benjamins with Lehman Brothers, danced a national macarena. Those days seem like the distant past now, and in many ways, the first decade of the 21st Century has been quite different from the giddy future we might have projected. In one way, though, the new millennium has delivered: we’ve gotten great fiction, often from unexpected quarters. When The New York Times named “The Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years” in 2006, none of the finalists was younger than 69, and the most recent publication date was 1997. But the ’00s have introduced us to new voices, spurred others to new levels of achievement, and ushered in the late masterworks that have capped distinguished careers.

It’s a bit early, of course, to pass definitive judgment on the literary legacy of the ’00s, or how it stacks up against that of the 1930s, or 1850s. Who knows what will be read 50 years from now? But, with the end of the decade just a few months away, it seemed to us at The Millions a good time to pause and take stock, to call your attention to books worthy of it, and perhaps to begin a conversation.

To that end, we’ve conducted a poll of our regular contributors and 48 of our favorite writers, editors, and critics (listed below), asking a single question: “What are the best books of fiction of the millennium, so far?” The results were robust, diverse, and surprising.

We’ve finished tabulating them, and this week, we’ll be counting down the Top 20 vote-getters, at a rate of five per day. Each book will be introduced by one of the panelists who voted for it. On Friday, we’ll reveal Number One, along with the results of a parallel reader poll conducted via our Facebook group. And next week, we’ll run follow-up posts including Honorable Mention and “Best of the Rest” lists.

This page, updated as we post the list, will become an index. You can use it to navigate the series, or can check back at our home page; we also invite you to consider subscribing to The Millions via RSS feed or Kindle.  We hope you’ll share your thoughts here or on the entries for the individual books throughout the week as our list is revealed.

The List
#20: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
#19: American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman
#18: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
#17: The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
#16: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
#15: Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis
#14: Atonement by Ian McEwan
#13: Mortals by Norman Rush
#12: Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
#11: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
#10: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
#9: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
#8: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
#7: Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
#6: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
#5: Pastoralia by George Saunders
#4: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
#3: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
#2: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
#1: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Panel

Methodology
Each panelist could name up to five books available in English with an original-language publication date no earlier than Jan. 1, 2000. We then tabulated the votes of our panelists, along with those of our contributors. Books were ranked according to number of votes received. In the few cases where more than one book received the same number of votes, our contributors, believing firmly that ties are like “kissing your sister,” voted to break them.

Best of the Millennium, Pros Versus Readers

This is the byline used for site announcements and for articles by more than one Millions contributor.

In Memoriam Notable Articles

David Foster Wallace 1962-2008

In Memoriam Notable Articles
September 14, 2008 | 15 books mentioned 15 6 min read

I.
It seems fitting to begin a reflection on the late David Foster Wallace in a fit of anxiety about reception – about the propensity of words, sentences, personae, to falsify or to be misunderstood.

For example: I know this seems fraudulent and fanciful and like the scratching of some deep narcissistic itch, to write publicly about a famous person’s death. And also: I want you to know I know, and to make sure you know I want you to know I know, so that you don’t mistake me for someone less intelligent, original, precise, and self-critical than I am. Because I am terrified of the ethical misstep, of solipsism, and above all of getting things wrong.

So, I think, was my subject, for whom the vicious regress sketched above could go on infinitely, each new confession forcing a confession about the rhetoric behind that confession. Indeed, in his later work, as in the short story “Octet,” David Foster Wallace found a way to make the regress feel infinite. Some readers saw in this a kind of heroism – a commitment to representing philosophical truth, no matter how ungainly. Others saw it as evidence that Wallace had hit some kind of aesthetic cul-de-sac. Some even saw it as both: a heroic cul-de-sac. But it seems to me that Wallace’s manic sincerity was merely the obverse of our age’s reflexive irony. Each was an expression of deep suspicion of abstractions like “trust” and “faith.”

Which makes Wallace’s achievement even more impressive. Ultimately, his characters and narrators managed to push beyond paradox and to risk saying something about what used to be called the human condition. In honor of those risks – and with the preliminary apologiae more or less in place – let me try here to risk saying something about David Foster Wallace.

II.

David Foster Wallace was a large, shaggy, uncomfortable, funny person who once held me and 75 other people hostage for over an hour in a basement room in St. Louis. He was reading from his new book, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I was 19, and when the reading was over I squeaked out something like, “Infinite Jest really meant a lot to me,” and he said something like, “Do you want me to sign your copy?” and I said something like “I checked it out of the library” and then I ran away.

That is, Wallace was a person I did not, in any respectable sense of the word, know, though I am currently feeling a dreadful temptation to pretend otherwise, to insist on a connection between reader and writer, to assert some rights over the body, and over the life, and over the work. Then again, in another sense, I knew him – I did. I heard the critic John Leonard say one time that the great writers, the ones who matter, are “friends of the mind,” and David Foster Wallace was mine. Simply put: his work has mattered more to me, and for longer, than any other writer’s, and when he killed himself last week at age 46, I felt like I had lost a friend. His voice is still in my head.

I came to that voice in high school, when I first read Infinite Jest. This was immediately and not incidentally prior to my discovery of literature per se. I read the thousand-page book more or less continuously for three weeks (as would be my habit every few years) and I felt like someone was speaking to me directly, in my language, about people I knew, or had been. “Like most North Americans of his generation,” Wallace wrote, in a passage that hooked me early on, Hal Incandenza
tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency. 
The secret power of this voice, as Wallace would discover in his essay “Authority and American Usage,” lay in its immense ethical appeal. Although his descriptions of Hal’s life at a tennis academy, and of pharmaceutical habits or Eschaton, did not stint on arcana, Wallace was perfectly willing to admit that certain things were “hard to say.” Moreover, there was the seeming correspondence between the authorial persona and the real person I glimpsed through the interstices of the fiction, and, later, nonfiction.

That person was like an extreme caricature of many generational traits: polymathic, ironic, brilliant, damaged, and under intense pressure to perform. The difference was that DFW (as I came to think of him) had performed. Unlike so many of the other great minds of our time, he had made good on his promise, less by virtue of talent than through moral courage and hard work. I still think the elucidation of Gerhard Schtitt’s tennis philosophy in Infinite Jest is some of the best writing about writing I’ve ever read: “How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.” Wallace somehow managed to pay attention to everything.

III.

Of course, nothing is so unforgivable in postmodern America as an assertion of one’s own value, and in various large and small ways, Wallace’s critical reception would be dampened by schadenfreude. The surest way to marginalize the literary high-water-mark of the 1990s would be to exaggerate its (considerable) length and difficulty. “Sure Infinite Jest is great,” the logic went, “but does anybody actually read it?”

Similarly, I think, it would be both inaccurate and reductive to blame the burden of following up a masterpiece for driving Wallace to his death. In the 10 years that followed Infinite Jest – which might have been a perfectly reasonable gestation period for another long novel – Wallace published five books, for a more than respectable average of one every two years. The short stories “Church Not Made With Hands” and “Good Old Neon,” and the essays on the porn industry and John McCain in Consider the Lobster would be among his best work.

Furthermore, it was impossible to read about the Depressed Person in “The Depressed Person” and not to understand that the author had known depression on the most wrenching and intimate and long-term terms. The suicide that now hangs shadelike over the Wallace corpus in fact predated it, at least as a potentiality; think of The Sad Stork and Kate Gompert and “Suicide as a Sort of Present” and the narrator of “Good Old Neon.”

Or don’t, because revisiting Wallace’s work is liable to offer more questions than answers. E.g.: How can someone with so much going for him have felt so bad? How could such an ambitious communicator have settled for this final muteness? And what, in the end, can we say about it?

IV.

We can say, first of all, that David Foster Wallace’s death is a historic loss for readers. To me, the self-annihilating qualities of “Octet” and “Mister Squishy” and “Oblivion” didn’t read as fictional dead-ends, but as attempts to solve, once and for all, the preoccupations of Wallace’s youth, prior to some astonishing new novel.

And we can remember that that book would have reflected a side of David Foster Wallace his critics didn’t often acknowledge: the metaphysician. In retrospect, Wallace’s belief in something larger than logic is everywhere: in Schtitt’s philosophies, in the prayerful ending of “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s,” and in “Good Old Neon,” where a suicide suggests that “all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life [turn] out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward.” Indeed, it offers some solace to recall that Wallace imagined death, in Infinite Jest, as a restoration, a
catapult[ing] home over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues. 
This lovely image of connection posits death as the antithesis of depression, whose cause and effect, as Wallace diagnosed them, was the ontological problem of aloneness. Wallace revisited the proposition again and again, most recently in a soon-to-be-minutely-parsed commencement address at Kenyon College:
I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of what your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. 
But on this point, Wallace, who got so much right and saw so much so clearly, fell prey to a junior-grade fallacy, which now deepens into irony. As he himself put it in Infinite Jest: “sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.”

Even as Wallace’s darkest images expressed the anguish of existential solitude, the act of writing fiction, of writing it so well, was itself an invocation of community. His finest creation, Don Gately (the Leopold Bloom of Infinite Jest) bodies forth the possibility of true empathy, and we learn, through a series of hints, that he will try to lead Hal Incandenza out of the prison of the self.

Gately’s secret? He has come to understand that there is no proof, that some things one simply takes on faith. And as Gately observes, it works. David Foster Wallace’s death looks, from where I’m sitting, like a failure of communication. But his life, and his work, are an affirmation of it. Death is not the end.

In Memoriam Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 15 6 min read
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Notable Articles The Millions Interview

Crime Pays: Jo Nesbø Talks about Killing Harry Hole and the Best Job in the World

Notable Articles The Millions Interview
February 17, 2012 | 15 books mentioned 17 16 min read
When you write, it’s important to do it while you have the enthusiasm for the idea. Maybe the most important period of your writing is when are convinced that your idea is the best idea any writer ever has had. So you have to use that energy because the time will come when you wake up in the morning and you will doubt your idea.
Notable Articles The Millions Interview
| 15 books mentioned 17 16 min read
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Annals of Japery Notable Articles

There Are Two Kinds of Novelists…

Annals of Japery Notable Articles
March 18, 2014 | 15 books mentioned 22 5 min read

There are two kinds of novelists, the peckish and the ravenous: those who fastidiously nibble on the pie of human experience (Jane Austen), and those who gorge themselves on its hearty filling (Emily Bronte). (There are also two kinds of pies, but no matter.) I first started making such judgments after a sharp hunger pang interrupted my reading of Chad Harbach’s MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction. Reaching for a half-eaten pastry in the refrigerator, I had stumbled upon the elusive truth: at some point, every writer lands on one side of an aesthetic divide, or as Zadie Smith puts it, travels down one of two paths for the novel.

Once possessed of this key classificatory insight and another slice of pie, my literary splicing continued apace. Alice Munro, it struck me, is a hypoallergenic writer, while Joyce Carol Oates is a shedding one; J.K. Rowling a perennial novelist, Robert Galbraith a seasonal one; Cormac McCarthy a novelist who neglects to contact one-night stands after a passionate night of lovemaking, Tom Wolfe one who sends each conquest a handwritten note on monogrammed paper; Salman Rushdie Team Jacob, and Cynthia Ozick Team Edward.

John Banville is our most eminent bituminous novelist, whereas his fellow Irishman Roddy Doyle is one who has no idea what that classification means; Martin Amis is a novelist who pees standing up, Karen Russell one who pees in some other manner; and Jonathan Lethem is a novelist colloquially known in locker rooms as a grower, while Jonathan Franzen, the originator of the contract/status writer dichotomy, is by all accounts a shower.

Surveying the gluttonous mess I had made, I revised my theory to distinguish between prim novelists (Woolf, Forster), never far removed from a napkin and a DustBuster, and Rabelaisian novelists, who chew with their mouths open, get crumbs stuck in their beard and leave various and sundry colorful stains on their manuscripts (Balzac, Nicholson Baker, if their copyeditors are to be believed).

Shutting off the kitchen light, I next reflected that novelists, like bulbs, come in two categories: the incandescent (Pynchon, Barth, Ellison) and the efficient (Marilynne Robinson, John Cheever, Teju Cole), those Energy Star LED certified wonders who are just as illuminating as their more brilliant versions. Should these categories prove too restrictive, a sui generis novelist like W.G. Sebald can in a crisis be compared to a lava lamp.

Having gone to bed still a little hungry but satisfied with my theorization, I heard a bump in the night, at which point I continued my conceptual cleaving. There are indeed two kinds of novelists, but appetite, manners or household appliances have nothing to do with it.

Rather, there are robust novelists (D.H. Lawrence), who announce their presence by busting down the front door of your literary consciousness to steal your electronics, and insinuating novelists (Willa Cather), who sneak in through a window after you’ve dozed off and raid your refrigerator.

Kept awake both by the threat of an intruder and a stiff neck — the result of my aggressive pie-eating — I made a useful distinction between the arthritic novelist, whose plot machinations creak like old bones (Dan Brown), and the lithe novelist, whose manipulations cannot but leave the reader in awe of their balletic grace (Kate Atkinson). When especially hungry, lithe novelists will teach insinuating novelists yogic postures in exchange for food raided from your fridge.

The body — its motions and its wants — is very important to novelists. There are those writers who prefer to dwell on the shapely rump of human carnality, and those who find inspiration in the fertile hillocks of the womanly breast; that is, there are ass-men and tit-men. And then there is Philip Roth, who is both an ass-man and a tit-man, the first writer since Shakespeare to so straddle the two categories.

And while it is common knowledge that characters can be flat or round, the distinction holds also holds true for novelists, particularly when said novelists become pregnant. (We need not revisit Randall Jarrell’s seminal analysis of innies and outies here, as that great critic’s conclusions primarily concerned the poetic temperament.)

Having dragged my own body to a coffee shop after a sleep-deprived night, I continued my bifurcations, this time in a frothier vein. Owing to the vagaries of evolution and animal husbandry, there are lactose intolerant novelists (Dostoyevsky) and those blessed few for whom a latte does not ruin an afternoon (Marguerite Duras).

Furthermore, there are those novelists often praised as daring or fearless (Claire Messud), less for their portrayal of searing emotional content than for their willingness to drink eggnog at holiday parties in spite of their digestive problems. Lily-livered novelists, by contrast, studiously avoid life’s hard truths in their fiction and heavy cream in their kitchen.

Strolling back with my (black) coffee, I noticed my overgrown yard. It struck me that as novelists spend much of their day watching the grass grow, it is only logical that they can be defined according to their landscaping technique. Thus Donald Antrim is a push-mower novelist, while Rachel Kushner is a ride-mower novelist; and Jonathan Safran Foer cuts grass with an artisanal scythe, as opposed to a writer like Tao Lin, who eats each blade like a ruminant. (NB: There is only one type of cow, but each has four stomachs, making them unlike novelists.)

As for the Brits, Evelyn Waugh was the kind of novelist to hire someone to cut his grass, and Kingsley Amis the kind who made his son do it. (Amis fils, if you recall, is one of those novelists who pees standing up, a direct result of his mowing-filled childhood.) V.S. Naipul used pesticides, while Muriel Spark could weed a lawn with one withering look.

The connection between proper lawn care and prose style naturally led me to consider larger cosmological issues. Shifting my gaze from my cultivated garden to the stars, I concluded that there are so-called multiverse novelists (James Joyce, David Mitchell), whose many-stranded plots seem to intuit the mysteries of hidden realms, and then a horde of reactionary scribes who cling to the comforting universe model (George Eliot, John Updike). God is of course a writer unto himself and the most famous creationist novelist in history.

But alas, one cannot contemplate life’s great mysteries forever. It was time for my annual, disheartening reckoning with the IRS. Playing my usual coy games with TurboTax, I deduced that Saul Bellow was a novelist owing back taxes, while his good friend Richard Stern was one with nothing to declare but his genius; and that Faulkner was a novelist haunted by the past, while John Grisham is one who is well-invested in futures.

I write this now from the hospital after my appendix burst from excessive theorizing and audit anxiety, an unfortunate medical emergency which nonetheless led me to reflect on the difference between the vestigial novelist, who revels in the antiquarian (Sir Walter Scott), and the vital novelist, who writes because he has a pathological hatred of the tailbone (Ben Marcus).

After nearly 24-hours of intense thinking, I ruefully considered how hard it is for a novelist facing so many clear-cut choices. Laid up though I was in this antiseptic room, I took solace that at least I was only a critic, that endlessly classifying specimen whose depth, complexity, and fine gradations resist all neat distinctions.

Image via TheCulinaryGeek/Flickr

Annals of Japery Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 22 5 min read
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77 comments:

  1. Pingback: The Millions poll on top 20 fiction books of the millenium | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home
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  3. Pingback: Best Fiction of the Millennium (so far) « Book Sherpa
  4. Pingback: Best Fiction Top 20 « SONYA CHUNG
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  8. I predict nineteen books originally written in English topped by Bolano at number one. Unmitigated Yankee home field advantage aside, a useful exercise, and I hope you’ll let us see the ballots.

  9. Pingback: Five Books I Want to See Make The Millions’s Best of the Millennium List | Fiction
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  12. Ron Carlson, Five Skies
    Percival Everett, American Desert, Wounded
    Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
    Nowhere Man, Alexander Hemon
    Men in Space, Tom McCarthy
    Joseph McNeil, Netherland
    Jonathan Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    Kathryn Davis, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

  13. So difficult. Possibly Never Let Me Go, The Great Fire, The Road, Kavalier and Clay, Persepolis, White Teeth, Blind Assassin, Kafka on the Shore. A Neil Gaiman, a David Mitchell, or a Geraldine Brooks?. Stieg Larsson and Joseph O’Neill too soon? Bolano seems a shoo-in.

  14. Assuming more than one book by an author is allowed, my guess is that shoo-ins for the top 10 are:

    2666
    The Savage Detectives
    The Corrections
    The Road
    Austerlitz

    And the ones I hope also make it:

    Oblivion
    Eat the Document
    Everything is Illuminated
    The Human Stain
    Never Let Me Go

    American-Centric I know, but that’s what I tend to read.

  15. Savage Detectives actually doesn’t make the cut-off:

    “Each panelist could name up to five books available in English with an original-language publication date no earlier than Jan. 1, 2000.”

  16. Pingback: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link voted best fiction of the millennium so far « One Story blog
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  18. Predictions for the top 5 vote-getters: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell; 2666 by Roberto Bolano; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon; The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen; John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead.

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  23. The Story of Edgar Sawelle- Wroblewski
    Life of Pi- Martell
    Blindness – Saramago
    Fortress of Solitude – Lethem
    The Horned Man – Lasdun
    Elegance of the Hedgehog – Barbery
    I upset myself not to have more women here – Katharine Weber is really wonderful and if we were considering a body of work versus only one novel, she would be on the list. Also Annie Proulx.

  25. Pingback: Coming in at No. 11 « Meanderings

  29. “Ten minutes later she was naked, fifteen minutes later she was moaning, eighteen minutes later she was whispering words of love that she no longer needed to feign, after twenty minutes she began to lose her head, after twenty-one minutes she felt her body was being lacerated with pleasure, after twenty-two minutes she called out, Now, now, and when she regained consciousness she said, exhausted and happy, I can still see everything white.” – Blindness by Jose Saragamo

  31. I was going to pick 2666 as #1 at first, but then it came out at #4 yesterday. So, my toss up for #1 now will either be Netherland by Joseph O’Neill or The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Dave Eggers might have a chance too if A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is regarded by the panel as fiction instead of a memoir as promoted by the book’s publisher. But still, being a Bolano fan(and if more than one work from a single author is allowed) I am holding out for By Night In Chile simply because The Savage Detectives which was originally published in Spanish in 1998 is not eligible.

  32. Pingback: Revisiting The Millions’ Best Fiction of the Millennium List « Book Sherpa
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  34. Pingback: on that Best Fiction of the ’00s list « orbis quintus
  35. Pingback: Best fiction of the millennium « Naptime Writing

  37. No Tree of Smoke on the above list? Shame, shame. There are some great books on that list but Johnson’s is better than most of them, if not all.

  38. Not impressed with the list at all. I still prefer Franzen’s Strong Motion over Corrections, the latter getting more and more angry as I pick through it.

    A better list would have included:

    Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire
    Roth’s Human Stain & Everyman
    Arthur Phillip’s The Egyptologist
    John Crowley’s Daemonomania
    Houellebecq’s Platform
    Pete Dexter’s Train

  39. Pingback: The Millions: best fiction of the new millennium « Books to the Ceiling
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  42. Where’s Murakami? Kafka on the Shore and After Dark both appeared this side of the millennium and of course 1Q84 (though that has yet to be translated into English).

    To be quite honest, Atonement appearing on the list seems to suggest laziness on the part of the individuals polled. It’s certainly a well-known book, but it’s hardly well-written what with its conclusion being a cheap trick. Ah well, I guess McEwan’s anti-feminism is appealing enough to overcome such stylistic deficiencies.

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  46. Pingback: Book Group Buzz - Discussion of Book Clubs, Reading Lists, and Literary News - Booklist Online » Blog Archive » Best Books of a New Century?
  47. Pingback: etcetera — Best Books of the Millennium Countdown
  48. Pingback: I’m a Corrections Fan But I’m Beginning to Understand Why I Shouldn’t Be « Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes
  49. Pingback: Three new books on my nightstand « Extemporaneous Expressions
  50. Pingback: Best Books of the Millenium? | BOOK CLUB CLASSICS!
  51. Pingback: The Known World by Edward P. Jones « Hungry Like the Woolf
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  54. Pingback: Great Years for Books « Hungry Like the Woolf
  55. Pingback: Lists, Lists, Lists! And Other End-of-Decade Obsessions | Nostalgia
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  59. The best novel I’ve ever read, a fabulous book that anyone with a uterus ought to own is The Lost Daughter by Daralyse Lyons. It is the most fabulous work of literature I’ve ever read, rich with character, plot, and subtext…

  60. Pingback: links for 2010-01-02 « Rumblegumption

  61. Wow. No J.M Coetzee. In fact, no African authors whatsoever. Well done! *facetious laughter*

  63. Pingback: Millions' Best Fiction of the Millenium (so far) | BOOK CLUB CLASSICS!
  64. Pingback: The New Sociology, or, in Praise of the Middle Zone « Lee Konstantinou
  65. Pingback: Books & Authors » Lit Links for 6/23: Summer Reading Extravaganza!

  66. is this a ‘worst’ list? did i click the correct link? ‘corrections’ is #1 and ‘known world’ is #2?! are you JOKING?! this millennium list shows the sad state of modern fiction.

  67. Pingback: jenandthepen

  69. How is it possible that _Infinite Jest_ isn’t on this list?!! I know that this “Top 20” is now over two years old, but still, I’m shocked. DFW’s masterpiece bests most of the novels on this list, in my opinion (if not all of them — hey, I don’t pretend to objectivity!). I won’t name names, but while I agree that approximately 50% of those books (/authors) listed are well-deserving of praise, I am entirely flabbergasted that such a well-read and discerning panel of writers and readers neglected to honor _Infinite Jest_ (/DFW).

    p.s. Franzen’s _The Corrections_… at #1?!! I can almost guarantee that Franzen himself would agree with me (e.g. that _Infinite Jest_ is far more worthy of the blue-ribbon prize).

  71. Pingback: Things Read Today – modern day game of thrones, best of the millenium, memory palaces, and navel-gazing bullshit « Anagrams
  72. Pingback: Indian Fiction in America | James Russell Ament
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From the Newsstand Lists Notable Articles

The Franzen Cover and a Brief History of Time

From the Newsstand Lists Notable Articles
August 16, 2010 | 15 books mentioned 17 8 min read

Jonathan Franzen occupies the cover of this week’s Time, and, as the magazine will happily point out, he’s the first novelist to do so in “more than a decade.” The Franzen cover—and the Franzen headline: “Great American Novelist”—is a pretty transparent bit of attention-mongering. After all, Franzen’s predecessor, Stephen King, got only one paragraph in his cover story, and Time profiled Franzen only four years ago. (Both Franzen stories include lots of bird watching and Lev Grossman.)

Still, Time could use a boost as much as literature, and it’s hard to fault the magazine. In fact, its choice of Franzen provides an opportunity to look back at Time‘s long history as literary arbiter and evangelist.

In The Powers That Be, David Halberstam writes that Time impresario Henry Luce

had a powerful sense of what people should read, what was good for them to read, and an essential belief worthy of the best journalist, that any subject of importance could be made interesting. Thus the cover story, the personalizing of issues so that a lay reader could become more interested and more involved in serious reading matter.

This same impulse seems to be at work in Time‘s Franzen cover. (Under the headline it reads: “His characters don’t solve mysteries, have magical powers or live in the future.”) Franzen himself has remarked on it. In his famous Harper’s essay “Perchance to Dream,” he writes that “my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover.”

Franzen ends up arguing that a shift in Time‘s cover choices—from James Joyce to Scott Turow—offers more proof of America’s cultural decline. But just about every interaction between Time and a literary type has been characterized by a waffling between reaching out and selling out that, today, we’d describe as Franzean. Two favorite examples: When Bennett Cerf tried to convince William Faulkner to do a second Time cover, 15 years after his first, Faulkner asked for an estimate on how much it would add to Random House’s bottom line so that he could simply reimburse the publisher. In The Prisoner of Sex, Norman Mailer—who seems to have married Jeanne Campbell, Luce’s former mistress, for revenge as much as for love—recalls Time‘s offer of “a cover story on the author’s reactions to the most prominent phenomenon of the summer season: the extraordinary surge of interest in Women’s Liberation.” Despite having a movie to promote, Mailer decides that “only a fool would throw serious remarks into the hopper at Time.”

In 1923, Joseph Conrad appeared on Time‘s first bookish cover and its sixth overall. The story began:

Joseph Conrad, rover of the seven seas, has never set foot in the United States. Now he is coming. At about the end of this month the man who holds probably the most exalted position in contemporary English letters is to arrive here for a visit which it is hoped will last through May.

And that’s about it. Conrad’s entire cover story ran only 425 words, a standard length for early Time articles, and this first batch of literary covers were mostly linked to reviews. Thanks to the magazine’s short and punchy house style, these reviews always managed to include some biographical information. (The section on “The Author” came right after the one on “The Significance.”)

By the 1930s, though, you could see a formula beginning to set — a personalized opening, a capsule biography, some detailed description (Willa Cather “looks and talks like a kindly, sensible Middle-Western housewife, stout, low-heeled, good at marketing and mending“), and, above all, a few kind words about the author’s latest. Given Time‘s practice of deploying multiple reporters, these profiles were often the most thorough or invasive of their time. (The J. D. Salinger cover story is a good example of this.) Given Time‘s goal of reaching the broadest possible audience, these profiles also turned their subjects into rather flat characters: Cather the housewife, Hemingway the hunter, and so on.

The other thing to say about Time‘s audience is that, from the beginning, the magazine has paid attention to lowbrow lit. Its cover story on E. Phillips Oppenheim praises his “light fiction” and opens with a mutually flattering comparison to Henry Ford, and this is one of many such examples. In fact, after surveying its literary history, I’m more surprised that Time hasn’t put Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer on its cover than that Jonathan Franzen made the cut. (Time did put Harry Potter on its cover for what was essentially a profile of J. K. Rowling.)

Below, you too can survey this history through links to the covers and cover stories for each of Time‘s literary stars. Read them to chuckle at the magazine’s weakness for hype (Robinson Jeffers is someone “a considerable public now considers the most impressive poet the U. S. has yet produced“). Read them to get a contemporary perspective on some historical figures (though don’t expect the best and the brightest: Lillian Ross‘s New Yorker profile of Hemingway, for example, is much better than Time‘s). Read them to marvel at Time‘s uncanny ability to feature the best writers’ worst books. Most of all, read them to watch how this red-bordered cultural institution ferries between the high and the low. The Virginia Woolf cover story is especially good at this, but all of them do it to one degree or another. Even Jonathan Franzen’s.

Methods

Time put 14 authors on its cover in the 1920s, 23 in the 1930s, seven in the 1940s, 11 in the 1950s, 10 in the 1960s, eight in the 1970s, four in the 1980s, four in the 1990s, one in the 2000s, and, now, Franzen in 2010. That adds up to an objective-sounding 83, but I should explain my principles in compiling this list. While Time also likes to revive dead authors—Faulkner, for example, submitted to that second cover in 1964, two years after his death—I included only living authors who wrote primarily imaginative work: novels, plays, or poetry. These criteria still left room for some judgment calls—William Allen White did not make the list because he’s better known for his politics and his newspapering (and because White’s cover story focuses on his Kansas gubernatorial campaign), but I kept Upton Sinclair and the cover story on his California gubernatorial campaign. Feel free to dispute my choices or to add anyone I missed in the comments.

Each entry includes the author’s name and, where applicable, the name of the work that prompted the profile. There are also links to a print-friendly version of the cover story and to an image of the cover itself. In fact, thanks to Time‘s new paywall, the Franzen cover story is the only one you can’t read online.

The List

1920-1929

Joseph Conrad. “A Great Novelist to Visit the United States.” April 7, 1923. Cover image.

Israel Zangwill. “Imaginary Interviews: Israel Zangwill, Englishman of Letters.” September 17, 1923. Cover image.

George Bernard Shaw / Saint Joan. “Saint Joan.” December 24, 1923. Cover image.

Eugene O’Neill / All God’s Chillun Got Wings. “All God’s Chillun.” March 17, 1924. Cover image.

Amy Lowell / John Keats. “Miss Lowell Eulogizes, Analyzes, Forgives the Poet.” March 2, 1925. Cover image.

Booth Tarkington / Women. “Mr. Tarkington’s Ladies.” December 21, 1925. Cover image.

H. G. Wells / The World of William Clissold. “Wells, Wells, Wells.” September 20, 1926. Cover image.

Rudyard Kipling / Debits and Credits. “Loud Kipling.” September 27, 1926. Cover image.

Sinclair Lewis / Elmer Gantry. “Bible Boar.” March 14, 1927. Cover image.

Michael Arlen / Young Men in Love. “Mayfairian.” May 2, 1927. Cover image.

E. Phillips Oppenheim / Miss Brown of X. Y. O.. “Number 100.” September 12, 1927. Cover image.

Eugene O’Neill / Strange Interlude. “New Plays in Manhattan.” February 13, 1928. Cover image.

Edgar Wallace / People. “Master of Mass.” April 15, 1929. Cover image.

Robert Bridges / The Testament of Beauty. “Laureate Testifies.” December 2, 1929. Cover image.

1930-1939

Willa Cather / Shadows on the Rock. “Amen, Sinner.” August 3, 1931. Cover image.

Eugene O’Neill / Mourning Becomes Electra. “Greece in New England.” November 2, 1931. Cover image.

Philip Barry / The Animal Kingdom. “Angel Like Lindbergh.” January 25, 1932. Cover image.

Robinson Jeffers / Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems. “Harrowed Marrow.” April 4, 1932. Cover image.

T. E. Lawrence / The Odyssey [trans.]. “Scholar-Warrior.” November 28, 1932. Cover image.

Noel Coward / Design for Living. “First Englishman.” January 30, 1933. Cover image.

Gertrude Stein / The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. “Stem’s Way.” September 11, 1933. Cover image.

James Joyce / Ulysses. “Ulysses Lands.” January 29, 1934. Cover image.

Thomas Mann / Joseph and his Brothers. “Great Mann.” June 11, 1934. Cover image.

Upton Sinclair. “California Climax.” October 24, 1934. Cover image.

Maxwell Anderson / Valley Forge. “Washington, by Anderson.” December 10, 1934. Cover image.

Kathleen Norris / Woman in Love. “Golden Honeymoon.” January 28, 1935. Cover image.

John Buchan. “Canada’s New Governor General.” October 21, 1935. Cover image.

George Santayana / The Last Puritan. “Philosophic Footballer.” February 3, 1936. Cover image.

John Dos Passos / U.S.A. trilogy. “Private Historian.” August 10, 1936. Cover image.

Virginia Woolf / The Years. “How Time Passes.” April 12, 1937. Cover image.

Sidney Howard. “Meat Show Meeting.” June 7, 1937. Cover image.

Ernest Hemingway / To Have and To Have Not. “All Stones End . . . .” October 18, 1937. Cover image.

Holger Cahill. “In the Business District.” September 5, 1938. Cover image.

Andre Malraux / Man’s Hope. “News From Spain.” November 7, 1938. Cover image.

William Faulkner / The Wild Palms. “When the Dam Breaks.” January 23, 1939. Cover image.

James Joyce / Finnegans Wake. “Night Thoughts.” May 8, 1939. Cover image.

Carl Sandburg / Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. “Your Obt. Servt.” December 4, 1939. Cover image.

1940-1949

Kenneth Roberts / Oliver Wiswell. “Angry Man’s Romance.” November 25, 1940. Cover image.

Sinclair Lewis / Cass Timberlane. “Laureate of the Booboisie.” October 8, 1945. Cover image.

Craig Rice. “Mulled Murder, with Spice.” January 28, 1946. Cover image.

Eugene O’Neill / The Iceman Cometh. “The Ordeal of Eugene O’Neill.” October 21, 1946. Cover image.

C. S. Lewis / The Screwtape Letters. “Don v. Devil.” September 8, 1947. Cover image.

Rebecca West / The Meaning of Treason. “Circles of Perdition.” December 8, 1947. Cover image.

John P. Marquand / Point of No Return. “Spruce Street Boy.” March 7, 1949. Cover image.

1950-1959

T. S. Eliot / The Cocktail Party. “Mr. Eliot.” March 6, 1950. Cover image.

Robert Frost. “Pawky Poet.” October 9, 1950. Cover image.

James Thurber. “Priceless Gift of Laughter.” July 9, 1951. Cover image.

Graham Greene / The End of the Affair. “Shocker.” October 29, 1951. Cover image.

Joyce Carey / Prisoner of Grace. “Cheerful Protestant.” October 20, 1952. Cover image.

Thorton Wilder. “An Obliging Man.” January 12, 1953. Cover image.

Ernest Hemingway. “An American Storyteller.” December 13, 1954. Cover image.

Andre Malraux. “Man’s Quest.” July 18, 1955. Cover image.

Herman Wouk / Marjorie Morningstar. “The Wouk Mutiny.” September 5, 1955. Cover image.

James Gould Cozzens / By Love Possessed. “The Hermit of Lambertville.” September 2, 1957. Cover image.

Boris Pasternak / Doctor Zhivago. “The Passion of Yurii Zhivago.” December 15, 1958. Cover image.

1960-1969

J. D. Salinger / Franny and Zooey. “Sonny.” September 15, 1961. Cover image.

Tennessee Williams / The Night of the Iguana. “The Angel of the Odd.” March 9, 1962. Cover image.

Evgeny Evtushenko. “A Longing for Truth.” April 13, 1962. Cover image.

James Baldwin / The Fire Next Time. “The Root of the Negro Problem.” May 7, 1963. Cover image.

John Cheever / The Wapshot Scandal. “Ovid in Ossining.” March 27, 1964. Cover image.

Phyllis McGinley. “The Telltale Heart.” June 18, 1965. Cover image.

Robert Lowell. “The Second Chance.” June 2, 1967. Cover image.

John Updike / Couples. “View from the Catacombs.” April 26, 1968. Cover image.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn / In The First Circle. “The Writer as Russia’s Conscience
Headline.” September 27, 1968. Cover image.

Vladimir Nabokov / Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. “Prospero’s Progress.” May 23, 1969. Cover image.

1970-1979

Gunter Grass / Local Anaesthetic. “The Dentist’s Chair as an Allegory in Life.” April 13, 1970. Cover image.

Richard Bach / Jonathan Livingston Seagull. “It’s a Bird! It’s a Dream! It’s Supergull!” November 13, 1972. Cover image.

Norman Mailer / Marilyn. “Two Myths Converge: NM Discovers MM.” July 16, 1973. Cover image.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn / The Gulag Archipelago. “An Artist Becomes an Exile.” February 25, 1974. Cover image.

Gore Vidal / 1876. “Laughing Cassandra.” March 1, 1976. Cover image.

Alex Haley / Roots. “Why ‘Roots’ Hit Home.” February 14, 1977. Cover image.

John Le Carre / The Honourable Schoolboy. “The Spy Who Came in for the Gold.” October 3, 1977. Cover image.

Mario Puzo / Fools Die. “Paperback Godfather.” August 28, 1978. Cover image.

1980-1989

John Irving / The Hotel New Hampshire. “Life Into Art.” August 31, 1981. Cover image.

John Updike / Bech is Back. “Perennial Promises Kept.” October 18, 1982. Cover image.

Garrison Keillor / Lake Wobegon Days. “Lonesome Whistle Blowing.” November 4, 1985. Cover image.

Stephen King / It. “King of Horror.” October 6, 1986. Cover image.

1990-1999

Scott Turow / Burden of Proof. “Burden of Success.” June 11, 1990. Cover image.

Michael Crichton / The Lost World. “Meet Mr. Wizard.” September 25, 1995. Cover image.

Toni Morrison / Paradise. “Paradise Found.” January 19, 1998. Cover image.

Tom Wolfe / A Man in Full. “Tom Wolfe Writes Again.” November 2, 1998. Cover image.

2000-2009

Stephen King / “Riding the Bullet.” “Everyone’s A Star.com.” March 27, 2000. Cover image.

2010

Jonathan Franzen / Freedom. “Great American Novelist.” August 23, 2010. Cover image.

From the Newsstand Lists Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 17 8 min read
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Lists Notable Articles

The Most Anticipated Books of 2008

Lists Notable Articles
January 4, 2008 | 15 books mentioned 16 6 min read

With 2007 in the rear view mirror, we now look ahead to a new year of reading, one packed with intriguing titles.Let’s kick off with a pair that Garth was already pining for a year ago:Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) won the Prix Goncourt and was a runaway bestseller in France. Not bad for a novel that runs over 900 pages. The Kindly Ones has been generating buzz on this continent for a while now, with Forbes asking “2008’s Hottest Book?” back in 2006. The delay, of course, is the translation, which many have suggested is quite an undertaking for this complex volume. Literature-in-translation headquarters, The Literary Saloon, meanwhile, has been following the progress, and recent accounts indicate that the going is slow. Many readers are hoping to get their hands on this one in 2008, but my sources at HarperCollins tell me 2009 is a likelier bet. Of course, you could read it in French.The other book, Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (we were 600 years off when we wrote about it last year), also lacks a release date, but its arrival seems somewhat more tangible in that the translator has at least been identified – it’s Natasha Wimmer. Late last month she told the Times’ book blog that she was just finishing up. She added, “Long stretches of the novel are set on the Mexico-U.S. border and inside a prison. And that’s not all. Bolano really gives the translator a workout. I also researched Black Panther history, pseudo-academic jargon (actually, some of that came naturally), World War II German army terminology, Soviet rhetoric, boxing lingo, obscure forms of divination and forensic science vocabulary, among other things. If that makes the novel sound like a hodgepodge, I promise it’s not. Even the most obscure detours are thoroughly Bolano-ized – filtered through his weird, ominous, comic worldview.” The Spanish speakers among us can already have this one in hand if they want.Already out or coming soon: 2006’s surprise Pulitzer winner for March, Geraldine Brooks, has another novel out that draws from both literary and literal history. Last time it was the Civil War and Little Women, with The People of the Book, it’s World War II and the Sarajevo Haggadah. If you want to learn more about the famed Haggadah and the real-life events that inspired Brooks’ novel, there was a recent New Yorker story on the topic (which is sadly not available online.)Roddy Doyle’s new collection of stories, The Deportees, includes one that revisits characters from his iconic novel The Commitments. Of the collection, The Independent writes, “Charm and animation are the qualities that count with Doyle’s deportees, as he goes about sticking up for disparaged incomers in a context of Dublin demotic exuberance.”Adam Langer decamps Chicago, the stomping ground of his last two novels, for his new book Ellington Boulevard, “an ode to New York” according to the catalog copy. The book, says The Daily News, “tells the story of one apartment before, during and after the boom years in city real estate. 2B is on W. 106th St. and a new landlord is looking to make a killing.”February: Lauren Groff’s debut, The Monsters of Templeton arrives on the scene with a nice boost from Stephen King, who way back last summer had this to say about the book in Entertainment Weekly: “The sense of sadness I feel at the approaching end of The Monsters of Templeton isn’t just because the story’s going to be over; when you read a good one – and this is a very good one – those feelings are deepened by the realization that you probably won’t tie into anything that much fun again for a long time.” That taken together with novel’s first line – “The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.” – is enough to pique the interest of many a reader, I’d imagine.In keeping with the theme of debut novels with impressive backers, Ceridwen Dovey, who grew up in South Africa and Australia, scored blurbs from J.M. Coetzee and Colum McCann for Blood Kin, which PW describes as “a parable of a military coup as told by the ex-president’s barber, portraitist and chef.” It sounds like it may share some territory with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow. Another novel of a regime and its hangers on.In The Invention of Everything Else, Samantha Hunt has crafted an “imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker where Tesla lives out his last days,” according to the publisher’s catalog description. Hunt was one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” in 2006. We can report that, anecdotally at least, the book is generating some interest. When we requested a galley from Houghton Mifflin a few weeks ago, we were told they were all gone.March: Tobias Wolff has a handsome volume of “New and Selected” stories on the way, Our Story Begins. The title story appeared in a 1985 collection, Back in the World, reviewed here by Michiko Kakutani.April: Interesting coincidence: Richard Bausch recently told Washington Post readers about his new novel, “It’s called Peace, and is set in Italy, near Mt. Cassino, in the terrible winter of 1944. Based on something my father told me long ago.” Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been reading about the battles that raged around Cassino in the winter of 1944, in Rick Atkinson’s excellent history of the liberation of Italy, Day of Battle. I would imagine there’s much for Bausch to draw from there.Keith Gessen, of n+1 fame will see his debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, published in April. The LA Times, naming Gessen a “writer to watch,” offers back handed half-compliments, calling the book “a novel about, well, other bookish, male, Ivy League-schooled bohos in New York — their burning literary, academic and journalistic ambition, their pain. It’s a powerfully intelligent book that stylistically falls somewhere between a narcissistic wallow and a Tom Perrotta-style satire.” That may or may not be too harsh, as Gessen and company seem to inspire snark wherever they tread, but if anything, the discussion surrounding the book may be as fun to read as the book itself.Esteemed host of The Elegant Variation and friend of The Millions, Mark Sarvas will deliver his long awaited debut, Harry, Revised in April. He’s been keeping us up to date on his blog.Andrew Sean Greer also has a new book out in April, The Story of a Marriage. It’s set in 1950s San Francisco.You may have read Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Year’s End” in the year end New Yorker fiction issue. It’ll be collected with several other stories in Unaccustomed EarthMay: James Meek blew me away in 2006, with his odd and fantastical historical novel, A People’s Act of Love, which immersed readers in a world of post World War I Czech soldiers marooned in Siberian Yazyk among a mystical sect of castrati who lurk through the town like ghosts. And let’s not forget the escaped convict who claims he is being pursued by a cannibal. Meek is back in May with a much more conventional sounding effort, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, about a journalist in the Afghan mountains covering the post-9/11 war and then back, trying to make sense of the “real” world upon his return.Tim Winton is a big name among Australian readers but not so much in the States. However, his rough-edged characters and windswept, lonely landscapes will transport nearly any reader to the remoter parts of Australia with ease. His latest, Breath, coming in May, offers big-wave surfers “on the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia.”June: Regular New Yorker readers may recognize the name Uwem Akpan. The Nigerian-born native of Zimbabwe landed a coveted spot in the Debut Fiction Issue in 2005 for his story “An Ex-Mas Feast,” and he was back again 2006 with “My Parents’ Bedroom.” Both stories appear in his forthcoming debut collection, Say You’re One of Them, which seems likely to fit in well with the mini-boom of African literature that we’ve seen over the last few years.Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming novel The Enchantress of Florence sounds very ambitious. Here’s a description from the Guardian: “Machiavellian intrigues of international high politics are scarcely the preserve of our century alone and in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence, the original master of unscrupulous strategy takes a starring role. This seductive saga links the Mughal empire with the Renaissance by way of an Indian princess, Lady Black Eyes, who finds herself central to the power struggles of 16th-century Florence. A virtuoso feat of storytelling, Rushdie’s novel also reflects on the dangers that come when fantasy and reality grow too intertwined.”July: Chris Adrian wowed readers in 2006 with his post-apocalyptic novel The Children’s Hospital. That novel’s ardent fans will be pleased to get their hands on a new collection of stories called A Better Angel. The collection’s title story appeared in the New Yorker in 2006.Western Haruki Murakami fans may have heard that another of his books has been translated. This one is a memoir titled – with a casual reference to another literary giant Raymond Carver – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. On his blog Ted Mahsun notes, “The book is about his experience running in marathons. He’s quite the accomplished runner, having run in the Boston, New York and Tokyo marathons, amongst others. I didn’t think it would get translated into English since a lot of Murakami’s non-fiction which have been published in Japan gets ignored by his translators.” It’s Murakami’s only other non-fiction to appear in English besides UndergroundAugust: Paul Theroux is ready to tell us about another of his epic train rides in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: 28,000 Miles in Search of the Railway Bazaar. “Thirty years after his classic The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux revisits Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Siberia.”Date undetermined: Garth enjoyed Gregoire Bouillier’s “refreshingly odd voice” in his quirky memoir The Mystery Guest. Another memoir, Report on Myself, which won the Prix de Flore in France is forthcoming in spring 2008, but a release date has not yet been indicated.Tell us about your most anticipated books in the comments.

Lists Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 16 6 min read
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Annals of Japery Notable Articles

Read Me! Please!: Book Titles Rewritten to Get More Clicks

Annals of Japery Notable Articles
January 21, 2014 | 15 books mentioned 78 2 min read

As Upworthy-style headlines sweep the internet, aiming to snag as many clicks as possible by pandering to as many whims and obsessions as possible, the dignified mystery of the great book title stands in stark contrast. The Upworthy headline had been widely satirized on other websites and social media, including some folks applying them to book titles, so my Millions colleague Nick Moran and I were inspired to muse as well — what if books were whorishly titled, optimizing our search engines rather than our imaginations, rather than leaving us to discover who Oliver Twist was or who was proud and who was prejudiced?

Leave your own optimized book titles in the comments or on twitter with the hashtag #litworthy.

The Shiniest Guy In School Had Her at “You’re My Particular Brand of Heroin”

 

 

He Didn’t Want to Dance with Her When They First Met. Now He Really, Really Does.

 

 

Watch This Kid Burst Into Tears When He’s Refused Some More Porridge

 

 

They Told Him White Whales Were Impossible to Hunt. That’s When He Went Literally Crazy.

 

 

You Thought Millennials Were Bad? Watch These British Kids Totally Nail Chaos Theory.

 

 

Some Guy With Two First Names Proves That “Nymphet” Is The Grossest Word In English.

 

 

You’ll Never Guess Which of the Four Sisters the Hot Neighbor Kid Ends Up Married To

 

 

This Guy Didn’t Tell His New Governess About His Secret Ex-Wife In The Attic. What Happened Next Really Burned Him Up.

 

 

Watch How Complicated This Guy’s Road Trip Gets When He Lets A Group of Dwarves Plan It.

 

 

The Most Powerful Dark Wizard in the World Tried to Kill Him When He Was a Baby. On Page 4,305 You’ll Find Out Why.

 

 

We Thought We Could Beat On Against The Current Without Being Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Past. Boy, Were We Wrong.

 

 

You Know How You’ve Been Looking for the Secret to Eternal Youth? This Guy With a Really Ugly Painting in His Attic May Have Found It.

 

 

Here’s One Weird Trick To Get Out of Paying Your Rent Forever

 

 

He Paid For A Prostitute But The Pimp Punched Him Anyway. What A Phony.

Annals of Japery Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 78 2 min read
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In Person Notable Articles

A Critic’s Notebook: On Meeting Ayn Rand’s Editor at Antioch College

In Person Notable Articles
July 21, 2011 | 15 books mentioned 54 11 min read

1.
We met at a writer’s conference at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. At sixty-six, Patrick O’Connor had a roving eye and a drinking problem. A self-professed Trotskyite and anti-Stalinist from the old radical ‘30s left wing of the Democrat party, he was Ayn Rand’s editor at New American Library in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

We quickly discovered we had something in common: our aversion to Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

I was an insecure young professor of philosophy at a conservative evangelical college, with a troubled marriage and two kids. Cedarville College was four miles from Antioch, but  so distant ideologically from the famously radical Antioch that it might as well have been four light years.

I was prepared to dislike Patrick O’Connor intensely, based upon his association with a writer I considered odious. But he knocked me off balance with his first words. I later learned he was quite practiced at this.

We met in the quad during a cigarette break. Patrick O’Connor nursed a black coffee in a white ceramic mug he’d walked off with from the college cafeteria. I had a deep tan from mowing five acres of grass every week that summer, and lazing with my kids at the pool. A small man with a round face, he had a sly smile and a direct manner. We regarded each other from opposite ends of a picnic table.

Hey kid, have your good looks gotten in the way of you being taken seriously as a writer?

I deflected his question. Feeling misplaced in both a marriage and a job led to fantasies about women, art, and salvation that would later land me in world of trouble; I had already taken one of the women writers at the conference for a late night spin in my convertible, and had plans to see her that night. Somehow I had arrived at two non-original ideas:  that I needed to write fiction, not philosophy, and that my personal aesthetic should be, “I write to get the girl.” I was a hollowed out writing conference cliché, and I was sure Patrick O’Connor saw right through me.

Was I a frivolous person, impersonating a serious one? Talking to her favorite editor, I was certain that Ayn Rand did not see herself this way.

2.
On April 15, 2011, almost twenty years after my encounter with Patrick O’Connor, and almost 30 years after Ayn Rand’s death in 1982, Atlas Shrugged opened in theaters around the country. The movie is based on Rand’s bestselling dystopian novel of the same name, a literary vehicle expressing her trademark worldview: the morality of rational self-interest, or, Objectivism. The film was financed by a wealthy devotee of Ayn Rand’s work, and marketed aggressively to the Tea Party demographic by FreedomWorks, one of the prime movers in the Tea Party movement, which engaged in a massive campaign to encourage audience attendance, and to push the film into as many theaters as possible. The opening line of Atlas Shrugged — “Who is John Galt?” — has appeared on signs at Tea Party protests across America. Glenn Beck praises Atlas Shrugged regularly, and hosted a panel discussion dedicated to asking if Rand’s fiction is finally becoming reality. Once a shadowy cult presence in the margins of American life, Ayn Rand is now one of the central intellectual and cultural inspirations for the base of the Republican Party.

3.
A few days ago on Twitter someone tweeted, “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in philosophy: the search for a moral justification for selfishness.”

Ayn Rand’s books provided that moral justification for my evangelical Christian students. Atlas Shrugged, in particular. They were drawn to the fierce youthful idealism of The Fountainhead, which they found, quote, empowering. I found both novels to be insufferable. Rand was a third rate novelist of turgid prose who saw no reason to pen a sentence without making a speech.

Here is a sample sentence from Atlas Shrugged:
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call “free will” is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
As a stylist, she could be dreadful, her prose in service to her philosophy:
It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness — and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question.
A drop of rain pain in the shape of a question: “Who is John Galt.” That’s some raindrop.

4.
I don’t remember what I said to deflect Patrick O’Connor’s question — something short and inane. I was already deeply conflicted about my appearance, and felt frequently that my life was a fraud, a series of performances at home and at work. Teaching was a kind of performance art. Although I had chosen a substantive discipline, social and political philosophy, I often wondered whether this was to mask my insecurities. I felt myself to be frivolous and vain. Writing a book on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida had done nothing to dissuade me from this view, as Derrida himself was regarded as a lightweight, a “deconstructionist” more in vogue with language and literature departments than with “serious” philosophy departments in academe.

I steered the conversation to safer topics: Antioch, and Ayn Rand’s books. Antioch was a hotbed of student radicalism and curricular innovation. Two years later, four miles southeast, my “Christian” college would try to fire me for publishing a book on feminism, yet here I was in conversation with the editor of an indomitable woman from Russia, herself among the first women to be admitted to university after the Russian Revolution — an atheist and fierce critic of religion — who was nevertheless the guiding light of some of my evangelical Christian students.

The performative contradictions in that last sentence continue to astonish me.

5.
By the time I met Patrick O’Connor, I was itching for a fight about Ayn Rand. Two students were making my life hellish in class. Both were Econ students, promoting Rand as an apostle of free market capitalism and suspicious of my muddle-headed liberalism which harped about the growing chasm in Reagan’s America between the rich and the poor and the need for distributive justice. John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness? Forget it, Rawls was a wuss. Additionally, they were having difficulty with the concept of Jesus of Nazareth having compassion for the poor, like, say, Mother Teresa. Never mind that Jesus was a Jewish Mediterranean peasant, probably illiterate, with a biting critique of the rich and possessed of peasant humor — “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven” — my students weren’t buying it. It was not “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do) for these students, it was more like, “What would John Galt think.” I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about what John Galt thought. Holly and Mark were becoming royal pains and I wanted to kick Patrick O’Connor in the ass.

So when he told me that he was a Trotskyite, a Communist, and from the democratic wing of the Democratic party, I knew he was as misplaced with Rand as I was at my college.

I asked him directly: What was she like to work with? How had he managed to be that woman’s editor all those years?

Do you want to know why Ayn Rand’s books sell so well? he countered.

Well, yes.

Because she writes the best children’s literature in America, O’Connor said. The Fountainhead is practically a rite of passage for alienated youth. She writes these epic, Wagnerian things. Where the sex takes place on the very highest plane and it speaks to the kids’ highest aspirations, their youthful idealism. It’s all YA stuff.

In that case, I argued, people should grow out of her, like a phase, they should get over her ideas when they become adults.

This is America, he said. There aren’t many ideas. Ayn Rand had a few simple ones which she believed in fiercely and promoted relentlessly.

But surely you don’t agree with her philosophy? The whole Objectivism thing from Atlas Shrugged?

Of course not! But we never talked politics. I knew better.

I wanted to know just how well Ayn Rand sold, really.

She paid the bills. The lights, the gas, the heating bills, the Christmas bonuses. Here’s the thing you gotta know about publishing, kid. The publishing industry itself is basically left, but true publishers publish what they think will sell. There is very little publishing “from belief” and that’s the way it has always been. We’ll publish anything that we know will sell, and everyone — no matter what they may think of her personally — everyone, every one, admires her sales.

I asked about the “didactic nature” of her prose and he laughed.

Didactic, hell, it’s worse than that. She writes to convert!

I thought of my evangelical Christian students. They liked the idea of conversion. They’d like to convert all of godless Russia to Christianity. China, too. And of course, they wanted to “win America for Christ.” The irony of this: these good Christian kids admired an evangelical atheist who believed in conversion. My head swam.

What about Rand’s reputation for being “difficult?”

I did everything she said.

What’s everything? (I had three books in the pipeline. Naively, and un-Rand-like, I said yes to everything Macmillan and Prentice Hall told me.)

Ayn Rand wanted approval of copy, advertising, art, you name it, O’Connor said. Publishers almost never give in to these kinds of demands, but we did. Because of her sales. I told the bosses, look, it’s her bat and ball.

6.
You can get schooled at Twitter if you have the right friends. The other day someone tweeted that Facebook is the people you went to school with, and Twitter the people you wish you went to school with.

So. the other day, Maud Newton tweeted: “Irony of Atlas Shrugged, movie about great people laid low by mediocre jealous people, is that it is wholly mediocre.”

It’s been years since I spoke with Patrick O’Connor. And I’ve had time to think about Rand, about her legacy, about the way she never really went out of fashion among what John Scalzi calls the “nerd revenge porn” crowd. And I agree with O’Connor that Rand wrote children’s literature. The problem is that a lot of these people have grown up, put on colorful colonial uniforms, and are trying to shrink the nation’s budget to the size where it can be dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the bathtub. A libertarian whose ideas are as wacky as Rand’s (who in fact is named Rand) is now a United States senator in Kentucky. Former Fed Chairman and economist Alan Greenspan is a devotee of Ayn Rand. And a guy whom no one had heard of until recently, congressman Paul Ryan, (R-WI) Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has been making the GOP case for massive budget cuts that will hurt the poorest and most vulnerable among us, using principles derived from Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” of Objectivism, and requiring his staff to read her work.

Paul Ryan proposes a budget plan would cap non-security discretionary spending at $360 billion for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 and freezing it for five years. That’s equal to 2006 spending levels. Over the next decade that means cuts to education, job training, and social services of 25 percent below levels needed to maintain current services. These reductions come on top of the $38.5 billion already cut from this year’s budget.

Two-thirds of the long term budget cuts that Ryan proposes are directed at middle class and low-income people, as well as the poorest of the poor at home and abroad. At the same time, he proposes tax cuts up to 30 percent for the nation’s wealthiest corporations.

Paul Ryan and his followers have solidified the connection between Ayn Rand, the Tea Party, and the Grand Old Party, with nary an outcry from the “religious right,” Karl Rove’s “base” that put George W. Bush in power. No one that I am aware of in the religious right has called attention to the words of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah in the Bible:
Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims — laws that make misery for the poor, that rob my destitute people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children. What will you have to say on Judgment Day, when Doomsday arrives out of the blue? Who will you get to help you? What good will your money do you?

Isaiah 10:1-3, The Message translation
In lecture tours around America, Ayn Rand defended “the virtue of selfishness.” She had a long term love affair with Nathaniel Brandon, a young psychologist, who later established the Nathaniel Brandon Institute to promote Rand’s philosophy. Though it was reported that she did so with her husband’s full knowledge, it is generally acknowledged that Frank O’Connor (no relation to Patrick) found the experience to be “difficult.”

I don’t know if Patrick O’Connor got himself laid in Yellow Springs, Ohio. But the affair with the writer I met at that Antioch conference created deep pain in my family, and in hers, and led to the breakup of both marriages. In time, I came to understand the wisdom of that saying, “All love affairs are special cases, and yet at the same time each is the same case” — but in my case, it was too late.

I understand the selfishness part of Objectivism. It’s the virtue part that causes me difficulty.

7.
On the day that Atlas Shrugged opened in theatres, someone tweeted, “Republicanism is crumbling of its own avarice, lust for power, excesses, and hypocrisy. It could not be otherwise when their entire “philosophy” is based upon the works of a sociopath.”

Patrick O’Connor did not think that Ayn Rand was a sociopath—to him she was just a loveable little old Jewish lady from Leningrad– although apparently his bosses at New American Library thought otherwise.

“She can’t be Jewish, she’s a fascist!” he reported them saying.

O’Connor challenged their hypocrisy: You’ve been living off this woman for years. She’s been paying all your bills.

The philosopher Jurgen Habermas spoke often of the “legitimation crisis” that plagues late capitalism, as core communication functions in society become disabled or “colonized” by money and power. I’ve often wondered whether Patrick O’Connor believed that publishers decrying Ayn Rand as a fascist while enjoying the benefits of her labor should undergo a legitimation crisis or shut up.

Here are Ayn Rand’s own words, in Atlas Shrugged.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become tools of other men. Blood, whips, guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other.

8.
My encounter with Patrick O’Connor went to the heart of my struggles in those days: Was I a serious person? Was I really a pretty boy, flighty, without substance? Or someone serious enough to write, to take myself seriously as a writer? Ayn Rand took herself seriously and produced dreck—really dangerous stuff. She was a true believer. I no longer knew what I believed. I was carried away by the next breeze, toward the next woman, self absorbed and a wisp of the wind—but she stood as firmly planted as an oak. Rand was like Reagan: wrong but strong. She has endured, despite turgid prose and half baked ideas that were laughed out of the academy by people like me.

The year before I met Patrick O’Connor, Mary Gaitskill published a novel called Two Girls, Fat and Thin, which featured a thinly disguised Rand character, Anna Granite, and her philosophy of “Definitism.” Like the character Justine in her novel, Gaitskill had actually interviewed followers of Ayn Rand. I asked Mary Gaitskill: what is it about Ayn Rand, and why is she still here? What inspired her to write about Ayn Rand? Gaitskill wrote back:

I was inspired in part by realizing how important Ayn Rand’s ideas still were, and how deep they got into the American psyche.  I thought then (and I’ve been proved right) that she was much more influential than she was given credit for.  I didn’t have to be that smart to conclude this, I knew that Alan Greenspan had been an early devotee, and that William Buckley had taken her very seriously and that Atlas Shrugged was (according to one poll) one of the five top best-sellers in the history of the world, up there with the Bible.  I found this astonishing. Still do.

Gaitskill went on to say:

Rand appears to be so crazy, and yet she really does speak for an aspect of America, really for an aspect of human experience.  She treats big ideas in a way the common person can understand them; that is one legitimate reason for her popularity.  Something I noticed about the followers, the “cultists” that I met–they tended to be nice people yearning for bigger meaning in their lives. Most of them were not especially selfish.  It’s worth noting that most of them were also NOT people who knew Rand or were part of the early group.  Those people, the few I met, struck me as both crazy and unpleasant.   But the lower-level followers, no.  They were in their own way idealists.

9.
Patrick O’Connor believed that Ayn Rand sold because she knew who she was, she knew what she wanted, and because she spoke to people’s common dreams– the dreams of well meaning, idealistic people who want something more. I wasn’t dreaming of anything that day at Antioch, except maybe Rilke’s earnest childlike plea: Change your life. I knew that I needed to change my life, but didn’t know how. I couldn’t guide anyone reliably, anywhere, except in circles.

Saul Alinsky used to say, when you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.

Meanwhile, The Economist has reported several sharp spikes in sales of Atlas Shrugged since 2007. According to the Ayn Rand Institute, sales of the novel hit an all-time annual record that year, then reached a new record in 2008. USA Today reports that Atlas Shrugged made its debut on the USA Today Best Selling Books List on January 22, 2009, two days after President Obama’s inauguration. On April 20, Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957, hit number 65 on the list, propelled by the new movie. Released in 299 theatres, the movie made $1.7 million in its first week.

As Patrick O’Connor insisted to me in 1992, she sells.

Do you remember this joke that was circulating in the 1980s: While deconstructionists were taking over English departments, Republicans were taking over the country.

I never found that joke to be funny.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

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