A Speculative 20 Under 40, from 40 Years Ago

Lists Notable Articles
June 4, 2010 | 14 2 min read

Most people in the literary world are now aware that the New Yorker has selected the “best” 20 writers under age 40. This is a follow-up to the magazine’s 1999 list, which was fairly prescient in spotting some soon-to-be superstars in the book universe. There are some wonderful writers on the new list. The ages range from the early 20’s to right on the cusp of the big 4-0. The list is evenly split between men and women. From the names alone you get a much more international flair this time, reflecting how the world has changed in the past decade. But when you look at the 1999 list and the 2010 list side by side, one must wonder if the predictions will play out in a similar fashion. There is no doubt that within this group there will be some Pulitzers and National Book Awards to throw around. But I do worry if the world had changed so much that these young authors, despite talent or skill, won’t be able to reach the same level as their predecessors.

The majority of these writers are in their mid-to-late 30’s and are just now at the start of what we hope will be a long and fruitful career. But if you look back 40 years to the year 1970, there were many more established, award-winning authors under the age of 40. They were often times both critical and commercial successes. If the New Yorker had released a “20 under 40” list 40 years ago, it might have looked something like this…

1970

Philip Roth
Joyce Carol Oates
Raymond Carver
Donald Barthelme
John Updike
Shirley Hazzard
John Barth
Thomas Pynchon
Susan Sontag
Toni Morrison
Frank Conroy
Ken Kesey
Don Delillo
E.L. Doctorow
Jerzy Kozinski
Hunter S. Thompson
Alice Walker
Michael Crichton
Tom Wolfe
Cormac McCarthy

2010

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chris Adrian
Daniel Alarcón
David Bezmozgis
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Joshua Ferris
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Rivka Galchen
Nicole Krauss
Yiyun Li
Dinaw Mengestu
Philipp Meyer
C. E. Morgan
Téa Obreht
Z Z Packer
Karen Russell
Salvatore Scibona
Gary Shteyngart
Wells Tower

1999

George Saunders
David Foster Wallace
Sherman Alexie
Rick Moody
A.M. Homes
Allegra Goodman
William T. Vollmann
Antonya Nelson
Chang-rae Lee
Michael Chabon
Ethan Canin
Donld Antrim
Tony Earley
Jeffrey Eugenides
Junot Diaz
Jonathan Franzen
Edwidge Danticat
Jhumpa Lahiri
Nathan Englander
Matthew Klam

Bonus Link: The Risks of Fiction: On The New Yorker Writers Under 40 List

is an author and editor. He has written for publications including Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers and GOOD, among others. His latest book is The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. Jeff lives with his wife in Oklahoma.

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14 comments:

  1. Nice take on the list with the 70s version.

    For the most part, I think the 2010 list is a good one, and I hope it proves as fruitful as the lineup from 1999 (and yours from 1970).

    Others I would have liked to see on the current roster? Amanda Eyre Ward, Reif Larsen (“The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” was only sporadically good, but I really loved the book’s inventiveness), John Brandon (“Arkansas” is a weird mind trip, man), Joe Hill (to paraphrase Willie Nelson, the guy can scare the paint off a trailer hitch with his ghost stories), Kevin Brockmeier, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and Roy Kesey.

  2. Good god, that 1970 list is an absolute murders’ row–a literary equivalent of the 1927 Yankees. I wonder what the revisionist 2010 list will look like in 40 years….hope I’m around to see it.

  3. Pynchon and Thompson’s writing couldn’t be more unlike mine, but what always made me crazy about them is the passion controlled by the craft.

    All of the names on the 2010 list have the craft.

  4. Craft, but what about passion, without which craft is pointless?

    I confess I’m not familiar with most of the names on the list — I’ve read and enjoyed Wells Tower’s collection, liked Foer’s first novel but couldn’t get into the second, and was underwhelmed by Galchen’s novel. (Have read bits from a couple of the others but not enough to form an impression.)

    The 1999 list has what seems to be many more authors I would already have considered to be in mid-career — even when it came out, I would have known most of the names vs. this list, and I read more literary fiction now than I did then. I guess I have a lot of reading to do from the 2010 list.

  5. Nice 1970 list, but I think to be more realistic you’d have to find a few names that we now don’t really now. Plus, someone like say, Cormac McCarthy, wouldn’t have made the list–and that would reflect on the list now.

  7. No passion? What bunk.

    What about Adichie’s Ghosts? http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=250

    What about Alarcon’s City of Clowns? http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/06/16/030616fi_fiction2

    What about Krauss’ Last Words on Earth? http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/02/09/040209fi_fiction

    What about Russell’s Haunting Olivia? http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/06/13/050613fi_fiction

    Even readers like me that tend toward more formally inventive fiction can appreciate their passion and craft and tremendous promise.

  9. In 1970 I was seventeen and had read everybody on that list and met half of them. Now, other than David Foster Wallace I haven’t even heard of anyone on the 1999 and 2010 lists. I have to figure out if I gave up, dumbed down or just died.

  11. Pingback: Fiction Writers Review » Blog Archive » 20 Under 40, 10 Over 80, and 20 More Under 40 (40 Years Ago)

  12. I have to point out that there’s no way DeLillo could have POSSIBLY been on the 1970s list… he wrote “Americana,” his not-exactly-stellar first novel, in 1971. Even if it had been published earlier, he doesn’t begin to do his best work until the near-eighties with Running Dog… and of course in the mid-eighties there came the triumvirate of White Noise, Libra and Mao II, all of which remain among the best work of the past 40 years.

    This list and others like it, including the New Yorker’s, are just a practice in literary revisionism, backwards or forwards…

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Essays Lists

Literary Beatdowns: or, Excerpts from Smollett’s ‘Critical Review’

Essays Lists
July 27, 2016 | 2 6 min read
Nasty book reviews compel our attention, summoning the cruel voyeur in everyone that derives pleasure from the pain of others. I mean a merciless excoriation, equal parts tragedy and comedy, a review that out-writes the writing in question and betrays the very real fun to be had at the expense of bad literature. Alas, such beatdowns are hard to find these days. I say this as a reader, writer, and editor of academic book reviews, in which most criticisms, even legitimate ones, are veiled, muted, or moderated. Reviews of popular literature too err on the side of generosity, following the unspoken code of authors to review others’ books as you would have them review yours -- with obvious exceptions, for instance Michiko Kakutani’s review of Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone, described as “an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed.” Generally, readers want decorum. If what you crave is vitriol, put down your Sunday Book Review, and proceed to the grandstanding and hobby-horsing of readers’ online forums. It was not always thus. In eighteenth-century Britain, as the market for print expanded, with more readers and writers and more books than ever before, a new generation of critics emerged to hold the gate against unlettered barbarians. Tobias Smollett, who helmed The Critical Review from 1756 to 1763, never minced words in his judgment of whether a particular text was worth the paper it was printed on. A serious novelist in his own right, Smollett was famously cranky and combative, earning the nickname “learned Smelfungus” from another serious novelist, Laurence Sterne. In his fiction (Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, Launcelot Greaves, Humphry Clinker), Smollett was a master of ugly and violent comedy at a time when, as Simon Dickie writes, “Britons -- or a high proportion of them -- openly delighted in the miseries of others,” a time when people “laughed at cripples and hunchbacks…tormented lunatics and led blind men into walls…beat their servants and scoffed at the hungry peasants who crouched along the road outside every major town.” This was a hard-nosed, hard-knuckled era -- in life, in literature, and especially in literary criticism. To read Smollett’s reviews is to see a man cutting to the chase, and often to the bone. Sometimes, we take his word, believing the pilloried writer a hack or a fool or a charlatan, now justly chastised. Other times, we laugh at the colorful grousing, at the striking generality of the complaints, their detail-free applicability to almost anything, not only any bad book but any bad person, bad group, bad institution. All Smollett needed, it seems, was a target for his wrath. And as the pages of the Review attest, targets abounded -- many more, in fact, than Smollett alone could aim at, so others pitched in: Samuel Johnson, David Hume, and Oliver Goldsmith, to name a few. Specific reviewers remained anonymous, the better to create the impression of a unified voice, but writers of badly reviewed books tended to blame Smollett, returning their fire on him. It’s easy to understand that anger. Would you want your book called “a very trivial, insipid, injudicious and defective performance, without plan, method, learning, accuracy, or elegance; an unmeaning composition of shreds, rags, and remnants…a patched, a pie-bald, linsey-woolsey nothing”? (That was the assessment of a book called A New and Accurate History of South-America.) Unlike writers, readers must have found plenty of entertainment, at least in the following cases: 1. “A puny, miserable reptile has here crawl’d into existence, happily formed to elude all attack by its utter insignificance: it is indeed no small mortification to our pride that we have been obliged to bestow even so much notice upon it, as this.” – review of The Fair Citizen; or the Real Adventures of Miss Charlotte Bellmour 2. “Every line of it betrays a consciousness of guilt and shame, while it promulgates the effrontery of the author. Like an impertinent cur that has been chastised for biting the heels of a traveller, he howls and yelps, to the disturbance of the whole neighborhood. Had there been less malignity in his address, we should have looked upon him with the eyes of compassion, and left him in obscurity to plunge from one blunder to another, and flounder on in meer despair: but there is such rancour mixed with his petulance, and so much low cunning used to disguise his ignorance, that he deserves no favour, and ought to be displayed in his true colours for the benefit of the public.” – response to the rebuttal of the initial review of Remarks on Aneurisms 3. “He that thinks he can extract entertainment from an extravagant rhapsody composed of nonsense, treason, and vulgar abuse may lay out two shillings in the purchase of this pamphlet.” – review of Memoirs of the Principle Transactions of the Last War between the English and French in North America 4. “A spout that flows with a very insipid beverage! The author is very little indebted to the friends, who, he says, encouraged and assisted him in this meagre production; which is as void of spirit, amusement, and contrivance, as any piece we have ever seen offered to the public.” – review of The Spouter; or the Double Revenge 5. “The authors of the CRITICAL REVIEW are very sorry to find themselves engaged in a kind of quarrel with a very dull and scurrilous writer, who, like many other grubs, has smarted from their animadversions. A man of any character would avoid such a contest, as carefully as he would shun a scuffle with a chimney-sweeper; for, how severely soever he may chastise his antagonist, the dispute itself is disgraceful, and he may chance to carry off some of the smut that so liberally sticks to his opponent.” – response to the rebuttal of the initial review of The Fortunate Villager; or, Memoirs of Sir Andrew Thompson This last passage runs on (and on), taking up a page and a half, because Smollett himself, like his opponent, couldn’t “avoid such a contest.” He rolled around in the muck with the unfortunate writer of The Fortunate Villager, dirt and smut be damned. For one review, in 1760, Smollett was convicted of seditious libel, fined £100, and sentence to three months in prison. We should go easy on him, though. The Critical Review was politically conservative, but its purpose was to give notice, however brief, of everything off the presses, good, bad, or atrocious -- which is why that “miserable reptile” didn’t “elude all attack.” Paying attention to so much dreck was a noble and certainly an arduous endeavor, one that required patience, and in 1761 we find a complaint about “all the complicated assaults of dullness…whose progeny spring up like the dragon’s teeth which Cadmus sowed; whose heads, like those of the Hydra, are no sooner mowed down, than they reanimate as it were under the scythe, with the most astonishing increase.” Nevertheless, Smollett and company recognized good writing and praised it, whatever the genre; in fact they often overpraised books that probably didn’t deserve it. What’s more, other periodicals, then and later, could be equally severe. The Monthly Catalogue, for instance, ran a review of The Fair Citizen that concluded, “one good pudding is worth fifty modern romances.” And decades later, Francis Jeffrey, editor of the prestigious Edinburgh Review, famously began a trenchant write-up of William Wordsworth’s "The Excursion" by stating simply, “This will never do.” Jeffrey ended by arguing, “The case of Mr. Wordsworth, we perceive, is now manifestly hopeless, and we give him up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of criticism.” Not until the middle of the nineteenth century was this sort of treatment widely frowned upon. Gradually, the work of the critic was professionalized; universities came to accept literary criticism as a discipline. Book reviews became more polite and reflective. Lucky for us, though, Smollett’s battles are not lost to historical obscurity. The Critical Review is digitized and available on Google Books: search it for such flinty adjectives as “preposterous,” “insufferable,” and “execrable,” or simply drop in anywhere for the flavor of the literature and literary criticism of a less polite time. And thank Smollett for getting so dirty that readers might remain clean, not to mention amused. Image credit: Wikipedia
Essays Lists
| 2 6 min read
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Lists

Making a Novel

Lists
December 3, 2008 | 5 2 min read
In the novel writing workshop I taught this fall, I asked my students to write down as many novel devices they could think of, starting with the basics (plot, character, and so on), and continuing into more shadowy, magical territories. I participated as well, and after a few minutes I found myself writing down some unexpected stuff - not exactly devices, and yet, integral to my own novel, or to ones I'd read and admired. Afterward, we shared our lists with one another; read aloud, they sounded beautiful, and wise, and often one word would hit me in the gut and I'd think, "Yes! That is necessary to the novel!" It was a strangely inspiring exercise.What follows is the list of devices my class and I came up with. There were a few repeated ones, but for the sake of space I have only listed them only once. What would you add to this list?character, plot, language, conflict, resolution, scene, setting, theme, point of view, pacing, voice, dialogue, style, tone, detail, summary, exposition, chapters, rhythm, time (of day, of year, of life), structure, protagonist, antagonist, inciting incident, climax, mid-point, prologue, epilogue, double entendre, vernacular, structure, tension, suspense, story within a story, discomfort, context, seeming villains who turn out to be good guys, seeming good guys who turn out to be villains, description, historical period, biblical narrative form: ("and then and then and then..."), fantasy, fact, logic, dream sequence, "aha!" moment, McGuffin, red herring, discovery, desire, twist of fate, internal monologue, explanation, events, obstacles, eavesdroppers become involved in plot, autobiographical elements, prediction, magic, arbitrary action, humor, contrast (between characters, events, points of view), relationships, confession, events, growth, deus ex machina, references to literature or popular culture, innocents caught in a web of deceit, unreliable narrator, sex, perspective, flashback, slow motion, stasis, denouement, longing, motivation, beauty, surprise, sidekick, misunderstanding, secrets, entrances, exits, light
Lists
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Lists Notable Articles

The Most Anticipated Books of 2008

Lists Notable Articles
January 4, 2008 | 16 8 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.
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| 16 8 min read
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