But What If We're Wrong? (5 page)

Now, here's where things get hard.

On the one hand, we must accept Vonnegut's larger argument. We must concede that important writing finds a way to accurately represent life, and that the writing that does so will consciously intermingle with the meaningful culture of the time (impermanent though it may be). What that constitutes in our present culture is debatable, but here's a partial, plausible list . . .

• The psychological impact of the Internet on day-to-day living.
  
• The prevailing acceptance of nontraditional sexual identities.
  
• The (seemingly regular) deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers.
  
• An unclear definition of privacy.
  
• An impotent, unspecified hatred of the wealthiest “one percent.”
  
• The artistic elevation of television.
  
• The cultural recession of rock and the cultural ascension of hip-hop.
  
• The prolonging of adolescence and the avoidance of adulthood.
  
• A distrust of objective storytelling.
  
• The intermittent rebooting of normalcy in the years following 9/11.
  

I'm not saying an important book must include one of these ideas, or even an idea that would comfortably fit on this list. But it needs to include
something
that taps into what matters about the world
now
. There has to be something at stake that involves modernity. It can't just be well written or smartly plotted; a well-written, smartly plotted book can absolutely be “great,” but—within the context of this debate—“great” is not enough. (A list of great books that have been forgotten completely would be exponentially longer than the book you're reading right now.) In order to overcome such impossible odds and defeat the unrelenting ravages of time, the book has
to offer more. It has to offer a window into a world that can no longer be accessed, insulated by a sense that this particular work is the best way to do so. It must do what Vonnegut requests—reflect reality. And this is done by writing about the things that matter today, even if they won't necessarily matter tomorrow.

Yet herein lies the paradox: If an author does this
too
directly, it won't work at all.

The aforementioned “unpacking” of literature isn't just something people enjoy. It's an essential part of canonization (and not just in literature, but in every form of art). If the meaning of a book can be deduced from a rudimentary description of its palpable plot, the life span of that text is limited to the time of its release. Historically awesome art always means something different from what it superficially appears to suggest—and if future readers can't convince themselves that the ideas they're consuming are less obvious than whatever simple logic indicates, that book will disappear. The possibility that a cigar is just a cigar doesn't work with literary criticism, and that's amplified by the passage of time. Gary Shteyngart's
Super Sad True Love Story
is literally about media alienation, so it can't
really
be about media alienation. Jonathan Safran Foer's
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
is literally about the 9/11 attacks, so it can't
really
be about the 9/11 attacks. When any novel is rediscovered and culturally elevated, part of the process is creative: The adoptive generation needs to be able to decide for themselves what the deeper theme is, and it needs to be something that wasn't widely recognized by the preceding generation. In one hundred years, it's possible that the contemporary novel best illustrating media alienation will be something like
Cormac McCarthy's
The Road
, even though nobody makes that connection now. The defining 9/11 novel may end up being
Infinite Jest
, even though it was written five years before the actual event and has very little to do with New York or terrorism or global politics.
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The only detail we can all be certain of is that a novel's (eventual) interpretation will (eventually) be different from its surface meaning—and if that doesn't happen, the book won't seem significant enough to retroactively canonize.

So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them.

I realize this sounds like advice from a fortune cookie. In fact, I suspect my whole line of reasoning reads like a collection of ineffectual riddles:
“The most amazing writer of this generation is someone you've never heard of, representing a subculture we don't even recognize,
expressing ideas that don't signify what they appear to mean.”
It's a little like insisting the best musician in China is someone who's never had the opportunity to learn an instrument—even if that's true, what good is the theory without proof? But that's the wrong way to look at it. My goal is not to contradict conventional answer “X” by replacing it with unconventional answer “Y.” My goal is to think about the present in the same way we think about the past, wholly aware that such mass consideration can't happen until we reach a future that no longer includes us. And why do I want to do this? Because this is—or should be—why we invest time into thinking about anything that isn't essential or practical or imperative. The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It's a mistake that never stops being made. So while it's impossible to predict what will matter to future versions of ourselves, we can reasonably presume that whatever they elect to care about (in their own moment) will be equally temporary and ephemeral. Which doesn't necessarily provide us with any
new
answers, but does eliminate some of the wrong ones we typically fail to question.

[
8
]
“I would say the likelihood of the greatest writer of this period being totally unknown is twenty percent,” says
New Yorker
book critic Kathryn Schulz.
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“The likelihood that
he or she will be known, but not currently appreciated? Higher. That would be more like fifty-fifty.”

Schulz gave these answers off the top of her head, having no idea that this was the question I was going to ask. If I'd given her more time to consider the answer, I would not have been surprised if her response had been different (in fact, by the end of our seventy-five-minute conversation, I'd already gotten the sense that she wished she had provided a slightly lower percentage for the first part of the query and a slightly higher percentage for the second). Both figures are offhand guesstimates, impossible to justify in any conversation that doesn't take place inside a tavern. But if you happened to be inside that hypothetical tavern, the second half of the equation is certainly more fun. There is a finite threshold to how much you can debate the possibility that we don't know who somebody is, but there's unlimited bandwidth for speculation over which nondescript contemporary artist is more important than we realize. This practice is central to the entire game of criticism. Here, for example, is a line from the last paragraph of a 2015
New York Times Book Review
notice for Elisa Albert's novel
After Birth
: “No doubt
After Birth
will be shunted into one of the lesser subcanons of contemporary literature, like ‘women's fiction,' but it ought to be as essential as
The Red Badge of Courage
.” Now, I have not read
After Birth
, so I can't agree or disagree with this critic's assertion. But I've been a paid critic for enough years to know my profession regularly overrates many, many things by automatically classifying them as potentially underrated. The two terms have become nonsensically interchangeable. My current interest, however, doesn't focus on the overrated or the underrated, or even the properly rated. I'm more concerned with the unrated, and particularly things that are unrated on purpose.

[
9
]
Imagine a giant, bottom-heavy, two-dimensional pyramid.
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Imagine that every living American writer occupies a level within this structure. Imagine that every living writer is a brick.

At the top of this two-dimensional pyramid are the irrefutably elite, proven by both the length of their careers and a consensus about what those careers have meant. These bricks are writers like Philip Roth. Roth has written twenty-seven novels over a span of fifty years, many of which have been successful and all of which have been taken seriously. Someone can certainly dislike Philip Roth's ideas or argue his reputation exceeds his talent, and someone else can dismissively claim no one talks about him anymore. But even those who hate him have to open their attack by conceding his perceived greatness, since that classification is no longer dependent on the subjective opinion of any one person. The nonfiction wing of this level houses elemental tacticians like Robert Caro; someone like William T. Vollmann straddles both lines, fortified by his sublime recklessness. Even the lesser books from these writers are historically important, because—once you're
defined
as great
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—failures become biographically instructive.

The next tier encompasses those writers who are broadly classified as “great,” but who have not worked long enough to prove this designation as non-transferable. These are the likes of Jennifer Egan and Dave Eggers and Donna Tartt, plus a host of nonfiction writers who've produced meaningful, influential journalism in a relatively short time (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jon Krakauer, Lawrence Wright, et al.). If these people continue to produce new work that's comparable to their old work (or if they happen to die young), they will creep into the pyramid's elite tier. But for reasons that are (usually) beyond their control, this rarely happens. Space at the top is limited.

The third tier houses commercial writers who dependably publish major or minor bestsellers and whose success or failure is generally viewed as a reflection of how much (or how little) those books sell. These individuals are occasionally viewed as “great
at
writing,” but rarely as great writers. They are envied and discounted at the same time. They are what I call “vocally unrated”: A large amount of critical thought is directed toward explaining how these types of novels are not worth thinking about. Books purchased exclusively by women tend to get placed in this category,
14
along with legal thrillers, YA novels marketed toward
adults, novels that become action movies about dinosaurs, and anything involving weird sex or vampires or weird sex with vampires or detailed descriptions of nuclear submarines.

The fourth tier includes writers who produce good work every two or three years, alongside one glaring outlier—a good book that
becomes
the working equivalency of “great,” based on the way it is received by the public. These tend to be expertly plotted novels that tap into something universal and underserved; they sell like crazy and are inevitably converted into major motion pictures
15
that supplant the novels in the mind of the public. In 1996, this occurred twice (Alex Garland's
The Beach
and Chuck Palahniuk's
Fight Club
). A more recent example was Gillian Flynn's
Gone Girl
in 2012. The upside to this experience is that the writers become rich enough to write forever, in whatever way they choose. The downside of this experience is that the rest of those writers' careers are viewed through the prism of their singular super-success.

The fifth tier comprises authors who write decent books that are well reviewed, but
only
well reviewed. Such writers might even be described as “brilliant” in high-profile places. But the books make no impact and sell less than fifteen thousand copies. Any perceived success is mostly a media illusion. Among their limited fan base (and often in their own minds), these authors are considered criminally underrated, even if the passage of time tends to prove the opposite. They share this tier with the handful of cult
writers
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who can make a semi-decent living writing exclusively for a small, specific audience. These are the novelists working in genre fiction, six or seven poets, and nonfiction autodidacts who tend to focus on drugs and arts criticism and conspiracy theories and actual cults.

Which brings us to the final tier: the “quietly unrated.” This is the level encompassing the vast majority of American writers. The reality of publishing is that most books just
come out
. They are written, edited, marketed, and publicized—but nothing else happens. They are nominally reviewed by the trade publications that specialize in reviewing everything, and that's as far as it goes (if they receive any attention beyond that, it likely skews positive, but only because there's no point in criticizing a book nobody else has heard of). I could easily give you examples of these books, but I don't need to—just look at your own bookshelf and note any book that you wouldn't even know existed if you didn't somehow happen to possess a copy. The bulk of fantasy fiction lives in this category, along with the lesser vampire novels and self-published memoirs and self-help books that don't go viral and non-salacious unauthorized biographies and dense literary fiction that appealed only to the lone acquisition editor who got fired for acquiring it. Which is not to suggest that these books are necessarily bad, because that kind of subjective deliberation isn't even on the table.
These books are just books.
They were produced in a factory, they were made available in multiple bookstores, and (even in the worst-case
scenario) at least five hundred strangers took them home or downloaded them in exchange for money. If you put the author's name and the exact title into a search engine, it will be the first entry. The books can be found in public libraries, but not all public libraries. Their technical, physical similarities to
Goodbye, Columbus
are greater than the differences, but the key difference is that no one cared about them at the time of their release. Which will make them that much greater if someone eventually does.