Where Is the Next Classic Book?

Today’s authors attain success with one of two crowds: the mainstream and the literary. Rarely the twain shall meet.

AI-generated photo of books looking sad

Over the past few months, I have read two books that changed the way I view literature. The first was Herzog by Saul Bellow. In Herzog, the protagonist, Moses Herzog, is a lonely, paranoid, twice-divorced failed academic with a self-destructive streak. The first half of the book takes place over just a few days and consists largely of fragments of letters that Herzog writes. (It’s not clear whether Herzog ever sends any of the letters, or even if he physically writes them down.) Herzog is a deeply unlikable character who gets himself into trouble seemingly on purpose. Plus, since Herzog is an intelligent scholar of political philosophy, many of his musings are dense. Despite Herzog’s unlikability and his often-unintelligible ramblings, I was hooked by the novel from start to finish. It was the best book I had read this year—up until the next book I read.

Suttree is Cormac McCarthy’s under-appreciated gem. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, Suttree describes the life of Cornelius Suttree, an intelligent and well-bred man who casts off his prominent family sometime before the beginning of the novel to enmesh himself with the various weirdos and low-lifes who make up Knoxville’s underclass. Those unfamiliar with McCarthy’s writing style will be hard-pressed to imagine why the book made such an impact on me. McCarthy is, according to a writer at the New York Times, “the last of a generational cohort of writers who redefined American prose.” Like Blood Meridian, the book for which McCarthy is most famous, Suttree is a unique reading experience that grabs the reader by the lapels and shouts, “Pay attention!”

Among other things, what Bellow and McCarthy have in common is that they are both dead. Bellow died in 2005 (but not before describing McCarthy’s prose as “absolutely overpowering”), and McCarthy died just under a year ago as of this writing. Both writers are also considered some of the best fiction writers to have ever come out of the American literary scene. It’s likely that Bellow and McCarthy will still be read 100 years from now, in the same way that book geeks still read James Joyce and Henry James over a century after the meaty parts of their careers.

Good for Saul Bellow and Cormac McCarthy. Each writer enjoyed both literary and monetary success, achieving that much-sought-after double-whammy of being popular enough with the mainstream of American society to earn decent pay while not becoming so beloved that they earned the scorn of their fellow literary travelers. Perhaps the most striking part of this is that Bellow and McCarthy may have been among the last generation of American writers who could have this type of celebrated career.

As a mostly casual observer of today’s popular culture, I lament the current state of American literary affairs. Since my first year or so of college, I have sought out books that have stood the test of time. This has made me more of a snobbish reader (though I still try to keep at least one foot in the literary zeitgeist and, unlike some of my very snobbish friends, I still enjoy so-called “genre fiction”), and along with it, a more discerning one. There really is a world of difference in quality between, say, Stephen King and Dostoyevsky. And it isn’t clear to me that many of today’s authors will be recognized 100 years from now among the classics-inclined readers of the future.

It seems that the gulf between popular writers—those who sell millions of copies of their books and remain atop the New York Times bestseller’s list for years at a time—and literary authors of the Cormac McCarthy-Saul Bellow stripe is large and growing. As a result, the most popular writers today are those who sell lots of books but whose legacy will likely evaporate shortly after their deaths. Meanwhile, writers who innovate and would otherwise be considered literary geniuses either don’t exist or are sidelined by the overwhelming market power of the popular authors.

In preparation for writing this newsletter, I googled “top writers today.” The first promising result was this list of the “Top 15 Best Living Famous Authors Today and Their Books” from McZell Writing (it’s telling that I’ve never heard of McZell before finding this article). Here are the names: Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, John Green, Elif Shafak, Alice Walker, Khaled Hosseini, Brian Evenson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, Jerry Jenkins, Michael Chabon, Rachel Kushner, George Sauners, Jonathan Franzen, and Mark Manson. I suspect most people have only heard of the first two names on this list, though if I mentioned the titles of some of the other authors’ books (The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzon, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green), it’s possible that you’ve at least heard of maybe half of these authors. Moreover, of the first three names in that list, two of them are young-adult fiction novelists, and one (Stephen King) is not what you’d call a literary genius. 

Here’s another list, this time by The Guardian, of “Fresh voices: 50 voices you should read now.” The 2018 list contains just five authors under the “fiction” category, and only one of them, Sally Rooney, is recognizable. The others—Guy Gunaratne, David Chariandy, Jessie Greengrass, and Eley Williams—are indistinguishable from a random sample taken out of a phone book. A third list from ghostwritersandco.com again contains Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, and John Green, along with other household names such as Margaret Atwood, George R. R. Martin, and Colleen Hoover. The only authors who could be considered literary are Haruki Murakami and Atwood.

This is far from a scientific process, especially considering two of the lists I cited could have been written by bored highschoolers perusing the “popular new releases” table at Barnes & Noble. But these lists are at least instructive, since most of today’s big-name authors are mega-famous and have written books that have sold extremely well.

In contrast, here are a few authors from the past with whom most people will be familiar: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, William Shakespeare, Ralph Ellison, J. R. R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Jose Saramago, etc. Maybe I’m cherry-picking, but these authors are mostly pretty famous, and only Tolkein, Lewis, and Orwell could legitimately be considered sub-par literary names.

Why are today’s authors either not famous or not well-respected by the literary establishment? There are a few explanations that are often in tension with one another but that may nonetheless add up to a halfway-plausible description of reality.

The first is that the literary establishment is too hoity-toity for its own good. I have a lot of sympathy for this explanation. I find myself rolling my eyes and tuning out when I talk to literary types for too long. They are often well-read and intelligent, but their disdain for anything resembling mainstream success borders on pathological rather than deeply considered. This, as I mentioned, is why I like to read some Stephen King every once in a while. Even though I don’t hold King in as high regard as I do, say, Salman Rushdie, I still think he’s an incredible storyteller and has a nearly unparalleled command of plot.

The second explanation is that today’s literary authors simply aren’t as good as ones in prior years. Again, this explanation has a lot to recommend it. When I think about literary authors today, there aren’t many candidates for authors of classics. I mentioned Salman Rushdie in the previous paragraph. His Midnight’s Children is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I think it’s good enough to be read 100 years from now. Others of whom I’ve heard include Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Karl Ove Knausgard, and Jon Fosse. (Tellingly, the last two on that list are Norwegian. Perhaps the literary center of gravity has shifted across the pond for the time being.) Maybe Knausgard and Pynchon will be the only ones who will be remembered in a century. That suggests that today’s great authors aren’t as good as those who came before them.

A third explanation is that the market for literary fiction has evaporated. Partly this is due to the availability of easier-to-digest forms of entertainment like movies and TV shows, as well as more mundane and attention-span-sucking social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter. The shrinking market also has to do with our lackluster education system in which students aren’t exposed to classic works in ways that endear them to future readers. Whatever the causes of shrinking demand for literary fiction, the results are obvious: Nobody buys (or reads) books anymore. Elli Griffin recently broke down some of the publishing industry’s idiosyncrasies in a piece on her Substack. According to her analysis of a trial in an antitrust lawsuit that involved two of today’s largest publishers, just two book-publishing categories—books by celebrities and perennial bestsellers like The Bible and Very Hungry Caterpillar—“make up the entirety of the publishing industry.” Meanwhile, most books sell fewer than 1,000 copies, and about half sell fewer than a dozen copies. Even books that publishers consider smashing successes sell a paltry number of copies. Penguin Random House U.S. gives advances based on how many copies it expects books by certain authors to sell. The top tier of books are ones that sell 75,000 copies or more. Griffin has it right: “Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up?”

Whatever the explanation, it’s clear to most people that the state of literature in the U.S. today is in decline. It’s possible that someone will break out of the pack and achieve success both in terms of money and literary acclaim. But until that time, I’ll be mostly content reading books by authors who have long since met their fates.