The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40
Last year, I wrote a piece here called “The Future of Literary Fiction” , which included a list of authors that I regularly search for at Amazon.com for their upcoming novels or short story collections. In essence, it’s a personal version, exclusive of age or nationality, of other recent attempts to list the best writers of fiction. I referenced the list of authors in the 1999 “Future of American Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, which has held up extremely well. Now, TNY has published a new list of “20 under 40”, which doesn’t pretend to be a “best of” list as much as a grouping of representative voices for our current culture. This has generated a number of alternate lists, including this one at The Guardian of British authors and this tiresome and nearly incoherent screed by Lee Siegel in The Observer informing us that fiction is dead. Nonsense.
I like lists, obviously, but I think it’s pointless to confine them to age or nationality. Why leave out Dave Eggers because he’s a year too old? So, here’s my own list again, somewhat expanded, after a year’s additional reading. Sixty writers still writing great fiction.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Kazuo Ishiguro
Thomas Pynchon
Lorrie Moore
Martin Amis
Annie Dillard
Ian McEwan
T.C. Boyle
Milan Kundera
George Saunders
Nicholson Baker
Jeffrey Eugenides
Nathan Englander
Shirley Hazzard
Salman Rushdie
Jane Smiley
David Mitchell
Francine Prose
Sarah Waters
Jim Harrison
Will Self
Thom Jones
E. L. Doctorow
William Trevor
Zadie Smith
Donald Antrim
Tim O’Brian
Alice Munro
Philip Roth
Haruki Murakami
Ryu Murakami
Joyce Carol Oates
Victor Pelevin
Jonathan Franzen
Kevin Brockmeier
John Barth
Jhumpa Lahiri
Robert Coover
Denis Johnson
Richard Powers
William T. Vollmann
Cynthia Ozick
Michel Faber
Stuart Dybek
Ha Jin
Rivka Galchen
Akira Yoshimura
Charles D’Ambrosio
Alexander Hemon
Antonya Nelson
A. M. Homes
Annie Proulx
Maile Meloy
Yoko Ogawa
Jean Echenoz
Janet Frame
Geoff Dyer
Deborah Eisenberg
Jonathan Littell
Mary Gaitskill
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Chris,
Thanks for your updated list. I turned 41 on 6/13 and bought the NYer issue in an airport on 6/14. Tired enough to experience relief that I was no longer young enough to be disappointed for not being included and not even having a published book. Then, I realized that it was last year’s birthday that counted. I think I’d rather be under 40 and still eligible for jealousy.
Anyway, your list certainly has many more writers on it who have proven themselves through multiple books and decades. You have at least 10 I love and 10 I haven’t read.
A list I like is authors who didn’t publish a novel until their late thirties or later…Delillo, Exley, Dan Fante, Bukowski, and then other writers I haven’t even read but whose stories resonate… like the chap in England whose 6th or 7th attempt at the novel, published in his 60s or 70s, proved to be a rewarding one. I think he was a career civil-service employee.
Anyway, good reading to you this 4th.
Alex Kudera
Thanks, Alex. I suppose DeLillo seems like an obvious omission, but I’ve just never been sold. I loved the opening of Underworld, but couldn’t stay with it. And, I’m guilty of writing a pretty negative review of his Point Omega ( http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/120406-point-omega-by-don-delillo ). Exley I need to try again. I know a lot of people love A Fan’s Notes. Thanks for mentioning him.
Good reading to you.
Christopher
I’m not so sure if Milan Kundera is still firing on all cylinders, or if his more recent books are worth reading at all. His last non-fiction piece (I know, this is a fiction list) The Curtain was totally unnecessary.
There are three on the list that I am only hopeful are still writing, since they haven’t been heard from recently. Marquez, Kundera, and Tim O’Brien, who’s relatively young, but has been silent for quite a while. I hope we haven’t heard the last of any of them.
Dan,
Yeah, on Kundera, that’s what I’ve heard. I own some of the slimmer, newer novellas but have not been able to get into them. I’m pretty sure Immortality was Kundera’s last great book (or very good or whatever). Maybe it’s the switch to French holding him back? I like the way Nabokov arguably (perhaps indisputably) got better when he moved on to English (after Russian and German I think).
Chris,
Thanks. I tend to go for an alienated first-person protagonist, and for this reason, with Delillo, would encourage trying again with one of the first three early ones. Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street. And also White Noise. The first three aren’t considered his “big books” of course. Libra is actually quite good and his best effort at a “page turner” type of novel. I didn’t even notice he was missing from your list, but I’m glad you left his buddy Paul Auster off.
I have tried Auster, and my fellow WFTC writer Michael Antman likes his recent work a lot, but it’s all too dry for me. Not too PoMo, much of which I like a lot, just too dry. Coetzee is another of the ilk I can’t warm to. But, Libra is on my list and maybe White Noise should be too.
And Cormac McCarthy. Sixty-one!
Of Auster, I can specifically recommend only his two most recent, Man in the Dark and Invisible, both of which I thought were great moral suspense stories. I thought some of his earlier books, like Brooklyn Follies, were pretty shrugworthy, and City of Glass, part one of the New York Trilogy, was a complete cheat and a waste of time.
BTW, another fine novelist who I think belongs on any list like this would be Colm Toibin. And hey, where’s Mark Helprin — A Soldier of the Great War, The Pacific, Memoirs from Antproof Case, Refiners Fire?
I haven’t read Toibin yet and should. Helprin holds a special place off my list. I’ve tried reading all of the books Michael mentions, plus Winter’s Tale (twice), and never got past the first 50 pages of any one of them.
I derived some pleasure from ‘Identity’, less from ‘Slowness’ and absolutely none from ‘Ignorance’. With you on Immortality.
Kundera apparently inspires so much fear that in the UK he even designs his own covers, which are by and large terrible. Again I return to The Curtain- which he adorned with a chalk drawing of a curtain, pulled back to reveal an EYE.
Wow.
I must confess I’ve read the New York Trilogy about five times. Addictive little books. This was seventeen years ago or so. The Music of Chance is my favorite Auster novel. Man in the Dark did nothing for me. That’s the only one I’ve read since the mid-nineties. Invention of Solitude has two intriguing novella-length memoirs. I’ve taught the one about his dad several times, and college students seem to really get into it.
The more I hear about Kundera the person, well, yeah. Not sure if I want to buy that “n” after all.