Earlier this year, the editor of The New York Times Book Review polled several hundred authors, critics and other literary types, asking them to identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”
They decided on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but writers being writers, they first quibbled over every word of the question. By “American,” did the Review mean written by one or merely concerning the nation? What is original “fiction” in these dark days of Frey and Viswanathan? Amusingly, even “25 years” was scrutinized: what about, say, A Confederacy of Dunces, written in the ’60s and surely a product of that decade, but not published until the early ’80s?
But most pressingly, what is “best”? According to A.O. Scott, who formulated his commentary after reviewing the tally of votes, they are the books “that assume a burden of cultural importance.”
They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.
Beloved fits this bill with its story of the African American post-slavery experience, but that’s not reason alone to make it “best.” Scott offhandedly defines a “classic,” a category “best” books would fit into, as one that has become “a staple of the college literary curriculum,” as Beloved did swiftly after its publication in 1987. As I wrote recently about what makes a photograph iconic, the arbiters of artistic taste are largely nameless: the curators, critics, dealers, auctioneers and teachers. Along with White Noise, The Crying of Lot 49 and Time’s Arrow, Beloved was one of the centerpiece works of discussion in my postmodern lit class in college, taught a mere five years after its publication by a passionate man named Zackel who resembled Bob Hoskins.
At any rate, I think Beloved also works because it functions on multiple levels. You can put down your CliffsNotes and read it just as a romance-drama or as an American Gothic ghost story, and it’s still a good read. It may have won the Pulitzer for its importance, but it’s still a perennially popular seller, if I’m not mistaken.
Perhaps paradoxically, Scott suggests, if I’m understanding him correctly, the best books are consciously written to be “important.” Scott agrees Ann Beattie, for example, “is among the most gifted and prolific fiction writers of her generation”
but her books are nowhere to be found on this list; not, I would venture, because she fails to live up to the survey’s implicit criterion of importance, but because she steadfastly refuses to try.
But the rare book can still be as “important” as it is publicly popular and accessible, and there in a nutshell you have a great literary work, one with lasting power that I can still throw in my bag to read on the subway.