But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

  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.10 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.11 “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.12 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 great13—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 pictures15 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 writers16 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.

  So that’s the pyramid.

  Now, if the world were logical, certain predictions could be made about what bricks from that pyramid will have the greatest likelihood of remaining intact after centuries of erosion. Devoid of all other information, a betting man would have to select a level-one writer like Roth, just as any betting man would take the Yankees if forced to wager on who will win the World Series one hundred seasons from now. If you don’t know what the weather will be like tomorrow, assume it will be pretty much the same as today. But this would require an astonishing cultural stasis. It would not simply mean that the way we presently consume and consider Roth will be the way Roth is consumed and considered forevermore; it would mean that the manner in which we value and assess all novels will remain unchanged. It also means Roth must survive his inevitable post-life reevaluation by the first generation of academics who weren’t born until he was already gone, a scenario where there will be no room for advancement and plenty of room for diminishing perceptions (no future contrarian can provocatively claim, “Roth is actually better than everyone thought at the time,” because—at the time—everyone accepted that he was viewed as remarkable). He is the safest bet, but still not a safe bet. Which is why I find myself fixated on the third and sixth tiers of my imaginary triangle: “the unrated.” As specific examples, they all face immeasurable odds. But as a class, they share certain perverse advantages. One is that they are insulated against the shifting perception of commercial success.17 Another is the narrative potential of the unsung, unappreciated hero. But the advantage that matters most is the one that’s also most obvious: Unrated books are a neutral charge. The weight of history is not there. They have the ability to embody whatever people want, without the complication of reinvention.

  I am, against my better judgment, making a prediction: I am predicting that the future world will be fundamentally unlike our present world. And this prediction can be seen as either risky or safe, depending on how far you extend the timeline. Ask anyone reading Anna Karenina in the present day what they think of the story, and they will often mention how surprisingly contemporary it seems. That would suggest the 1877 age of Tolstoy is essentially similar to the age of today, and that the only antiquated details are the details that don’t matter. Part of me would like to believe this will always be true. But the part of me who’s writing this book is more skeptical. I think the social difference between 2016 and 2155 will be significantly more profound than the social difference between 1877 and 2016, in the same way that the 139-year gap between the publication of Anna Karenina and today is much vaster than the 139-year gap between 1877 and 1738. This acceleration is real, and it will be harder and harder for future generations to relate to “old” books in the way they were originally intended. In as little as fifty years, the language and themes of The Corrections will seem as weird and primordial as Robinson Crusoe feels to the consumer of today: It will still be readable, but that reading experience won’t reflect the human experience it describes (because the experience of being human will be something totally different).

  This is where the unrated book holds its contradictory advantage. We know what The Corrections is supposed to be about, and the public record of that knowledge will remain as static as the novel’s content. Now, could some future person reinterpret and recast its meaning to make it more pliable to her era? Yes. But it would be far more effective—and considerably more inventive—to enact that same process with a text that has no preexisting meaning. A book that is “just a book”: the forgotten airport bestseller no one took seriously or the utterly unknown memoir that can be reframed as brilliant and ultra-prescient. Instead of fitting the present (past) into the future, we will jam the present (future) into the present (past).18 And it won’t be the first time this has been done.

  Am I certain this will happen? I am not certain. I’m the opposite of certain, for motives that are even more convoluted than the ones I just expressed (more on that later). But this possibility strikes me as plausible, primarily for a reason that must never be ignored: History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “a set of lies agreed upon”). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

  But That’s the Way I Like It, Baby. I Don’t Want to Live Forever.

  First, there was rock and roll.

  Actually, that’s not true. First, there was absolutely everything else that ever existed, and then there was rock and roll, spawned sometime in the vicinity of 1950. It was named after a 1934 song by a female harmony trio known as the Boswell Sisters, although this might be more of a coincidence than a causal relationship; the term was popularized by the Cleveland radio DJ Alan Freed, a man who played black music for white audiences and unwittingly caused the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame to be built on the shores of Lake Erie, the artistic equivalent of naming North America after the first guy who happened to draw a map of it. “Rock and roll” is a technical term that denotes a specific kind of music—you can (almost) always dance to it, it (quite often) involves a piano, and it has not flourished in any meaningful way for well over fifty years, except as a novelty. This is because “rock and roll” soon morphed into “rock ’n’ roll,” a mid-sixties derivative of the same music now packaged with an ingrained mission statement: Here is art made exclusively for teenagers, self-consciously reflecting what is assumed to be their non-musical mores and values. (This period exists inside a small chronological window, beginning the night the Beatles first performed on The Ed Sullivan Show and ending with the December 1967 release of Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love.) By the dawn of 1968, “rock ’n’ roll” had evolved and expanded into “rock,” which is only a cultural designation—but a designation encompassing all popular music that has roots in “rock and roll,” including the preexisting artists who invented it.19 Almost anything can be labeled “rock”—Metallica, ABBA, Mannheim Steamroller, a haircut, a muffler. If you’re a successful tax attorney who owns a hot tub, clients will refer to you as a “rock star CPA” when describing your business to their less hip neighbors. The metaphysical conception of “rock” cuts such a wide swath that it even includes subgenres that can be applied with equal ubiquity, like punk and metal and (until the mid-nineties) hip-hop. The defining music of the first half of the twentieth century was jazz; the defining music of the second half of the twentieth century was rock, but with an ideology and saturation far more pervasive. Only television supersedes its influence. And pretty much from the moment it came into being, people who liked “rock” insisted it was dead. The critic Richard Meltzer allegedly claimed that rock was already dead in 1968. And he was wrong to the same degree that he was right.