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By Root 818 0

mean for him what it had come to mean for me, a melancholy vision of a beautiful band built, constitutionally, to die. I had begun to imagine all of my wanderings through rock clubs and festivals, through blogs and social networks and download sites, as the meanders of a floraphile through resplendent gardens that will flourish only for a season; to regard all these remarkable new bands, seemingly inexhaustible in supply, as dazzling marigolds, begonias, impatiens—their palettes brilliant but their roots fragile, incapable of abiding a frost. Indeed, in my fevered brain the word ANNUALS now hung above my whole dark mental tableau of viral culture, with its waves upon waves of showy, brave nanostories, the spikes supplanted unceasingly by more spikes, and it gave me a bit of hope to discover that for Adam, at least, the name still spoke to something gorgeous.

BEAUTIFUL IT-CHILDREN

Not long ago the New York Times Book Review, eager to court the hoopla that attends all media rankings of the unrankable, sent a letter to hundreds of prominent writers, critics, and editors, asking them each to pick the single best work of American fiction published in the previous twenty-five years. The results were compiled into the inevitable list. Beloved, by Toni Morrison, led the brass band, with Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom quadrilogy, and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral tromping up just behind. From the color commentary offered up in the Times’s companion essay, by the critic A. O. Scott, one factoid stood out: all five of these writers had been born in the span of just six years, between 1931 and 1936. And the gerontocracy was alarmingly absolute. Of the twenty-two works that received more than one vote, only four had been written by authors born after 1945, and none at all by authors born after 1951, an age distribution that looked like so:

FIG. 2-2—AGES OF AUTHORS OF THE “BEST WORKS OF AMERICAN FICTION OF THE LAST 25 YEARS,” 2007

“In sifting through the responses,” Scott remarked, “I was surprised at how few of the highly praised, boldly ambitious books by younger writers—by which I mean writers under 50—were mentioned. One vote each for The Corrections and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, none for Infinite Jest or The Fortress of Solitude, a single vote for Richard Powers, none for William T. Vollmann, and so on.” Almost entirely missing from our notions of “great,” that is, was the work of an entire generation of well-established novelists (Franzen, Chabon, Wallace, Lethem, and the other writers Scott mentions, all of them born between 1959 and 1964) and also, one might add, a second entire generation of just-publishing writers, born in the 1970s, who were now coming along behind. One can hypothesize any number of comforting explanations for this absence (demography of the survey’s eminent voters, the lack of time for young writers’ reputations to harden), and yet the poll’s verdict, while arguably incorrect on the merits, felt terribly inevitable—it seemed hard to imagine that the slighted novels and writers Scott listed would be judged by history as “great,” in the sense with which we apply that word to Roth or Nabokov or James or Melville. The ineradicable defect lay not in the works and authors themselves but in how they had been presented to us, the way that An Important Novel by a Young Writer had, over that quarter-century, become something packaged and sold in a very particular fashion.

That is: as with indie-rock bands, the rapid appearance and disappearance of young writers is a byproduct of niche sensationalism, though in this case a sensationalism that has prevailed in the literary world for the past two decades. The basic problem can be traced back to roughly 1987, when the anointing by the Village Voice of a “literary brat pack” (including such writers as Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz) created a new paradigm by which a first-time novelist could be assessed much like a pop singer or matinee idol. Ever since then,