21st century classics?

20 years in, which novels from this century, so far, do you expect will become 'classics'?

To get the conversation started, below are the Booker Prize winners so far:

2019 The Testaments by Margaret Atwood,
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

2018 Milkman by Anna Burns

2017 Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

2016 The Sellout by Paul Beatty

2015 A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon Jones

2014 The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

2013 The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

2012 Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

2011 The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

2010 The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

2009 Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2008 The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

2007 The Gathering by Anne Enright

2006 The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

2005 The Sea by John Banville

2004 The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

2003 Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre

2002 Life of Pi by Yann Martel

2001 The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

2000 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

I have only read 2 of these novels myself: Life of Pi and The True History of the Kelly Gang. Both were excellent.

21st Century Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winners, with runners-up (from Wikipedia):

2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx
Waiting by Ha Jin
2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams
2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Servants of the Map: Stories by Andrea Barrett
You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett
2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
American Woman by Susan Choi
Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins
2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
An Unfinished Season by Ward Just
War Trash by Ha Jin
2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
The Bright Forever by Lee Martin
The March by E. L. Doctorow
2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
After This by Alice McDermott
The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
2008: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Shakespeare's Kitchen by Lore Segal
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
2009: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
All Souls by Christine Schutt
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

2010s

2010: Tinkers by Paul Harding
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet
2011: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Privileges by Jonathan Dee
The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee
2012: No award given.6
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (posthumous nominee)
2013: The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
2014: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Son by Philipp Meyer
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis
2015: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Let Me Be Frank with You by Richard Ford
The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami
Lovely, Dark, Deep by Joyce Carol Oates
2016: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen7
Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link
Maud's Line by Margaret Verble
2017: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead8
Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett
The Sport of Kings by C. E. Morgan
2018: Less by Andrew Sean Greer
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
2019: The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
There There by Tommy Orange

I would expect Wolf Hall to become a classic. I personally found it a bore, but that's just me. My favorite in your list is John Banville's The Sea.

...and this recent "top 100" from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/best-books-of-the-21st-century

My guess is that most of our guesses will be completely wrong. By the time the dust has settled and people can look back on the early 21st century with some perspective, they'll have a quite different sense of what the really important threads in 21st century literature turned out to be. Probably based on some cataclysmic 21st century historical events that haven't happened yet. Whereas we are currently looking for books that tick the boxes we thought were important forty or fifty years ago.

At least madpoet gets us off on the right foot by examining award winners, rather than our bestsellers lists, which seem to have almost no prophetic power at all.

>4 thorold: You're probably right: it may be too early to know. And looking back on some past Booker or Pulitzer winners... some are still well known and respected, but others have been quite forgotten.

I realize now that I have hardly read any of these-- I've been focusing on classics. Maybe I need to read more contemporary works.

>7 madpoet:, I rarely read anything recent myself, but for the same reason stated here: it sometimes takes decades for quality to rise to the top, and I've only so much lifetime. I figure if I go back sixty years plus and pick up only the titles that are still recognized now after that interval, I'm getting the best. Anything more recent does have important contemporary relevance, but for its literary merit I'm only guessing.

At the same time, I do appreciate that the majority opinion cannot determine what you'll like. I thought Go Set a Watchman was fantastic, but I don't see any hope now of it becoming a heralded classic. Which leaves me with no conclusion, other than my first paragraph defends "playing it safe".

I've read quite a few of the Booker winners, not so many of the Pulitzers. But I find it tricky to guess who has the staying power to be a classic, except for people like Atwood and Carey (and maybe Hollinghurst) who already established themselves in the last century. The narrow road to the deep north is one of the most impressive recent novels I've read, and Milkman another, but will people still be wanting to read about the legacy of WWII and the Northern Ireland Troubles in a century's time?

I think a book like George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo that plays with the form of the novel in an innovative way has a chance at becoming a classic.

I read a lot of contemporary fiction and I've probably read about 40% of these books. Even so, it's really hard to tell. I have different expectations for new fiction than for established classics and it's difficult to compare.

>9 thorold:

And here I thought The Narrow Road to the Deep North was a frivolous book and I would roll my eyes if it were to become a classic.

>11 lilisin: ... which is precisely the sort of reason why it’s futile for us to try to guess these things without historical perspective. We need to get a bit further away from it to decide whether it’s adding depth to western views of Japanese modern history or trivialising it.

On the other hand, taking liberties with someone else’s culture never seems to have excluded books from becoming and remaining classics. We haven’t stopped reading Mansfield Park or The Tempest or A passage to India because of what post-colonial critics said about them. If anything, they get to spend more time on the syllabus because of all that critique.

>10 japaul22: I should think experimental books are the hardest to predict: a huge proportion of the books that we thought were going to revolutionise the novel turn out to have been unreadable and/or pretentious when we come back to them, and most experimental novelists end up forgotten by all but a tiny club of fans. Whilst the few that we subsequently decide were really important were usually failures in their own time. I don’t think the 1919 reader would have tipped either Kafka or Robert Walser as future big names...

>12 thorold:, regarding failures in their own time, my favourite example is Moby Dick. Poor Melville died largely unappreciated.

The fact that it is hard to predict what will become classics is the reason on Sci-Fi movies, TV shows the characters enjoy books that are classics now rather than pick modern works to be enjoyed in the future as the new "classics"

On Star Trek the Next Gen. they do Hologram programs of Sherlock Holms, Shakespeare, Picard enjoys a 40's style noir.

In history, at my university, it is considered "history" after 50 years. I wonder if classics/books work the same way?

https://oomscholasticblog.com/post/what-makes-book-classic

>15 Tess_W:
50 years is a good cutoff point even if a bit arbitrary. Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World used 40 years in both its first and second editions.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee feels like a future classic with its multigenerational storyline about a family living through historical and political changes. But maybe in 50 years instead of 20 years (as Tess_W mentioned).

While reading about classics, I came upon an article that had novelists polled in 1936 and it asked them what current writers they thought would still be read in 2000. (https://www.openculture.com/2014/09/readers-predict-in-1936-which-novelists-would-be-read-in-2000.html) Here is the list:

Sinclair Lewis
Willa Cather
Eugene O’Neill
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Robert Frost
Theodore Dreiser
James Truslow Adams
George Santayana
Stephen Vincent Benét
James Branch Cabell

Interesting to note no Faulkner, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald.

>18 Tess_W:, also surprising who's there. I had no idea James Cabell had that high a profile at the time, thought he was niche.

>19 Cecrow: Can honestly say that I have never heard of Cabell.

>20 Tess_W:, I guess it's more accurate to say, he's niche now, lol

In the same vein as >18 Tess_W: — some time ago, I came across this agency report that appeared in quite a few newspapers in October 1938 — I don’t think I ever managed to track down the original piece in the Observer:

"Readers of The Observer were recently asked to name six characters from novels of the present century most likely to be remembered fifty years hence. Those that received the most votes were Soames Forsyte, Jeeves, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Jesse Oakroyd. Father Brown and Peter Pan! Sherlock Holmes only just missed being included in the six. ."

Interesting that those Colophon readers only thought American authors deserved classic status, whilst the Observer readers apparently hadn’t heard that anyone was writing books on the other side of the Atlantic…

I didn't recognize Jesse Oakroyd, and came up with The Good Companions by JB Priestley; sounds like a good read.

>23 Cecrow: Yes, it’s an enjoyable minor classic, and Priestley was a sharp observer of thirties England. I once went travelling for a month with that in my backpack and somehow never managed to swap it anywhere, so I read it about four times back to back. And haven’t read it since…

>18 Tess_W:

I'm struck by how accurate the list is, the only real exception being James Branch Cabell. Although I was unaware of him or James Truslow Adams (whose non-fiction is still highly regarded, apparently), the other eight remain significant figures.

>22 thorold: "we" do tend to be ethnocentric.

>18 Tess_W: Fitzgerald was largely forgotten as fringe author and only gained notoriety during the war years. I’m surprised by Hemingway. He was established by then and well known. Not sure about Faulkner.

Among that list I'm inclined to only include Sinclair Lewis.
As for Hemmingway, he does not hold up well at all: yet, to
me anyway, Fitzgerald does.

I really liked The Sea (Banville) and Milkman (Anna Burns) - definitely books that I will be reading more than once and decent candidates IMO to stay in print for a long time.

I've just finished, and thoroughly enjoyed, a reread of Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. I think this would make most lists of modern classics these days.

Whoops! Just realized this thread is about books written since 2000. Never mind!

>28MccMichaelR

I can appreciate Fitzgerald's skill, but I don't enjoy his books.

So far I've liked Hemingway's books better.