ThomasLitchford

Or, to put it another way, who’s the Big Deal Novelist of my generation? (These questions are not asking the same thing, necessarily, but they both get at something that’s been sticking in my craw, lately.)

An article in Time magazine asked the first question in July 2006. The position of the article is that the last novelist who could be said to have been the voice of his generation was Douglas Coupland, who doesn’t even like the concept.

Note also that every single one of the writers to bear the title has been both white and male. Whose generation are they speaking for, exactly? “When people say generation, they’re usually not including, say, people who live in Africa, Asia and people without bank accounts,” Coupland says tartly. “It’s an exclusionary and delusional concept.”

Other authors the article names as voices of their generations are “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jay McInerney, (and) Bret Easton Ellis….”

I think I agree with Couplands’–and the article’s–assessment, that it may no longer be possible (or worthwhile) to have a single voice that speaks for an entire generation. It’s possible that the world is so interconnected and multicultural that the term “voice of a generation” is meaningless.

So that’s the reason for my other question: who’s the Big Deal Novelist? And really, what I guess I’m asking is, where are the Big Books?

Just off the top of my head, the four books that have made the biggest splashes recently–and, by “recently” I mean since I started paying attention to contemporary literature–are Infinite Jest, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, White Teeth, and The Corrections. Maybe Everything Is Illuminated. I’m talking about books the arbiters of American culture were drawn to like iron filings to so many magnets.

Certainly, more so than any of the others listed, Infinite Jest rearranged the American literary landscape. That book is in a different league. (As a writer, I feel completely demoralized by David Foster Wallace and his capabilities.)

How often does a novel like that come around?

Thinking just about the authors themselves, Zadie Smith strikes me as the most talented of the lot. Her latest, On Beauty, is a terrific novel; it’s everything that Everything Is Illuminated is not: On Beauty is a book full of well wrought characters acting out a timeless human drama; Everything Is Illuminated relies too heavily on a gimmick, and the story…well, what is the story?

Zadie Smith is the one to watch. Zadie Smith is the one to beat.