I don’t actually lose sleep calculating whether today’s award-winning books are as “great” as the greats of yesteryear (terrible failure in a critic, I know). It’s an easy argument, because everyone can think of at least one instance where it’s true. Also, many of the lousy books of yesteryear are out of print, leaving us with a, shall we say, distorted perception of the cumulative literary output. I can imagine ancient Egyptian critics of the Middle Kingdom poring over papyri and sniffing that the hieroglyphics are derivative and uninspired.
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Is today’s fiction irrelevant? The blogosphere debates: Are today’s novels merely clever where they should be deep? (via libraryland)
Quite so. I think that the only way to know if a writer can be considered a ‘great’ is to wait a few decades or, better yet, coupla hundred years. In the meantime, all we are left with are our own preferences and opinion (eg, ‘I think So-and-so is great’), but these are all that matters anyway.
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