It’s a good book, but will it last? Who cares
Recently on social media I sawan example of a seemingly perennial argument: When it comes to quality and artistic merit, books published today don’t live up to the classics of yore. According to these folks, we are in the midst of a decline in artistic quality. Today’s books, they claim, will not be remembered like the “classics.”
The cause of the decline varies, depending on who’s making the argument. Itmay be any one or combination of publishers, book critics, the internet, video games, liberals, conservatives, falling IQ’s, fluoridated water … you name it.
Today’s books just aren’t built to last, they say, like … the “Iliad.” Whocares?
Trying to predict what will be remembered a millennia or two from now is pointless as a criteria for what to read today.
It may be more helpful to know why this argument crops up so frequently. If we’re going to raise these questions, rather than running around in circles having the surface-level debate, we should dive underneath.
One obvious factor is what I call the “back inmy day” effect: It is common for people to believe that whatever the state of the world was when theywere most comfortable with the state of theworld is how theworld should be forevermore. This is a common response when it comes to teaching. Even when folks knowthat I have 20 years of experience teaching writing and have written several books on the subject itself, they will insist that what’s missing these days is sentence diagramming, because, by gum, that’s howthey learned to write.
It wasn’t. We have research stretching back before Iwas born showing that the skills of writing and sentence diagramming aren’t related, but because theywere skills learned around the same time, they are joined in people’s minds.
Something similar is atwork with literature. Even worse, some folks fear that adding to the canon somehow means devaluing what’s already there. This is the “Hall-of-Fame” effect, named after those who compare contemporary athletes to legends of the past. Cy Young had more complete games than Greg Maddux even played in his entire career. This does not mean that Maddux is not also an all-time great. Similarly, looking at a contemporary novel and saying that it’s not going to last as long as the “Iliad” isn’t actually saying all that much. This is just misplaced nostalgia.
Times change, and we’re pretty terrible at judging what’s going to last. “Lastingness” is a terrible way to judge something’s value in the moment, which explains why millions of pairs of Zubaz pants sold in the 1990s.
And you knowwhat, it’s OK if something isn’t going to last, provided it illuminates something important about the moment. “Bright Lights, Big City” by Jay McInerney was talked about as “The Great Gatsby” of the 1980s, but you don’t often find it on high school reading lists.
Also, don’t forget: At F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death, “The Great Gatsby” was lost in obscurity, only to be later resurrected. It sold more than twice as many copies in 1960 as it did the year of its release (1925).
Just because Zubaz didn’t have the staying power of Levi’s doesn’t mean itwas a mistake for us to buy so many.
OK, bad analogy maybe. Even for the brief period Zubaz were cool, theywere still ugly.
But who cares? Focus on the moment. We’ll all be gone before we knowwhat’s going to last anyway.