Modern Books I Think Will Become Classics

McCarthy strips the prose down to almost nothing and still manages to carry the full weight of what he’s doing. The father and son walking through ash after the world has ended: the novel refuses to explain the catastrophe, refuses to offer much hope, refuses to confirm that anything the father believes about himself is true. What stays is the father’s certainty that his son is worth protecting even when protecting him seems futile. I’ve reread it twice and come away with different answers each time about whether it’s pessimistic. That’s a good sign.

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The horror of this novel is what it never says directly. Three children grow up at a boarding school, and Ishiguro gives the reader enough information to understand what they are before the characters do. The gap between what we know and what they allow themselves to understand is where the book lives. I think about Kathy’s narration — how she talks about her life as if it’s a reasonable one — more often than I think about most novels I’ve read in the last ten years.

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I have more uncertainty about this one than the others. The Goldfinch is a long, ambitious, nineteenth-century-scale novel about grief, beauty, and addiction, and it does things that most contemporary literary fiction won’t try. It also has a final fifty pages of philosophical exposition that not everyone finds earned. I think it will last — the first hundred pages are among the best sustained prose in contemporary American fiction — but this is the entry on this list where I’m least confident.

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Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad and makes it literal — an actual railway running beneath the American South. The risk of the conceit is that it becomes allegorical in a way that distances rather than implicates. It doesn’t. Each state the protagonist passes through represents a different failure mode of American racial politics, and the structure ensures that each section has to earn its place as both an argument and a story. The 2016 Pulitzer is less interesting to me than the fact that it holds up on rereading.

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The most contested book on this list. Some readers find it manipulative; others find it the most emotionally honest novel they’ve read. I don’t think the two positions are incompatible — it is manipulative, and it is honest — and Yanagihara seems to know this. The question of classic status is whether a novel that divides readers this sharply can last. I think it will, partly because the division is the point: the novel is about what we are willing to look at directly and what we need to look away from.

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The case for The Night Circus as a future classic rests almost entirely on atmosphere and reader loyalty, which I’m aware is a weaker argument than the others here. It doesn’t have the moral weight of The Road or the structural ambition of The Underground Railroad. What it has is a world that readers return to, and that’s not nothing. I’m less confident about this one than any other on the list, but I’ve watched enough people talk about it years after reading it to include it.

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Whether you believe the first story or the second story is what the novel is asking you to decide, and the question stays open. I find books that are still being debated twenty years after publication more interesting than books that are merely celebrated, and Life of Pi is still being debated. The discussion about the ending hasn’t settled. That’s usually a good sign.

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Narrated by Death, set in Nazi Germany, about a girl who steals books. The premise is doing a lot of work, and the novel earns it. Its capacity to find readers across age ranges is the argument for longevity here: it’s read by teenagers and adults, assigned in schools, and recommended between friends. Books that survive category distinctions tend to last longer than those that serve a single audience perfectly.

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Already a classic. I’m including it on this list because it illustrates the pattern I’m gesturing to with the others: it felt like a warning when it was published, then like history, and now like journalism. The books that keep changing their category without losing their formal properties tend to be the ones that last. Atwood wrote something that is still being read as a primary document.

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Already a classic. Including it here as an anchor, not a prediction. Morrison’s prose is the standard by which the others on this list are measured, whether they know it or not. The ghost of Beloved is not a metaphor for history; it is history, given a body and allowed to act. The novel is still being taught, still being argued about, still being reached for when writers want to show what American Gothic can do at its most demanding. If the others on this list are trying to become what Beloved already is, that’s a reasonable thing to aim for.

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