Books of their time

Lists are fun. People like them, especially when they disagree with them. There’s a delightful feeling of smugness reading a list and discovering that the whoever compiled the list didn’t have sense enough to include an entry that you know should be on that list. Of course, being on a list means nothing. Lists are popular, but useless, especially lists like The Nation’s Favourite Books, or Top 100 Books of All Time.

If you’re interested enough in books to read an article on the best books of all time, then chances are you’ll spend most of that time ticking off all those you’ve already read and double-checking to make sure those you haven’t are on your list of books to read. The remainder of the time you’ll just spend tutting and shaking your head in disbelief.

One of the things which makes lists particularly useless is the problem of immediacy. Things which have tugged at us for some reason recently are moore likely to make it on to the list than things which may have tugged at us more strongly, but did so thirty years ago. We remember hype and noise more than content.

So, I don’t hold much stock in lists. Which is why I decided that we need another one.

Imagine you’ve been appointed Curator of Literature and your job is select books that are a reflection of the time in which they written; that is, books of their time. These won’t necessarily make it to any most popular book list, or best books list, because sometimes the best books are just too universal and concerned not with the moment, but with any moment. A book of its time either has a deep and lasting impact on the time in which it was written, or is an acute reflection of the mood and values of that era. It speaks for it in a way that other books don’t.

Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera wouldn’t make the list, although it is one of the greatest books ever written. It is a timeless book, not defined by or defining, the period in which it was written. Or take Herman Wouk’s The Cain Mutiny. Now you might think this is one of the best books you’ve ever read and it was a bestseller – but was it a book that either defined the period or grew out of the popular culture and concerns of the era? On the other hand, you might think that a book published the year before, The Catcher in the Rye, is not a particularly good book but it did encapsulate many of the concerns, feelings and culture of the era. In which case, Catcher would make the list but poor Herman would miss out.

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four wouldn’t make my list because I think it came to be a book of a time that came after it. On the other hand, I’d make a good argument that A Homage to Catalonia, which is not nearly as good, might just well make my list.

Historical novels, for one obvious reason, probably wouldn’t make the list either – but perhaps they might. Yourcenar’s The Abyss (aka Zeno of Bruges) makes it on to my list because it is very much a book that reflects prevailing mood and sensibilities, despite its historical context.

I’m going to propose five eras:

An Unsettled Peace and the Depression (1920-1945)
Cold War, Civil Heat and Counter-Culture (1946-1965)
Protest and the Personal (1966-1980)
Capitalism Unleashed, the Wall Unmade (1981-2000)
The New Millennium Years (2001-2012)

I know the eras are arbitrary, and you may disagree with them. Fine. Re-define them. I don’t think it is particularly helpful to go back prior to 1920. Already, that far back, we are at the farthest point at which cultural connection becomes too tenuous to be useful.

Just to get you started, I’m going to populate the lists with just two books from each era.

An Unsettled Peace and the Depression (1920-1945)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Cold War, Civil Heat and Counter-Culture (1946-1965)
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Protest and the Personal (1966-1980)
Slaughter House 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar

Capitalism Unleashed, the Wall Unmade (1981-2000)
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

The New Millennium Years (2001-2012)
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

You’ll notice I’ve not included any non-fiction, which is because non-fiction is almost always of its time, or comes to define an essential concern of its time, like Simone de Beauvior’s The Second Sex.

Over to you. You can leave your suggestions in the comments, or send me an email and I’ll post your suggestions. What do you think are books of their time?