The June 14 issue of The New Yorker, perhaps the premier showcase for American fiction, features a list of “20 Under 40” — that is, 20 accomplished writers under the age of 40. Many of the names are familiar: Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nell Freudenberger, Rivka Galchen, Nicole Krauss, Gary Shteyngart, ZZ Packer, Wells Tower.
The purpose of the exercise, the editors explain, is “to offer a focused look at the talent sprouting and blooming around us,” in particular the talent of these “young fiction writers who we believe are, or will be, key to their generation, . . . the ones our grandchildren and their grandchildren will read.”
It is hard to quarrel with this hopeful forecast, particularly at a moment when it’s not certain anyone’s grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren will be reading fiction at all. But the emphasis on futurity misses an essential truth about fiction writers: They often compose their best and most lasting work when they are young. “There’s something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them ‘budding’ or ‘promising,’ when in fact they’re peaking,” Kazuo Ishigurotold an interviewer last year. Ishiguro (54 when he said this) added that since the age of 30 he had been haunted by the realization that most of the great novels had been written by authors under 40.
At the time, this anxiety struck some as comical, but history bears Ishiguro out. Even great novelists who endure in the collective memory as Prosperos, long seasoned in their “secret studies,” often performed their greatest magic when they were young. Flaubert was 29 when he began writing “Madame Bovary” (and was 34 when it was completed).Thomas Mann was 24 when he completed his first masterpiece, “Buddenbrooks.” Tolstoy, after a period of dissolution followed by military service, began writing “War and Peace” at age 34. Joyce, who wrote “Ulysses” in his 30s, already had two major works behind him. The late-blooming Proust, his youth idled in Paris salons, was only 37 when he began writing “Remembrance of Things Past.” Even Kafka, the 20th century’s most haunting exemplar of anguished paralysis, was 29 when he wrote “The Metamorphosis” and 31 when he began “The Trial.”
Unsurprisingly, in youth-obsessed America, writers have often done their best work early. Melville was 32 when “Moby-Dick” was published (after the successes of “Typee” and “Omoo”). The writers of the lost generation found their voices when they were very young: Fitz gerald (28, “The Great Gatsby”), Hemingway (27, “The Sun Also Rises”). Faulkner lagged slightly behind. He had just turned 32 when “The Sound and the Fury” was published. Then again, it was his fourth novel.
The celebrated post-World War II generation was just as precocious. Norman Mailer was only 25 when “The Naked and the Dead,” his classic, and enormous, war novel came out. And James Jones’s even longer work, “From Here to Eternity,” was published when he was 29. The indefatigable warhorses who grew up in the 1950s were also good very young: Joyce Carol Oates (31, “Them,” her fifth novel); Philip Roth (26, “Goodbye Columbus”); John Updike (28, “Rabbit, Run”); Thomas Pynchon (26, “V.”).
This isn’t to say there are no late-blooming giants of fiction. Joseph Conrad didn’t become a major writer until his 40s (after long years at sea). Katherine Anne Porter was 40 when her first short-story collection was published. Virginia Woolf entered her prime in her 40s. Norman Rush’s first novel wasn’t published until he was in his 50s. Nor is it to say that brilliant young novelists don’t mature into greater ones. Henry James peaked at about 60. Roth reached an extraordinary phase in his 60s. The Bellow of “Herzog” (49) is a greater artist than the Bellow of “The Adventures of Augie March” (38), which itself introduced a wholly new aesthetic to the English-language novel. And the Don DeLillo of “Underworld” (60) far surpasses the DeLillo of “End Zone” (35).
IT may well be that the writers singled out by The New Yorker have already written lasting works. But it is a mistake to assume that because they are young — at least according to our culture’s ever expanding notion of youth, when 40, or even 50, is “the new 30” — they must be poised midway up Parnassus, with higher achievements to come. The trouble, perhaps, is that this definition of “young writer,” which owes less to literary considerations than to the intersecting categories of sociology and marketing, muddies our understanding of how truly original, enduring fiction comes to be written. Worse, it threatens to infantilize our writers, reducing them to the condition of permanent apprentices who grind steadily toward “maturity” as they prepare to write their “breakthrough” books.
“Writers are not scholars but athletes, who grow beer bellies after 30,” as Updike (then well into his 30s) wrote in “Bech: A Book.” He was jesting, but only in part. Not every major fiction writer is a natural, but each begins with a storehouse of material and memories that often attenuate over time. Writers in their youth generally have more direct access to childhood, with its freshets of sensation and revelation. What comes later — technical refinement, command of the literary tradition, deeper understanding of the human condition — may yield different results but not always richer or more artful ones.
Certainly, Philip Roth could not have written “American Pastoral” or “Sabbath’s Theater” in his 20s. But the wisdom we associate with maturity sometimes surfaces early. Joyce was 25 when he wrote “The Dead.” He was a young man, but not a “young fiction writer.” So too with the Melville who wrote “Bartleby the Scrivener,” already a commercial washout at age 34. Yet today even writers deep into their 30s are depicted as being perpetually on the threshold, ingénues or hothouse shoots who need to be coaxed toward some hypothetical eventual flowering.
“What was notable in all the writing, above and beyond a mastery of language and of story telling, was a palpable sense of ambition,” the New Yorker editors note in the introductory essay explaining their choice of writers. “They are all aiming for greatness: fighting to get our attention, and to hold it, in a culture that is flooded with words, sounds and pictures; fighting to surprise, to entertain, to teach, and to move not only us but generations of readers to come.”
No doubt all this is true. But it was also true, in some form or other, generations and even centuries ago. Now, as then, the most meaningful “fight” waged by literary artists is interior. Their principal adversary is not a noisy culture or inattentive readers. It is themselves.
