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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
so i suppose that my "problem" (it's not a problem really) reading the vast expanse of modern american fiction has more to do with the fact that it's still unsorted-- it's a local conversation, in the local code, with local assumptions, and some may be the next odisseys and the next brothers karamazov, but most will be a flash in the pan soon rendered irrelevant. so when confronted with the large mass of modern publishing it's hard to sort things. not that i don't enjoy the occasional flash in the pan-- some are quite good. but one has to connect with them.
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The contemporary is always about sorting through. That's its problem and its excitement, depending on you. The past comes pre-filtered. Imagine how many crap novels Russians had to wade through in the 19th C before discovering a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky, or even a Turgenev or a Gogol. The past is settled for us, just as, I imagine, our contemporary will be for future generations. Lit studies will run their 'millennial fiction' courses (or whatever they decide to call our cultural age) and speak only about Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo and a handful of others, blissfully unaware (hopefully) of names like Michael Cunningham and all those other flash-in-the-pans that we've had to deal with.