I was a member of the entirely white, predominantly male, and somewhat doddering Modern Library editorial board that compiled a list of the hundred best novels written in English in the twentieth century. I don't want to dodge my contribution to the list's notoriety. In fact, I want to cheerfully assent to the opinion expressed in these pages that the list is “weird.” When I saw the final roster, I was a little shocked at what the ten of us had wrought, not only in respect to the list's glaring omissions (no Toni Morrison, no Patrick White, only eight women in the lot) but in respect to its generally oppressive stodginess. The voting process was partly at fault for this quality of desuetude. A luncheon meeting with a good wine that allowed for lively disputation would have soon eliminated such toothless pretenders as The Magnificent Ambersons and Zuleika Dobson.
As it was, we voted by mail ballot. Each judge checked off from a roll call of several hundred novels the works he (or, in the case of A. S. Byatt, she) thought worthy of making the cut. The books were then ranked by the number of the votes tallied. Those receiving, say, nine votes (like Ulysses and The Great Gatsby) were placed at the top of the list, and the others were rated downward accordingly. Such a procedure led to some odd (or weird) results. That Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh reached the empyrean (at Nos. 5 and 12, respectively) didn't necessarily mean they deserved such an exalted rating. It meant only that eight or nine judges just happened to believe those books belonged somewhere among the anointed hundred.
People who were legitimately exasperated by the Modern Library's inventory might take heart from a rival list drawn up by the bright members of the course in publishing at Radcliffe College, and printed in The Boston Globe and USA Today, among other papers. They would be encouraged, at least at first, by the youth of those involved (most are in their twenties) and by the fact that most are female and some nonwhite. The students’ choices, while often extravagant, are in many cases a bracing corrective to the Modern Library's pervasive air of superannuation. An example: The Catcher in the Rye, bogged down at No. 64 on our list, vaults to second place, right after The Great Gatsby.
In a way, the Radcliffe list is as proper and predictable as the Modern Library's. It pays appropriate homage to the great modernist authors: Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Steinbeck, James, Orwell, Nabokov. Yet it also affirms the importance of certain women writers not present on the other list, notably Toni Morrison (with three titles) and Flannery O'Connor. Sometimes the importance is exaggerated: Alice Walker's The Color Purple at No. 5? But most of the old fogies to whom one might rightly object have been dumped: Booth Tarkington, Arnold Bennett, James T. Farrell, Thornton Wilder, and John O'Hara. These patricides seem to be worthy ones, allowing space not only for writers whose absence was conspicuous from the Modern Library list—John Updike and Don DeLillo—but for a small yet refreshing category: children's books.
They seemed a wonderful addition. I found myself not giving a damn that Charlotte’s Web (No. 13) and Winnie-the-Pooh (No. 22) were in a much loftier position than A Passage to India (No. 59) and Sons and Lovers (No. 64). But I began to be made uneasy by the realization that many significant gains were offset by inexplicable losses. Where was the matchless Graham Greene? What happened to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth? Walker Percy's The Moviegoer was gone, as was John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle; and who should pop up in their stead but the hectoring Ayn Rand, represented by her dismal blockbusters The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
Moreover, just as the Modern Library list had done, the Radcliffe list ignored virtually all experimental fiction and many widely read contemporaries—from Beckett to Pynchon, from Joan Didion to Robert Stone. Finally, there were the profoundly eccentric rankings. Is Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy really better than anything written by Theodore Dreiser?
Somewhere in this is a lesson. Perhaps it's only that all lists are weird, but each list is weird in its own way.
[New Yorker, August 17, 1998.]