New Yorker plays it safe (again) with ’20 under 40′ fiction list

Despite the conceit that suggests otherwise, lists in magazines are not meant to be definitive. No, they are meant to spark debate, and to goose sales. So it is with the New Yorker‘s new list of what it says are the 20 top fiction writers in the U.S. under the age of 40. One could assume that a publication as esteemed as the New Yorker would put forth its list with a sense of finality; argue all you want, but these are the best. Period.

Nope. The editors admit to the futility of the exercise in the introduction: “The habit of list-making can seem arbitrary or absurd, leaving the list-makers endlessly open to second-guessing (although to encourage such second-guessing is perhaps the best reason to make lists).”

The problem is that the New Yorker didn’t even do that right. Seeing the list, no one would necessarily argue against any of their picks. That’s the problem. They’re safe. Here they are:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37.

I’ve read some, have noble plans to read others. But even for those whose work I haven’t read (or even read about before now), seeing their bios and reading their excepts, I can’t make a compelling case for why they shouldn’t be there. And, if the New Yorker truly wanted to do a service with this list, there would be arguments galore.

Now, they defend themselves against such attacks by pointing out how edgy a similar 1999 list was. Hogwash. After admitting that Michael Chabon and David Foster Wallace already were stars, they suggest that they also “included writers whose breakthrough books were still ahead of them. Junot Díaz was the author of a popular story collection, “Drown,” but “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was still eight years away. Jonathan Franzen had published two well-received novels, but “The Corrections,” his enormously successful National Book Award-winning work (which was excerpted in that issue), wasn’t published until 2001. Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book, the story collection “Interpreter of Maladies,” came out the same month as the fiction issue and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide.”

If The Corrections was excerpted, then it’s star was already on the rise, and Lahiri’s book, though it didn’t come out before the issue, was already tipped as a pick hit. Not exactly picking something out of the slush pile, here.

Now, it would be worse for the magazine to do just that, pick something from a complete unknown and herald it as the next big thing (It already did that with Freudenberger, who it conveniently includes on this list to perhaps bolster it’s “plucked from obscurity” practices back when she was made a star while sitting a couple of desks away from the fiction editor at… the New Yorker. But the magazine could have picked some under the radar people who don’t traffic in literary fiction. Where’s Duane Swierczynski? Or Joe Meno? Or Tao Lin? Each has shaken up fiction and storytelling in ways their peers on the list have not.

Don’t get me wrong; anything that raises the profile of young authors, and makes people think about/debate explore fiction should be praised. But the New Yorker had an opportunity to do something truly special here, and it squandered it with a predictable list that cements the status quo at a time when it ought to take pains to, in the very least nudge it just enough to induce mild discomfort.

For my look back on the 10th anniversary of the 1999 list, click here.