Reading the 21st Century: Books of the Decade, 2000–2009 by Stan Persky (review)

Calling up fiction and non-fiction titles, Stan Persky surveys literature that has marked the first decade of the twenty-first century. He offers chapters, inter alia, on Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, and books about atheism, especially Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Persky is an eclectic and exuberant reader. His chapter on ‘late style,’ one of the best in Reading the 21st Century, provides a roster of works by J.M. Coetzee, Jose Saramago, and Philip Roth in relation to Edward Said’s thoughts about ‘timeliness and lateness.’ Although Persky discusses many books written in English, he also provides a healthy sampling of international works in translation. He extols Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis, written in Spanish, as well as Orhan Pamuk’s Turkish novels and Shahriar Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story, published originally in Farsi but not available to readers in Iran.

Whatever he reads, Persky looks for ‘engaging’ and ‘relevant’ writing. He excludes some notable fiction writers: Marilynne Robinson, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and others. He does not justify these exclusions, except to say that he is ‘heartened by the abundance of good work’ from which is obliged to select. Sometimes Persky reads for the sake of improvement. His chapter on twenty-first-century economics – sub-prime mortgages, free markets, and the US housing bubble that burst in 2008 – has a workmanlike quality to it. His eyes glazed over, he admits, while coming to grips with Paul Krugman’s analysis of foreign currency trading in The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.

Whatever the subject, Persky likes a good story. In a chapter about Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, he conjures up the image of storytellers sitting on a front porch telling each other stories to pass the time. While lamenting the passing of a storytelling culture, by which he means a literary culture, Persky wonders what comprises a good story and how a story grabs attention. Mendelsohn’s The Lost, he observes, is ‘filled with reflections on the nature of story itself.’ He admires ‘complex background stories’ that enrich character and plot. The authenticity of the story resides in its telling. From Soldiers of Salamis Persky quotes a sentence that confirms this insight: ‘All good tales are true tales.’ A story is good because it holds attention through details, pacing, and complexity.

As he thinks through twenty-first-century writing, Persky examines reviews from The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, or The New York Review of Books. By doing so, he creates a ‘horizon of expectation,’ as Hans Robert Jauss calls the culture of literary reception. This technique has the virtue of balancing Persky’s predilections against other opinions. For example, he cites critical reviews of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine from The Guardian, Left Business Observer, and The New York Times alongside plugs from Arundhati Roy and John Berger.

Persky grouses about the decline in reading and the corollary decline in general knowledge. He predicts an ‘impending cultural catastrophe’ of North American if not global proportions because people no longer read books. He makes clear that he is the one doing the reading, while younger generations busy themselves with video games, YouTube, Facebook, iPods, and the mobile gadgetry of connectedness. On more than one occasion, Persky complains about people yammering into their cell phones. ‘It’s fairly de rigueur these days to be armed to the teeth with technology designed to facilitate multi-tasking,’ he writes, whereas he proudly states his preference for ‘mono-tasking,’ which is to say the concentration that can be lavished upon one book at a time. There is more than a touch of humbuggery about this position. Persky sees himself as part of a ‘minuscule, beleaguered minority whose voices are pretty much lost in the din of advertising...