The Pleasure of the Past in the Present

What does the nineteenth century look like to twenty-first-century US novelists? To which novels might nineteenth-century specialists turn to capture a sense of how the era is currently imagined and to what purposes? These are two of the questions sparking my reading over the last few years. Born and raised a nineteenth-century specialist, I tilted toward modern and, more recently, contemporary fiction. Take this report as a way of bridging enthusiasms. My account will not make us see the nineteenth century any more clearly in its contemporaneous context, but it should make a little more vivid what its contemporary meanings might be, for US novelists and for the rest of us. Beyond that, my inquiry considers the abiding and sustaining joy of reading the twenty-first century’s nineteenth century.

As I was researching my last book, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 (2009), it was relatively easy to find the novels that were admired in their own day but that New Critical literary history and its radical antagonists had since forgotten. That archive depended on a lively print review culture whose record, with a little ingenuity, I could collocate, so that the novels that everyone thought were especially worthwhile but that were now mostly to be retrieved from library sales—a dollar a dozen—might be recovered. And with a little more ingenuity, I could develop a story about the cultural work that this middle-class realism undertook during the mid-twentieth century. Eventually, I wondered whether the same might be done for the novels highly regarded today, since I knew that nearly every one of these would float into critical oblivion too. So I dutifully started to apply my research methods to the most recent books.

However, as Huck Finn says, I soon gave up that notion. There just wasn’t the general culture of print reviewing that there had been decades before. Yes, a couple of important new venues had emerged, but they couldn’t replace the dozens of opinion magazines, weekly newspaper supplements, daily reviews, and belles-lettres quarterlies that once did this brokering. There were, as you’d suspect, a vertiginous array of websites, including some where the discussion of new books enjoyed a level of insight and urgency that scholars might find invigorating. But there seemed no ready way to constellate them. You get the picture: there were lots of places where you could read about this person’s cherished favorite and that one’s grievous disappointment, and you could sometimes encounter eloquent, informative meditations on one title or another, but I was interested in something else—the pleasures of literary history.

So my next gambit was to start thinking about the finalists for literary prizes. Over the range of five or six, then ten, later twelve or thirteen prizes, a repository began to take shape, a trove of nearly three hundred novels (through 2013) that I’ve been reading and teaching for the better part of a decade. One award was the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for the best historical novel, conferred by the Society of American Historians. The biannual Cooper Prize distinguishes some pretty good books, but only a couple, like Richard Powers’s Gain (1999) or Philip Roth’s Plot against America (2005), are likely to show up in a literary historian’s table of contents or syllabus. In the current century, Cooper jurors seem to favor the early twentieth century, though they also like the postwar era. Still, these historians have distinguished a few recent novels treating nineteenth-century subjects. The true revelation in my hunt was how often the other prizes do too. So let me share with you some titles that you may find interesting, if you don’t know them already. Great books? Not really. They inhabit the realm of the pretty good; some appeal to a scholarly bent, but some you’ll want to read, if you haven’t already, because they’re fun. Knowing what you know about the nineteenth century, you find at once that little real knowledge translates literally while delighting...