Decade in Books

Speaking in a rare 2003 interview with CBS, when asked about contemporary fiction, the writer Philip Roth concluded crankily “Oh I don’t think in twenty or twenty-five years people will read these things at all…there are just other things for people to do.” Yet the tinges of melancholy in Roth’s remarks,  his despairing attitude towards modern life,  would feed into and animate some of the decade’s most memorable books. In an age increasingly defined by growth in technology, secularism, and the standardization of culture, writers, like humanity, are being challenged as never before.

Responses to such a challenge have been varied. The decade’s most illustrious books were those from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, a fact more easy to lament than it is to deny. Whatever your reservations about Rowling’s tiresome, adverb-heavy prose style, her stories provided a  source of escapism craved by children and parents alike. They refract the realism of Tom Brown’s School Days through the fantasy genre, creating a magical world where the English schoolboy stereotype can suffuse unhindered by normal reality. Similarly sensationalist was Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, in which the typical detective story is taken to the furthest extreme.

Readers unsatisfied with the Potter phenomenon could look back, however, to Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ for more imaginative pleasures. Published in 2000,  The Amber Spyglass brought the trilogy to its climax, threading a coming of age narrative through moral and theological discussion. But what was so uplifting in Pullman’s rationalist vision would infect two of the decade’s most notable pieces of non fiction: Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Martin Amis’s The Second Plane. Although no-one would doubt Dawkins’s skills as a scientist, in this vitriolic 2006 work it is not problem-solving but problem causing that recurs. Writing with all the zeal of the evangelists he describes, Dawkins won 8.5 million readers by refusing to analyse religion on its own terms. In Amis’s 2008 collection of essays the same penchant for aggro prevails, where questions of terrorism and faith are addressed in suavely condescending prose.

But more enjoyable than Potter, more significant than Pullman and more probing than Dawkins were the works of four big, mind-altering novelists. Ian McEwan’s Atonement  and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin excelled ethically and aesthetically, lighting up modern concerns about childhood through dilemmas of authorship and what it means to play out a fictional role. Better still were the exuberant, modernist debuts from Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer, whose novels White Teeth and Everything is Illuminated poignantly elaborate the nuances of ethnic identity. Indeed, on the evidence of such writing it is less likely that Roth’s prophecy will prove true than that, in twenty five years time, Smith and Foer’s novels will be acknowledged as modern classics.

Originally published in Varsity.