Has contemporary literature lost the ambition to become “great”?
Lately I have found myself wondering whether we are living through a period in which genuinely great literature has become increasingly rare. I don’t mean that contemporary fiction is bad. On the contrary, there are many accomplished, intelligent, and beautifully written novels being published. Yet they often strike me as *very good* rather than *great* in the sense of works that fundamentally reshape our understanding of the novel or alter the way we read the world.
I realize that literary greatness can only be judged across time, but I also wonder whether we have become more hesitant, aesthetically or culturally, to produce works with that kind of ambition. Is this simply nostalgia, survivorship bias, or has something changed in the conditions under which literature is written and received?
For me, Elena Ferrante is perhaps the last contemporary novelist whose work feels genuinely canonical in scope and emotional depth, whose fiction seems likely to endure as more than a document of its historical moment. I would love to be persuaded otherwise.
Which novels published in roughly the last twenty years do you think deserve to be called *great* rather than merely *good*? I’m less interested in books that are currently fashionable and more interested in works that possess genuine aesthetic ambition and the potential for lasting significance. What recent novels should I keep an eye out for, and why?