It’s been a busy summer for me: three far-flung weddings on three different continents, two of which we spun into short vacations; a long dog-sitting stint at my sister’s place; and a move, in the midst of all that, to a new apartment, complete with various snafus getting the internet set up. We still haven’t fully unpacked, and I still haven’t set up my desktop computer. But I’m mostly settled in, and I’ve got my decrepit 12-year-old MacBook Pro up and running—it’s time to get back on the blogging horse!
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In my absence from Online, I missed getting to comment on either ESPN’s “Top Athletes of the 21st Century” or the NYT’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” This probably should have been an opportunity for me to reflect on the fact that I don’t have to write about every piece of engagement-bait nonsense barfed up by our floundering media giants, and yet here we are.
Being lazy engagement bait, both lists are stupid on their faces—let’s get that out of the way first. Trying to rank athletes is something of a fool’s errand even within one sport, even a sport like baseball (my lifelong sporting obsession) that’s absolutely drowning in data. How do you compare pitchers to hitters? How do you compare guys who played pre-integration to those playing today? Even within a much shorter time span, can you compare the speed-crazy 1980s to the power-mad steroid era at the turn of the century? Now try to compare baseball players to basketball players. All the stats go out the window; we’re left with awards and accomplishments—championships, trophies, All-Star selections. Now compare them to water polo players and gymnasts. There are almost no points of connection. It’s an exercise in absurdity.
The absurd exercise managed to get even more absurd, albeit also more interesting, in ESPN’s hands, because—despite supposedly having polled their affiliates all over the world—they came up with an improbably U.S.-centric list, with 56 of the selections being American-born (and plenty of the remainder having attained their fame, or at least the greatest measure thereof, here). Unsurprisingly, the list, especially the top half, is very light on soccer players, and there’s almost no representation of sports that are neither popular here nor dominated by our athletes at the Olympics (one solitary cricketer, for instance, down at the very bottom). Basketball is overrepresented, in keeping with ESPN’s contractually dictated biases. But it’s the inclusion of Olympians that’s particularly perplexing, when you get down to trying to understand what the editors mean by “the top athletes,” “the greatest athletes of the 21st century,” or “the best athletes of the 21st century” (they use these terms interchangeably).
The single greatest athlete of the 21st century? Michael Phelps, apparently. Which, sure, the guy was amazing…in an athletic niche that almost nobody pays attention to, three years out of four. Maybe that's enough, though; if you’re indisputably the best ever in your sport, no matter how marginal that sport might be, you’re the greatest, right? Except that if Olympic dominance like Phelps’s is good enough for the #1 position, surely all-time great cross-country skier Marit Bjorgen and all-time great speed skater Ireen Wüst are in the top five, or at least the top ten, right? Nope—they’re not on the list at all. Are there any marathoners, any distance runners at all, any representation of Kenyan and Ethiopian dominance in those highly visible sports—ones in which far more regular people participate as amateur competitors than in things like gymnastics, ice hockey, auto racing, American football, or even, for all its recreational popularity, swimming? No, of course not. Americans don’t know them.
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In the literary world, or at least one tiny-but-influential corner thereof, a bunch of very different people approached a similar question about a completely different subject and botched it for similar reasons. The best books of the 21st century, as selected by a bunch of NYT contributors, are even more preposterously U.S.-centric than ESPN’s list of great athletes. They chose 87 books by Americans! Entire continents went unrepresented, or almost entirely unrepresented (Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was the only selection by an Asian author who lives and works in Asia). To the very limited extent that the contributors engage with Asia or Africa, it’s almost all through the eyes of Americans and a few Europeans (Min Jin Lee, Katherine Boo, Marjane Satrapi, Mohsin Hamid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Hisham Matar). All of these authors were born in Africa or Asia or have close family connections there, so it’s not like this is literary tourism or colonialism, but it is still a degree of remove from the reality of life in other countries, in other cultures—an incuriosity about the world except as communicated by the same little coterie of English-speaking MFA graduates who write all our novels, our short stories, our essays, and, of course, our book reviews.
The American literary ecosystem, dominated by a few institutions like the Times, is a small, closed system. A group of authors who are the product of the same class, the same cities, the same schools, all reviewing each other’s work—no surprise that nothing new enters the system, and that the criticism of what does get covered is invariably toothless. Book clubs and attentive individual readers pick up the books covered (and nearly always recommended) by the Times, they sell (modestly, but well enough), and the cycle continues.
It’s striking that when the Times published an alternative list of reader selections for the 100 best, 39 books were shared between the two lists. (When this second one dropped, I was online enough to peck out some salty Reddit comments on my phone.) Many of the other 61 show up as runner-up recommendations in the original list, too; there’s enormous overlap between the lists, which would be surprising in light of older stereotypical expectations of authors’ reading preferences (obscure, thorny, experimental) and those of bourgeois newspaper subscribers (middlebrow, unchallenging, conventional). Times change, I guess. Even the literati are now firmly middlebrow, inward-looking, and narrow-minded.
It’s not news that American readers are parochial; for all our imperial ambitions, we’re a famously parochial people. We don’t follow the news of the world except when our military is (or might be) involved and we know perilously little about other cultures, about geography, about the history of the rest of the world. We rarely read anything in translation, and what little we do is almost always European—mostly 19th-century classics, the occasional more recent Nobel winner. We don’t trust ourselves to recognize greatness on our own, I guess.
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What is greatness, anyway? As presented by ESPN and the NYT, it’s somewhere near the intersection of “what we know and like” and “what’s marketable.” The “top athletes,” or “top books,” sure, I’ll buy that as a list of who’s got the biggest sponsorship deals, the most Instagram followers, the most sales, the most Google searches. And the “best,” if it can’t be quantified by sabermetric number-crunching, might as well be purely subjective. But the greatest?
Maybe a quarter-century is just too short of a window for evaluating these things. When we think about the literary canon, and even when we think about the great athletes of the past, we tend to think about legacies, about influence—the first to do it, the inventors, the bar-setters, the ones who invented styles, revolutionized genres, spawned a thousand imitators. Things can be great without being good; they can be great without deserving moral approbation.
What’s the greatest TTRPG of all time? (See, I managed to find my way home eventually!) It’s D&D, obviously. It doesn’t have to be the best, it doesn’t have to be your favorite, and it doesn’t have to be unproblematic. Greatness is objective, undeniable, beyond all that.
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