The NYT Has a 100 Best Books List, plus Alexandra Jacobs Continues to Baffle

This first part is a very minor and, perhaps, tedious thing to write about. But The New York Times is so singularly influential, I’m so invested in the book in question, and so genuinely, deeply confused by this scenario, I can’t let this pass without comment. (And it’s my newsletter, so.)

I gave Jonathan Rosen’s book The Best Minds a glowing review last year. The publisher sent me an advance copy, for obvious reasons, and I was really transported by the book. Part first-and-third-person memoir, part big-picture nonfiction, the book artfully uses the life of Michael Laudor, a close childhood friend of Rosen’s, to illustrate broader issues relating to mental illness and how we treat it, here in an America where folk anti-psychiatry remains the default attitude towards mental health. Laudor overcame a schizophrenic break and long hospitalization to graduate from Yale Law, only to later kill his fiancé in a shocking and widely-publicized attack. As Rosen demonstrates, Laudor was exceptional, yes concerning his considerable intellect and academic accomplishments but also in terms of his unusually passionate and large support system. This included a number of doctors and academics from his family’s social circle, the faculty of Yale Law School, and a whole host of nonprofit and activist types who took Laudor as a symbol of what schizophrenic people could accomplish. Yet Laudor was ultimately all too typical, in that his schizophrenia proved beyond his control or the control of anyone who cared about him, resulting in the murder of his much-loved fiancé Caroline Costello and the end of his life as a free person. And while Rosen avoids delivering any didactic lectures, it’s impossible to come away from the book without grasping how liberal permissiveness and the enforcement of hope over science put Costello and Laudor in a terrible position, a tragic one.

I was so excited about the book not just because I think the text itself is so well done but because I hoped it would force a conversation our society desperately needs to have - we have allowed our attachment to pleasant and false narratives to distract us from the hard choices that have to be made regarding disorders that hijack the mind. And certainly no publication would have greater ability to spark such a conversation than The New York Times, now firmly a singular colossus in our media environment and a direct conduit to the brains of the elite liberals who have fucked up mental health discourse. Which is why, as I said at the time, I found the Times review so deeply disappointing as well as bizarre. Alexandra Jacobs’s review was profoundly positive - and totally silent on the actual political and moral content of The Best Minds. I challenge you to find any engagement at all, in that ~1100 word review, with the concept of whether what the severely mentally ill really need is more autonomy, greater freedom, less supervision. I challenge you to derive any sense that Jacobs understands the greater stakes, beyond the story of two bright young Jewish boys from Westchester, the broader public relevance of what happens when the well-educated and successful put good feelings over good sense. That is what the book is about. “The Tragedy of Good Intentions” is part of the subtitle!

It’s difficult not to conclude that this absence is largely a product of the venue in which Jacobs was writing. As times, the NYT appears bizarrely hostile to conventional psychiatric medicine and has run piece after piece that waves in the direction of Tomas Szasz-style anti-psychiatry. In the broader sense, as I can tell you from a great deal of experience, left-leaning people are often profoundly uncomfortable talking about the difference between what the mentally ill want and what they need. Progressive attitudes towards disability have cast a chilling effect on our ability to treat those with psychotic disorders as anything other than busy little self-actualized nonconformists, in part because nobody yells louder than disability activists and in the 21st century they who yell the loudest win. But it could be different. Here’s a piece from the New York Post, the famous/notorious NYC tabloid, which incidentally receives a little casual mockery in Jacobs’s review. The Post’s story does precisely what the NYT’s coverage of The Best Minds refused to do, putting Laudor’s sad history in broader social context. And it’s hard not to conclude that the Post is able to do this sort of work where the Times can’t because the right-wing Post has permission to engage in ideas and controversies that the Times feels it can’t thanks to its boho liberal subscriber base.

The best engagement we get is an acknowledgment that the book “examines the porous line between brilliance and insanity and the complicated policy questions posed by deinstitutionalization,” which says nothing about the questions or what makes them complicated, and that it represents “a thoughtfully built, deeply sourced indictment of a society that prioritizes profit, quick fixes and happy endings over the long slog of care.” But precisely what makes The Best Minds so compelling and important is that it does not simply collapse into yet another limp bromide about the need for more funding or more support. Michael Laudor had more support than 99% of the schizophrenic population, and at the time of the murder he had become wealthy. That was not the problem. The problem was that he was deeply sick and yet no one was willing to take his freedom away from him, even thought that was what was necessary.

Anyway, at the time of the review I registered my confusion and let the moment pass. Sadly no big public debate on treating the severely mentally ill emerged. Now I’ve been re-annoyed. Recently the Times commissioned a poll of the 100 best books of the 21st century, I guess to coincide with the completion of the first quarter of the century. (Hope nothing good gets published the rest of this year!) Three of the Book section poohbahs at the NYT had a back and forth about the list, and it reopened the wound. In that discussion Jacobs again praised The Best Minds, which is nice, but again did so in a way that betrays no interest whatsoever in the uncomfortable social issues the book calls attention to. Sayeth Jacobs

It’s biography, it’s memoir, it’s a cultural history of mental health in America, and it’s got some literary history in there as well. I’ll probably be lowered into my grave bleating “Best Minds! Best Minds!”

… it is biography, and it is memoir, and it is in a sense a cultural history of mental health in America. Mostly it’s an indictment of the way that a large number of highly-credentialed people made a series of bad decisions regarding Michael Laudor and how to handle his illness, essentially participating in a coverup of how sick he really was, as a way to demonstrate their open-mindedness; this is symbolic of larger problems. And I can’t comprehend why a professional book reviewer who likes the book so much has literally nothing to say about that dimension of it.

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The actual list that the Times has assembled? You know, I mean, it’s like… fine. It’s inoffensive, generally not wrong but sometimes wrong, boring, and predictable. The entries that were probably meant by voters to be seen as unpredictable are themselves entirely predictable. The list definitely reflects the culture of the New York Times, but then most of who they polled are not employed there, and I suspect the Guardian or New York or any number of similar publications would have produced a nearly-identical list. You have all of the typical sweaty-palmed maneuvers typical of this genre, most obviously the labored attention that’s clearly been paid to representation. It’s pointed out in that subsidiary piece that only one white man has made the top ten, and of course there’s a desultory suggestion that he be kicked out; this is a good reminder that pink pussy hat theatrics will haunt our culture industries for a long time to come. It never seems to occur to people that when you go on and on about the importance of diversity in these kinds of rankings, and then the rankings are in fact diverse, the inevitable message is that the “marginalized” within them are playing JV. You don’t need to do that.

Here’s some specifics. I am aware that this list is the collective opinion of many people, but I have no choice but to react to it as the product of one consciousness.

• No Inherent Vice is just a joke. Just a jealous joke from jealous people. Some of the books that made it over Inherent Vice are not remotely of its caliber and it makes the whole thing seem so absurd. Too many books given a boost because of what the voter thinks their vote says about them, rather than voting based on what’s actually good.

• Jenny Offill is better than most of the novelists on this list.

• Tree of Smoke is, I don’t know, 80 slots too low? If they put it at 1 instead of at 100, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Either way, it’s a better and more ambitious and more moving and more complete work than Train Dreams, which is somewhat inexplicably half the list higher than Tree of Smoke. Nobody Move is a significantly better novella than Train Dreams. Don’t get it.

• I adore Toni Morrison. The older I get the more I suspect that Sula is my favorite novel of all time; you can read my love letter to it here. But Toni Morrison does not belong on this list. It’s no insult to acknowledge that her major work was over before the turn of the millennium. A Mercy at 47 is just baldly a kind of backdoor lifetime achievement award, and I’m quite confident that the voters who put the book in that position didn’t think it belonged there. They apparently felt they had to kiss Morrison’s ring on a list like this, which is ultimately what makes lists like this what they always are. She was a truly great novelist of the 20th century and that is absolutely fine.

• The Savage Detectives came out in 1998. I don’t understand the utility of going according to the translation date, unless (as with Morrison) you’d like to reward a writer in Roberto Bolano whose best work came out in the 20th century. But then he’s already up higher on the list with a book that actually came out this century. Savage Detectives is a worthy book, but its placement on this list is kind of a cheat.

• The Secret History is a great book, so great that people want to keep finding new ways to celebrate it. One way they do so is by ritualistically overrating The Goldfinch. That later work is a good book, I think, but not of the same caliber, a weepy melodrama that carries a lot of capital-S Serious Literature signifiers. It’s ultimately a well-crafted yarn that lacks The Secret History’s chilling plausibility and deeper resonance. You can just write another five-star Goodreads review for Secret History, if you’d like.

• Listing the Blight Frederick Douglass book (which I have not yet finished) seems straightforwardly a matter of rewarding the biography’s subject rather than the biography itself, which I find perfectly good and enjoyable and well-written but not exceptional. The listing says “It is not hard to throw a rock and hit a Great Man biography.” Setting aside the odd construction employed there, well, yes. Good point.

• I’m glad that Rachel Cusk, Helen MacDonald, and Hua Hsu got their flowers.

• Picking a couple graphic novels to celebrate - and in so doing demonstrating how open minded you are - and going with Persepolis and Fun Home is just so boring. So, so boring. Those are the Barnes & Noble approved graphic novels for adults to display on their living room Billy bookshelves. Please, pick different graphic novels, perhaps ones that flatter a different sensibility.

• I don’t mean to be abstract, but a lot of entries feel obligatory even though I don’t particularly object to their presence or even their placement. Atonement, sure. The Flamethrowers, sure. Kavalier & Clay, checked off the list. The Road, The Sellout, The Underground Railroad, all have clearly accumulated enough credits to graduate. Consider them appropriately celebrated. That is not a diss. It’s just that these are the books that the people who write these lists are going to inevitably choose, and people who would not choose these kinds of books are never going to be the kinds of people that The New York Times is going to give a vote to.

• Free-of-flaw-if-safe always beats messy-but-evocative, in this kind of exercise. Never Let You Go is a lovely little book, packaged in Very Serious garb and possessed of that well-machined nature that begs you to love it. Meanwhile The Buried Giant is fractious and strange and simultaneously too slow and too short and perpetually inspired and defiantly its own weird thing, and well, it would never come within a country mile of a list like this. But I know which one inspires me more and I know which one I’d rather have young writers be inspired by. These lists always end up feeling like a museum gift shop to me.

• There is not enough nonfiction listed and the nonfiction that is there, while mostly excellent, tends to be exactly the kind of the nonfiction you’d expect to find on a New York Times 100 best list - relentlessly safe. I’m not sure if China Mieville’s October belongs, but it would be worthy if chosen, and it’s exactly the kind of work I’d love to see represented here, if only because it would bring a little political danger to the nonfiction. I’d also love to see Meet Me in the Bathroom to represent a kind of scruffy incompatibility with the staid culture such lists always represent. And of course the best stuff is that which most of these voters have probably never heard of. I’m not even sure if The Birth of the Cool by Lewis MacAdams is even still in print, but it has more vitality, more interesting history, and more of an engaging point of view than almost anything that’s been published this century. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton remains a towering achievement that says more about elite American life than pretty much anything you could choose. At the Existentialist Cafe is a triumph. Legacy of Ashes! Legacy of Fucking Ashes, guys!

• Having written and deleted a dozen specific insults here, I’m going to attempt to protect any future chance I have of being published and say that some of these… are certainly choices.

• This is completely scattershot and I’m sure there’s many others I’m missing, but Dept. of Speculation, We Believe the Children: The Story of a Moral Panic, Life at These Speeds, Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics, and Capital in the Twenty First Century all cry out for recognition in my own weird estimation. The Windup Girl would be fun. How to Be Depressed. There’s a least ten books here trying to do what On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous does and don’t do it nearly as well. I could go on.

• Of course number one on the list is Ferrante, and I say that in two senses at once - of course because it’s earned and of course because it’s expected. I’ve only read the first two of those books, but they’re very very strong, and you can see why people fall in love with them, and the “mystery” of Ferrante’s identity is a great marketing hook, and there’s just enough overt feminist branding going on to placate NPR, and so that’s the book that becomes a consensus masterpiece. And it’s really fucking good so that’s fine, I’ll take it. Richly deserving, not particularly inspiring, I’m cool with it.

As an aside… in their dialogue, Jacobs and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai complain that there aren’t more books about “the way we live now.” Well, so then where’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.? We get Ben Lerner but no Nathaniel P? It’s such a showcase of the weird dynamics of literary success and appreciation. Nathaniel P. came out and was a sensation, and then you had a countercurrent that complained that it was overhyped because the kind of people it presented both lovingly and satirically were the kind of people who wrote about books. Here I think it works in the opposite direction - I suspect people don’t want to acknowledge that a really disproportionate part of the book-reading world is the kind of artsy Brooklynite (literal or metaphorical) portrayed in that book and so avoid books about them. But it tolls for thee, literati, it tolls for thee. Anyway, Nathaniel P. belongs on this list, precisely for “the way we live now” reasons as well as its other merits. And it would make a good avatar for a really common type of celebrated book that gets published these days, talky and long and based on the intricate connections between a broad roster of characters, punctuated by plot beats that tend not to be big in material terms but to have big repercussions for said roster. Sometimes those books are bad, sometimes they’re very good, but they are a major part of what the novel is doing right now, and yet they have a curiously small presence on this list, which is part of why it doesn’t feel like “the way we live now.” And Nathaniel P. is worthy and would represent a corner of contemporary fiction that’s weirdly neglected on this list.

Ultimately, this kind of list is intended to provoke, and it has provoked me, obviously, and I’m honestly just glad that there’s still professional coverage of books somewhere. As with all things New York Times, so many of my complaints would matter much less if that publication did not enjoy such complete dominance at the top end of influence and success. Sometimes people want to throw out a publication like The Washington Post as a peer/competition, but the people I’m friendly with who work at the Post tell me they live in constant fear of a wave of layoffs. And I have readers who complain whenever I write a word about the NYT, saying that it’s easily ignored; in my world, it is not, and frankly I think they’re wishing rather than analyzing. This is why Jacobs’s very incomplete love for The Best Minds rankles - because if the New York Times doesn’t want to start a conversation, there’s a good chance it won’t get started, and their editors have very subtle tools for determining what gets discussed and what doesn’t. Meanwhile, the longer this condition continues, the more imperious and unaccountable the publication becomes. Their campus walls grow only higher and higher. Trust me, you can talk at The New York Times, but you can’t talk to The New York Times, and that’s bad news.

(Dwight Garner pretending not to know what “best” books means is hilarious. I don’t believe you, Dwight! I think you do know what the word best means!)