The notion of assembling a panel of judges and voting on the "Random House/Modern Library List of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century" was a silly one to begin with -- an effort to arrive at a 1950s-style consensus that hasn't existed since, well, the 1950s. But then, some people seem to like that sort of thing: The irrepressible credit-claimer Harold Evans -- fresh from insisting that he was the one who actually fired James Fallows as editor of U.S. News & World Report -- felt compelled to insist that the best-novel list had really been his idea back when he was president of Random House.
But then, if millennium fever compels you to do this kind of thing, you could do worse than the folks at the Modern Library. You could do a lot better, too. The judges are right that James Joyce's Ulysses is the best novel of the 20th century (every once in a while, the shibboleths of the cocktail-party set turn out to be correct). But does Joseph Heller's Catch-22 -- funny as it is -- belong at number 7? Or John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra at number 22? Or Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road even in the top 5,000?
Still, as we said, it could have been worse. In fact, it is already worse. The Modern Library's editors presented the list to the 100 students in Radcliffe College's summer publishing course, the most prestigious workshop in the trade, a six-week training camp for aspiring publishers and editors. And in outrage over the predominance of white, male, American authors and the heavy literariness of the Random House list, the Radcliffe students prepared their own counter list. Pay attention. The future of the publishing of American fiction will be in the hands of these Cliffies.
They declared Alice Walker's The Color Purple the 5th best novel of the 20th century. John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men the 12th. A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh the 22nd. Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz the 47th. John Knowles's A Separate Peace the 67th. And Douglas Adams's A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the 72nd. Each of these books "speaks to today's time," explained publishing student Sam Lubell. And the Modern Library's judges? "I just felt like they were pretty out of it." If by out of it he meant that they included books the Radcliffe students hadn't read in junior high school, he may be right. THE SCRAPBOOK was at first inclined to mock the Random House editors for their list, but now they look like the last brave sentinels at the Bastille. After them, the deluge.