Review | In 1997, I predicted the rise or fall of literary reputations. How did I do?

It’s now 26 years later, and spurred in part by the death of Cormac McCarthy, I recently wondered how well my predictions and guesses had stood the test of time. Reputations rise and fall, often precipitously, as I stressed even then in my lead paragraph:

“Picking the winners in fiction’s race for the canon really is a mug’s game, especially since teachers and critics keep changing the track rules. A front-runner like Hemingway now seems ready for the pasture, or even the knacker’s yard, while a late-starter such as Zora Neale Hurston recently swept into the winner’s circle of the Library of America. Will she stay there? Will Hemingway make a comeback? Wait and see.”

I began my essay proper by choosing a dozen “key” works, those “few books since 1972 that have tried, with more success than not, to depict the complex and troubled soul of America. I mean Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow,’ John Cheever’s ‘Collected Stories,’ John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, Toni Morrison’s ‘Song of Solomon,’ Raymond Carver’s ‘Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories,’ William Gaddis’s ‘J R,’ Cormac McCarthy’s ‘All the Pretty Horses,’ and Annie Proulx’s undervalued ‘Accordion Crimes.’” I described them then as “substantial efforts that take up, often with visionary power, the cankers and rose-colored dreams of contemporary American life: politics, race, money, work, technology, coming of age, the spiritual self, immigration, sex, suburbia. If you want to understand the way we live and think and feel now, these are the books to read first.”

That last sentence certainly does sound bumptiously confident. I then named Don DeLillo “the single author who best addresses the obsessions of the past 25 years.”

How do those books and authors strike me now? For one thing, that mini pantheon makes clear why old-fashioned literary histories employed phrases like “the bubble reputation,” “Fortune’s wheel” and “the whirligig of taste.” Overall, I’d say that the works by the “realist” writers are now largely regarded as dated period pieces. Cheever’s stories — which chronicle privileged WASP life in New York and New England — no longer seem relevant to our complex cultural moment. Updike’s Rabbit quartet — aside from that delicious prose — might be the post-World War II analogue of John Dos Passos’s three-volume, Depression-era “U.S.A.”; in short, respected but seldom read. The minimalist Carver was once the god of creative-writing students, and “Cathedral” must have been the most analyzed short story of the 1970s and ’80s. MFA candidates worship other gods now.

How about the remaining authors? Pynchon’s name still carries almost mythic resonance, but nothing after his first three novels seems to have fired up much excitement. To my mind, “Mason & Dixon” — published later in the year of my essay — is actually his Great American Novel, but Harold Bloom and I may have been the only people to read it. Even “Gravity’s Rainbow” has been reduced to little more than a worshiped icon, known largely for its oft-quoted opening sentence: “A screaming comes across the sky.” As for Gaddis, he was a coterie author then and he still is, but his devotees — of which I am one — are growing old.

For a writer, growing old is a mixed blessing: You are revered for your early achievements, but your later books quickly end up remaindered. Nothing by DeLillo has carried the impact of “White Noise” (about a professor of Hitler studies living in the time of an Airborne Toxic Event) or “Libra” (about Lee Harvey Oswald) or “Mao II” (“The future belongs to crowds”). His Cold War epic, “Underworld,” also published later in 1997, opens with a thrilling novella-length account of the 1951 pennant-deciding game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers — it’s been published separately as “Pafko at the Wall” — but the novel’s sheer size must scare off many 21st-century readers. Flash fiction, it isn’t.

That leaves Morrison, Proulx and McCarthy. Morrison is holding steady but, again, almost entirely for the books written in the first half of her career. More and more, “Beloved” has usurped attention from the others, with the partial exception of “The Bluest Eye.” Proulx herself regards “Accordion Crimes” as probably her best book, a portrait of the immigrant experience in America, but much of it is as horrific, in a lower-key way, as certain scenes in “Beloved” and most of McCarthy’s western dance of death, “Blood Meridian.” None of these masterpieces provides “comfort” reading. Even Bloom couldn’t stand the gore in “Blood Meridian” when he first tried the novel.

My literary “tour d’horizon” — a vogue term of that era — also touched on “the much-mocked but phenomenally gifted Joyce Carol Oates,” who is still writing as strongly as ever, but without that One Big Book her oeuvre seems diffuse: Where does one even start? As for Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, it will be interesting to see how future critical opinion addresses ongoing accusations of misogyny, sexism and racism in their work.

Elsewhere in my essay, I went on to briefly discuss Stanley Elkin, Russell Hoban, Gilbert Sorrentino, Steven Millhauser and James Salter — all personal favorites of mine — and waved to Donald Barthelme, Norman Mailer, Carol Shields, Anne Tyler, John Barth, William Gass and Peter De Vries, among many, many others. They all still float around in our collective literary consciousness, but can their books — with the probable exception of Tyler’s — be found on your shelves?

This has been a gloomy litany, but it underscores a hard truth: People can read only so much, and they will inevitably privilege the books of their time, those that seem relevant to their present concerns. In essence, the works of 25 or 50 years ago are no different from those of the even more distant past: E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” (1975) and Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” (1900) are both just Old Books. And how many people ever read more than an occasional Old Book once they leave school? Still, so much of the past’s fiction — buried pleasure — deserves to be unearthed, which is why I write so frequently about half-remembered classics.

Perhaps surprisingly, major genre works have often proved more enduring than a period’s major literary novels. Take fantasy and science fiction: In 1997, I praised William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” John Crowley’s “Little, Big,” Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” and the works of Ursula K. Le Guin — all remain vital to contemporary writers and readers. More generally, American novelists have wholly embraced the energy and potential of fantasy in its various forms. We are all fabulists now. This century revels in comics, graphic novels, manga and superhero movies. Authors as varied as Colson Whitehead, Walter Mosley, Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand and Michael Chabon, to name a few prominent figures, all grew up loving fantasy and science fiction. Near the end of my essay, I even mentioned Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982: “His vision of a dirty, overcrowded slum world, where everything is gradually falling apart, is now the way most of us imagine the 21st century. Dick has seen the future and nothing works.” That seems unnervingly prescient, as does Dick’s obsession with simulacra: How can we distinguish the fake from the genuine, the real from the hallucinatory?

Today, I wouldn’t dare make any guesses about which writers and works of the past quarter-century matter most or will continue to interest people in, say, 2048. Very few, though, especially given the ascendancy of movies, television, social media and video games as our central forms of storytelling. Still, if you really care — and geniuses certainly won’t and shouldn’t — there are some steps to take that will improve the odds of your books being read after your death:

1) Write first-rate genre fiction, whether it’s mystery, fantasy or romance.

2) Be sure to produce One Big Masterpiece suitable for the classroom.

3) Build a fan base among the young.

4) Find a publisher willing to keep your books readily available.

5) Dominate some niche better than anyone else. So long as people lose themselves in Regency romances, they will always read Georgette Heyer.

Of course, none of this may work. In the 1920s, Joseph Hergesheimer — not Willa Cather or F. Scott Fitzgerald — was the most admired and critically acclaimed American novelist.

I was going to end there, but instead let me remind readers of just how wonderful those now-neglected writers could be. At the close of his novel-in-miniature “The Country Husband,” John Cheever seamlessly segues from realism into a realm of dreamlike enchantment, gradually rising to the story’s final famous sentence: “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”