I’m more sanguine about the future of the serious American novel than Philip Roth, even though I understand that literacy is changing in the Digital Age, that the term no longer refers to just reading words, that perhaps a world dominated by written matter was more exception than rule.

It’s been eight years since Sam Tanenhaus and A.O. Scott of the New York Times did their excellent survey of the best American novel from 1980-2005. Would they be able to do a good one 25 years from today? The first two paragraphs of Scott’s introductory essay, “In Search of the Best,” and the top selections from the list:

“More than a century ago, Frank Norris wrote that ‘the Great American Novel is not extinct like the dodo, but mythical like the hippogriff,’ an observation that Philip Roth later used as the epigraph for a spoofy 1973 baseball fantasia called, naturally, The Great American Novel. It pointedly isn’t – no one counts it among Roth’s best novels, though what books people do place in that category will turn out to be relevant to our purpose here, which has to do with the eternal hunt for Norris’s legendary beast. The hippogriff, a monstrous hybrid of griffin and horse, is often taken as the very symbol of fantastical impossibility, a unicorn’s unicorn. But the Great American Novel, while also a hybrid (crossbred of romance and reportage, high philosophy and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard-nosed skepticism), may be more like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster – or sasquatch, if we want to keep things homegrown. It is, in other words, a creature that quite a few people – not all of them certifiably crazy, some of them bearing impressive documentation – claim to have seen. The Times Book Review, ever wary of hoaxes but always eager to test the boundary between empirical science and folk superstition, has commissioned a survey of recent sightings.

Or something like that. Early this year, the Book Review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify ‘the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.’ The results – in some respects quite surprising, in others not at all – provide a rich, if partial and unscientific, picture of the state of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.”

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THE WINNER:

THE RUNNERS-UP: