I read the intentionally provocative GQ article 21 Books You Don’t Have To Read a couple weeks ago and was surprised by how not-terribly-offended I was by it. The article invited various contemporary authors to each bad-mouth a famous book and suggest another, lesser-known book as an alternative. The list sparked a backlash which seemed to center primarily around its choices of the Bible, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and The Lord of the Rings as books to denigrate, once again demonstrating that there is no more reliable way for an online publication to generate backlash (and clicks) than by attacking something millions of people are familiar with.

I emphasize familiar with as opposed to love, because I think the main determining factor here, the hinge on which the controversy swings is familiarity, or to put it more simply, fame. The authors in the GQ article didn’t offend anyone’s sensibilities by making an unfair comparison on the merits, because most of the people objecting haven’t read the unfamous books these authors are comparing the famous ones to. Their offense was in having the temerity to compare unfamous things with famous ones, and what’s more, finding in favor of the unfamous ones.

What we have are two groups of people who come at questions of literary merit from very different perspectives. The backlashers, we may say, generally object on purely fame-based grounds. Lonesome Dove is more famous than the Jean Stafford book, therefore it must be better, even though it would be a fair surmise that only a very small fraction of such people know who Jean Stafford was and a vanishingly small number will have read that book. Similarly, with the comparison between Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy the comparison is purely fame-based, likewise Tove Jansson versus Hemingway (though in that case there is an added element of purely geographical parochialism—Hemingway is the prototypical American writer, while Tove Jansson is not an American.)

The authors are a diversely-motivated cast, but I would say in what may seem like a sop to the backlashers that they also reflect a diverse cast of biases: towards the new (though Tristram Shandy and Jean Stafford have been no less hallowed by time than the books they are replacing), towards racial and gender diversity (many examples), towards simplicity and contemporary “marketability,” (hence the attack on Bleak House, a book with its rolling periods naturally inimical to the Clarity-Brevity-Sincerity theory of style) and in certain cases towards—and I think this is the most controversial claim I’ll make here in the eyes of backlashers—quality as opposed to popularity, with the replacement of Coelho, Catcher in the Rye, Franzen, and Old Man and the Sea being primarily rooted in longstanding objections to these works by critics. Each of these is an example of a book that got labelled and marketed as a classic despite the fact that literary writers and critics almost to a person think they’re shite; they are each an instance of capitalism attempting to usurp the judgment of the critics, and the critics roundly saying in articles such as this one, nay, your marketing hype can’t change the fact that these books sucked balls when you foisted them on us, and will continue to suck balls from now into perpetuity.

Now how does this constellation of biases comport or differ with mine as a self-proclaimed “Old Book Appreciator”? Let me summarize my critical values this way:

1. Literary merit takes many forms, but these forms must be characteristic to be truly literary.

There are many guises great art can come under, but great art must have an identity that distinguishes itself. It must forge something new and coherent out of its influences; great art creates unities out of multiplicities. Hence I endorse the effort to reject Coelho, Catcher in the Rye, Franzen, and Old Man and the Sea (none of which are particularly old) using no other basis than that none of them is a great literary achievement. Give something actually great a chance.

2. Fame is no inherent proof of merit, nor is it a demerit.

The Old Man and the Sea is not a classic merely because Hemingway wrote it, or because Hemingway did write other books that are classics, or because Hemingway—with his forced mythological/allegorical mien—clearly set out to write a book he wanted others to regard as a classic. No, sorry, this affords far too much deference to a famous author on account of his fame. Famous authors don’t get to will their works into classic status; that status must derive from the merits inherent in the work itself; if we abandoned this standard, every Dan Brown and Michael Crichton book could be considered a classic, no matter how lazy the writing is. Stephen King could take a crap on his typewriter, publish the results, and be deemed to have produced a “classic”, were fame a legitimate basis on which to call a book that.

3. Age in a book is no inherent merit or demerit.

James Joyce couldn’t stand Dickens; I on the other hand find Bleak House to be a highly entertaining rhetorical performance, and I think the idea that a book ought to be rejected on the basis of its antiquity is appalling. Books aren’t good or bad because of their age; they are good or bad because they are good or bad. If Dickens is often too diffuse and uneconomical or Thomas Carlyle repeats himself too much, criticize them on those concrete grounds—but don’t reject them on nothing more than age and perpetuate this false notion that the past was dead or slow or simple; it was none of those things.

On the other hand, a book is not necessarily always a classic just because its fame has endured. As Dr. Johnson pointed out in his famous Preface to the Plays of Shakespeare, “Some seem to admire indiscriminately whatever has been long preserved, without considering that time has sometimes cooperated with chance.” He goes on to argue that time assists in judgment not because of such indiscriminate prejudice, but because it furnishes far more examples and a wider perspective to see works in a broader context; hence we can see a writer like Samuel Butler whose critical reputation has fallen as his critique of Victorianism has come to seem more and more tame. We have not yet had that same amount of time in which toexamine mid-century (much less contemporary) books against their context; who can say what critiques of modern life will come to be seen as the truly radical and artistically significant ones? It is early yet.

4. Great literature is a global phenomenon, and parochialism blinds us to this fact.

Is Tove Jansson better than Hemingway? For all I know, she could be. That’s because we live in an environment where only a fraction of the literature written from around the world makes its way to our shores, and only a small amount of that is read by most Americans. If I told you that I read a book published last year called Ties by Domenico Starnone that is greater than anything Jonathan Franzen has ever written, would you believe me? Would you believe that the literature being produced around the world is actually superior tp the literature being produced here? You wouldn’t know that unless you were reading it; but it is. The incredible books being produced year after year around the world put the products of our domestic writers to shame; we simply have nothing comparable to Matthias Enard, a Karl Ove Knaussgard, a Lazslo Krasznahorkai, or an Elena Ferrante.

As I’ve noted before, our conventional lists of “the Classics” is way too short. The main reason people in the U.S. think of The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls when they think “classic,” and not Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux or Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin or Froth on a Daydream by Boris Vian or Mehmed, My Hawk by Yaşar Kemal or Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih or Tyrant Banderas by Ramón del Valle-Inclán or Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis or The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat or The Summer Book by Tove Jansson or Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz or The Door by Magda Szabo or Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine or Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, is because they were born in the U.S., where the classic status of Hemingway has been drilled into them by the culture and that of these other authors has not been, even though they are no less venerated in their own countries than Hemingway is here. Rank parochialism makes us think our own country’s books are classics and relevant, and those of other countries—some of whom, like France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Poland, who have literary traditions no less storied than our own—are somehow not relevant.