| Iris Murdoch David Levine |
She May Have Died in 1999, but Iris Murdoch Is the Perfect Novelist for Our Time
Her absolute refusal to judge her characters is an antidote to contemporary literary certainty.
For much of 2021, while putting the finishing touches on my own book, I served as a reader for a literary prize. I was excited—honored, even—to do it, and looked forward to deeply immersing myself in the fiction of this moment. And did I ever: I read at least the first chapters of more than 200 novels, turning my reading year into a kind of supersize survey course of contemporary literature. At first it felt great, as if I were tuned in to the frequency of our age. By the fall, though, I felt as though I was overdosing on the contemporary. It’s not that the literature of today wasn’t good—I read several wonderful books!—so much as that contemporary literature cannot help but be, well, contemporary.