"In each column I’ll write about a single novel and the year it was published. The novel may not be the best-selling book of the year, the most praised, or the most highly awarded—though awards do have a way of fixing an age’s conventional wisdom in aspic. The idea is to choose a novel that, looking back from a safe distance, seems most accurately, and eloquently, to speak for the time in which it was written. Other than that there are few rules. I won’t pick any stinkers."
American Dreams: The 20th Century in Novels (Nathaniel Rich, The Daily Beast)
