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I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest. Do Not Go Gently Edition for Wednesday, July 7, 2010.

On today's program, when do novelists hit their prime? Checking in again with Liz Faire and Robert Crisgall retires his great column, The Consumer Guide.

Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor Julia Turner.

Hello, Julia.

Hi, Julia.

And our film critic, Dana Stevens.

Hey, Dana.

Hey, Dana.

Dana, I long ago gave up hope that I would be a short stop for the New York Mets or a Bono-style lead singer rock star.

But there's some tiny part of me that held out hope that in my, you know, 40s or 50s, there would be a sudden Proustian flowering of my late genius.

And now I've been informed by Sam Tannenhouse.

Forget it.

All right. So Sam Tannenhouse is the editor of the New York Times book review, also of their op-ed Sunday op-ed page. He's a terrific writer and critic in his own right. And he wrote, I thought, a very perceptive essay about the New Yorker series called 20 Under 40, which turns its attention to younger fiction writers. And what Sam takes issue with, I think quite rightly, is the word or epithet, younger being applied to writers under 40.

When you look at the historical record, in fact, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Thomas Munt,

these were all people who flowered well before the age of 40.

There was no sense of mystery about where their talent would go. In some instances, even by the age of 25 or 26. So in some way, this kind of raising the bar on the notion of younger is preposterous. What did you make at this essay? Well, I think you should cling to your hope still, Steve. I think that there's still hope for the likes of us. This is a really fun piece to read. It's a great piece of polemic, and he certainly makes a good point about, you know, an important percentage of American novelists who peaked early. But I think he's leaving out and cherry-picking pretty seriously in this piece. I mean, I couldn't read it without immediately starting to pick it apart and think, what about Henry James, who he himself mentions this counter-argument in his piece?

Or Edith Wharton, who he doesn't mention, who started writing in her 40s and sort of flowered on into her 60s. I mean, maybe it's just me as a middle-aged writer myself trying to cling to the dream, but I'm not sure that I'm so convinced by this argument that 40 is over the hill for a novelist. What do you think, Julia? Well, I was just more struck by his

point that the New Yorker is a bit silly to characterize achievements under 40 as striking a

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