The one living literary genius

I suppose I can argue with my own headline and admit that Cormac McCarthy is also a genius, or at least the writer of one book of true genius, No Country for Old Men. At the same time, I am absolutely convinced that John Le Carré will be seen, after I’ve been rotting in the ground for decades, as the leading literary light of the late 20th and early 21st century. To be sure, there are some who argue — even now, despite decades of evidence to the contrary — that he’s a genre writer, but I suspect most of those who continue to put forward such inanity are unserious minds or people who have actually never read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the reissue of which gets a nice little write-up here by the L.A. Times. But those critics will also be dead in the ground for centuries as George Smiley lives on and on, cuckolded and protecting the West for eternity.