What Makes a Work of Fiction a Classic?

As readers know, I tend to use the weekly “Bookends” feature of the Sunday New York Times book review section as fodder for this blog. The way the feature works is as follows: the editor poses a question and then two of various regular participants attempt to answer it, sometimes with opposing views, but often with just different slants.

This Sunday (Oct. 18, 2015), the question (slightly different online than in the print edition) was: “When we declare something a ‘classic’ we emphasize timelessness. But shouldn’t art speak to something current?”