There they are again: the classics. In TLS of December 1 George Steiner picks his books of the year. He writes: “Would that an editor had excised the parts of prolixity and self-indulgence in Neil Belton’s ‘A Game with Sharpened Knives’ (Phoenix). But even as it stands, this novel about the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger in Austria and wartime Dublin comes very close to being a classic.” Finally we have the genre I was waiting for a long time already: the near-classic.
I nominate Thomas Bernhard for the status of coming very close to having written a classic.
Other suggestions are welcome. Maybe Updike? Sartre?