In the June 20 edition of The New York Times Book Review (will FD ever catch up?) Sam Tanenhaus argues that the best novels are written when the authors are young. Examples are trotted out.
“There are only three subjects for a writer: love, money, and death” said Faulkner (and Yeats, says something similar, though he only mentions sex and death). All of these should be of interest throughout one’s life, but perhaps the ideas of young writers on these themes have been given greater weight recently.
Tanenhaus does not discuss who decides what novels get published. There has long been a bias in publishing to take a chance on a young (cheap) writer, and many an older writer has been dropped by his/her agent and publisher, of if starting out at an older age, never gets a contract (things are slightly better in genre fiction).
Then there’s the question of who decides what is great. Perhaps critics are just more interested in tales of young love, youthful adventure, and so on than they are with the concerns that might center the novels of an older writer. And perhaps the young have more time to read and gravitate to those books that mirror their own concerns, stamping them with “great” well before they have read the works of older writers, on themes perhaps not so close to the heart of young readers.