At the tail end of summer, Dwight Garner accomplished what few legacy media critics have since the days of Michiko Kakutani: he wrote a review that helped sell a book. A literary novel of more than 600 pages, no less. It was a conservative first printing. At 37,000 copies, Riverhead Books was not expecting a bestseller, despite the author’s previous Booker Prize-winning 2014 epic A Brief History of Seven Killings having sold half a million copies worldwide.

One mark of a great motif is its ability to linger whether you understand it or not. I did not understand why every character in Alexander Sorondo’s debut novel Cubafruit needed to be drinking cubafruit in every scene, but after about 50 pages, I wanted to drink some myself. This presented a difficulty: Neither the drink nor the plant it’s made from exists outside of the novel. Like those Harry Potter fans in line for butterbeer lattes at Books-A-Million, I too wanted to taste the fictional world I was inhabiting. I mixed two parts guava juice with one part Cointreau, one part reposado, one part rum, two shakes of Peychaud’s bitters, and a squeeze of lime.

I can remember the first time I really understood the millennial obsession with authenticity. It was the summer of 2016, a few months after I moved to Seattle, as the bright lights of a newly urban existence began to dim in the rhythms of the day to day, and the lingering jokes about gentrifying hipsters with their artisanal beard wax and fair trade coffee had long worn out their punchline. My job at the time was ingratiating myself to hospitality workers, concierges of major hotels especially, so they might hand out my company’s travel magazine to any tourist looking for the hottest restaurant in the hippest neighborhood, one willing to advertise to the type of tourist who still reads print mags in the first place.

The customary Booker Prize winner is, like the MFA novels battling for the laurel, a product of many compromises. On the one hand, the legacy institutions cling desperately to the remnants of their prestige during an era in which the very notion of prestige is as precarious as the production of literature itself: finding any book worthy enough to not further demean the reputation of the Prize by its bestowal is difficult enough; add to that the mutually hostile demand that it might be adored by the general public.