I was musing, eating three tacos, good but expensive, as is everything these days, about what author, or at least what author I am familiar with, would render the modern world best at the moment.

F Scott Fitzgerald comes to mind with his depiction of the Jazz Age, that bubbly time full of social activity and unrest. It would be hard to imagine what sort of romance he might superimpose on today's polemic environment--some woke version of the Daisy-Tom romance, perhaps with an added nonbinary transgender figure.

Nabokov might be a candidate as today's chronicler. But with his loquacious wit and wordplay, he might be too internalized, and indeed, possibly the more quiet 1950s was a better backdrop for his narration, the campuses of today are nothing like the genteel quiet, and easily scoffable campuses of Lolita or Pnin. But he certainly knew Ithaca, lately in the news a nice setting for a contemporary story.

What would Philip Roth do with these times? His stories seem to show characters in high relief against the absurdities of the time and place, be in a snobby Jewish Country Club in Goodbye Columbus or a poor, beleaguered father looking for his radical daughter in the slums during the tumultuous sixties in American Pastoral.

Aldous Huxley tended not to address the tumultuous surroundings of his characters, though he might provide a nice lampoon of an alt-right or woke character, as he did the character of the Communist Ekki Giesebrecht in Eyeless in Gaza. His depiction would involve characters nibbling on the edges of revolt, and perhaps one or two, usually lower-class it seems, wholeheartedly joining the revolutionaries--an Illidge from Point CouterPoint. He would not take the current controversies quite seriously, instead regarding them as a silly backdrop on which his privileged characters socialize and introspect.

Christopher Isherwood might be an exciting chronicler of today. He would have has his eccentric characters moving throughout the modern demi-monde in New York or San Franciso, peripherally involved with personalities themselves involved in political revolts but related only to them in terms of erotic connection.

Possibly, Saul Bellow would do it best. Mr. Sammler's Planet provides an excellent satire on campus politics, with the old world gent attending a Columbia Rally of the hostile new counterculture, exposed to, amazed at the venom, knowing there was, almost as evil as he escaped from, a new toxic ideology emerging. 

And finally, second best might be Robert Graves, the author of I, Claudius, with, possibly a cast of modern politicians watching the tumult across the land, jockeying for nomination, planning their elections, taking as best advantage of the times as they can. We can only imagine who would be his Caligula.