Potential for what?

Sadly I haven't read any of the top 5 works of American fiction in the past 25 years (as named by the NYTimes Book Review). But I have read the summary of it written by AO Scott, NYTimes film critic. I like the last page best, it makes me feel like I am part of a generation of potential:

So the top five American novels are concerned with history, with origins, to some extent with nostalgia. They are also the work of a single generation. DeLillo, born in 1936, is the youngest of the five leading authors. The others were born within two years of one another: Morrison in 1931, Updike in 1932, Roth and McCarthy in 1933.

Their seniority, needless to say, is earned - they have had plenty of time to ripen and grow - but it is nonetheless startling to see how thoroughly American writing is dominated by this generation. Startling in part because it reveals that the baby boom, long ascendant in popular culture and increasingly so in politics and business, has not produced a great novel. The best writers born immediately after the war seem almost programmatically to disdain the grand, synthesizing ambitions of their elders (and also some of their juniors), trafficking in irony, diffidence and the cultivation of small quirks rather than large idiosyncrasies. Only two books whose authors were born just after the war received more than two votes: "Housekeeping," by Marilynne Robinson, and "The Things They Carried," by Tim O'Brien. These are brilliant books, but they are also careful, small and precise. They do not generalize; they document. Ann Beattie, born in 1947, is among the most gifted and prolific fiction writers of her generation, but her books are nowhere to be found on this list; not, I would venture, because she fails to live up to the survey's implicit criterion of importance, but because she steadfastly refuses to try.

Expand beyond the immediate parameters of this exercise, and the generational discrepancy grows even more acute: add Thomas Pynchon and E. L. Doctorow, Anne Tyler and Cynthia Ozick, John Irving and Joan Didion and Russell Banks and Joyce Carol Oates and you will have a literary pantheon born almost to a person during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Further expansion - by means of a Wolfe here, a Mailer there - is likely to push the median age still higher. Think back on that 1965 survey; it's hard to find an author on the list of potential candidates much older than 50.

Is this quantitative evidence for the decline of American letters - yet another casualty of the 60's? Or is the American literary establishment the last redoubt of elder-worship in a culture mad for youth? In sifting through the responses, I was surprised at how few of the highly praised, boldly ambitious books by younger writers - by which I mean writers under 50 - were mentioned. One vote each for "The Corrections" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," none for "Infinite Jest" or "The Fortress of Solitude," a single vote for Richard Powers, none for William T. Vollmann, and so on.

But the thing about mythical beasts is that they don't go extinct; they evolve. The best American fiction of the past 25 years is concerned, perhaps inordinately, with sorting out the past, which may be its way of clearing ground for the literature of the future. So let me end with a message to all you aspiring hippogriff breeders out there: 2030 is just around the corner. Get to work.