re: This might be a silly question, but how do you track contemporary good literature?

Start with awards shortlists rather than winners, but focus on authors with multiple nominations rather than titles.

Once you have a list of authors, skim through their bibliography and look for plot summaries that you find interesting.

If necessary, search for spoiler free reviews of the author or selected works. Be aware that it is frequently very difficult to avoid spoilers online, most people have no sense of nuance when it comes to literary criticism (It's the best book ever because I liked it, it's the worst book ever because I didn't), and book communities are just as liable to circlejerk themselves into an echo chamber as anything else.

Worse yet, there is a tremendous push by the publishing industry to blur the line between genre fiction and literary fiction at the behest of and in pursuit of the twitter/social media audience and their outsize presence online. Progressives and their sympathetic postmodern intellectuals in academia have attacked literature with fervor so that books are no longer battles in the culture war but merely casualties. Authors like Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides win heaps of praise, then disdain, seemingly at random.

I would suggest Chabon, Franzen, Eugenides, Tartt, and Saunders if you are looking for contemporary, broadly "American" lit.