Before I get to the writeup, a quick note to those of you who pushed me to pick up Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen: I did pick it up today, and I’ll read it at some point in the next few weeks. The picture of Moore on the back scares the crap out of me, though. I would move to the other side of the street if I saw that coming at me.

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I think Willa Cather is one of the most underappreciated novelists out there, and I can’t figure out why. Her novels are wonderful, beautifully written with great attention to detail and a deep understanding of human emotions. Her main characters are always compelling. And for people who read with an agenda, she offers a little of everything – she was as sincere an American patriot as you’ll find (by which I mean she clearly loved America and Americans, especially the immigrants who made this country what it is), and for the multiculturalists, she was one of America’s first great female novelists and probably its first great lesbian novelist. For whatever reason, however, her work has been gradually deprecated over time, and it’s a shame.

My first introduction to Cather’s work was My Ántonia, a story of immigrant families on the Nebraska plain, with a focus on the eldest daughter, Ántonia. It’s a beautiful novel that starts out as something of a love story but instead is a celebration of friendship wrapped around a praising of the immigrant’s work ethic.

Cather appears on the three main book lists I’m working through via another novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop. While I’d rank this just a shade below My Ántonia, it’s still an amazing book. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a story of friendship, even more so than My Ántonia, along with a story of faith, set among the New Mexico territory when it was still largely uncharted land.

The main character, Father Jean Latour, doesn’t become an archbishop or receive a visit from the Reaper until the book’s final chapter; the book is almost a biography of his life starting from his transfer out to the southwest. Latour is accompanied by Father Joseph Vailliant, a slightly flawed foil to Latour’s compassionate Catholic faith, and the two slowly build their church’s following in their oversized territory village by village, overcoming corrupt local priests, narrowly avoiding a murderer, befriending the real-life frontiersman Kit Carson, and all the while deepening their friendship.

If there’s a criticism of the novel, it’s the general lack of conflict; problems are solved in short order and there’s no villain or enemy or large obstacle overshadowing the whole book. But I’d argue that to point out this as a failing of the book is to miss the point – Cather’s writing is compassionate, sensitive, almost sentimental, emphasizing the bonds that form between friends and the way that those bonds help us react to and influence the world immediately around us. It’s an optimistic outlook, one that I suppose is out of favor at the moment in the literary world, but if we value diversity in everything else, we should value it in literary viewpoints too.

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange appears on the three major lists of the best books of the 20th century (Modern Library, Radcliffe, and the TIME 100), one of 25 books to pull off the trifecta. It’s a masterwork, a deeply philosophical novel that poses serious questions about liberty and free will, as well as a linguistic tour de force written in a brilliantly expressive invented slang.

The novel is narrated by Alex, who refers to himself as “Your Humble Narrator,” a teenage tough called a “droog” who spends his evenings causing mayhem, assaulting older citizens, dabbling in the occasional rape, and listening to dramatic pieces of classical music. Eventually arrested in a home invasion gone awry, Alex spends two years in prison before he’s offered a chance to gain his freedom in two weeks if he submits to an experimental treatment known as the “Ludovico Technique,” probably the best-known sequence from the book or the movie version, where Alex is forced to watch violent films with his eyelids held open. In its final third, Alex re-enters society and the questions begin: Is a man still a man if he’s acting morally by force rather than choice? How much do we want or expect our government to do in the name of public safety?

Burgess created his own slang for the novel to give it a futuristic or alternate-history feel. Most of the new words draw from Russian vocabulary – “nadsat,” meaning teenager, from the endings of the Russian words for the numbers between eleven and nineteen; “viddy,” to see, from the Russian “vidyet” – with occasional invented slang words, like “sinny” for the cinema. It makes the first few pages of the book a bit tough to get through, but after a while, it becomes easier to follow and adds color to Alex’s language, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes almost musical, while also creating a clear delineation between his speech and that of the adults around him.

My senior year in high school, I took an AP lit class with Mrs. Glynn – who saw phallic and “concave” symbols on every page of every book – and she assigned us a choice of one of three books: Slaughterhouse-Five (also on all three top-100 lists), Catch-22 (ditto), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (omitted by Modern Library). I ended up reading and enjoying all three, since they presented moral or philosophical questions, often about horrible situations, with heavy doses of humor and a thoroughly modern tone. A Clockwork Orange would have fit perfectly on this list, and if anything, Burgess’ novel is more clever and more serious than the other three.

I often come across books that are marketed as remarkable achievements for their young authors – Chris Paolini’s Eragon, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – but such books always leave me thinking, “Pretty good for someone that age,” instead of just “Pretty good.” I’ve now found an exception.

Carson McCullers wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when she was 22 years old, and there is no trace whatsoever of immaturity or short life experience anywhere in this book. It is filled with a deep sensibility of isolation and alienation, of spiritual voids and societal oppression. It seems to me that given her understanding and empathy for all of the characters around whom the novel revolves, McCullers would have to have been black and white, exalted and condemned, religious and irreligious, hopeful and hopeless, a witness to tragedy, a widow and a widower, a member of the underclass, a holder of a Ph.D. in literature, a mother, a father, and a drunk. Few authors ever show this level of understanding of the human condition; McCullers did it at an age when many authors are busy writing their theses.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter dissects the lives of five people in a small Southern town that is forever teetering on the precipice of financial ruin: Mick Kelly, a world-weary twelve-year-old girl whose family is squeaking by; Jake Blount, an angry, alcoholic drifter; Biff Brannon, the town’s bartender, who becomes a widower early in the book; and Dr. Copeland, an educated black man whose atheist/Marxist views and uncontrollable temper have alienated him from his own children. The fifth man, John Singer, is a deaf-mute whose life partner (it’s not made explicit whether the two are homosexual, but that detail is irrelevant – their relationship is that of a married couple) loses his marbles and is committed to an asylum. Singer becomes the somewhat-willing audience for the private thoughts of the other four characters, often responding with nothing more than nods and smiles, occasionally writing down a more detailed answer, and sometimes saying nothing at all. Is he a priest receiving confessions? A God or Jesus figure? Or the personification of an uncaring world? McCullers gives hints but no firm answers to these questions or to the question of what the other characters symbolize, leaving just enough room for the reader’s imagination and for a host of differing interpretations of her work throughout the ensuing years.

McCullers also had an unusual gift for prose and sits as a sort of bridge between the lyrical but difficult style of Faulkner and the plain but still sparkling text of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Her words are seldom superfluous, yet her descriptions are evocative, especially when discussing the thoughts or feelings of characters, as when one of the five characters above gains some measure of emotional advancement towards the novel’s close:

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror… he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith.

I could see a criticism of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter‘s plot as thin. Very little happens in the book to move things forward, and there’s nothing to resolve at the end; the book’s climax is a little out of nowhere, with one event setting off a trigger of smaller events, petering out towards the story’s conclusion. However, the lack of narrative greed doesn’t stop the book from flowing because McCullers’ prose is so strong and her characters so well-developed. It’s a remarkable achievement for an author of any age.

If you’ve already read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Richard Wright wrote an excellent review in New Republicwhen it was published, but if you haven’t read the book, bear in mind that his review contains significant spoilers.