I’ve said many times that my favorite American-born author is F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night is still the best American novel I’ve ever read, and of course The Great Gatsby belongs near the top of any rankings of the most important novels ever written. Fitzgerald’s literary output was short – four completed novels and forty or fifty short stories – so when I find an author who counts Fitzgerald as a major influence, he gets an automatic five-point bonus. John O’Hara is one such writer.

Appointment in Samarra was his masterwork, a cutting FSFesque look at the destructive effects of alcohol and small-town society on one man and his marriage. It was controversial in its time for its harsh language (tame by our standards) and frank treatment of sexuality (same), and that seems to have led reviewers even to this day to denigrate its quality as a novel.

The book opens with an epigraph from W. Somerset Maugham, which provides the novel with its title and the reader with a clue as to how the plot ends:

DEATH SPEAKS:
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just now when I was in the market place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go on to Samarra and there Death will not find me.” The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture,” I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

The novel tells the story of the self-destruction of Julian English, a happily married man who owns the Cadillac dealership in his small Pennsylvania town, but whose temper and tendency to drink to excess lead him into a three-day spiral where he destroys just about everything in his life. By limiting the scope to just 72 hours, O’Hara gives us a deeper level of detail into the lives of English and some of the book’s secondary characters, and his dialogue crackles, bringing life into mundane conversations, where every phrase seems to open the window into its speaker’s character just a few millimeters more.

Comparing O’Hara’s prose to Fitzgerald’s is unfair; the latter was a master of using beautiful phrases to describe even the most harrowing sequences, unparalleled in American fiction. O’Hara works with a greater economy of words, and his prose is often more jagged, in line with the plot but not up to Fitzgerald’s impossible standard. Appointment in Samarra would otherwise fit comfortably in Fitzgerald’s canon, right alongside the similar story in The Beautiful and Damned (another marriage on the rocks, but a much longer tale), with the same alcohol-drenched setting and unflinching look at how we treat each other and how we respond to our environments.

Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, another entrant in the TIME 100 (and on the Modern Library 100 as well), is a strange psychological novel in a fantastic setting with interesting side characters, but it ultimately falls short because the two central characters are so very uninteresting.

The Sheltering Sky tracks the breakdowns – one physical, one mental – of Port Moresby and his wife, Kit, as they travel into the Sahara with a friend, Tunner. Kit Moresby is neurotic to an extreme, while Port is alienated from almost everything in his life.
Yet both find their downward spirals hastened by bad choices – not just bad, but stupid and unrealistic as well. It’s clear from the start that their marriage is doomed, but it’s doomed because the thinly drawn characters have no emotional intersection, so the reader is left watching each of their demises at a distance. And when one or the other (usually Port) attempts to offer some deep philosophizing, it reads as hollow, as if the character is speaking the author’s words rather than his or her own.

The shame of it is that Bowles dropped these two-dimensional beings into a wonderful three-dimensional world. His various fictional Saharan towns and oases are richly detailed, some evoking beautiful villages under blue skies, others ominous with their narrow streets and unfriendly denizens. The handful of side characters – a comical mother-and-son due named Lyle, various French colonial administrators with their own troubles and biases, a Jewish shopkeeper in the oasis where Port takes ill – are all sketched with greater clarity and depth than the two nitwits at the story’s center.

I’d love to say that this novel, Bowles’ first, represented a fine first effort upon which he’d likely improve with future works, but every evaluation of his canon lists this novel as his finest, so if you don’t care for The Sheltering Sky, you might wish to follow my example and skip the rest of Bowles’ writings.

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea isn’t just on the TIME 100; it’s one of 25 books to appear on that list, the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century, and the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s rival list. (Others include 1984, An American Tragedy, Lolita, and The Great Gatsby, all of which are also in The Novel 100, as well as another recent read for me, All the King’s Men.) What makes Wide Sargasso Sea unusual for any of these lists is its genre: It’s a prequel to a classic novel written by someone else – Charlotte Brontë’s gothic romance, Jane Eyre .

Rhys (née Ella Williams) apparently connected with a minor and almost stock character in Brontë’s book, Antoinette Bertha Cosway. Rhys was also a Caribbean-born woman sent to England at the brink of adulthood, only to find her hopes of a paradisiacal England like the one she found in literature dashed by a change in fortune, the death of her father, forcing her to abandon her studies and find work. She was haunted by Antoinette’s character, saying, “I was convinced that Charlotte Brontë must have had something against the West Indies, and I was angry about it.” So she wrote.

The prequel comprises three sections, with the third just a short look at Antoinette’s life in England. The first two depict her childhood with a mother who is going insane (although Rhys leaves it vague whether it’s due to genetics or circumstance) and then her somewhat rushed marriage to a confident young Englishman who is seduced by Antoinette’s beauty as well as by her substantial dowry, an inheritance from her mother’s second husband. Antoinette herself is anxious, depressed, and submissive, looking for some vein of independence but finding herself always chained to the people and places around her.

Wide Sargasso Sea is short and its main theme is straightforward – Rhys emphasizes the imbalance she sees in interpersonal relationships, primarily romantic ones, with parallels in master/slave relationships. It is almost a feminist tract in response to the Victorian sensibility of Brontë’s work, although Jane herself was a strong character with an independent streak; think of it more as Rhys’ response to Brontë’s treatment of Antoinette (known as Bertha in Jane Eyre) as a helpless creature, more her husband’s ward than wife. Rhys also employs one of the more obvious symbols (fire) I’ve come across in any literary work, one that would be a great example for teaching literature students about symbolism and how it can be integrated into a novel in a way that is unobtrusive yet still powerful.

As an exploration of an underdeveloped character in another novel, Wide Sargasso Sea is profound and thought-provoking, opening the door to broader questions of how the dominant/submissive dynamic permeates many romantic relationships. Without Jane Eyre to hold it up, however, it’s an unfinished novella that trails off without a proper ending to its linear plot. If you haven’t read Jane Eyre, you certainly should, as it’s one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language and appears on The Novel 100, but also because it opens the door not just to Wide Sargasso Sea and to the amazing world introduced in Jasper Fforde’s hilarious book The Eyre Affair.

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Speaking of lists, this book pushes me past the halfway point on the TIME 100 list, to 50 7/12, since I’m seven books into Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time. Anyway, I hope you all have a safe, happy, and (most importantly) delicious Thanksgiving. If all goes well and I have time to take some pictures tomorrow, I’ll have some food pr0n on the site over the weekend.

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, another entrant in the TIME 100, is a wonderfully terse novel, or perhaps novella, that manages to pack a ridiculous amount of detail and emotion into its 130-odd pages.

TPoMJB is a comedy of manners set over a novel of ideas, or more accurately of ideology. Miss Jean Brodie is an independent-minded teacher at an all-girls school between the wars, and she chooses six girls from her class of ten-year-olds to be the “Brodie Set,” singled out allegedly for their unique personalities, but more apparently for Miss Brodie’s gratification of her own ego and the imitiation of some of her own religious ideals. Miss Brodie teaches the girls what she believes is important, often running afoul of the private school’s authorities and other teachers, and lets the Brodie Set see or hear glimpses of her personal life, including her aborted affair with a married co-worker – whose Catholic faith she subsequently denigrates, as she blames it for the end of their tryst – and longer-running affair with another co-worker. Yet Miss Brodie is not the enlightened teacher of a Dead Poets Society, instead blaming the one “stupid” girl in the Brodie Set, Mary, for almost everything that goes wrong, and never hesitating to point out the failings of her other chosen charges.

The story itself covers the time from the selection of the Brodie Set to Miss Brodie’s downfall when one of her charges – the identify of whom is the only real “spoiler” plot element of the book – betrays her to the school’s headmistress. Underlying that story, however, is a tripartite battle of ideas: Miss Brodie’s Calvinist beliefs against the Roman Catholic beliefs of her paramous Mr. Lloyd, with a non-religious ideology, fascism, entering the fray over the course of the book as fascism itself rises to prominence and then becomes a threat in Europe.

Spark employs a brisk, matter-of-fact style, and she plays with time by never really establishing a “present” time, jumping back and forth in an anecdote-drive story. She reveals future plot elements with almost offhand comments early in the text, such as telling us that Mary dies in a fire or that Rose eventually becomes known for sex, then giving the reader more details at later points. It’s an unusual style, but effective in keeping things moving while also keeping the reader a bit off balance. And if you don’t like it, at least it’s over quickly.

UPDATE: This review is from 2007, when I first read the book. I’ve since revised my view of the book and have it on my top 100.

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – another entry in the TIME 100 x – gets the dreaded “first novel” qualification: It’s excellent for a first novel, with metaphor and thematic depth that many novelists can’t reach through an entire career. But like a lot of first novels, it’s sloppy and disjointed, and perhaps a bit ambitious for a first work. It was an announcement of the arrival of a great voice, but its readability doesn’t quite match its scope or its raw intelligence.

White Teeth‘s nonlinear plot revolves around first two and eventually three families in London. The first two include a Bengali couple (Samad and Alsana) and their twin boys and a Jamaican wife (Clara) and sad-sack English husband (Archie) and their culturally conflicted daughter; when two of the three kids get into trouble at school, they’re shuffled off to tutoring at the house of a dementedly rationalist English family (the Chalfens) with an almost Stepfordish devotion to cheerful reason. The novel opens with Archie’s attempt at suicide, which fails (obviously) and leads to his introduction to Clara, and then careens from story to story, time period to time period, jumping ahead to show how first the parents and then the kids are dealing with the assimilation challenges of a multicultural society, all set against a backdrop of an unfeeling Western society that erodes cultural traditions.

When Smith gets rolling, her dialogue is outstanding and she displays a broad wit ranging from wordplay (the Chalfen family’s “Chalfenisms”) to clever turns of phrase (“Archie says Science the same way he says Modern, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them”) to bathroom humor and even the occasional bit of slapstick. Her dialogue doesn’t cut out all of the mundane realities of actual dialogue, giving it a flavor of realism that so many postmodern novels lack, and she shows off a sense of economy when she uses the characters’ words to give the reader more insight into their characters – Archie’s regular use of the outdated phrase “I should cocoa!” being the most frequent example.

Her wizardry with words has its limits, however. The book is loaded with literary allusions which are nearly always identified for the reader, giving them a showy feel (“Look how well-read I am!”) and robbing them of some of their power, while the one time she does use an allusion and doesn’t spell it out – to a controversial novel published in the 1980s – the distraction is gone and the power of the conversation takes over. There’s also a bit of sloppiness throughout the book – such as the time she uses the name of one twin in a conversation about his brother – as well as one major plot element that is wildly unrealistic, when without his wife’s knowledge, Samad sends one of his preteen sons to Bangladesh to prevent him from becoming too Westernized. I’m sorry, I understand that this is a plot device, but when Alsana didn’t castrate her husband after finding out he had kidnapped one of her sons and sent him halfway around the world, it put a bit of a hole in the book’s credibility.

Where White Teeth really shines, however, is in its use of metaphor and symbolism, in a way rarely seen in postmodern literature, betraying (in a good way) that well-read background that Smith brings to the table. Teeth – real, missing, or fake, although surprisingly never gold – appear all over the book, with their presence or absence standing in for the connections between various characters and their pasts; several chapter titles refer to the “root canals” of characters. The battle over the genetic engineering of a mouse – a major plot element in the book’s last third that isn’t even introduced before the two-thirds mark – stands in for some of White Teeth‘s recurring themes, like tradition versus modernity, or racism and the post-racial society. The novel is bold and ambitious, so despite some structural flaws (like the massive changes in plot direction, almost as if Smith changed her mind partway through) and the above-mentioned sloppiness, it works both as a good read and a work of literature.

Lucky Jim marks my first entry into the world of Kingsley Amis, courtesy of that TIME list of the All-TIME 100 Novels, and I’m hooked. Lucky Jim falls somewhere short of Waugh and Wodehouse on the humor continuum – Amis even includes a direct hat-tip to Waugh late in the book – but sits as a much more realistic novel than the best comic works of his English contemporaries.

The Jim of the book’s title is Jim Dixon, a sort of accidental lecturer at a minor “red brick” university in England, and he is the classic normal guy surrounded by wackos. His boss, Professor Welch, can’t remember Dixon’s name (calling him Faulkner, the name of his predecessor), can’t finish a thought, and can’t drive to save his own life. His sort-of girlfriend, Margaret, recently tried to kill herself and is engaged in a bizarre cling-and-push dynamic with Jim. (It’s funnier than it sounds.) One colleague, known just as Johns, lives in the same apartment building as Jim and seems to exist solely to report Jim’s foibles to Welch. And about a half-dozen other nuts populate Jim’s life, while Jim himself tends to exacerbate the situation by running to drink when the going gets tough and by coming up with some harebrained schemes to try to torment Johns and Bertrand, Professor Welch’s son and the boyfriend of Christine, with whom Dixon finds himself inadvertently falling in love.

Amis derives comedy both from the setup and from the action, a rare skill and one that separates funny writers from genuine comic novelists. Lucky Jim‘s story revolves around Dixon’s desperate attempt to keep his job by agreeing to come to a small arts festival at Professor Welch’s house and give a speech on Merrie England. Every time Dixon goes to the house, however, he ends up in trouble, usually of his own making, from falling asleep with a lit cigarette to the creation of the love triangle – rather, love pentagon involving himself, Bertrand, Christine, Margaret, and a married woman Bertrand may or may not be shagging on the side. It is occasionally riotous, always smirk-inducing, and surprisingly realistic, especially the dialogue between Jim and Christine, which borders on the mundane but imbues the book with a grounded feeling that, as much as I love the man’s works, Wodehouse books and stories don’t have.

While at Harvard, my favorite class was “Comedy and the Novel,” taught by Professor Donald Fanger (now retired); among the eight books was The Master and Margarita , still the best novel I’ve ever read, and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller , an experimental novel by Calvino that’s among the funniest I’ve ever read. Lucky Jim would have fit into the syllabus without any shoehorning at all.