→ February 11, 2009
→ By

The Dud Avocado.

I sat down and tried to read, but I couldn’t. After ten pages I was in a state of cold fury. Read! I didn’t want to read, it was just a substitute for living.

Funny words coming from an author (speaking through her semi-autobiographical protagonist) in the middle of her first novel, but Elaine Dundy wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers or flout convention. Her debut (and by all accounts best) novel, The Dud Avocado, was a critical success and was popular in its day, but has fallen out of print at least once since its original publication and just returned to print in mid-2007, less than a year before Dundy died. The book earned her plaudits from Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, and Groucho Marx, who wrote to Dundy:

I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you’re the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which incidentally is a great name for a law firm). If this was actually your life, I don’t know how on earth you got through it.

The novel follows American ingénue Sally Jay Gorce as she tries to make her uncertain way among the Bohemian set in Paris in the 1950s, “tries” being the operative word, as Sally Jay is hapless in just about every matter that matters, foremost among them love. She enters a tepid affair with a cartoonish and quite married Italian diplomat, falls in love with a smarmy American from her hometown, and goes on a mistake-prone jaunt with a man she’s never met but who has developed a crush on her after seeing her on stage. She has a tremendous knack for wearing the wrong thing, and is developing a habit of saying the wrong thing. Oh, and she loses her passport during a night on the town.

Dundy said in later letters and in the afterword to this most recent edition of the book that all of Sally Jay’s bad decisions mirror her own from her time in Paris, which I would imagine was a lot less funny to live through than it is to read about. The intimate connection with her scattered protagonist clearly helped Dundy infuse the character with the spirit for which she and the book are praised, but also a self-awareness that Dundy probably didn’t have as she lived through these misadventures:

Was I beginning to have standards and principles and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in the way?

There is an interesting plot beyond Sally Jay’s bad-luck-in-love escapades, and aside from the coincidence that drives the book’s final chapter or two (perhaps a comment on the inescapability of one’s destiny) the story is very tight. But it’s the humor that carries it into a class with Scoop, Lucky Jim, and your better Wodehouse novels.

Sorry to be rushing through these a bit, but I’m still two books behind what I’m reading; I’m probably a day away from finishing Rabbit, Run, after which I’m looking at a re-read of Catch-22.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 29, 2008
→ By

Summer Lightning.

“Have you ever tasted a mint julep, Beach?”
“Not to my recollection, sir.”
“Oh, you’d remember all right if you had. Insidious things. They creep up to you like a baby sister and slide their little hands into yours and the next thing you know the Judge is telling you to pay the clerk of the court fifty dollars.”

I’ve waxed poetic about the joys of P.G. Wodehouse before, but I think I’m due to push those of you who haven’t dipped into one of the greatest comic writers in the history of the printed word to do so. I’ve actually started to change my opinion on Wodehouse; after years of seeing the Jeeves/Wooster series as his masterworks, I’m coming around to the Blandings Castle series as the funnier books.

Summer Lightning is the third novel in the Blandings series (although there are some short stories set in between the second book, Leave it to Psmith, and this one), although they don’t really have to be read in sequence. It might be the funniest one of the six I’ve read, because it includes all of the key characters – the Efficient Baxter, Lady Constance, Galahad Threepwood, and, of course, the Empress of Blandings – and provides enough other plot strands to move the story beyond the typical Wodehouse framework of two couples whose engagements are blocked by the poor financial prospects of the would-be groom and an eventual misunderstanding that causes one party to break it off.

The Jeeves/Wooster novels and stories are brilliant, but the Blandings Castle series’ ensemble cast gives more opportunities for humor and also avoids overtaxing characters that might seem a little thinly drawn if given too much stage time. In addition, the presence of a true villain in Lady Constance Keeble, who disapproves of every match, despises her brother Galahad and looks down on her other brother Lord Emsworth, gives the Blandings novels more narrative greed than the typical Jeeves story, where the biggest question is usually how Jeeves intends to extract Wooster from impending nuptials, although Roderick Spode and the pilfered cow creamer do stand as counterexamples.

Next up: As many of you have begged me to do, I’ve started Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 18, 2008
→ By

Nobody’s Fool.

Admin stuff for today: Chat 1 pm EST, and I’ll be on ESPN 710 in Los Angeles at 1:40 pm PST.

Sully had known Rub too long to believe this particular coincidence. He could tell by the way the young man was carrying his large head, like a medicine ball precariously balanced on his thick shoulders, that he was coming to see Sully and that he wanted to borrow money. In fact, Sully could tell just by looking at him how much Rub wanted (twenty dollars), how much he’d settle for (ten), and how long it would take for them to arrive at this figure (thirty minutes).

Sully is the ne’er-do-well protagonist of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, written before his Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls and something of a tune-up work, a funny and engaging novel where the reader can see the author working on his craft, particularly his prose.

Sully, né Donald Sullivan, is a sixty-year-old man living in a dying town in upstate New York, a ne’er-do-well in a community short of do-wells of any ilk, although his own brand of doing-not-well is as unique as a fingerprint. He’s surrounded by a cast of believably-crazy locals, from the dimwitted Rub of the above quote to his tightly-wound ex-wife Vera to his landlady Miss Beryl (who talks to her late husband’s picture as well as to the African mask on her wall) and her hyper-ambitious son Clive Jr. Yet Sully is most affected by one character who died before the book even began – his alcoholic, abusive father.

Russo unfolds a tableau more than he tells a straight story, although there is ultimately a central narrative thread revolving around Sully’s relationship with his father and reconnection with his estranged son, Peter, whose own marriage and career are falling apart through bad choices in a higher-rent variation of Sully’s life. The story is richer by far for the additional characters and subplots – although “subplot” sounds so perfunctory for the side stories Russo weaves so well into and around the main narrative – built around well-rounded characters living believable lives and facing difficult choices.

Many of those choices revolve around getting older, whether it’s the infirmities and occasional indignities of aging (faced by, among others, Sully and his wounded knee, and Miss Beryl and her slender threads of independence), or anticipating and then dealing with the death of a parent. Yet despite so many heavy storylines – among others, there’s a man who hunts down and nearly kills his estranged wife – Russo manages to infuse the book with humor, particularly in the dialogue. Sully is the perfect smartass, a lifelong class clown who never stops running his mouth, often to his own detriment – not that that stops him from running it.

Empire Falls is a more complete novel, with a better-rounded storyline and a more empathetic main character, but it doesn’t have the same degree of wit or slapstick as Nobody’s Fool; I preferred the former but would recommend the latter as well. And I credit Russo for acknowledging that life revolves around food by putting that most American of culinary institutions, the greasy spoon, at the center of both novels.

Next up: William Kennedy’s Legs, part one of the “Albany” trilogy that eventually earned him a Pulitzer Prize of his own.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 17, 2008
→ By

Mary Poppins.

Mary Poppins is one of my daughter’s favorite movies, and I’ve seen it probably 30 or 40 times in the last few months. (“Watcha Poppins?” could get annoying after the hundredth time, except that she’s so excited about it that I could never hold it against her.) So I decided to take a crack at the book on which the movie is loosely based. Mind you, I was unaware that there was a book until a few months ago, and it turns out that there are eight in the series, although reportedly P.L. Travers, the Australian critic who wrote the books, hated the Disney film so much that she refused to allow them to make a sequel.

Even for an adult, the book is fun, although it’s a lot less whimsical than I would have expected from the movie. Poppins herself is not Julie Andrews’ version: She’s quite severe with the children, who are naughtier than their film counterparts, and she’s nowhere near as pretty as Julie Andrews was. Most of the anecdotes in the film come from the book, but with changes:

  • Mary and Bert (who barely appears in the book) do enter into a painting and go to a country fair, but without the children.
  • Admiral Boom, who appears a few times in the film as comic relief, appears just once in passing in the book.
  • The tea party on the ceiling comes doesn’t include the jokes that are central to the film scene. The talking dog that alerts Mary to the problem in the movie is actually part of a different story altogether in the book.
  • Katie Nanna has already quit at the start of the book.
  • Jane and Michael have twin, infant siblings who get their own story in the book.
  • The entire sequence on the rooftops appears to be original – Bert, also called the “Match Man” in the book, is clearly a longtime friend of Mary Poppins’ but only makes his appearance as a street artist, not a chimney sweep.
  • The run on Mr. Banks’ bank and Mrs. Banks’ suffragette efforts are original to the film, and in the book, Mary Poppins stays a year or so, rather than the week of the movie.

Yet at the same time, two of the best stories in the book – which is more a collection of stories than a single narrative – is omitted from the film entirely. In one, Mary takes the children to Mrs. Corry’s for gingerbread cookies, only to learn how the stars ended up in the sky. In another, the twins earn top billing, and the reader sees how infants see the world and that we lose something when we grow out of that stage of life.

The difference in Mary Poppins’ character between the book and the film is enormous. In the film, she’s there for the purpose of bringing the slightly neglectful father who is married to his work and has some rather definite ideas about family life back into the loving-father role. In the book, she’s there to trigger Jane and Michael’s imaginations and improve their behavior; Michael in particular has one story where he’s a real brat, and Mary whisks him and Jane around the world visiting “friends” of hers (they’re animals now, but in the original version were apparently people based on unflattering stereotypes).

Unlike the movie, which has a single narrative and draws you into the story and the two main characters (Mary and Bert), the book is just a collection of fun and imaginative stories that doesn’t create the same connection between the reader and the main character. So while I recommend the book because it’s fun and the magical twist in each story is usually very clever, I wasn’t sucked in the way I have been to other great children’s novels like The Phantom Tollbooth.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 19, 2008
→ By

Decline and Fall.

I read lots of novels, mostly ones that are considered by someone to have great literary merit. I find that I enjoy a significant number of these novels, and have discovered many that ended up on the Klaw 100 because I stepped out of my comfort zone and read a book I didn’t expect to like, or had never heard of, or thought too long. But there is no doubt that I’d be perfectly happy spending all of my time reading books like Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. Of course, the problem is that even the entire catalogues of Waugh and Wodehouse and Fforde and Amis wouldn’t get me past a year, so I’ve got to spread them out a bit – usually saving them for bad travel days where I need the distraction.

Decline and Fall is a nonsense novel along the lines of Scoop, with a faint underpinning of seriousness, as opposed to a more overtly serious work like Brideshead Revisited. The story follows Paul Pennyfeather, the bland quasi-hero who serves more as a prop than as a character, serving both as a window on to the lives of the slightly insane people around him and as the unwitting victim to the schemes of those characters. He’s sent down from university after a fraternity prank, derailing his hopes of a career in the ministry, leading him to a teaching job at a small and poorly-run public school in Wales (which is depicted as the backwater of England), where everyone he meets is a little bit dotty. Waugh savages everyone along the way – academics, hypocritical clerics, upper-class snobs, etc. – scoring points both with sarcastic putdowns and comical situations (not least of which are the pair of nine-lived con artists who keep reappearing in Paul’s life). The satire is a little dated, of course, but the dry wit is still fresh.

The serious underpinning is a sort of latent nihilism and futile search for meaning (one character says he walked away from a career in the ministry not because he couldn’t believe in God, but because “he couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all”) and, along the way, a dissatisfaction with the answers one finds. Waugh was a misanthrope’s misanthrope, and it’s not clear what he hated more: the world around him, or himself. Pennyfeather accepts the seeming randomness in his life, although much of what appears to be “random” is actually due to the machinations and screw-ups of the people around him; one might argue he should choose better company, but either way, his reluctant acceptance of whatever comes his way, without ire or desire for revenge, is one way to cope.

For a little more on Decline and Fall, The Guardian’s books blog has a note from March of this year bemoaning the lack of appreciation of the novel today, 80 years after its publication.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 16, 2008
→ By

Winnie-the-Pooh.

Seriously – A.A. Milne’s first book of stories for his son, Winnie-the-Pooh, is #22 on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the 20th century’s top 100 novels. They’re pushing the definition of “novel” with this one, both because it’s a collection of stories rather than a novel and because it’s very short, but it’s still a fun read and something I look forward to reading to my daughter.

The stories revolve around the familiar set of characters, including Edward Bear, better known as Winnie-the-Pooh, a “Bear of Very Little Brain” who has a series of minor adventures that typically involve a rescue at the hands of Milne’s son, Christopher Robin. The humor is unmistakably English, almost like Wodehouse or even Waugh for children, and the language used isn’t dumbed down. The characters have actual character – Rabbit is bossy, Owl is book-smart but light on street smarts, Piglet talks a good game but is actually a chicken, and so on. Winnie-the-Pooh is a little dim, but can sometimes be clever despite his diminutive cranium. And I have to admit that I share a certain affinity with the bear:

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast,” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s the same thing,” he said.

Speaking of Waugh, I’ve got one more review from my trip, his Decline and Fall, probably coming on Friday.

Also, there is a Klawchat today at 1 pm – HTML page is here but it’s not linked on the baseball page yet.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 7, 2008
→ By

The Sot-Weed Factor.

John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (on the TIME 100) is a spot-on parody of the picaresque novel, a genre that includes Klaw 100 entries Tom Jones and The Pickwick Papers, novels with wide-ranging comical adventures running to seven or eight hundred pages. The style had been out of favor for well over a century at the time that Barth began work on his magnum opus in the late 1950s, and in satirizing it Barth also managed to imbue his work with a strain of social commentary and of symbolism that the earlier works often lacked.

The book’s unusual title comes from a real poem of the same name, written by Ebenezer Cooke, an English poet who sought himself to satirize the culture and society of the Province of Maryland, about whom little was known at the time that Barth decided to build a false history/biography of the man. “Sot-weed” was another name for tobacco, and a factor is, of course, a middleman in the trade of tangible goods. Barth takes Cooke and makes him into the poet laureate of Maryland, a man bent on preserving his innocence even as he is caught up in various political, military, and criminal intrigues that involve him, his twin sister, the fallen prostitute who is the object of his affections, and his childhood tutor, the shapeshifting Henry Burlingame. Many of these machinations are apparently at the whim of the God-like Lord Baltimore and the Satanic sociopath John Coode, although their appearances in the novel are oblique, to put it mildly.

In great picaresque style, Barth takes Ebenezer from his childhood to his dissolute days of drinking and idleness in London and then sets in motion a Rube Goldberg-like chain of events that lead him into and out of such troubles as marriage, kidnapping, bankruptcy, various threats to life and limb, the loss of his father’s estate, and endless encounters with impostors, not to mention at least three people who pretend to be Ebenezer when he’s not around to defend his name. Like most picaresque novels, The Sot-Weed Factor starts to drag in its final third, but Barth rallies for a slam-bang finish with a sham trial, the exposure of the frauds that remain on the table, and the settlement of all of the loose ends still untied, all set in motion by another pair of coincidences (a standby of the genre) that put Ebenezer and two of his comrades in just the right place at just the right time.

Barth’s novel also veers from the picaresque norm, perhaps by way of deepening the parody, through its sheer bawdiness. The prose is full of double entendres and euphemisms for sex and the body parts used therein. Men are often depicted as sexual animals who’ll take whatever they can get – in some instance, not distinguishing between man or woman, and in one instance between man or beast – while women veer from manipulators who use sex as a tool or as trade to victims-in-waiting for rape or abuse. (Indeed, the offhand treatment of rape was the one glaring negative aspect of the experience of reading the book; whether or not it is appropriate to the time in which the book is set and faux-written does not make one more comfortable with reading about rape, even when it’s never brought to pass on the page.) Tom Jones, at the least, had plenty of sexual shenanigans, and part of the book’s climax (!) comes as the title character nearly unknowingly commits incest. Barth gives the reader more sex, particularly more talk of sex, both satirizing the giants of the literary genre but also setting contrast to the willful virgin Ebenezer, whose drive to protect his innocence is a joke that runs through the entire work to the very last pages. One of the best in-jokes of the book is the alleged “true story” of John Smith and Pocahontas, after which you will never think of an eggplant in the same way again.

Next up: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 24, 2008
→ By

On lit lists.

So reader ajd posted this in the comments on my Vanity Fair review, a follow-up to his question of whether I ever read lesser-known works by great authors:

My original question was, in part, based on criticism in works like Myers’ _Reader’s Manifesto_, i.e. that certain “great” literature is only considered great because it is deemed so by the keepers of the kingdom. I’ve always wondered how useful certain lists of great books are for this very reason — do the authors pick the best books, or do they pick the books that make them look the most intelligent and the most in tune with what other literati value?

Obviously this is moot to some extent, as one simply has to start somewhere. And some of your less-favorable reviews seem to indicate that you agree with this general premise above; I’d just wondered if, once you’ve read other works by authors on these lists, you’d found you preferred them over the best-known books.

I’m with Myers and ajd to a point; there is no question that some books are considered great because they’ve always been considered great, and I think there are a few books that are considered great because they’re incredibly hard to read. There’s also the whole stream-of-consciousness movement started by Joyce – like a viral infection through the world of fiction – that gets praise from academics but that leaves most readers cold or on the outside altogether. I admit I haven’t read Pamela or Clarissa, but their greatness has to be almost wholly derived from their influence on contemporary or near-contemporary authors, since they’re scarcely read today.

However, there’s a limit to this absolute-contrarian view. Some books are considered great because they’re actually great. One Hundred Years of Solitude (in the top 20 of the Novel 100) is one. Most of you who’ve read The Master and Margarita (which is in the honorable mentions for the Novel 100) agree that it’s phenomenal. I don’t hear anyone saying that Don Quixote (#1 on the Novel 100) isn’t anything special.

I also run into a fair amount of disagreement on the rankings of novels by prolific authors. What is Charles Dickens’ greatest novel? In high school, we read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. The Novel 100 includes the former, but adds Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers (the latter being my favorite). Some cite Hard Times for its blend of comedy and biting social commentary. And when the Guardian did its list, the only Dickens novel on it was David Copperfield.

Part of why Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is typically considered his best book is that it’s his most serious, and there is absolutely an academic/critical bias against comic novels. (That said, Modern Library put A Handful of Dust over Brideshead Revisited, while the Bloomsbury 100 includes the former but omits the latter.) It is almost as if a comedy has to be very old (Fielding, Austen) or the author’s only great work (Heller’s Catch-22) to be taken seriously.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ July 23, 2008
→ By

Pale Fire.

You could interpret Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (on the TIME 100 and #53 on the Modern Library 100) in any number of ways. The book comprises an unfinished, 999-line epic poem – occasionally brilliant, but mostly pedestrian and often just silly – by John Shade, and 150 pages of critical commentary by the late poet’s neighbor, the very eccentric Charles Kinbote.

I prefer to view the book as a satire of modern critical commentary on poetry, where the critic or analyst can find whatever s/he wants in the poem by looking hard enough, even though the analysis may be informed by nothing more than a series of coincidences. As a satire along these lines, Pale Fire is undoubtedly successful, blending outright humor with the dry wit that comes of exaggerating the satire’s target to the point of comedy, but satire does not provide a novel with any narrative greed. Only a strong plot can do that, and the plot of Pale Fire is weak, not least because the reader can figure out the two main twists before completing the first third of the book.

Similarly, the clever wordplay throughout Pale Fire is amusing, but doesn’t hold the reader’s attention. Yes, it’s great to see a reference in the poem to “Hurricane Lolita,” followed by a dry, witless comment on the name Lolita. Yes, the reference to “word golf” in the index is funny when you follow the “see also’s” to their conclusion. The play on the names of Oliver Goldsmith and William Wordsworth is good for a chuckle, but the moment passes. You can’t sustain a novel on cleverness alone, so while Pale Fire is undeniably clever, you have to buy into the mystery of the narrator’s identity to find the narrative greed here that will propel you through the book.

Nabokov himself apparently said that the narrator is a fraud, a madman with an invented backstory, but there are other critics and fans of Pale Fire who offer differing interpretations, that perhaps the narrator’s commentary is guided by Shade from beyond the grave, or that the narrator is Shade himself, or that Kinbote is who he says he is (a minor plot point I won’t spoil). These debates are mildly interesting, but even the mystery of who is who and what is what wasn’t enough to propel me through the text. With thirty pages to go, I was still dragging myself to the end. It was obvious from the start how Shade would die, and obvious to me from early on who Kinbote was or thought he was. I thought we might get some major plot twist at the end, but none came, and the fairly insubstantial plot of the attempt to assassinate the king of possibly-fictional Zembla was boring, not least because we know it fails. Nabokov also said that he wrote primarily for himself, and I suppose his tastes were far different than my own.

Next up: An out of print novel by Anthony Powell, one of his first, a comedy called A View to a Death, which preceded A Dance to the Music of Time. I was lucky enough to stumble on a copy in a used book store for $2, although I see some copies online for under $10.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 27, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part five.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part three (#60-41)
Part four (#40-21)

I doubt there will be too many surprises here, as I’ve discussed most of these last twenty books somewhere before. The complete list of 100 is available as a spreadsheet at Google Spreadsheets. But don’t click now or you’ll spoil the top 20…

20. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett. Dark and violent and completely gripping, Red Harvest was Hammett’s first novel and established the format of the hard-boiled detective novel with its sparse style and unblinking descriptions of bloodshed. It may have been the basis for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as well.

19. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. Perhaps the archetype of the brooding male hero, although I kind of felt Heathcliff was just an asshole. It’s a tremendous story of anger, vengeance, and cruelty, unfolding in layers as one might peel back an onion. Also available in a much-beloved semaphore version.

18. If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino. If you love inventive or just plain weird books, this is for you. The subject of the novel is the reading of a novel. Alternating chapters show a dialogue between the Author and the Reader, interlaced with opening chapters from various fictional novels. Calvino, one of the great fabulists of the twentieth century, takes his inspired silliness to a new level.

17. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s all about the green light. Jay Gatsby’s ill-fated chase of the American Dream, set in the Jazz Age as the automobile begins to make its presence felt on our culture. It ranked first on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century, and second on the Modern Library’s own list.

16. The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford. A classic English novel of betrayal, The Good Soldier describes a web of infidelities that destroys the lives of five people, with incredible dialogue and the powerful, recurring symbol of the human heart. I’m pretty sure that at $2.50 it’s the cheapest book on this list.

15. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , by Carson McCullers. Full review. An amazing achievement of prose and of literary introspection. McCullers looks into the human soul and finds a lot of dusk, if not dark night.

14. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Like stepping into a lucid dream, and indeed, the protagonist finds the line between reality and dreams blurring while searching for his wife, who has either left him or is being held against her will. You’ll have a hard time putting it down, although there is one scene of graphic torture that was tough to get through.

13. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Ignatius J. Reilly with his dyspeptic valve is one of the great hero-antiheroes in American literature as he’s forced to get his lazy ass a job. The book was published posthumously after Toole’s suicide through the persistence of his mother, who is portrayed in an unflattering light in the book, and novelist Walker Percy; twelve years after Toole’s death, Confederacy won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy. Hated it in high school … okay, that’s not fair, I hated the first twenty pages and rented the movie. I went back for a re-read 16 years later and saw what I’d missed: One of the greatest ironic novels I’ve ever read. It’s bleak in its portraits of English society and its strictures, of human emotions, and of fate, but Hardy (who also was a noted poet) writes beautifully and slips numerous bits of wordplay into the text.

11. The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. Collins, a protégé of Charles Dickens, believed that nothing in the novel was more important than the plot, and he wrote perhaps the first suspense novel in this story of mistaken identities, ghost sightings, and the unctuous, nefarious villain Count Fosco. Its use of multiple narrators was revolutionary for the time, and while it has the potential to be confusing, it’s critical for the way Collins wants to unfold the plot before the reader

10. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh. Full review. A hilarious and absurd satire of the news media that was written in the 1930s but is just as relevant today, as a man who wants no part of the job becomes a foreign correspondent to an African state on the brink of civil war.

9. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding. Fielding made his bones as a novelist by parodying Samuel Richardson’s Pamela with his own work, Shamela, and then moved to a broader satire with Joseph Andrews before stepping out with an entirely original work, the comic picaresque Tom Jones. The story is built around Jones’ romantic pursuit of the daughter of Squire Western, who is constantly trying to pair his daughter up with the villainous son of Jones’ foster parents. Along the way Jones is arrested, accosted, consorts with prostitutes, and runs into no end of conniving, selfish secondary characters.

8. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. The history of Colombia told as the history of one family, with a heavy dose of magical realism and the sweeping feel of an epic despite the focus on individual characters. The Buendía family plays a role in the rise of the fictional town of Macondo until a banana plantation, owned by foreigners, arrives and triggers a lengthy and ultimately complete collapse.

7. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner. The history of the American South told as the history of one family, mostly limited to the decline of the region after the Civil War. Patriarch Thomas Sutpen builds his fortune, but sets the seeds for his family’s downfall through his greed and racism. Told in Faulkner’s usual style of multiple perspectives and winding prose.

6. Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton. The best book ever written about Africa was written by a white South African, decrying the country’s apartheid system while offering threads of hope for its future once the system is dismantled. Preacher Stephen Kumalo leaves his rural village to go to the city to help his dissolute sister, Gertrude, and find his son, named Absalom, who went to help Gertrude earlier but never returned and ends up in jail.

5. Beloved, by Toni Morrison. And here we have African-American history, dating back to their emancipation from slavery. Sethe and her daughter Denver are trying to establish a live for themselves as free women when a young woman, known simply as “Beloved,” arrives at the house. Is she the reincarnation of the child Sethe killed to keep her out of slavery? Sethe’s obsession with Beloved opens the door to a host of questions – are African-Americans held down by the weight of their past, or are they complicit in allowing their past to weigh them down? No one writing today does so with prose like Morrison’s or with as much literary depth.

4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The greatest one-hit wonder in literature and perhaps in the arts. The story alone makes it a classic, but Lee’s use of language, combining a Southern dialect with the unmistakable voice of a child, elevates it to its legendary status.

3. Emma, by Jane Austen. Austen herself wrote that she didn’t expect anyone to like her meddling, imperious protagonist, but nearly two hundred years after publication the book remains extremely popular, and the title character is a major reason. Character development was never Austen’s strength, but Emma grows up across the book’s 400-odd pages, with the usual cast of comic-relief supporting characters, including her worrywart father and the garrulous Miss Bates.

2. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. To the reviewer who called Lolita “the only convincing love story of our century,” I submit Tender is the Night, the story of the gradual, inexorable breakdown of the seemingly perfect marriage between two beautiful people by way of infidelity, drink, and mental illness. If Fitzgerald had to go out early, he could not have gone out on a higher note.

1. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. An absolute masterpiece, banned by the Soviets for decades for its subtle yet severe indictment of communism’s many, many failures. The Devil comes to Moscow and exposes its society for all its vapidity, running into the frustrated author The Master and his faithful girlfriend Margarita, a story intertwined with a dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Jesus, all stacked with allusions to the Bible and major works of 19th century Russian literature. It is a work of unbridled genius, of acrimonious dissent, and most of all, of hope and faith in humanity.

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