Yesterday Terry Teachout conducted a “purely personal inventory” of the ten American novels he “most wished” he had written, and this morning Patrick Kurp countered with his own list of ten. If you removed the alien and seditious titles from my own three-year-old list of the fifty best English-language novels published since the Victorians — a list originally compiled for students who kept pestering me for recommended readings — you’d be left with this roster of ten:
( 1) Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
( 2) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
( 3) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
( 4) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
( 5) Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)
( 6) Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)
( 7) Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970)
( 8) Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941)
( 9) William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
(10) Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)
As one of Kurp’s commentators said, this is a “nifty parlor game.” But it also, I think, points to something serious.
“There are some works of literature that every civilized American should be familiar with,” Hugh Kenner wrote years ago. But no one believes that any more. It’s telling, don’t you think, that Teachout, Kurp, and I agree on just one writer — Cather — without even agreeing on which of her novels ought to be first read. I have tried to update Kenner’s apothegm (“There are some works of literature that every civilized American should be familiar with, although no one will ever agree on what they are”), but even this innocuous paradox is enough, in today’s English departments, to get me housed with the reactionaries, the racists, or worse.
All that’s left are parlor games, offered (as Teachout says he offered his) “apropos of absolutely nothing.” If literature is no longer a part of every civilized American’s cultural inheritance, you can thank your English teachers, who gladly coughed up their authority over it.
Just 6 titles on your list to go – finishing up James's Portrait of a Lady now and will start on Wharton and Cather later this year. This is my second venture into James – the Ambassadors was very difficult and Portrait is likewise, but several chapters are just spectacular, like 42 where Isabel ruminates on her sad state of affairs with Osmond. Worth struggling through pages and pages of drawing rooms and perceiving stuff just to get to these gems. Henry loves people who perceive. A lot.
Gerry, n nDon’t neglect James’s minor masterpieces like Washington Square and What Maisie Knew. Ditto Wharton. Her “divorce” novel The Custom of the Country is no longer widely read — everyone prefers The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome — but it is a weird and beguiling mixture of social comedy and horrifying tragedy.
The phalanx of public perception simply can't be that frequently correct in its determinations of the best books of the great authors. In that post above, you indicated you had read Washington Square, yet it predictably doesn't materialize when there is Portrait of a Lady to contend with. That's fine. But The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's worst novel; it's dreadfully slow-moving and disingenuously emotional compared to every other short story and novel. I've departed from the literary world for a couple of years now because I'll never be an English major, and I'm barely twenty. My own choices of good literature are just too idiosyncratic to have shaped by others. I like stories and whatever personally resonates. I'm sure you'll think I am an unthinking consumer of popular trash, given some of the choices. n n nIf I were to conjure a list of English language novels (I like Russian novels and French novels more, and I'm more experienced with them), I'd go with: n1. The French Lieutenant's Woman ~ John Fowles n2. Washington Square ~ Henry James n3. The English Patient ~ Michael Oondjate n4. Possession ~ A.S. Byatt n5. Daniel Deronda ~ George Eliot n6. The Beautiful and Damned/ Tender is the Night ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald n7. East of Eden ~ John Steinbeck n8. Exodus ~ Leon Uris n9. The Tenant of Wildefel Hall ~ Anne Bronte n10. Jane Eyre ~ Charlotte Bronte n11. Wuthering Heights ~ Emily Bronte n12. Memoirs of a Geisha ~ Golden n13. Ragtime ~ Doctorow n n n nAnd in your larger list, how can you be a Commentary writer in good standing and like Invisible Man? I remember being forced to read it in my A.P. English language class and grimacing as I analyzed all of the passages as if they were actually credible. I was so good at pretending to be a flaming Democrat that my teacher consistently marked my essay with perfect scores. I had to cover the contorted expressions on my face as she read out the essays to the class so they would emulate the unceasing self-hatred I had tapped into. I'm actually shivering now just to recall it. n