Dan Brown, king of the world
Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol has edged out The Guinness Book of World Records to become the No. 1 Christmas best seller in England, a victory for fiction at a time when nonfiction was expected to rule.
So a lot of British readers will find Dan Brown under the Christmas tree. Me? I’ve been wrapping up China Mieville’s extraordinary The City and the City, and, a late discovery, Dave Zeltzerman’s audacious comic crime novel Pariah, for those on my gift list. What books are you giving for Christmas?
I say the surprise victory for fiction is good news, even if the fiction in question is an undemanding potboiler. Not that there’s anything wrong with nonfiction, but it’s refreshing, in this age of reality television, celebrity memoirs and 24-hour news channels, any time the public shows a taste for the novel, which, after all, has been the flagship of Western culture for the past 300 years or so.
Brown’s triumph is considered such news in Great Britain that two leading newspapers, the Guardian and the Independent did stories about it.
“This year there is very definitely a much stronger end-of-year Christmas fiction market,” André Breedt at Nielsen BookScan told the Guardian. “The autobiography and biography market overall peaked in 2007, and ever since then it has been slowing down.”
I can’t find a similar story on U.S. sales, but The Lost Symbol tops the fiction best seller lists at The New York Times and Publishers Weekly, both of which had it at No. 2 last week. USA Today, which doesn’t separate fiction from nonfiction or hardcover from paperback, has Sarah Palin’s political memoir, Going Rogue at No. 1, followed by New Moon, the paperback reprint of Stephanie Meyer’s teen vampire phenom, at No. 2.
“To be Christmas number one is very exciting indeed,” Alison Barrow, of Transworld, Brown’s British publisher, told the Independent.
“People shopping this week and last are the people who are looking for a safe bet, and Dan Brown is a safe bet,” said John Howells, a spokesman for Britain’s leading bookstore, Waterstone’s, in the Guardian.
The British combined list tilts heavily toward fiction, with two Stephanie Meyers books, a new novel by Jodi Picoult and the late Stieg Larrson’s first thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo making the top ten “ahead of a host of celebrity autobiographies.”
To find anything like literary fiction on any of the lists, you have to go all the way to No. 11 in The New York Times, where Barbara Kingsolvers The Lacuna holds steady. USA Today lists Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel The Lovely Bones at No 20, doubtless boosted by the new movie version. PW also has The Lacuna at No. 11.
But it’s the most wonderful time of the year, so I say a rising tide lifts all boats, the glass is half full, and what the heck, life’s a box of chocolates.
If Sue Grafton, Stephen King, James Patterson, Laurel K. Hamilton, Michael Crichton, Glen Beck, Nicholas Sparks and John Grisham, all with books in The Times fiction top 10, are selling a ton of books this holiday season, then maybe, just maybe, Paul Auster, Dan Choan, Daniyal Mueenuddin, China Mieville, Colum McCann, Hilary Mantel and the other authors of the year’s best literary fiction are selling at least a pound here and there.
You may say that I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.
Michael Connelly
“Mysteries” as a literary genre has long since been a capacious category, embracing everything from traditional cozies and whodunnits to noir detective stories, police procedurals, crime capers, ambitious semi-literary novels — anything with a soupcon of criminality, whether or not it includes a mystery with clues for the reader to figure out along with the protagonist.
It’s not a genre that, as they say, “speaks” to me, even though I cheerfully agree that great work is done within its expansive confines all the time. When I turn to crime fiction, I’m looking for the exceptional novel, the one that bursts or (and I hate this word, too, but we don’t want to be here all day) “transcends” the conventions of the genre.
By contrast, the true aficionado loves the genre for just those familiar tropes and narrative devics, and while often able to recognize the exceptional novel, is better suited to identify the worthwhile mystery that fulfills rather than transcends the conventions.
That’s why I’m turning to my longtime friend and erstwhile colleague, Oline Cogdill, for a list of best mysteries of 2009. No one knows more about the ins-and-outs of crime fiction than Oline, who has served as the Sun Sentinel’s mystery fiction columnist for nigh on 20 years. I’ve found a number of fine authors — Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos– on her recommendation.
Denis Johnson
Before considering Oline’s best-of-2009 list, which appeared in yesterday’s Sun Sentinel, let me say that I read only three crime novels in the past year — and each one was outstanding. China Mieville’s The City and the City, a fantasy disguised as a down-to-earth police procedural, was my favorite book of the year. I’ve raved about it elsewhere, often.
In Nobody Move, Denis Johnson avoided the pretentiousness that sinks most literary writers when they slum in a genre, producing a terrific thriller that compares well to the best of Elmore Leonard. And I’ve just finished Dave Seltzerman’s twisted, propulsive and hilarious Pariah, which I will be reviewing somewhere in the very near future. Zeltserman is one sick dude, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Attica Locke
None of those books made Oline’s list, which could be an indication of the genre’s breadth, or it just could mean I don’t understand the category well enough. Oline chose Michael Connelly’s two novels, The Scarecrow and Nine Dragons, as a tie for No. 1. Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising is her top debut mystery. And Oline names Otto Penzler’s The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives as a “must-have” for mystery lovers.
For purposes of comparison, here’s a link to Adam Woog’s “Best Crime Fiction of 2009” column in the Seattle Times. Unlike Oline, he includes Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire, one of the most popular books of the year. Otherwise, the two lists overlap to a degree I find astonishing, which is a testimony, I think, of the acumen and knowledge of each reviewer.
Join in — if you’re a mystery lover, or just read a crime novel or two that you really liked, by all means let us know. What was your favorite mystery of 2009?
Did Garrison Keillor, beloved host of NPR’s “A Prairie Home Companion” and author of innumerable faintly schmaltzy books about Norwegians in Minnesota, veer dangerously close to anti-Semitism in a recent essay about Christmas?
“Don’t Mess With Christmas,” which appeared in the online magazine Slate this week, is a comic argument that “Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.”
Keillor got worked up after taking part in a Unitarian service in Cambridge, Mass., where he was offended to discover that “Silent Night” had been rewritten “to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God.”
He writes: “If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn ‘Silent Night’ and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough.”
Keillor is explicitly hard on Unitarians, not to mention Ralph Waldo Emerson, former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, and New England elites in general, all in the context of keeping Christmas songs religiously pure. These are easy targets — Unitarians are one of the few groups you can still mock with impunity. And it’s always open season on “elites,” whatever that is.
To his credit — sort of — Keillor doesn’t stop there, but tackles head on the historical fact that many secularizing Christmas songs have been written by Jews (Irving Berlin, Mel Torme, Johnny Marks, etc.):
“And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t.”
Keillor is a humorist, in some respects the riskiest of all writing disciplines. Humorists always run the danger of being misunderstood — the good ones, anyway. A classic example is Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay, “A Modest Proposal,” with its suggestion the Irish ease their poverty by selling babies for rich people to eat.
Maybe Keillor, like Swift, is overstating a point he does not actually believe — Jews should keep their unworthy hands off our Christmas songs! –to make a larger point: Keep the Christ in Christmas.
Or maybe he’s dead serious. The essay, though written in a sprightly, readable style, has a sharp tang of bitterness. Even if Keillor means to overstate his case for satiric or rhetorical value, the plain thrust of his argument — Christmas is for believing, practicing Christians only –seems to run counter to much of the Christmas spirit.
You know, all that peace on earth, good will to men stuff. Reaction to Keillor’s essay, which you can find at Salon and also at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, GalleyCat and elsewhere, ranges from agreement to accusations of anti-Semitism.
Most, however, are reasoned and funny in themselves, like this one at Salon from pinkoursula: “Hey, if you’re going to nit pick (in the spirit of Christmas), don’t go translating a perfectly lovely German song into English. English speakers need to write their own damn carols. So please, keep your Englische hands off our Stille Nacht!”
This is not the first time Keillor, generally perceived as a doctrinaire liberal, has outraged a group you would think he’d be in sympathy with. A Salon column from 2007, “Stating the Obvious,” defended traditional male-female marriage, indulging in some offensive gay stereotyping in the process. For a scathing and pointed response, see The Stranger website.
Do I think Garrison Keillor is anti-Semitic or homophobic? No, his talent and record earn the benefit of the doubt. But that doesn’t mean he might not be slipping.
The quality of his signature “Lake Wobegon” monologues on “A Prairie Home Companion” has become spotty, at best. More jokey, more anecdotal, less shaped and poignant. Less funny, too. A few months ago I heard one that consisted of fart jokes that wouldn’t pass the taste meter in a Seth Rogen movie.
In some of his columns, and some of his monologues, I can’t help detecting a distinct tone of what might be called “age-related crotchetiness.” He’s been doing “A Prairie Home Companion” for 38 years. That’s a long time to plow one field. I’d get cranky, too.
E.B. White
Well, not really grammar books, but books on English language usage, which can not only be invaluable but also (I swear to God) fun. A fine essay on H.W. Fowler in The New York Times inspires me to ask: What usage books have you found most, er, useful?
This is not a trivial question, even as we race heedless into a bookless, paperless world. Until we’re all fitted with microchips that allow direct mind-to-mind communication (which Cormac McCarthy, in a rare chat with the Wall Street Journal, thinks will be less than 100 years), language will remain the fundamental medium between one person and another — or a billion.
And Mark Twain’s famous remark will still be relevant: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
And most of us as writers want to bring down lightning with our prose, right? But usage is more than writing. We think in words, too, we conceptualize our feelings (which is where the human being actually resides) in words, string those words together into sentences, and use those sentences to mediate not only with other people, but with ourselves.
Trying to find the right word, and cast our thoughts and feelings into good, strong language, is therefore also a way to teach ourselves how to think clearly.
The spark igniting this discussion is The Times essay by Jim Holt on H.W. Fowler, author of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, for many writers the most sacred of books and known to devotees as Fowler’s. Holt gives the story of how Fowler–not a trained grammarian or lexicographer — came to write the book and why it holds such a place of imminence.
Fowler’s has not, however, been one of my principle usage guides, and no doubt I am the poorer for it. But I do have my few indispensable favorites. In fact, they are arrayed on the desk before me this very minute.
Roget’s International Thesaurus has by far been the volume to which I’ve turned most often and most profitably. The version I have is so old — I purchased it new in 1977 — that the publisher is “Harper & Row.”
Roget’s is much more than a synonym dictionary. In fact, any “Roget’s” that’s arranged alphabetically is spurious and to be avoided at all costs.
This book instead collates knowledge and the words relating to them in categories. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone searching for a synonym for a common term, only to find the original word did not mean quite what I thought it did. No book has challenged me the way this one has.
My second most valuable resource is The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Houghton Mifflin, 1979). I have in my possession a number of newer dictionaries, but this is the one I return to again and again.
Its definitions are beautifully concise yet thorough, but its boon lies in the etymolgies–brief descriptions of the history and development of each word. Do not waste your money on any dictionary that does not include word origins. Once I understand how a word arose and came to mean what it means today, it is much harder to misuse it (though not impossible, as regular readers of this blog no doubt can attest).
Finally, no writer — and I believe no speaker — of English should be without that charming little classic, The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White. It is very much a grammar usage guide, but not merely for the sake of propriety. Its true subject, as the title says, is “style.”
Strunk, who drafted the prescriptive grammar section, can be reduced to a single, timeless dictum: “Omit needless words!”
White, the great essayist and children’s author (Charlotte’s Web, among others), and a student of Strunk’s at Cornell, revised the text and added “An Approach to Style.” Among his many graceful recommendations, I am always most heartened by this simple one: “Write with nouns and verbs.”
I am certain many other great and handy books on English usage exist in this big world. If you have a favorite I’ve overlooked, by all means let me know.
And I’m not kidding about giving these and similar volumes as Christmas gifts. They may initially be met with a sneer, the way I used to receive the presents from a particularly practical aunt. But long after I was sated with the novelty of flashing ray guns or walkie-talkies, I still wore the underwear and socks.
Wish you had thought of mashing up zombies and Jane Austin, thereby producing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, one of the commercial literary successes of recent times? Here’s your chance to redeem yourself and possibly win, if not fame and fortune, a new laptop.
The folks over at BoingBoing announced just such a contest yesterday. You can win an HP Envy laptop (priced at $1,800) for rewriting a scene from a classic book in the style of another classic book. The contest ends Friday — not much time, but how hard can it be?
Judging from the entries already posted on the site, pretty darned hard. I suggest avoiding Star Trek, as in the entry in which the crew of the Enterprise finds itself beamed into A Christmas Carole. Too predictable. Also, please, leave Hemingway alone. His terse, declarative style is not as easy as it looks, and the results are usually tepid.
People who take joy in this kind of cleverness will find much delight in these efforts, even if they do not care to enter the contest themselves. A few of the best, or at least cleverest, so far: Chapter four of Thoreau’s Walden as written by H.P. Lovecraft (“My mind was invaded by the mad squawking of a hooting owl…”).
Someone has mashed up the first chapter of Genesis with the opening paragraph of The Catcher in the Rye (“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is how in the beginning, god created the universe, and how it was all formless and desolate, and all that kind of crap”). There’s also a mash-up of Catcher and Romeo and Juliet.
Hamlet is meshed with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe (“Be all my sins remember’d/ the answer is 42…”) The first lines of One Hundred Years of Solitude recast as the opening of A Tale of Two Cities. Raymond Carver takes a turn at Dracula. Kurt Vonnegut tackles A Christmas Carole. “Peanuts” retells Wuthering Heights.
Some inspired parodist merges The Little Prince with A Clockwork Orange, which would probably get my vote, if I had one (‘There was me, having scatted all smashy-wash in the Desert of Sahara. My plane having been like tolchocked in the blustery sand and I all on my ownsy not having a single droog to give help to the helpless, Oh my brothers. It was real horrorshow, having not enough moloko to peet for even a week”).
And one poor soul, either missing the point or just taking the opportunity to plug one of his favorite writers, offers an exchange, unaltered as far as I can tell, from Terry Bisson’s 1990 short story, “They’re Made Out of Meat.” I mention this only because this is one of the funniest and most heartbreaking sci fi stories ever. Read it in its entirety at Bisson’s website. You’re welcome.
Back to the contest. Some of the entries already posted are pretty darned good. If you want to win that laptop, get cracking. And if you do enter the contest, please post a copy of your mash-up here, in today’s comment section, so the rest of us can enjoy it, too. Best of luck.
Uh, but just to clarify: We’re not giving away a laptop, BoingBoing is. Go to their site to enter the actual contest.
The young Patricia Highsmith
This has been a terrific year for major biographies of under-appreciated or misunderstood women fiction writers. First came Brad Gooch’s “authoritative” biography of Flannery O’Conner, followed by Benjamin Moser’s much-needed book about Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian modernist. And now, at the end of the year a bonus: Joan Schenkar’s revealing biography of Patricia Highsmith.
I’m deeply gratified to see three of my favorite women writers finally get the serious biographical attention they’ve long deserved. What are some of the women writers you’d like to tell people about?
All these biographies are worth reading, having been well and widely reviewed — some critics think Schenkar’s may be a masterpiece. But let’s hope they also drive new and appreciative readers back to the works of their respective subjects. O’Connor, Lispector, Highsmith — each was an original, at odds with the tenor of their times.
You might think O’Connor needs no help in this regard. After all, her cheerfully perverse Southern Gothic stories are forced upon reluctant high school and college students, especially the unsurpassable “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” What’s more, The Complete Stories was recently named the best fiction title in the first 60 years of the National Book Award.
So it’s very surprising indeed to learn that Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor is, as The New York Times reports, “the first major biography” of the literary icon who died 44 years ago at the age of 37. Despite her literary fame, I’d say O’Connor would be grateful to be rescued from the teachers and scholars who stand between most readers and the fevered religious nightmares of her short stories and three novels. O’Connor’s fiction, for all her Catholocism, packs a potent perverse power that’s best experienced, not explained.
Clarice Lispector, also young
Clarice Lispector is probably not, as The Economist claimed earlier this year, “the most important Jewish writer since Kafka.” (More than Isaac Babel? Philip Roth? Bernard Malamud? Saul Bellow? I.B. Singer? I could go on…) But she is certainly one of Brazil’s most important 20th century writers, an idiosyncratic modernist who deserves a much higher profile among English-language readers than she’s had up till now.
Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector seeks to correct his unfortunate situation. The author of numerous novels and a few short stories that will haunt me forever, Lispector was also very odd. Stylish and self-possessed — she wore Chanel suits, wrote a beauty column and married a diplomat she did not love –she also seems to have felt no connection to the world.
Yet no writer of my experience–not Joyce, not Kafka, not Camus –creates out of ordinary details a sharper, more terrifying sense that life may really be as meaningless as we all, deep down, fear. For this reason, I suggest starting with her short stories.
Patricia Highsmith, of course, is best remembered as the creator of Tom Ripley, the sociopathic anti-hero of The Talented Mr. Ripley and four other novels. A productive novelist, she also wrote Strangers on a Train, among other novels, and scores of unsettling, amoral short stories. Contemporary writers who owe her a debt range from Jeff Lindsay, creator of the heroic serial killer Dexter, to Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster.
Apparently Highsmith was, in the words of publisher and bookseller Otto Penzler, “a horrible human being”–she drank, smoked, disliked people in general and seduced married women for sport. In one of the most praised nonfiction books of the
Flannery O'Connor as a young woman
year, Schenkar’s The Talented Ms. Highsmith seeks out the darkness in the heart of this influential misanthrope.
So read these biographies, not only for what they can tell us about these writers but also about the times and places in which they lived. But also go to the works of O’Connor, Lispector and Highsmith. Each possessed a fierce talent, and their stories are the kind that can shake your world and make you feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable things. And isn’t that one reason we read in the first place?
Trying to make sense of Kirkus’ closing in light of the enthusiastic demand for McSweeney’s newspaper project, the San Francisco Panorama, I find a barely literate blog post declaring the stupidity of the book and newspaper industries. Suddenly I wonder if the information highway isn’t hurtling us toward a vacant lot.
“The internet and technology is transforming just about every industry there is,” begins the post by Steven Hodson at Inquisitor.com. “Some at more breakneck speed than others but the change is coming. Changing as well is the consumer’s buying habits as more of our goods are obtainable as never-ending digital goods and for an almost zero distribution cost.”
Hodson goes on in that ungrammatical vein for several more paragraphs. The post is headlined “Book industry joins the news business on the stupid train,” illustrated by a small school bus, the kind assumed in pop culture to transport special needs students. Get it?
What makes this post so dispiriting, though, is not how very poorly it’s written, or the mixed metaphors of its presentation. No, it’s the likelihood Hodson is right in what I will charitably call his “argument.” Traditional media companies are fighting “against an inevitable future” in which technology renders them obsolete.
Meanwhile, McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers’ admirable journal, has spent nine months putting together an old-fashioned broadsheet newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama, which went on sale Tuesday and almost immediately sold out, according to Publishers Weekly –despite its hefty $16 price in bookstores.
“The newspaper feels and looks like what the Sunday New York Times used to—complete with its own magazine and stand alone book section,” reports PW. Its 300 pages includes sports, local news, editorials.
“We can’t remember any group of people being as excited about a publication as those for Panorama,” said Stacey Lewis of City Lights bookstore.
I’d like to think the Panorama’s popularity in San Francisco provides evidence of pent-up demand for real newspapers. But I’m not that stupid. A one-time publication, it is instead an exercise in nostalgia, a last glimpse of what is being lost. Newspapers used to do this every day, remember, using typewriters, glue pots, X-acto knives and lead type.
McSweeney’s publisher, Oscar Villalon, understands the appeal of the Panorama. “While some have credited McSweeney’s with recreating the newspaper,” PW observes, “Villalone said Panorama served more as a reminder of what newspapers were like in the past.”
Goodbye to all that. The internet genie is out of the bottle, I know. There’s no going back. Traditional book and newspaper industries are doomed, a cheering thought to many. But let’s take a moment to ponder the baby that’s going out with the bathwater: professionalism, quality control, expertise, institutional memory, journalistic and literary standards.
I know, too, that many good and smart people are working very hard to make the Internet a viable vehicle for intelligent discourse. McSweeney’s is one high-profile example. Many smaller sites struggle to carry the torch. One example is The Palm Beach ArtsPaper, an online start-up cultural journal founded by recently laid-off print journalists.
I hope they all find ways to make the economics of the web pay, because journalism and book publishing are both labor-intensive operations that in essence create hand-made products. It’s expensive to put out a newspaper, or find and publish worthwhile books.
If not, then “writers” like Hodson are destined to become the norm, and all of the news and opinion we consume will read like this: “The publishers are facing a future of electronic distribution that is beyond their control as e-reader, and more typical devices like smartphones and computers, gain market momentum as principal ways to read our books.”
Shoot me now. In response to my initial post yesterday on the demise of Kirkus, I received a thoughtful response from Robert Woerheide, who struck an optimistic note on the future of publishing: “With readers and writers at its heart–rather than bean-counting execs–I believe the future of literature can still be bright.”
Let’s all pray Mr. Woerheide is right. What do you think? Is there hope for journalism and literary culture?
Someday the death of old media might be marked by the date of Dec. 10, 2009, the day that Nielsen Trade Papers announced it is closing Kirkus Review and Editor & Publisher, venerable trade publications covering the book and newspaper industries.
Few details are available at this moment, but according to The New York Times, Nielsen is shuttering the two magazines as it gets out of the trade publications business. It is selling other properties — The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Adweek, and Mediaweek among them — to “to a joint venture of Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners.”
Nielsen will hold onto a few publications, including Contract magazine and Progressive Grocer.
The loss of Kirkus Review is yet another blow to literary culture in the United States, following the extreme contraction of newspaper book review pages over the past three years. Book reviews are essential to the public conversation that helps keep literary culture alive.
Kirkus was founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus to serve libraries, publishers, agents and booksellers. Published monthly, it produced about 5,000 brief book reviews annually. I suggest we all pray for the health of its chief competitor, Publishers Weekly.
Editor & Publisher is even more venerable, dating to 1884. Also published monthly, it covers all aspects of the newspaper industry. It was a newsroom staple during the long, blissful years I spent laboring in newsrooms in Tennessee and Florida.
PoynterOnline has the complete Nielsen press release.
I keep telling myself the Internet is an information highway — a good thing — but they’re paving paradise, no doubt a digital parking lot is soon to follow.
Ray Bradbury: A classic?
That’s the question posed by Edwin Frank, editor of the New York Review of Books Classics, which recently celebrated 10 years of republishing underappreciated books like Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now or Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago. His answer, as you might guess from those titles, is a resounding “Yes!”
“During a debate in London last week to celebrate the series’ anniversary,” reports Chris Cox at the Guardian, “Frank explained that their choices are often simply governed by personal taste: if they think something deserves to be launched into the firmament as a classic, they go right ahead and do it.”
Wait a minute. You mean any of us can, on the basis of personal taste, gut feeling or whatever, decide what books are classics? In a moment I’m going to ask what, in that case, some of your classics might be, and offer a few of my own suggestions. But first:
The mind reels. As a book reviewer, I believe in the existence of more or less objective aesthetic principles by which a book’s quality and value can be judged. The canon, however stuffy and off-putting is filled with titles that reward the effort required to master them.
On the other hand, I will never forget deciding to reread Crime and Punishment 12 or 15 years ago. After soldiering through the opening, page-long paragraph, I quietly set the book down with the shuddering thought that life is too short. If memory serves, I read Robert Olen Butler’s Tabloid Dreams instead.
But let’s not dismiss the canon casually. In high school I abominated Shakespeare. I despised Dickens. I dismissed Poe. Even in college I found Madame Bovary a bore and a chore. Coming back to these authors and works later in life, however, I found them rich, alive and — believe it or not — fun.
Plus, once you break the code of a Great Book, once you get past the museum mustiness and discover that the immortal writers were actually flesh and blood men and women like us, you can experience a miraculous foreshortening of time, a kinship and sense of identification with people who lived long ago in places far away.
But today I want to celebrate not the acknowledged classics, but every reader’s right to revere the books of his or her choice. As Chris Cox argues, there are two types of classics, the ones we know we should have read but probably haven’t. And the ones you’ve read five times and pressed upon all your friends.
Cox offers from his personal list: Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; The Tenants of Moonbloom, by Edward Lewis Wallant; and the Frank Bascombe novels of Richard Ford.
Off the top of my head, I add: Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger; Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome; The Gods of Pegana, by Lord Dunsany; Trilby, by Georges du Maurier; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera; Kim, by Rudyard Kipling; Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen); Christy, by Catherine Marshall; The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud; It Looked Like Forever, by Mark Harris; Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut; The Golden Apples of the Sun, by Ray Bradbury; West with the Night, by Beryl Markham.
Wow. I could do this all day (Lord of the Rings!), but I’d rather (Catch 22!) hear what books (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter!) you think should be considered (Old Yeller! –okay stop that) classics. My only ground rule: Time does count for something, so nothing published after 1999.
Fire away!
Tis the season of lists, part 14. Novelist Howard Jacobson has compiled a fascinating list at the Guardian, his selection of the top 10 novels of sexual jealousy. “Tales of innocence and wonderment leave me cold. Black obsessiveness is what the novel does best. And jealousy is its natural domain.”
Jacobson, the author of 10 novels, most recenlty The Act of Love, confesses the very first story he ever wrote described “a bout of jealousy I had suffered.” Writing was the only way, it seemed, he could gain any mastery. “It was as though the shame associated with jealousy needed to be expiated in prose.”
No. 1 on Jacobson’s list: Tolstoy’s great short novel, The Kreutzer Sonata, “a crazed story of desire, rage, real or imagained adultery.” No. 2: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy. No. 3: The much loved, much hated experimental novel Jealousy, by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
In selecting Joyce’s Ulysses, Jacobson comes close to cheating. “The fact that Leopold Blood has learnt to live with, and even love, his wife’s infidelities, does not exclude this great comic novel from the jealous category.” Um, yes it does.
Jacobson’s most penetrating insight comes at No. 7, Persuasion, by Jane Austen: “Sexual jealousy is not normally what we think of as Jane Austen’s terrain. But her novels are full of jealousy’s tragic potential.”
For all its delicious provocation, Jacobson’s list is a bit high-falutin’, somewhat obscure – which is good in its way. Maybe now I’ll get around to reading Venus in Furs (N. 9), by Leopold Von Sacher Masoch. But a list of more familiar, more handled titles would be useful too.
Maybe I’m particularly stupid this morning, but for all the novels I’ve read in my wastrel life I cannot readily think of any — any!– that make sexual (or romantic) jealousy a dominant theme. More common, it seems to me, is sexual longing. Is The Great Gatsby a novel of jealousy, or Anna Karenina? How about Of Human Bondage? Madame Bovary? The Sun Also Rises?
Maybe a little, I think, but mostly these are stories of longing, of desire, of romantic frustration or sexual impotence. Okay, then, surely the distinguished history of crime fiction is filled with jealousy. The Postman Always Rings Twice? Nope. The Talented Mr. Ripley? Negative (in more ways than one). The Big Sleep? Unh-huh.
Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair can be said to be a little about jealousy – but the hero loses his lover not to her husband or another suitor but to God. Surely, I wrack my brain, jealousy abounds in the work of John Updike, the great chronicler of the sexual revolution in suburbia. But all I come up with is Roger’s Version, very good but lesser novel, and it’s God-haunted, too.
Mmmm. How about classical literature? Jacobson includes Othello on the grounds it’s not a novel only “because novels weren’t going form yet.” So: Aha! Medea! She murders her children after Jason betrays her for a younger, more politically useful woman. Jealousy, indeed. Sort of.
And after that, I’m dry. I could cast my failure into a smarty-pants critique of jealousy as an inferior trope for fiction – it’s a crude emotional motivator, doesn’t stick in the mind, and usually appears as a minor theme – but this would certainly be bogus. Indeed, jealousy is a primal human experience. Literature must be replete with it.
So instead of trying to justify myself, let me appeal to you. Help me out. What are your favorite novels of jealousy?
Chauncey Mabe
