100 top novels — 13

New addition: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (#45), by Junot Díaz

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
20 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

21 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
22 Native Son – Richard Wright
23 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
24 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
25 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
26 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
27 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
28 Wolf – Jim Harrison
29 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
30 The Master and Marguerita – Mikhail Bulgakov

31 Blindness – Jose Saramago
32 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
33 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
34 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
35 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
36 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
37 The Intuitionist – Colson Whitehead
38 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
39 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
40 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass

41 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
42 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen
43 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
44 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
45 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz
46 1984 – George Orwell
47 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
48 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
49 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
50 Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

51 Mao II – Don DeLillo
52 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
53 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
54 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
55 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
56 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
57 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
58 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
59 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
60 Neuromancer – William Gibson

61 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway
62 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
63 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley
64 The Chosen – Chaim Potok
65 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
66 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
67 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
68 Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
69 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
70 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy

71 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
72 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
73 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
74 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith
75 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
76 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
77 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
78 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
79 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
80 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka

81 The Fall – Albert Camus
82 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
83 Straight Man – Richard Russo
84 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson
85 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
86 Kindred – Octavia Butler
87 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
88 The Palace of Dreams – Ismail Kadare
89 The Street – Ann Petry
90 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter

91 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
92 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
93 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
94 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod
95 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
96 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
97 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
98 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

the brief wondrous life of oscar wao

When I taught English composition, one of the things I disliked most was trying to describe why a perfectly good paper got a B grade and what separated it from an A grade. It’s a tired cliché that is true about many arts: it’s hard to define good writing, but you know it when you see it. There’s an ineffable something that makes some writing feel elegant, smooth, clever, and pleasing, while other writing seems clunky, silly, boring, and torturous. And even when I’m reading good writing, I’m often hard put to say how the author pulled off an audacious, but fantastic passage that would have fallen flat in other hands.

Junot Díaz, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), is that kind of writer in spades. He mixes graduate-level English prose and vocabulary, with street slang English and Spanish and a heavy dose of literary and cinematic references from genres as broad as classical English poets to science fiction and fantasy to comic books and Japanese anime—somehow managing to make it all sound effortless and natural. His thoroughly post-modern, non-linear narrative turns category inside-out and hierarchy upside-down. Sometimes it’s hard just keeping track of the narrator, who shifts without warning through different first-person voices, into a blend of second- and third-person, and back.

Lest you think Díaz is some kind of savant, unaware of his craft, his introductory first chapter—not called an introduction, but clearly serving to frame the rest of the novel—explicitly tells you he’s about to take you down the rabbit hole, into a Dominican wonderland (the titular “wondrous” is a direct link to Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), and then he takes you there. That place is full of oppressive heat, superstition, violence, corruption, plantains, and sugar cane. Reading the many footnotes (yes, footnotes!) provides a crash course in the history of the Dominican Republic, with special emphasis on the Trujillo Era (named for the Dominican dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, aka, El Jefe), which lasted for over 30 years (1930-1961). Díaz quite consciously uses the novel to educate his audience, creating an entire new world (for the Dominican-ignorant) in the high tradition of the fantasy literature in which he is obviously steeped.

Oh, and there’s a story, too. It’s a family story. A story about sons and daughters. About growing up with parents that love their children, but show it in ways that are not always helpful for anyone. It’s a sad story, with the possibility for life and love between the tragedies. It’s a story about racism, sexism, bad luck, and a few things we can do to fight them, whether successfully or not. If the ending doesn’t leave you hopeful, at least it doesn’t leave you broken. The novel feels very personal for Díaz, like he was compelled to write it, if for no other reason than to have it stop bothering him. And perhaps this is part of what makes it a great novel—that Díaz knows his craft and his material intimately and could write it no other way than as an expression of himself and his experience.

100 top novels — 12

New addition: The Palace of Dreams (#87), by Ismail Kadare

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
20 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

21 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
22 Native Son – Richard Wright
23 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
24 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
25 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
26 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
27 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
28 Wolf – Jim Harrison
29 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
30 The Master and Marguerita – Mikhail Bulgakov

31 Blindness – Jose Saramago
32 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
33 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
34 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
35 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
36 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
37 The Intuitionist – Colson Whitehead
38 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
39 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
40 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass

41 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
42 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen
43 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
44 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
45 1984 – George Orwell
46 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
47 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
48 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
49 Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
50 Mao II – Don DeLillo

51 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
52 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
53 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
54 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
55 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
56 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
57 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
58 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
59 Neuromancer – William Gibson
60 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway

61 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
62 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley
63 The Chosen – Chaim Potok
64 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
65 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
66 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
67 Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
68 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
69 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
70 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak

71 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
72 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
73 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith
74 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
75 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
76 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
77 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
78 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
79 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
80 The Fall – Albert Camus

81 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
82 Straight Man – Richard Russo
83 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson
84 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
85 Kindred – Octavia Butler
86 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
87 The Palace of Dreams – Ismail Kadare
88 The Street – Ann Petry
89 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter
90 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong

91 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
92 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
93 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod
94 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
95 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
96 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
97 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

the palace of dreams

Ismail Kadare, an Albanian writer living in French exile since 1990, says that “the writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.” His self-proclaimed attempt to invent a hell on earth resulted in The Palace of Dreams, a novel of shadows, cold, uncertainty, and suspicion in which the state watches everything, including our dreams. Set in what feels like the 19^th-century in the Ottoman Empire, it is the story of Mark-Alem, a young and not-entirely-competent son of an venerable family with a long tradition of government service and association with power. When his family gets him a job in the titular palace, Mark-Alem finds himself wandering down long corridors of identical doors, with no one and no end in sight. Though he struggles to understand what is expected of him and to do it when he does understand, his family connections ensure his quick rise through the bureaucracy. In the end, he has become one of the people he once despised.

That’s not a spoiler, because the book’s suspense comes not from what will happen, but from the aura of secrecy and distrust that emanates from the very streets and buildings, not to mention the people that populate this world. It feels like a Terry Gilliam movie (think especially, Brazil). Written in Albanian, I read a version translated from French into English. And still the prose worked—either a testament to the translators, or, more likely, to the power of Kadare’s story-telling ability. The Palace of Dreams is an excellent addition to the list of literature criticizing totalitarian government and to the way such societies dehumanize us all.

beloved

Much has been written about Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and Beloved, Morrison’s novel of slavery, family, and community. Along with many others, I think and feel Beloved is among the best novels ever written; the book is hard for me to write about because I have such strong feelings about it. Moreover, I’ve realized that the difficulty is related to why the work is #2 on my most current top 100 novels list.

As I’ve described briefly elsewhere in this blog, the criteria for my top 100 novels include subject matter, emotional impact, intellectual impact, and the ability to work on many levels at the same time. Beloved has it all. It moves me emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. I am alternately and sometimes simultaneously horrified by the brutality it describes, impressed by its ability to evoke deep senses of human commonality, and stunned by its structural power. It’s a prose poetic masterpiece of rhythm, structure, theme, and symbol. It’s a ghost story cut by enigmatic motivations and profound mysteries of life, love, and death. It’s a powerful indictment of our nation’s history of slavery, of the dehumanizing effects of that institution and the on-going impact of racism and injustice. Structurally, the novel mirrors a consciousness, cycling forward and back, remembering and re-remembering in an associative, flowing logic.

All this in a mere 275 pages—the multifaceted punch and epic sweep catapult Beloved to almost the top of my list (superceded only by Garcia Marquez’s even more epic tale). It is a glorious novel, painful to read, and which, in even my third or fourth reading, continues to yield new gems of connection and understanding.

[Caveat for the first-time reader: get through the first 50 pages, just going along for the ride. You’ll probably be confused. Try to enjoy the images and prose. It gets easier and the work is more than worth your while.]

100 top novels — 11

New additions: Lord Jim (#19), by Joseph Conrad; Huckleberry Finn (#49) by Mark Twain

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
20 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

21 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
22 Native Son – Richard Wright
23 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
24 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
25 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
26 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
27 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
28 Wolf – Jim Harrison
29 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
30 The Master and Marguerita – Mikhail Bulgakov

31 Blindness – Jose Saramago
32 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
33 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
34 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
35 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
36 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
37 The Intuitionist – Colson Whitehead
38 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
39 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
40 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass

41 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
42 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen
43 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
44 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
45 1984 – George Orwell
46 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
47 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
48 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
49 Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
50 Mao II – Don DeLillo

51 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
52 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
53 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
54 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
55 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
56 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
57 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
58 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
59 Neuromancer – William Gibson
60 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway

61 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
62 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley
63 The Chosen – Chaim Potok
64 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
65 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
66 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
67 Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
68 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
69 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
70 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak

71 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
72 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
73 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith
74 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
75 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
76 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
77 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
78 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
79 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
80 The Fall – Albert Camus

81 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
82 Straight Man – Richard Russo
83 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson
84 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
85 Kindred – Octavia Butler
86 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
87 The Street – Ann Petry
88 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter
89 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
90 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

91 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
92 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod
93 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
94 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
95 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
96 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

lord jim

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad in 1902, is a well-known classic of English literature and is #17 on my current 100 top novels list. Lord Jim (1900), one of Conrad’s lesser-known works, is its equal in message and prose—so much so that rating one over the other is difficult; I may need to reread the later novel, which I last read over 20 years ago, in order to properly place the earlier one on my list.

Below, I outline most, but not all, of the plot of Lord Jim in a sort of parable form. These spoilers do not ruin the book because the careful unfolding of the story is a joy whether you know the story or not. I do not believe the book’s ability to touch its reader, its moral significance, or any of its other powers are diminished by foreknowledge of the plot.

Consider the story or a man whose reputation and word is worth more than anything else to him. The man is part of the small crew of ship with thousands of passengers. There are not enough lifeboats for all the people on board. The ship is old and a freak accident creates a situation in which a thin bulkhead is all the stands between life and death. The bulkhead’s steal creaks, bulging inward with the force of the sea behind it. Any reasonable person would believe the ship will go down at any moment. A storm is approaching, making the chances even worse for the boat and its inhabitants.

The man does not know what to do. He is frozen in fear and uncertainty. When his captain and two other shipmates escape their impending doom in a lifeboat, he, at the last minute, jumps to the boat without thinking, an automatic survival response. The ship disappears in the storm, apparently sinking without a trace, and they believe themselves lucky to have got out when they did. However, the man is immediately ashamed of his actions and wishes to be on the ship, despite the fact that he would be dead. Death seems preferable to life knowing that he deserted the thousands of people who trusted in the crew to carry them safely to their destination.

Fortunately for its passengers, the ship did not sink; by morning it is found and then towed to a nearby port. Because the other men in the lifeboat run away, the man stands trial alone during the inquiry into the affair. The public disgrace he suffers is surpassed only by the disgrace he feels within himself. Once the trial is over, he tries to escape his reputation, but it always finds him—or at least he imagines it finds him. Eventually he flees the “civilized world” altogether. Even there, in a colonially privileged status that sets him apart from the people around him, his fate is determined by his need to live up to the standard he sets for himself.

Told by a narrator sympathetic to the man, the story is full of regret for a life destroyed by a moment’s indiscretion, of respect for the impossible standard to which the man holds himself, and of quiet, resigned disdain for a world that does not acknowledge the virtue and beauty of the man or, for that matter, of any person: “What I had to tell her was that in the whole world there was no one who would ever need his heart, his mind, his hand. It was a common fate, and yet it seemed an awful thing to say of any man. . . . He was great—invincible—and the world did not want him, it had forgotten him, it would not even know him.” “Nobody, nobody is good enough” for a world that gossips about our flaws and never celebrates our successes, even though we all have our share of both.

A complex story of human pathos and principle, told in brilliant, stylistic prose, Lord Jim stands with Heart of Darkness as a classic and deeply thoughtful novel.

My thanks to Michael for calling my attention to this book.

100 top novels — 10

New addition: The Intuitionist (#36), by Colson Whitehead

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
20 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

21 Native Son – Richard Wright
22 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
23 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
24 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
25 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
26 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
27 Wolf – Jim Harrison
28 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
29 The Master and Marguerita – Michael Bulgakov
30 Blindness – Jose Saramago

31 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
32 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
33 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
34 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
35 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
36 The Intuitionist – Colson Whitehead
37 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
38 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
39 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
40 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

41 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen
42 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
43 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
44 1984 – George Orwell
45 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
46 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
47 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
48 Mao II – Don DeLillo
49 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
50 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

51 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
52 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
53 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
54 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
55 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
56 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
57 Neuromancer – William Gibson
58 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway
59 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
60 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley

61 The Chosen – Chaim Potok
62 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
63 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
64 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
65 Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
66 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
67 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
68 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
69 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
70 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

71 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith
72 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
73 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
74 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
75 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
76 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
77 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
78 The Fall – Albert Camus
79 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
80 Straight Man – Richard Russo

81 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson
82 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
83 Kindred – Octavia Butler
84 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
85 The Street – Ann Petry
86 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter
87 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
88 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
89 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
90 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod

91 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
92 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
93 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
94 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

the intuitionist

Colson Whitehead came out of nowhere. A friend passed me The Intuitionist; I read a page and was immediately drawn in by the beauty of the phrases and the audacity of the ideas. Here’s a guy and a book I’d never heard of that just blew me away. It’s a wonderful experience that I get too infrequently.

With sentences redolent of dank atmosphere and cranky attitude, Whitehead shows us a beautifully feral cynicism that speaks of the world’s injustice and the ultimate reasons things happen in our society—money mostly, but there is still room for the random individual act based on principle or feeling or whatever you would like to call that amorphous energy that moves us. Aside from any message, I reveled in the pleasure of his well-wrought images, crafted in just a few words. For example, “a freelance poltergeist of metropolitan disquiet” or “her potted plant depotted, an akimbo regret of roots and soil.” Every act is steeped in murky, grim mystery—even eating:

She picks up a can of tinned meat from the kitchen floor. She digs out some of the gray material onto a piece of bread and mashes the meat into a lumpy layer with the underside of her spoon. The meat and bread are of the same consistency. The hunger dizziness in her head drains away down some inner sluice.

The novel is set in a city that feels like a sort of 1950s New York, though it is never explicitly named, yet the city is enough “every city” to be a parable, not a documentary. The ostensible subject, elevators, a.k.a. “short range vertical transport”—escalators also fit in this category, but they are the poor step-child to the higher status elevators—is also a metaphor for a deeper message. This book can be read as a detective novel with a twist and Whitehead nods explicitly to the genre on several occasions, most notably by creating explanatory conversations toward the end of the story. But to read it only this way would ignore the multiple layers waiting quietly in lightless elevator shafts, smoky union offices, and stale barrooms. This is a relatively small novel (255 pages) of big ideas: race, philosophy, art, irony.

And Whitehead’s not afraid to cut sharply into the substance of our world. He knows that ideas are dangerous, that the right idea at the right time can change the world: “They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device.” In particular, he knows that white people live in a made up world of privilege: “White people’s reality is built on what things appear to be . . . . They judge them on how they appear when held up to the light” But, “there is another world beyond this one. . . . Don’t believe your eyes.” And while he also talks about internalized oppression, he understands the ways that external oppression creates and reinforces that system. For example, women of color are not seen as agents of their own destiny, with dreams and the ability to make them happen: “these white men see her as a threat but refuse to make her a threat, cunning, duplicitous. They see her as a mule, ferrying information back and forth, not clever or curious enough to explore the contents. Brute. Black.”

The world Whitehead describes is not pretty. For individuals, he ascribes little chance of escape. “There was no hope for him . . . . He knows the other world he describes does not exist. There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.” Nevertheless, the ending speaks of the next volume in this history, of the opportunity for progress, even as he sees that the opportunity is likely to be squandered, squashed. This does not mean we don’t continue to try.

Colson Whitehead is a brilliant, original prose artist. In The Intuitionist, his first novel, he displays a painfully bleak, stylistically gorgeous sensibility, together with a complex grasp of the realities in which we live. It’s the kind of pain I could go back to again and again.

100 top novels — 9

With certain exceptions, when choosing a new novel to read I am always hoping it will make the top 100—why waste my time with anything else? So, when I write my little review of a new book that does make the top 100 (such as the new edition to the list: Middlesex – #64), I’m always already reading the next book that might also make the top 100. Therefore, in the interest of being concise, I often wait to see if I can post a new top 100 list with two (or more!) new books. I hope at the beginning of each book that it might make it and then, somewhere along the way, it doesn’t live up to its potential for me. I’m sure most of you know what I’m talking about. This process has, sadly, occurred once again. And here, without further delay, is my new top 100 novels list:

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
20 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

21 Native Son – Richard Wright
22 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
23 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
24 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
25 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
26 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
27 Wolf – Jim Harrison
28 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
29 The Master and Marguerita – Michael Bulgakov
30 Blindness – Jose Saramago

31 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
32 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
33 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
34 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
35 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
36 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
37 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
38 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
39 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
40 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen

41 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
42 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
43 1984 – George Orwell
44 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
45 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
46 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
47 Mao II – Don DeLillo
48 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
49 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
50 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

51 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
52 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
53 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
54 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
55 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
56 Neuromancer – William Gibson
57 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway
58 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
59 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley
60 The Chosen – Chaim Potok

61 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
62 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
63 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
64 Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
65 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
66 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
67 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
68 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
69 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
70 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith

71 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
72 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
73 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
74 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
75 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
76 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
77 The Fall – Albert Camus
78 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
79 Straight Man – Richard Russo
80 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson

81 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
82 Kindred – Octavia Butler
83 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
84 The Street – Ann Petry
85 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter
86 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
87 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
88 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
89 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod
90 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy

91 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
92 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
93 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler