Greetings, and welcome back again as together we venture on that intrepid expedition to gather and cherish the finest treasure of all, neither gold nor ghost orchid, neither Manet triptych nor mauve taaffeite, but rather the cornerstones of civilization, Literature.

Today I offer Norman Mailer’s novels, ranked from least great to greatest – not counting Transit To Narcissus, which is of academic interest, or Executioner’s Song, which I’m counting as a biography because it is a biography (some people need to be told).

Norman Mailer's Novels Ranked in Ascending Order of Greatness: 

10. The Gospel According To The Son (1997): the life of Jesus Christ from the viewpoint of Jesus Christ - like George Moore’s The Brook Kerith, it’s brilliant for what it is, I just struggle to find interest in the subject at all. His portrait of the Devil is memorable, though: he comes back to it in The Castle In The Forest. James Wood wrote a review of Gospel called “He Is Finished” which I found very hard to forgive but I would have to admit, even if Wood was kicking Mailer when he was down, Mailer was down.

9.  The Deer Park (1955): while it has its moments, it’s an oddly bloodless bit of work from Mailer, who didn’t go back to novels for ten years after this. Later he wrote a play of the same material, and the play is the true realisation of what he only gestures at here. It’s fine for a 1950s novel and was nearly made into a film in the 00s, which might have been very good if it had joined us in existing.

8. Of Women & Their Elegance (1979): the life of Marilyn Monroe from the viewpoint of Marilyn Mon - hmm. I don't struggle to find interest to quite the same degree as Gospel, but surely this wasn't the best use of his time. It’s a respectfully and cleverly crafted novella that never really feels necessary. It’s like he’s still trying to convince her she should have gone for him instead of Miller. I wouldn't blame him, but 1979? Possibly a bit belated. 

7. The Naked & The Dead (1948): Quite the debut, of course, but barely much like the novelist Mailer was to become. It is a great war novel with a remarkably cutting political edge. It is also written in a code that says "I Love You, Hemingway" many thousands of times. In technique, his later work leaves it far behind, and he uses “fug” for “fuck”, which gets old fast. 

6. Barbary Shore (1951): again, a bit on the nose by later standards, but Mailer’s second and only avowedly Marxist novel is where he really gets going and it still holds up. A big risk to write this when he did, with McCarthyism well under way. I’m quite a fan of it. The first glimmers of his style show up here and you can see how valuable it is for a writer to realise that mixed metaphors are actually fine for certain effects that they might perhaps need if they’re not trying to write like either Hemingway or Evelyn Waugh. If I were switching things around, this is the one that would most likely make it into my top 5 in a different mood. 

The Top 5: 

5. Tough Guys Don’t Dance: Mailer unbuckles his belt and bangs this one out for the sake of it, and almost accidentally produces an enjoyable parody of noir-thrillers but more noticeably a piss-take of himself, and at the same time his clapback to those who dismissed him as a rapey John Wayne-ish bastard. It’s full of digressions and gorgeous writing that he hasn’t bothered to restrain (good!) and completely unhinged scenes, and a plot that shows why he didn’t like writing plots, all exactly the kind of thing that makes Mailer Mailer. Better than it’s even supposed to be. The narrator's Dad is a great character. I won't say much about the film of it that Mailer directed, but suffice to say that Mailer deliberately making his cast give absurd performances because he didn't actually give a shit, makes a case-study in why Mailer was, and remains, a memorable individual. 

4. Why Are We In Vietnam (1967): another severely deranged splodge from Big Norm, as can be ascertained from the very notion that this is, on some level, Mailer’s comedy novel. The style he picks for the narrator has to be read to be believed, but out of all the sheer bizarreness, there come some utterly cold, haunting moments. England has had its rotating cake-stand of bad-boy writers “with a fresh modern voice that explodes off the page and drags British fiction kickin and screamin into the 80s/90s/21^st century”, but they look very English indeed compared to this. Mailer’s idea of a bold approach is a whooole other level and not exactly what you’d call lapidary prose. “The violence of the language here,” my tutor said, “enacts the violence of America.” That is one way to put it.

Now it may seem, or even be, slightly rash to put Why in the top half of Mailer’s fiction since it is not by any remote means a “traditional” (ie proper) novel. It stands on its own as a unique artefact, with A Clockwork Orange as its only maybe-precursor unless we trace the origins back to Finnegans Wake, though everything from Faulkner to Catcher In The Rye to The Naked Lunch is satirically digested along the way to producing this. But it holds its ground in my mind because Mailer always wanted to take his writing to the absolute extreme limit and this is where he reached it. There was nowhere further to go beyond this, for him or anyone else except Pynchon. (He could, however, sidestep along the edge – Ancient Evenings came next.)

Incidentally one of the works that Mailer seems to burlesque here is Deliverance and if someone were lazy enough to call this “like Deliverance on acid”, I would object but not that strenuously. In fact, Deliverance only came out three years after this, which makes me think Dickey had some balls on him. A thankless task to write a novel that’s “like Why Are We In Vietnam, off drugs.” 

3. The Castle In The Forest (2007): Nobody could possibly have wanted this novel at all (Hitler. As a little kid. And Satan’s in it. Sure. OK. Why not.), let alone want Mailer to make it his last work. But he did, so here we are. It feels full of unfulfilled promise, a nagging sense of Mailer being made to hold back at times, but it is the novel where Mailer finally makes Evil the theme of his novel, as he had been saying he wanted to do since the 60s if not earlier. And wow, it’s good. And wow, it’s weird as fuck. Full of terrible ideas that he should not have run with, but which he makes work because he's just that good, it is an extremely dark and entirely unrepresentative note for him to go out on. Unrepresentative except for its mastery of style. Harlot’s Ghost would have made a better mic-drop, but he wrote Gospel after that, so I’m glad we’ve got this instead. Amis says that “one thinks of The Castle In The Forest with respect but no-one would seriously compare it to Harlot’s Ghost”. Impeccably fair, and yet I wonder if this won’t be the one, out of all of them, that lasts if the rest get forgotten. After all, if people want to read novels about Adolf Hitler, their options are limited. 

2. An American Dream (1965): this is the most Mailer of all Mailer novels. This is the epitome of Mailer. I love this book. The writing is incredible, the themes he’s interested in are vertiginous metaphysical craziness, the imagery is unforgettable, the whole mood and vibe of it is unique. It has that interesting mix that Mailer flirts with, of being ultra commercial pulp and high modernist at the same time. A 400 page, slightly toned down version of this, Mailer Does Manhattan, would have easily been the settled choice for Great American Novel. 

But no, Mailer prefers to lash out this fever-pitch hallucination, written in monthly instalments (which is mind-blowing because it reads like it was written in one long, moon-howling night), according to some versions of history by sending off the first draft to the publisher each time. The anguish of Genius is not to be assuaged by our silly mortal notions of editing. Incredible if true. To think of the years that most novelists slave over their poignantly shit autobiographical dull-fests, with a nice turn of phrase every thirty pages in the forlorn hope that it might keep our blood-pressure from dropping any lower. An American Dream, on the other hand, was made into a film called See You In Hell Darling, which was on Channel 5 and surely must be the dumbest thing I have ever seen, and to be clear, I’ve seen Killing Them Softly and this was as bad. There’s no justice.

1. = Ancient Evenings (1983, but mostly written in the 70s): Let’s just leave aside that this novel is nuts. Park that. Even without that, it’s really hard to know what to make of Ancient Evenings, since so much of it barely feels like it’s Mailer writing it. Although some of his preoccupations run through it more clearly than in any other of his novels, he has mostly effaced himself from the actual style. Very few people would be able to guess Mailer wrote this book if you quoted a random passage. In style, it reads almost more like a late George Moore novel, as does Gospel According To The Son (though the subject matter this time is precisely not like a George Moore novel). It feels timeless, and, to quote Book Of Mormon, “I guess that’s kind of what you were going for.” Mailer actually told his publisher, “I care who reads it in a hundred years time, I don’t care who reads it now.” (Banner day for us, thought his marketing team.) 

And it works, that’s the thing. I can’t think of any other modern writer who can offer an achievement on this level. Other people have written extraordinary literary edifices, true, but to all of them we can ask, “Yes, but it’s not set in ancient motherfucking Egypt, is it?” Because that’s a pretty amazing thing to do. And pull off. There is something almost disreputable in how transporting this novel is, how grand and eerie its atmosphere is. The other, not touchstone exactly, but the other association I have for it would be something like pre-Raphaelite poetry or even early Yeats. A wild book in many ways, but ultimately with an elusive uncanny quality, at times like watching a solemn ritual in a stone temple and just catching echoes of their murmurs and whispers. Plus there’s butt-sex, but hey, you know.

1. = Harlot's Ghost (1991): the other one of his two masterpieces, and I cannot quite give it the advantage over the visionary weirdness of Ancient Evenings, although the 20^th century setting allows Mailer to soar high in language he doesn’t have to moderate for fear of anachronism, giving him back the full range of his formidable resources as a sentence-maker, and let’s him get his teeth into the Cold War. Some of the absolute greatest writing he ever did, maybe his best. The American Left thought it was a betrayal, the Russian critics hailed it as the Great American Novel, making him a kind of reverse-Solzhenitsyn. 

If there was one conspicuous whim in Mailer’s life, it was of course to write the Great American Novel. And for all that can be said of his predecessors in the Great American GAN Chase, jostled in the melee though he is by Melville, Twain, Norris, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Warren, Bellow, Doctorow, Dickey and whoever else thought it was worth a go to write one as if there weren’t already a bunch of others before (and DeLillo, Wallace and Franzen give the impression that they were blithely trotting along at the tail-end of the revelry after Harlot’s Ghost – twice in Wallace’s case), I still think Harlot’s Ghost is lead contender (actually I think they should give it the crown and have done with the debate), not only for its scale (a vast sprawl, but I wouldn’t have it any shorter) and ingenuity (the ways Mailer uses one narrative conceit to incorporate everything he could possibly want) but for its sheer literary superiority: none of them control and command the page, let alone the tome, quite like Mailer does. (Ernest Goddamn Hemingway, interestingly, never really wrote one that could fit the bill. He did his bit for Great Novels, this I do not libel – but Hem was more of an Ancient Evenings guy – fuck America, my masterpieces veto all borders. Hemingway On Manhattan is a novel we are decidedly blessed to have been spared, as we can see from the novels of John O'Hara.)

Structurally it might be objected that H’s G is more like four or five novels stuck into one, but a) I’m not sure what difference that makes, and b) there is a pressure and momentum to the narrator’s life which, to me, never really lets up. An odd fact – out of all the striking and unforgettable things that happen in the novel, including the Bay of Pigs, the bit I remember the most is when he drops someone’s painted egg. I mean, you can’t take this guy anywhere. It’s a paralyzing moment even to read, and a great rebuke to the popular myth that Mailer was all bombast and bigness. Harlot’s Ghost is actually a wealth of moments that never leave you, big and small – Harlot’s lectures and self-justifications, Harry’s elaborate tail-chasing attempts to cover up his own mistakes, the audio-tape they make to ruin a target’s marriage, the revelations of the homosexuality of his fellow agents, the madness of his macho rival Dix (Dix! Fuck’s sake, Norm), dozens of other great images and scenes, and as many great lines. Yes, I would really have liked to have Harlot’s Grave, which would have taken us to Vietnam (!) and 1970s Hollywood (?) and, radically, had an ending. 

But I guess he knew it couldn’t be done. He couldn’t write all that just for the sake of not leaving Harlot’s Ghost on a cliffhanger. He wrote half a dozen other little things instead, and a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, and The Castle In The Forest, anything but Harlot’s Grave. He had hundreds of pages of notes for it - he said they weighed on him. He told people his Oswald biography was the sequel, he told people Castle In The Forest was a sequel in theme. He just didn’t write the sequel. But then, does War & Peace need a sequel? My perhaps contentious answer: No, it doesn’t. And Mailer’s epic is fine as it is. Fine? One of the best novels I have ever read. If Literature has any objective, it’s to be this. Mailer wins. Peace, I’m out. 

The Adventure Of Literature - Reading LOTS Of Words

Hi! And welcome to my new blog, The Adventure Of Literature: Reading Lots of Words. This is a precursor to a later blog, The Salvific Odyssey Of Literature, which will begin when the world is ready for it.

As an opening ceremony, I offer a definitive list of the fifty hottest, sexiest novels since 1967. Should you have had a preview of this list, I hope that you will still find some interest in seeing this annotated version. In coming to write the notes, I have made some alterations to the final list, as I concluded that at least a couple of the first draft choices were not sufficiently justifiable or, to put it less pleonastically, not justifiable.

And so let us begin our adventure.

British Novels set in Britain:

       JG Ballard – Crash (1973) – or, you know, Cocaine Nights. Or Super Cannes. It’s JGB innit. But Crash still stands gloriously apart. When it comes to novels “only one author could have written”, there’s Crash and then the rest. Incidentally, I'm not sure if it's set in Britain or not. 

        Ruth Rendell – A Judgement In Stone (1977): apparently the Left don’t like this book because they don't think it's about snobbery, they think it is an example of snobbery, but then the Left are silly and wrong about a lot of things. Life isn’t all lovely, you know!

        Raymond Williams – Loyalties (1985) – this is a bit too dry and sober for its own good and I didn’t think of it right off for the top 50. But there’s nothing else like it. It’s the only British novel that has really made an effort to think about the Left over a long period, from the 30s to the 80s, and with an unusual complexity where the moral judgements we’re supposed to make about any particular character become elusive to the point of being frustrating, exactly as it should be.

        John Burnside – The Mercy Boys (1999) – either this or The Dumb House, both very good. This one’s about a bunch of Scottish losers, like Trainspotting but with middle-aged drunks instead of young junkies, and without the vitality and optimism. It’s all about how shit their lives are and how shit life is. To coin a phrase, “choose death.” And Burnside just absolutely goes for it, he piles it on like he’s entombing you as you read it. It is possible, conceivably, that it might even be too much even for our love of BLEEEAAK. But that’s why it’s on here. Burnside says he “shouldn’t have written it.” So top 50 it is.

        James Wood – The Book Against God (2003) – not committed to this being in the top 50, because it’s a modest novel, but I remember how I finished it with a feeling that in some way it captures what a novel should be. Something effortlessly enjoyable about reading it. Also: he is Claire Messud’s husband! He bumped her off the list! I feel a bit bad about that, as she nearly made it on the list for The Woman Upstairs. 

Novels set abroad but by British authors:

        JG Farrell – The Siege Of Krishnapur (1973) – amazing historical novel, easily one of the greats of the period under discussion today.  

        Lawrence Durrell – Avignon (1974-1985, coll 1992) – Durrell is the only novelist I put in the same bracket as Mailer, although they’re nothing alike to most people’s thinking. But I adore him and on some level of literary genius and command of language and strength of imaginative conception, I feel they have something in common. Avignon is so great. It is technically a bunch of novels but really they all go together and work at their best when you read them one after the other in the big mega-novel omnibus edition. Total masterpiece.

        Anthony Burgess – Earthly Powers (1980) – I was torn between this and MF (1971) but I’m leaning away from cleverness, and although MF is actually a ravishingly gorgeous read, it’s also a bit too clever, and Earthly Powers has a bit more kick to it.

        George Steiner – The Portage To San Cristobal Of A.H. (1981) – one of the truly unsung masterpieces and one of my favourite novels ever. Cold and biting and unforgettable and Da Troof. It keeps coming back to me and making me feel depressed and cultured at the same time.

        DM Thomas – The White Hotel (1981) – I actually need to re-read this but I remember being super-impressed by it.

        John Harvey – Coup D’Etat (1985) – this plopped into the ocean of books and sank and most people thought it was commercial trash but it’s not really. It’s an old-fashioned novel but it has a depth to it. It doesn’t do anything special or new or glittery so it got ignored, but sometimes I feel like I’m crying out for a novel about something that matters, written by an author who means it, and isn’t a translation, and Coup D’Etat is actually an example of what I’m thinking of.

        Tariq Ali – Fear Of Mirrors (1998) – proper good. A vengeful icepick in the heart of the Stalinist pigs. Effectively it’s Trotskyism: The Novel, which means that unlike the vast majority of novels about Communism, it is motivated by a terrible aching sadness that the Soviet Union failed so early on and from this perspective, it understands so much more than the usual “it was terrible because they tried it at all” crap. Ali has a rather distinct method in novel-writing, which ignores orthodoxy about not having info-dumps of historical information, so that he blurs the line between fiction and history-lesson and discussion, making the novel into a free forum for everything he wants to say about the most salient feature of the 20^th century, through the eyes of characters who knew much less – so I think he’s inviting us to think of it, not just as a story, but a political act you’re engaging with as you read it. But at the same time, the novel is marbled with the constant bitter pain of how broken these people felt, seeing it all in ruins.  

        Robert Edric – The Book Of The Heathen (2000) – I’ve read quite a lot of Edric, people seem to ignore him, but up until he gave up and wrote crime novels, he could be relied on for something pretty bracing and this one goes above and beyond. It’s a gratifyingly unsubtle novel, fully prepared to just have everything be v v bad, and some people just be pure evil (in this case, missionaries and Euro-imperialism in general), and to not get cute about it.

Nadeem Aslam – The Wasted Vigil (2008) – I was a bit iffy about it when I started reading it but by the end it gave me a bit of hope for contemporary literary fiction. Aslam’s style takes a lot of getting used to, punchy sentences about stark things but with oddly romantic lilts or turns of phrase, it keeps you off guard so that you’re never firmly in one tone or another. In fact, you never quite get used to it, and really the whole novel is the experience of trying to follow Aslam along the tightrope of his poetic prettiness through and over the terrain of not-self-evidently-pretty war-zones and terrorist attacks. Maybe he falls off, maybe we do, maybe it’s not top 50, but I think it stands out from the crowd. 

American Novels Set In Their Contemporary America:

        John Updike – Couples (1968) because OOOOOh.

        Hubert Selby – The Room (1971) because Ewwww and also Ahhhh.

        Robert Stone – Dog Soldiers (1974) – this is good and A Flag For Sunrise is pretty good. I think he might be right-wing but that’s OK, they’re allowed out of the house.

       Joseph Heller – Something Happened (1974) – yes, I know you didn’t like it.

       Saul Bellow – Humboldt’s Gift (1975) – starting to wonder if this is top 50 but it’s the first one I went to re-read when I heard Bellow died and it has a lot going for it. Another novel based entirely on someone he knew. Make something up, Bellow!

       Rosellen Brown – Tender Mercies (1978) – a completely minor novel in a way, but unusually memorable for what it is. Could drop it if I think of something better.

      Russell Banks – Continental Drift (1985): I wrote about this for Metro and referenced Fanon. Sure enough, Claire thought it best to edit out any mention of Fanon.

       William Gaddis – Carpenter’s Gothic (1985): I’m sure I wrote something about this for Metro, too, but can’t find anything now. In any case, it’s between this and A Frolic Of His Own. Frolic is a bit more exuberant and enjoyable, and by comparison CG seems like Gaddis hasn’t tried as hard, but actually it hits harder, like a boxer who is supposed to be sparring but accidentally knocks his partner out.

        Andrea Dworkin – Mercy (1990) – written from blistering rage, just one non-stop accusation against smugness. Possibly the only novel ever written that isn’t basically bourgeois.

      Bret Easton Ellis – American Psycho (1991) – greatness, obvs. I really think Ellis must be the best American novelist of our era. He’s scarily intelligent and this feels rare in writers these days. I’ll be honest, I can’t rate the patta-cakes 80s satire of Wolfe and Amis after Ellis, and not only are they never as lethally scathing, but they’re never as funny. Patrick is sort of adorable: I’m in Courtney’s bed. Courtney shivers and presses against me. I’m at a loss for what to say so I stammer “Tiffany lamps… are making a comeback.”

     Harold Brodkey – The Runaway Soul (1991) – well, speaking of bourgeois, this is bourgeois as absolute fuck and everyone said it sucked but I thought it was pretty great. Alright, not everyone said it sucked but it was cool to say it wasn’t good. I thought it was, at its best, astonishing, and otherwise very enjoyable. It’s just one guy trying to capture experience in words for 800 pages. Not everyone digs it, how weird is that. Adam Mars-Jones owes everything to this but does it with more English poised discipline and classical reserve (I like his stuff too) whereas Brodkey is as American as American fiction gets, and sometimes I think I would pick Brodkey over Bellow, which is blasphemy so let’s pretend I didn’t say that.

      Richard Price – Clockers (1992) – great novel obvs, and excluded from discussions of great American fiction for equally and laughably obvious reasons. It suits nobody, on any side of any discussion.

      Tim O’Brien – In The Lake Of The Woods (1994) – which is good, as you know.

     William Gass – The Tunnel (1995) – right, so. The Tunnel. You probably won’t like this one, and you’re not supposed to like it, and "is life too short for novels you’re not supposed to like, discuss", and I don’t even feel a great love for it myself, but if we’re talking about who has written novels that aren’t just part of the great please-publish-me mulch of today’s fiction, then I think this utter bastard deserves a nod. It is clever but I think it escapes mere cleverness. Or maybe it doesn’t! Maybe it’s so clever, it fooled me. It is actually really hard to keep track of what, exactly, is going on in it. Gass is probably a bit of a dick, because you’d have to be to write something this extreme. I believe some of the reviews made reference to “the correct term for making your way through The Tunnel is boring” and “no light at the end” and so on. 

     However. Top 50.

      David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest (1996) – yay! I sometimes worry that Wallace slums it a bit too much in IJ but it doesn’t matter, it’s still great. He was a phenomenal writer. Also clever but not too preening. (Incidentally, for an example of a writer who I admire for cleverness but also think the cleverness disqualifies them from greatness, I am thinking of Joseph McElroy. But then again perhaps that’s unfair. I’m like that.)

     Don DeLillo – Underworld (1997) – it’s quite hard to pick which DeLillo – Mao II? The Names? But I’ll be honest with myself, when I think of “DeLillo” and “best”, this is the main one I think of. Could be shorter, mind. And not as good as Harlot’s Ghost. Although that is far from a low bar. In any case, Don was on form here, and The Names is nice, too. 

American Novels set in Historical America:

       EL Doctorow – The Book Of Daniel (1971): naturally Ragtime is great too, but this is better. Fuck you, America.

        Robert Coover – The Public Burning (1977): of course these two go together, because they’re about the same thing. Fuck you again, America. But they’re both on here on the merits, not just to make a pair.

       Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian (1985): I don’t idolise McCarthy like some people do, but this is an honourable book.

       Toni Morrison – Beloved (1987): I don’t know, this or The Bluest Eye? Or A Mercy? I picked this one because we had a seminar on it at UEA and someone slagged it off and I launched into a fairly long speech in its defence that went on for so long and with such passion and intensity of analysis that at the end, the guy just said “wow.” Sadly I can remember doing it but not what I said! Apparently it was good. So is the book, I reckon.

       Gore Vidal – Empire (1987): lots of choices to sort through with Vidal, but Empire finds him in full flow, some of his best work. It doesn’t wear Vidal’s learning lightly and is all the better for that – you can see him, off the page, nonchalantly swatting away rival novelists with his pointedly traditional technique and gigantic intelligence and masterful no-mistakes control. Once you get into the groove of Vidal’s acerbic humour, which only takes a couple of pages, you can settle in to watch him kick the shit out of American patriotism for hundreds of pages while he affects to only be barely interested and mildly distracted by a handsome Italian boy in the distance. I also think of Empire as really one vast continuous novel with its direct sequel Hollywood, which is equal to this.

        Philip Roth – American Pastoral (1997): not a few Roth options. This was the one that astonished everyone when it came out though, and it is clearly a tremendous book, even if it is marginally one rung down from how high up it has been elevated.

        Norman Mailer – Harlot’s Ghost (1991): actually a lot of this takes place outside the US, which his wife told him not to do as it dragged the novel in too many directions. Do you think maybe Mailer doubled-down after that? Of course he fucking did. Anyway, don’t get me started on Norm. Needless to say, Harlot’s Ghost defines my idea of great literature, including the bits that don’t work, which are few. Very few considering it’s about 1200 pages long – a spine thick enough to test a bibliophile’s backbone. I said, to test a bibliophile’s backbone! I thank you. Advance Warning: after investing a lot of time in it, readers are often flustered to find it doesn’t have an ending, it just stops. That’s because Mailer was going to write a sequel and then couldn’t be bothered because lol. Although in fairness, I actually think it ends on a very haunting goosebumps moment.

        James Ellroy – The Cold Six Thousand (2001): I didn’t pick them for this reason but I like how the Roth, Mailer and Ellroy each offer different views of the 1960s. I picked The Cold Six Thousand because a) I haven’t read any of his after this so for all I know he might have topped it, but b) I think that out of everything he was working towards up to that point, it was in this novel that he both distilled what he wanted, and found a way to expand it massively. A refinement of American Tabloid, recast in different dimensions. 

     Edward P Jones - The Known World (2003): which you've read, so you know. 

American Novels set outside America:

        Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow (1973): Bonkers and a true monument in literary history. Thank you, Pynch.  

        Joan Didion – A Book Of Common Prayer (1977): truly great novel. First off, she writes so incredibly well, it is humbling. And two, it’s the kind of “shall we actually take events in the world seriously for a change?” novel that I think there are remarkably few of, when you go looking for them. I love Didion’s seething anger underneath this novel, keeping it so focused and hard, never a false move. Sheer talent.

        Paul Theroux – The Mosquito Coast (1981) – maybe not top 50 if I think of another one but so vivid. I remember almost every detail of it, from start to finish, like a dream. An extraordinary portrait of a charismatic maniac, a total asshole who has the terrible ability to get things right often enough to keep the disaster going, and an equally extraordinary sense of the impossible pressure of living with him. Every time he scores another victory, it only postpones their doom, prolongs the agony and increases the dread. The climax is pure Heart of Darkness fever. It doesn’t go as dark as I thought it was going to, but for Theroux’s purposes it doesn’t actually need to.

        Norman Mailer – Ancient Evenings (1983): Telepathic love among the pyramids over the course of a millennium, all of which is in ancient Egypt. Buckle up, buckaroo. If it was by anyone else, it would be rubbish, but because it’s Mailer, it’s not stupid, it’s DEMENTED. How to approach it? First of all, don’t be deceived by the apparent slightness of its 709 pages – Mailer does a lot with this slip of a novella. Three hundred thousand words simply fly by. Now I don’t want to brag but the first time I read it, I read it in one day. Those were the days! Just me and this book and nothing else in the world. This was Mailer’s best one in his wife’s judgement. I keep mentioning his wife because she was really cool and his best critic. 

     Second point in approaching AE is to celebrate how wildly unique it is. Considering that 1980s American literature was otherwise a dreary tundra of minimalism, meta-fiction, yuppie brats, politically correct earnestness and Tom Wolfe, it looks pretty obvious that the decade’s soaring pinnacle now stands out as Mailer’s mega-epic. I fondly imagine him being on a book-talk TV show with another author, who first explains that her novel is a brief but delicate impression of the tremors which gradually disturb a marriage, and then Mailer is asked to describe his new novel and he explains that it is a provocation to a revolution in the consciousness of our time that will challenge the human race’s conception of itself and ultimately recognise him as the voice of God. Ancient Evenings is la grande bouffe of full-on crazy-Mailer; it was our loss that the critics’ slack-jawed horror cowed the great man back into relative sanity for the rest of his career. The mind simply reels at what he might have written if he’d been encouraged. But we can still share the consolation that we’ll always have Egypt.

          James Dickey – To The White Sea (1993): Dickey wrote a grand total of three novels, the first one being Deliverance, and the second one being Alnilam, and I sort of want to choose Alnilam because it’s pretty ace, but To The White Sea has a kind of Hemingway’s-evil-twin vibe going on with it which I really dug a lot. So it’s not a good one if you’re in the mood for lush prose, but it is a good one if you want a very sparse, hard and weirdly amazing dark-visionary thing.

          Madison Bell – All Souls’ Rising (1995): which you’ve read, so you know.

          Thomas Pynchon – Against The Day (2006): and he came back to us! I had spent all my adult life resigned to the obvious and perfectly reasonable reality that Pynchon could only do it once. And then he oh my god did it again. And my love for him was true and deep and unshakeable and I honour him. It’s been ten years (or more, arguably), and I am now perfectly satisfied that this really is as good as Gravity’s Rainbow and a shining beacon of his honest-to-goodness genuine greatness. And also that he has, if anything, got more politically radical in his old age. Mwah!

Novels by gentlemen hailing from other corners of the globe:

         VS Naipaul – Guerillas (1975)

         VS Naipaul – A Bend In The River (1979) - I couldn't choose between these, they must be the most impressive right-wing novels ever. 

        JM Coetzee – Disgrace (1999) - gloomy old South Africans. Cheer up, you're free now. 

       John Banville – The Sea (2005): I love it when people call novels like this “beautiful.” Is it? Yes, sort of. But then again, no. Not at all.