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 20th 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.
