The Modern Library

by Colm Toibin

  Age in year of publication: fifty-one.

  Michael Cunningham 1952–

  1990 A Home at the End of the World

  This novel is narrated by four of its characters, and its considerable power and emotional force come from that sense of voice which governs contemporary American fiction. Here the voices of Bobby and Jonathan, old school friends; Alice, Jonathan’s mother; and Clare, who befriends both men and has a child with one of them, are compelling and haunting, full of a melancholy effort to make sense of things. There is a luxury in the writing which echoes F. Scott Fitzgerald; the narrative contains beautiful sentences, astonishing moments of insight and disclosure. The first half of the book, especially, has a rich perfection about it; Cunningham is particularly good on family attachments and entanglements. The early relationship between Jonathan and Bobby, their desire for each other, their early sexual encounters, are wonderfully described, and Jonathan’s mother’s observation of her gay son is superb. (‘I knew the bite and meanness of boys was missing from his nature.’)

  In the end, as in all American fiction, the true hero of the book is America itself: its ability to change; the sudden, bright opportunities it offers to make money, to make friends; the beauty and variety of its landscapes; its ability to tempt us with hope and resolution. This is certainly one of the best American novels of the decade.

  Michael Cunningham was born in Los Angeles, and now lives in New York City. A Home at the End of the World is his second novel. His fourth novel, The Hours, appeared in 1998 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Specimen Days appeared in 2005.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.

  Robertson Davies 1913–1995

  1970 Fifth Business

  ‘I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.’ The novel begins with a careful, precise and striking first-person account of a boy growing up in rural Canada in the early years of the century, his sharp intelligence and narrative skills, and perhaps bitter wisdom, cutting through the dark, conservative world of his parents and their village. Our narrator, almost to spite his mother, takes part in the First World War, and his matter-of-fact version of life in the trenches, of his own injuries and time in hospital, is disturbing and convincing.

  But this is not a novel about childhood, nor is it a war novel. It is a novel about what happens then, after the drama of childhood and war. It is told in the shadow of four figures from childhood: Boy Staunton, who becomes a millionaire politician; his wife Leola, our narrator’s former sweetheart; Mrs Dempster, a minister’s wife, who goes mad; her son Paul, who becomes a magician (Davies loved the idea of magic). Our narrator’s sensibility makes him a sharp chronicler of the world around him; his interest in saints and religion becomes a secret life. His account of the world and of his own life is rigorously intelligent; its stilted style is in contrast with the deep pain which is buried in the narrative, and the play between the two is often breathtaking and always engrossing.

  Robertson Davies was born in Ontario and lived much of his life in Toronto. He published three novel sequences: The Salterton Trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy and The Cornish Trilogy. Fifth Business is the first book of The Deptford Trilogy, which was completed with The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975).

  Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.

  Louis de Bernières 1954–

  1994 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

  (US: Corelli’s Mandolin)

  Set on a Greek island during the Second World War, this novel combines narrative sweep, a mixture of tragedy and comedy, a number of extraordinary and lovable characters and the sense of a tightly knit traditional society in a changing world. It almost stands alone in contemporary English fiction for its ability to deal confidently with the outside world, for the warmth of its tone, for its breadth and scope and for its lack of cynicism.

  It tells, using methods which remind the reader of both Charles Dickens and Gabriel García Márquez, the story of Dr Iannis and his daughter Pelagia living easily together on Cephalonia in the years before the war. When the Italian army invades the island, the Italian control is half-hearted and almost good-humoured. Dr Iannis and his daughter try to ignore the considerable charms of Captain Corelli, who is billeted with them. The novel moves from Iannis’s kitchen to the life of the village to the terrible cruelty of the war. Stories about music, medicine, fishing and horrific events in Greece in the Second World War are placed beside other stories about love and death. The tone moves effortlessly from the very funny to the deeply harrowing once the Germans arrive on the island. The writing is always fluid; the scenes are fast moving and varied and always interesting; the novel is fiercely readable, almost impossible to put down.

  Louis de Bernières was born in and lives in London. His other novels include The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992). Captain Corelli’s Mandolin won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1995.

  Age in year of publication: forty.

  Don DeLillo 1936–

  1997 Underworld

  The publication of Underworld confirms Don DeLillo, if we needed confirmation, as the most exciting, original and innovative American novelist now working. He has been fascinated by what happens to language, truth and logic during a late phase of capitalism; how a society which grew around dreams of hope, of infinite optimism, deludes itself and is deluded by ritual and images and words. He loves technology, its mystery and glow, its hum and buzz; he is interested in hidden systems and codes, by the poetics of late twentieth-century paranoia.

  Underworld, all eight hundred and twenty-seven pages of it, is his epic, his panoramic vision of the United States in his time. It is obsessed with waste and garbage, including the concern of J. Edgar Hoover (who has various walk-on parts in the novel) that protest groups will go through his garbage and put it on public display. The novel is also obsessed with the bomb and the Cold War, and the vast areas of the American imagination which have been filled with images of fear and destruction. In Underworld DeLillo also presents a relaxed version of ordinary life, intimate family relations, memories of childhood, tender love and sexual desire. He places these beside magnificent set scenes about public life and history, and the result is a great monument to the enduring power of the novel.

  Don DeLillo, son of Italian immigrants, was born in the Bronx, New York, and still lives in New York City. His novel White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985, and Libra (1988) the Irish Times Literature Prize.

  Age in year of publication: sixty-one.

  Anita Desai 1937–

  1984 In Custody

  In India, where so many have so little, what is the use, what is the glory of poetry? Anita Desai’s answer takes shape in the person of Deven, a teacher of Hindi in a college in Mirepore, a dustbowl town near Delhi. Married to Sarla, a living pillar of pessimism, his real love is poetry, in the old language, Urdu.

  Deven is a timid, put-upon soul, bullied by his friend Murad into interviewing the great but reclusive poet Nur. Deven’s visits to Delhi to see him turn into a nightmare of farcical episodes in which drink, layabouts, frenzied birds and even more frenzied wives manipulate Deven, forcing him into debt and dishonour. Nur is a splendid creation, lizard-like, rapacious; yet of the two it is Deven who, in his acceptance of the price he has to pay in the service of art, triumphs over the multitudes of self-destructions on offer.

  This is a novel with many meanings, many faces. One of the most resonant is that of India itself, with its blazing heat, its preference for individualistic chaos: this is India in the early 1980s on the point of change, during that recent past when the wonders of its history were abandoned and crumbling. Placing this magnificent inheritance in safe custody, Desai exposes the dilemmas of modern India in cool and lyrical prose.

  Anita Desai was born in Mussoorie, India, and lives in England and the USA. This novel became a Merchant Ivory film in 1993; other praised novels inclu
de Fire on the Mountain (1977), Clear Light of Day (1980) and Fasting, Feasting (1999), which was the runner-up for the Booker Prize.

  Age in year of publication: forty-seven.

  Pete Dexter 1943–

  1988 Paris Trout

  This is a clearly written, tightly paced novel about the Deep South in the time between the Korean and the Vietnam Wars when racial segregation was absolute, but certain actions against black people – cold-blooded murder of teenagers, for example – would not be condoned by a white jury.

  Paris Trout is a moneylender, a small-time banker and a storekeeper. He is tight-lipped and ruthless. He has never paid taxes and he obeys no laws. He has recently married Hanna, an intelligent, sensitive and attractive schoolteacher, and he has made her life a misery. He has also lent money to a black man to buy a car. When the payments are not made he visits the man with a local thug and manages to shoot a young black girl, killing her, and injuring an older woman.

  He is brought to trial; Harry Seagraves is his lawyer. Seagraves is a good man, but he is not a hero. He grows to loathe Trout, but he still defends him. He is sure that he can use his clout in the locality to have him released. The novel makes clear that in a society like this no one can afford to behave heroically; most people are prepared to play with the system or be bought. Trout understands this like nobody else. No one’s motives are pure except perhaps Hanna Trout’s; she remains eloquent and long-suffering and determined to survive. The last hundred pages of the novel are full of unexpected twists and turns; a wonderful addition to the contemporary literature of the South.

  Pete Dexter was born in Pontiac, Michigan, and lives in California. Paris Trout won the National Book Award in 1988. His other novels include Brotherly Love (1992) and God’s Pocket (1984).

  Age in year of publication: forty-five.

  Joan Didion 1934–

  1977 A Book of Common Prayer

  A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy (1984) are Joan Didion’s most powerful works. The style is that of her best journalism: taut, nervous, brilliantly observant and cutting, using constant repetition, searching always for the moment which sums everything up.

  A Book of Common Prayer is set in the fictional Central American country of Boca Grande, of which the narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, after her husband’s death, controls ‘fifty-nine point eight per cent of the arable land and about the same percentage of the decision-making process’. She is an anthropologist and scientist, and uses these skills to analyse and describe the story of Charlotte Douglas, who comes to Boca Grande from North America and misunderstands almost everything. The narrator will die, ‘very soon (from pancreatic cancer)’, she tells us early in the book, and the tone of the narrative has a hardness, an impatience and an urgency, and the sense of someone pushed into making short, sharp observations about people and things. The narrator is at her sharpest when she describes her husband’s venal, stupid family, her own wayward son, and of course the musings and antics of Charlotte Douglas. (‘Charlotte would call her own story one of passion. I believe I would call it one of delusion.’) This is a book which lends itself to constant re-reading – watch how Didion uses single-sentence paragraphs, openings and endings; there is not a word out of place.

  Joan Didion was born in California and lives in Berkeley. Her best journalism is included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979) and Miami (1987). Her extraordinary memoir of the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, The Year of Magical Thinking, won the National Book Award in 2005.

  Age in year of publication: forty-three.

  Isak Dinesen 1885–1962

  1958 Anecdotes of Destiny

  ‘I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser,’ says Isak Dinesen, speaking through Mira Jama, who tells the first of the five tales in this collection.

  Isak Dinesen is most famous for her autobiographical account of her life in Kenya, Out of Africa (1937), but her fictional work is equally exceptional, and unlike the fiction of anyone else. Though Danish, she generally wrote in English and then translated her work into her native tongue, but this cannot account for the particular quality of her work. Patrician, fantastic, Dinesen’s English has unusual beauty and great technical skill. She uses it to explore themes of desire, freedom, artistic endeavour, destiny and the aspirations and inspirations of the human spirit.

  In this way the five tales in Anecdotes of Destiny are closely connected, and in the writing itself images of angels, birds and, always, the sea, enclose each story. Most famous is ‘Babette’s Feast’, in which Babette, a famous French chef, changes the lives of the members of an obscure and puritanical religious sect living on a Norwegian fjord. In other long stories, ‘The Diver’, ‘Tempests’ and ‘The Immortal Story’, all the influences of the great sources – the Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, the Bible – are put to her sophisticated use, creating a fairy-tale world all her own, full of crystal visions and sibylline marvels.

  Isak Dinesen was the pen-name of Karen Blixen. She lived in Denmark and in Kenya. Babette’s Feast was successfully filmed in 1987.

  Age in year of publication: seventy-three.

  E. L. Doctorow 1931–

  1975 Ragtime

  Ragtime, using stylish sentences and light cadences, tells the secret and unsecret history of the United States at the turn of the century. It is a novel of public drama, murder trials, teeming immigrants, political upheaval, vast wealth, Victorian values and secret longings. It is peopled by Freud and Jung, Houdini and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Emma Goldman, Henry Ford (‘Henry Ford had once been an ordinary automobile manufacturer. Now he experienced an ecstasy greater and more intense than that vouchsafed to any American before him, not excepting Thomas Jefferson’) and J. P. Morgan (‘He was a monarch of the invisible, transnational kingdom of capital whose sovereignty was everywhere granted’), but its main protagonists are heroic figures in search of justice in this swiftly changing society.

  Doctorow tells these stories with great verve and passion, as though he is inventing a myth of origin for the United States. The story of Coalhouse Walker, the black man whose car is vandalized, is the most powerful and dramatic in the book. (It occurred to Father one day that Coalhouse Walker Jr. didn’t know he was a Negro.’) The novel’s other protagonist, of course, is the privileged narrator himself, whose father has gone on an Arctic expedition, whose uncle’s – Mother’s Younger Brother – obsessions move right through the novel, whose tone, in its easygoing neutrality and awestruck curiosity, is close to that of the narrator of The Great Gatsby.

  E. L. Doctorow was born in New York. His other novels include The Book of Daniel (1971), Billy Bathgate (1988), and The March (2005) which won the Pen Faulkner Award and the American National Book Critics Circle Award.

  Age in year of publication: forty-four.

  Roddy Doyle 1958–

  1990 The Snapper

  The Rabbittes, who appear in The Commitments (1987), The Snapper and The Van (1991), are the first happy family to appear in Irish writing since The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Of these three novels The Snapper is probably the most accomplished. The Snapper tells the story of Sharon Rabbitte, twenty-year-old daughter of Jimmy and Veronica, who gets pregnant. The father is an unlikely suspect, and Sharon doesn’t want anyone to know who it is; the novel follows the course of her pregnancy and the antics of her family and friends.

  Doyle captures brilliantly the atmosphere of a working-class Dublin family and community; there is a superb account in the novel of a large family in a small space, all of them shouting different things at the same time on the same page. There is something almost miraculous in this book about the way in which dialogue is manipulated and controlled. The laughter and wisecracks, the drama between individuals and the group, the skilful pacing, make the book incredibly readable. It is also politically sharp in its depiction of an Ireland in which religion and nationalism have lost their power.

  Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin and lives th
ere still. He has written five novels and two plays. The Snapper was made into a film by Stephen Frears; The Commitments was filmed by Alan Parker. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize in 1993. He has also written two volumes of The Last Round Up: A Star Called Henry (1999), and Oh, Play That Thing! (2004).

  Age in year of publication: thirty-two.

  Margaret Drabble 1939–

  1977 The Ice Age

  ‘A huge icy fist, with large cold fingers, was squeezing and chilling the people of Britain.’ This is the 1970s, the decade which followed the flourish of the Swinging Sixties and the Beatles, in which boom and bust and national depression and greed set the scene for the arrival of Thatcher, a punishment for all the sins so splendidly chronicled here.

  Margaret Drabble writes in a tradition currently out of fashion – that of Mrs Gaskell and Arnold Bennett, in which social conscience and a social historian’s eye control her imagination, making her a fine recorder of the way we live together, and of the moral consequences of same.

  Anthony Keating, Drabble’s hero, is a perfect Seventies man. He writes songs, he works in television, then throws everything up for property speculation, the quick-buck Seventies virus which infected England, and which in this case gives Keating a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. Drabble places Keating in a crowded, vivid world. With wife and children, mistress and her children, business colleagues inside and outside prison, danger abroad, danger at home, to a threnody of dead or decrepit dogs, Keating’s story is a burst of indignation for a senile Britain. Because Drabble is so skilled a storyteller, The Ice Age is full of surprises, full of interest, an immensely absorbing record of a shabby age.