The Modern Library

by Colm Toibin

  Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin and lived in Oxford most of her life. In our opinion her best five novels are Under the Net (1954), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and the Good, Henry and Cato (1976) and The Black Prince (1973). The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978.

  Age in year of publication: forty-nine.

  Vladimir Nabokov 1899–1977

  1955 Lolita

  Nymphet: a young girl just past puberty; beautiful, semi-divine. Humbert Humbert, born in Paris, comes to the New England countryside in 1947 and encounters Lolita, twelve years old, ‘with an impact of passionate recognition’. To take possession of his beloved, he marries her mother. Sex with his dream-child, urgently longed for by Humbert, knowingly accepted by Lolita, becomes more than child abuse – as Lolita pertly points out, it’s incest.

  Humbert sweeps up his Lolita and for two years lives in heaven and hell, travelling with her through America. Humbert’s festering soul chronicles every moment of lust and play, always creating more trouble, inventing dangers. Lolita grows up, the outside world encroaches. There is separation and death – both the same for Humbert.

  In Lolita Nabokov’s imagination is that of a magician puppeteer. Humbert Humbert is a monster, yet we do not always feel so; Lolita the abused girl-child alternately startles and beguiles us. Their story is not sordid but full of yearning, wordplay and jokes – ironic and biting, often erotic. Lolita is one of the immortal love stories. For its fabulous language, its wit, its revolutionary portrait of a different kind of moral monster (not a political one), and because it brilliantly cocks a snook at all known taboos, Lolita is one of the most influential novels of our time.

  Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg, and lived in Europe, the USA and then Switzerland. He was a master prose stylist in both Russian and English. Lolita was rejected by many publishers on the grounds of obscenity. Like Joyce’s Ulysses it was published first in France, in English, and did not appear in the United States until 1958. The first British edition was published a year later.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-six.

  (1) V. S. Naipaul 1932–

  1961 A House for Mr Biswas

  The expectations of Mohun Biswas are not great. Assured at birth of a miserable life by the village pundit, the curse of his life proves to be the community into which he is born: the Hindus of Trinidad. Overpowering in their vociferous insistence on conformity and control, this swarm of venal, fighting tragicomedians is vividly and preposterously alive. Most ebullient is Mr Biswas, a template of indignation and ambition, albeit modest: all he wants is a house of his own, some dignity, some privacy, where the irritations of his in-laws can be viewed from afar.

  Out of this simple wish Naipaul created this masterpiece, and in Mr Biswas, with his stomach powders and fluent Trinidadian English, one of those characters who becomes a part of life. We follow him through a plethora of jobs, from sign painter and sugar-cane overseer – Mr Biswas miserable – to hilariously inventive journalist – Mr Biswas happy. We are with him as son, husband, father and testy family man until his final triumph: a peculiar house of his own.

  A House for Mr Biswas is also a history of, and a farewell to, Naipaul’s own people, written as the old ways were disappearing. Its greatness lies in its laughing testimony to the frustrations and humiliations of the poor, expressed with magnificent humour and invention, without the bleak despair which marks much of his later work.

  V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, but came to England in 1950 and now lives in Wiltshire. His travel books include An Area of Darkness (1964), about India and The Return of Eva Péron (1980). His other novels include The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Half A Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004). His many awards include the Booker Prize for In a Free State, the David Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement and in 2001 the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Age in year of publication: twenty-nine.

  (2) V. S. Naipaul 1932–

  1979 A Bend in the River

  V. S. Naipaul’s most brilliant novels are In a Free State (1971), A Bend in the River and The Enigma of Arrival (1987), with their sombre tone and grave, melancholy wisdom. Of the three, A Bend in the River is the best.

  The novel takes place in a country very like Zaire, where the narrator, Salim, a Muslim whose family is of Indian trader origin, moves during a time of conflict and sets up shop. The novel deals with history not as a rich legacy full of ancestral voices, but as a set of erasures, and this makes the tone very dark indeed. Against this vision of the past as a void is the deep richness of the present; the minor characters who impinge on Salim’s life, such as the servant Metty, the sorceress Zabeth and her son Ferdinand, are wonderfully and vividly drawn, as are the dramatic changes which take place in our narrator’s life in the village, and the slow eruption – this is after all Conrad’s territory – of civil strife. There is a scene where the President – clearly a version of Mobutu – speaks on the radio, which is utterly electrifying, as are the later scenes of catastrophe in the book.

  Age in year of publication: forty-seven.

  R. K. Narayan 1906–2001

  1952 The Financial Expert

  Narayan’s great novels are set in his fictional town of Malgudi, in southern India. There is something particularly engaging about the stumblings of Margayya, the hero of this one, who luxuriates in an anxious love of money. He begins his financial endeavours sitting under a banyan tree with a tin box, extorting rupees out of any simple soul who comes his way. Fate, in the shape of a sex manual at first called Philosophy and Practice of Kissing and later more timidly entitled Domestic Harmony, makes him an entrepreneur. An enslaved wife, a house symbolically partitioned from his brother with whom he is forever scratchily at war, and a son, Balu, so loved and so unworthy that he proves to be Margayya’s worst investment, complete Margayya’s world.

  Narayan has been attacked for presenting the miseries of India – poverty, the caste system, etc. – too benevolently. This politically correct position fails to see that Narayan’s lightness of touch and unruffled irony reveal a thousand trenchant truths. The bombastic Margayya, with his vanity, his large ambitions and small meannesses and his manoeuvrings around the gods and Mammon, lives the harsh life of those at the bottom of the heap. This is all the more apparent for the vigour, laughter and buoyancy Margayya uses to combat the weaknesses of his pinched soul. That is the real genius of Narayan.

  R. K. Narayan was born in Madras and lived in Mysore. Considered one of India’s greatest writers, among his best-known novels are The Painter of Signs (1977) and A Tiger for Malgudi (1983).

  Age in year of publication: forty-six.

  Patrick O’Brian 1914–2000

  1970 Master and Commander

  This is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s sequence of novels about life in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. For those who entertain dismal notions of the sea and all who sail on it, it is important to know that naval paraphernalia and perfect period detail are only two of the splendours of O’Brian’s writing, superseded by the vice-like grip of his storytelling and the instant charm of his characterization and dialogue.

  Lieutenant Jack Aubrey, RN, meets Stephen Maturin, a penniless physician, during the performance of Locatelli’s C major quartet at the Governor’s House in Port Mahon, Minorca, on 1 April 1800. They fall out. Thus begins one of the great literary friendships, as these two very different men – Aubrey a cheerful bulldog Englishman and true man of the sea, and Maturin an enigmatic Irish-Catalan – begin a lifetime of adventure together. Though there are battles aplenty, how men live together, the capering, petty and sometimes lonely qualities of a male society, rather than the tedious brutalities we associate with war, is the subject here. There is nothing monastic or uncultivated about their experiences. Music flows through the novels, which, in turn, are like a series of illustrations, each telling a different story, each one illuminating, through a tiny community on a wooden ship, the confusions and glorie
s of the human condition.

  Patrick O’Brian was born in Buckinghamshire, and lived in south-west France and Dublin. A distinguished translator, biographer and novelist, he published twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-six.

  Edna O’Brien 1932–

  1962 The Lonely Girl

  (renamed Girl with Green Eyes in 1964)

  The idea that the Republic of Ireland moved from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century in five or ten years has proved very fruitful for Irish novelists. All Edna O’Brien’s work is concerned with the drama between freedom and restriction, between old-fashioned values, and possibilities which are new and untested. In later novels such as Time and Tide (1992) or Down by the River (1996) she presents this conflict as tragedy, but in her early work, especially her first three novels known as ‘The Country Girls Trilogy’, she uses a lighter tone.

  Of these novels, the second one, Girl with the Green Eyes, is the most accomplished. Caithleen and Baba have arrived in Dublin where they are staying in digs and searching for adventure; they are desperate to lose their virginity and desperate to hold on to it at the same time. Baba is full of malice and plans for the future; Caithleen, on whom the novel focuses, is more melancholy and uneasy than her friend, more provincial, but she too wants love and wants to get away from her ghastly family. She meets an older man, a foreigner involved in the movies, who is oddly wise and distant and cynical but great in bed. The tone of the novel is perfectly wry and innocent; some scenes – Caithleen’s efforts to cook fish, for example, or her father’s visit – are desperately funny.

  Edna O’Brien was born in the west of Ireland, but has lived in London for many years. Her other books include August is a Wicked Month (1965) and A House of Splendid Isolation (1994).

  Age in year of publication: thirty.

  Flannery O’Connor 1925–1964

  1952 Wise Blood

  ‘Jesus was a liar’ is the oft-repeated cry of Hazel Motes, grandson of a preacher, who returns from the war with his mother’s spectacles, the Bible, and his faith gone awry. In Taulkinham, Tennessee, he founds the Church Without Christ, an entirely original concept to the inhabitants of that town, imbued as they are with Bible-belt religion of the more conventional kind. Motes’s journey through this novel is a test from God. He is accompanied by bizarre villains such as Asa Hawks, the seeing blind preacher, and his determinedly nauseating daughter Sabbath. And there is the fox-faced young Enoch Emery, driven to absurdities by his wise blood, ‘inherited from his daddy’. Animals provide a Greek chorus – a gorilla, a moose, some interesting pigs – even Haze’s car looks like a rat. Hoover Shoats, whose rival Holy Church Without Christ precipitates vengeance, completes these ‘poor white trash’ who have no need for the Lord to mete out punishment; they are a dab hand at doing so themselves.

  O’Connor’s creations are grotesque but familiar, brutish but funny, every stitch of their clothing and oddity of speech presented to us in fine detail like an etching on glass. Unique in O’Connor’s startling use of language and in the intense originality of her Gothic imagination, this is a classic of the American South.

  Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia. Her novels include The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and her Complete Stories won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. John Huston filmed Wise Blood in 1979.

  Age in year of publication: twenty-seven.

  John O’Hara 1905–1970

  1958 From the Terrace

  This is a big, brilliant, old-fashioned novel – all eight hundred and ninety-seven pages of it – which offers a panoramic view of American society in the first half of the twentieth century. It moves slowly, showing scenes and characters in great detail. The dialogue, throughout the book, is inspired: it is hard to think of a writer who uses dialogue so well. It is also full of strange, startling insights into the lives and motives of the characters, which are reminiscent of those of George Eliot.

  Our hero Alfred Eaton is born into a prosperous family in a small town in Pennsylvania; his mother drinks and has affairs, his father loved his older brother who died, and has no interest in Alfred. Thus he grows up self-sufficient, he makes an effort, people respect him and admire him. There is a wonderful account in this book of what it is like to be young, rich and good-looking in New York in 1919 and 1920. After the war Eaton goes into business, he gets married, he has children, he has a mistress, he moves to Washington and takes part in government. O’Hara writes well about his most private, intimate thoughts and moments, and then superbly about public events such as the Wall Street crash. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, as time moves on and Eaton’s personality coarsens, this great American story darkens, this exemplary character, given every opportunity, somehow fails. This is a deeply convincing and disturbing novel, with myriad small touches of pure genius; it is also very funny. It deserves to be widely read and known.

  John O’Hara was born in Pennsylvania. His other books include Appointment in Samarra (1934), BUtterfield 8 (1935) and Pal Joey (1940).

  Age in year of publication: fifty-three.

  Michael Ondaatje 1943–

  1987 In the Skin of a Lion

  This is a short novel about layer and texture and language. It is set in Toronto and south-western Ontario in the 1920s and 1930s: it offers still points, short scenes, moments in the lives of a number of immigrants; it dramatizes the construction of Toronto. The novel is haunted by the building of one bridge, how it was designed and planned, the deaths and accidents during the slow progress. The prose here has a strange, slow, poetic and deliberate tone, which is also present in Ondaatje’s subsequent novel The English Patient (1992). Great risks are taken with narrative, so that the novel comes to resemble a group of photographs or tiny clips from a film. The main character is Patrick Lewis: in a stunningly beautiful piece at the beginning of the book we see him with his father, who works with dynamite to clear logs. Later, we see him arriving in Toronto, falling in love, spending time in prison, and then telling the story. Ondaatje manages to combine a sense of mystery in the spaces between the words with a deeply solid characterization. His genius is in creating one of the best novels of the century about work, which is also one of the best novels about dreams and disappearances and magic.

  Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and educated in England and in Canada, living there since 1962. His other works include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Coming Through Slaughter (1979), Running in the Family (1982) and the novels Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Divisadero (2007). He has also published several volumes of poetry. The English Patient, joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1992, was made into a film in 1996.

  Age in year of publication: forty-four.

  Grace Paley 1922–2007

  1959 The Little Disturbances of Man

  Grace Paley’s world is a small but happy one, happy in the sense that nothing worse remains to happen to the creatures she invents. Subtitled ‘Stories of Men and Women at Love’ (though love–hate would be a more accurate description), her women, the Virginias, Faiths and Annas of these stories, are busy bringing up the children; husbands – Richards, Johns, Peters – having departed for the next woman on the agenda, propelled by testosterone, usually darting a backward glance at wife number one and keeping a careful foot in her door. Elsewhere, bodies age, grandparents fret, kids run riot, and, as always, families demonstrate the American dream to be a species of nightmare.

  It is the language she uses, a mélange of New York Russian-Polish-Yiddish, that is the hallmark of her work. Jewish mother lamenting sons: ‘First grouchy, then gone.’ Jewish son, lamenting mother: ‘Me. Her prize possession and the best piece of meat in the freezer of her heart.’ This language is much more than inconsequential wisecrackery; it beats with a rhythm that banishes sentimentality and enables Paley’s understated and colloquial vignettes to suggest broad spaces of emotion and desire – and enjoyment, for Grace Paley adds greatly to the joy of life, each sto
ry like sipping a very strong, very dry Martini. Of the little she has written, these stories show her at her wild and original best.

  Grace Paley was born and lived in New York. Her only other story collections were Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985) which appeared in Collected Stories (1994). Begin Again: Collected Poems appeared in 2000.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-seven.

  Jayne Anne Phillips 1952–

  1984 Machine Dreams

  This is a most unusual novel, gritty, imaginative, skilful, the family story of the Hampsons, who live in a small town in the USA, during those years when confidence in the American dream disappeared in the Depression, in the Pacific during the Second World War, and in Vietnam.

  In 1946 Jean marries Mitch Hampson just after his return from the war. Both are already marked by hardship and family loss. Mitch, in New Guinea and the Coral Sea, has returned from a world of machines and death that deadens him for married life. Their two children, the girl Danner and her brother Billy, who like his father is required by his country to fight in the East, this time in Vietnam, complete the story. There is both charm and power in this novel. Phillips uses stream of consciousness, dreams, images of flying horses, aeroplanes, but always appurtenances of war are buried in the appurtenances of life. Cars, dresses, housework, sex, the clicking of pipes in creaking houses mingle with ‘smells of tobacco and men, the sound of men’s voices’ and ‘big machines, earth movers and cranes’.