by Colm Toibin
Artistically, Jayne Anne Phillips’s fine understanding of the place of public events in private lives gives a timeless quality to this intently told family story. ‘You never see the everyday the way you might,’ says Jean Hampson. But Jayne Anne Phillips does.
Jayne Anne Phillips was born in West Virginia and lives in California. Other highly praised books include stories Black Tickets (1979) a novel, Shelter (1995) and Lark and Termite (2008).
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
Sylvia Plath 1932–1963
1963 The Bell Jar
This is Sylvia Plath’s only novel. It is written in the same precise, tense, sharp style as the last poems, with the same tone of brutal honesty moving closer and closer to exasperation and breakdown. But the book is also very funny and frank about social and sexual ambition in 1950s America, the worry about sex and boys, the tension between a Puritan upbringing and sudden, bright chances presented to our heroine. There is a marvellous description of looking at an erect penis for the first time: ‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzard and I felt very depressed.’
The world is watched by Esther Greenwood with the amoral, opportunistic and slightly weary tones of The Catcher in the Rye, and this means that Esther’s breakdown and suicide attempt in The Bell Jar are all the more moving and shocking. The book is full of images of death and decay; the first paragraph opens: ‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs’ and ends: ‘I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.’ The fact that the life and times of the heroine mirror what happened in the life of the young Sylvia Plath gives the book an added immediacy and power.
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston. Her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, was published in 1960. She committed suicide in London a month after The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Her best-known collection Ariel was published posthumously in 1965.
Age in year of publication: thirty-one.
Katherine Anne Porter 1890–1980
1962 Ship of Fools
It is 1931, the eve of Hitler’s accession, and the Vera, a German freighter, sets off from Vera Cruz bound for Bremerhaven, carrying a motley collection of persons of differing nationalities, religions and political beliefs. The passengers perform with brio – loving and lusting, revealing smallness of mind and heart and largeness of bigotry and snobbery. Lurking behind each cabin door are stories diverse, disturbingly real and perkily human.
This is a novel written ahead of its time, taking the German attitude to the Jews in the decades before the war as an analogy to be extended to the poor, to women – to all the dispossessed. But in no didactic way: Lowental, Jewish, is almost as repellent as the Germans who persecute him, and the women on the ship treat each other like ghoulish tricoteuses. This independence of mind marks Porter’s work, as does her style: witty, sometimes acerbic, sometimes beautiful, or languid like the roll of a ship.
The ship itself is, of course, an allegory for mankind on its voyage to eternity. Always celebrating as well as indicting the endless folly of Western Man, about to embark on yet another world war, Katherine Anne Porter shows how from the tiny hatreds and foolishnesses of ordinary souls a great body of hate can grow.
Katherine Anne Porter was born in Texas and lived in Europe and America, North and South. She took twenty years to write Ship of Fools, which became an instant bestseller and was filmed in 1965. Her Collected Stories won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966.
Age in year of publication: seventy-two.
Anthony Powell 1905–2000
1951–1975 A Dance to the Music of Time
A Question of Upbringing (1951), A Buyer’s Market (1952)
The Acceptance World (1955), At Lady Molly’s (1957),
Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), The Kindly Ones (1962),
The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier’s Art (1966),
The Military Philosophers (1968), Books Do Furnish a Room (1971),
Temporary Kings (1973), Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975)
It is unwise to consult any British person about this novel sequence, which, in the manner of Proust, recounts the life and experiences of Nick Jenkins, a denizen of the English uppermiddle, if not aristocratic, class. The English disease of fussing about class has long prevented Powell from receiving the universal acclaim which is his right.
In Powell’s world the Establishment meets Bohemia. Nick Jenkins begins his narration before the First World War and ends in reflective old age, his companions a kaleidoscope of eccentrics, musicians, sluts, women ferocious and loving, men in love or in drink, generals, politicians, necrophiliacs – the cast is as large and as real as life itself. These are comic novels, classical in composition, interweaving sexual entanglements with intricate negotiations for power, with world wars and high matters of state, contemplating always the mysterious nature of love, most particularly of friendship experienced, lost, grieved over. Time dances – and it takes a heavy toll.
There are few masters of English prose with Powell’s command of irony and elegance of language. These are tender, amusing, pervasive novels; they remain in the memory. It is unnecessary to read the twelve together, but once begun …
Anthony Powell was born in London and lived in Somerset. He wrote other novels, and his memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling (4 vols 1976–82), illuminate A Dance to the Music of Time. His awards included the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W. H. Smith Award.
Age in year of publication: forty-six – seventy.
V. S. Pritchett 1900–1997
1998 The Lady from Guatemala
A Pritchett sentence is unmistakable. ‘She was a smart girl with a big friendly chin and a second one coming.’ ‘What the unconverted could not forgive in us was first that we believed in successful prayer and, secondly, that our revelation came from Toronto.’
Such words chivvy us into the Pritchett world of shopkeepers, barbers, sailors, small businessmen, religious Nonconformists and women who are much more than a match for any men who come their way. Pritchett delights in writing about human bodies, their shape and protuberances, about marriage, love and everything that leads up to, and away from, marital irritation. His women are powerful creatures, bold-nosed, full-breasted, large-eyed and, quite often, on the rampage. These are not enclosed English people. They often skip overseas and greet foreigners with feisty poise.
Pritchett is the great chronicler of those quotidian institutions which actually keep the wheels of England turning: seedy hotels, small houses, trains and a great deal of rain. His ordinary things are full of vim and bounce. Pritchett is the greatest English short story writer of this century, combining love of the English character with an inquisitive wit. This book, a choice of his best stories, shows his exceptional powers of observation and his effortless command of the use, as well as the beauty, of the English language.
V. S. Pritchett was born in Ipswich and lived in Paris, Spain, Ireland and London. Equally distinguished as an essayist and critic, his other best works are The Complete Short Stories (1990) and his autobiographies, The Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971).
Posthumous publication.
E. Annie Proulx 1935–
1993 The Shipping News
The narrative method here is original, quirky, unforgettable, and so too are the characters. The style is brisk and authoritative, as though this was the only way that the story could be told. There is no nonsense; scenes are short. The author has no interest in heroics, or fine descriptions. The novel is full of details: boatbuilding, housebuilding, knot-making, bad weather, good weather, journalism. No one is perfect.
The place is Newfoundland, where our protagonist – it would be hard to call him a hero – Quoyle, a journalist down on his luck, comes with his aunt, a very tough old bird, and his two daughters. The atmosphere is awash with salt water and conversation and work half done. The sea and the wind and th
e vagaries of the human heart in equal proportions fuel the narrative. Slowly, Quoyle and his aunt, whose ancestors have come from this place, start to fit in with life in Newfoundland, becoming immensely lovable and credible characters. Proulx has the ability to make the most ordinary moments in their lives shine with a luminous grace, at times a mild incandescence. She keeps the novel moving in scenes which are constantly unexpected and original.
E. Annie Proulx was born in Connecticut. Her other novels include, Postcards (1991), The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes (1996), and That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) and the volumes of stories, Heartsongs (1988) and three volumes of Wyoming Stories, Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004) and Fine Just the Way It Is (2008). The Shipping News won the National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
Age in year of publication: fifty-eight.
Mario Puzo 1920–1999
1969 The Godfather
In writing about the Sicilian Mafia at home in the playing fields of the USA, Mario Puzo created a universal fairy tale in which, crossing Greek gods with Robin Hood, he produced a new race of heroes, criminals of honour, murderers with a sense of justice.
Such are the Corleones, ruled by Don Vito, the Godfather, a man who protects all who belong to him. Within his kingdom he is omnipotent, capable of arranging for the decapitation of a horse and its insertion into a recalcitrant’s bed whilst tending tomatoes in his back garden. When we meet him, just after the Second World War, the Mafia are on the point of change; drugs have entered the scene, and ritual warfare breaks out between the Mafia families. Corleone’s sons, the rumbustious Sonny and the deceptive Michael, move to centre stage, encircled by a gallery of Mafiosi men and women, following the descent into open warfare like the chorus in an opera. And indeed, in its viciously orchestrated finale, this is what The Godfather is seen to be – a grand opera, in words and action, its voice reaching the heavens.
One of the reasons The Godfather, the movie, is one of the best ever made is that this novel bursts with Puzo’s romantic characterization and unfailing verve for storytelling; it is one of the most popular ever written.
Mario Puzo was born in Manhattan, New York, and lived in Bay Shore, Long Island. He won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1972 Francis Ford Coppola movie of his book.
Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
Thomas Pynchon 1937–
1973 Gravity’s Rainbow
The novel opens in London towards the close of the Second World War. A shadowy intelligence department discerns a statistical correlation between American GI Tyrone Slothrop’s sexual encounters and V2 rocket hits. The implicit pun – cockup or conspiracy? – is typical and encapsulates one central unresolved theme of this complex novel. The wider canvas of the book is a phantasmagoric vision of Europe at melting point, a teeming zone where national borders and fixed identities of every kind have dissolved into a shimmering chaos of aggressively competing interests. Everyone is a displaced person. But out of the chaos the future is embodied in multinational corporations which transcend old boundaries and variously exploit, encourage, depend on and serve the demands of emerging technologies. As the secrets of the rocket are gathered and assembled, the autonomous human subject is disassembled: Slothrop literally disintegrates as a character. There are vast numbers of other characters and emblematic presences and set pieces idiomatically based on literary and film genres and cultural forms. Mysticism, drug culture, political history, pornography, cabaret, slapstick, comic books and gangster movies all provide frames of reference. Pynchon’s sympathies are clearly with the underground, the alternative and the unofficial.
Linguistically, Gravity’s Rainbow is extremely inventive, its densely textured, hallucinogenic prose keeping us off-balance and engaged, as well as entertained and astonished.
Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York. His other novels include V (1963) Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006) and Inherent Vice (2009).
Age in year of publication: thirty-six.
Jean Rhys 1894–1979
1966 Wide Sargasso Sea
Antoinette Cosway, the first Mrs Rochester, is the madwoman in the attic at Thornfield Hall who haunts Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea is set in Jamaica in the 1830s. Antoinette tells us of her childhood on the lush island, with its superstition and troubled colonial inheritance and, hovering over her family, an expression of the decadence of the white community, madness. Antoinette is an heiress and is married off to Rochester on his arrival in Jamaica. Fragile and unloved, she has little to seduce him with except the spells and magic of the island. The cadenced words Rhys uses, breathing the winds and smells of the islands, have a seductive, languid force which cruelly exposes Antoinette’s failure.
But the first Mrs Rochester is no more than an imaginative starting point for Jean Rhys to imply larger meanings. In all her novels she is the great chronicler of the unprotected. Here, in dreamlike, exquisite prose, she recreates an experience of madness which is one of the most affecting in literature. Antoinette’s fate resonates, it is symbolic. For Rochester can never discover the secrets of the islands; Rhys reveals them to be the forces that lie dormant in the weak, fluttering, disregarded beneath the political, racial and sexual tyrannies of the strong.
Jean Rhys was born in Dominica, and lived in Europe and in England. Wide Sargasso Sea appeared twenty-seven years after her earlier four novels and won the W. H. Smith Award and the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1967.
Age in year of publication: seventy-two.
Anne Rice 1941–
1976 Interview with the Vampire
There are very few popular novels as strange as this one, in which Anne Rice began her journey into the world of vampires, beings of beauty and horror whom she uses to tell us about how and what we are.
Interview with the Vampire famously begins with a boy in a room in San Francisco, listening, with a tape recorder, to the life story of Louis, since 1791 a reluctant vampire consumed with anguish for his lost mortal world. For two centuries he has endured the life of a vampire, awake only at night, nauseated that he must kill human beings to survive. New Orleans is the setting, and in that ravishing city Louis’s longing for redemption conflicts with the outrageous enthusiasm for evil of his companion, the vampire Lestat. Vampires live – and love – and drink blood for ever, so the story Louis tells moves out to encompass other vampires’ extravagant experiences.
Anne Rice imagines her erotic and mysterious tale in prose which is luscious, decadent, rueful. The reader is transfixed by writing of intense sexuality, conveying desire and desperation with vehement force. With Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this is one of the great tales of the supernatural, a mythic exposition of the meaning of good and evil.
Anne Rice was born in and lives in New Orleans. This is the first of her bestselling ‘Vampire Chronicles’, and The Witching Hour (1990) is the first of her sequence of novels about the Mayfair dynasty of witches. Interview with the Vampire was adapted for film in 1994.
Age in year of publication: thirty-five.
Mordecai Richler 1931–2001
1971 St Urbain’s Horseman
It is the 1960s. Jake Hersh and his large Jewish family have moved from Montreal to London, where he sets about making his career as a film director and raising his children. This novel is about the fate of being Jewish, male, ambitious and Canadian during those years. Jake’s wallet and his penis, not to speak of his conscience, also play important roles in the novel. He is constantly under siege from producers; from his father; from his shadowy cousin who flits about the world as gambler, singer, horseman, rake and freedom fighter; as well as from the taxman; from an old friend who is slowly becoming rich and famous; and from his own mortality. He has broken his father’s heart by marrying the beautiful Nancy, who is a gentile, and now he has also broken his mother’s heart by being accused in an obscenity trial. This does not prevent her arriving in
London to be by his side: she is nosy, racist and aggressive, and she drives Jake and Nancy out of their minds.
Jake is in constant flight from all that raw emotion. In England, he finds it hard to make much sense of the natives – there is a marvellous description of a ghastly English dinner party. While Jake’s background renders him powerless in the public world of the Swinging Sixties – with actors, producers and TV people everywhere – he is tender and human in his own house with his wife and his three children. Jake Hersh is one of the great Jewish creations of the North American novel.
Mordecai Richler was born in Montreal and lived in England between 1959 and 1972, before he returned to Montreal. His other novels include Cocksure (1968), Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) and Barney’s Version (1997), which was adapted for film in 2010.