by Colm Toibin
Age in year of publication: forty.
Marilynne Robinson 1943–
1980 Housekeeping
This is a most unusual novel, steeped in imagery of water and light, lakes and trains, and the mountains and snows of the north-eastern USA, where the town of Fingerbone seems to float.
Here live three generations of women. Sylvia, the grandmother, has three daughters: Molly, who becomes a missionary in China; Helen, who is mother to Lucille and Ruthie, but follows her father into the bottom of the lake; and Sylvie, a drifter. Ruthie is the teller of the tale and through her eyes we witness the quiet desperation of children at loose in the world. Grandmother dead, mother dead, they end up with Sylvie, who like all her sisters has eschewed for ever the accepted ways of being a woman. No housekeeping, cake-making or doily-crocheting for her, but magic in the mountains and love when required. As the disapproving townsfolk of Fingerbone move in, Sylvie and Ruth and Lucille variously set off on pilgrimage, the past travelling with them.
Marilynne Robinson has a rare eye for nature. Every insect, gnat on the wing, the shifting colours of snow, water, ice ‘the colour of paraffin’, ‘plaited light’ is closely observed. Smells too – woods with the odour of ‘the parlor of an old house’, cleanliness that smells like a sun-warmed cat. This is a wistful, laconic novel, illuminated by a haunting sense of the spirit of nature, and the spirit of place.
Marilynne Robinson was born in Idaho and lives in New England. Her other novels are Gilead (2004) which won the American National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize and Home (2008) which won the Orange Prize. Housekeeping was filmed by Bill Forsyth in 1987.
Age in year of publication: thirty-seven.
Philip Roth 1933–
1997 American Pastoral
Swede Levov has everything: he is good-looking, a superb athlete, rich, a good father, a good son, a good citizen and a good employer; he is married to a former Miss New Jersey, with whom he has a pretty good sexual relationship; he is even-tempered, at ease with himself, mild-mannered, and much admired. Philip Roth establishes him convincingly and in great detail as one of the most contented men in America, post-Jewish, but deeply alert to his family’s recent history as immigrants. Why then, does his daughter, Merry, become such a difficult presence in the house, refusing first to eat her food and then slowly becoming obsessed with the Vietnam War until she puts a bomb in the local store-cum-post office and disappears? Why do the riots in Newark, where the main Levov factory is sited, occur?
Roth dramatizes the significant events of the second half of the century in the United States in the life of one family, in one all-American consciousness. The result is a novel which is intensely absorbing and readable with some magnificent set scenes such as a forty-fifth anniversary high school reunion at which the narrator meets the Swede’s brother among many others, and a dreadful dinner party at the end of the book which must be the best worst dinner party in all fiction. Swede Levov is alive in this book not as a recognizable type, but as a uniquely vivid personality. His character and his consciousness stay in your mind.
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, and now lives in New York State. His other books include Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), I Married a Communist (1998), The Plot Against America (2001), Everyman (2006), Exit Ghost (2007) and Indignation (2008). American Pastoral won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
Age in year of publication: sixty-four.
Norman Rush 1933–
1991 Mating
Sometimes a novel appears which seems to have no direct literary antecedents, which is written in a tone which is new and fresh, and takes an approach which is original and startling. Norman Rush’s Mating is such a book; it deals with Americans in Africa; it is narrated by a female anthropologist on the make in Botswana. She is urbane, intelligent and has read thousands of books, now she is in search of new sensations and a warm climate and useful research material. She is knowing and cynical and pushy, too selfconscious as a narrator to make the reader dislike her too actively, but so adept with sentences and paragraph endings and exciting prose rhythms, not to speak of self-knowledge, that the reader is full of admiration for her and deeply amused by her antics.
The novel, like all good comic writing, has a dark side: our heroine sets out on a lone journey across the desert to find the brave, remote Utopia which a shady and attractive American called Nelson Denoon has set up in a place called Tsau. While some of this is very funny indeed, there is something strange and unsettling about the social control which Nelson insists on, and the world he has invented. The tone of this book is flawless, the voice is utterly convincing.
Norman Rush was born in San Francisco and now lives in New York. He is the author of three works of fiction: a book of stories, Whites (1986), Mating which won the Irish Times Literature Prize and Mortals (2007). He lived and worked in Africa between 1978 and 1983.
Age in year of publication: fifty-eight.
Salman Rushdie 1947–
1981 Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie is a born storyteller, whose work has been a turning point in the development and perception of modern Indian fiction. Rushdie vibrates with moral passion, with opinion and political belief. He is a dominating writer who engulfs his readers in fabulous stories. A master of comic invention, his characters, full of snot, ego and physical abnormality, leave you with a sense of having sneezed violently and laughed too long and too loudly. Midnight’s Children – an allegory for India’s recent history – leaves you with a great love for its Indian world.
Saleem Sinai is born on 15 August 1947, one of 1001 children, magically endowed, whose birth coincides with India’s severance from Britain. Rushdie takes a savage swipe at Mrs Indira Gandhi and her notorious 1971 Emergency measures, whilst the fantastical plot and flamboyant narrative, centring on the swapping of two babies at birth, give entirely new excitement to the most traditional of British comic literary fancies. Rushdie is the kind of writer whose work is too much surrounded by academic contemplations of his ‘magical realism’ and ‘post-modernism’. Readers need only concentrate on the ebullient Rushdie imagination and the wonder and entertainment of the novel itself.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay and educated in England. Midnight’s Children won the Man Booker Prize. Other novels include Shame (1983), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Satanic Verses, which won the Whitbread Fiction Award (1988), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001), Shalimar the Clown (2005) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008). Midnight’s Children was awarded the Man Booker of Bookers for the best Man Booker winning novel of the first forty years in 2008.
Age in year of publication: thirty-four.
J. D. Salinger 1919–2010
1951 The Catcher in the Rye
It is against the odds that this book, which had such a cult following in its day, and during the twenty years after publication, should still be fresh and fascinating. But it is still fresh and fascinating.
It tells the story of a few days in the life of a sixteen-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield who, about to be thrown out of another expensive school, escapes to New York. He books into a hotel, tries to lose his virginity, meets his kid sister – the scene where he sneaks into the apartment is magnificent – and ponders on the nature of things. His thought process is direct and unforgettable, he has odd fascinations and desires, he has great loves and hates, and he has a most peculiar and impressive sort of intelligence. Clearly, he needs psychiatric help, but psychiatric help also needs him (and his version of the encounter would be by far the more interesting). In other words, Salinger created a character who stays in the mind, whose first-person narrative the reader enters completely, whose verbal quirks – and he has many – remain funny and do not irritate, and whose story is likely to survive into the far future.
J. D. Salinger was born in New York. His other books include Franny and Zooey (1961) and two collections of stories. At the time of his death he had lived in
seclusion in New Hampshire for many years.
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
Frank Sargeson 1903–1982
1965 Memoirs of a Peon
Michael Newhouse, New Zealand Casanova, is the protagonist of this picaresque satire, which takes us from his childhood through his youth to his later years, by way of the procession of vociferous women who catch his eye.
Michael is a puffball of conceit, one of those oblivious men who specialize in making others aware of their own intelligence and emotional requirements. Thus a puzzled sense of indignation wafts through Michael’s story, as he perambulates around Hamilton, Auckland, Wellington, Rotorua and the farms and towns of the North Island, extending his favours to mothers and daughters, utterly unconcerned with his country’s complacent, puritanical values. Circumstance constantly foils him as he snuffles around for a corner of New Zealand life where a more diverse sexuality and a more willing attitude to copulation can be discovered.
Much of the pleasure of the novel comes from the comic grace of its narrative. Michael, raised by his Edwardian grandparents, has mastered a sedate New Zealand version of their formal prose which fluently decorates his descriptions of the ‘raging pit of disappointment’ fate always seems to place in his path. Seeming artless, this novel is artful, a radical work using the life and times of an intelligent rake to stick pins into conventional pomposities, in New Zealand in particular, and in the world in general.
Frank Sargeson was born in Hamilton, New Zealand, and lived and wrote in New Zealand. Important works are stories, Conversations with My Uncle (1936) and the novel The Hangover (1967).
Age in year of publication: sixty-two.
Paul Scott 1920–1978
1966 The Jewel in the Crown
India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, the possession most loved, most influential, most mourned. This is the first volume of Scott’s grand work The Raj Quartet, and is set in 1942, the beginning of tumultuous times, with Europe at war and India in ferment, raging with anti-British riots, on the road to Independence.
Rape is at the centre of events, the political rape of India by the British, the physical rape of Daphne Manners by Indian peasants in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore, an outrage which reverberates immediately and for many years to come throughout the British community in India. And throughout the Indian communities too, for Daphne Manners had committed the unforgivable sin of falling in love with a Hindu, Hari Kumar. He, in turn, a Hindu educated at an English public school, is an outcast in both worlds.
Over Scott’s vast landscape hovers the magnificence of India itself, almost a spectator, watching as Scott moves through the past, present and future to show that just as there was no mercy in British India for those who transgressed Imperial rules so, subtly, mercilessness became the weapon upon which the British impaled themselves.
Paul Scott was born and lived in London. The books that follow The Jewel in the Crown in The Raj Quartet, which became a successful television series in 1983 as The Jewel in the Crown, are The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971) and A Division of Spoils (1975). Staying On, a coda to The Raj Quartet, won the Booker Prize in 1977.
Age in year of publication: forty-six.
Hubert Selby Jr. 1928–2004
1964 Last Exit to Brooklyn
This is written with a freedom and flow and use of vernacular and voice that make it compelling and hugely readable. It is full of dirty language and dirty longings and dirty activity in general, including the most appalling violence; it is strictly for maiden aunts. It is a set of loosely connected stories in which some characters reappear, in which an all-night diner called The Greek regularly features. It includes some of the most unsavoury characters in modern fiction: a crowd who hang around the bar and beat up soldiers; a ‘hip queer’ called Georgette who is in love with a man called Vinnie and gets her leg cut by a knife by the crowd from the bar; and a woman called Tralala, one of the strongest characters in the book, who does the most appalling things to a soldier, generally hangs around looking for trouble and gets badly beaten in the end. One of the longest scenes is about a strike and a man called Harry, who is lazy and drunken and bloody-minded and unhappily married. Slowly, he realizes he is gay, and there are terrible consequences. The last scene is set in a low-life housing project. The tone of the book is cold and angry; Selby moves among the damned with an urge to tell us – to yell at us, if necessary – that this is what the American dream looks like now, that this is what hell is like, and there is no possibility of redemption. Some people, including the man who owned Blackwell’s bookshop and Robert Maxwell, if you don’t mind, succeeded in having the book banned for a short while when it was first published in England.
Hubert Selby Jr. was born in Brooklyn and lived in Los Angeles. His other books include The Room (1971) and The Demon (1976).
Age in year of publication: thirty-six.
Will Self 1961–
1993 My Idea of Fun
A Cautionary Tale
The junkies’ group therapy session on page 175 of this novel would be its most savagely funny episode were it not for the ending, which provides the best last paragraph in modern fiction since Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.
Will Self is a master of the grotesque and a pricker of conventional bubbles. In his hands the gentility of the English is hung, drawn, quartered and then incinerated for good measure. What could be more genteel than the south-coast town of Saltdean where Ian Wharton, our hero, first makes an appearance? Ian has eidesis, or photographic memory, which is good news for the Fat Controller, who descends upon Saltdean, Ian and anyone who gets in his way. He knows what to do with eidesis and how to turn the repulsive Ian into his significant other, using disgusting notions such as washing the face with semen soap as part of his regime.
This is a familiar England, where emphysemic pigeons land hacking on window sills and keel over dead, and where babies munch razor blades and happily burble blood. In this pungent Swiftian attack, using as many nasty images as possible, Self cuts to the gut and watches his subject bleed, usually to death. His writing is always elegant, his invention lurid and his mind a whirlpool of ideas.
Will Self was born and lives in London. His acclaimed short story collections are The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), Grey Area (1994) and Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998). His other novels include Great Apes (1997), How the Dead Live (2000), The Book of Dave (2006) and The Butt (2008).
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
Vikram Seth 1952–
1993 A Suitable Boy
At almost fifteen hundred pages long, A Suitable Boy is a sprawling, engaging and supremely confident novel set in the early years of independent India. It is essentially an old-fashioned tale of manners with a political background, as though Anthony Trollope had applied his skills to modern India. Its power and its extraordinary popularity derive from its array of characters and the real aura of warmth and glow and even love which surrounds their creation.
The main story is that of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s efforts to find a suitable husband for her daughter Lata. Mrs Mehra is bossy, emotional and ambitious, and Lata is intelligent, wilful and also ambitious, but in a different way. The novel dramatizes the clash between traditional morals and manners and the vagaries of the young. Seth loves playing off the haughty against the humble, the feckless and charming against the conservative and staid. There is an infinite number of minor characters, and long, fascinating digressions about land reforms and other aspects of political life in India. The light tone, the delight in the detail, the eye for pure comedy and drama, and the fearless use of nineteenth-century literary devices make the book easy to read, and justify its astonishing length.
Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta. His other books include An Equal Music (1999), The Golden Gate: A Novel In Verse (1986), From Heaven’s Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) and Two Lives (2005).
Age in year of publication: fo
rty-one.
Bapsi Sidhwa 1938–
1988 Ice-Candy-Man
(US: Cracking India)
From the lap of her beautiful Ayah, or clutching her skirts as Ayah is pursued by her suitors through the fountains, cypresses and marble terraces of the Shalimar Gardens, little Lenny observes the clamorous horrors of Partition. It is 1947. Lenny lives in Lahore, in the bosom of her extended Parsee family – Mother, Father, brother Adi, Cousin, Electric-Aunt, Godmother and Slavesister. Working for them, or panting after Ayah, are Butcher, the puny Sikh zoo attendant, the Government House gardener, the favoured Masseur, the restaurant-owning wrestler and the shady Ice-Candy-Man – Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, friends and neighbours – until their ribald, everyday world disintegrates before the violence of religious hatred.
No other novel catches as this one does India’s centuries-old ways of living with religious difference before Partition. Lenny is inquisitive and notices everything: clothes, smells, colour, the patina of skin, sex everywhere, and eyes – olive oil coloured, sly eyes, fearful eyes. In writing which is often lyrical, always tender and clever, with a nuance here, a touch there, Sidhwa shows us the seedbed of the Partition massacres – an abused Untouchable, the ritual disembowelling of a goat, a priest shuddering over the hand of a menstruating woman. This laughing, gentle tale, told through the eyes of innocence, is a testament to savage loss, and a brilliant evocation of the prowling roots of religious intolerance.