Favorite books, 1920–1939

Thirteen ways of looking at a vicennial

Fiction and poetry only; one per author. I’ve read or tried to read most of the inner Western Canon, to the point of getting through 900 pages of An American Tragedy (verdict: I haven’t seen the movie, but just see the movie.) The most notable book I haven’t made a serious attempt at is Finnegans Wake; I’m sure I’ll find a spare ten years to puzzle my way through that one any second now. If there’s a book you read in high school and it’s not here, I’ve probably read it and thought it was fine but preferred the comic adaptation. The list is all White authors (couldn’t quite talk myself into sneaking in Mules and Men as fiction), which even though this is the last time period that’s gonna happen is still regrettable; should’ve at least tried some of the era’s Kawabata/Tanizaki. Do better next time!

1. Virginia Woolf: The Waves

Mary Hutchinson (not Jinny), painted by Vanessa Bell (not Susan, definitely not.)

One challenge posed by Ulysses was to find a purpose for beautiful sentences again; Woolf, no fan of Joyce’s vulgarity, answered by saying that beautiful sentences are beautiful, and fuck you. From the moment six middle class children wander about a garden, they’re doomed to be limited by idiosyncrasies of personality; there’s some hope their collective understanding as a class can compensative for this, and a few times in their lives it does. On re-reading, I identify a lot less with Louis (if you’re so smart, start a newsletter or something) and understand Susan (love, hate, what more do you need) and Jinny (to look hot in order to live, not that there’s anything wrong with vice versa) much more.

2. Marcel Proust: Time Regained (tr. Mayer/Kilmartin/Enright)

They don’t tell you that after Swann’s Way, the next five books are up and down (the nadir being hundreds of pages of the narrator whining about Albertine.) It all comes together again in this last book, however, with all the stray themes re-gathered and enlivened by Marcel’s awareness of impending death, which lets him be mean to the characters he wants to be mean to again. There’s tragedy; there are beautiful sentences; there’s one last Guermantes party; there’s a paving stone out of place which makes it all possible.

3. Andrei Platonov: The Foundation Pit (tr. Chandler/Chandler/Meerson)

The bleakest. Platonov was one of the few writers who experienced the worst of autocratic rule and was willing and able to write about it in a way that captures both its barbarism and bizarreness (though he couldn’t publish this during his lifetime.) Stalinism warps language, yet communication persists between the lines even when a misreading could be fatal. Totalitarianism is fundamentally absurd; that won’t stop it from liquidating you. Read 1984 (a good book) first, because it’ll be hard to take seriously after this.

4. James Joyce: Ulysses

Does take a long time to get truly great—it’s rather self-satisfied at first (oooh, I’m writing about nose-picking, are you triggered yet?) But, opposite to The Waste Land, it gets funnier and freer as it goes along as Joyce commits to parody, and even gets touching as Bloom and Stephen bro down. The Molly ending is the best stream-of-consciousness prose written up to that point in time, and even if Woolf beat it before long Joyce still gets an A for effort.

5. Wallace Stevens: Harmonium

While everyone else was agonizing over what poetry even was after Pound and Eliot (including Eliot but not Pound, who should’ve agonized more over a number of things), Stevens was churning out banger after banger: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, “Six Significant Landscapes”, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”, and of course “Sunday Morning”. Like the Velvets, this initially sold a hundred copies, but everyone who read it became a poet, unfortunately.

6. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain (tr. John E. Woods)

I read most of this walking to and from work last November and December (although an endless airport check-in queue was an apt setting for a crucial late 40 pages), with the pace of the passage of time dependent on how fjucking cold it was. The philosophical interest is less in the ideas themselves than in the process of working things out, as Mann finally talks himself into agreeing that liberal Settembrini, however annoying he is, is basically right.

7. Franz Kafka: The Castle (tr. J.A. Underwood)

Surprisingly different from The Trial. Rational action doesn’t even seem possible: as soon as K. shows up he’s helpless, doomed to be bewildered by Calvinball and boring speeches. The bureaucracy of The Castle, too indifferent for conspiracy, keeps running inexorably, and the grinding of K. into fertilizer seems coincidental. Underwood’s translation (the one to read) includes the critical edition’s famous ending, and all I have to say about that is

8. William Carlos Willams: Spring and All

A now-familiar mix of poetry and manifesto, with the two parts not quite lining up: he states that Imagism is basically kaputt and then tells us about his wheelbarrow. His revealed preference is for the image to bring its shocking clarity to Imaginationland. “The crowd at the ball game” gets close to this: after all, baseball was an activity designed to dissolve into reverie, until sabermetrics.

9. William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

Faulkner’s sometimes accused of being over-fascinated with Southern backwardness (what’s next, Proust charged with being into rich French people), but what struck me as futuristic upon re-reading was Jason. He might be the most psychologically astute depiction of a true believer Trump voter to date—the casualness of his racism (except against Dilsey, who’s a woman), his crookedness coupled with the ease with which he can be scammed, his determination above all to enforce his patriarchal status on someone else’s kid. Quentin (the third) remains a drip.

10. Katherine Mansfield: The Garden-Party and Other Stories

The stories I was assigned to read in high school in New Zealand are narratively and sociologically complex: maybe the closest anyone got to Dubliners, country aside. The title story gets through its easy satirical points, then refuses to let the authorial stand-in off the hook, then suggests the hook doesn’t really matter since we’re all going to die. The ones I wasn’t assigned are SO FREAKING MEAN; seriously, what did Mr and Mrs Dove do to deserve that?

11. Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon

Comparing this and The Thin Man to The Big Sleep I prefer Hammett to Chandler (score another for the Christgau Is Right file.) He stays far from self-parody and makes Spade magnetic without leaving any doubt that he’s a nasty piece of work. Further points of advantage: pre-war San Francisco is more interesting than pre-war LA, plus you know who killed who.

12. W.B. Yeats: Michael Robartes and the Dancer

Short book, but it does have one of the three or four greatest poems in the English language. And it’s good front to back: the works dealing with the Easter Rising and its fallout are angry without disguising a queasiness with violence, and those that try to work out the twentieth century are prescient: he’s well aware he won’t be able keep his daughter locked up in his tower, no matter what his Victorian-ass id wants.

13. P.G. Wodehouse: The Code of the Woosters

Of the two Wodehouse novels I’ve read, this is the one that executes its escalating farce plot—artfully juggling thefts of notebooks, cop helmets, and cow-creamers—as immaculately as the contrasting deadpans of Wooster and Jeeves. Plus it doesn’t have blackface in it, and it realizes British Fascism is something to be made fun of (some other Fascisms, less so.)

Previously: Favorite novels 1800–99, 21st century; favorite books 1900–19.

Next year: Mid-century! I guess I finally have to read The Catcher in the Rye.