Welcome to my salon, make yourself at home, help yourself to coffee or sangria. If you brought something harder, please take it to the patio or the bathroom, and share a bit with any moochers who trail there after you.
I don't quite have a diary here. At least, not one that travels in a straight line in order to reach a clear destination. It is often thus. I have enough themes and insights to fill several diaries - but they'd all come out lumpy and half-baked. I mixed a half-dozen bowls of batter this week, but none became cakes. Here are the themes I explored, then retreated from: Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude; Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel; a letter of Keats'; J. M. Coetzee on "What is a Classic?"; Edmund Wilson on Nabokov & Nabokov on Dostoevsky; Laughing At vs. Laughing With.
The last could have grown quite weighty, looking at humorists, and then at critics, in two camps: those who pick out flaws vs. those who joyfully immerse themselves in a work. Then I either would have found a third, entirely different kind of humor/angle of view - or else I'd have gone Hegelian, and found a synthesis that comprehended the con & pro stances. Those are some pretty eloquent diaries, except for the slight hiccup of being completely imaginary.
But my house is your house. Feel free to wander down to the basement right now, and leave a comment about any of these cake recipes (or, indeed, anything at all). If a recipe catches your fancy, tell me what ingredients I should be sure to use, in case I ever do bake that cake. I have always enjoyed experimenting in the kitchen, wearing an apron and safety goggles (my cakes go Boom just as often as my books do).
As you can see, as you can not-smell, there is no freshly baked cake. For freshly baked, please join the small gaggle behind the bushes, at the far end of my patio. For us coffee drinkers in the salon, I'll whip up a couple of strudels:
1) Ways of not writing Too Much.
2) What is a Great Novel?
1) Ways of not writing Too Much.
When I examine ideas that intrigue me, I get a bit like Rembrandt, finding ever smaller and subtler gradations of shading and hue. But Rembrandt could always look back at the face, and make sure all that he saw was really there. Whereas I sometimes find hues that come from an overactive imagination.
Novels, to me, are as hard to grasp as a fractal: The closer you look, the more there is. I'd guess there are 888 distinct skills that can be applied to writing a novel, and you need to handle at least 333 of them to come up with a Great Novel. But the skills of handling plot and character are much nearer the core than the skills of handling weather and rare adverbs.
There may be 8, or there may be 40, ways of not writing Too Much. Let's look at 3 of them.
The first is, pruning your word count. Twain said that the difference between the right word, and almost the right word, was the difference between lightning and a lightning-bug. A careful, diligent writer will pore over their text, finding places where 15 words can say the same thing more tightly than the 19 in the first draft. If you do this throughout, you end up with a tighter, punchier text, that is easier to read, and more impressive. It's like a steak without any fat or gristle.
The second is, pruning your realism. There are writers who bombard you with details. They may even knock you into submission, so you're overwhelmed, but do feel the mass and substance of their created world. But a finer writer will create the same world in a third as many strokes, and make it dance to boot. The key is having a sharp sense of which details are most salient, and which others are merely backing up the picture you've already drawn.
For instance, Dickens (aided by his apprenticeship as a court-reporter) has a great eye for characters. He'll give you a scarf, a beard, a particular way of bowing, and the character springs to life before your eyes - just as much as if a duller writer gave you two paragraphs of introduction. Or Flaubert, in Madame Bovary. He'll give you a list of six things in a room. But he spent two weeks of head-scratching compiling that list, so that those apparently random objects will map out the whole plot their owner's personality is built upon.
I can see a third form of concision, even rarer and more powerful. I'm not sure I grasp it myself, but I'll try.
I see it most in Shakespeare, and it relies on his almost infallible sense of our common humanity. I don't think anyone in history understood the human heart (and, perhaps, the mind and spirit) better than Shakespeare. He also knew how to speak to ours, and make them sing in harmony with his creations. He's like Spielberg - without the musical score, and you don't ever feel like you're being played with.
With such a clear view into his audience, and such confidence in his own ever-flowing pen, Shakespeare deftly divides each character in three. He has descriptions, but doesn't rely on them - he also shares the soliloquies where the main characters discover themselves and, by discovering, change themselves. Harold Bloom writes a lot about this, and various critics say that this invention of self-reflection (which developed, three centuries later, into stream-of-consciousness) is a keystone on which the Novel was built.
And Shakespeare doesn't even need much description and soliloquy together, which are the first step of his characters. He has such a global awareness of personality, that he shows it in every conversation and every action each player takes - the second step. He tells us the bare minimum, just what the character needs to have a distinct personality. But he suggests much more. We taste their words and see their gestures and implications. So the personality lives, and breathes; and we aid in their creation. We involve our own imagination in the picture. If a character discovers themself in soliloquies, and other characters guess at their motives, we the audience are discovering and guessing right along with them.
Look at Hamlet. Everyone has a theory of Hamlet's moods: He misses his father; He's lonely and bored without friends; He yearns for Ophelia; He's completely mad. These theories are advanced one after another, by different characters, as the play proceeds. So we entertain them, one after the other. We walk all the way around Hamlet, and view him from every side. In fact, each of these theories is partly true. And that is how you write one of the largest characters in Western literature, even though you don't have an 800 page Novel to stretch out in.
The third part of Shakespeare's greatest characters, after the telling and the suggesting, is the mystery. He has this way of leaving a hole at the center - room to breathe, as it were - and we keep looking into that hole, trying to find the missing part. How can Lear be such a wise, good, beloved, experienced king - yet such a fool for his daughters? Shakespeare's fullest creations live with us as tantalizing questions for the rest of our lives.
The second strudel is still in the oven. I've already written enough to call it a diary. I could stop here. But I do have these half-formed thoughts kicking around in the oven of my skull. Well, anyway, here's the beginning of strudel two.
2) What is a Great Novel?
Every different Novel partakes of all sorts of meanings: it has a genre, a country of origin, it fits in certain boxes within the history and typology of the Novel. I apologize for the oddness-pretentiousness of capitalizing Novel throughout, but it is the unit of measurement in this theorizing.
We have this whole industry or culture of reading, with critics and academics, writers and publishers on top, and the world's reading public receding beneath them, as if it were an aristocracy. It's not an aristocracy at all, it's much more complicated and vibrant than that. But the people who would be Lords and Ladies if it were an aristocracy fall into thinking of it that way. Just as, here in LA, celebrities and beautiful people develop an attitude of entitlement; or, on Wall St. and in the Hamptons, billionaires do. There's always a little bit of truth in these systems. If you can win a Nobel Prize in Literature, you're approximately the Duke or Duchess of something.
Within this culture of reading, there is also a sort of aristocracy of Novels. Though it's like during the Wars of the Roses: a Novel only holds it title until a stronger usurper comes along. There aren't clear titles for the ranking of Novels. There are a lot of indicators. After the Nobel Prize there are Pulitzers, Bookers, and many others. And there are The New York Times Books of the Year, and bestseller lists, and millions sold.
There's an axis of meaning, in the aristocracy of Novels, which seems to be half the conversation within the establishment of the culture of reading. It is: How excellent and eternal is a given Novel? If there is a Platonic world of Ideal Novels, how close does any given Novel get to the heart of it?
If I were to put ranks to them, I'd say that the highest books are Canonized - literally, for they're accepted as part of the Western Canon. The next rank might be Classic, then Great Novel. Horace said a Classic is a book that people still read a century after it was written. If you wanted to make sure that you included all the most notable books, you could have a fourth rank for Novels which, though not precisely Great, were Unique, because no other Novel was quite like them. You couldn't say Winnie the Pooh is a great Novel, but it's possibly unique.
It turns out that for the last half century there has been a War of the Roses going on in the world of Novels, and you can see it in the first rank of books: Why are they called the Western Canon? Why not the World Canon, or just the Canon?
The two sides in this war are the old, traditional guard of dead, white, male European (and some American) authors - and the new guard of everyone else. Fifty years ago critics would often compile lists of the best books in history, and these books would start with Homer and the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, some Greeks and Romans - then skip the next millennium and a half (except for St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante and Chaucer), until Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and then 350 years of European Novels, Science and Philosophy, and a bit over 100 of American ones. They'd include at most five non-whites and ten females. Nothing remotely low-brow; and SF, fantasy, mystery, thriller, western, romance and young adult Novels stood almost no chance.
The best known of these dead-white-male lists is The Great Books. The only women on the list are Jane Austen and George Eliot; the only non-whites are St. Augustine and Maimonides.
The list I just gave, who ruled the aristocracy of books from Victorian times until the 1970s, is the old guard. The new guard is everyone left outside, knocking to get in from the cold. In the '70s and '80s the old guard were attacked from all sides, as feminists, people of every country, continent and color, and people from any other non-traditional viewpoint (such as champions of the genres I mentioned) demanded that their voices be heard, and their authors get a seat at the high table. Thank god they did!
There was, I grant, something reassuring in the old guard, in their having been the foundation of western thought for centuries. If you read all the Great Books, you had the influences, the memes and the quotes that almost all authors had been drawing upon - until the 1920s, when Modernism started to break the ramparts, and let fresh blood in. Well, mostly dead blood, but at least blood from outside the established Canon.
The 1970s and '80s were the same thing, but twenty times as much of it. Now, 30 years later, half the ramparts are gone, and we've settled into a compromise between the two guards: the dead-white-male, and everyone else.
What we've gained is, the "100 Greatest Novel" lists are a lot less predictable, and more varied, than they were 40 years ago. What we've lost is, there is no established Canon, and what exactly a Great Novel is looks a lot less clear. So the sense of motion is refreshing, until you wonder if you're standing on quicksand.
In the last year, I've looked at more than twenty "100 Greatest Novel" lists, and I'll show you the most balanced and thoughtful one I've found. One of the best things about it is, it's about 60% traditional Western Canon, but Daniel Burt has looked long and hard to find Novels from outside the Canon, which truly meet all the established criteria of excellence, and also bring new voices and styles of book into the list. It's also nice that this is the 2nd edition, and has (in spite of the cover) his 125 Greatest Novels of All. Now, this is not definitive - but it's pretty darn good. I've given this book to five members of my family; it's the best book on books I know.
The link takes you to a facsimile of the book (well, 3/4 of the pages are missing). Scroll down to pages 6-9 to find a table of contents, i.e. the list of 125, in order. Page through what lies below, to get a sense of the 4-5 page chapters he has, looking at each Novel on the list in depth.
I asked, What is a Great Novel? But there is no succinct definition. I've been chewing on this question for several years now, and the best answer I have is to point you to Daniel Burt's list. I've read my way through half of his list and can attest, they've all been great so far. Admittedly, I've so far avoided Tale of Genji, Finnegans Wake, Gravity's Rainbow, Dream of the Red Chamber and Clarissa.
Dear Reader, I'll throw in a random act of kindness, for those who don't click links. This diary has been rescued. I never expected that, and am pleased at my surprising good fortune. So here, to pay my karma forward, is Daniel Burt's erudite and tasteful list of 125 Great Novels:
1 Don Quixote
2 War and Peace
3 Ulysses
4 In Search of Lost Time
5 The Brothers Karamazov
6 Moby-Dick
7 Madame Bovary
8 Middlemarch
9 The Magic Mountain
10 The Tale of Genji
11 Emma
12 Bleak House
13 Anna Karenina
14 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
15 Tom Jones
16 Great Expectations
17 Absalom, Absalom!
18 The Ambassadors
19 One Hundred Years of Solitude
20 The Great Gatsby
21 To the Lighthouse
22 Crime and Punishment
23 The Sound and the Fury
24 Vanity Fair
25 Dead Souls
26 Le Pere Goriot
27 The Portrait of a Lady
28 Women in Love
29 The Red and the Black
30 Tristram Shandy
31 Finnegans Wake
32 Tess of the D'Urbervilles
33 Buddenbrooks
34 Invisible Man
35 The Man Without Qualities
36 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
37 Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
38 The Tin Drum
39 Wuthering Heights
40 Pride and Prejudice
41 The Scarlet Letter
42 Gravity's Rainbow
43 Beloved
44 Nostromo
45 Fathers and Sons
46 The Trial
47 Lolita
48 Mrs. Dalloway
49 Dream of the Red Chamber
50 Clarissa
51 Persuasion
52 Jane Eyre
53 David Copperfield
54 Petersburg
55 Things Fall Apart
56 The Princess of Cleves
57 The Stranger
58 The Red Badge of Courage
59 The Counterfeiters
60 The Grapes of Wrath
61 The Golden Notebook
62 Sons and Lovers
63 The Good Soldier
64 A Passage to India
65 Daniel Deronda
66 Germinal
67 My Antonia
68 An American Tragedy
69 Hunger
70 Berlin Alexanderplatz
71 Midnight's Children
72 U.S.A. Trilogy
73 Les Liaisons Dangereuses
74 The Charterhouse of Parma
75 The Sufferings of Young Werther
76 Cities of Salt
77 A Farewell to Arms
78 The Death of Artemio Cruz
79 Herzog
80 Candide
81 The Sleepwalkers
82 The Last Chronicle of Barset
83 The Awakening
84 Robinson Crusoe
85 Call it Sleep
86 Waverley
87 Oblomov
88 Their Eyes Were Watching God
89 Under the Volcano
90 Snow Country
91 Nineteen Eighty-Four
92 As I Lay Dying
93 The Pickwick Papers
94 The Betrothed
95 Pale Fire
96 Last of the Mohicans
97 Les Miserables
98 Uncle Tom's Cabin
99 Doctor Zhivago
100 Native Son
101 On the Road
102 Frankenstein
103 The Leopard
104 The Age of Innocence
105 Dom Casmurro
106 A Hero of Our Time
107 Catcher in the Rye
108 Moll Flanders
109 The Good Soldier Svejk
110 The Master and Margarita
111 Brideshead Revisited
112 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
113 American Pastoral
114 The Handmaid's Tale
115 Manon Lescaut
116 The Woman in White
117 Some Prefer Nettles
118 A Bend in the River
119 Cold Nights
120 Dracula
121 The Woman in the Dunes
122 Gone with the Wind
123 The Three Musketeers
124 The Hound of the Baskervilles
125 Treasure Island
As I said, I've spent years pondering What is a Great Novel? When you ponder as long and hard as I do, it gives you an awful headache, and that drives you to drink, and then you have to clean up your act and stop seeing the wastrels you used to call your friends . . . Anyway, at the end of the journey, you want more than a kewpie doll to show for it. I'd like to scrape some meanings from all my explorations, and it'd be rather nifty if I could fashion a larger understanding to keep them all in. But that understanding will be a flexible living thing, and will take another decade or two to grow.
Where should I put all my meanings, my ideas about Novels, in the meantime? What is the Periodic Table of Novels?
The Great Books list is pretty settled - but it's old, boring, and not nearly large or flexible enough for my meanings. The Western Canon is a good first order approximation. But it's very fuzzy at the edges (nowadays, after 40 years of being attacked from all sides), and it's perhaps too broad and unwieldy. The best Western Canon I've got written down is Harold Bloom's, at the back of his book, The Western Canon. Bloom's an utterly voracious reader, and far more wise than foolish. His list is almost 2000 titles long. Can't fault him for lack of ambition. He's probably read 70% of them, too.
I find the most useful tool (and by far the most ubiquitous) is the "100 Best Books" list. You just have to keep in mind that none are final - each is just another lens to look at the infinite library through.
In the last 40 years, as the two great armies of books collided (the dead-white and the fresh-red), the 100 lists have gotten mighty crowded. Daniel Burt's method is the commonest: Keep about half of the old list, and squeeze in a representative or two from each of the new literary fields that demands a voice. So you'll see an awful lot of lists with Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, to show that the list maker didn't forget Africa. For India, Midnight's Children; for Latin America, 100 Years of Solitude; for African-American, Invisible Man and Beloved. There may be more representatives from each of those - but you'd be amazed at how ubiquitous those five books are. They're wonderful choices, because they're undeniably Great Books, but they're also fresh new voices.
There is no best balance between these two armies. There is no 100 list that begins to contain all the greatnesses in the Novel. So I've stopped looking for a static balance, and I'm trying to find a dynamic path that will take me from the infra-red of Novels to the ultra-violet, through waves and particles and stained-glass windows crafted centuries ago. I'd like to sample as many shades and angles of the Novel as I can discover.
So I move like Foucault's Pendulum. I travel back to the center - Shakespeare, Austen, Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Woolf - and then I set out again, toward an undiscovered corner of this great chamber, which contains every Novel worth looking at. I'm looking into Russia now. I've only read about twenty Russian Novels, and half of them were by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I've been making a list of more than fifty books I've never opened, but should: Pushkin, Turgenev, Bely, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, Pelevin . . .
I'm not sure what I'll look into next. Perhaps recent SF and fantasy (though that is a perilous path, for one who loves to escape, as I do). Eventually I'll have a longer list than Bloom does. I don't need a definition of great Novels that works for everyone - just an understanding of a few thousand Novels that I happen to find great. I love books so much, I don't think my theory of Novels will ever harden into an amber of facts, or that my understanding will ever stand still. Doesn't Foucault's Pendulum just keep swinging into new parts of the darkness, and find new kinds of light there?
OK, patient Reader, who has come so far. I've meandered a lot and talked too much - now it's your turn to comment.
Did my theories and ideas make sense to you? Some of them?
Would you have preferred to hear one of the six I threw away earlier this week?
Is it important to prune your prose of excess floweriness and rambling verbosity?
Is Shakespeare really all that at drawing characters to life?
Is there an aristocracy of Readers, or are professors and critics just pompous windbags?
Is there an aristocracy of Books? Can you ever be sure one Novel > Another?
Do you have a favorite country/genre/kind of book?
Which books would you throw off Daniel Burt's list of 125?
Which other books would you replace them with? (You can either measure the Novels for Greatness - or just for how much you like them)
Can a book called The Novel 100 include 125 Novels, or is it immoral or illogical?
If your friends are all wastrels, should you trade them in for kewpie dolls?
Are we there yet?