Tossed-off trifles and top one-hundreds
/The Guardian’s recent “100 Best Novels of All Time” list caused quite an understandable hullaballoo, it being broadly agreed—and obvious—that the list is terrible. The Guardian’s explanation of the list’s rationale and method didn’t really help, either.
All of this occasioned a lot of talk about this list, any such list, and novels in general, and while I saw a lot of thoughtful observations and critiques—including the question, which I’ve raised before, of whether something as broad and protean as “the novel” can be meaningfully sorted and discussed this way. But the best response came from Joel J Miller, who crowdsourced a better list through an open thread on his Substack. Each commenter could submit five to seven novels for inclusion, with Joel tabulating and weighting the entries for a new top hundred. You can look at the finished list here. It’s much, much better.
I commented with my own seven at the last minute, and found myself contending with some of the questions occasioned by the Guardian’s list in the first place. The Guardian’s list was for English-language books but was open to literature translated into English from any language. Huh? Joel’s was for novels, and yet I saw multiple people nominating the Iliad and Odyssey—an elementary mistake.
I ended up limiting myself to a pretty strict definition of novel and only books originally written in English. But even within those parameters I faced a more fundamental question: what precisely does best mean? What do I think the best novels in English are?
To be more specific, I paused over the work of Charles Portis. I certainly wanted to include him in my seven and my gut said to nominate Gringos, but I had already seen a few other commenters nominate True Grit and the herd mentality of such things, the desire to bandwagon in order to game the process, intruded. Maybe Gringos is better—I’m still undecided—but True Grit had a better chance of making it into the top one-hundred. Having had the question occur to me at all made whatever choice I would make feel inauthentic.
Which brought to mind a line from Douglas Murray I quoted in the course of my very first John Buchan June:
There are many jokes that the roulette wheel of publishing can play on those who spend their lives at its table. But one of the finest is when a writer toils away at their magnum opus only for some tossed-off trifle or jeu d’esprit to go into multiple editions and risk overtaking their whole life’s work.
True Grit is undoubtedly the Portis novel most people would be familiar with. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print but was quite literally something he dashed off while sick to entertain himself. Meanwhile, possibly greater novels like Witch Wood, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River, much beloved of the few of us who look beyond the first couple Hannay novels, are pretty much neglected by the wider public. Likewise with Gringos, the discovery of which almost seems a rite of passage for serious Portis fans.
I wouldn’t call True Grit or The Thirty-Nine Steps “trifles” by any means; Portis and Buchan were too brilliant to trifle, and even their lesser books—say Masters of Atlantis or The House of the Four Winds—are more interesting than the best books by lesser writers. The competition, I suppose, is between best-known, favorite, and the elusive best. I wound up just listing my favorites by a few favorite writers. I suspect most of the other commenters did the same.
Joel’s list has Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion well ahead of Emma, the book I’d rate Austen’s best, and, as I’ve mentioned before, Poe’s best-selling book in his own lifetime was a writer-for-hire textbook about seashells. It is strange to consider the vagaries of what a writer is remembered for.
For what it’s worth, my seven, in no particular order:
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
Emma, Jane Austen
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
True Grit, Charles Portis
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Witch Wood, John Buchan
I had a hard time coming up even with these seven. This morning I woke up and realized I wanted to include Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes, or perhaps Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday. Too late. I also felt guilty including no fiction by CS Lewis, and another part of me strongly wished to include at least one Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, or John Le Carré. Ask me on another day and I might come up with an entirely different seven—though Lord of the Rings and one of Portis’s will probably be on there.
I suppose the real takeaway—all controversy about such lists aside—is that we should be thankful there is so much good literature to choose from. Maybe I’ll just have to make my own top one-hundred.
