The protagonist, Kostoglotov, is, like Solzhenitsyn, a former political prisoner, who is faced with a life-threatening cancer for which he needs radiotherapy, with potentially devastating consequences for his sexual life. Not long released from the camps into internal exile, this represents a brutal shattering of his hopes for what remains of his life after the Gulag has robbed him of his youth and early manhood. Kostoglotov develops an unlikely relationship with a lonely middle-aged female doctor, and the main plot of the novel explores their tentative and ultimately unrealized emotional intimacy. It is the enmeshing of their personal stories into a whole tableau of other characters and their voices, however, that makes the novel’s impact so striking. It tells of self-deception and careerism; of youthful desire and innocence; of anger, faith, and resignation. Most of all, it tells of broken lives in a society still shaped by the Gulag. DG
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1900s
Myra Breckinridge
Gore Vidal
Lifespan | b. 1925 (U.S.)
First Published | 1968
First Published by | Little, Brown & Co. (Boston)
Full Name | Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Myra Breckinridge is a reeling tour de force, a bawdy full-frontal attack on decency and polite behavior. Shocking in its time—not least for its content and rude prose—it is even more so, considering Gore Vidal had run for Congress eight years before. This is not the kind of book one expects from a politician. Myra is a sublime creation. She is a voracious dominatrix, a brazen superhero, a big slut, a voluptuous omnivore: “Myra Breckinridge is a dish, and never forget it, you motherfuckers, as the children say nowadays.” Myra used to be Myron, a meek film critic, but after a radical act of self-creation—a sex change in Copenhagen—Myra comes to Hollywood to take on the forces of male domination and become “woman triumphant.” More feminine than a proper woman, more masculine than an intact man, she is a woman so liberated she may be a mockery of feminism. She certainly calls into question sexual stereotypes and reflexive morality.
The focus of Myra’s gleeful battle is Uncle Buck Loner. Buck is a he-man who runs an academy for burgeoning Hollywood stars and starlets. Myra tries to fool him into thinking she is Myron’s widow—which, in a way, is true—so that she can claim Buck’s estate as her inheritance. She is convincing, knowing things only Myron could. Buck does not believe her, insisting that Myron was a “fruit.” He does not part with his money easily and staves off her lawsuit by hiring her to teach Empathy and Posture. She wreaks havoc—an Amazon let loose in a china shop of American innocents. Sadly, there is a problem. Something goes wrong with her sex change, and she reverts to being Myron. She may not have succeeded in becoming woman triumphant, but she—and Vidal—have indisputably triumphed in bringing American hypocrisy and self-obsession forever to its knees. GT
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1900s
The First Circle
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Lifespan | b. 1918 (Russia), d. 2008
First Published | 1968
First Published by | Harper & Row (New York)
Original Title | V kruge pervom
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel, initially published in a shorter version in the hope of passing Soviet censorship, was revised into a “final” version, first published in Russian ten years later, in 1978. His novel is at the same time a portrait of late Stalinist society and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of patriotism. The book is set mainly in a special privileged prison for engineers, scientists, and technicians forced to work on inventing gadgets for Stalin’s police apparatus. It describes Soviet society not only from the point of view of the prison inmates, but also from that of their families, their non-inmate colleagues, and their jailers. It is Solzhenitsyn’s special talent to speak convincingly in many different voices, immersing us completely in each character’s inner world.
The First Circle of the title refers mainly to the privileged nature of the special prison, which forms a Dantean first circle in the hell of the Gulag. In the final version the phrase is also used in a different sense, when one of the characters speaks of his own people or nation as “the first circle” and the outside world as “the next one.” The relationship between inner and outer in this sense, and the loyalties owed to each one, is an important element in the plot of the book. Yet it is the great merit of The First Circle that the characters discussing these questions never become pure mouthpieces, but are given to the reader as full and complex human beings inhabiting their own interconnected worlds. DG
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1900s
A Void / Avoid
Georges Perec
Lifespan | b. 1936 (France), d. 1982
First Published | 1969
First Published by | Editions Denoël (Paris)
Original Title | La Disparition
A Void / Avoid, Gilbert Adair’s remarkable translation of the title of Georges Perec’s extended lipogram—a literary exercise that involves writing without a given letter of the alphabet—adds a further layer of self-reflexivity to a novel that does nothing but point (obliquely) to what is missing. Writing without the letter “e” requires mastering avoidance techniques, and here Perec proves himself a virtuoso, mobilizing the often forgotten resources of the French language so as to inscribe within it a new “e”-less idiom. But Perec’s novel is far more than an elaborate linguistic game. It is proof that it is possible to do without the letter “e,” a demonstration that affirms the expressive possibilities of (even a deficient) language that—as the second sense of Adair’s title suggests—is deeply troubling. In A Void / Avoid, there is something missing, a hole or vacuum that threatens to suck in all the other letters. An indispensable vowel, what Perec calls “a basic prop,” turns out to be dispensable. What then cannot be removed?
The question takes on added urgency when the experiment in the removal of a vowel is repeated in the obliteration of a people. The missing letter is the clue not only to the genesis of the novel, but also to the plot’s series of disappearances. The forbidden “e” turns out to be a kind of malediction, an invisible bodily mark that condemns the characters, one by one, to death. An exercise in style brilliantly executed, this is a ludic detective fiction in which the key to the mystery is visible everywhere and nowhere. KB
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them
Joyce Carol Oates
Lifespan | b. 1938 (U.S.)
First Published | 1969
First Published by | Vanguard Press (New York)
National Book Award | 1970
Deliberately labeled with a lowercase “t”, them was written early on in Joyce Carol Oates’s prolific career, and remains one of her most original and best executed works. It focuses on the working-class lives of Loretta Wendall and her children, Maureen and Jules, in inner-city Detroit between 1937 and 1967.
One of the novel’s most challenging features is the way it takes the representation of the naturalistic novel to the limits. It opens with a famous author’s note claiming that the text was based on the life of one of Oates’s students at the University of Detroit. This note gives way to a naturalistic narrative about the lives of the Wendalls, juxtaposing a forceful psychological portrayal of each of the characters with the violent realities of their everyday life. Halfway through the novel, however, the main narrative is unexpectedly interrupted—with several letters from Maureen to “Miss Oates.” Maureen questions her teacher about the role of literature and Miss Oates’s suggestion that literature gives form to life. Maureen, who has prostituted herself and been beaten by one of her mother’s lovers, asks contemptuously if literary form can really give order and coherence to a life such as hers. Maureen’s impassioned letters voice an irrepressible anger toward the type of literature that can only be understood and savored in the safe middle-class world inhabited by Miss Oates and her kind. Through the very process of writing,
Miss Oates is no longer part of the working-class experience she describes—she is no longer one of them. SA
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1900s
Ada
Vladimir Nabokov
Lifespan | b. 1899 (Russia), d. 1977 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1969
First Published by | McGraw-Hill (New York)
Alternate Title | Ardor
Ada, or Ardor, is Vladimir Nabokov’s irrepressively inventive novel, which can, for want of a better description, be called a family chronicle. Using Tolstoy as a cultural touchstone and point of departure, Nabokov embarks upon an extraordinary epic prose adventure involving, invoking, and expanding upon a diffuse intertextual network. In common with Lolita, Ada is the story of an intense but taboo sexual relationship. The incestuous union between Ada and Van, raised as cousins but biologically brother and sister, is presented in such a way that the reader is not encouraged to feel the sense of moral condemnation that might be expected.
Ada is undoubtedly one of Nabokov’s most challenging novels, which above and beyond its subject matter, confuses, bewilders, and delights the reader in turn. Quite apart from the sheer intricacy and ingenuity of his writing, the novel confounds expectations of time and place. The events of the novel unfold not on Earth but within the alternative geography of Antiterra, playing with our perceptions of what is real and what is realistic, and as the elderly Ada and Van reflect upon their relationship the narrative is complicated by the continued but unsignaled temporal shifts.
In its treatment of a forbidden romance, the novel follows the couple over eighty years. The unique combination of myth and fairy tale, eroticism and romance is matched only by the singularity of Nabokov’s writing style. JW
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1900s
The Godfather
Mario Puzo
Lifespan | b. 1920 (U.S.), d. 1999
First Published | 1969
First Published by | Putnam (New York)
Movie Trilogy Released | 1972, 1974, 1990
Few novels have forced themselves into the cultural imagination as brutally as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Arriving on the bestseller list at a highly contentious moment in U.S. history, when political institutions and social practices were being scrutinized and questioned as never before (or, arguably, since), The Godfather raised the stakes.
The novel poses questions about the origins and legitimacy of power by interrogating the notion that, as Balzac’s epigraph puts it, “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” Here is a novel that purports to show you how things “really” work, while also playing games with the reader. Making the bad guys seem good, the novel redefined the gangster genre. Puzo’s strategy of rhetorical inversion, overturning conventional moral presuppositions of right and wrong, enforces a new understanding of the manipulative and treacherous capacities of language. Twisting distinctions between hero and villain, Puzo’s enthralling story of the Corleone’s “family business” and Italian-American immigrant culture serves to affirm the “outlaw” character of America in general.
Although The Godfather has filtered into the culture mostly through the movie trilogy and other derivations, the novel remains the driving force behind the mobster culture industry. It is the novel that gives us such legendary sayings as “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” and “a lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” Above all, in spite and perhaps because of the clear, accessible prose, the novel testifies to the myth-making potential of contemporary writing. Puzo’s depictions of Italian Americans have been seen as both celebratory and defamatory: either way, Puzo’s The Godfather remains remarkably influential, compelling, and readable. JLSJ
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1900s
Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth
Lifespan | b. 1933 (U.S.)
First Published | 1969
First Published by | Random House (New York)
Full Name | Philip Milton Roth
When Portnoy’s Complaint first appeared in 1969, it was immediately hailed as scandalous. This was partly because of its explicit sexual content, which is considerable and inventive, but it was also because this content was linked to a kind of diagnosis of the American male of the times. Portnoy’s situation—his fixation on his mother; his difficulties with members of the opposite sex; his occasionally maudlin self-pity—described and defined a syndrome with which all too many of Roth’s (male) readers were familiar. Into this mix also goes Portnoy’s Jewishness, here seen as a kind of exaggeration of the repressive orthodoxies against which the book and Portnoy himself impotently rail. In a sense, it is not a book with a story to tell, but rather one with a condition to portray. Portnoy is trapped in a world that cannot fulfill his bizarre and extreme fantasies. Yet the reader does not blame Portnoy; if nothing else, he at least has occasional flashes of insight into his condition, and Roth writes with a great deal of wit and panache.
Perhaps because of the further increase in sexual explicitness since the 1960s, Portnoy’s Complaint now looks less extreme than it did at the time; despite this, its capacity if not to shock, then at least to deeply embarrass, is undiminished. In the end the book’s real strength lies in the figure of Portnoy himself and the universality of his complexes and humiliations. DP
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1900s
Jacob the Liar
Jurek Becker
Lifespan | b. 1937 (Poland), d. 1997 (Germany)
First Published | 1969
First Published by | Aufbau-Verlag (Berlin)
Original Title | Jakob der Lügner
Jacob the Liar manages to do what might seem to be impossible, to tell the story of the Holocaust through humor. Largely based on Jurek Becker’s own childhood experiences in the Jewish ghetto, the novel takes the form of a memoir from its only survivor, who is compelled to tell the story not of the tragic deportation of his friends and family, but of the moments of calm that preceded the tragedy.
The narrative focuses on Jacob Heym, who, in order to cheer up his friends, convinces them that he has a clandestine radio that picks up news from the Allied powers. As the lies spiral out of control—at one point Jacob even has to improvise an entire speech by Winston Churchill—Becker shows the reader the effect that this new hope has on the population. Even though the rumors are all false, the hope that they bring allows people to carry on their lives, creating a touching web of interactions, as people fall in love, deal with family members, and socialize with friends. While we know all along that Becker’s novel cannot end happily, the horror of the empty train cars waiting to be filled with the town’s population is mitigated by the strength of the connections that bind the people together.
Originally a screenplay, Jacob the Liar is written in a lucid, clear, and often funny tone with moments of touching beauty. Becker’s take on the holocaust novel will leave the reader sobered and mindful, but also aware of the continuing possibility of human joy, even in the worst of circumstances. AB
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1900s
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
John Fowles
Lifespan | b. 1926 (England), d. 2005
First Published | 1969
First Published by | Jonathan Cape (London)
WH Smith Award | 1969
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles set out to do what should have been an impossibility: to reconcile the scope of Victorian realism with the cynicism of a self-reflective experimental narrative. That Fowles realized his purpose in a novel that is a magnificent blend of story, history, and literary critique is testament both to his skill as a writer, and to the ambition of his humanism. The novel is a pastiche of Victorian realism—undermining the latter’s formal claim to comprehensiveness and truth by drawing attention to what was rendered unspeakable by a complacent sense of narrative propriety. Yet it is a
lso full of respect and almost envy for the fundamental premise of nineteenth-century realism: that human reality is representable, and that the novel has an explanatory function with a moral duty to be as truthful as possible.
In this tale of a nineteenth-century gentleman, Charles Smithson, who falls in love with the engimatic, jilted Sarah Woodruff, the twentieth-century narrator plays with his reader’s expectations. He scorns especially the illusion of narrative omniscience and omnipotence and flirts with the endless possibilities of interpretation. He also utilizes an essentially Dickensian narrative license to address the reader as familiar and intimate. The “dear reader” addressed here is expected to tolerate—and welcome—a range of devices. Footnotes give information on sources in the style of a scholar and a gentleman. There are long historical digressions, copious quotations from Victorian classics, and digs at the twentieth century’s own complacencies. Still, just as the reader addressed by Dickens or George Eliot was credited both with an interest in knowing and a capacity to understand others, so, too, Fowles works to make us see the ties that bind us all. PMcM
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