The Modern Library

by Colm Toibin

  Eugene McCabe was born in Glasgow, but has lived most of his life on a farm close to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. His play King of the Castle (1964) is a classic of the contemporary Irish theatre. His shorter fiction is collected in Christ in the Fields (1993). He also published a fiction The Love of Sisters (2009).

  Age in year of publication: sixty-two.

  Patrick McCabe 1955–

  1992 The Butcher Boy

  This is a relentless and flawless version of grief and madness. It is told in the first person by one Francie Brady, whose mind moves at enormous speed and with considerable logic. He watches the small Irish town he inhabits, the coming and going of a chorus of disapproving housewives, his father, his mother, the doctor, the priest, his friend Joe, a local dog and, most of all, Mrs Nugent and her son Philip. He makes a number of escapes – to Dublin, to a seaside resort, to a Borstal, to a mental hospital. He finds work in the local slaughterhouse. He deals with his mother’s madness and death and his father’s drinking as though they are normal parts of his experience.

  There is an extraordinary amount of pain at the core of the book, and this is made most clear when Francie glosses over it, laughs when he should be crying. He is obsessed with comic books and chocolate bars and pigs and the activities of young Philip Nugent as ways of avoiding what is happening in his own life. He is abandoned by his friend Joe. The account of his abuse by a priest in Borstal is superbly done. McCabe’s version of Francie’s psychology, and his observation of town life, are comic; using the clarity of Francie’s voice and dramatizing with great skill the inevitable consequences of his manic condition, the novel invents its own world and its own set of rules, and remains deeply convincing.

  Patrick McCabe was born in County Monaghan in Ireland and lives in Sligo. His other novels include Carn (1989), The Dead School (1995), Breakfast on Pluto (1998), Winterwood (2006) and The Holy City (2009). Both The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto were made into films by Neil Jordan.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-seven.

  Cormac McCarthy 1935–

  1985 Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West

  Cormac McCarthy’s vision is dark, apocalyptic and violent. His language takes its bearings from the Old Testament, the Joyce of Ulysses and William Faulkner; his syntax is nervous, clotted, he uses short sentences, and then immense, long, curling sentences, like an old preacher. He moves from the vernacular to a high literary style. He mainly writes about men.

  Blood Meridian is the book where all his obsessions and his genius as a stylist are most apparent. It tells the story of a group of men in possession of guns and horses on the Texas–Mexico border in the 1840s. McCarthy’s Wild West is a barren, hostile landscape; killing is both whim and passion, the book is full of scalpings and hangings, whole villages destroyed, uneasy alliances, further scalpings, dead babies hanging upside down from trees. His group of misfits roam like wild, bloodthirsty animals. His version of the American past as a sort of hell has almost no precedent in American narrative; his refusal to offer meaning and moral shape to his story makes this novel, and his other work, original and disturbing.

  Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island but was brought up in Knoxville, Tennessee. He lives in El Paso, Texas. Child of God (1973), an account of a necrophiliac on the rampage, is his most savage and disturbing book. All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998) are labelled ‘The Border Trilogy’. He followed these with No Country For Old Men (2005) filmed in 2007 and The Road (2006) which won a Pulitzer Prize and was filmed in 2009.

  Age in year of publication: fifty.

  Mary McCarthy 1912–1989

  1963 The Group

  This novel caused a sensation when first published because of its frank descriptions, not so much of sex itself, but of all the contraceptive devices, unguents and general embarrassments that go with it – the bad breath, strange noises, teeth jarring and fiddly birth control methods that coupling requires. Read over thirty years later, the novel is still a diverting tribute to such fumblings.

  The group consists of seven upper-middle-class women, Vassar educated, products of everything freedom and money can buy – and even in 1933, when the novel begins, this was considerable. These young women were among the first to benefit from advances in medicine, contraception, education and equality of opportunity. With pitiless wit and a caustic eye, Mary McCarthy shows how the progress of science elevated its voice to entrap them again. The seven friends, Polly, Pokey, Libby, Kay, Dottie, Priss and Helena, founder on the rock of bad judgement, sadistic men and useless doctors and pundits, always shakily clinging to a longing for work, love and marriage.

  Mary McCarthy provides an unusual and immensely readable account of the early adult lives of certain young women engaged in life and the practicalities of sex. The Group does a prescient and satirical demolition job on those theoretical bullies who are always telling women what to do, and think – and who met their match in Mary McCarthy.

  Mary McCarthy was born in Seattle and lived in Paris and the USA. Other notable novels are The Company She Keeps (1942) and The Groves of Academe (1952).

  Age in year of publication: fifty-one.

  Carson McCullers 1917–1967

  1951 The Ballad of the Sad Café

  This short novel tells a story of love. And so it is a ballad, but also an American Gothic opera – a tragi-comic Carmen, a poor white Porgy and Bess. McCullers’s small Southern town is the kind where there is absolutely nothing to do except eat mashed rutabagas, collard greens and the occasional pig, and keep a watchful eye on your neighbour. Here lives Amelia, a six-foot-two, hairy sort of woman, clever at making money, doctoring, and distilling the best liquor in town. When her Cousin Lymon turns up – a malicious four-foot hunchback – she takes a great passion for him, which is incomprehensible but eternally fascinating to the folk who gather every night in the café Cousin Lymon opens in a store. When Cousin Lymon falls in love with the one man most likely to cause Amelia pain, the resolution of these passionate difficulties sees the lights in the café dim and the stage fall empty, Amelia’s lament lingering in the air.

  Carson McCullers writes in polished Southern tones, and this novel is written in language of singular beauty with not a word out of place. Her explorations of the frustrations of love are never bleak but seem to celebrate human love at its oddest and best, turning humdrum lives into heroic ones, and making a sad love story endearing and droll.

  Carson McCullers was born in Georgia, and wrote the equally famous novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Member of the Wedding (1946).

  Age in year of publication: thirty-four.

  Ian McEwan 1948–

  1978 The Cement Garden

  This novel was published in the year before Margaret Thatcher took power in Britain, and its tone and content seem to imply that there was a very great need for her. The house where the four children – Julie, Jack, Sue and Tomare – are being brought up by their parents is in sight of new tower blocks, and the proposed motorway which caused the houses around them to be knocked down, has never been built. Neither parent has any siblings so there are no relatives. The father dies first, and then the mother after a long illness. The children, three of whom are in their teens, decide to bury her in the cellar and tell no one. This is presented as perfectly normal by Jack, who narrates the story. They loved their mother, but they want the giddy freedom which running the household will offer them.

  There is not a false note in the whole book; McEwan makes you feel that this is, perhaps, what you would do too under similar circumstances. In any case, the siblings are locked into their own dramas. Tom, the youngest, wants to dress like a girl and is allowed to do so, then he wants to be a baby and this too is arranged. Jack is obsessed with his own adolescent body. Sue keeps a diary. Julie gets a boyfriend. They settle down into an uneasy and fragile harmony, broken only by Der
ek the boyfriend and the gradual rise of the smell from the cellar. Their world has been so perfectly created that you feel miserable at the prospect of its being broken up.

  Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire. He published his first volume of stories, First Love, Last Rites, in 1975. His other novels include The Child in Time (1987), Enduring Love (1997), Amsterdam, which won the Booker Prize in 1998, Atonement (2001), which was made into an Oscar-winning film in 2007, Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007) and Solar (2010).

  Age in year of publication: thirty.

  John McGahern 1934–2006

  1990 Amongst Women

  In all of John McGahern’s fiction – he wrote five novels and three volumes of stories – there is an air of perfection. He works on a small canvas; the same figures and the same landscape and indeed the same hard-won bleakness appear in much of his work. There is a timeless beauty about his fiction which means that it is unlikely to date or seem out of fashion. The opening pages of his first novel, The Barracks (1963), contain some of the best prose written in English in the second half of the century.

  Twenty-seven years later McGahern’s fifth novel Amongst Women tells the story of the War of Independence veteran Moran, his three daughters, his two sons and Rose, his second wife. Besides having one of the best first sentences in recent fiction (‘As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters.’), the book is remarkable for the plainness of its prose, its seamless structure and its careful delineation of the dark forces which gather around family relationships. Moran is both a violent bully and a man with an enormous capacity to charm; his daughters fear him and love him at the same time. McGahern’s genius lies in the relentless accuracy of his prose, and the graceful portrayal of his characters.

  John McGahern was born in Dublin and lived in County Leitrim. His novel The Dark was banned by the Irish Censorship Board in 1965. The Leavetaking (1974) and The Pornographer (1979) were followed by his magnificent Collected Stories (1992), That they May Face The Rising Sun (2001) and Memoir (2005). Amongst Women won the Irish Times Literature Prize.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-six.

  Patrick McGrath 1950–

  1996 Asylum

  This novel is written in a language which has been created to preserve order, to describe precisely, to win the reader’s trust. This is the first sentence: ‘The catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession has been a professional interest of mine for many years now.’

  The narrator is the psychiatrist Peter Cleave, who works in a top-security mental hospital in England in the 1950s. He tells the story of how his colleague Max Rafael’s wife Stella ran away with the brutal murderer and sculptor Edgar Stark, an inmate of the hospital. As with all of McGrath’s work, every word and phrase is carefully weighed and placed; from early on, you cease to trust Dr Cleave’s narrative, but despite this, the figure of Stella, obsessed with Stark, becomes more and more clear and engrossing. Her introduction to Stark, his efforts to escape, her flight to London, her life with him there, and all the inevitable consequences are narrated with an almost prurient zeal by Dr Cleave. Her state of mind and the desires which impell her are utterly convincing, and the way in which Stark deals with her and Cleave watches over her make the book dark, disturbing, Gothic. The scenes in a Welsh farmhouse are particularly bleak. This is the sort of book that when you finish, you immediately want to hand to someone else to read.

  Patrick McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital where his father was Medical Superintendent. His other books include Spider (1992), Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993), Port Mungo (2004) and Trauma (2008).

  Age in year of publication: forty-six.

  Larry McMurtry 1936–

  1985 Lonesome Dove

  It is extraordinary and unexpected that two of the best American novels of the past decade have centred on the Wild West. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove lacks the poetry and intensity and fierce power of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, but it makes up for that in the quality of its characterization and its plain, careful, perfectly pitched style. It is almost a thousand pages in length, the sort of book that you would stay up all night to finish; it has many old-fashioned virtues: a gripping story, action, sex, death, strong silent types (McMurtry is very good on these), human weakness, strong-willed women, harsh landscape.

  It tells the story of a journey of a group of men, one woman and a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana at a time when the Native Americans have been all but wiped out and America has been tamed for the white man. It reads like a book of the Old Testament, a battle against nature at a time when old virtues are being replaced, with constant setbacks caused by the weather, cruel Indians (the few remaining), the crossing of rivers and the vagaries of the human heart. The fact that the tone of this book has been unaffected by the advances made in prose fiction by Joyce and Beckett, Faulkner and Pynchon does not lessen its impact, which is immense, or its status as a modern American masterpiece.

  Larry McMurtry was born in Texas, where he now lives. His many novels include Horseman, Pass By (1961), filmed as Hud in 1963 and The Last Picture Show (1966) which was made into a film in 1971. Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

  Age in year of publication: forty-nine.

  Norman Mailer 1923–2007

  1979 The Executioner’s Song

  The Executioner’s Song is a brilliant work of imagination, based on numerous interviews given by the murderer Gary Gilmore and those around him. Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah having demanded the death penalty for himself; he had spent twenty-two of his thirty-five years in jail.

  The novel moves like a camera, describing each scene coldly and dispassionately in short paragraphs, never judging, never summing up, never overwriting, allowing each character great latitude and sympathy. It is a triumph of control; the author and his famous ego are totally absent. No one is good or bad; people are motivated by strange, complex passions, longings, compulsions and loyalties. The novel is full of sex and sexual desire in a climate controlled by Mormons. Gilmore’s girlfriend Nicole is one of the great creations in contemporary American writing; she is protean and wild and impulsive, deeply loyal and, at the same time, easily distracted. Gilmore emerges as damaged and trapped, his willingness to destroy and be destroyed giving the book a grim tragic power and a sort of grandeur.

  Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey and grew up in Brooklyn. His talent as a novelist was often disguised by the extent and uneven quality of his publications. His best books included The Naked and the Dead (1948), Armies of the Night (1968), The Fight (1975) and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1969). The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-six.

  Bernard Malamud 1914–1986

  1952 The Natural

  This is one of the best books about sport, which means that it is about much more than the game of baseball which it describes. It is written in a spare clear style, and in a tone in which light and darkness do battle against each other for the body and soul of our hero.

  It opens with the nineteen-year-old Roy Hobbs going to Chicago on a train with his scout. He is an orphan who has been discovered as a baseball wizard and he is destined for the big time. When the train has to stop, he pitches his skills against a famous baseball player who is also on the train, and wins. He is watched by a journalist who will follow the rest of his career, and a woman called Harriet, his nemesis, who is crazy and manages to shoot him in the stomach.

  The rest of the novel takes place fifteen years later when Roy makes one last effort to succeed. He is too old, and he is still capable of being bewitched by women (all the women in this novel bewitch); he is moody and hungry for sex and love and hero status, but he is still a brilliant player. The games – the crowd, the tension, the next shot – are described in the novel with great verve and excitement. Roy Hobbs’s uneasy but ravenous desire, his desperation to avoid the past, give the narrative a
stark power and depth. It is the raw simplicity of The Natural, his first novel, which makes it so gripping.

  Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn. His other masterpieces are The Fixer (1967) and Dubin’s Lives (1979), and his Collected Stories were published in 1997. The Natural was made into a film in 1984.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.

  David Malouf 1934–

  1990 The Great World

  The Great World is a portrait of Australian life during and after the Second World War. It is hard to make generalizations about Malouf’s work. He never repeats himself. His characters are portrayed and handled with great feeling and depth; he is capable of creating moments of pure beauty in his books; he insists always on the complexity of things, the various levels on which things happen.