The Modern Library

by Colm Toibin

  Amos Tutuola was born in Nigeria and worked in Lagos and Ibadan in Western Nigeria most of his life. His other novels include My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) and Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer (1987).

  Age in year of publication: thirty-three.

  Anne Tyler 1941–

  1988 Breathing Lessons

  Maggie Moran, wife to Ira for twenty-eight years, is a ‘whiffle-head’, one of those women who tell a perfect stranger the entire story of their life, with attendant husband and children standing by, rigid with embarrassment. Breathing Lessons tells the story of twenty-four hours in the life of the sublime Maggie, Ira and their two disappointing children, Jesse and Daisy: ‘Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?’

  Maggie pursues happiness, indeed insists upon it. As they take a trip to the funeral of the husband of Maggie’s best friend Sabrina (where Maggie sings ‘Love is a Many Splendoured Thing’, one of Anne Tyler’s unsurpassed virtuoso performances), dreams end in disaster, but real life taps Maggie buoyantly on the shoulder.

  Anne Tyler’s novels chronicle with intricate delicacy the scratchy habits of domestic life; her affectionate disembowellings of marital and family arrangements send out simultaneous signals of anguish and humour, always captured in small details, delicately inserted, almost thrown away. Baffled but hopeful, Tyler people are in total command of pathos and humour, and, using the author’s greatest gift, they keep the reader teetering on the edge of laughter – the out-loud kind, and the flickering kind – producing a constant humming impatience for the next page.

  Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis and lives in Baltimore. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) and The Accidental Tourist (1985, filmed 1988) are two of the best of her novels. Breathing Lessons won a Pulitzer Prize.

  Age in year of publication: forty-seven.

  John Updike 1932–2009

  1960–1990 The Rabbit Quartet

  Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990)

  These four novels tell the story of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, American male. We first meet him aged twenty-six, an ex-basketball player married to Janice whom he abandons, pregnant, for Ruth. Rabbit’s women – his wife, his mom, his mother-in-law, his sister, his daughter-in-law and his varied mistresses and encounters are alive in every varicose vein, as is Rabbit’s organ itself which takes on a life of its own, leading Rabbit to infidelities and betrayals, always rising and falling, jiggling around, no peace to be had at all. Life with Janice under these circumstances always remains complex and reflects the times – the Vietnam War, race relations, a society in turmoil on all fronts. The misdemeanours of Rabbit and Janice’s son Nelson echo everything that has gone before, and as their lives progress, sex overapplied and misused becomes a mordant, always explicit, analogy for the disintegration of the United States under a barrage of drugs, wars, junk food and TV; eerily predicting too, Clintonesque adventures to come.

  Updike is an irresistibly funny writer with a deceptively easy style. His sense of comedy and his quirky philosophical contemplations flash through this quartet, a contemporary American classic. Each novel can be read separately, but read them all; each one seems even better than the one before.

  John Updike was born in Pennsylvania and lived in Massachusetts. Novelist, poet, essayist and short story writer, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit is Rich and for Rabbit at Rest.

  Age in years these books were published: twenty-eight – fifty-eight.

  Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) 1930–

  1986 A Dark-Adapted Eye

  Ruth Rendell writes under two names, her own and that of Barbara Vine. The Rendell novels are, generally, detective novels centring on Chief Inspector Wexford and the fictional southern English town of Kings Markham, whilst those written under the name of Barbara Vine are psychological novels in the manner of Dickens or Wilkie Collins. To start on her detective novels, read From Doon with Death (1964), a Rendell classic. And so too is A Dark-Adapted Eye, her first Barbara Vine novel. Set in Suffolk, mostly in the 1950s, this story of the Longley women, Vera and Eden, uses the things that English gentlewomen do – embroidery, baking, keeping a spotless house, making do and behaving as women should – as a foil for what they also do in secrecy, in pursuit of power. This story of love and murder between sisters has such impact that the very trees in the Suffolk lanes arch up to warn of the damage wreaked, particularly on their menfolk, by women such as these, tight-laced in snobbery, fighting for life within rigid social rules.

  There is more to this wily novel than meets the eye. The Longley clan always speak in ‘half-shades and half-truths’ and thus Barbara Vine ends this novel … the other half of the truth being there for us to find out if we can.

  Ruth Rendell was born in London and lives in Suffolk. Many of her novels have won awards and have been televised. A Dark-Adapted Eye won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-six.

  Alice Walker 1944–

  1982 The Color Purple

  ‘Take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me.’ This is the voice of Celie, who writes most of the letters in this novel. Her voice is vivid and strong, her intelligence is sharp. Although the novel is set in the American Deep South, whites appear in the book as a sort of afterthought; the book is more concerned with the relationships between black men and women, between Celie and her stepfather (who is the father of her children), between Celie and her wastrel husband, between Celie’s stepson Harpo and his wonderful wife Sophie and his second wife Squeak. These relationships are all fraught and difficult, if also various and immensely interesting, in sharp contrast to the relationships between the women, especially that between Celie and the singer Shrug, whom her husband loves and brings home and who eventually rescues Celie, which is tender and complex and sexual (it is clear from very early in the book that Celie is gay).

  The other letter-writer in the book is Celie’s sister Nettie, the clever one in the family, who has escaped and gone to Africa and whose letters have been withheld by Celie’s husband. This relationship, too, is full of tenderness, love and warmth. Alice Walker risks a great deal with Celie’s voice – her spelling, for example, is often wildly inaccurate and there is an innocence about her observations which plays against her general shrewdness – but succeeds in creating one of the most memorable characters in contemporary American fiction.

  Alice Walker was born in Georgia and now lives in San Francisco. The Color Purple won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner 1893–1978

  1954 The Flint Anchor

  There is no one quite like Sylvia Townsend Warner. She has her own way of looking at the world and a breadth of vision as open as the East Anglian sea and sky she writes about here.

  In the early nineteenth century, Anchor House in Loseby, Norfolk, is the home of John Barnard, a house made of the dark flint of the area, as is the soul of the man himself. A man of lofty morality, he fears ‘nothing but God’, an emotion which sours his life and that of his family – wife Julia, sipping rum all day, and wimpish children, the Wilberforces and Euphemias of the time. But then there is his pretty daughter Mary, a serio-comic creation of the first order, who raises the pursuit of self-interest to a high art. Around them bustle those instigators of teas, dinners, walks, visits, attendances at church – not to mention the surprising fishermen of the village: inventive disturbers of all of those who live behind the sharp walls of the House of Flint.

  Warner is not a romantic: she has a keen eye for malevolence and other flaws of the soul, yet she absorbs us totally in the personalities and daily concerns of her characters, unheroic though they be. Every novel Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote was entirely different from its predecessor in subject, period and story, but all of them are the work of
a great English stylist, and all are diverting, funny and very, very clever. This little-known novel is a lost treasure.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in Harrow, Middlesex, and lived mostly in Dorset. She was a poet, novelist, short story writer and biographer. Her other notable novels are Lolly Willowes (1926), Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927) and The Corner That Held Them (1948).

  Age in year of publication: sixty-one.

  Evelyn Waugh 1903–1966

  1952–1961 The Sword of Honour Trilogy

  Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Unconditional Surrender (1961)

  This is a beautifully structured and deeply melancholy account of England and the Second World War, which also contains moments and scenes of pure hilarity. It is written in a spirit of great tenderness and tolerance and a sort of humility. Guy Crouchback is the scion of one of the great English recusant families now down on its luck. He lives alone in a castle in Italy. His wife, the irrepressible Virginia – a figure straight out of Waugh’s earlier fiction – has left him, marries twice more, and pops up throughout the trilogy to humiliate him. The first novel opens at the outbreak of war when Guy, at the age of thirty-five, returns to England and joins up. The trilogy then deals with his sensations and experiences. He is sensitive, watchful, loyal, good-humoured and a devout Catholic, but he is also distant, awkward, slightly priggish and self-centred. His character works superbly in the books because his loneliness and sadness are absorbed by the war, and his personality undergoes many tests and changes – he sees action in Africa, Egypt, Crete and Italy. The novels move fast in a series of short scenes; Waugh’s comic skills are used with great effect, especially in minor characters and the whole business of military operations and regulations. Guy’s father, retired now, living in a hotel by the sea, is one of the miraculous creations in the books.

  Evelyn Waugh was born in West Hampstead, London. Most of his working life was spent in London and travelling until he finally settled in Somerset. He wrote many novels and travel books. They include Decline and Fall (1928), A Handful of Dust (1934), The Loved One (1948), Brideshead Revisited (1945) and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957).

  Age in years these books were published: forty-nine – fifty-eight.

  Fay Weldon 1933–

  1980 Puffball

  Fay Weldon’s role in late twentieth-century literature is that of the good witch, her special brew being woman and man, particularly when both are embroiled in marriage. In Puffball she adds to the potion by placing the marriage of Liffey and Richard within a larger structure, in which the spite of woman for woman is hilariously and lethally exposed.

  Liffey is an excellent Weldon heroine – a good woman, kind and loving. Husband Richard is an ambitious advertising man, pompous in London, a bore when they move to the country, near Glastonbury, to breed. It is hell: the cottage is hell, the neighbours, Mabs and Tucker, are hell. Liffey’s womb takes on a life of its own as it battles to survive the general onslaught; and indeed there is no modern novel that so nimbly takes us through that rarely described experience, the biological stages of pregnancy, and the exact surgical instructions necessary to perform a Caesarean. If there is a message here, and all novels with happy endings like Puffball offer one, it is that women are biologically discriminated against by God, should he exist, and by Nature, if he doesn’t.

  Fay Weldon is a perspicacious, compelling storyteller who makes you laugh – and weep – for the malice and ill-will we mortals hurl at each other in the name of love.

  Fay Weldon was born in Worcestershire, brought up in New Zealand, and lives in London. She is a novelist, TV, radio and stage dramatist, journalist and commentator. Among her novels are Praxis (1979) and The Life and Loves of A She-Devil (1986).

  Age in year of publication: forty-seven.

  Irvine Welsh 1958–

  1993 Trainspotting

  ‘Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonized by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonized by. No. We are ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth.’ Meet Mark Renton – Scottish heroin junkie, fan of Hibs United, hopeless shoplifter, Iggy Pop fiend, and the hero of Irvine Welsh’s explosive and hilarious novel.

  Set among Edinburgh’s troubled housing estates, Trainspotting brings a whole new world into the novel, a new kind of person, a low-life humour and demotic energy. These are mostly characters who have never known work, who defy the materialist ethos of 1980s Britain, and who embrace music, drink and drugs as the only truth in a nation of lies.

  Though Welsh owes something to Burroughs and Ballard, and to his late compatriot Alexander Trocchi, he draws much more from popular culture, punk rock and the rave scene. The episodic rush of Trainspotting is remarkable because of the way it deals with class politics and for the power and range of its voice. It is interesting also because it offers a breathtakingly vivid picture of lives that are never written about. The world of Trainspotting is not a charming Scotland of castles and Bravehearts; it is a place of new sicknesses. As Renton says of an old auntie who falls in love with Romantic Edinburgh: ‘Instead ay a view ay the castle she’d goat a view ay the gasworks. That’s how it fuckin works in real life, if ye urnae a rich cunt wi a big fuckin hoose n plenty poppy.’

  Irvine Welsh was born in Edinburgh and now lives in London. His other books include The Acid House (1994), Ecstasy (1996), Filth (1998), Glue (2001), Porno (2003) and Crime (2008). Trainspotting was filmed in 1996.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-five.

  Eudora Welty 1909–2006

  1972 The Optimist’s Daughter

  Eudora Welty is a writer who has listened closely all her life. Living in Mississippi, her language merits recording – the singing, teasing English of the South.

  She is the alert observer of small communities of people, families, everyday things. There is a Welty miasma, an atmosphere in which wildly comic words and vigorous behaviour scuffle with a sense of loss, failure or grieving. Thus, minor incidents take on major significance, and this is exactly so in this account of Laurel’s return home for the illness and death of her father, Judge McKelva. Born optimist, ‘fairest, most impartial, sweetest man’, after the early death of Laurel’s mother Becky – beloved Becky – he has married the young and malign vulgarian Wanda May, a vixen on green high heels. Every neighbour and friend comes to greet Laurel, and each object in the old family home comes alive for her return: the sewing machine, the gooseneck lamp, cupboards ‘with the earnest smell of mouse’.

  Welty’s theme is memory, the confusion of life and the comedy of love, love of all kinds: the friends and neighbours at the funeral are a melodic Mississippian Greek chorus to Laurel’s recollections. Eudora Welty is a southern magician, a mistress of words that tell us the meaning and value of the things and people we live among, and of the past.

  Eudora Welty was born and lived in Jackson, Mississippi, and wrote five novels and many short stories. This partially autobiographical novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

  Age in year of publication: sixty-three.

  Rebecca West 1892–1983

  1957 The Fountain Overflows

  Everything Rebecca West did, and wrote, had determination about it. This novel has the intense charm of a classic Edwardian novel recounted in the expressive prose of that time, yet it was written in the 1950s.

  Rose Aubrey tells the story of her childhood. She lives with her parents, brother and two sisters in South London, in the sort of poverty associated with wayward and improvident fathers. This adored man, Piers, is given to gambling and speculation, whilst security of some kind is provided by Rose’s artistic, serious mother, so that some of what we associate with such childhoods is still there: the hearths, the gaslight, the walks, the teas, and most of all the music – for the love of music and the talent to make it is the only deliverance the girls can hope for.

  Much of the novel is autobiographical. Reb
ecca West was Rose Aubrey, and the power of the novel comes from her resolute belief in the way things were. Into her portrait of Piers Aubrey, her father, she pours dreams of worship: ‘Our Papa was far handsomer than anybody else’s … he stood like a fencer in a picture …’ These long-remembered cries are like ghosts in the novel giving it the keenness of a lament – for a family life that could have been, for the artistic aspirations that, instead, made life worth living.

  Rebecca West was born in London of a Scottish mother and Irish father. She lived in London and was a celebrated journalist, novelist, political commentator and critic. Her classic study of the Balkans, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon was published in 1942.

  Age in year of publication: sixty-five.

  Edmund White 1940–

  1982 A Boy’s Own Story

  Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story tells the story of an unnamed American white boy growing up gay in the 1950s. It is a careful and close examination of an effort to invent an identity. Nothing is taken for granted. His parents seem distant and strange even before their divorce, and after the divorce they emerge as capricious and irrational, as does the boy’s sister. He is alone with his sexuality. He wants, and the sense of his desire in the book is overwhelming, to sleep with a man, an older man, a younger man, any man, just as he wants to escape from home. But he does not want to deal with the implications of any of this and this makes his story complex and fascinating. He does not want to become the narrator of The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) or The Farewell Symphony (1997), White’s two novels which deal with our hero as a young gay man on the rampage and an older man in the age of AIDS. The sense of honesty in the book is matched by the writing, which is wonderfully dense and sharp at the same time; White understands, as almost no one before him did, how perfect the novel form is for a dramatization of gay identity, how a gay character’s search in a hostile environment for recognition and completion remains, for the moment, intrinsically interesting and tense.