A Novel List

During a recent interview, Caroline Kennedy was asked to name her favorite novel.  It was impossible for her to name just one, but she did list a couple that made her laugh (LUCKY JIM and A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES) and some that made her cry (JUDE THE OBSCURE for one).  You have to admit those are some pretty impressive choices.  I loved Kingsley Amis' LUCKY JIM so much that, like the idiot teacher I all too frequently was, I convinced the department to get a few hundred copies for my Humor in Lit class.  LUCKY JIM, without going into particulars, is a British comedy of manners, every page filled with wit dry enough to make your lips pucker.  I loved it as a senior in college.  Imagine my surprise when my students didn't share my enthusiasm.  LUCKY JIM became a symbol in my career of the hubris that sometimes got in the way of effective lesson planning.  The point is that choosing LUCKY JIM says a lot about Caroline Kennedy, at least to me and other Amis fans.  And then her choice of JUDE THE OBSCURE!  Most people would have settled for TESS.  It is right up there with Woody Allen including SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION in his list of "Things That Make Life Worth Living."

Of course, now my own answer to the favorite novel question is going through my head like an old and increasingly irritating melody.  What follows is a purging of sorts.

I'm like Caroline Kennedy in that I couldn't possibly name one favorite novel.  If the question instead was to name a favorite work of literature, I have an immediate answer.  KING LEAR.  I get emotional just typing it.  I saw a production when I was in high school and even though I didn't understand any of it, I knew that something significant was happening.  Father Boyle taught it when I was in his Intro to Shakespeare class my sophomore year.  Father Steele did it with me when I was a senior in his Tragedies class that met at Ernie's Bar at 44th and Lowell at least once a week.  I figured out a way to work it in no matter what class I was teaching.  I even taught it to bewildered sophomores at Marycrest when I was only in my second year of teaching.  Poor kids.  I've seen James Earl Jones, Lawrence Olivier, Paul Scofield, and many more local performers like Ed Baierline (sp) down at The Germinal Stage, all do Lear and all move me from outrage, to pity, to vengeance, to vindication, to joy.  I've almost got it committed to memory.

On the other hand, novels are a different story.  There are the obvious choices:  CATCHER IN THE RYE, THE GREAT GATSBY, HUCKLEBERRY FINN.  Those are the first three that always jump into my mind because I was still in junior high when I read them.  CATCH-22 comes next because every time I reread it (once a year from my sophomore year in high school until I got married and had a life) I came away with a different idea.  But the number one idea to this day is that it is the funniest book I know.  Not as antic but maybe more powerfully satiric, BRAVE NEW WORLD is the only novel that I missed teaching when I retired.

Then there are those choices I make after the first wave.  These are almost like those novels you would, as an English teacher, be remiss in omitting.  MADAME BOVARY is the most fulfilling novel I've read.  I can't think of anything about it that is not simply perfect.  ANNA KARENINA is perhaps a greater book only because it is about such enormous things, but when it comes to style and matching sound to sense, I'll take Flaubert.

And finally, UNDERWORLD by Don DeLillo stuns me with its structure and technique.  It contains the best description of a moment in a baseball game in all of literature, or at least in all of the literature that I'm aware of.

I was going to add LUCKY JIM, but that class long ago, the one where the wrong kids showed up, ruined it for me.