Over at National Review, they’ve got a list of the top ten conservative novels written by Americans since 1950:
1. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
2. Midcentury by John Dos Passos
3. Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow
4. The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton
5. The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy
6. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
7. Shelley’s Heart by Charles McCarry
8. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
9. Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin
10. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
National Review has always had a yen for such user-voter lists of conservatives’ favorites, but isn’t there something a little sad about this one?
I mean Advise and Consent, The Time It Never Rained, and Shelley’s Heart are, at best, superior genre fiction, while Mr. Sammler’s Planet, The Thanatos Syndrome and Freddy and Fredericka are far from their authors’ best works. And what Marilynne Robinson is going to think of being called conservative, I can’t wait to hear, since, in her essays, she seems to invest a great deal of self-esteem in assuring her readers how liberal she is.
But, really, the main lesson taught by this list is how weak the list really is. And what’s the cause of that? Is it that the voters chose weak novels? Or that the list tracks the general weakness of the novel over the last sixty years? Or that conservatives have produced inferior fiction for decades?
January 25th, 2010 | 9:05 am
Perhaps a lesson is that any artists who have an adjective in front of their work are going to be mediocre most of the time, whether that adjective is “conservative,” “liberal,” “women’s,” “gay,” “Chicano,” “Catholic,” or whatever.
January 25th, 2010 | 9:28 am
Hm. Why would The Thanatos Syndrome be more “conservative” than Love in the Ruins, for example? Or Lost in the Cosmos, which is my husband’s all-time favorite book not by a sacerdotal figure?
And by “conservative” favorites, do they mean books by self-identified “conservative” authors, or Stuff Conservative People Like — are we talking talent or taste, primarily, or some muddle of both? A lot of conservative people liked Gilead, for example, regardless of Robinson’s own intentions and political orientations.
For instance, I happen to think Lorrie Morgan’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is an absolutely stunning piece of pro-life fiction, although — and I know next to nothing about Lorrie Morgan — that might have nothing to do with her intentions and orientations at all. The story just falls out in such a way that it bears witness to truth, for those who have ears to hear. That’s a very different category, maybe, from a list of “fiction by intentionally pro-life authors.” Or maybe it isn’t?
Anyway — and I admit I haven’t had time to follow the link yet — is this list a commentary more on writers, or on readers?
January 25th, 2010 | 10:22 am
If you are referring to (conservative) American writers only, then I agree to this:
“Or that the list tracks the general weakness of the (American)novel over the last sixty years?”
Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Pym, Muriel Sparks, and Wodehouse just to name a few, were still typing away 60 years ago. Daphne du Maurier was a Cornish Nationalist which maker a member of the right wing with gives her conservative predilections among her other ones. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Taylor was a known Commie.
January 25th, 2010 | 10:24 am
Oops! Typed way too quickly. My long held dislike for American novelists obviously got to me.
January 25th, 2010 | 11:13 am
Sally–I’ve never tried Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, but another probably unintentionally pro-life book I sometimes recommend is Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis.
Mrs. Jackson–Don’t forget James Hilton, the most conservative of them all, who had a few years in the 1950s before his untimely death.
January 25th, 2010 | 11:17 am
And what have you got against genre fiction?
January 25th, 2010 | 11:48 am
I meant Lorrie Moore, by the way, not Morgan.
And thanks for the recommend of the Bakis novel.
January 25th, 2010 | 11:52 am
And the point about the British novel is well taken, too. Most of my favorite 20th-century fiction writers are mid-century English writers. In fact, I think I’m going to get up from this desk right now and read Excellent Women again.
January 25th, 2010 | 12:10 pm
Mischief–I got nothing against genre fiction. I read a ton of it, have theories about all of it, and have reviewed more than my share of it, over the years. But there’s something revealed about the decline of the novel in this fact: If one makes the least suggestion, these days, that, after all, the novel at its most ambitious was something more than genre fiction, one is immediately attacked as somehow judgmental and insufficiently appreciative of the fewness, muchness, rareness, greatness of mysteries and science fiction.
(A bonus point, Sally, if you can place:
the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives
without looking it up. One of my favorite weirdly recursive poems.)
January 25th, 2010 | 12:43 pm
Nope. I lose. You’ll have to tell me.
January 25th, 2010 | 12:53 pm
Mrs. Jackson’s list leaves off Alice Thomas Ellis, of course, whose work I love, and who was writing far more recently than 60 years ago. Her thesis (much like Percy’s) is largely The World Is Going To Hell, In Case You Haven’t Noticed, only with small, domestic, relational kinds of scenarios and fewer verbal tics.
January 25th, 2010 | 12:53 pm
Sally–It’s Robert Graves’ Warning to Children, one of the weirdest things for which I’ve always had a soft spot.
January 25th, 2010 | 2:15 pm
What about the Robert Heinlein novels, especially the ones with Lazarus Long?
Some Heinlein quotes for you:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/robert_a_heinlein.html
January 25th, 2010 | 4:07 pm
No, the something to be to revealed is that you are, in fact, judgmental and insufficiently appreciative of the fewness, muchness, rareness, greatness of mysteries and science fiction.
There is absolutely nothing in eliminating genre elements that makes your novel “more than” those that include them. It does not make any given work more important to take place in the here-and-now and doesn’t involve determining who committed a crime.
January 25th, 2010 | 5:33 pm
First of all, I love genre fiction and all those “epic” movies which nowadays turn out to be genre movies (mostly fantasy and science fiction). But it’s a fact that genre writers accept certain limitations which do not characterize novel-writing “at its most ambitious.”
If a genre novel breaks out of the limitations, it is pointed to with pride by fans of the genre. But it’s telling that the novel had to “break out” in order to be considered seriously as a novel. If genres are not limiting, why does the exceptional novel have to break out of the limitations?
Because of its conventions, because of its inbuilt limitations, the genre novel encourages laziness in writing. It doesn’t have to–and here we can all fill in our favorite “break-out” examples (my own is “A Clockwork Orange”)–but for the most part it does.
In other words, being somewhat appreciative of genre writing and being “insufficiently” appreciative aren’t really the same thing.
January 25th, 2010 | 6:36 pm
I forgot Mr. Chips?? Hallo. I should be shot. Especially since the film version of Random Harvest with the perfectly dreamy Ronald Coleman is a favorite. ( Dreadful admission, yes, yes and all that. Let’s hope my taste in novels is better than movies.)
Sally Thomas, thank you. I was not aware of Alice Thomas Ellis but I just looked her up and she looks good. She wrote for The Spectator? At the same time Elizabeth Daivd did, perhaps? Wow, to have been a subscriber in those days. If you’ve not read any of David’s work, start with An Omelet and A Glass of Wine – a collection of her essays from The Spectator and other rags like Gourmet. I also looked up your blog. Very nice. I love Betty too. And (her) blue and white china. She links to my blog (Patum Peperium) and you link to some of the same blogs I do. We’re on vacation right now but stop by sometime and visit.
January 25th, 2010 | 7:46 pm
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January 25th, 2010 | 11:12 pm
Thanks for the tips, Mrs. J, and the blog visit.
Yes, Thomas wrote a delightfully scattered-but-pointed column called Home Life for the Spectator in the ’80s. There are, I think, four volumes of it in print, called — surprisingly — Home Life One, Two, Three, and Four. I have all but Three, which is apparently hard to find, and recommend them.
The columns are all brief vignettes, most of them involving the eccentric comings and goings of people in her household, though occasionally she will drop something like, “I went to visit the grave of the second son on his birthday,” and proceed to describe a meeting, in the graveyard, with a woman who had lost her only child in infancy forty years earlier and still grieved, and how the two of them stood there agreeing that you never stopped missing them. The first time I read that passage, I had to put down the book and cry. She was a comic writer and often ruthlessly funny in her observations of human nature, but she understood loss. And she had the knack of putting the most severe indictments in the mouths of her protagonists, as revelations of their own weakness — if that makes any sense. Her characters frequently say very scathingly true things, but the fact that they say them so scathingly is understood to be part of their frailty.
January 25th, 2010 | 11:25 pm
Conservative in what way? The 4 Twilight books are socially conservative, but they’re apolitical. They’re popular and fun, though not exactly “high literature.”
Take care & God bless
Anne K
January 26th, 2010 | 1:24 am
Post-Buckley, National Review seems to treat the adjective “conservative” like evangelical t-shirt companies treat “Christian.”
January 26th, 2010 | 3:15 am
Sally–I just had mailed to you a copy of Alice Thomas Ellis’ Home Life, Three, figuring you should complete the set.
January 26th, 2010 | 9:32 am
Oh, wow! Thanks!
Did I mention that I also don’t have a dishwasher?
Seriously, thank you.
January 26th, 2010 | 11:24 am
Wow Sally, the more you write about Ellis the more I am intrigued. To your question, yes, this does make complete sense:
“And she had the knack of putting the most severe indictments in the mouths of her protagonists, as revelations of their own weakness — if that makes any sense. Her characters frequently say very scathingly true things, but the fact that they say them so scathingly is understood to be part of their frailty.”
In fact it makes so much sense Ellis will be next on my list. Thank you. Ellis was at the Spectator in the ’80′s? Then she wasn’t there with Elizabeth David, but there just after David. Which means she was there with one of David’s successors, Jennifer Patterson. Jennifer was actually the cook at the Spectator. Speaking of not having a dishwasher, Jennifer, one day in a fit of disgust threw all of the soiled teacups and saucers the staff had (rudely) left for her to clean, out the window. The Spectator’s kitchen was on the top floor of the building it occupied. People walking below could have been injured. Thankfully they weren’t. She was fired. She left. The next morning she was in the kitchen cooking away, acting as if nothing had happened. They promoted her to writer. Her books are very rare as well but worth finding. Most Americans of a foody bent know Jennifer as the dark haired (and observant Catholic) lady who died not from eating too much fat but from smoking too many cigarettes of the BBC’s cookery series, Two Fat Ladies.
January 26th, 2010 | 11:38 am
I just looked up Jennifer and found her obit – a worthy and amusing read – I did not do justice to her tossing out the teacups. It also seems to confirm she was a conservative – heh :
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-jennifer-paterson-1112008.html
January 26th, 2010 | 4:28 pm
Joseph,
The most glaring omission from the list for me is “American Pastoral” by Phillip Roth, who like Ms. Robinson wouldn’t be caught dead by anyone calling himself a conversative and yet wrote a great novel (one of the best of the second half of the twentieth century) that is full of conservative themes.
January 26th, 2010 | 7:42 pm
Arminius–
Yes, Roth’s whole American Trilogy ought to count. And Rabbit, Run, and in the pages of FT, Rusty Reno has argued that On the Road is much less radical than one remembers.
Then, too, Sometimes a Great Notion, and The Old Man and the Sea, and all the better books by authors on NR’s list: Henderson the Rain King and The Moviegoer and A Soldier of the Great War. And on and on . . .
And yet, set these sixty years of novels, from 1950 to 2010, against any comparable list of novels from, say, the sixty years of 1840 to 1900, and it looks pretty pathetic.
That’s a problem, yes?
January 27th, 2010 | 4:07 pm
I’ve always wondered whether English people were really more eccentric than we are, or whether they just have better obituary writers.
February 19th, 2010 | 5:01 pm
No Atlas Shrugged?
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