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?

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.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-jennifer-paterson-1112008.html

“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.

Did I mention that I also don’t have a dishwasher?

Seriously, thank you.

Take care & God bless
Anne K