Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid
The author was born in Antigua; this book follows a girl’s life in Antigua from age ten to eighteen; it ends with her on a ship bound for England. She leaves her mother and father and all the people and places she had known without regret: “the world into which I was born had become an unbearable burden and I wished I could reduce it to some small thing that I could hold underwater until it died.” Until it died? I found no justification on the pages of this book for such a venomous thought. Annie’s early life is idyllic; she basks in the largesse of love bestowed upon her by her parents, especially by her mother, and she comes across as a pleasant child. But in her mid-teens she changes into an angry, deceitful, malicious troublemaker. Most significant is the hatred she harbors for her mother. Why? The woman isn’t the monster Annie perceives her to be. She’s strong-willed and wants to control her daughter; Annie, equally strong-willed, resists. Such clashes are normal; this one, in its implacable intensity, is not. When Annie is fifteen she has an illness that keeps her bedridden for many months; it’s some sort of emotional crisis, but its root cause is never accounted for; she simply recovers. Too much about her is allowed to remain murky; instead of insight into what makes her tick, the author empowers Annie with negatives. In presenting her as a hateful young woman Kincaid seems to be gloating about it. There was something perverse – and false – in this portrayal. When Annie left Antigua it was without my good wishes.

The Miraculous Barber - Marcel Ayme (French)
In the dazzling opening chapter, which takes place at a luncheon party, we gradually realize that the man observing the people around him is having a stroke and is in a slow motion struggle to keep contact with a world that’s becoming increasingly distorted and fragmented. His death sets off an improbable chain of events. What matters in this book is not the ungainly plot but the characters, each of whom has some quality that’s just short of being fantastical. Ayme holds his avaricious, pretentious, vain, stupid, spineless, amoral, crazy characters up to ridicule, but his attitude is amused rather than cruel. Since the book involves politics, one is left wondering how a country made up of such bunglers can survive. The barber of the title provides the answer: he’s a man with no expertise (beyond cutting hair), but he’s running France from behind the scenes simply because he’s practical and decisive. If a reader takes this novel as a farce, he’ll find it entertaining, fresh, and smart.

L’Assommoir - Emile Zola (French)
The title refers to a type of bar where people go to get smashed – to drink to the point of physical and mental destruction. Gervaise, the novel’s main character, is affected by the alcoholism of her husband, but for most of her life she never drinks. Her hopes as a young woman are modest: to be able to get on with her work, to always have something to eat and a half-decent place to sleep, to bring up her children properly, not to be beaten, and to die in her own bed. None of her hopes are realized. Zola belonged to the school of Naturalism, which advocated a strict adherence to reality. I believed in his depiction of life in the Paris slums (this is raw stuff, sordid and vulgar even by today’s standards). But it’s Gervaise’s story and, near the end, as I followed her slide into the mire, I became increasingly detached. As a writer Zola was drawn to extremes, and extremes distort reality. He reduces Gervaise to an animalistic state; her corpse is discovered when people smell rotting flesh. I wasn’t moved because she had ceased to be the woman I knew and cared about; she had become a vehicle to make a point about the ills brought on by poverty. Zola also went to extremes in the other direction, toward a Victorian mawkishness; he includes two characters who are so saintly that they’re preposterous. But, despite its faults, this work aspires to greatness and in many ways achieves it. I wrote that I knew and cared about Gervaise; she’s as real as anyone in fiction. In the twenty years we spend with her all is not bleak: there’s her glory as she makes her laundry business a success, her contentment in the first years of marriage. Though she’s far from perfect, at her core she’s a good, kind-hearted woman. She’s also hard-working and determined, but she slips in her resolve. Just a slip, but it begins her slow, inexorable (and sadly overdone) dissolution. Zola is like a painter on the grand scale, able to make, with words, his settings and people emerge from the canvas; throughout the novel are scenes that teem with life. The first of these takes place in the washhouse, culminating in an epic fight between Gervaise and Virginie. Gervaise’s saint’s day feast sprawls, in all its roistering vitality, over thirty-eight pages. Zola also chose the right ending for the book. The undertaker’s assistant had made brief appearances. Being an agent of death, people see him as an ominous figure, yet he jokingly refers to himself as “the ladies’ comforter” because he brings to them the sweetness of eternal sleep. On the last page he speaks tenderly to the corpse of Gervaise as he lifts her, with fatherly gentleness, and places her in the coffin. At this moment she did, again, matter to me.

The Nightingale - Sholom Aleichem (Yiddish) 
In a simple, direct way Aleichem brings to turbulent life the exotic world of a Jewish shtetl, with its foul-smelling mud streets and small, dark houses. There are no pogroms or raids by Cossacks in this novel; the troubles that befall the Jews of Mazepevka come from poverty and the human flaws that their all-pervasive religion cannot eradicate. Love, kindness and generosity are present, but there’s also greed, backbiting, jealousy, and various other destructive feelings and behavior. We’re not in the uplifting world of “Fiddler on the Roof.” But no group of people, if depicted honestly, would emerge pure as the driven snow. Aleichem is honest, and for this he should be commended. He does seem to be denouncing the Jewish practice of arranging marriages. Esther, who embodies the virtues of kindness and generosity, is pressured by her family to marry a detestable – though wealthy – widower. I felt how odious this marriage would be for her. Especially since she loves Yosele, has loved him since they were children. Yosele is the cantor’s son, the nightingale of the title; he can sing with an exquisite sweetness. Though he reciprocates Esther’s love, this is no love story. The fault lies entirely with Yosele. He doesn’t appear to be a complex character, but, near the end of the book, when one looks back, trying to account for his actions, it becomes clear that Yosele has always been mentally unstable. Early on his emotionality seemed part of an imaginative, creative nature; but it darkens. When he returns to Mazepevka, just as Esther is about to marry the widower, we’re presented not with a lover come to rescue her but with a madman. I was surprised at how unobtrusively Aleichem leaves us with nothing. The last words in the novel, before the withering epilogue, come from the coachman: “If you think about it, you come to realize it’s a rotten world.” * 

Therese Raquin - Emile Zola (French) 
Zola wrote this when he was in his mid-twenties, and if I were advising him I would have recommended that he abandon the idea of being a novelist and take up shoemaking. Of course, that would be bad advice, but this is a bad novel. It’s strident and overwrought, both in how the characters carry on and in the prose. Zola may have felt that by presenting a gloomy, grim, ugly world – and doing it unrelentingly – he was being a realist; but the people in this book are too extreme to be real. Zola assaults the reader with a torrent of shrill adjectives; he was obviously writing in a frenzy, carried away by his story of illicit passion, murder and guilt. There’s no artistry, no thoughtful restraint, and the results are as melodramatic as a dime novel. At the time it came out in France its luridness made it a cause celebre. I stuck with it to the halfway point, hoping it might get better, but it just kept getting worse. 

A Long Desire - Evan Connell 
The eleven pieces in this book are about people who embarked on obsessive searches. Most desired wealth (though prestige comes a close second); six of the quests involve discovering a passage to India or finding riches in the New World. The lure of gold can drive man to endure appalling hardships and to commit atrocious acts. The majority of the searchers fail to reach their goals, and the outcome for many is a gory death. I was struck by their determination, brutality, resourcefulness. Also, their gullibility. My gut reaction was often, What folly, what madness! There are boring stretches in which Connell simply presents researched facts; when he enlivens the facts with a novelist’s flare the results are engrossing and even fascinating. My favorite episode was about the crazed search for El Dorado. My favorite character (and, I believe, Connell’s) is the only woman: Mary Kingsley, a proper Victorian lady with an insatiable desire to explore remote places. She wasn’t after gold; she just wanted adventure. Nothing fazed her – she remained unflappable in the face of cannibals and crocodiles. And she always observed tea time.

Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

This novel is sabotaged by its author. Rushdie’s brilliance as a stylist and the inventiveness of his mind are on relentless display; he overwhelms his own work. The characters and plot can’t move; they’re buried under his ego. And why does Rushdie constantly (over and over!) interject remarks about what will happen later in the story (when something will, ostensibly, take on meaning)? At the point where the authorial conceit had gotten waist deep, I decided to slog on no further.

An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser

It’s a tragedy that Dreiser didn’t recognize the virtue of conciseness. Not that I expect minimalism from him; he was an expansive writer. But the reason I stopped reading this novel (at around page 400, just short of the halfway mark) is that he belabored everything, and did so in a lumbering prose. I knew I had enough when I expected the next chapters to hash over the same emotions. Couldn’t someone have clued Dreiser in to the fact that when he had revealed a state of mind he didn’t need to repeat it twenty times? He had a strong story to tell, but we get the material in its crude form, every last bit of it; there’s no selectivity. Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie, also long (though half the length of Tragedy), was more artfully done; he created a full and detailed picture of life, but it was accomplished with a deft touch. In Tragedy he constructs scenes as if he were moving heavy blocks of stone. Instead of getting better as a writer, Dreiser became long-winded and boring.

Germinal - Emile Zola (French)

Darkness pervades this novel like a shroud. That darkness is true to Zola’s subject. We’re deep in the coal mines; when above ground we experience the harsh, bleak lives of the miners and their families. These people are brutish, they’re noble, they’re both. But most of all they’re real, which is what a social protest novel needs to survive. Shining through, like a light at the end of a long tunnel, are those things that many yearn for: love, kindness, tenderness. The book has problems – Zola can be maudlin, and the closing chapter is surprisingly weak (where is Catherine?). Yet the scene in the collapsed mine was so strong that it became an ordeal I had to go through. This is a work of passion executed with craftsmanship. Zola was a realist and a humanitarian with something to say.

This Man and This Woman - James T. Farrell
Simply written, about two simple people dealing with psychological problems far beyond their ability to cope. This depressing relationship, which came through in all its misery on every page, got to be too much for me. This is a case of a writer faithfully and effectively conveying emotions, but he presented them in too unrelenting a way.

Silas Marner - George Eliot
A good, well-constructed novel, but one which never came alive for me. I didn’t find Silas to be a real, multi-dimensioned character, especially in his miser days. When Eppie arrived, I appreciated her golden presence, but she was too perfect. This is a major failing in Victorian novels – virtue is perfect, without complexity. The other plot line, with the Cass family, did have complexity (interesting, how effective the Victorians were when handling evil). A third characteristic of Victorian novels is that moral issues are explored, though Eliot was too obvious in putting her instructional points across.

A Sport and a Pastime - James Salter
I felt ambivalent as I read this book. Salter grants a legitimate power to sex, which he presents graphically (more graphically then need be; things get gross at times). The novel is about (maybe) the fact that we can die of love. Or the lack of it. It raises the possibility that events are happening to an imaginary couple dreamed up by the lonely narrator. An intriguing angle – but was this the case? All the hidden meanings, accumulating rather than taking any discernible shape, became frustrating. I finally decided that Salter was indulging in literary posturing, a conclusion supported by his overly-elegant prose, and at this point I had enough.

Restless House (Pot-Bouille) - Emile Zola (French)
I sometimes felt I was looking into a cesspool – Zola is that ferocious toward the residents of the apartment house he fictionally roams; he examines the hypocrisy, avarice, maliciousness, and indifference toward others contained in its rooms. Not a pretty picture of man. But on closer reflection many characters are just weak, and some are good. The writing is forceful and, often, funny – which the book needs, as unremitting disgust is too hard to take. I can understand why this book was banned in France; but Zola wrote out of conviction, not to shock. *