January 30, 2020

From the aphorisms of Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort:

“All that I’ve learned I’ve forgotten; the little that I still know, I’ve guessed.”

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Marcel Proust on anticipation, from Within a Budding Grove:

“I continued to wait, alone or with Swann, and often with Gilberte, come in to keep us company. The arrival of Mme. Swann, prepared for me by all those majestic apparitions, must (so it seemed to me) be something truly immense. I strained my ears to catch the slightest sound. But one never finds quite as high as one has been expecting a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer’s leap in the air …”

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From Joe Moran’s First You Write a Sentence:

“Reality is not there to be hunted and speared with sentences. In good writing, problems are lived, not solved—are held and weighed with words, not beaten with a stick until they are tamed.”

“The word sentence comes from the Latin sentire, ‘to feel.’ A sentence must be felt, and a feeling is not the final word, but something that grows, ripens and fades like anything else that is alive. A line of words should unfold in space and time, not reveal itself all at once, for the simple reason that it cannot be read all at once. Out of this immovable fact about the sentence—it unfolds—flows every¬thing else.”

“In noun writing, anything can be claimed and nothing can be felt. No one says who did what to whom, or takes ownership or blame. Instead of saying that x is not working (verb and participle), they say that there has been a loss of functionality (two nouns) in x. The words are not even trying to illuminate; they are immunizing themselves against the world.”

A Poem

The eye, benighted by electric switches,
Is caught by a window where snow bewitches
The weary melancholy that nerved the week.

I stop for a moment on my way to bed
To view the framed landscape, which snow has bled
Of every discretion assumed by sight.

How meekly the soul’s imperfect tense
Surrenders to snow’s soft violence,
Letting go of the senses’ hide-and-seek.

Within the white vision, my silence spins
A blanket confession to nameless sins;
Before the deep weather, a soul’s contrite,
Content to admire the silenced night.

Fiction of far-flung truths and close-to-home consequences: a holiday gift list for off-the-beaten track readers.

Making a gift of a book speaks of our desire for significant conversation, something beyond the daily round of “What’s new?” It’s an emblem of respect, and often special affection, between giver and recipient. By my lights, at least, such gift-giving isn’t always well served by the plethora of “books of the year” or “books everybody’s talking about” that clog media outlets every December; if you share the feeling, you might be interested in this list of eight works of fiction — spanning time, place, and style — that might help you connect meaningfully with the adventurous readers on your list. (For a similar selection of nonfiction titles, see Seven Books Nobody’s Talking About.)

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Breaking the Silence of Broken Hearts

Of all the griefs the world can hold, regret can be the most corrosive. The heart’s inventiveness in turning such anguish inward, allowing it to infiltrate conscience as well as consciousness, seems limitless, even though words are seldom a match for its true character. A slim collection of four stories, Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle is animated by speech rhythms, its narratives carried along on fits and starts of thoughts and ellipses of memory and emotion. Its genius is the way its prose conveys the abiding argument we have with our own failings and feelings and with the needs, demands, and affections of those closest to us.

The first tale begins like this: “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.” (The initial four words provide the story’s title.) What follows reveals a woman’s retrospective remorse for neglect of her firstborn, a daughter of some talent who is now nineteen years of age and into whose personality a teacher or counselor is seeking the mother’s insight. Confronted by the external request — “‘I’m sure you can help me understand her’” — the mother’s interior voice broods upon the shortcomings of her motherhood, deficiencies compelled by personal and economic circumstance and by the sheer exhaustion of making ends meet, and weighs its effect on her daughter’s character. The result is a searing dramatization of life — and love — stunted by class, and labor, and lack of leisure, of fate more earthbound than providential, but nonetheless determining. By the time we reach the end of this quietly shattering tale — only twelve pages since we began — we are staring at a sorrow so deep, we feel dizzy.

The title story, five times as long as “I Stand Here Ironing,” depicts the bickerings of a married couple when the kids are gone and mortality comes to call. The wife and husband have nearly lost their lives in inarticulacy because they’ve lacked the solitude expression requires. In unpacking what this means to them, Olsen (1912–2007) unflinchingly evokes profound emotions in a way that leaves the reader disturbed and humbled by something like the catharsis a tragic drama can deliver. The two stories in the middle of the volume — “Hey, Sailor, What Ship?” and “O Yes” — are marked by a similar empathy and originality. Tell Me a Riddle is an unforgettable book.

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A Singular Legacy

A novel that at times seems not very far removed from memoir, The Dead of the House by Hannah Green (1927–1996), is a lyrical evocation of the history of an Ohio family. It is a book of precious strength, as beautifully composed as any American novel written in the second half of the twentieth century.

Covering a period that runs roughly from the 1930s through the 1950s, Green’s novel is narrated by a woman of the author’s age and background. Through the three parts of her tale, in which she progresses from childhood through adolescence into adulthood, Vanessa climbs a family tree as enchanted as a forest, its deep roots entwining the present in all the entanglements of the past. “I thought that if I did go into your woods,” she says as a child to her grandfather, “I would go back into the past and I’d never be able to come out again.” Which is an apt description of what Vanessa does in this book, ruminating on the fate of her family — an old American breed of pioneers and preachers, businessmen and distant women — at the same time as she steps into her self through the familiar crises of coming-of-age: first boyfriend, sibling rivalry, encounter with death. But The Dead of the House is by no means a conventional family saga; it’s more like a book of poems in which meanings are glimpsed rather than grasped, and in which recollection is recast as reverie.

As Vanessa comes into her own present out of the embrace of her family’s past, Green captures our common passage from the almost mythic realm of our childhoods into the realities of our adult lives. Her book is a telling evocation of how we are shaped by our inheritance, bound to our dead by those qualities bestowed on us “by the strange accidents of time, of blood, of love.”

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The Life of a 16th-Century Mediterranean Traveler

A transporting historical novel that leads readers across the borders of their parochialism, be it physical, historical, or imaginative, Leo Africanus takes the form of a fictional autobiography of the celebrated geographer, adventurer, and scholar al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzān al-Zayyatī, Born in Moorish Granada in 1488, Hasan fled with his family from Spain to Fez to escape the Inquisition, then journeyed extensively through Africa and the Middle East; captured by Sicilian oceangoing brigands, he was eventually taken to Rome where he was presented to Pope Leo X, who baptized him as Johannes Leo. While in Italy he wrote a trilingual medical dictionary (in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew) as well as his famous Description of Africa, for which he is remembered as Leo Africanus.

From this remarkable life, the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf has fashioned a marvelous narrative in which the civilizations of Islam and Christendom engage each other in the experience of a single person. Beginning with an account of the expulsion of Arabs and Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, the story follows its protagonist’s family to Fez, then traces his peregrinations through cosmopolitan Cairo, across the Sahara to Timbuktu, to the Constantinople of Suleiman and the Rome of Raphael and the High Renaissance. Hasan’s exploits as merchant and diplomat give him, and the reader, an enlightening view of the flux of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world.

Organized into forty chapters corresponding to the first forty years of Hasan’s life, the book is part history, part travelogue, and, delightfully, part picaresque, replete with pirates and princesses; it places its hero within view of many of the prominent events and personalities of his politically and culturally dynamic time. Satisfying in the many tales it weaves and in the fabled settings it evokes, Leo Africanus is a novel of intellectual discovery and storytelling enchantment.

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Requiem for a Way of Life

Despite its brevity — it runs just over one hundred pages — Ferdinando Camon’s Memorial is so extraordinary in its power that, when I first encountered it some years ago, I read it all the way home: I began it waiting for the train from suburban New York to Manhattan, read through the train ride, then continued with one eye as I made my way through Grand Central Terminal to the subway, downtown on the IRT, up the stairs to the street, and on the elevator up to our apartment. I remember to this day standing inside our doorway, keys in hand, until I finished the book. That was thirty years ago; the story, and the experience of my first reading of it, still haunt me.

Written by one of the most notable of Italy’s post-World War II writers, this enchanted autobiographical novel is steeped in the peasant culture of Camon’s native Veneto, an ageless and all-but-vanished way of life the author left behind for the city and the twentieth century. Relating the death of his mother and the building of an altar to her memory by his father, it mixes memory and meditation to evoke his people’s spare, brutal, and profound intimacy with earth, with death, with generation.

“She knew nothing outside her house and those places where she worked,” writes the narrator of his subject, “but those places she knew by heart.” As he describes that house and her labors to nourish her family’s life within it, Camon constructs an altar of words that, like his father’s altar of copper and wood, bears witness to how much such a heart can hold. It’s a small book about a small life; yet the reader who opens it will discover a story moving in its sympathy, dignity, and desire to articulate the deepest human needs.

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Fathoming Love’s Deep Currents in Rural Ireland

Like Memorial, The All of It by Jeannette Haien (1921–2008) is a book one can read in a single session. At its start, a priest stands fishing in a salmon stream, pondering the dark secret that the death of a parishioner has revealed, and the astonishing tale the woman who survives the deceased has told him. In Haien’s stunning, rapid, beautiful novel set in a village in the west of Ireland, mortality and morality, sin and sympathy, compromise and commitment are joined in an emotional embrace that is magical, consoling, memorable. It’s hard to say anything more without spoiling the delicate surprise of this spare novel. Poet Mark Strand put it precisely right: “The only book I know in which innocence follows experience. A truly amazing thing.”

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A Playful Prayer Book

In her enchanting volume of inventive and unusual stories, Forms of Devotion,Diane Schoemperlen arranges incidents, narratives, and philosophical speculations around wood engravings from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to create fictional worlds of worship and wonder. The devotions she cleverly examines range from attachments to objects and daily rituals to romantic passions and anatomical attractions. She writes with a detachment that is not ironic but imaginatively analytical: classical reserve meets exuberant originality.

The title story, in which an essay by Emerson seems to have wandered into a story by Italo Calvino, is a lighthearted yet powerful celebration of faithfulness. Other tales explore the resonance of rooms and the innocence of objects, the shifting mysteries of perspective and love (“Love lets you loose in a part of the world where the atmosphere is too rare to sustain human life for long”). One story is constructed as a math word problem: “Train A and Train B are traveling toward the same bridge from opposite directions. . . .”

Another, “Rules of Thumb,” is an alphabet of imperatives for the modern age, beginning with “Avoid the temptations of envy, pride, fast food, and daytime TV talk shows.” Constructing her fictions with a comic, surprising, and deliciously odd formality, Schoemperlen manages to enhance our understanding of an astonishing range of everyday emotion and eternal perception. Her strangely told tales inform one’s attention with a richness not often found in contemporary fiction. Opening this book is like uncovering an unconventional missal that is profoundly amusing and uncannily suggestive.

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From High Comedy to High Mass

Tell me you’re not intrigued by a novel that begins, “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” Over a long career (born in 1881, she died in 1958), Rose Macaulay’s grandly individual talent expressed itself in clever comedies of manners (Keeping Up Appearances, 1928), thoughtful forays into idiosyncratic scholarship (Pleasure of Ruins, 1953), and profound inquiries into the elusive nature — and stuttering nurture — of religious faith (tellingly captured in two posthumously published volumes of letters to an Anglican priest in America, Letters to a Friend 1950–1952 and Last Letters to a Friend 1952–1958). All three strands of her literary intelligence are interwoven with élan in her final novel, and her masterpiece, The Towers of Trebizond.

A wonder of eccentricity, absurdity, adventure, wit, learning, and style, the novel is narrated by an Englishwoman named Laurie, who is accompanying her aunt and that freespirited missionary’s consort, the Rev. the Hon. Hugh Chantry-Pigg, on a trek from Istanbul to the fabled Trebizond. Exploiting the appeal of the ancient terrain to modern pilgrims of various stripes (“I wonder who else is rambling about Turkey this spring,” says Aunt Dot. “Seventh-Day Adventists, Billy Grahamites, writers, diggers, photographers, spies, us, and now the B.B.C.”), the first part of The Towers of Trebizond is leavened with comic questions. Will Father Chantry-Pigg be able to establish a High Anglican mission in Turkey? Will Dot emancipate Turkish women by coaxing them to wear hats?

As the book progresses and Laurie is left to her own devices, her grapplings with loves both sacred and profane push the book’s high spirits onto a loftier plane of inquiry. There the tantalizing uncertainties of belief are revealed to be as eerily evocative as the most legend-laden ruin. Must faith’s reach always exceed its grasp? Traveling with Rose Macaulay and her characters, the answer remains in doubt, but the trip, at least, is heavenly.

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The Story of a Spirit-Child

“What are you doing here?” one of them would ask.
“Living,” I would reply.
“Living for what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know? Haven’t you seen what lies ahead of you?”

The young boy being interrogated is Azaro, narrator of The Famished Road. What lies ahead of him is a long road of poverty, flood, earthquake, preternatural apparitions, political brutality, separation from his parents, reunion, desperation and mystery, communion with the dead, love and hope — all manner of life in its quotidian and mythical dimensions. That road runs through the center of Ben Okri’s novel, a work of eerie beauty and, despite the book’s supernatural compass, extraordinary fidelity to fundamental human emotions.

Denizen of an impoverished African village, Azaro is a child who has not lost touch with the spirit realm other children abandon at birth. Straddling the temporal and eternal worlds, he chooses a life in time (to the incredulity of his spirit interrogator in the passage quoted above), and his story is animated with both magical wonders and the everyday life of his family and their neighbors. While his parents struggle to keep Azaro among the living, the boy seeks to assume a solid identity in the shifting landscape of vision and actuality he describes.

The family’s intimate milieu is suffused with myth, folktale, and belief, but grotesque political realities (echoing those of the author’s native Nigeria) are never far away, and Azaro’s father — a figure whose exertions as a laborer and heroics as a boxer are rendered with uncanny intensity — is determined to engage them, however futilely. Teeming incidents — his mother’s cagey battles with the landlord, the drunken and dangerous revelry that spills from Madame Koto’s bar, the oppressive presence of factional thugs — are filtered through Azaro’s consciousness and woven by Okri into a mesmerizing narrative both mystifying and curiously true to life. Although the boy’s tale is phantasmagorical, it aches with real human sentiment — imagine García Márquez crossed with Dickens and you’ll approach something of the book’s flavor.

Be warned: If you don’t let the book carry you along, you’ll soon be exhausted by your resistance to its rushing, unfettered imagination. But give in to the current of the author’s musical prose and otherworldly visions and you are in for a transformative reading experience. Okri’s book is bigger than life in just the way that, deep in our hearts, we know our lives are bigger than circumstantial evidence suggests.

Charles Dickens may well be the most ingenious author in English literature. The energy of his inventiveness gave birth to a gallery of characters — from Oliver Twist to Ebenezer Scrooge — whose lives have overflowed the boundaries of his books to become permanent fixtures in the collective imagination. So strong is the shadow cast by his work — and by such monuments of storytelling as Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities — on our idea of the novel that it obscures how sui generis his writing is. A hundred years after the author’s heyday, J. B. Priestley was insightful — and brave — enough to suggest that “this great novelist was not, strictly speaking, a novelist at all.” Indeed, the gifts of observation and inspiration that Dickens possessed (or that possessed him) demanded their own creative venue, and his books seem not so much plotted by their author as traversed: If London had not existed to be his muse, he would have had to invent another city as teeming and multitudinous, as physically present and as psychologically unfathomable to engage his genius. Unlike Austen or Trollope, Flaubert or Henry James, Dickens does not manage the action of his tales within defined social or aesthetic borders; rather, he leads the reader down avenues and alleyways that are strange, vivid, filled with looming, often murky phenomena. At once familiar and ominous, the Dickensian world is a dreamscape in which states of heart and mind are rendered from an excess of palpable detail.

When we open one of his formidable tomes, we soon recognize a peculiar sense of dynamism: It’s as if the author has not set out to write a novel, but has been dropped into a pulsing reality he has to write his way through, improvising a narrative out of the available material, much in the way we must construct a life. That may be why so many of his novels — the early, Dickensian-defining ones especially, such as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, culminating in David Copperfield — begin with the birth of a protagonist and follow his adventures into adulthood, as if chronology provides the only possible organizing principle. No surprise, then, that the stories are ultimately about fate, which may seem to unfold around his heroes, but is more truly dependent upon their discovering, one step at a time, the destinations of their personal journeys.

This “biographical” approach suggests a reason his supporting characters, who contribute so much to our pleasure in reading Dickens, are so boldly drawn, their defining traits exaggerated to within an inch of caricature. Think of Wackford Squeers, the wicked schoolmaster in Nickleby, or the obsequious Uriah Heep in Copperfield, or the eternally disappointed bride, Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations. For all their vivid presence and comic (even when sinister) verve, these figures are described not as beings but as experiences. What we remember of people in our own pasts has a similar quality. Recall your favorite aunt and you’ll see in miniature what Dickens does at scale: The qualities that define a person in recollection are those that are larger than life, markers for the whole being that serve as milestones in memory. Just so, his characters are both less naturalistic and more real than the creations of other novelists, the way a snapshot colored with reminiscences can coalesce our lived experience more tellingly than a return visit to its physical setting. It is the way our minds and our memories work, animating people and places whenever we turn our attention to them fully. Uniquely, Dickens does this not only with his characters, but also with streets and buildings, landscapes and weather, moral challenges and social conventions, even government offices: There has never been a more exact description of what bureaucratic processes feel like than that of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. Dickens discovered stories wherever he looked — in the shape of chimneys, in law courts, in fog — even before he peopled them with characters. He knew that we live in stories every minute, and he found them for us everywhere; no other writer sweeps us up into the moment-by-moment storyness of life in quite the same way.

All of which can make his novels — to some literary scholars, at least — seem messy, rambunctious, and arbitrary in construction, imperfect equations when their parts are summed. The enduring popularity of his creations proves a more general truth: For readers, if not critics, the formal perfection of a book is not as important as its imaginative life.

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David Copperfield

“Of all my books, I like this the best.”

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

So begins this marvelous narrative, a novel so filled with character, invention, suspense, and inspired storytelling that one finishes it with an overwhelming regret: The turning of the last page closes the book on such a vivid world that one feels immediately impoverished. Dickens famously called Copperfield the “favourite child” of his literary brood, and its autobiographical frame goes some way toward explaining why. The eighth of his novels to be written, it is the first one narrated in the first person, and, from the opening words, the direct address of the protagonist is captivating. The coming-of-age tale that David relates has many points of contact with Dickens’s own experiences as the son of a debtor, as an adolescent employee in a factory, as a parliamentary reporter, and, lastly, as a successful novelist.

The book is peopled with enough memorable characters to sustain the careers of a half dozen storytellers. The cast includes — to mention only a few — David’s imperious aunt, Betsey Trotwood, who comes to his rescue with an asperity as sharp as her magnanimity is deep; Aunt Betsey’s simple-minded protégé and muse, Mr. Dick; the improvident, incorrigibly optimistic, and unabashedly grandiloquent Mr. Micawber; the charming, caddish seducer Steerforth; the unforgivable, unforgettably named Uriah Heep, whose unctuous servility cannot mask his evil intent; and David’s childhood housekeeper and lifelong ally, the stalwart Peggotty, whose caring nature reflects the unaffected nobility of her family of Yarmouth fishermen. Through all the plotting and sub-plotting, the overriding sentiment of Dickensian fiction — that there is a goodness abroad in the world that courses beneath the surface complexion of beauty, the façades of wealth and privilege, and the social currency of fashion, even when we least expect it — carries the hero of this novel toward the satisfaction of a happy ending. You shouldn’t read only one Dickens, but if you do, make it David Copperfield.

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Oliver Twist

The Orphan as Hero

“Please, sir, I want some more” is among the most famous utterances in Dickens. It’s spoken by a very small orphan named Oliver Twist to the man in charge of ladling out the meager meals Oliver shares with his fellow inmates in the workhouse established by society to house impoverished youngsters. In a single sentence, it conjures all the forces at the heart of Oliver’s tale: innocence, want, mischief, hunger, boldness, desperation, misfortune. And, last but not least, institutionally sanctioned cruelty: “The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle, pinioned him in his arms, and shrieked aloud for the beadle.”

Oliver Twist was its author’s second novel, telling a continuous story in a way his first, the delightful but episodic Pickwick Papers, did not. What’s innovative in the book is not its shape, however, but its focus: Never before had a child been put so center stage in a novel; more importantly, while Wordsworth had evoked it in verse, never before had childhood been treated in a prolonged narrative as a state of being in its own right, with all the colors and contours of an emotional landscape as fully developed as an adult’s.

As Oliver progresses from workhouse minion to undertaker’s assistant, then to conscript in the thieving army of urchin pickpockets led by the Artful Dodger and in thrall to the seedy ringleader Fagin, the reader is treated to a searing social satire on the treatment of paupers and bereft children, a vivid portrait of the urban criminal underworld, and a suspenseful if murky plot that is a roller coaster of melodramatic hopes and fears, degradations and redemptions. It’s an exhilarating chase, led by a young writer learning to harness his extraordinary creative energy.

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The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

Pure Storytelling Bliss

The title given this novel for its serial publication (over nineteen months in 1837 through 1839) sums up its rambunctious plot: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings, Downfallings and Complete Career of the Nickleby Family. A descendant of the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, Nickleby inherits from its literary forebears a penniless young hero who — equipped only with luck and native wit — must make his way in the world against forces of iniquity, depravity, and greed. Those evil attributes are embodied especially in Nicholas’s dastardly uncle, Ralph, who is determined, out of sheer malice, to thwart his nephew’s fortune, just as the Cheeryble brothers, Nicholas’s eventual employers and perfect models of Dickensian benevolence, are determined to help him make it.

Before he gets to the Cheerybles, however, Nicholas is apprenticed by his uncle to Wackford Squeers, the very model of a modern wicked schoolmaster, whose educational establishment, Dotheboys (say it as three words: “Do-the-boys”) Hall, provides ample opportunity for Dickens to attack the brutal conditions of contemporary boarding schools. Nicholas’s subsequent adventures include a stint in a traveling theater company, depicted by the author with much relish and comic verve, and several encounters with the spiteful initiatives of his uncle, each designed to obstruct Nicholas’s success or threaten the virtue and well-being of his sister and mother. With luck, stalwart friends, and a good heart, our hero, of course, triumphs, not without timely help from Newman Noggs, a failed gentleman impressed by poverty into the service of Ralph Nickleby — until he emerges from his own shadow to upset his employer’s villainous designs.

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A Christmas Carol

From Humbug to the Happiest of Holidays

You know the story of this quintessential holiday tale, but have you ever read it? So many times has the tale been told — in numerous stage and screen adaptations — that we are apt to take the power of its invention for granted. Yet no retelling comes close to capturing the humor and human sympathy, the delicious spookiness and ultimate good cheer of Dickens’s original narrative.

In less than a hundred pages, A Christmas Carol relates, with an imaginative richness that belies its brevity, how the crabbed soul of an uncaring old man, Ebenezer Scrooge, is summoned back to generous life by the visitations of four spirits: first the shade of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, and then the spirits of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. Through their hauntings, Scrooge is moved by fear and understanding to embrace the abandoned affections of his youth, confront the meanness of his current existence, and recognize the sordid end he’ll meet if he does not change his ways.

All of the author’s famous gifts are on display in this cheering fable of a miser’s Christmas Eve metamorphosis from misanthrope to man of good will, including his talent for deft characterization (in the figure, for instance, of Scrooge’s clerk, the put-upon but ever hopeful Bob Cratchit); for poignant sentiment (in the figure of Cratchit’s lame son, Tiny Tim); and for ingenious monikers (was any curmudgeon ever more aptly named than Ebenezer Scrooge?). If my volume 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die was nine hundred books shorter, A Christmas Carol would still be in it.

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Dombey and Son

A Family’s Fortune

The first novel that Dickens planned in detail before beginning composition, Dombey and Son marks a turning point in his development, ushering in the period of his mature works. Abandoning the pleasures of the picaresque and the improvisatory impulses of his earlier novels, it gains in their stead a surer sense of structure and thematic coherence, allowing Dickens to inform his story with a more focused social consciousness. As a result, in concert with telling the tale of a man of business and his family, the narrative of Dombey and Son illuminates the tumultuous changes wrought, in mid-nineteenth- century England, by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of mercantile culture.

In outline, the plot is simple: A successful shipping magnate, Paul Dombey, is desperate for a male heir to validate for the next generation the name of the family firm, Dombey and Son. His pride blinds him to the havoc his single-mindedness wreaks in the lives of his daughter, his ill-fated wife, and the sickly son she gives birth to, young Paul, who will die before he reaches adolescence. Around this frame are wrapped several comic, dramatic, and suspenseful sub-plots, as well as penetrating passages on the effects of new economic forces, which threaten — with the full support of Mr. Dombey — to transform human interaction to “a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting.” The most powerful of these forces is the advent of the railroad, to which Dickens returns throughout the book, charting how its tracks disrupt the “law and custom” of every neighborhood they cleave, eventually pulling precincts and people into the magnetic influence of the economic development they speed.

From the opening chapter, in which the word “house” is ominously informed by its dual meaning as both the family’s home and the firm of Dombey and Son, to the last, in which Mr. Dombey reaches a level of self-knowledge that allows sentiment to temper strict calculation, the emotional strains of Dombey and Son echo those of A Christmas Carol — in a minor key, perhaps, but on a grander scale. Throughout, Dickens writes with a confidence that makes this novel, although one of his lesser known, among his most satisfying.

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Bleak House

A Treasure House of Invention and Sentiment

Although it lacks the affectionate warmth of David Copperfield and the narrative unity of Great Expectations, Bleak House is considered by many critics to be its author’s greatest achievement. Unlike those other two novels, which, of course, have their own ardent champions, Bleak House is not steeped in childhood or focused on the unfolding of a childhood’s layers of hopes and sorrows in later life; it is a novel of adulthood, a nuanced exploration of social mores, economic and legal entanglement, romantic passion, mature love, and murderous envy.

Innovative in its structure, it is told in two distinct and alternating voices. The first — third-person, present tense, omniscient in perspective — ranges widely through the fashions and foibles of contemporary society, from the sclerotic and treacherous confusion of the Chancery courts to the dilettantish do-gooding of self-regarding philanthropy. Immediate and often satiric, this voice is contrasted with the first-person narration of Esther Summerson, an apparent orphan with a real heart of gold, whose modesty, capability, and emotional intelligence bring a reflective and generous cast to the storytelling.

Along with the dual narration, the complexity of the plot, which is fed by many tributaries, creates an atmosphere of obscure machination that is perfectly evoked by the novel’s famous opening paragraphs, in which the actuality of all of London seems to be diffusing itself into a sodden, shadowy netherworld: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping.” At the center of this netherworld, “at the very heart of the fog,” Dickens writes, “sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.” There, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the notoriously protracted case of a contested will that has consumed the best energies of several generations of litigants, spins its web of futility and disappointment — a web that, one way or another, ensnares the characters of Bleak House, from Esther to the young lovers, Ada Clare and Richard Capstone; from John Jarndyce, Esther’s noble and gentle savior, to Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock; from the homeless street sweeper, Jo, to the insidious attorney Tulkinghorn. As always in Dickens’s best novels, the cast of ancillary personalities is rife with memorable actors, including the resolutely shiftless Howard Skimpole and the relentlessly observant Inspector Bucket, the first professional sleuth to play a central role in a major English novel.

This capacious book — it runs to nearly a thousand pages — seems to be a compendium of everything its author had learned about inventing characters and telling stories. It weaves several strands of popular (or soon to be popular) fiction — social satire, romance, sentimental education, the novel of sensation, and the detective story — into a single vast tapestry of reading that is surprising, intellectually compelling, and wholly satisfying.

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A Tale of Two Cities

The Classic Novel of the French Revolution

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . .

A Tale of Two Cities may have the most famous opening of any novel ever written, the frequent application of its words outside the novel’s specific context giving it an edge over the nearest competition, Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice. Echoing the dichotomies invoked in its opening sentences, the work unfolds in a series of parallels and mirrorings, alternating between London and Paris in the years before and during the French Revolution. Indeed, the plot turns on the uncanny resemblance between two men, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, the first a progressive noble from an aristocratic, cruelly reactionary French family, the second a brilliant but dissolute English lawyer who both represents and resents Darnay, ultimately coming to his rescue when the Frenchman falls afoul of the Revolution’s unforgiving fervor.

Despite being among its author’s most widely read novels, A Tale of Two Cities is the least Dickensian. Swept along by the rapid movement of the complex plot, and the frantic history that propels it, the narrative reveals character through action and incident rather than through Dickens’s more typical reliance on dialogue and personality quirks. Missing, too, is the sense of comedy that leavens and enlivens even the darkest of his other books. As a consequence, A Tale of Two Cities is the neatest storytelling contrivance in Dickens’s oeuvre. Although it lacks the warmth and humor of his other tales, it has the alternately intimate and violent passions of the Revolution — both brilliantly embodied in the baleful figure of Madame Defarge, knitting and scheming with ruthless intensity — to meld its themes of vendetta, betrayal, regret, sacrifice, and resurrection into a headlong chronicle of historical drama and personal nobility. The pageant concludes with Carton’s final thoughts, nearly as memorable in expression as the novel’s first lines: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

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Great Expectations

Destiny’s Promises

Like David Copperfield, Great Expectations is the story of a child’s coming-of-age, told in the first person. Like David Copperfield as well, it is the story of a young man’s coming to grips with his unassuming legacy and practical place in the world. More nuanced and darker in mood than the earlier novel, however, Great Expectations is its author’s deepest working of the terrain of childhood and the fears and fates that spring from it. Anchored in a Kentish village, around which the years and events of the complicated plot will revolve, the book returns Dickens to his native ground in search not of autobiographical details, but of the familiar spirits and psychological tempers that nurtured his imagination: the injuries of class, the uncertainties of love, the snobberies of fashion, the limited purview of personal agency, the coincidence — or is it more? — that links crime and fortune, or goodness and inequity.

From the thrilling opening scene — in which the young Philip Pirrip (or simply Pip, as he introduces himself) is surprised on a visit to his parents’ graveside by an escaped convict who presses the boy into his service — we are seized by the story and pulled into its embrace. As we follow Pip’s progress — his thralldom to the alluring young Estella; his fascination with Miss Havisham (one of Dickens’s greatest characters, a woman so traumatized by disappointment that she has sat for years, transfixed by loss, in the setting of her unconsummated wedding celebration); the arrival of his “great expectations” in the form of an inheritance whose source is mysterious; his estrangement from his good and noble brother-in-law, Joe Gargery — we are held rapt by the choreography of character, incident, and brilliantly paced suspense.

Dickens notoriously rewrote the final scene, mitigating the bleakness of his original ending to offer the promise of a fulfilling reconciliation between Pip and Estella. Whatever the particulars of the pair’s destiny, the rich satisfactions of the novel remain. In the end, Great Expectations is not really about expectation at all, but about regret, and as powerfully so as any book in our language. Where Pip’s literary sibling David Copperfield is discovering his future, making his way in the world, the protagonist of Great Expectations is uncovering his past, illuminating all the shadows of the self that remembrance can conjure. Moving with narrative verve between London and the countryside, the book depicts in vivid colors the humbling of youthful presumptions by the inscrutable and — for the lucky, at least — wisdom-inducing quandaries of life.

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A memorial gallery of seven writers who died in 2019: Diana Athill, Russell Baker, Ernest J. Gaines, Clive James, Robert K. Massie, Edmund Morris, and Toni Morrison.

Last year, I published 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die; this year saw the death of several authors whose achievements are celebrated therein. As 2019 draws to its own ending, I’ve gathered the brief essays I dedicated to works by these late writers into a small gallery to commemorate the lives they led and the meaning they left behind.

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Diana Athill (December 21, 1917–January 23, 2019)

Instead of a Letter: The Detours of Disappointed Love

There are many pleasures to be found in the pages of a memoir: the achievements of the author, if they be splendid; her sophistication, intellect, or humor; the insight that comes from sharing one person’s perspective on a particular time or place. What is more rare, and what one gets from Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter, is the alternately uncomfortable and exhilarating revelation of another’s experience, in all its day-by-day, year-to-year uncertainty.

Written in the author’s mid-forties, it tells a story of childhood in the English countryside, high times at Oxford during the 1930s, bleak times during the war; of adolescent romance imagined into being, carried to the brink of adulthood, then lost with crushing effect. The ensuing sadness shadows Athill’s emerging career at the BBC and in the book world — she was one of the founding members of the distinguished publishing firm André Deutsch — until she learns, through the wisdom of work and words, to conjure something like happiness from the vagaries of love and the verities of time.

Beginning with an evocation of her grandmother’s last days, Athill’s narrative unfolds within the worrying embrace of that matriarch’s memory: “What have I lived for?” the dying woman asks the young Diana. Asking the same question of herself in these pages, the author answers with startling alertness to the equivocations of emotion and intention that shape the weather of our waking hours. Beautifully honest in its self-portrait, Instead of a Letter captures, with paradoxical exactitude, the tentative aura every pilgrim bears on her progress toward maturity.

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Russell Baker (August 14, 1925–January 21, 2019)

Growing Up: A Satirist Comes of Age

In 1979, New York Times reporter and commentator Russell Baker won the Pulitzer Prize for his “Observer” column; three years later he won another for this autobiographical book. As the title suggests, Growing Up focuses on his childhood, Depression-era years spent in Virginia, New Jersey, and Baltimore under the watchful influence of his mother (his alcoholic father died when Baker was five). Lucy Elizabeth was “a formidable woman. Determined to speak her mind, determined to have her way, determined to bend those who opposed her. In that time when I had known her best, my mother had hurled herself at life with chin thrust forward, eyes blazing, and an energy that made her seem always on the run.” She couldn’t stand a quitter and wouldn’t be one, even when her husband’s death meant giving up one of her children to the care of relatives.

As much as this is a book about the author growing up, it is also a book about Lucy growing old, and the son frames the bulk of the chapters — vibrantly drawn, good-humored scenes of hard times; adventures with the extended family of aunts and uncles; boyhood and adolescent antics; eventual graduation to college and the military — with affecting portrayals of his aged mother adrift in senility. The clear-eyed honesty of the opening and closing pages does not disguise the enduring love he feels toward the woman he remembers so vividly throughout the book, “a warrior mother fighting to protect her children in a world run by sons-of-bitches.” She was determined that her son Russell would make something of himself, as indeed he did through every stage of his distinguished career as a writer, which reached a culmination of sorts in Growing Up. In his apprenticeship as a newspaper reporter, he learned how to find a story and tell it; in his heyday as a satirist, he perfected the ability to illuminate the private and public vanities of the tumultuous times in which he lived; as a memoirist, he added a new dimension to his already considerable skill set. It’s best called wisdom, and it makes this generous remembrance of things past a delight from start to finish.

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Ernest J. Gaines (January 15, 1933–November 5, 2019)

A Lesson Before Dying: The Dignity of Resistance

It is 1940s Louisiana, and the innocent black man named Jefferson who had the bad luck to be in a store when a white shopkeeper was killed has been falsely charged with robbery and murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. We know how events will turn out, just as the characters do, because inevitability is the central reality of the all-too-real fictional world Ernest J. Gaines creates in this spare and moving novel. But it’s not the central truth.

Set in a time and place where racial segregation, Jim Crow injustice, political oppression, and poverty promise no future and guarantee little enough present to the black men and women brought to life in its pages, A Lesson Before Dying is told by Grant Wiggins, who has returned to Louisiana to teach at the poor church school on the plantation where he was raised. He has grown unhappy with his decision to come back to this small, familiar world after having left it to attend college, and he dreams of leaving once again, for good. Holding himself aloof from those around him, Wiggins is reluctant to interfere when his aunt and her friend Miss Emma, godmother of the wrongly condemned man, ask him to visit the slow-witted Jefferson as he awaits electrocution. They want him to help Jefferson rediscover some dignity after having been compared to a hog in court by his own attorney during the closing arguments at his trial. “I want the teacher make him know he’s not a hog, he’s a man,” says Miss Emma. “I want him know that ’fore he go to that chair.”

Neither man embraces the idea, and for several visits, Jefferson won’t talk. But, under pressure from the two elderly women and from his girlfriend, Wiggins sticks with it, slowly bridging the gap between himself and Jefferson so that the doomed man learns to confront his inhuman fate by embracing his human one, thereby connecting both men to the wider community in unexpected ways. What’s inevitable proves to be filled with profound surprises, not the least of which is the legacy of learning the student leaves his teacher.

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Clive James (October 7, 1939–November 24, 2019)

Cultural Amnesia: An Uncommon Commonplace Book

“Clive James is a brilliant bunch of guys,” a New Yorker wag once aptly wrote. Across several decades, all of them kept very busy producing a body of work — essays, television reviews, memoir, poetry, fiction, songs, wisecracks — that was broad, deep, and smart, exhibiting an unmatched combination of brio and brilliance. James may be the most entertaining intellectual you’ll ever read.

If you want the most satisfying cover-to-cover encounter with his intelligence, pick up the first volume of his autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, a hilariously funny narrative of his coming-of-age in Australia before setting off to Cambridge. Or try As of This Writing: The Essential Essays 1968–2002, where you will be treated to illuminating encapsulations of disparate writers and subjects you always wanted to know more about, even if they’re completely new to you: One of James’s talents is a gift for offhand instruction that makes learned curiosity infectious.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, on the other hand, is admittedly a bit of a mess. “In the forty years it took me to write this book,” James discloses at the outset, “I only gradually realized that the finished work, if it were going to be true to the pattern of my experience, would have no pattern. It would be organized like the top of my desk, from which the last assistant I hired to sort it out has yet to appear.” The resulting volume is a collection of forty-odd brief essays, each prompted by a sentence, epigram, or passage James has highlighted in the course of his wide reading. To use a coinage from another age, it is at heart a “commonplace book,” a personal journal preserving passages of particular interest; what makes Cultural Amnesia uncommon is the way each quotation James collects leads to a consideration of its import, as well as the circumstances, character, and fate of the person who said or wrote it. Piecing together and embellishing the strands of his reading life, James reveals how they’ve informed both a cerebral consciousness and a moral conscience. “I wanted to write about philosophy, history, politics and the arts all at once, and about what had happened to those things during the course of the multiple catastrophes into whose second principal outburst (World War I was the first) I had been born in 1939,” James explains. His gallery is large enough to include the jazz giant Louis Armstrong and the French political philosopher Raymond Aron, the Roman historian Tacitus, the British miniaturist Beatrix Potter, and such emblems of mid-twentieth-century courage and suffering as Egon Friedell and Heda Margolius Kovály (whose stories are unforgettable). In a perfect example of James’s cultural catholicity, the actor Tony Curtis stands next to Ernst Robert Curtius, scholar of medieval Latin literature.

The whole enterprise is an impassioned and — by dint of James’s glorious style — engaging defense of the reading life: “somewhere within the total field of human knowledge,” he writes, “humanism still beckons to us as our best reason for having minds at all.” This massive, sprawling, quirky exploration of one man’s humanistic vocation leaves us not only with a remarkable reading list, but with a thinking list as well. In its idiosyncratic way, it’s a book you can’t put down, and will never exhaust.

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Robert K. Massie (January 5, 1929–December 2, 2019)

Nicholas and Alexandra: The Family Drama of Imperial Russia’s Fall

Robert Massie’s account of the fall of Imperial Russia paints a vast and fascinating historical canvas that is vividly illuminated by the family drama the author sees as its focal point: the hemophilia of Tsarevich Alexis, only son and heir of Nicholas II, last czar of all the Russians. The illness had particular significance for the author, as he reveals in his introduction, because it was shared by his own son. In another book, Massie has described how Nicholas and Alexandra sprang from a bit of research left over from a story on hemophilia he had written for the Saturday Evening Post. “For years,” Massie explained, “I had heard the story of Rasputin and the Tsarevich. But it was only in outline — brief, remote, indistinct, blurred. Historians passed over it quickly, usually in no more than a sentence or two. Somehow to me, both as the father of a hemophiliac and as a product of the rigorous historical discipline I was trained in at Oxford, this treatment seemed inadequate.” Massie began learning as much as he could about “the most famous hemophiliac” and the mysterious holy man who, because he seemed able to control the boy’s bleeding, was entrusted by the czar with greater and greater power — with disastrous effects for the Romanovs and their rule.

Yet it is not just Massie’s personal connection to his subject, or his sensitive attention to the Romanovs’ intimate concerns, or even his rich portrayal of Rasputin’s sinister influence that makes Nicholas and Alexandra such a memorable and enduring volume. The material the author marshals is rich enough in politics, personalities, and intrigue to provide the plots of any number of Russian novels, a shelf of studies of royal dynasties and military alliances, and at least one storybook romance (that between the title characters). Massie’s mastery in ordering this enormous trove — the astuteness of his historical emphases, his deft characterizations, the felicity of his prose — all combine to shape a single massive and absorbing narrative. As it unfolds, the familial dilemma becomes the kernel of an astonishing chronicle of history, religion, and revolution, one that encompasses both the twilight of Imperial Russia and the martyrdom of Nicholas, Alexandra, and their five children. Still, despite the scale and spectacle of the book’s subject, it is the human qualities of this doomed family — faith and love, courage and dignity in the face of a horrific fate — that in the end move readers most.

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Edmund Morris (May 27, 1940–May 24, 2019)

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt: The Pre-Presidential T. R.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was the twenty-sixth president of the United States. He remains our youngest chief executive (he was forty-two when he assumed the office upon the assassination of President McKinley), and he is certainly one of the most fascinating. Naturalist John Burroughs once said of his friend “T. R.” that he was a “many-sided man, and every side was like an electric battery.” In the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, acclaimed biographer Edmund Morris covered the unflaggingly energetic pre-presidential years of this dynamo.

It’s quite a story. At various times in the course of Morris’s nine-hundred-plus pages, Roosevelt reveals his remarkable talents as writer, rancher, soldier, and politician — to say nothing of his claim to the title of “fastest handshaker in history.” Consider these highlights:

• While studying at Columbia Law School, T. R. wrote the still authoritative Naval War of 1812, which was published in 1882.

• Sickly and asthmatic as a boy, Roosevelt later devoted himself to what he called the “strenuous life.” As a hunter and outdoorsman, he spent some time as a rancher in the Badlands of Montana, to which he moved to escape his grief after the tragically early death of his first wife in 1884.

• In 1898, T. R. resigned as assistant secretary of the navy to form, and eventually lead, the Rough Riders cavalry regiment. Their famous charges up Cuba’s Kettle and San Juan Hills during the Spanish-American War made T. R. a national hero.

• Elected governor of New York in 1898, Roosevelt became William McKinley’s vice-presidential running mate in the 1900 election, assuming the position of chief executive himself in September 1901 after McKinley’s death. (It was in that same month, incidentally, that Roosevelt apparently first used his famous slogan “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”)

Morris makes the most of his rich material, orchestrating vast stores of incident and information into an engaging narrative that is a joy to read. He makes the force of T. R.’s larger-than-life presence felt in each of the varied contexts Roosevelt so vigorously dominated, illuminating the complicated character behind the trademark caricature — pince-nez, heavy mustache, dazzlingly big teeth — that history has handed down as his enduring image. Along the way, Morris also draws a detailed portrait of the age.

This enormous yet briskly compelling book is the first volume of Morris’s T. R. trilogy. Theodore Rex, covering Roosevelt’s presidency, appeared in 2001; it was followed nine years later by Colonel Roosevelt, which details its subject’s post–White House career. Each is written with the same verve and intelligence that make The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt such a delight.

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Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931–August 5, 2019)

Beloved: Dearly Departed

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” says a character in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, and novelist Toni Morrison, who devoted part of her master’s thesis at Cornell to a study of Faulkner’s work, seems to animate every intuition those words contain in the pages of her fifth novel, Beloved.

Set in post–Civil War Ohio, but crisscrossing time and space in an intricate series of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a runaway slave raising the children she led out of Kentucky. She is tormented by what she has escaped and haunted by what she cannot: the memory of the infant daughter for whom Sethe chose doom rather than slavery. A ghost story in which the author reveals the spirit at the heart of her tale in her first sentences, the book’s suspense is built not on surprise as much as upon the particularity of the unfolding grief that drives Sethe and her extended circle of family and old friends to the brink of madness. Infusing her realistic narrative with supernatural power and presence in the apparition who gives the book its name, Morrison conjures emotional truths more powerful than a strict naturalism ever has access to. This is a novel about love, loss, regret, horror, the high price of freedom and the illusions it buys, and, perhaps most of all, the eternal human need, despite the sorrowful and unfulfilled promises of past and present, for “some kind of tomorrow.”

Upon its publication, the critic John Leonard wrote that, without Beloved, “our imagination of the nation’s self has a hole in it big enough to die from.” Yet it does not diminish the novel’s native eloquence to suggest that in its pages Morrison ponders, and makes palpable in an American way, themes that reach all the way back to Greek tragedy. “This is not a story to pass on,” we read on the last page of Beloved. But such stories can’t help themselves from being told eventually: That, in fact, is the most human truth of all, and readers far into the future will be grateful that Morrison, writing those words as she drew Sethe’s tale to a close, had proved them wrong.

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