US’ best fiction on loneliness
You can be lonely in a crowd, but Gina Barreca says you can’t be lonely inside a really good book.
Ihave the great good fortune of a life replete with companionship, love and satisfying work, and yet loneliness has been my constant pale companion.
My debts to loneliness are incalculable: One of the earliest and most cherished is one I’ve accrued since childhood, becoming a devout reader before school even started, one who learned that the opposite of being lonely was being curious.
You can be lonely in a crowd, but you can’t be lonely inside a really good book.
Unlike most people, books aren’t afraid to confront loneliness. They let you in; they open up and make a space for your imagination.
In Look Homeward, Angel, novelist Thomas Wolfe writes, ‘‘Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.’’
I agree. Like Wolfe, I think there’s a particularly definable American kind of loneliness and so I’ve been searching my shelves, reviewing the scholarship and asking my friends and colleagues which 10 works of fiction they’d name as the ‘‘loneliest’’ books in America.
I don’t mean the ‘‘loneliest book’’ in the same way the Maytag repairman was lonely: I don’t mean books rarely requested. I mean the ones that best capture an essentially American sense of disconnection.
Nor was I asking about books focused on solitude — Henry David Thoreau comes to mind, as do May Sarton and Cheryl Strayed — but instead about works of fiction that capture the pain of being emotionally, psychologically, spiritually or culturally isolated.
I started with my own list of 50 works of fiction that lasso loneliness and drag it forward as only a US writer could.
I put an initial list on my Facebook page where it was corrected, mocked, cheered, applauded and supplemented by those who had their own, often querulous, ideas on the subject.
Although leaving myself open for muttered disbelief (‘‘How could you leave off Fight Club?’’) and sneering ridicule (‘‘Guess you never read The
Bell Jar because otherwise you surely would have included it over other lesser titles.’’), I hereby present a list of the best American fiction written for adults on the subject of loneliness, beginning with a brief quotation to suggest why the work is essential.
‘‘Whatever walked there, walked alone’’: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.
‘‘The vast obscurity beyond the city’’: The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald.
‘‘Misery hides aloof’’: Bartleby the
Scrivener by Herman Melville.
‘‘She didn’t like to be alone. Even more, she didn’t like being with people’’: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.
‘‘Why can’t I talk to you?’’: Of Mice
and Men by John Steinbeck.
‘‘She would of been a good woman
. . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life’’: A
Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery
O’Connor.
‘‘People always clap for the wrong reasons’’: Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.
‘‘Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire’’: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.
‘‘Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down’’:
Beloved by Toni Morrison.
‘‘Some visceral part of me simply blamed her for having what I wanted, and for having it so easily’’: A
Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.
OK: I simply cannot leave these next 10 off the list, even if I can’t make the space to quote from them. Here are more of the best on American loneliness:
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy
Allison.
Appointment in Samarra by John
O’Hara.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway.
Go Tell It On The Mountain by James
Baldwin.
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.
I Know This Much is True by Wally
Lamb.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London. Deadwood by Pete Dexter.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte
Perkins Gilman.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty
Smith.
The best American writers give us perspective on the difference between being alone and being lonely: One is like walking the shoreline while the other is like drowning in the open sea. The landscapes might border and, to an extent, define one another but the experiences are not the same. They hold their own stories — and yet their stories are ours.