Best books… Richard Ford
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer, best known for his Frank Bascombe novels, chooses his five favourite books. His latest collection of short stories,
Sorry for Your Trouble (Bloomsbury £16.99), is out now
The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy, 1961 (Methuen £10.99). The best New Orleans novel there is; very Southern, but as far from Faulkner as imaginable. Percy’s 1962 National Book Award winner is a tone perfect, letter perfect evocation of Henry James’s injunction that no themes are so human as those that reflect – out of the confusion of life – the close connection of bliss and bale. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty,
1980 (Mariner Books $17.99). Welty is the other great Mississippi genius. Her sensate vocabulary, matched to her limitless availability to, and sympathy for, life densely and intimately lived, render these powerful stories deeply humane and often uproarious. Nothing you’ll ever read is like them.
Black Boy
by Richard Wright, 1945 (Vintage £9.99). Memoir or novel, Wright’s historydefying achievement – to “hurl words into this darkness” – vividly, bludgeoningly, but most of all truly, gives shape and eloquence to a black youth’s flight from Jim Crow Mississippi on to a literary firmament he could never have dreamed of in that far-away childhood. A daunting book.
The Great Fire
by Shirley Hazzard, 2003 (Virago £8.99). An overlooked masterpiece, Hazzard’s story – set in postwar Japan, Hong Kong, England and NZ – takes as its subject the inferno of war (atomic devastation) and the blaze of human passion (all sorts). Her sentences leave me breathless. Her on-the-page intelligence is unrivalled. It is a novel about how to be civilised.
The Untouchable
by John Banville, 1997 (Picador £9.99). It’d be hard to say which is the best book by the unmatchable Irish novelist John Banville. Here are exquisite sentences, a vibrant canvas brimming with masterfully drawn characters, social history, considerable wit and whimsy, astute assessments of lives as lived, and oh, yes, espionage (English) on a grand scale.