Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck
(Norton, $32)
On some level, John Steinbeck was a humble man, said Alexander Kafka in The Washington Post. Asked after winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in literature if he thought he deserved the honor, the author of The Grapes of Wrath replied, “Frankly, no.” But Steinbeck had earned the praise that the world heaped on him. He had captured several “quintessentially American” moments in big novels that helped us understand ourselves. In this “smart, soulful, and panoramic” biography, author William Souder reminds us that Steinbeck’s stories drew considerable power from the author’s belief, planted by a marine biologist friend, that human beings are best understood as members of “a phalanx,” a group unit moving like a school of fish toward a shared goal.
Steinbeck (1902–1968) was never fully comfortable standing out from the crowd,
by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866). Fiction grants us experiences that we otherwise wouldn’t have; mercifully, in this case. Dostoevsky is always excellent in his depiction of dark psychological states, but this rendition of (justified) paranoia is unparalleled and has stayed vivid to me all my life.
Crime and Punishment
by Henry James (1881). I could propose almost any of James’ novels, which so shaped my literary youth. His very sentences reflect the experience of psychological apprehension—sometimes glancing and indirect, then suddenly illuminating, as if you’ve been groping through a dark maze and suddenly round a corner into revelation. But I have a particular love of Isabel Archer and her strangely recognizable struggles.
The Portrait of a Lady
by Virginia Woolf (1925). I often teach portions of this novel, and with each re-read I love it more. It speaks so strongly and clearly to the time of life in which I now find myself. Clarissa’s joys are wrested from sorrow; her past is as precious as the day around her, as is every moment of the novel’s one day.
Mrs. Dalloway
by Ralph Ellison (1952). Dismayingly, people seem to speak less often of Ellison than in my youth. Like the other modernists, he requires a degree of attentiveness perhaps at odds with the era of Instagram. But this extraordinary novel more than repays the effort, and its honesty, intensity, and urgency remain undiminished.
Invisible Man
(1996). Munro knows her world, and every facet of her characters, to bedrock. She conveys more in a single story than most writers do in a novel. Her prose is glorious—concrete, restrained, with the occasional, always justified, lyrical fillip—and her insight pitiless. She sees everything but knows that life is mysterious, that self-knowledge and the knowledge of others are fractured and partial.
Alice Munro: Selected Stories
by Jenny Erpenbeck (2015). This novel, about a retired classics professor and his engagement with a group of African refugees in Berlin, is extraordinary—in the exploration of this character’s complexity, his conscious efforts to connect, and the limitations of his education and temperament. Like Munro, Erpenbeck is profoundly wise and honest.
Go, Went, Gone