Best books…chosen by Tom Crewe
Tom Crewe was recently named to Granta’s list of Britain’s best young novelists. The New Life, his acclaimed fact-based debut novel about two men collaborating on an 1890s study supporting homosexual freedom, is now available in paperback.
Miss Marjoribanks
by Margaret Oliphant (1866). Some days it feels like my life’s mission to help enshrine Oliphant’s rightful place as one of the greatest Victorian writers. She wrote many wonderful books, but this one, about a young woman’s successful campaign to revolutionize her town, is a great place to start. It’s so witty and wise in unexpected ways that no one who reads it will want to stop there.
The Vagabond
by Colette (1910). Colette mined her own experience to tell the story of a music hall artiste. This novel is fascinating for its time, and still exceptional in being about a woman— already divorced—who is living life on the road, with a sweet, loving man at home. Lively, sensitive, and sad, it also features the best kiss I’ve encountered in literature.
The Tree of Man
by Patrick White (1955). White won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973, but it hasn’t kept him in wide circulation. The Tree of Man describes almost the entire lifetimes of a husband and wife living simply on a farmstead in the Australian bush, in ceaselessly interesting, dramatic prose. You won’t read anything else like it.
Ayala’s Angel
by Anthony Trollope (1881). I greatly admire Trollope, who comes closest to tracking in prose the slow but haphazard and never uninteresting movements of life in human society. He wrote so much that even many of his fans aren’t aware of quite how much he could do, and how extraordinarily well. Ayala’s Angel is a late novel full of comedy, romance, and delight: It’s ostensibly leading up to one marriage but ends with five.
The Comforters
by Muriel Spark (1957). Among other things, this book is about a woman who comes to believe that she is living in a novel (which she is). Like all Spark’s work, it is done with stylish economy—economical in everything except its immense cleverness. How wonderful, and how intimidating, that it was her debut.
Maid and Manservant
by Ivy Compton-Burnett (1947). This book is about a domestic tyrant, especially in his relationship to his children. But one doesn’t read Compton-Burnett for her plots so much as for her extraordinary dialogue. Her characters war with words, spilling blood with perfectly pointed phrases.