The Modern Library (21 page)

Of these novels, the second one,
Girl with the Green Eyes,
is the most accomplished. Caithleen and Baba have arrived in Dublin where they are staying in digs and searching for adventure; they are desperate to lose their virginity and desperate to hold on to it at the same time. Baba is full of malice and plans for the future; Caithleen, on whom the novel focuses, is more melancholy and uneasy than her friend, more provincial, but she too wants love and wants to get away from her ghastly family. She meets an older man, a foreigner involved in the movies, who is oddly wise and distant and cynical but great in bed. The tone of the novel is perfectly wry and innocent; some scenes – Caithleen’s efforts to cook fish, for example, or her father’s visit – are desperately funny.

‘Jesus was a liar’ is the oft-repeated cry of Hazel Motes, grandson of a preacher, who returns from the war with his mother’s spectacles, the Bible, and his faith gone awry. In Taulkinham, Tennessee, he founds the Church Without Christ, an entirely original concept to the inhabitants of that town, imbued as they are with Bible-belt religion of the more conventional kind. Motes’s journey through this novel is a test from God. He is accompanied by bizarre villains such as Asa Hawks, the seeing blind preacher, and his determinedly nauseating daughter Sabbath. And there is the fox-faced young Enoch Emery, driven to absurdities by his wise blood, ‘inherited from his daddy’. Animals provide a Greek chorus – a gorilla, a moose, some interesting pigs – even Haze’s car looks like a rat. Hoover Shoats, whose rival Holy Church Without Christ precipitates vengeance, completes these ‘poor white trash’ who have no need for the Lord to mete out punishment; they are a dab hand at doing so themselves.

O’Connor’s creations are grotesque but familiar, brutish but funny, every stitch of their clothing and oddity of speech presented to us in fine detail like an etching on glass. Unique in O’Connor’s startling use of language and in the intense originality of her Gothic imagination, this is a classic of the American South.

This is a big, brilliant, old-fashioned novel – all eight hundred and ninety-seven pages of it – which offers a panoramic view of American society in the first half of the twentieth century. It moves slowly, showing scenes and characters in great detail. The dialogue, throughout the book, is inspired: it is hard to think of a writer who uses dialogue so well. It is also full of strange, startling insights into the lives and motives of the characters, which are reminiscent of those of George Eliot.

Our hero Alfred Eaton is born into a prosperous family in a small town in Pennsylvania; his mother drinks and has affairs, his father loved his older brother who died, and has no interest in Alfred. Thus he grows up self-sufficient, he makes an effort, people respect him and admire him. There is a wonderful account in this book of what it is like to be young, rich and good-looking in New York in 1919 and 1920. After the war Eaton goes into business, he gets married, he has children, he has a mistress, he moves to Washington and takes part in government. O’Hara writes well about his most private, intimate thoughts and moments, and then superbly about public events such as the Wall Street crash. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, as time moves on and Eaton’s personality coarsens, this great American story darkens, this exemplary character, given every opportunity, somehow fails. This is a deeply convincing and disturbing novel, with myriad small touches of pure genius; it is also very funny. It deserves to be widely read and known.

This is a short novel about layer and texture and language. It is set in Toronto and south-western Ontario in the 1920s and 1930s: it offers still points, short scenes, moments in the lives of a number of immigrants; it dramatizes the construction of Toronto. The novel is haunted by the building of one bridge, how it was designed and planned, the deaths and accidents during the slow progress. The prose here has a strange, slow, poetic and deliberate tone, which is also present in Ondaatje’s subsequent novel
The English Patient
(1992). Great risks are taken with narrative, so that the novel comes to resemble a group of photographs or tiny clips from a film. The main character is Patrick Lewis: in a stunningly beautiful piece at the beginning of the book we see him with his father, who works with dynamite to clear logs. Later, we see him arriving in Toronto, falling in love, spending time in prison, and then telling the story. Ondaatje manages to combine a sense of mystery in the spaces between the words with a deeply solid characterization. His genius is in creating one of the best novels of the century about work, which is also one of the best novels about dreams and
disappearances
and magic.

Grace Paley’s world is a small but happy one, happy in the sense that nothing worse remains to happen to the creatures she invents. Subtitled ‘Stories of Men and Women at Love’ (though love–hate would be a more accurate description), her women, the Virginias, Faiths and Annas of these stories, are busy bringing up the children; husbands – Richards, Johns, Peters – having departed for the next woman on the agenda, propelled by testosterone, usually darting a backward glance at wife number one and keeping a careful foot in her door. Elsewhere, bodies age, grandparents fret, kids run riot, and, as always, families demonstrate the American dream to be a species of nightmare.

It is the language she uses, a mélange of New York
Russian-Polish
-Yiddish, that is the hallmark of her work. Jewish mother lamenting sons: ‘First grouchy, then gone.’ Jewish son, lamenting mother: ‘Me. Her prize possession and the best piece of meat in the freezer of her heart.’ This language is much more than
inconsequential
wisecrackery; it beats with a rhythm that banishes sentimentality and enables Paley’s understated and colloquial vignettes to suggest broad spaces of emotion and desire – and enjoyment, for Grace Paley adds greatly to the joy of life, each story like sipping a very strong, very dry Martini. Of the little she has written, these stories show her at her wild and original best.

This is a most unusual novel, gritty, imaginative, skilful, the family story of the Hampsons, who live in a small town in the USA, during those years when confidence in the American dream disappeared in the Depression, in the Pacific during the Second World War, and in Vietnam.

In 1946 Jean marries Mitch Hampson just after his return from the war. Both are already marked by hardship and family loss. Mitch, in New Guinea and the Coral Sea, has returned from a world of machines and death that deadens him for married life. Their two children, the girl Danner and her brother Billy, who like his father is required by his country to fight in the East, this time in Vietnam, complete the story. There is both charm and power in this novel. Phillips uses stream of consciousness, dreams, images of flying horses, aeroplanes, but always appurtenances of war are buried in the appurtenances of life. Cars, dresses, housework, sex, the clicking of pipes in creaking houses mingle with ‘smells of tobacco and men, the sound of men’s voices’ and ‘big machines, earth movers and cranes’.

Artistically, Jayne Anne Phillips’s fine understanding of the place of public events in private lives gives a timeless quality to this intently told family story. ‘You never see the everyday the way you might,’ says Jean Hampson. But Jayne Anne Phillips does.

This is Sylvia Plath’s only novel. It is written in the same precise, tense, sharp style as the last poems, with the same tone of brutal honesty moving closer and closer to exasperation and breakdown. But the book is also very funny and frank about social and sexual ambition in 1950s America, the worry about sex and boys, the tension between a Puritan upbringing and sudden, bright chances presented to our heroine. There is a marvellous description of looking at an erect penis for the first time: ‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzard and I felt very depressed.’

The world is watched by Esther Greenwood with the amoral, opportunistic and slightly weary tones of
The Catcher in the Rye,
and this means that Esther’s breakdown and suicide attempt in
The Bell Jar
are all the more moving and shocking. The book is full of images of death and decay; the first paragraph opens: ‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the
Rosenbergs
’ and ends: ‘I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.’ The fact that the life and times of the heroine mirror what happened in the life of the young Sylvia Plath gives the book an added immediacy and power.

It is 1931, the eve of Hitler’s accession, and the
Vera
, a German freighter, sets off from Vera Cruz bound for Bremerhaven, carrying a motley collection of persons of differing nationalities, religions and political beliefs. The passengers perform with brio – loving and lusting, revealing smallness of mind and heart and largeness of bigotry and snobbery. Lurking behind each cabin door are stories diverse, disturbingly real and perkily human.

This is a novel written ahead of its time, taking the German attitude to the Jews in the decades before the war as an analogy to be extended to the poor, to women – to all the dispossessed. But in no didactic way: Lowental, Jewish, is almost as repellent as the Germans who persecute him, and the women on the ship treat each other like ghoulish
tricoteuses
. This independence of mind marks Porter’s work, as does her style: witty, sometimes acerbic,
sometimes
beautiful, or languid like the roll of a ship.

The ship itself is, of course, an allegory for mankind on its voyage to eternity. Always celebrating as well as indicting the endless folly of Western Man, about to embark on yet another world war, Katherine Anne Porter shows how from the tiny hatreds and foolishnesses of ordinary souls a great body of hate can grow.