JAMES WOOD'S BEST BOOKS SINCE 1945 (Circa 1994)

Back in 1994, prompted by Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, James Wood presented Guardian readers with his own list of the best British and American writing since 1945.  (He found Bloom a "fine, if prejudiced, reader of poetry, but an unreliable reader of prose.")  The list was offered as a mild corrective, an exercise Wood considered "amusing."  He was careful with his own caveats and omissions - he pled an "ignorance of the theatre" and realized that by omitting the category, he was overlooking the likes of Harold Pinter.  He also excluded journalism other than essays and book reviews.  And, finally, he cut the whole thing off around 1985 - unless "keeping to it would have meant omitting a writer's best work so far."  The list is especially interesting given that Wood says he sough to "avoid the 'representative', 'important' or 'influential' and chosen, instead, books which I like, which seemed to me deep and beautiful, which aerate the soul and abrase the conscience ... "

I had never seen the list - it's not available online - until Nicholas Richards, one of my readers, forwarded me a PDF of the original article.  I've decided to go ahead and reproduce Wood's list in its entirety for a few reasons.

First, it seemed as good a way as any to remind my New York readers that Wood will be appearing this evening at Queens College with Peter Carey and E.L. Doctorow.

Second, I thought the list was pretty damned interesting, and I know many of you will, too, and, since it isn't online, well TEV is all about the public service.

But finally, I'm offering it as a corrective of its own to some of the foolishness that has cropped up around Wood of late.  He certainly doesn't need me to defend him but this list should give the lie to the popular cliche of Wood as the hidebound dean of realism who thinks fiction stopped with Flaubert.  The list appears in its entirety after the jump, typed up exactly as it ran (with its idiosyncrasies), but I think you'll find some surprises.  Pynchon!   Barthelme!  DeLillo!  And quite a few others.  On Wood's best writing list.  (One wonders whether Zadie Smith bothered to read through this list before kneecapping Wood in the pages of the NYRB.)  Check it out - and discuss.

JG Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur
Jane Bowles: Collected Works
LP Hartley: The Go-Between
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead; Armies of the Night
Walter Abish: How German Is It
Harold Brodkey: Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
Cynthia Ozick: The Messiah of Stockholm; Art and Ardour
William Burroughs: The Naked Lunch
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5
Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems
John Cheever: Collected Stories; Falconer
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Angus Wilson: The Wrong Set; Hemlock and After; Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
Fred Exley: A Fan's Notes
Randall Jarrell: Poetry and the Age
Robert Lowell: Life Studies; For the Union Dead; Near the Ocean
Bernard Malamud: The Assistant; The Stories of Bernard Malamud
William Trevor: Collected Stories
James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time; Giovanni's Room
Toni Morrison: Sula; Beloved
Henry Green: Loving; Concluding; Nothing
Howard Nemerov: Collected Poems
AS Byatt: Still Life
VS Naipaul: A House for Mr. Biswas; In a Free State; The Enigma of Arrival
Tim O'Brien: If I Die In A Combat Zone
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
Flannery O'Connor: A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems
Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems
Ezra Pound: Pisan Cantos
John Barth: The Sotweed Factor
Saul Bellow:  The Adventures of Augie March; Seize the Day; Herzog; Humboldt's Gift
John Berryman: The Dream Songs; The Freedom of the Poet and Other Essays
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49; V
Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus; The Counterlife; Reading Myself and Others
JD Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
Donald Barthelme: Sixty Stories
Susan Sontag: Styles of Radical Will
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems
Robert Penn Warren: All The King's Men
Eudora Welty: Collected Stories
William Carlos Williams: Paterson
Edmund White: A Boy's Own Story
Amy Clampitt: The Kingfisher
Don DeLillo: White Noise
WH Auden: The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays; Collected Poems
Paul Bailey: Gabriel's Lament
Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop; Nights at the Circus
Bruce Chatwin: On The Black Hill
James Fenton: The Memory of War
William Golding: Lord of the Flies; The Spire
WS Graham: Collected Poems
Raymond Carver: The Stories of Raymond Carver
Martin Amis: Money; The Moronic Inferno
Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
Jonh Ashbery: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Selected Poems
Geoffrey Hill: Collected Poems
Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook
Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Heritage and its History
Muriel Spark: Memento Mori; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer
Phillip Larkin: Collected Poems
Ian McEwan: First Love Last Rites; The Cement Garden
Andrew Motion: Secret Narratives
Iris Murdoch: Under the Net; The Bell; The Nice and the Good
George Orwell: 1984; Collected Essay and Journalism (4 vols)
Carson McCullers: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
JG Ballard: Concrete Island
Anthony Powell: A Dance of the Music of Time
John Updike: Of the Farm; The Centaur; The Rabbit Quartet; Hugging the Shore
Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Ted Hughes: Selected Poems 1957-81
VS Pritchett: Complete Stories; Complete Essays
Craig Raine: A Martian Sends A Postcard Home
Marianne Moore: Complete Poems
Elizabeth Taylor: The Wedding Group
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children; The Satanic Verses
Tom Paulin: Fivemiletown
Joseph Heller: Catch 22
Christine Brook-Rose: The Christine Brook-Rose Reader
Anthony Burgess: Earthly Powers
Alan Sillitoe: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Graham Swift: Waterland
Iain Sinclair: Downriver
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited; The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold; Through a Cloud
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Denton Welch: A Voice Through a Cloud

Originally printed in the Guardian on Oct. 7, 1994.

Comments

[nicholas Richards]

Mark,

I don't think Waugh wrote a book called "Through a Cloud". It looks like a misprint from the Denton Welch book A Voice Through A Cloud" two lines down

Nicholas

[leon]

He failed to include a single work by William Styron. Quite a glaring omission, I must say.

[KB]

Zadie Smith's NYRB essay re: O'Neill/McCarthy was a cheap grad school pose.

[Pamela]

Interesting! Delighted to see the kudos for Jane Bowles, Wide Sargasso Sea, and The Assistant here--none of them shoo-ins on these kinds of lists.

[Peter G]

Waterland, Money, How German Is It, A Fan's Notes ... quite a few of my own favorites here.

I note that Counterlife and Remains of the Day are both post-1985, but I think that's a more general cut off than a fixed one.

[Nav]

Thanks for posting this list. This blog is the main reason I've come to love Wood's criticism, which in turn has provided me new ways of appreciating great writing. Can't imagine what else to hope for from a literary blog!

[Matthew Sheppard]

Didn't James Wood say of Harold Bloom that he's a fine...reader of prose but an unreliable reader of poetry? You've got prose and prose in the bit introducing Wood's list. Thanks for posting the list.

[TEV]

Hi Matthew, I've confirmed the quote is as I've typed it. I think that's why Wood decided to reconsider Bloom's list - because his prose choices were lacking.

[Alvy Singer]

It isn't the best of Ballard (the exhibition) and well, Salinger's best are Franny or the stories, don't think that Catcher has something special (or new) reading it today. And where is Ginsberg and his Howling?

[EC]

Criticism of Wood has gotten way beyond "the popular cliche of Wood as the hidebound dean of realism who thinks fiction stopped with Flaubert." The point isn't what books are on Wood's "thumb's up" list, the point is how he reads them.

[stephan]

A hold-over from my bachelor days, this defense of Zadie Smith -- but Mark, Mark, has Zadie Smith ever even mentioned Wood in the NYRB? I looked, because I had always read how gracious she was toward Wood, even after his knee-capping of her in his review of Book 1 and 2, and I didn't find anything.

Consider my defense of her honor completed.

[Dan Wang]

Now you have: "reader OR prose, but an unreliable reader of prose."

Confusing, to say the least!

[TEV]

Typos fixed, Dan. Thanks. Sorry

Stephan, not going to respond here right now because I am mulling a longer, more formal reply to Smith's essay, in which I would call her out on her sub-rosa score-settling with Wood. Forgive me if I keep my powder dry in the short term. But you remain an honorable feller ...

[BPJ]

I'm happy to see Updike's "The Centaur" appreciated by Wood; it's a favorite of mine (as I recall, the title character, based on the author's father, was meant to stand as a contrast to Rabbit Angstrom). "Hugging the Shore" is a fine example of Updike's excellence as a critic - I would have added one of his short story collections (not sure which, but I think the stories are his best work).

For Graham Greene, I would add "The Honorary Consul", and for Robert Penn Warren, some of his poetry.

Happy to see "Sula" on the list; "Jazz" is an underrated Morrison novel...

And I think the later 2 novels in Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, "The Mansion" and "The Town" were published after 1945 ("The Hamlet" was earlier); if so, they would go on my list. Not Faulker's finest, but still better than some that are on this list.

[Mike G]

No Nabokov? Wow.

[TEV]

In his lengthy intro, Wood explained that - for the purposes of this exercise - he considered Nabokov Russian.

[David Clarke]

The comment that the real criticism leveled at Wood is 'how' he reads them. If one is going to raise the issue then they need a little more intellectual heft than has been raised against Wood to date.

In fact, there is no 'way' he reads them if that implies a single, dogmatic ideological way. He reads them as poetry / prose of the sentence, he reads them as comedies, he reads them as tragedies, he reads them as satires and he reads with the eyes of a philosopher and theologian as well as a literary critic. As such he deftly does in fact criticize the advocates of hysterical criticism (semiotics, deconstruction), that reduce all writing to 'texts' and thereby as frustrated and inferior prose writers can indulge the fantasy that there 'writing' is just as important as the works they are reviewing. On the other hand, Wood is committed to the value of the novel as form and that historically it has taken over the role played previously by religious texts. His critics pass by this position and continue along their intertextual way, muddying the waters as to make them appear deep.

[James]

"I am mulling a longer, more formal reply to Smith's essay, in which I would call her out on her sub-rosa score-settling with Wood."

Sub rosa? Isn't it better for her to simply present an argument (that happens to be a rebuttal of Woods) than to attack him by name? Should her NYRB article have included a full disclosure?

Zadie Smith is the author of the novel White Teeth, which had its head put on a pike by James Wood, who is a big fan of Netherland, the novel she respectfully fails to fully admire in the above piece.

[Stephen]

you guys should check http://contrajameswoodblogspot.com for some wonderful, thorough wood-bashing.

[Stephen]

sorry, that's http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com

[rowan somervville]

Galling, isn't it when one skims through such a list and sees an unfamiliar, or worse, disliked author, in place of one's favourite.

A little stab in my own kidney when I see Amis - (who I like ) instead of Nabokov (who I worship) ...and where oh where is my beloved Wallace Stegner...

Why must we set up such combative discourse ? I believe the answer to that question is quite simply - fear of death- but that's another story.

In simpler terms, I think the best one can do with such a list is enjoy it for introducing us to unfamiliar or forgotten works . By ranting and plotting and laying siege to imagined towers, one fails to notice that the portcullis is up, the gates wide open, and there's a lovely garden within, open to the public and selling teacakes and lemonade.

[Topher]

Mr. Somervville: Nabokov was considered "Russian" by Wood for the purposes of this list.

Also, As someone who usually agrees with Wood in his assessments, I thoroughly enjoyed Zadie Smith's article in the NYRB. I'm sort of bored by the kneejerk reactions (commenter above: "Grad School pose" Really?) by the Wood fanboy contingent. Of course, I'm looking forward to your upcoming article, Mr Sarvas, but I'm worried that you called her piece a kneecapping, when Wood wasn't even mentioned. I mean, if that's a "kneecapping" what term would you use for Wood assault on Smith (and, again, I'm a bigger fan of the former than the latter)?

[rowan somervville]

Ah yes my dear Topher

Nabokov born in St Petersburg, Ishiguro born in nagasaki, naipal in Trinidad...

[Niall]

It's just lame to classify Nabokov as just a "Russian" writer, particularly since he wrote masterpieces in English. Moreover, his peripatetic exile life gave him very rich pan-EUropean and pan-American experience from which he drew in his writing. He is, in fact, the epitome of the writer who addresses western culture as such, in all its preoccupations. Where he was born and what his native language was are irrelevant to this classification.

[Andrew]

As someone said, of course there's no reason to charge ready to assault the foe's citadel- I confess to reading essentially no criticism so Wood doesn't even exist on my horizon so there's no axe to grind- but I'd find the absence of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker a glaring ommission, when one cosiders much more tame offerings in there. No Beckett, or does his Irishness preclude him?

[Niall]

I'm intrigued to read Mark's take on Zadie Smith's NYRB review - particularly as I know that Smith and Wood are good friends.

[Eugene O'Connor]

The omission of Hemmingway and Steinbeck seems peculiar.OK so Thurber is too light?

[sean murray]

Strange ommission indeed, Andrew, especially given Wood's heroic championing of those qualities we cherish in Beckett's work (and did he not recommend Neverland as 'The Unnamable with wickets'?)... every bit as heroic, in fact, as his championing of those of The Naked Lunch, The Sotweed Factor, The Crying of Lot 49, Sixty Stories...

[D.W. Merriman]

Robert Hass.

[Niall]

Denton Welch? Really? Over Hemingway or Steinbeck?

Ditto for Edmund White. Does Wood having something for teh geighs? Otherwise these choices are inexplicable.

[tom dewis]

I like Wood but I hate lists.

[Scott K]

No Cormac McCarthy? Doctorow? I think Elmore Leonard ought to be on a list like this if only to represent the genre. Oh well. So it goes.

[Marco]

Where's Lawrence Durrell? In Alexandria?

[Jonny]

Wood on McCarthy:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/25/050725crbo_books

And an excellent response to it:

http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com/2009/04/mars-attacks.html

[Sharpe Books]

Its is a very worth collection, but isnt there space for fun stuff on the ebst books collection ?

[DECT phones]

I would agree with mr oconnor furthur up that no steinbeck on the list seems odd.

[Burke Ritchie]

Wood wrote on VS Naipaul recently for the New Yorker.
He missed the flaw in Mr. Biswas: the author's Victorian reticence concerning the hanky-panky that must have gone on Hanuman house. Of course kids don't see much, and maybe not enough time had elapsed on the writing of Biswas, but it still seems a little bit, No Irish girl would..., to me. Readers should be grateful to Patrick French for telling us that in real life one of the gods fathered a child by a niece.

[eeleenlee]

I very much enjoyed Wood's concise and illuminating "How Fiction Works"

thanks for posting

[Matt]

Wood says Harold Bloom is an unreliable reader of prose. That's like saying Larry Bird was an unreliable three-point shooter. There is NO more reliable reader of prose than Harold Bloom!! I imagine Wood is somewhat envious of Bloom's status as THE American critic, it is the only explanation for such rude, polemical statements.

By the way, his list is a joke, On the Road is a poorly written piece of garbage, Plath was a rather boorish, inadequate poet with really nothing to say. Gravity's Rainbow is one of the great books ever, I don't care how over-dense or superfluous Wood deems it, it should be on any list of great books for that time period. I could go on and on, suffice it to say, James Wood is too idiosyncratic in his approach, and above all, OVERRATED!!!

[Alex]

Wood has a fine crtical mind. Still, compared to Harold Bloom, with his appreciation of "Gravity's Rainbow" and Roth's "Zuckerman Bound" books, "The Excutioner's Song" and "Ancient Evenings," Cormac McCarthy's "(pre-1985) "Suttree" and Gaddis' "The Recognitions," Wood is perhaps a bit "unreliable."

[Juan Francisco Ferré]

No Gaddis, no Gass, no Coover, no Beckett, no Nabokov, no McCarthy, no Davenport, no Hawkes, no Theroux, no Reed, no Kozinski, no Paley, no Gravity´s Rainbow, not a serious list, not a serious (literary) mind...

[david]

adventures of huckleberry finn This is a really good read for me, Must admit that you are one of the best bloggers I ever saw.Thanks for posting this informative article

[dan]

Nice

[alceste]

... no Faulkner? no Steinbeck? This sort of lists are always curious, but here Woods looks like scribbling it on a napkin, in bar -

[Renner]

I'm having trouble finding this article in the guardian archives. All references online to this seem to link back to you. Are you sure about the date? many thanks.

[Peter]

Great to see Henry Green and JG Farrell included on Wood's list.