The New Lifetime Reading Plan

V.S. Pritchett (1900-1997) was a journalist, essayist, and literary critic, but above ali a short-story writer of unusual distinction. His stories, which bring a finely ironical eye to bear on the pretensions and tribal customs of the English middle-class, are directly compa­rable in a British context to the American short stories of John Cheever; his tone and subject matter are also reminiscent of the novйis of Barbara Pym. Try his Complete Collected Stories (1992).

Barbara Pym (1913-1980) is one of many English novelists who deserve to be more widely known in America. Her novйis have a slightly old-fashioned quality, in the best sense; if you like Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, you will like Barbara Pym. She cele- brated but also gently satirized the mannered and compulsively reserved lives of members of the upper-middle class in its long decline from Victorian gentility. You will probably find yourself wanting to read ali of her novйis; start with Excellent Women (1952) and An Unsuitable Attachment (1982).

Thomas Pynchon (1937- ) has deliberately made himself com- pletely invisible in American life except through his books; no pho- tograph of him as an adult is known to exist, and he communicates even with his publisher only with elaborate precautions designed to protect his whereabouts and identity. Under the circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that his greatest novel, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), is in part an exploration of paranoid fantasies. Impossible to describe adequately but fascinating to read, the book, roughly speaking, is a nightmarish study of espionage and rocketry in the waning days of World War II; it is noteworthy especially for its daz- zling language, verbal and mathematical puns, narrative complexity, and bizarre humor.

Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) ranks with, or even ahead of, Ford Madox Ford as the great novelist of World War I. Despite the fact that (from the point of view of the English-speaking world) he served on the "wrong" side during the war, his novel Im Westen nichts Neues (Ali Quiet on the Western Front [1929]) won immedi- ate recognition as an expression of the terror, danger and tedium experienced by men in the front lines of that war, no matter which way they were facing.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) spent much of his adult life in France and Italy, but continued to write in his native German. He began his career as a poet in fнn-de-siиcle Munich and in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century, finally moving to Italy where he wrote the first several of his Duino Elegies. Thereafter he was beset by a paralyzing depression brought on by the grimness of modern life and especially by the catastrophe of World War I. He wrote nothing for a decade, then completed the Elegies in a burst of inspiration that also included writing the fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus (1922); both works assure him a place as one of the twenti- eth-century's greatest poets.

Ole Edvart R0lvaag (1896-1931). It is unfortunate, and unfair, that for many years R0lvaag's great novel Giants in the Earth (1927) was a favorite work of assigned reading in high school English classes. Generations of students learned to loathe it while reading it a few pages per night and sitting through stultifying explications of its themes and characters. If you have hateful memories of the book, try anyway to read it again with fresh eyes; if youve not yet encoun- tered it, a treat awaits you. There has never been a better book about the joys and sorrows of the early farming settlers on the north­ern Great Plains; pioneering, R0lvaag shows us, might have been gratifying, but it was no picnic.

Philip Roth (1933- ) first came to criticai notice with the publica- tion of his short-story collection Gooгbye, Columbus (1959), the title story of which fascinated many readers (and appalled many Jewish readers) by exposing the shallowness and money-grubbing boorishness of a suburban Jewish family. Roth achieved real celebrity with Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a first-person confes­sional account (on a psychiatrist's couch) of the narrators adoles- cence, his compulsive masturbation, and his suffocatingly protective mother. Although some readers, myself among them, feel that through a succession of scatological novelistic explorations of the guilts and obsessions of modern Jewish-American life Roth's work has grown rather monotonous, the brilliance and insouciance of his early work retains its luster.