The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
by Michael Chabon
read: 2004
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

I finished this one during an overnight layover at Heathrow Airport. Recommended for comic book fans.

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
read: 2019
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

I read this partially while in New Orleans, and it was fun to spot the novel's places as I went, particularly when Ignatius was hawking hot dogs in the French Quarter. It's a silly novel with a nonsense plot that somehow all ties together. Some of the scenarios were laugh-out-loud funny. But the unusual circumstances of the book's publishing history - Toole committed suicide some years before it saw the light of day - also bring emphasis to a sad undercurrent in the novel. The book ends on something of a high note, but it's easy to imagine Ignatius squandering his good fortune in short order.

A Death in the Family

A Death in the Family
by James Agee
read: 2017
Time 100 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

I have a beef with indie films: they never show anything. There is a tragedy, and the heroine gets a knock on the door, and she opens it, and the sheriff is standing there with his hat in hand and a grim look on his face, and then the camera cuts away. The audience has to imagine so much of the core emotional content. Movies are visual and auditory and we never really get inside the character's heads, so any reaction will probably feel forced and hollow, but I still feel cheated. A Death in the Family, by contrast, takes us into the heads of the people directly affected by Jay Follette's death, especially his wife Mary and small children Rufus and Catherine.

The role of religion looms large in the novel. Mary finds solace in her Christian belief, while her father and brother do not. At times, Agee shows religion as a negative force. Mary's retreat to her religious beliefs distances her from her children at a time when they need her support, and Father Jackson is perhaps the closest thing the story has to a villain. On the other hand, we see almost a dogmatic atheism from Andrew, who sees things he can't explain but won't accept them as being supernatural or spiritual.

A Death in the Family was published posthumously, and therefore there is some mystery about Agee's intentions around the order of some of the sections.

Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
read: 2014
Pulitzer Prize

I'd say Olive Kitteridge is most similar to Winesburg, Ohio, of the books I've read. Both are collections of short stories that have some common settings and characters; in the case of Kitteridge, the titular Olive is at least mentioned in every tale. Both capture the zeitgeist of a small town, though Kitteridge is set in coastal Maine rather than Anderson's Midwest. Both also deal with the tragedies and triumphs of normal life rather than earth-shaking events on a global scale.

I wasn't crazy about Winesburg, finding it repetitive, cliched, sentimental, and overly morose. Kitteridge has some of the same flaws, particularly how depressing many of the stories are, but Strout's just such a good writer and hits on unspoken truths of human existence:

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

Kitteridge is dripping with these kinds of poetic observations of modern tragedy. Offsetting the heartbreak is Olive, whose blunt matter-of-factness often serves a humorous counterpoint to the weighty themes.

One of Ours

One of Ours
by Willa Cather
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

Death Comes to the Archbishop took me by surprise because it wasn't a novel I expected a female author to write. The main characters were pretty much all men, and the setting was in the American West.  As I started One of Ours, another Cather book, I was a little disappointed to see it as kind of a conventional coming-of-age story, of dreamer Claude trying to find meaning in his life in a farming community in Nebraska. It was almost like a D.H. Lawrence novel.

Then Claude gets sent off to World War I, and everything changes. I understand the criticism that Cather glorified the war, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Soldiers die, or are injured, even in just the journey by boat across the sea. We see the war destroy towns and destroy culture; this is especially epitomized by David abandoning the violin to join the infantry. But for Claude, the war is a way for him to escape the tedium of farm life, and it exposes him to worlds and people he could not have encountered otherwise. His connection to David is probably more important than his connection to his wife (who is barely mentioned in the second half of the novel); he's a person that Claude would not have met in peacetime. The dichotomy between the horror of war and the perverse freedom it affords the small-town solider is brought out well in this passage:

All the garden flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz, for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.

It's true - poor Willy wouldn't have had this elaborate funeral in Omaha, but he probably wouldn't have needed a funeral at all if he had stayed. Maybe I'm giving Cather too much credit for that unstated part of things, but I don't think so.

The Color Purple

The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

The Color Purple is written in letter format. In the first chunk of the book, each letter is addressed to God. Later, Celie begins addressing her letters to her sister Nettie.

DEAR NETTIE,

I don't write to God no more. I write to you.

What happen to God? ast Shug. 

Who that? I say.

The novel doesn't have an atheist perspective, but more of a spiritualist one. The final chapter is addressed "DEAR GOD. DEAR STARS, DEAR TREES, DEAR SKY, DEAR PEOPLES. DEAR EVERYTHING. DEAR GOD." Celie's faith essentially carries her through periods of her life where very little good happens to her, whether that's faith in God, faith in Nettie, faith in her friend (and sometime lover) Shug, or just an irrational faith that things will somehow get better.

I was predisposed to dislike this novel based on Ralph Wiley's comments on it in Why Black People Tend to Shout, but I found I enjoyed it. Wiley objected to the portrayal of black men in Walker's world, but by the end of the tale some weight was given to the environmental factors that shaped Albert, Harpo, and even Alphonso. They aren't excused for their sins, but they aren't unredeemable either, and Albert in particular makes great strides to atoning for his wrongdoing.

Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

Scarlett O'Hara is maybe the worst mom in literature. Here's a typical quote:

Babies, babies, babies. Why did God make so many babies? But no, God didn't make them. Stupid people made them.

She's an interesting character, though. It was hard not to admire her courage even as I was disgusted by her Machiavellian tactics and lack of maternal instinct.

This is a book that draws criticism for being racist. One can make an argument that Mitchell wasn't espousing a racist viewpoint but rather showing her characters' perspectives on blacks, slavery, and race relations, but she certainly doesn't give any of her black characters equal time.

The Good Earth

The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
read: circa 1994
Pulitzer Prize

This was the first assigned reading book I had for high school English. I remember two things from the book:
1. the women's feet were bound to make them attractive, which makes it sound awful to be a woman in China during that time period.
2. the main character made it his mission in life to acquire land and valued land above all else.

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
read: circa 2007
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

Goodreads rates To Kill a Mockingbird in as the #1 book assigned to high school students, but my teachers never assigned it to me. I did read it a few years ago. I remember liking it, but this is definitely one I'll have to re-read at some point. Maybe the high school will assign it to my son someday.

The Known World

The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
read: 2013
Pulitzer Prize

The Known World, the second novel I read for Black History Month, has a great hook: apparently there were a small number of free blacks who owned slaves before the Civil War. The story centers around the plantation of slave-owning black Henry Townsend, both before and after his death. By making the slaveowner black, author Edward P. Jones forces us to confront slavery divorced from racism, something I'd never done before. To me, slavery was always something blacks did to whites, and I could draw a line from the dehumanizing oppression of slavery to the Jim Crow laws of the early-to-mid 1900's to the more subtle racism that exists today. The Known World forced me to consider the tragedy and absurdity of slavery as an institution. A runaway slave is stealing from his master; he's stealing himself. This point is made most absurdly when we see Broussard, a murderer, conducting the sale of the slave Moses from the jail cell where he awaits trial. The prisoner on death row has more rights than the slave; he still has near-absolute dominion over the slave.

One of the themes that runs through the novel is the psychological damage slavery does not just to slaves but to slaveowners, and even non-slaveowners in the community. Some examples: William Robbins, the wealthiest man in the county, loves his slave Philomena, but he can never really know if she loves him back. Robbins has a daughter by Philomena, Dora, and a white daughter by his wife, Patience, but the girls are denied sisterhood because of the barriers slavery erects. One of the many mini-narratives in the story involves a depressed man named Morris, who as a child staved off his sadness through his friendship with the slave Beau. But Morris and Beau can never be friends as adults the same way they were as boys. Even John Skiffington, who does not own slaves, sees his duties as Sheriff more and more consumed by chasing runaway slaves, to the detriment of his health and sanity.

Professor Amy Hungerford gives two fascinating lectures on some of the metatextual elements in The Known World: the left-to-right symbolism, the fragility of the written word versus the stability of the plastic arts, the power and failures of words to evoke imagination. The narrative voice is godlike and omniscient: it travels back and forth through time, takes a minor character and gives his life story in just a few paragraphs, explodes with minute details, peers into people's heads, and withholds judgement for all. I'm reminded of one of my favorite lines in poetry, Tennyson's "Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours / With larger, other eyes than ours / To make allowance for us all." The narrative voice has this feeling, of absolute knowledge, and understanding, and even pity.

In her final lecture Professor Hungerford describes how Jones worked on this novel for a long time, reading and researching and formulating and re-formulating the narratives and mini-narratives and minutiae, all while writing very little, so that by the time he finally put pen to paper he had entire sections virtually memorized. Professor Hungerford notes that Jones' mother was illiterate, and this suggested to a young Jones the mystery, power, and fragility that pervade the written word as a symbol throughout The Known World. Professor Hungerford wonders aloud at one point about how Jones must have felt carrying the weight of the novel around in his head. I have an idea for a novel myself that I've been thinking about for nearly a year. I think it's time I started actually working on it.

The Confessions of Nat Turner

The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron
read: 2013
Time 100 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

I read William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner as the first book in a series of four I'm going to read this February for Black History Month. It's a curious choice, because it has something of a reputation for being a racist work. Nat Turner was a real figure in history, a slave who led a revolt in Virginia in 1831, resulting in the death of 55 whites (and more than twice as many blacks in retribution). "The Confessions of Nat Turner" is the official court document where Turner describes the planning and execution of the uprising and many of the scant biographical details we know today. Styron writes his novel from Turner's perspective, but, as he writes in the prefacing Author's Note, allows himself "the utmost freedom of imagination" in filling in the gaps in the story and Turner's life. It's a work of fiction, not history. The liberties he took have led to the novel's unsavory reputation in some circles.

Styron admits, in an afterword to the version I read, "Most people were, and are, racist to some degree but at least my racism was not conventional; I wanted to confront and understand blackness." I'm not qualified to answer the question of whether Styron succeeded in his goal - even Styron admits, "... [M]y stranger's perspective might not always ring true to black people" - but I tend to believe that he did not intend Confessions to malign or mis-represent African-Americans. Styron's view of Turner probably is wrong, certainly is incomplete, and is certainly influenced by Styron's whiteness, but this isn't because of racism; it's because "the very fact of a person's otherness to you means there is always something fundamentally hidden about them."

The article in Ebony linked above (an excerpt from a book most recently published as The Second Crucifixion of Nat Turner) suggests Styron wrote the book to paint blacks as dumb, subservient, and degenerate, and Turner himself as an impotent and ineffectual leader. Styron is taking liberties with some of his characterizations, but often they are in the service of showing the evils of slavery. Turner is disgusted at the way Hark submits to the whites, but notes that "the unctuous coating of flattery" is there to disguise a hidden anger. Slavery was evil, and one of its evils was to repress blacks, socially, spiritually, intellectually, even morally. The characters in Confessions are flawed, but their flaws can be read largely as a product of the dysfunctional society surrounding them.

That said, some of Styron's liberties do put a bad taste in my mouth. In the afterword, Styron views Turner as "a dangerous religious lunatic," but he doesn't "want to write about a psychopathic monster," preferring to "demonstrate subtler motives" and "moderate this aspect of his character." This is a fine line to walk. Artistically, he can do whatever he wants, but the very need to moderate and make more subtle strikes me as part of what distances Styron from the black community critical of the book. There are those for whom the scars of racism are fresher, the rage more justified, and Turner's actions are heroic. Turner himself does not show the regret Styron attributes to him, entering a plea of "not guilty" because he says he feels no guilt.

Finally, the imagined relationship between Turner and Margaret Whitehead, the only victim he personally dispatched, is a real stretch. Styron notes that Turner does not mention a wife in his confessions and attributes a pious celibacy to him, assuming an absence of evidence to be an evidence of absence. Styron's Turner finds love, grace, and repentance in Whitehead, though their relationship cannot be consummated (or even acknowledged) in this world. Styron himself says of his representation of the Turner / Whitehead relationship:

No decision I made shows so well the pitfalls waiting for the historical novelist who, however well-intentioned, creates a situation or concept repugnant to idealogues; at the same time, nothing so deftly illustrates the invincible right of the novelist to manipulate historical fact and pursue his intuition concerning that fact to its artistically logical conclusion.

What exactly is an "artistically logical conclusion?" In a sense, fiction is "truer" than non-fiction, because a fiction can be completely true within its imagined world and non-fiction always has to answer to the reality of this one. Styron is writing a world that may be true to itself, but its relationship to this one is dubious. Is that bold, artistic, dishonest, offensive? Probably some of each.

American Pastoral

American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2005
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

I read this book shortly after the Time list came out, and I was absolutely spellbound.  I lent it to a co-worker who, upon reading it, called it one of the five greatest books he'd ever read.  I can't disagree.

American Pastoral captures the mental state of obsession; not the external state of stalking somebody, but the internal state of poring over an event or a decision over and over and over again while maintaining a seemingly healthy exterior.  Roth evokes this repetitiveness without being boring; the novel is gripping.  I've read six books of his and in my opinion this is his masterpiece.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #37, Pulitzer Prize

I started trying to read the books in the Time 100 greatest novels list a little less than two years ago, and starting the list made me look forward to going to Maine.  My family has a place up in Wells, an old house that used to be my great-grandmothers, with has no heat or air conditioning.  A little way up the road is a used book store, and I was looking forward to picking up a few books there.  I was able to pick up some of the novels I needed, but for one I didn't have to go that far; I found a copy of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey sitting atop an old bookshelf at the house.

That shouldn't have anything to do with my reading of Bridge, but it does.  It was a happy accident that I found the book.  When I finally read it, I found that the novel - really a few connected short stories with a wrapper tale - is a tale of an unhappy accident, a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in the early 18th century.  The premise is that a monk, Brother Juniper, witnessed the accident and wants to research the story of those killed in an attempt to determine how it was all part of God's plan.  He never is able to conclusively do so, but I wouldn't say Bridge is an atheistic work.  Instead, it suggests that God works in mysterious ways and his actions and motives are often inscrutable.  Maybe there are no accidents, but that doesn't mean we will ever understand why.

Beloved

Beloved
by Toni Morrison
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

If you want to understand race in America in modern times, you have to go back.

You have to go back to the period after the Civil War.  The slaves weren't immediately given equal rights after the Emancipation Proclamation.  They weren't given jobs, or money, or land, or instructions on how to live in a white-dominated world.  They weren't put in schools, or taught to read, or educated.    If ex-slaves wanted to move to areas with more opportunity and less racial prejudice, they had to do it themselves.  If they could find such a place.

There was little family structure.  Husbands were sold from wives, mothers were sold from children.  There were few grandparents to advise parents on how they had done things.  Men and women were bred together like horses.  Many children were products of slave women raped by their white masters.  Any community the ex-slaves had, they had to build themselves.

Slavery itself had destroyed the culture blacks had left behind in Africa.  They had names given to them by the white man, religion given to them by the white man, language given to them by the white man, and any attempt to continue or recreate their African traditions was stamped out.

Is it any wonder African-Americans are still disadvantaged?  The seeds were sown in the America five or six generations ago, and it is the world in which Toni Morrison's Beloved is set.  The characters have "freedom" but still depend on white people for work.  Sethe, a runaway slave, lives in terror of whites and being sent back to that world.  Sethe and Paul D are shamed by the scars from the abuses they suffered while slaves.  Sethe's daughters Denver and Beloved suffer for the sins of their mother, sins brought on by the fear, shame, and terror of slavery.

Morrison has a gift for playing with morality.  Sethe commits a horrid crime but comes off as almost saintly.  The largesse of white people is shown to be fool's gold.  When characters Beloved and Paul D appear, disrupting the home shared by just Sethe and Denver, we go through the feelings of distrust, happiness, anger, rejection, and acceptance the characters have for one another.  Morrison's style adapts, shifting from folkiness to poetry, taking us into characters' heads in stream-of-consciousness sections, in and out of the past, beyond the wall and death and back.  Beloved is a powerful work, with some devastating sections but also real optimism.  It's the best book I've read in 2012.

The Road

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2010
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize

The Road is the story of a father and son, surviving together on a doomed post-apocalyptic Earth against the elements, starvation, and rampaging hoards of cannibals.  Death is an inevitability, not just on an individual level but for the human species.  The air, sea, and land is drained of color and replaced with a lifeless gray.  Of the three Cormac McCarthy books I've read, The Road is by far the most optimistic.

The protagonists are an unnamed man and his son, who travel alone through a ruined America.  There is no chance that the boy will grow up to live a normal life, the kind of life the man had before whatever terrible event or series of events left the world so desolate, but they press on anyways.  They flee from death, though they recognize some fates - like being captured by the cannibals - are worse than death.  They take brief joy in simple pleasures like finding good shelter for a few days, or a can of Coca Cola.  Most significantly, the man impresses upon the boy that there is a right and a wrong, and that he cannot compromise his humanity in the effort to survive.  This is the real struggle of The Road - not survival, but maintaining some sort of moral code in a world where society has collapsed.

That said, it is a stark book.  That's undoubtedly by design, but it can make it hard to read; every few pages the major characters get in a dire situation - starvation, disease, marauders - manage to survive, only to be plunged into another life-threatening circumstance a few pages later.  McCarthy has stated in interviews that he doesn't think much of literature that doesn't "deal with matters of life and death."  I disagree with him on this front; once we move past concerns of life and death, we can engage what Faulkner called "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."  My issue with The Road, and with McCarthy in general, is that he doesn't take us there.  He has no intention of taking us there.  The struggle for basic human decency underlies the novel, but McCarthy rarely lets you inside his character's heads, so the feelings underlying the actions of the characters and their reactions to what they see are largely a matter of the reader's supposition.  

Tinkers

Tinkers
by Paul Harding
read: 2012
Pulitzer Prize

Tinkers is a member of a particular tribe of novel that rubs me the wrong way.  The prose borders on free-verse poetry, trying to get me to really intensely experience every scene in a way some readers probably like but I find tiring.  Although it's quite a short novel, it's packed with imagery and metaphor and characters spouting philosophy to the point where it loses much of its meaning.  A little more humor would help, too (A welcome exception is a series of encounters between Howard and Gilbert, a hermit in the woods, who turns out to be a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne's).  It's also got a lot of "the novel as craft" elements to it.  Get this: George, the main character, is a clock repairman, and so there are passages describing the working of clocks and the passage of time, but the narrative is told non-chronologically, with the plot spiraling out of itself backwards before ultimately regrouping in the conclusion.  It's like, a metaphor for the movement of a clock!  How clever!

There were a lot of things I liked about Tinkers, though.  A major theme is the way family history is passed between the generations and how they are connected to each other.  The novel has a few different story arcs, but a repeated pattern is the disconnect between father and son.  George Crosby is repulsed as a boy by his father Howard's Grand Mal seizure and tries to run away from home.  Later on we see Howard, as a boy, searching desperately through the woods looking for his own father, a former minister who's been taken away to an asylum for the insane.  The generations are cheated out of an opportunity to understand each other, father and son, as men.

Another element that worked for me was the element of "magic realism."  There are elements of unreality throughout the novel that are presented as fact and not really explained.  How could Gilbert the hermit really be old enough to be a classmate of Hawthorne's?  What did Howard really see in the woods when he saw the fish jump directly into the Indian's mouth?  This element of magic infuses other events, making it unclear whether descriptions are literal or metaphors.  When Howard describes his father fading away, it seems like it must be a metaphor, yet he describes the fading so visceral that it's ambiguous.  The reader is left guessing whether descriptions are poetic, reflective of derangement brought on by epilepsy or impending death, or magic.

I feel as if I've contradicted myself in the above paragraphs, but I really am ambiguous about Tinkers.  There are elements I liked about it, scenes or moments that spoke to me.  At the same time, parts of it felt high-falutin' and too precious.  There are undoubtedly readers who would absolutely love this book, and others who would hate it.  I fall somewhere in the middle.

The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
read: 2011
Modern Library #58, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my favorite bloggers, and in the glow of finishing The Age of Innocence, he wrote:

I generally try to avoid honorifics like 'best novel ever' or 'greatest American novel' and so on. But Age of Innocence really is quite incredible, and, at the moment, I consider it the best novel I've ever read.  

Of course, I had to give the book a shot after that.  And after finishing the novel, my immediate reaction was, "holy crap, he's right."  What follows are some reasons why.

1) It's perfectly constructed.  Age of Innocence is a tight story narratively.  It doesn't seem like anyone could change a word in the last half of the book.  It's not exactly a plot-driven book, but the twists and turns of the narrative all ring true.  Everything proceeds the way it has to.  I made the point before that I love novels that leave some pieces missing or unresolved, and while The Age of Innocence doesn't leave any questions unanswered, it still lingers due to the emotional impact of the work.  The last 100 pages especially are wrenching, devastating even, chapter after chapter, page after page, sentence after sentence.  And the epilogue is pitch-perfect, full of hope and optimism, but in a way that renders the rest of the novel all the more tragic.

2) The conflict.  William Faulkner once said that "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself ... alone can make good writing."  If someone asked for a definition of "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself," you could hand them this novel.  There are no good guys and bad guys; there is no life-and-death struggle.  What's at stake in The Age of Innocence is not survival or victory, but how much we're willing to sacrifice to be happy, whether one can sacrifice that happiness, what duty and honor and love truly mean, and the choices we make in our lives that bind us.  In short, it's about the human experience and the things that make it matter.

3) The context.  I've complained about some other works that it was hard for me to appreciate their context.  I certainly didn't go into reading The Age of Innocence with a profound knowledge of aristocratic society in New York in the late 19th century.  But even though that setting was critical to the events of the novel, I did not feel my ignorance left me with a disadvantage.  On the contrary, the notes Wharton hit were so universal that through my emotional connection to the characters and their situation, I was able to understand that society so much better.  The oaken strengths and the crushing limitations, the loyalty and the brutality, all of it unfolded vividly during the novel.

The best novel I've ever read?  I couldn't argue against it.

The Executioner's Song

The Executioner's Song
by Norman Mailer
read: 2012
Pulitzer Prize

Just a few weeks after tackling David Foster Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest, I decided to have a go at Mailer's 1000-pager The Executioner's Song.  I had read an article over at N+1 about crime and decided reading The Executioner's Song would help me understand more about the criminal justice system.  I don't know if it did that, but it was a terrific, gripping read.

The element I appreciated most was the moral ambiguity.  Gary Gilmore (the central figure, who committed two murders and was sentenced to death in Utah in the late 1976) has qualities we can sympathize with: he's thoughtful, intelligent, spiritual, can be sweet, and ultimately just wants to be loved.  We don't fully know what happened to him in the 14 years he spent mostly in prison early in his adult life, and we don't fully understand how his early childhood or stay in reform school shaped his later behavior, but there's a sense that things might have been different.  At the same time, Mailer in no way absolves Gilmore for his crimes, nor does he excuse them as a one-time lapse.  Gilmore is a disturbed, violent person with definite sociopathic tendencies.  He has a real and terrible impact on everyone whose life he touches.  But no human is one thing, even a man who murders two innocent people in cold blood, and we are left to confront the idea that there is something of Gary Gilmore in all of us.

The book is presented as non-fiction, though it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980.  It is written as a novel, including with specific scenes of dialogue.  It is impossible to tell what Mailer knows for sure, where he is repeating verbatim from interviews, where he is assembling scenes from various, possibly conflicting accounts, and where he is filling in gaps with fiction.  Certain scenes stand out in my mind - like what Gilmore said before killing his first victim - as fabrications where Mailer couldn't possibly know the truth.  It's not unethical, but it's not entirely journalistic at the same time.  Looking past that, I thought The Executioner's Song was excellent and thought-provoking.

Pulitzer Prize for Novel / Fiction

http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Novel
http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Fiction

1918 - His Family, Ernest Poole
1919 - The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
1921 - The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
1922 - Alice Adams, Booth Tarkington
1923 - One of Ours, Willa Cather
1924 - The Able McLaughlins, Margaret Wilson
1925 - So Big, Edna Ferber
1926 - Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis
1927 - Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield
1928 - The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
1929 - Scarlet Sister Mary, Julia Peterkin
1930 - Laughing Boy, Oliver Lafarge
1931 - Years of Grace, Margaret Ayer Barnes
1932 - The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
1933 - The Store, T.S. Stribling
1934 - Lamb in His Bosom, Caroline Miller
1935 - Now in November, Josephine Winslow Johnson
1936 - Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis
1937 - Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
1938 - The Late George Apley, Josh Phillips Marquand
1939 - The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1940 - The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
1942 - In This Our Life, Ellen Glasgow
1943 - Dragon's Teeth, Upton Sinclair
1944 - Journey in the Dark, Martin Flavin
1945 - A Bell for Adano, John Hersey
1947 - All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
1948 - Tales of the South Pacific, James A. Michener
1949 - Guard of Honor, James Gould Cozzens
1950 - The Way West, A.B. Guthrie
1951 - The Town, Conrad Richter
1952 - The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk
1953 - The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
1955 - A Fable, William Faulkner
1956 - Andersonville, MacKinlay Kantor
1958 - A Death in the Family, James Agee
1959 - The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, Robert Lewis Taylor
1960 - Advise and Consent, Allen Drury
1961 - To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
1962 - The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O'Connor
1963 - The Reivers, William Faulkner
1965 - The Keepers of the House, Shirly Ann Grau
1966 - Collected Stories, Katherine Anne Porter
1967 - The Fixer, Bernard Malamud
1968 - The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron
1969 - House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday
1970 - Collected Stories, Jean Stafford
1972 - Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
1973 - The Optimist's Daughter, Eudora Welty
1975 - The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
1976 - Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow
1978 - Elbow Room, James Alan McPherson
1979 - The Stories of John Cheever
1980 - The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer
1981 - A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
1982 - Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike
1983 - The Color Purple, Alice Walker
1984 - Ironweed, William Kennedy
1985 - Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie
1986 - Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
1987 - A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor
1988 - Beloved, Toni Morrison
1989 - Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler
1990 - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos
1991 - Rabbit at Rest, John Updike
1992 - A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
1993 - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler
1994 - The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
1995 - The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
1996 - Independence Day, Richard Ford
1997 - Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser
1998 - American Pastoral, Philip Roth
1999 - The Hours, Michael Cunningham
2000 - Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
2001 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
2002 - Empire Falls, Richard Russo
2003 - Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
2004 - The Known World, Edward P. Jones
2005 - Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
2006 - March, Geraldine Brooks
2007 - The Road, Cormac McCarthy
2008 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
2009 - Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
2010 - Tinkers, Paul Harding
2011 - A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
2013 - The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson
2014 - The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
2015 - All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
2016 - The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
2017 - The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
2018 - Less, Andrew Sean Greer
2019 - The Overstory, Richard Powers
2020 - The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

All the King's Men

All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #36, Pulitzer Prize

I'm impressed by tightly-constructed novels like a puzzles where all the pieces fit together in the end.  But I find that many of the books that stick with me over time are ones where not all the pieces fit; there's a chapter that doesn't make sense, or a decision I can't quite understand, or a line that conveys meaning that isn't apparent.  The apparent incompleteness causes me to ruminate on what it is that I'm missing.  I just finished All the King's Men, and largely it ties up the loose ends; Warren does a terrific job bringing the plot together while keeping things thematically linked.  There are a couple questions I still have after reading the book.

Why is Stark so insistent that they not cut any corners while building the hospital?  Stark is not only unprincipled, he is principled in his unprincipledness; he believes you really can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.  He says at one point that "You've got to make it [goodness], Doc.  If you want it.  And you've got to make it out of badness.  Badness.  And you know why, Doc? ... Because there isn't anything else to make it out of."  With such a cynical viewpoint, which is he so committed to avoiding the badness when constructing the hospital?

I guess on some level, the answer is obvious: he wants the hospital to be an emblem of goodness.  The interesting questions is the philosophical one: does he want it to be an emblem of goodness because of his philosophy on goodness (i.e., to prove that the purest goodness can come out of badness) or despite that philosophy (i.e., to show that this one time he can make something good without all the ugliness that normally attends his accomplishments)?

What is the Cass Mastern chapter all about?  Sometimes I go to a really nice restaurant, and there's something on the menu that doesn't make any sense.  Why are there nachos on the menu at this four-star restaurant?  Well, you got them, and they're ridiculous good, with some sort of inventive twist that only this celebrity chef could think of.  Art is similar; the one element that doesn't seem to fit in often ends up being the emotional touchstone of the whole work.  In the case of All the King's Men, the incongruent piece is the chapter on Cass Mastern, narrator Jack Burden's relative, that forms the subject of his (uncompleted) history thesis.  It's the only story that doesn't involve Jack, Willie Stark, and the Stanton's.

The story revolves around Cass, an ancestor of Jack's, having an affair with Annabelle Trice, the wife of a friend, who finds out and kills himself.  The slave Phebe knows the reason for the suicide, so Annabelle sells her.  Cass is distraught and attempts to track down Phebe, only to find she has been sold into a life of sexual abuse.  Jack tells the story in third-person as a flashback; while studying history he decided to write about Cass's letters.  But ultimately he is unable to, "perhaps ... not because he could not understand, but because he was afraid to understand for what might be understood there was a reproach to him."

Warren wraps this up later by suggesting that once Jack can confront the past he can finally move forward.  "The past" has three levels here: Jack's individual failures (in his personal relationships and in his career ambitions), the inherited family sin (because Cass is Jack's relative), and the sin of slavery that hangs like a cloud over the whole South.  Maybe I'm reading a bit too much into that - Warren doesn't delve too much into the plights on blacks otherwise - but there's no sin without Original Sin and in the South that's slavery.

The other element of Cass' journey that's significant is his fatalism.  He doesn't plan for affair to happen; it just does.  He doesn't intend for Phebe to be sold into a life of rape (in fact, he has strong abolitionist tendences), but she is.  Similarly, Jack finds the pattern of his life directed by others: the disintegration of his relationship with Anne, his marriage and divorce, and his coming to work for Willie Stark all are told as events that happen to him.  His lack of control manifests itself physically in the Big Sleep he suffers when going through difficult times and in the God-given Twitch he sees in the hitchhiker he picks up.  Only when he is ultimately able to see himself as a moral agent is he able to break free from the pattern Cass has set for him.  There he finds that neither Stark's Machiavellianism nor Adam Stanton's uncompromising idealism are satisfactory; we all have to make decisions as best we can and live with the results.