Greatest Novels of the Twentieth Century (okay, My Favorites)

My list is based on sensibility. Isn't everybody's? And you'll probably intuit certain favored themes that dominate the novels. Unplumbable mystery. Doomed youth. The place where youth is destroyed. Impossible love. I'm a total sucker for things like that. And virtuosity with language. That works for me too. I have at least two "show off" novels on this list but they deserved the berth.

And yes, my list is very gay. Or bi. Or polymorphously perverse. Most of my favorite writers were hermaphroditic in their prose, even if their practical sexuality was not. Breton was probably homophobic like most surrealists, but his writing is very bisexually charged quite often. Gunter Grass's little protagonist could morph from a hetero into a lesbian quite easily--remember the palm-licking passage in The Tin Drum?

Many novels I once admired (Hemingway, Fitzgerald) I no longer really respect. And I'm sad that I can't include Nathanael West, but he died so damn young. I think everybody recognizes the nascent genius of Day of the Locust, but I couldn't in good faith include one by him although I've read all his precious few published works.

I went down a few lists of the 100 Greatest Novels of the Twentieth Century. Generally, I'd read about sixty or seventy of the novels on the list. Many of the novels I had cared for during certain periods of my life (Sartre, Camus, Cather, Golding, Wilder, Paul Bowles) but now those novels seem to be provincial to their (admittedly often tempestuous, often interesting) times and zeitgeists. A great novel, like a great poem, has to be transcendent, don't you think? I think any great novel must repudiate its time either partially or wholly. I suppose that's a personal partiality.

Anyway, here's my crazy list. I should probably have some Japanese authors on here. Maybe Akutagawa. Kawabata. There are so many novelists who appear on others' list whom I love as writers of short fiction but not as novelists. I can't believe some of those lists weren't including Cheever's novel because of his mastery of the short story. He didn't similarly master the novel. Thomas Mann? Okay, enough yadda. These are in no special order.


1. Orlando, Virginia Woolf

2. Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov

3. The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil

4. Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau*

5. Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream!, James Chapman

6. Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

7. Great Expectations, Kathy Acker

8. My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Kathy Acker

9. Ulysses, James Joyce

10. Defoe, Leslie Scalapino

11. Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Andre Gide

12. Nadja, Andre Breton**

13. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

14. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

15. Light in August, William Faulkner

16. The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein

17. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass

18. The Lover, Marguerite Duras

19. Franny & Zooey, J.D. Salinger

20. Notre Dame des Fleurs, Jean Genet

21. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence

22. Dans le Labyrinthe, Alain Robbe-Grillet

23. 1984, George Orwell

24. Loving, Henry Green

25. Le Depeupleur, Samuel Beckett***



I didn't know Glass had adapted this! Read what he writes so beautifully here about this 2005 production:

"Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau's novel (written in 1929 and was later made into both a play and a film) forms the basis of the third installment of the trilogy of music/theater works began with Orphée and continued with La Belle et la Bête. In the previous two works (Orphée and La Belle et la Bête), film and opera were combined to create a hybrid form. For Les Enfants Terribles I envisioned something different. I invited the American choreographer Susan Marshall, to help adapt and direct a dance/opera based on the novel in which singers and dancers would share center stage.

"If Orphée is Cocteau's tale of transcendence and La Belle et la Bête his romance, then Les Enfants Terribles is his tragedy. Like the others, it articulates Cocteau's belief in the power of imagination to transform the ordinary world into a world of magic. But unlike the two previous works, in which transformation leads to love and transcendence, Les Enfants Terribles takes us to the world of Narcissus and, ultimately, Death. Hence the tragedy and power of the piece -- a snowball becomes a ball of poison. Dargelos becomes Agathe. A "Room" (normally a place of imagination and creativity for Cocteau) is transformed into a space that jealously refuses to let its "Children" grow up. A harmless "Game" turns into a fierce struggle that ends in destruction.

"The natural world is represented by the snow, which falls relentlessly throughout the opera and (like the spectators) silently looks on, bearing witness to the unfolding events. Here, time stands still. There is only music, and the movement of children through space."

— Philip Glass



** Breton's novel pointed towards hypertext fiction, and a sort of Proustian-Lautreamont new form of novel that nobody really followed up on.

***I suppose one could argue whether this is a novel based on word count, but I cannot see it any other way.