My Fifteen Favorite Novels

Updated: January 30, 2002

NOTE: a couple of these books aren't novels, but rather collections of short stories. So I guess this is my Fifteen Favorite Works of Book-Length Prose Fiction. but that doesn't sound as good.

1. City of Glass by Paul Auster

It's a pseudo-detective story about an obscure mystery novelist in New York City who stumbles onto a case involving a demented genius professor who'd performed a horrible language experiment on his toddler son years before. Now the son is grown up and the professor has been let out of jail. This book is wild. By the end I was so dizzy I didn't know what my name was anymore. Which is exactly what this book is trying to achieve.

The book may seem sophomoric at first glance -- a snooty English major friend of mine once dismissed Auster as 'too glib.' But she's wrong.

'City of Glass' is the first part of a trilogy, but the other two books really just serve to embellish this one, at least in my opinion. Auster keeps getting more and more popular, which is kind of bumming me out; he used to be Meg's and my little secret. His book 'The Music of Chance' was made into a good movie, and he also wrote the movie 'Smoke' and was involved with another experimental film improvised on the same set, 'Blue In The Face.' 'City of Glass' has also been published in an Art-Spiegelman-style comic book edition, but I'd recommend starting with the text original.

2. On The Road by Jack Kerouac

3. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The great surprise for me was this book's sense of humor and hugely expansive sense of the infinity of the human soul. The odd and unique characters who man the whaling ship are described with great affection and a sense of limitless wonder. I must admit I found Ahab's 'obsession' less convincing than other parts of this novel. His vengeance seems like a device to me; it's Ishmael who I care about. And the great mad cannibal Queequeq, and the crazy sea salts eating their whale steaks and rolling blubber off huge leviathans (I love saying 'leviathans') in great slippery strips.

The final piece in my web fiction project, Queensboro Ballads is a tribute to Melville and this book.

4. Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

It's a short first-person piece, part essay on morality and society, part tragedy and part black-comedy. The first section lays out an articulate and convincing argument that the human spirit will always defeat grand attempts at social engineering -- there will always be an "underground." But the second section shifts from the ethical view to the personal, and the narrator, himself the archetypal "underground man," dissects himself in a series of pathetic anecdotes full of social blundering, jealous obsession and deep cruelty. Dostoeovsky's view of humanity is very bleak, sordid and hopeless here. I'd always thought of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" as the pinnacle of pathetic characterization, but this book makes Kafka seem positively cheerful.

Ultimately, I'm still working out in my mind what this book means. You've probably heard me mention elsewhere that I've created a CD-Rom movie based on this novel, and after devoting two years to this project (which came out pretty good, I think), I still don't feel I completely understand what the book means. I guess that's why I like it so much. I think the book held a similar spell over Jack Kerouac, whose own most self-critical, "pathetic" novel, "Subterraneans" seems to have been modeled after it.

5. The World According to Garp by John Irving

6. Kin-Flicks by Lisa Alther

7. The Castle by Franz Kafka

I related to this novel especially because until recently I was employed as a database consultant by a large and elite Wall Street bank, and the similarities between my confused co-workers who cowered in fear of our managers and the villagers in Kafka's mythical town were striking.

8. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Jane Austen has become "hip" again recently, due to a flood of movies like "Emma" and "Sense and Sensibility." Ignore these movies -- they always get it wrong. Jane Austen was not about fine costumes and lush settings. It's all in the narrative voice, and you can't get that without the book.

9. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker is a weird case because I hated his most popular novel, 'Vox,' which was about a phone-sex call and was successful mainly because it was so racy. Baker doesn't write well about people. In fact his second novel, 'Room Temperature,' tried to be a follow-up to "The Mezzanine' by examining the author's thoughts as he fed his infant daughter a bottle, but even that was too human for him and the book was a bore. But when a subject gets him going -- a plastic McDonald's straw, a paper towel dispenser, whatever -- he's the best. I've enjoyed two other things he wrote: "U and I," a pitiless investigation into his own obsessive admiration for John Updike (which I loved despite the fact that I'm not crazy about Updike's writing, or his smug literary principles) and "Subsoil," a stunning horror story about potatoes (what else?) that ran in the New Yorker a couple of years ago.

10. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

11. Washington Square by Henry James

On the original version of this list, I had "Portrait of a Lady" as my favorite James novel. But then it came out as a movie starring Nicole Kidman, and I thought the movie was pretty blah (and John Malkovich simply should not be allowed to go on overacting like this). So I demoted "Portrait of a Lady" and switched my favorite choice to "Washington Square," a short and very sharp tale of love and greed in old New York. This was also recently made into a movie starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, but nobody I know saw it or talked about it, so I didn't mind as much. (It was also the basis for an old movie called "The Heiress" starring Olivia DeHavilland -- they made movies better back in the days.)

12. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

What a talent! She describes a sad, serious boy entering a Bennington-like upper-crust Vermont college and getting drawn into an odd group of Classics students intensely involved in their studies. It turns out they've been trying to simulate an ancient Greek Dionysian ritual (aren't we all?), and this gets out of hand and leads to all kinds of creepy, exciting endeavors. The publishers of the paperback version of this book seems to be trying to sell it as a suspense story, and got John Grisham to write a blurb. But this book should make John Grisham cry in his sleep, because I read 'The Firm' and I know he couldn't create characters like the impressive Henry or the hilariously annoying Bunny if his life depended on it.

13. Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

The really amazing thing is how Carver pulls this trick over and over again. It's quite impressive. I mean, some of these stories had me crying. As for 'Short Cuts,' Robert Altman's movie based on Carver's works, it was worth watching, but you gotta read the stories. The one I chose for this list is a comprehensive collection published not long before Carver's premature death from cancer.

14. Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth

15. Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol

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by Levi Asher