How to Read Literature Like a Professor (28 page)

I’
VE TOSSED BOOK AND POEM TITLES
at you, sometimes at a dizzying pace. I remember that sense of disorientation from my very early undergraduate days (it took me years to figure out “Alain Robbe-Grillet” from the passing references one of my first professors was wont to make). The result can be intoxicating, in which case you go on to study more literature, or infuriating, in which case you blame the authors and works you never heard of for making you feel dumb. Never feel dumb. Not knowing who or what is ignorance, which is no sin; ignorance is simply the measure of what you haven’t got to yet. I find more works and writers every day that I haven’t got to, haven’t even heard of.

What I offer here is a list of items mentioned throughout the
book, plus some others I probably should have mentioned, or would have if I had more essays to write. In any event, what all these works have in common is that a reader can learn a lot from them. I have learned a lot from them. As with the rest of this book, there is very little order or method to them. You won’t, if you read these, magically acquire
culture
or
education
or any of those scary abstractions; nor do I claim for them (in general) that they are better than works I have not chosen, that
The Iliad
is better than
Metamorphoses
or that Charles Dickens is better than George Eliot. In fact, I have strong opinions about literary merit, but that’s not what we’re about here. All I would claim for these works is that if you read them, you will become more learned. That’s the deal. We’re in the learning business. I am, and if you’ve read this far, so are you. Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves. When we’re lucky, they go together. If I had to choose, I’d take learning.

Oh, there’s another thing that will happen if you read the works on this list: you will have a good time, mostly. I promise. Hey, I can’t guarantee that everyone will like everything or that my taste is your taste. What I can guarantee is that these works are entertaining. Classics aren’t classic because they’re old, they’re classic because they’re great stories or great poems, because they’re beautiful or entertaining or exciting or funny or all of the above. And the newer works, the ones that aren’t classics? They may grow to that status or they may not. But for now they’re engaging, thought-provoking, maddening, fun. We speak, as I’ve said before, of literary
works,
but in fact literature is chiefly play. If you read novels and plays and stories and poems and you’re not having fun, somebody is doing something wrong. If a novel seems like an ordeal, quit; you’re not getting paid to read it, are you? And you surely won’t get fired if you don’t read it. So enjoy.

Primary Works

W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940), “In Praise of Limestone” (1951). The first is a meditation on human suffering, based on a Pieter Brueghel painting. The second is a great poem extolling the virtues of gentle landscapes and those of us who live there. There’s a lot more great Auden where those came from.

James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). Heroin and jazz and sibling rivalry and promises to dead parents and grief and guilt and redemption. All in twenty pages.

Samuel Beckett,
Waiting for Godot
(1954). What if there’s a road but characters don’t travel it? Would that mean something?

Beowulf
(eighth century
A.D
.). I happen to like Seamus Heaney’s translation, which was published in 2000, but any translation will give you the thrill of this heroic epic.

T. Coraghessan Boyle,
Water Music
(1981), “The Overcoat II”(1985),
World’s End
(1987). Savage comedy, scorching satire, astonishing narrative riffs.

Anita Brookner,
Hotel du Lac
(1984). Don’t let the French title fool you; it’s really in English, a lovely little novel about growing older and heartbreak and painfully bought wisdom.

Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland
(1865),
Through the Looking-Glass
(1871). Carroll may have been a mathematician in real life, but he understood the imagination and the illogic of dreams as well as any writer we’ve ever had. Brilliant, loopy fun.

Angela Carter,
The Bloody Chamber
(1979),
Nights at the Circus
(1984),
Wise Children
(1992). Subversiveness in narrative can be a good thing. Carter upends the expectations of patriarchal society.

Raymond Carver, “Cathedral” (1981). One of the most per
fectly realized short stories ever, this is the tale of a guy who doesn’t get it but learns to. This one has several of our favorite elements: blindness, communion, physical contact. Carver pretty much perfected the minimalist/realist short story, and most of his are worth a look.

Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales
(1384). You’ll have to read this one in a modern translation unless you’ve had training in Middle English, but it’s wonderful in any language. Funny, heartbreaking, warm, ironic, everything a diverse group of people traveling together and telling stories are likely to be.

Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
(1899),
Lord Jim
(1900). No one looked longer or harder into the human soul than Conrad, who found truth in extreme situations and alien landscapes.

Robert Coover, “The Gingerbread House” (1969). A short, ingenious reworking of “Hansel and Gretel.”

Hart Crane,
The Bridge
(1930). A great American poem sequence, centered around the Brooklyn Bridge and the great national rivers.

Colin Dexter,
The Remorseful Day
(1999). Really, any of the Morse mysteries is a good choice. Dexter is great at representing loneliness and longing in his detective, and it culminates, naturally, in heart trouble.

Charles Dickens,
The Old Curiosity Shop
(1841),
A Christmas Carol
(1843),
David Copperfield
(1850),
Bleak House
(1853),
Great Expectations
(1861). Dickens is the most humane writer you’ll ever read. He believes in people, even with all their faults, and he slings a great story, with the most memorable characters you’ll meet anywhere.

E. L. Doctorow,
Ragtime
(1975). Race relations and the clash of historical forces, all in a deceptively simple, almost cartoonish narrative.

Lawrence Durrell,
The Alexandria Quartet
(
Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
) (1957–60). A brilliant realization of passion, intrigue, friendship, espionage, comedy, and pathos, in some of
the most seductive prose in modern fiction. What happens when Europeans go to Egypt.

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917),
The Waste Land
(1922). Eliot more than any other person changed the face of modern poetry. Formal experimentation, spiritual searching, social commentary.

Louise Erdrich,
Love Medicine
(1986). The first of a number of novels set on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation, told as a series of linked short stories. Passion, pain, despair, hope, and courage run through all her books.

William Faulkner,
The Sound and The Fury
(1929),
As I Lay Dying
(1930),
Absalom, Absalom!
(1936). Difficult but rewarding books that mix social history, modern psychology, and classical myths in narrative styles that can come from no one else.

Helen Fielding,
Bridget Jones’s Diary
(1999). A comic tale of modern womanhood, replete with dieting, dating, angst, and self-help—and an intertextual companion to Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
(1813).

Henry Fielding,
Tom Jones
(1741). The original Fielding/Jones comic novel. Any book about growing up that can still be funny after more than 250 years is doing something right.

F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
(1925), “Babylon Revisited” (1931). If modern American literature consisted of only one novel, and if that novel were
Gatsby,
it might be enough. What does the green light mean? What does Gatsby’s dream represent? And what about the ash heaps and the eyes on the billboard?

Ford Madox Ford,
The Good Soldier
(1915). The greatest novel about heart trouble ever written.

E. M. Forster,
A Room with a View
(1908),
Howards End
(1910),
A Passage to India
(1924). Questions of geography, north and south, west and east, the caves of consciousness.

John Fowles,
The Magus
(1966),
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1969). Literature can be play, a game, and in Fowles it
often is. In the first of these, a young egoist seems to be the audience for a series of private performances aimed at improving him. In the second, a man must choose between two women, but really between two ways of living his life. That’s Fowles: always multiple levels going on. He also writes the most wonderful, evocative, seductive prose anywhere.

Robert Frost, “After Apple Picking,” “The Woodpile,” “Out, Out—” “Mowing” (1913–16). Read all of him. I can’t imagine poetry without him.

William H. Gass, “The Pedersen Kid,” “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” (both 1968). These stories make clever use of landscape and weather and are wildly inventive—have you ever thought of high school basketball as a religious experience?

Henry Green,
Blindness
(1926),
Living
(1929),
Party Going
(1939),
Loving
(1945). The first of these really does deal with blindness in its metaphorical as well as literal meanings, and
Party Going
has travelers stranded in fog, so that’s kind of like blindness.
Loving
is a kind of reworked fairy tale, beginning with “Once upon” and ending with “ever after”; who could resist.
Living,
aside from being a fabulous novel about all the classes involved with a British factory, is the only book I know in which “a,” “an,” and “the” hardly ever appear. It’s a bizarre and wonderful stylistic experiment. Almost no one has read or even heard of Green, and that’s too bad.

Dashiell Hammett,
The Maltese Falcon
(1929). The first truly mythic American detective novel. And don’t miss the film version.

Thomas Hardy, “The Three Strangers” (1883),
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(1886),
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891). You’ll believe landscape and weather are characters after reading Hardy. You’ll certainly believe that the universe is not indifferent to our suffering but takes an active hand in it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (1835),
“The Man of Adamant” (1837),
The Scarlet Letter
(1850),
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851). Hawthorne is perhaps the best American writer at exploring our symbolic consciousness, at finding the ways we displace suspicion and loneliness and envy. He just happens to use the Puritans to do it, but it’s never really about Puritans.

Seamus Heaney, “Bogland” (1969), “Clearances” (1986),
North
(1975). One of our truly great poets, powerful on history and politics.

Ernest Hemingway, the stories from
In Our Time
(1925), especially “Big Two-Hearted River,” “Indian Camp,” and “The Battler,”
The Sun Also Rises
(1926), “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927),
A Farewell to Arms
(1929), “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936),
The Old Man and the Sea
(1952).

Homer,
The Iliad, The Odyssey
(ca. eighth century
B.C
.). The second of these is probably more accessible to modern readers, but they’re both great. Every time I teach
The Iliad
I have students say, I had no idea this was such a great story.

Henry James,
The Turn of the Screw
(1898). Scary, scary. Is it demonic possession or madness, and if the latter, on whose part? In any case, it’s about the way humans consume each other, as is, in a very different way, his “Daisy Miller” (1878).

James Joyce,
Dubliners
(1914),
Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
(1916). First, the stories in
Dubliners
, of which I’ve made liberal use of two. “Araby” has so much going on in it in just a few pages: initiation, experience of the Fall, sight and blindness imagery, quest, sexual desire, generational hostility. “The Dead” is just about the most complete experience it’s possible to have with a short story. Small wonder Joyce left stories behind after he wrote it: what could he do after that? As for
Portrait,
it’s a great story of growth and development. Plus it has a child take a dunk in a cesspool (a “square ditch” in the parlance of the novel) and one of the most harrowing sermons ever committed to paper. Falls, rises, salvation and damnation,
Oedipal conflicts, the search for self, all the things that make novels of childhood and adolescence so rewarding.

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (1915), “A Hunger Artist” (1924),
The Trial
(1925). In the strange world of Kafka, characters are subjected to unreal occurrences that come to define and ultimately destroy them. It’s much funnier than that sounds, though.

Barbara Kingsolver,
The Bean Trees
(1988),
Pigs in Heaven
(1993),
The Poisonwood Bible
(1998). Her novels resonate with the strength of primal patterns. Taylor Greer takes one of the great road trips into a new life in the first of these novels.

D. H. Lawrence,
Sons and Lovers
(1913),
Women in Love
(1920), “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” (1922), “The Fox”(1923),
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928),
The Virgin and the Gypsy
(1930), “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1932). The king of symbolic thinking.