What Do Women Want? (29 page)

I have been the recipient of this sort of literary “criticism” for so many years that it makes me snort and laugh rather than smart and weep, but my heart goes out to the novice female writers who run this gauntlet with their first novels and are so wounded that they never show up for the second act. This is, of course, the point. Boo the women off the stage with catcalls and rotten tomatoes and get them back to their proper womanly duties—editing men’s books, feeding the egos of male writers, writing theses about James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway—as if we didn’t already have enough. Political correctness has rapped us on the knuckles for doing this to writers of color who are female. As a result, those artists are starting to be reviewed on their merits rather than their gender. This is a welcome change. Around 1970, Toni Morrison’s first novel,
The Bluest Eye,
initially was turned down by Random House (where she then worked as an editor) because at the time, it was assumed that African-Americans did not buy books and that nobody else would want to read novels about black people. The arrogance of those assumptions has long since been dispelled. But while it is clearly racist to attack writers of color, women writers who appear to occupy no minority niche are still fair game. Women are the scapegoats of the human race, and if scapegoats don’t exist in nature, they have to be invented. The Modern Library list contained only eight women because a ratio of 92 to 8 probably seems normal to literary folk. (Edith Wharton accounted for two of the nine titles.) Diversity has come to mean racial diversity rather than gender fairness. Wherever possible, the token women on a committee, a panel, a list, is apt to be endowed with melanin. This is a condescending way of including two “minorities” in one fell swoop. But women are not a minority; we are 52 percent of the population. We are, in fact, an oppressed majority. If we didn’t already know this the Modern Library list would have made it abundantly clear.

I’ve no particular wish to dump on the Modern Library. That venerable venture, started by legendary twenties publisher Horace Liveright and sold to Random House long before it was a vast agglomeration of formerly independent imprints, always has had a worthy mission: bring good books to the people inexpensively. The Modern Library was clever to devise the one hundred best list as a way of getting column inches for reading. It worked. Anything that gets people talking about books in a video culture is to be applauded. The composition of the original list was hard not to quarrel with.

1.
Ulysses
by James Joyce

2.
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce

4.
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

5.
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

6.
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner

7.
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller

8.
Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler

9.
Sons and Lovers
by D. H. Lawrence

10.
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck

11.
Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry

12.
The Way of All Flesh
by Samuel Butler

13.
1984
by George Orwell

14.
I, Claudius
by Robert Graves

15.
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf

16.
An American Tragedy
by Theodore Dreiser

17.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

18.
Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut

19.
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison

20.
Native Son
by Richard Wright

21.
Henderson the Rain King
by Saul Bellow

22.
Appointment in Samarra
by John O’Hara

23.
U.S.A.
(trilogy) by John Dos Passos

24.
Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson

25.
A Passage to India
by E. M. Forster

26.
The Wings of the Dove
by Henry James

27.
The Ambassadors
by Henry James

28.
Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

29.
The Studs Lonigan Trilogy
by James T. Farrell

30.
The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford

31.
Animal Farm
by George Orwell

32.
The Golden Bowl
by Henry James

33.
Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser

34.
A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh

35.
As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner

36.
All the King’s Men
by Robert Penn Warren

37.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder

38.
Howards End
by E. M. Forster

39.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin

40.
The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene

41.
Lord of the Flies
by William Golding

42.
Deliverance
by James Dickey

43.
A Dance to the Music of Time
(series) by Anthony Powell

44.
Point Counter Point
by Aldous Huxley

45.
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway

46.
The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad

47.
Nostromo
by Joseph Conrad

48.
The Rainbow
by D. H. Lawrence

49.
Women in Love
by D. H. Lawrence

50.
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller

51.
The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer

52.
Portnoy’s Complaint
by Philip Roth

53.
Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov

54.
Light in August
by William Faulkner

55.
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac

56.
The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett

57.
Parade’s End
by Ford Madox Ford

58.
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton

59.
Zuleika Dobson
by Max Beerbohm

60.
The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy

61.
Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather

62.
From Here to Eternity
by James Jones

63.
The Wapshot Chronicle
by John Cheever

64.
The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger

65.
A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess

66.
Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham

67.
Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad

68.
Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis

69.
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton

70.
The Alexandria Quartet
by Lawrence Durrell

71.
A High Wind in Jamaica
by Richard Hughes

72.
A House for Mr. Biswas
by V. S. Naipaul

73.
The Day of the Locust
by Nathanael West

74.
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway

75.
Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh

76.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark

77.
Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce

78.
Kim
by Rudyard Kipling

79.
A Room with a View
by E. M. Forster

80.
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh

81.
The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow

82.
Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner

83.
A Bend in the River
by V. S. Naipaul

84.
The Death of the Heart
by Elizabeth Bowen

85.
Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad

86.
Ragtime
by E. L. Doctorow

87.
The Old Wives’ Tale
by Arnold Bennett

88.
The Call of the Wild
by Jack London

89.
Loving
by Henry Green

90.
Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie

91.
Tobacco Road
by Erskine Caldwell

92.
Ironweed
by William Kennedy

93.
The Magus
by John Fowles

94.
Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys

95.
Under the Net
by Iris Murdoch

96.
Sophie’s Choice
by William Styron

97.
The Sheltering Sky
by Paul Bowles

98.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
by James M. Cain

99.
The Ginger Man
by J. P. Donleavy

100.
The Magnificent Ambersons
by Booth Tarkington

 

 

Ulysses
by James Joyce, a formerly banned book that is now safely verified as a masterpiece because nobody reads it in its entirety, was the safest of safe top choices. Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
gave the list a bit of derring-do, circa 1955. Evelyn Waugh’s
Scoop,
a personal favorite of mine, is a wonderful satirical novel about how the press starts wars, then covers them, but it is in no way as large a portrait of the world as
The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing. The Modern Library did make an attempt to include writers of color—V. S. Naipaul, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin—though women were not among them. Of the women on the list, Edith Wharton’s
The Age of Innocence
and
The House of Mirth
are inevitable rather than courageous choices. (I would probably give a limb to have written
The House of Mirth,
but it hardly takes imagination to praise Wharton this long after her death—in 1937—and more recent transfiguration into film.) Of course all these books are worth reading and would enrich anyone’s life, but so would the ones below.

The Random House readers who posted their choices on the Web site wound up with a list that puts four Ayn Rand novels in place of
Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Catch-22,
and
Darkness at Noon.
Since Ayn Rand is not my cup of tea, I must abstain, but the readers’ list is far more gender neutral than the original and doesn’t discriminate against sci-fi or horror authors. (Robert Heinlein and Stephen King figure prominently.) The attempt to create a women’s fiction list proved a fascinating exercise. I wrote the 250 or so distinguished women writers and critics whose correct addresses I have in my database. I posted a notice on the rather lively writers’ forum that used to be on my Web site (
www.ericajong.com
) until it was spammed out of existence, and then, for good measure, I wrote to about thirty male novelists, critics, and poets whose judgment I respect and whose addresses I happen to have. The results of this informal survey were instructive. Because I promised anonymity to my respondents, they were frank with me. They apologized for liking certain books that they deemed to be important in their own lives—
Gone With the Wind
and
Interview with the Vampire
are two examples—but that they suspected Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom might pooh-pooh. The scholars responded quickly—as if they had been list-making all their lives. The poets’ and novelists’ lists dribbled in more slowly. Pretty much everyone I wrote to tended to take the project seriously. They congratulated me on raising the question of a women’s list at all—whether or not they had seen the original Modern Library list. Sometimes they included lists from their best friends, members of reading groups or seminars.

Here are the books most frequently repeated (after 1. Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind
and 2. Anne Rice’s
Interview with the Vampire
):