Last year, I wrote a piece here called “The Future of Literary Fiction” , which included a list of authors that I regularly search for at Amazon.com for their upcoming novels or short story collections. In essence, it’s a personal version, exclusive of age or nationality, of other recent attempts to list the best writers of fiction. I referenced the list of authors in the 1999 “Future of American Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, which has held up extremely well. Now, TNY has published a new list of “20 under 40″, which doesn’t pretend to be a “best of” list as much as a grouping of representative voices for our current culture. This has generated a number of alternate lists, including this one at The Guardian of British authors and this tiresome and nearly incoherent screed by Lee Siegel in The Observer informing us that fiction is dead. Nonsense.

I like lists, obviously, but I think it’s pointless to confine them to age or nationality. Why leave out Dave Eggers because he’s a year too old? So, here’s my own list again, somewhat expanded, after a year’s additional reading. Sixty writers still writing great fiction.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Kazuo Ishiguro

Thomas Pynchon

Lorrie Moore

Martin Amis

Annie Dillard

Ian McEwan

T.C. Boyle

Milan Kundera

George Saunders

Nicholson Baker

Jeffrey Eugenides

Nathan Englander

Shirley Hazzard

Salman Rushdie

Jane Smiley

David Mitchell

Francine Prose

Sarah Waters

Jim Harrison

Will Self

Thom Jones

E. L. Doctorow

William Trevor

Zadie Smith

Donald Antrim

Tim O’Brian

Alice Munro

Philip Roth

Haruki Murakami

Ryu Murakami

Joyce Carol Oates

Victor Pelevin

Jonathan Franzen

Kevin Brockmeier

John Barth

Jhumpa Lahiri

Robert Coover

Denis Johnson

Richard Powers

William T. Vollmann

Cynthia Ozick

Michel Faber

Stuart Dybek

Ha Jin

Rivka Galchen

Akira Yoshimura

Charles D’Ambrosio

Alexander Hemon

Antonya Nelson

A. M. Homes

Annie Proulx

Maile Meloy

Yoko Ogawa

Jean Echenoz

Janet Frame

Geoff Dyer

Deborah Eisenberg

Jonathan Littell

Mary Gaitskill

Portnoy’s Complaint was my first time. I read it when I was 17 and I can still remember the outlaw sensation. This was a best-seller? This was literary fiction! Wow!

Today, this famous/infamous book is still as funny, obscene, and obscenely funny as any book I’ve ever read. Terry Southern, in his Blue Movie, could only ape Roth’s tropes, but not his savage energy or laughoutloud uproariousness.

Alexander Portnoy is Jewish, sex-addled, and beset by controlling parents who would deprive him of any and all of life’s little pleasures, from French Fries to masturbation. His story, a monologue, told to his shrink, is, as is most of Roth’s fiction, a rant against the absurd and the unfair and, most importantly, the unfree.

If you’re easily offended, stop reading, because (quoting from the book at hand being one of the regular features of this column) it’s virtually impossible to quote something representative, and funny, from Portnoy’s Complaint without it referring to sex. Here goes.

It was at the end of my freshman year of high school — and freshman year of masturbating — that I discovered on the underside of my penis, just where the shaft meets the head, a little discolored dot that has since been diagnosed as a freckle. Cancer. I had given myself cancer. All that pulling and tugging at my own flesh, all that friction, had given me an incurable disease. And not yet fourteen! In bed at night the tears rolled from my eyes. “No!” I sobbed. “I don’t want to die! Please — no!” But then, because I would very shortly be a corpse anyway, I went ahead as usual and jerked off into my sock. I had taken to carrying dirty socks into bed with me at night so as to be able to use one as a receptacle upon retiring, and the other upon awakening.

Later, as an adult, Portnoy meets The Monkey, a woman whose sexual adventurousness matches his own. Or, so he thinks. Ultimately, The Monkey wishes only to please and even takes part in a menage a trois at Portnoy’s insistence. But even that isn’t enough to bind him to her, and she eventually leaves.

Portnoy’s complaint is that he ultimately derives no satisfaction from sex, and, even worse, his preoccupation with sex is what thwarts him in achieving a meaningful, emotional connection with women. His inability, at the end of the book, to achieve an erection, let alone a relationship, with a strong Jewish female in Israel, is funny retribution for his past degrading mistreatment of women.

No one writes books like Portnoy’s Complaint any more. Novels of such sexual frankness are published infrequently (though a steady stream of vivid sexual memoirs have been published in the last decade), and the last really funny novel about sex I can think of was also by Philip Roth, one of his masterpieces, Sabbath’s Theater.

Now Read This! appears once a month on Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian who left his country as a young man before the war tore his country apart. In Chicago, he learned his craft as a writer, in English, and now sees his stories regularly printed in the New Yorker magazine. His fine second volume of short stories, Love and Obstacles, contains eight linked meditations on sex, love, war, writing, and dispossession.

Told in the first person by  Hemon’s stand-in, a young writer from Bosnia with a similar personal history, each story expresses the pain of growing up in a world in which girls are the ultimate (and unattainable) pleasure, writing is the ultimate endeavor, and war the ultimate tragedy.

The memorable first story, “Stairway to Heaven,” finds the narrator as a teenager in Zaire.

It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burnt flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling over my bed, not to mention a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees under my window. The most troubling was the ceaseless roll of drum: the sonorous, ponderous thudding hovering around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I could not tell.

We soon learn that the narrator is sixteen and, as this passage conveys, prone to over-dramatization.

His father is a minor Yugoslav diplomat and the family is holed up in an apartment, virtual prisoners of the violence in the country. He falls in with the next door neighbor, a wild young American diplomat and his sexy girlfriend. He dallies with drugs, only to be discovered by his parents. A final encounter with the American draws an arc from fascination to disillusion.

In “The Conductor,” we meet Muhamed D., one of Bosnia’s greatest poets, who befriends the young writer, who, in his early teens, writes dozens of poems every day. But, Muhamed D. is a real poet, and intuiting that the young man is only a poet manque, chooses to address him as “Dirigent,” turning him fancifully into an orchestra conductor. Over the term of the relationship, the young man witnesses the poet’s vital and courageous poetic output during the siege of Sarajevo, and learns what real poetry is all about. Later, the poet visits the U.S. and they enjoy a wild, drunken night, ending with the young man’s coming to understand that beauty takes many, unexpected shapes.

Hemon saves the best for last. “The Noble Truths of Suffering” depicts an encounter between the young writer, now himself published in the New Yorker and visiting his parents in Sarajevo, and Dick Macalister, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist on a State Department visit to Sarajevo. Macalister resembles Tim O’Brien or Robert Stone, writers of war and its aftermath. A drunken night together followed by lunch with the young writer’s parents the next day, leaves a lasting impression, with the young writer diligently following Macalister’s future work, hoping to find himself used as creative fodder. The story has a trick ending, which I won’t give away, except to say that we come to view the difference between the Bosnian and the American indistinguishable.

In the final story, the writer’s mother asks Macalister if her son is any good as a writer. The reply is “It takes a while to become a writer.” Macalister said, “I think he’s well on his way.” No, Aleksandar Hemon has arrived.

Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.

I know, I know. But, a.) I’m on vacation, so I needed something I could write about off the top of my head and briefly, and, b.) while you may have read it, you’d be surprised how many people, particularly young people brought up on the LOTR movies, have not read Tolkien’s masterpiece.  

If you haven’t read The Hobbit, you need to do so before the movie comes out next year and spoils it for you forever. The main reason why is expressed in the book’s subtitle, “There and back again.” Today we call them “road movies,” but The Hobbit is a trip, Bilbo Baggin’s walking trip, over and through craggy mountains full of orcs, and terrifying forests full of other unmentionables, and beyond to even greater perils. The magic of the book is in the way it conveys the time and effort it takes to make such a journey. Incident, danger, the changing of the terrain, of the seasons, suprising new characters at every turn, and the sheer physical exertion required, all add up to an incredible “journey”. And journey is not something we get to do anymore.

Now read this! is taking a brief vacation, because I am! Last week I wrote about my favorite novel of all time. Now it’s your turn. Leave a brief comment about your favorite novel of all time and we’ll see if any of us agree. Until next week!

My list of the top five novels of all time changes from time to time. Currently it is:

1. Anna Karenina, 2. Lolita, 3. Sabbath’s Theatre, 4. Cousin Bette, 5. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.

Numbers two through five will likely change or change in order, but Tolstoy’s novel of adultery in 19th century Russia has been at the top since I first read it twenty-five years ago. I’m not alone in this. Both Nabokov and Dosteoevsky called the book “flawless,” with the former calling it “one of the greatest love stories in world literature.” In 2007, J. Peder Zane published a book, The Top Ten, the results of asking 125 writers to choose their favorite top 10 books. The overall number one book was Anna Karenina. (An accompanying website allowed everyone to offer their own top ten. The list I posted in 2007 is at the end of this column. Like I said, my list changes.)

Anna Karenina begins with one of the most famous opening lines of all world literature: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Here are a few reasons why it is the best novel I’ve ever read.

It’s the story of the eponymous Anna, and her affair with Count Vronsky. What begins as an innocent flirtation becomes a passionate and destructive love affair that threatens to destroy both lovers. Vronsky, a dashing horseman and soldier, becomes Anna’s refuge from her spent marriage to a pompous court functionary. A 19th-century convention that seems mostly removed from current life (unless you’re talking about high-profile politicians) — her discovery will lead to near-total ostracism, social and otherwise. Her relentless regrets and self-doubt will eventually bring her to a sad and terrible end.

In parallel is the story of Levin and Kitty, whose marriage of mutual respect and commitment unfolds in a rural setting, in contrast to the metropolitan milieu — St. Petersburg and Moscow — where the tragedy of Anna takes place.

Anna is a profound character study and a masterful depiction of human vulnerability. She is flawed but entirely lovable and as real and believable as anyone you’ve ever met in the flesh. Here’s her introduction:

Vronsky . . . . stopped to allow a lady to leave. With the habitual flair of a worldly man, Vronsky determined from one glance at this lady’s appearance that she belonged to high society. He excused himself and was about to enter the carriage, but felt a need to glace at her once more — not because she was very beautiful, not because of the elegance and modest grace that could be seen in her whole figure, but because there was something especially gentle and tender in the expression of her sweet-looking face as she stepped past him. As he looked back, she also turned her head. Her shining grey eyes, which seemed dark because of their thick lashes, rested amiably and attentively on his face, as if she recognized him, and at once wandered over the approaching crowd as though looking for someone. In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile. She deliberately extinguished the light in her eyes, but it shown against her will in a barely noticeable smile.

Vronsky is immediately smitten, as are we. What man wouldn’t respond to a woman so described, and what woman wouldn’t want to be described in similar terms? Later, Anna will complain bitterly that falling in love with Vronsky was not her fault, that it was beyond her control, all of which is prefigured in this early paragraph by the repeated contrast between her “will” and the “barely noticeable smile” (he says it twice), her passion, that she cannot sufficiently control.

John Updike said, “In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark . . . . Anna Karenina emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.”

In part, Tolstoy accomplishes this by never judging her, despite her follies. His compassion for the trap in which she finds herself makes the novel as heartbreaking as it is revealing about human frailty.

(A note about translations. The first time I read Anna Karenina I picked up and dropped three different translations, including the one by Constance Garnett. I never found one that didn’t have all sorts of strange verbal constructs and odd word choices that I found suspect and distracting. My second reading was of the (justly) acclaimed translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is available in a handsome Penguin paperback that is a pleasure to hold.)

Other recommended works: War and Peace, Master and Man, The Cossack, The Sebastopol Sketches, The Death of Ivan Illych, and The Kreutzer Sonata.

My top ten in 2007 (all of which I will get to in this column eventually):

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The Magus by John Fowles

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Cousin Bette by Honore De Balzac

Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.

I first read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park on the recommendation of Vladimir Nabokov, who, in his Lectures on Literature said, “Mansfield Park is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework art, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child.”

He also wrote:

At first Jane Austen’s manner and matter may seem to be old-fashioned, stilted, unreal. But this is a delusion to which the bad reader succumbs. The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person, or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book. An original author always invents an original world, then we experience the pleasurable shock of artistic truth, no matter how unlikely the person or thing may seem if transferred into what book reviewers, poor hacks, call “real life”.

To put it in another way, a great novel is one that creates a wholly convincing world, one in which all of the parts are completely integrated and are, preferably, not all that similar to the world in which we live. Sometimes that world is totally the writer’s creation, as with the Oz books. Sometimes, as with Austen, that world is at least not unlike one that was once real and commonplace, but is no more.

In Austen’s world of the early 19th century British gentry (she wrote all of her major works between 1810 and her death in 1817), the day is spent visiting the neighbors, making charitable visits to the poor, horseback riding, or preparing for the Ball. Women should draw, dance, sing, and play the piano, and men, or, rather, gentlemen, should be able to tell the difference between talent and mere effort in these matters.

Money is something that’s been around in such abundance for so long that no one thinks about it much unless marriage is involved. Then, eligible bachelors are “worth five thousand a year” or “alas, only five hundred a year.”  Sex is for marriage exclusively. Single men who indulge in it are naughty; single women who indulge in it are ruined forever. In such a world, morality is not only a matter of crime and punishment. One can cross over into the reprehensible simply by putting on a theatrical performance in the absence of parental approval.

And that is what much of Mansfield Park is about. The central character is Fanny Price, born poor and being raised by her aunt and uncle in a mansion along with her four cousins, all of them treating her as an inferior with the exception of Edmund who becomes her protector almost from her arrival. Here (pardon the length of this charming passage), we learn that Edmund will take pains for his young cousin’s health by providing her with a horse for her daily exercise.

Though Edmund was much more displeased with his aunt than with his mother, as evincing least regard for her niece, he . . . at length determined on a method of proceeding which would obviate the risk of his father’s thinking he had done too much, and at the same time procure for Fanny the immediate means of exercise, which he could not bear she should be without.  He had three horses of his own, but not one that would carry a woman. Two of them were hunters; the third, a useful road-horse: this third he resolved to exchange for one that his cousin might ride; he knew where such a one was to be met with; and having once made up his mind, the whole business was soon completed.  The new mare proved a treasure; with a very little trouble she became exactly calculated for the purpose, and Fanny was then put in almost full possession of her. She had not supposed before that anything could ever suit her like the old grey pony (of which she had been deprived); but her delight in Edmund’s mare was far beyond any former pleasure of the sort; and the addition it was ever receiving in the consideration of that kindness from which her pleasure sprung, was beyond all her words to express.  She regarded her cousin as an example of everything good and great, as possessing worth which no one but herself could ever appreciate, and as entitled to such gratitude from her as no feelings could be strong enough to pay.  Her sentiments towards him were  compounded of all that was respectful, grateful, confiding, and tender.

We can imagine where this might lead in Austen’s world of perpetual romantic entanglements.

Later, when the children are young adults, Harry Crawford and his sister Mary arrive in the neighborhood, at a time when the stern and principled uncle is away managing business interests. While concerned about the depth of Mary’s principles, the somewhat priggish Edmund cannot completely ignore her charms. Harry will toy with Fanny’s cousins’ affections (and later with her own).

All this leads up to a plan to put on a play called Lovers’ Vows, in spite of Edmund and Fanny’s concern that the family patriarch will disapprove. Eventually Edmund is drawn into the fun, leaving Fanny to appear the scold. Of course, the father returns and is mightily displeased.

Eventually, there will be further romantic interactions and, of course, a happy ending, none of which will be revealed here. I should simply list some of the novel’s many charms: Fanny may be a bit of a stick, but she’s so carefully and lovingly drawn that her principles become her most winning feature; the book makes us actually believe that once upon a time putting on a theatrical in one’s parents’ living room was a sin worth censure; and, its depiction of a sheltered, privileged life presents a convincing demonstration that with privilege comes moral responsibility, and that meeting that responsibility — particularly in one’s interactions with the opposite sex — is the only thing that justifies that privilege.

To conclude with Nabokov: “The charm of Mansfield Park can be fully enjoyed only when we adopt its conventions, its rules, its enchanting make-believe. Mansfield Park never existed, and its people never lived.” Except, I would add, in the minds of those who read it.

Other recommended works: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persusion, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility. They’re all great.

Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.

I dislike the term “genre fiction.” It’s pejorative, and is used to make a value judgment on works of art for their content, rather than their execution. There’s a reason why we don’t think of Poe as a genre writer of horror or detective fiction. Though others might disagree, I don’t think of Tolkein’s “Trilogy” (when I was a teenager we referred to it only as the “the Trilogy” and never as The Lord of the Rings) as fantasy genre fiction or Stanislav Lem’s Solaris as science fiction genre fiction, or Stephen King’s The Shining as horror genre fiction. Now, there is some value in having a term to differentiate between works of high quality and works written less well and according to a formula, but “genre fiction” seems ill suited to that. “Pulp fiction” (shorn of its Tarantinoness) would perhaps be more helpful.

A. E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle, published 70 years ago, is neither genre nor pulp, but one of the most original and influential novels about space and monsters ever written.

The eponymous Space Beagle is an intergalactic spacecraft on a multi-year mission to explore new worlds (sound familiar?). Its central character and hero is Elliott Grosvenor, a young man trained in the techniques of a new science called “Nexialism” — think holism on steroids. Grosvenor’s ability to think and synthesize across multiple disciplines perfectly positions him, far more than more narrow-thinking scientists and military leaders, when the Space Beagle encounters the real stars of the show — space monsters. 

The Space Beagle confronts (and the novel is structured around) four progressively more dangerous monsters. It will give you some idea of how nasty these monsters can get when I tell you that the first, least deadly monster is widely considered to be the inspiration for the creature depicted in the Alien movies. His name is Coerl.  

On and on Coerl prowled . . . . His great forelegs twitched with a shuddering movement that arched every razor-sharp claw. The thick tentacles that grew from his shoulders undulated tautly. He twisted his great cat head from side to side, while the hairlike tendrils that formed each ear vibrated frantically, testing every vagrant breeze, every throb in the ether. There was no response. He felt no swift tingling along his intricate nervous system. There was no suggestion anywhere of the presence of the id creatures, his only source of food on this desolate planet.

See at least a family resemblance to Alien designer H. R. Giger’s nightmare beast? Coerl is also endowed with superhero strength and, being virtually immortal, and very hungry, becomes a bit of a problem when the Space Beagle lands and takes in the “nice kitty,” who proceeds to dine on the inhabitants and escape capture by crashing through foot-thick bulkheads. 

The second monster is the Riim, a telepathic bird-like race that can force the ship’s crew to experience dangerous hallucinations, even though the Rhim are light years away.

The scariest is the scarlet monster Ixtl, found floating in deep space, an immortal creature dating back to before the Big Bang, who, once he gets aboard the Space Beatle, wrecks havoc trying to reproduce by implanting eggs in the crew members’ bodies (another nice detail lifted for Alien).

The fourth is Anabis, an evil consciousness that is as large as a galaxy, whom the Space Beagle can’t simply flee because it might follow them back to the Milky Way. 

van Vogt’s achievement is that he can create a plausibly invincible enemy (each monster is bigger and badder than the one before) only to have Grosvenor just as plausibly defeat each one — and never so obviously as with blasting ray guns or jumping to light speed. 

Even less obviously, because the reader’s attention is so focused on the monsters, Grosvenor defeats a fifth enemy just as threatening — the scientific and military leadership of the Space Beagle. The monsters repeatedly bring out the worst in the crew, accentuating professional jealousies and power ambitions, and only Grosvenor is quick enough to circumvent his fellow crew members in order to save them from themselves. Without being in the least bit weak, physically or otherwise, he’s quite the heroic nerd. 

(Note: The section of The Voyage of the Space Beagle featuring Coerl was actually the first story he sold, to Astounding Science Fiction magazine, and was titled “Black Destroyer.” A. E. van Vogt went on to become a prolific and popular writer of science fiction, and many of his books remain in print.)   

Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them. 

I won’t often devote this column to poetry. Since much of the best poetry is written in shorter forms, it doesn’t really fall within the scope of a “great books” column. (Though, even as I write this, it occurs to me that I may have to write about handfuls of poems by Stevens, Wilbur, and others, someday.) But, I could not long put off writing about T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, for me the best long poem of the English language of the 20th century.

Though I first studied the poem in college — emphasis on “studied”, which doesn’t always mean “experience” or “appreciate” — my first encounter with Four Quartets took place while being chased by fierce thunderstorms across Interstate 70 in Kansas in the early evening. (I learned the next day that I had been surrounded by tornados!) I had put in a cassette recording I’d made off an LP of Four Quartets being read by Sir Alec Guinness.

No, the incredible impression the poem made on me at the time had nothing to do with Obi Wan Kenobi. Guinness’ delivery, though, seems the perfect voice for this poem, much more earnest and spiritually aware than Eliot’s own weary, almost defeated delivery. (The recording is hard to find, but well worth the search. Highly recommended.)

From the beginning, I was captivated by the cadence, the imagery, and the playful, seeking nature of the words. It’s impossible to quote anything less than the whole of the first section:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

                              But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

                        Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush Into our first world.

There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Hamlet is the play, they say, with the greatest number of memorable lines. For me, there’s not a single unmemorable line in what you’ve just read (more than once, and out loud, is recommended).

Perhaps the greatest conundrum of human existence is time, its evanescence balanced by its relentlessness. We can only understand it in the presence of things, such as the “drained pool,” itself a metaphor for time; and we can only understand things in the context of time, their creation, existence, and passing. And, beyond that, most crucially, is what we cannot see or hear or experience as duration, what those of a spiritual bent, “the unseen eyebeam”, perpetually seek: “for the roses/Had the look of flowers that are looked at”. For Eliot, as he says later in Burnt Norton, we can only find that “at the still point of the turning world”, where time and being eternally intersect.

Eliot wrote Burnt Norton in the relative serenity of the mid-30′s. The three remaining long poems that make up Four Quartets — East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding — were written during World War II and with the air-bombardment of London in the background.

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass,

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Here, a description of what would appear to be the natural cycle of creation and destruction, only hints at the larger context. This is not a poem about the war, as such, but clearly the war is at the heart of lines such as this.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action,

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.

Such moments of lucid despair are soon followed by a return to the spiritual seeking which is the great theme of Four Quartets.

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise.  In my end is my beginning.

At the heart of the third poem, The Dry Salvages, Eliot confronts the existential notion of “right action” in a world whose contradictions we can never fully understand. He draws upon the Hindu teachings of Krishna.

“Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;

You are not those who saw the harbour

Receding, or those who will disembark.

Here between the hither and the farther shore

While time is withdrawn, consider the future

And the past with an equal mind.

At the moment which is not of action or inaction

You can receive this: ‘on whatever sphere of being

The mind of a man may be intent

At the time of death’ – that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others:

And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare forward,                       

O voyagers, O seamen,

You who came to port, and you whose bodies

Will suffer the trial and judgment of the sea,

Or whatever event, this is your real destination.”

So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

On the field of battle,                                       

Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers.

But, though it is essential for us not to despair, and to “fare forward,” Eliot brings some light and hope into the equation — assuming that we remain committed to the challenge.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is

Incarnation. Here the impossible union

Of spheres of evidence is actual,

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled,

Where action were otherwise movement

Of that which is only moved

And has in it no source of movement-

Driven by daemonic, chthonic

Powers. And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realised;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying.

In the final poem, Little Gidding, after describing death by air, fire, and water, Eliot meets “some dead master”, who may be Christ or some other spiritual guide from the past. What follows is a brief sermon, which leads the entire poem back to lines reminiscent of the beginning of Burnt Norton.

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

Only there is a new tone, one of comfort and reasurrance. The children of the rose garden have returned, accompanied by the redemptive image of Pentecostal fire.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always-

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Published in 1944, Four Quartets — four poems in five sections each — is less than 50 pages long. I’ve quoted enough of it here, I hope, to convince you to read the entire work. While written by a devoted Christian, it is spiritual without being preachy, its language deeply influenced by Eastern religions. No poem has given me greater solace or hope in the face of what is unknown and unknowable.

Other recommend works: The Waste Land and other Poems.

Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.

Okay, okay. You’ve read The Great Gatsby. We’ve all read The Great Gatsby. You were assigned it in 8th grade, then in high school, and again in Freshman English in college (though your subsequent readings were the Cliff’s Notes!). And you still have that crushed paperback with the cheesy neon lights on the cover. You forgot all about it until you saw the movie on TV, and when Mia Farrow went orgasmic over Robert Redford’s tailored pink shirts, you thought, “Well, that’s enough of that!” (And you didn’t even know, thank God, about a remake with Mira Sorvino and Toby Stephens!)

Well, forget all that. You’re a grown-up now and you need to read Gatsby with a grown-up’s perspective.

Not, of course, that it’s about such grown-up people. Gatsby, in particular, remains the eternal man-boy throughout the book, fixated on Daisy and the wealth he’ll need to win her back, like you and I once obsessed over that perfect pair of shoes that would stun that particular girl (or boy) back when we were 14.

We’re all familiar with the story, and though it’s a corker, full of erotic obsession, adultery, lost love, jealousy, booze, gangsters and murder, the real reason to read and reread The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s prose.

Here’s the famous description of the road between West Egg and New York.

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The image of the doctor’s huge eyes is memorable enough, but the preceding paragraph is what gives that image its real power.

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land.  This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s huge eyes are so potent because they rise up out of a contemporary Hell, vividly described, which the characters in the novel must pass through between their beautiful mansions, where their dreams are realized, and New York City, where the wealth their dreams are made with is created.

The two central characters, the narrator Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, are perfect bookends. Nick is careful and reticent, the repository of other men’s dreams and secrets and never, himself, one to take chances or push himself forward. He’s the perfect receptacle for such a story, because he’s essentially empty.

Gatsby, however flawed, perhaps criminally, however much a slave to his own dreams, however Daisy-whipped, is nonetheless a man of action who will stop at nothing to achieve everything.

But he’s also the King of Overkill, since, as we learn, Daisy is okay, but hardly a Cleopatra. She’s vain and shallow and slightly boring — all good reasons why her husband Tom cheats on her.

Here’s Gatsby described by Nick at the moment of his dream’s fulfillment.

I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

Ultimately, The Great Gatsby is about the wisdom, or lack thereof, we exercise in the selection of our aspirations, how it is the quality of our wishes or dreams that is the real test of the man or woman, far more than his or her ability to make the aspiration real.

No matter what your English teacher once told you, this is great stuff.

Other recommended works: Tender is the Night, The Pat Hobby Stories, and The Collected Short Stories.

Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.