Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and educated in England and in Canada, living there since 1962. His other works include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Coming Through Slaughter (1979), Running in the Family (1982) and the novels Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Divisadero (2007). He has also published several volumes of poetry. The English Patient, joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1992, was made into a film in 1996.
Age in year of publication: forty-four.
Grace Paley 1922–2007
1959 The Little Disturbances of Man
Grace Paley’s world is a small but happy one, happy in the sense that nothing worse remains to happen to the creatures she invents. Subtitled ‘Stories of Men and Women at Love’ (though love — hate would be a more accurate description), her women, the Virginias, Faiths and Annas of these stories, are busy bringing up the children; husbands — Richards, Johns, Peters — having departed for the next woman on the agenda, propelled by testosterone, usually darting a backward glance at wife number one and keeping a careful foot in her door. Elsewhere, bodies age, grandparents fret, kids run riot, and, as always, families demonstrate the American dream to be a species of nightmare.
It is the language she uses, a mélange of New York Russian-Polish-Yiddish, that is the hallmark of her work. Jewish mother lamenting sons: ‘First grouchy, then gone.’ Jewish son, lamenting mother: ‘Me. Her prize possession and the best piece of meat in the freezer of her heart.’ This language is much more than inconsequential wisecrackery; it beats with a rhythm that banishes sentimentality and enables Paley’s understated and colloquial vignettes to suggest broad spaces of emotion and desire — and enjoyment, for Grace Paley adds greatly to the joy of life, each story like sipping a very strong, very dry Martini. Of the little she has written, these stories show her at her wild and original best.
Grace Paley was born and lived in New York. Her only other story collections were Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985) which appeared in Collected Stories (1994). Begin Again: Collected Poems appeared in 2000.
Age in year of publication: thirty-seven.
Jayne Anne Phillips 1952–
1984 Machine Dreams
This is a most unusual novel, gritty, imaginative, skilful, the family story of the Hampsons, who live in a small town in the USA, during those years when confidence in the American dream disappeared in the Depression, in the Pacific during the Second World War, and in Vietnam.
In 1946 Jean marries Mitch Hampson just after his return from the war. Both are already marked by hardship and family loss. Mitch, in New Guinea and the Coral Sea, has returned from a world of machines and death that deadens him for married life. Their two children, the girl Danner and her brother Billy, who like his father is required by his country to fight in the East, this time in Vietnam, complete the story. There is both charm and power in this novel. Phillips uses stream of consciousness, dreams, images of flying horses, aeroplanes, but always appurtenances of war are buried in the appurtenances of life. Cars, dresses, housework, sex, the clicking of pipes in creaking houses mingle with ‘smells of tobacco and men, the sound of men’s voices’ and ‘big machines, earth movers and cranes’.
Artistically, Jayne Anne Phillips’s fine understanding of the place of public events in private lives gives a timeless quality to this intently told family story. ‘You never see the everyday the way you might,’ says Jean Hampson. But Jayne Anne Phillips does.
Jayne Anne Phillips was born in West Virginia and lives in California. Other highly praised books include stories Black Tickets (1979) a novel, Shelter (1995) and Lark and Termite (2008).
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
Sylvia Plath 1932–1963
1963 The Bell Jar
This is Sylvia Plath’s only novel. It is written in the same precise, tense, sharp style as the last poems, with the same tone of brutal honesty moving closer and closer to exasperation and breakdown. But the book is also very funny and frank about social and sexual ambition in 1950s America, the worry about sex and boys, the tension between a Puritan upbringing and sudden, bright chances presented to our heroine. There is a marvellous description of looking at an erect penis for the first time: ‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzard and I felt very depressed.’
The world is watched by Esther Greenwood with the amoral, opportunistic and slightly weary tones of The Catcher in the Rye, and this means that Esther’s breakdown and suicide attempt in The Bell Jar are all the more moving and shocking. The book is full of images of death and decay; the first paragraph opens: ‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs’ and ends: ‘I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.’ The fact that the life and times of the heroine mirror what happened in the life of the young Sylvia Plath gives the book an added immediacy and power.
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston. Her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, was published in 1960. She committed suicide in London a month after The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Her best-known collection Ariel was published posthumously in 1965.
Age in year of publication: thirty-one.
Katherine Anne Porter 1890–1980
1962 Ship of Fools
It is 1931, the eve of Hitler’s accession, and the Vera, a German freighter, sets off from Vera Cruz bound for Bremerhaven, carrying a motley collection of persons of differing nationalities, religions and political beliefs. The passengers perform with brio — loving and lusting, revealing smallness of mind and heart and largeness of bigotry and snobbery. Lurking behind each cabin door are stories diverse, disturbingly real and perkily human.
This is a novel written ahead of its time, taking the German attitude to the Jews in the decades before the war as an analogy to be extended to the poor, to women — to all the dispossessed. But in no didactic way: Lowental, Jewish, is almost as repellent as the Germans who persecute him, and the women on the ship treat each other like ghoulish tricoteuses. This independence of mind marks Porter’s work, as does her style: witty, sometimes acerbic, sometimes beautiful, or languid like the roll of a ship.