One of the reasons The Godfather, the movie, is one of the best ever made is that this novel bursts with Puzo’s romantic characterization and unfailing verve for storytelling; it is one of the most popular ever written.
Mario Puzo was born in Manhattan, New York, and lived in Bay Shore, Long Island. He won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1972 Francis Ford Coppola movie of his book.
Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
Thomas Pynchon 1937–
1973 Gravity’s Rainbow
The novel opens in London towards the close of the Second World War. A shadowy intelligence department discerns a statistical correlation between American GI Tyrone Slothrop’s sexual encounters and V2 rocket hits. The implicit pun — cockup or conspiracy? — is typical and encapsulates one central unresolved theme of this complex novel. The wider canvas of the book is a phantasmagoric vision of Europe at melting point, a teeming zone where national borders and fixed identities of every kind have dissolved into a shimmering chaos of aggressively competing interests. Everyone is a displaced person. But out of the chaos the future is embodied in multinational corporations which transcend old boundaries and variously exploit, encourage, depend on and serve the demands of emerging technologies. As the secrets of the rocket are gathered and assembled, the autonomous human subject is disassembled: Slothrop literally disintegrates as a character. There are vast numbers of other characters and emblematic presences and set pieces idiomatically based on literary and film genres and cultural forms. Mysticism, drug culture, political history, pornography, cabaret, slapstick, comic books and gangster movies all provide frames of reference. Pynchon’s sympathies are clearly with the underground, the alternative and the unofficial.
Linguistically, Gravity’s Rainbow is extremely inventive, its densely textured, hallucinogenic prose keeping us off-balance and engaged, as well as entertained and astonished.
Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York. His other novels include V (1963) Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006) and Inherent Vice (2009).
Age in year of publication: thirty-six.
Jean Rhys 1894–1979
1966 Wide Sargasso Sea
Antoinette Cosway, the first Mrs Rochester, is the madwoman in the attic at Thornfield Hall who haunts Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea is set in Jamaica in the 1830s. Antoinette tells us of her childhood on the lush island, with its superstition and troubled colonial inheritance and, hovering over her family, an expression of the decadence of the white community, madness. Antoinette is an heiress and is married off to Rochester on his arrival in Jamaica. Fragile and unloved, she has little to seduce him with except the spells and magic of the island. The cadenced words Rhys uses, breathing the winds and smells of the islands, have a seductive, languid force which cruelly exposes Antoinette’s failure.
But the first Mrs Rochester is no more than an imaginative starting point for Jean Rhys to imply larger meanings. In all her novels she is the great chronicler of the unprotected. Here, in dreamlike, exquisite prose, she recreates an experience of madness which is one of the most affecting in literature. Antoinette’s fate resonates, it is symbolic. For Rochester can never discover the secrets of the islands; Rhys reveals them to be the forces that lie dormant in the weak, fluttering, disregarded beneath the political, racial and sexual tyrannies of the strong.
Jean Rhys was born in Dominica, and lived in Europe and in England. Wide Sargasso Sea appeared twenty-seven years after her earlier four novels and won the W. H. Smith Award and the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1967.
Age in year of publication: seventy-two.
Anne Rice 1941–
1976 Interview with the Vampire
There are very few popular novels as strange as this one, in which Anne Rice began her journey into the world of vampires, beings of beauty and horror whom she uses to tell us about how and what we are.
Interview with the Vampire famously begins with a boy in a room in San Francisco, listening, with a tape recorder, to the life story of Louis, since 1791 a reluctant vampire consumed with anguish for his lost mortal world. For two centuries he has endured the life of a vampire, awake only at night, nauseated that he must kill human beings to survive. New Orleans is the setting, and in that ravishing city Louis’s longing for redemption conflicts with the outrageous enthusiasm for evil of his companion, the vampire Lestat. Vampires live — and love — and drink blood for ever, so the story Louis tells moves out to encompass other vampires’ extravagant experiences.
Anne Rice imagines her erotic and mysterious tale in prose which is luscious, decadent, rueful. The reader is transfixed by writing of intense sexuality, conveying desire and desperation with vehement force. With Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this is one of the great tales of the supernatural, a mythic exposition of the meaning of good and evil.
Anne Rice was born in and lives in New Orleans. This is the first of her bestselling ‘Vampire Chronicles’, and The Witching Hour (1990) is the first of her sequence of novels about the Mayfair dynasty of witches. Interview with the Vampire was adapted for film in 1994.
Age in year of publication: thirty-five.
Mordecai Richler 1931–2001
1971 St Urbain’s Horseman
It is the 1960s. Jake Hersh and his large Jewish family have moved from Montreal to London, where he sets about making his career as a film director and raising his children. This novel is about the fate of being Jewish, male, ambitious and Canadian during those years. Jake’s wallet and his penis, not to speak of his conscience, also play important roles in the novel. He is constantly under siege from producers; from his father; from his shadowy cousin who flits about the world as gambler, singer, horseman, rake and freedom fighter; as well as from the taxman; from an old friend who is slowly becoming rich and famous; and from his own mortality. He has broken his father’s heart by marrying the beautiful Nancy, who is a gentile, and now he has also broken his mother’s heart by being accused in an obscenity trial. This does not prevent her arriving in London to be by his side: she is nosy, racist and aggressive, and she drives Jake and Nancy out of their minds.
Jake is in constant flight from all that raw emotion. In England, he finds it hard to make much sense of the natives — there is a marvellous description of a ghastly English dinner party. While Jake’s background renders him powerless in the public world of the Swinging Sixties — with actors, producers and TV people everywhere — he is tender and human in his own house with his wife and his three children. Jake Hersh is one of the great Jewish creations of the North American novel.
Mordecai Richler was born in Montreal and lived in England between 1959 and 1972, before he returned to Montreal. His other novels include Cocksure (1968), Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) and Barney’s Version (1997), which was adapted for film in 2010.