Age in year of publication: forty.
Marilynne Robinson 1943–
1980 Housekeeping
This is a most unusual novel, steeped in imagery of water and light, lakes and trains, and the mountains and snows of the north-eastern USA, where the town of Fingerbone seems to float.
Here live three generations of women. Sylvia, the grandmother, has three daughters: Molly, who becomes a missionary in China; Helen, who is mother to Lucille and Ruthie, but follows her father into the bottom of the lake; and Sylvie, a drifter. Ruthie is the teller of the tale and through her eyes we witness the quiet desperation of children at loose in the world. Grandmother dead, mother dead, they end up with Sylvie, who like all her sisters has eschewed for ever the accepted ways of being a woman. No housekeeping, cake-making or doily-crocheting for her, but magic in the mountains and love when required. As the disapproving townsfolk of Fingerbone move in, Sylvie and Ruth and Lucille variously set off on pilgrimage, the past travelling with them.
Marilynne Robinson has a rare eye for nature. Every insect, gnat on the wing, the shifting colours of snow, water, ice ‘the colour of paraffin’, ‘plaited light’ is closely observed. Smells too — woods with the odour of ‘the parlor of an old house’, cleanliness that smells like a sun-warmed cat. This is a wistful, laconic novel, illuminated by a haunting sense of the spirit of nature, and the spirit of place.
Marilynne Robinson was born in Idaho and lives in New England. Her other novels are Gilead (2004) which won the American National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize and Home (2008) which won the Orange Prize. Housekeeping was filmed by Bill Forsyth in 1987.
Age in year of publication: thirty-seven.
Philip Roth 1933–
1997 American Pastoral
Swede Levov has everything: he is good-looking, a superb athlete, rich, a good father, a good son, a good citizen and a good employer; he is married to a former Miss New Jersey, with whom he has a pretty good sexual relationship; he is even-tempered, at ease with himself, mild-mannered, and much admired. Philip Roth establishes him convincingly and in great detail as one of the most contented men in America, post-Jewish, but deeply alert to his family’s recent history as immigrants. Why then, does his daughter, Merry, become such a difficult presence in the house, refusing first to eat her food and then slowly becoming obsessed with the Vietnam War until she puts a bomb in the local store-cum-post office and disappears? Why do the riots in Newark, where the main Levov factory is sited, occur?
Roth dramatizes the significant events of the second half of the century in the United States in the life of one family, in one all-American consciousness. The result is a novel which is intensely absorbing and readable with some magnificent set scenes such as a forty-fifth anniversary high school reunion at which the narrator meets the Swede’s brother among many others, and a dreadful dinner party at the end of the book which must be the best worst dinner party in all fiction. Swede Levov is alive in this book not as a recognizable type, but as a uniquely vivid personality. His character and his consciousness stay in your mind.
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, and now lives in New York State. His other books include Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), I Married a Communist (1998), The Plot Against America (2001), Everyman (2006), Exit Ghost (2007) and Indignation (2008). American Pastoral won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
Age in year of publication: sixty-four.
Norman Rush 1933–
1991 Mating
Sometimes a novel appears which seems to have no direct literary antecedents, which is written in a tone which is new and fresh, and takes an approach which is original and startling. Norman Rush’s Mating is such a book; it deals with Americans in Africa; it is narrated by a female anthropologist on the make in Botswana. She is urbane, intelligent and has read thousands of books, now she is in search of new sensations and a warm climate and useful research material. She is knowing and cynical and pushy, too selfconscious as a narrator to make the reader dislike her too actively, but so adept with sentences and paragraph endings and exciting prose rhythms, not to speak of self-knowledge, that the reader is full of admiration for her and deeply amused by her antics.
The novel, like all good comic writing, has a dark side: our heroine sets out on a lone journey across the desert to find the brave, remote Utopia which a shady and attractive American called Nelson Denoon has set up in a place called Tsau. While some of this is very funny indeed, there is something strange and unsettling about the social control which Nelson insists on, and the world he has invented. The tone of this book is flawless, the voice is utterly convincing.
Norman Rush was born in San Francisco and now lives in New York. He is the author of three works of fiction: a book of stories, Whites (1986), Mating which won the Irish Times Literature Prize and Mortals (2007). He lived and worked in Africa between 1978 and 1983.
Age in year of publication: fifty-eight.
Salman Rushdie 1947–
1981 Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie is a born storyteller, whose work has been a turning point in the development and perception of modern Indian fiction. Rushdie vibrates with moral passion, with opinion and political belief. He is a dominating writer who engulfs his readers in fabulous stories. A master of comic invention, his characters, full of snot, ego and physical abnormality, leave you with a sense of having sneezed violently and laughed too long and too loudly. Midnight’s Children — an allegory for India’s recent history — leaves you with a great love for its Indian world.
Saleem Sinai is born on 15 August 1947, one of 1001 children, magically endowed, whose birth coincides with India’s severance from Britain. Rushdie takes a savage swipe at Mrs Indira Gandhi and her notorious 1971 Emergency measures, whilst the fantastical plot and flamboyant narrative, centring on the swapping of two babies at birth, give entirely new excitement to the most traditional of British comic literary fancies. Rushdie is the kind of writer whose work is too much surrounded by academic contemplations of his ‘magical realism’ and ‘post-modernism’. Readers need only concentrate on the ebullient Rushdie imagination and the wonder and entertainment of the novel itself.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay and educated in England. Midnight’s Children won the Man Booker Prize. Other novels include Shame (1983), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Satanic Verses, which won the Whitbread Fiction Award (1988), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001), Shalimar the Clown (2005) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008). Midnight’s Children was awarded the Man Booker of Bookers for the best Man Booker winning novel of the first forty years in 2008.
Age in year of publication: thirty-four.