Donna Tartt was born in Mississippi and lives in New York. This, her first novel, was an international bestseller, as was her second, The Little Friend (2002).
Age in year of publication: twenty-eight.
Elizabeth Taylor 1912–1975
1957 Angel
Elizabeth Taylor is one of those English novelists who choose small parameters in which to work upon the monumental fragilities of life. Of her eleven novels, models of graceful prose and sharp humour, Angel is her magnum opus. This story of the life and times of Angelica Deverill — Angel — is told with ironic elegance. Angel, prickly, vain and deluded, writes popular novels notable for their romantic asininity and for their vast sales. She uses her money to discard her humble beginnings, to buy a beautiful husband — Esme Howe Nevinson, minor painter, major rogue — and to live in Paradise House, ultimately only with her sister-in-law Nora and an assembly of cats. Angel is resolutely single-minded but Elizabeth Taylor, always an emotional wizard, so cleverly insinuates the isolation behind her cranky misbehaviour that when Angel dies we are loath to see her go. In the Taylor world, lives that seem uneventful prove quite otherwise. She has an iron-like but delicate way of disinterring maggots of egoism, self-deceit and hypocrisy, for which sins she has much compassion, moving on, an expert observer of the vagaries of desire and love, to reveal the small cruelties we inflict upon those nearest to us, wryly pointing out where real love often lies.
Elizabeth Taylor was born in Berkshire and lived in Buckinghamshire. This novel was chosen by the British Marketing Council in 1983 as one of the best ten novels published since the Second World War. She was equally famous for her short stories.
Age in year of publication: forty-five.
Peter Taylor 1917–1994
1986 A Summons to Memphis
This novel is written in a style which is deceptively languid and effortless. The story it tells is tangled and disturbing even though it is set in a world of good manners and considerable comfort in the South of the United States in the years between about 1930 and 1970. The Carver family come from old money; old Mr Carver’s rebellion consisted of going to Vanderbilt University instead of Princeton, and marrying slightly above himself. He, however, did not allow his four children to rebel at all; A Summons to Memphis tells the story of what they did to him in return. The central event in their childhood was a move from Nashville, where they were happy, to Memphis after their father was half-ruined by a colleague. They never got used to the new city. Their father broke up central love affairs in three of their lives; the fourth was killed in the war. The two girls never married; they run a business now and move around Memphis like teenagers. The narrator Philip is the one who got away. He lives uneasily in Manhattan, but in the months after his mother’s death he is constantly summoned to Memphis where his father, aged eighty-one, is also acting like a teenager and is planning to get married. That is, until the two sisters, brilliant creations both, pounce on him and his intended and then move in on top of him and set about making his life a misery. Taylor steers between a Southern Gothic and a deeply civilized, deadpan and almost distant style, all the more to inspire the reader with awe and fascination. This book can be read in one sitting without once looking up.
Peter Taylor was born in Tennessee and lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of many collections of short stories. A Summons to Memphis won a Pulitzer Prize.
Age in year of publication: sixty-nine.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o 1938–
1967 A Grain of Wheat
This subtle, melancholy novel is set on the eve of Kenyan independence; its characters include a number of British administrators, but the narrative focuses mainly on a group of characters who have been involved in one way or another in the struggle for independence. They are Karanja, who worked for the British and is now in great danger; Gikonyo, who was detained by the British and whose wife had a baby with Karanja while he was away; and Mugo, who was viewed as a hero for his resistance to torture and beatings while in detention, and has been asked to make the main speech on Independence Day in his village. But Mugo was, in fact, the one who betrayed Kihiki, a man who was hanged by the British.
There is a very sharp portrait in this novel of the British as irrational and defeated, misguided idealism mixed with vicious cruelty. But the violence of the Mau Mau years has defeated everybody, has left a legacy of treachery and fear and poison. There is no disillusion, because there was no illusion in the first place. Courage is shown as a form of hatred or a form of passivity. In all the accounts we have of a national liberation, this is the most sober and clear-eyed, and the most angst-ridden, even though it allows the characters, even the British, golden moments which are rendered with great beauty and affection. But, it is clear, nothing has been solved by independence.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o was born in Kenya and after a brief teaching spell in the USA, now lives in Nairobi. His early novels, including A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood (1977), were written in English, but more recent novels such as Wizard of the Crow (2006) have been written in Kikuyu.
Age in year of publication: twenty-nine.
John Kennedy Toole 1937–1969
1980 A Confederacy of Dunces
This book, set in New Orleans, is written with an enormous flawless comic flair, an eye for the absurd detail and an ear for the perfectly placed non sequitur. It tells the story of the truly dreadful Ignatius Reilly, vastly overweight, an intellectual bully, constantly burping and deeply unpleasant in every possible way. Other characters include his long-suffering mother and several of her acquaintances and a policeman whose job it is to sit in the public toilets of a bus station seeking out suspicious characters when he is not made to dress up in absurd costumes by his superior. Ignatius’s mother wants him to get a job; she has spent a fortune on his education. He is so arrogant and smelly and rude that no one, it seems, will employ him until he approaches Levy Pants, whose employees are even more wildly insane than our hero; later he works selling hot dogs, but eats more than he sells. His views on the question of race do not bear repetition: ‘I do admire the terror which Negroes are able to inspire in the hearts of some members of the white proletariat and only wish … that I possessed the ability to similarly terrorize.’ The writing is always controlled, and brilliant and pointed. This is Southern Gothic at its most complete and perfect.
John Kennedy Toole was born in New Orleans and committed suicide after this book had been turned down for publication by innumerable publishers. The novel was finally published by Louisiana State University Press due to his mother’s persistence and the novelist Walker Percy’s help. It then won a Pulitzer Prize.
Posthumous publication.
William Trevor 1928–
1991 Reading Turgenev
‘Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life,’ writes William Trevor. A splendid evoker of such bits and pieces, his novels are sometimes set in England, sometimes in Ireland, but always, in ironic, simple prose, he delves into the iniquities and failures and necessary forgiveness which constitute our lives.