1998 News of the ‘100 Best’ first broke on this day in the New York Times. First and third was James Joyce, with Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist. Nabokov’s Lolita came in fourth, followed by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Of the top ten, probably only two would have been much favoured – or even read – by the general literate public: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (in second place), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (seventh).
Publishers of affordable literary classics since 1917, the Modern Library is now a subsidiary of Random House. To re-focus attention on the venerable imprint – and incidentally sell a few more of its titles – the parent company dreamed up the ‘100 Best’ stunt, drafting in a panel of nine historians and novelists including Daniel Boorstin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Gore Vidal and (the only woman) A.S. Byatt, to make the hard choices.
Lists are meant to provoke, and this one produced plenty of reactions – both in the public prints and on the Random House website. Only nine women’s novels make it – eight if you reckon that Edith Wharton is down for two. Where were Toni Morrison, Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing – not to mention the doyenne of all the other list-makers in the nation (see 11 July), Harper Lee? And where were the inventive, narratalogically experimental Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo? Or, to venture a personal opinion: welcome, Philip Roth, but where is your namesake Henry, author of Call It Sleep, the most imaginative novel of immigration and assimilation in English?
Regrets for those included? There were a few. Why the wordy On the Road? Was it any more than the talisman of a movement? Did Brave New World really belong at number five – or at all? And how had John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra snuck in at number 22? O’Hara had long been disparaged by both academic and metropolitan critical opinion because, as a social realist, he ran counter to what the ideology taught that ‘American literature’ ought to do – that is to engage with the abstract universals of (as de Tocqueville put it) ‘human destiny, man himself, … face to face with nature and with God’.
Still, left to itself the general public didn’t do all that much better. Invited by the Modern Library panel to produce their own list, they came up with a ‘100 Best’ whose top ten featured three novels by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, and four by Ayn Rand – nothing short of her entire fictional oeuvre.