If you’re putting together a list of “the greatest books,” you’ll want to do two things: (1) out of kindness, avoid anyone working on a novel; and (2) decide what the word “great” means. The first part is easy, but how about the second? A short list of possible definitions of “greatness” might look like this:
As writers tend to be practical—at least, as regards writing—the list makers here generally have avoided adhering strictly to one approach. That’s to their credit and our benefit. We learn more about literature from intuitions than calculations, and the intuitions of good authors are especially valuable because, as the poet James Richardson puts it, writers are “how books read each other.” So what can these lists tell us about how these writers read great books, and how those great books, in turn, read them? For a representative example, let’s consider the selections made by Judy Budnitz, a younger author known for fabular, dreamily deadpan short stories.
The first thing to notice about Budnitz’s list is that it isn’t an effort to capture all the eternal works of the West. There’s no Homer, no Shakespeare, no Dante, no Chaucer—no roundup of Great Greats. But she also hasn’t ignored the giants; at least four of her choices—Nabokov, Tolstoy, Isaac Babel, and Bruno Schulz—are picks that would look reasonable in any collection of All Stars. This is a common approach, and it speaks to the loyalty most writers feel to their craft heritage (and in a book like this, to their desire to look erudite alongside their peers). It’s a hard pull to resist. Even David Foster Wallace’s idiosyncratic selection of top-selling authors (see #4 above) includes C. S. Lewis, who’s no less canonical for being wildly popular.
The best parts of Budnitz’s list, however, are personal. Some of these elements are obvious—as a short story writer, she favors short fiction (four of her ten selections); as an Atlanta native, she likes Southerners (three of ten); and as a contemporary writer, she prefers more recent work (only Tolstoy predates the twentieth century).
But Budnitz’s list also tells a less straightforward story about aesthetic and political affinities. Her more obscure picks are especially revealing in this regard. She’s the only author here, for instance, to choose a book by Donald Barthelme, whose ludic, funny, and intensely smart stories are likely formal touchstones for her own work. Her selection of Richard Yates (who’s enjoying a minor renaissance) and William Goyen (who remains largely unknown) tells us even more. Yates’s work bears little technical resemblance to Budnitz’s, but his attention to the ways in which dreams are diminished by neighborhood expectations would be attractive to Budnitz, whose stories, however oblique, are often social parables. Goyen, a Texan with a cascading, biblical prose style, would seem to be the odd man out here. Yet while Budnitz is more understated, more withholding, and decidedly more off-kilter, there is a soulfulness to her best writing—a willingness to relinquish control—that recalls the best of Goyen.
This is her most unusual pick, and it is likely the truest. And isn’t that what we want from a “greatest books” list, that it show, as Goethe said genius always must, “the love of truth”?
David Orr, the 2004 recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, lives in New York City.