Author: Edith Wharton
First Published: 1920, in the Pictorial Review

The first chapter of the Age of Innocence is one of those magical first chapters that contains the entirety of the book within it. In fact, it holds a single sentence that contains the entire book:

He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.

For that is nearly everything that this book is about: Newland Archer’s insufferable dawdling, his dilettantism, the dilettantism of everyone around him, the constant delay of his own pleasures, and satisfactions never to come.

It is one of the most heartbreaking stories ever told.

Wharton presents an archaeological inventory of the Old New York Society into which she was born. It’s the early 1870’s, a time when everything—and everyone—has an exact and prescribed seat at the lavish dinner table of social custom. The relentless detail of Wharton’s novel produces more than just gorgeous prose; it constructs the fine bars of Newland Archer’s gold and crystalline cage. Every item, every word, every mood, every temperature is an essential part of the magnificent social structure that shackles him in velvet chains from which he can never escape.

You can open The Age of Innocence, point to any random paragraph, and immediately find evidence of this delicate, filigreed ironwork. The details and descriptions of Newland Archer’s world are Wharton’s foundation, walls, and ceiling. But there is one paragraph in particular that linguistically unites all of the themes of this great book—the imprisoning details, the social imperatives, the unconquerable addiction to those imperatives, the pain of a life suppressed:

There was something about the luxury of the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so charged with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into his system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the others, made any less systematized and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. But now it was the Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood irresolute, half-way down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins.

This paragraph appears at the end of Chapter 21, after Archer has spotted Ellen Olenska on Granny Mingott’s pier. He plays the game that he so often plays with himself—the game whereby he delays his own pleasure. “If she doesn’t turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I’ll go back.” Of course, she doesn’t turn, and he does go back. It’s the same cowardly march to his own execution that he can’t help but repeat, over and over.

Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation of The Age of Innocence is my favorite book-to-screen movie of all time, not only because of its visual splendor, but because of its absolute fidelity to Wharton’s original text. It has been dismissed as slow and boring by many, but to me it is probably the greatest film adaptation ever done of one of the greatest novels ever written.

Author: Truman Capote
First Published: 1965, in The New Yorker

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of Western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”

So begins, beautifully, Truman Capote’s meticulously-researched masterpiece about the brutal 1959 murder of the Clutter family in their home, and the pursuit and execution of their killers. It’s hard for us today to imagine airport news stands devoid of true-crime books with their glossy black covers and embossed, bright red lettering, but before In Cold Blood, the modern true crime story as we know it had yet to be born. Literary accounts of crimes and criminals had always been popular with readers, going all the way back to the Newgate novels of the early 19th-century, and even earlier with such “rogue” novels as Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. But In Cold Blood inaugurated what Capote himself called the “nonfiction novel”—a genre of writing that told the “truth” with the artistry and devices of the traditional realist novel. When you read the book, you step into another densely atmospheric and psychological world, chiefly because Capote’s journalism skills walk arm in arm with his creative powers as a novelist.

The story came to Capote’s attention one day when he read a 300-word, one-column article in the back of the New York Times:

Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI)—A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged. The father, 48-year-old Herbert W. Clutter, was found in the basement with his son, Kenyon, 15. His wife Bonnie, 45, and a daughter, Nancy, 16, were in their beds. There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut . . .

Capote immediately traveled to Kansas (escorted by his childhood friend Harper Lee) to investigate the story. The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were captured shortly afterwards, and Capote spent the next six years researching and writing the “novel.” The book has been rightly hailed as the author’s greatest achievement.

I have talked about incredible openings before (García Márquez and Shirley Jackson), but with Capote, it’s the ending that never leaves me. The closing scene of In Cold Blood takes place in the cemetery where the graves of all four Clutters are “gathered under a single gray stone.” Al Dewey, the lead investigator who apprehended Smith and Hickock, meets Nancy Clutter’s high school friend, Sue Kidwell, at the gravesite. After a noticeably unemotional conversation about college plans and boys, Sue trots off, seemingly late for something undisclosed.

“And nice to have seen you, Sue. Good luck,” he called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging, shining—just such a young woman as Nancy might have been. Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.

Author: Jo Ann Beard
First Published: 1997, by Little, Brown

This is one of those books that comes along once in a lifetime. It’s so special that as soon as I finished it, I immediately sent a copy to Elizabeth Quinlan, my reading compatriot and the daughter of the woman who brought this reading sickness upon me in the first place. Like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Boys of My Youth has a voice that is as astounding as it is unique. I’ll let Ms. Beard speak for herself:

Here’s one of my preverbal memories: I’m very little and I’m behind bars, like a baby monkey in a cage. My parents have just put me to bed in a room with bright yellow walls. This is fine with me because in my crib there are various companions—the satin edge of my blue blanket, the chewable plastic circle that hangs down almost to mouth-level on a piece of green cord, and a boy doll named Hal with blue eyes and lickable hands and feet made of vinyl. At this point in my life, I love Hal, and the satin borders of blankets better than any of the humans I know. My mother puts Hal up next to my head as soon as I lie down, which is exactly where I don’t want him. I smack him in the face.

The Boys of My Youth is a collection of non-fiction stories that read like fiction. They jump around to different parts of the author’s life, and together form a kind of memoir. But the book defies categorization, as does Beard’s writing.

One of the things I find most compelling about Beard is her ability to push the boundaries of metaphor and meaning. In this paragraph for example, she juxtaposes an unlikely host of nouns and verbs that give the passage a life of its own:

It is nine o’clock on Saturday night, the sky is black and glittering with pinholes, old trees are bent down over the highway. In the dark field behind, the corn gathers its strength, grows an in inch in silence, then stops to rest. Next to the highway, screened in vegetation, a deer with muscular ears and glamorous eyes, stands waiting to spring out from the wings into the next moving spotlight. The asphalt sighs in anticipation.

The anthropomorphizing of the trees and the corn is just magical. And nearly every sentence in this autobiographical collection, to me at least, sparkles like one of those night-time pinholes.

“The Fourth State of Matter,” first published in The New Yorker in June of 1996, is a grim retelling of Beard’s early departure from work on a day that a graduate student came into her building at the University of Iowa and gunned down the members of the Physics Department. (“At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through.”) But the story is also about her dying collie, the squirrels that have taken up residence in the spare bedroom upstairs, and a husband who has left her. Only Beard could weave these disparate parts together with such dexterity.

“The piece created a small stir when it first appeared,” wrote Tai Moses in a review for metroactive.com. “Some critics were unsettled by Beard’s application of refined narrative technique to a real-life tragedy. Similar criticism was leveled at novelist Kathryn Harrison after publication of The Kiss, her memoir about her incestuous relationship with her father. It wasn’t just that Harrison had made public such a shameful secret; the real complaint seemed to be that she did it so beautifully. But how could she not? To expect a writer to set aside her aesthetic sensibilities in the face of horror seems absurd.” 

Author: Shirley Jackson
First Published: 1962, by Viking Press

Shirley Jackson is best known for her short-story “The Lottery” (1948), as well as her novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). But I’ve heard people say that We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of the best books they’ve ever read, and I am in total agreement with these people. I would go so far as to say that if I had to select my ten favorite books of all time, We Have Always Lived in the Castle would be one of them. The first paragraph is certainly one of the greatest openings ever written:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenent, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

In terms of first paragraphs, only García Márquez comes close.

Mary Katherine Blackwood (or “Merricat” as she’s called in the novel) is the paradigm of the unreliable narrator, reminiscent of the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, only with a more child-like and oddly welcoming writing style. From the beginning, you know this narrator is disturbed, and that you cannot trust anything she says. Her world is a self-created fantasy realm through which the “real story” pokes holes when she is not in control of her narrative. The irony here is of course that Jackson, the author, is in complete control of the narrative, and the book is a marvelous example of the magic a writer can work by withholding bits of information, and revealing other bits at just the right time.

The characters are exquisitely Dickensian (no surprise why I love this book so much), particularly Uncle Julian in his wheelchair, who calls to mind Mr. Dick from David Copperfield. And the final disaster that takes place near the end of the book is like some horrific riot right out of A Tale of Two Cities, or Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. There is an eerie pacing to the story, perfectly timed, that aggravates the mystery behind why everyone else in the family is dead. But it is the voice of the gifted, eccentric narrator that makes it impossible for me to put this book down.

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
First Published: 1925, by Charles Scribner’s Sons

If ever there were a book about holding on to the past, The Great Gatsby is that book. How my heart goes out to Gatsby every time I see him reaching toward that faraway green light across the bay! The light of Daisy Buchanan, the light he’s kept burning all his life. But this book is about more than reaching back. It’s also a beautiful, harrowing, and detailed picture of The Jazz Age, a story about the tenacity of love/obsession, and not least a story about class warfare and resentment.

Fitzergerald is a master of style and metaphor, and my favorite trick of his is the creation of explosive description by way of casting aside the literal meaning of words. Take this sentence for instance:

The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound, was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.

The moon’s reflection is a triangle of scales, rippling like the surface of a fish skin, trembling as if it were human. Accompanying the movement is the music from Gatsby’s party, pelleting the lawn with moisture. The banjos are dripping! Only Fitzgerald could turn music into raindrops so convincingly.

Here again, he maintains his watery theme, transforming moonlight into something damper—something capable of saturating clothes:

A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

And here, he levitates Tom and Daisy’s massive, foreboding house:

The Buchanan’s house floated suddenly toward us through the dark rustling trees.

I also love Fitzgerald for the relentless details he provides, details that transport you back to that roaring time and place. He plays Three O’Clock in the Morning for us, “a neat, sad little waltz of that year,” which dates the story to 1922; and lets the saxophones wail all night at Gatsby’s parties, “while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers [shuffle] the shining dust.”

Author: Marilynne Robinson
First Published: 1980, by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

So much has been written about this book, everywhere, and by everyone, that I’m reluctant to say much else other than it is one of my favorite books of all time. And I am certainly not alone (though when I re-read this classic, I like to think that I am—the intimacy that it commands from you is surprising.) It’s a beautiful rendition of “loss without heaviness,” as the book’s editor, Pat Strachan, said nearly 30 years after it was published, and the language, the mood, the imagery, and the lake—all of it sucks you right in.

There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us long.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the story is that there isn’t much of one: two girls are raised by an eccentric aunt, walk around a lake a lot, and grow apart. Not much to it, but at the same time you just lose yourself in the landscape, the language, and the dark undertones of the characters’ interactions. Ruthie (the narrator) is a dreamer, and she makes a dreamer of you too. You plunge into the dream only to awaken, like Ruthie, longing for something that is no longer there, or was never there to begin with.

We all have mornings like that, I think.

Author: Carson McCullers
First published: 1946, by Houghton Mifflin

What I say to people about Carson McCullers is that when you walk down a street with Carson McCullers, you walk down a street with Carson McCullers. McCullers leaves no proverbial leaf unturned, no detail unnoticed, and given the rich Southern people, places, and events that populate her history, there is a lot to notice. She is relentless in her detail, insistent with floods of mood and atmosphere, unrelenting when it comes to creating an uneasy “feeling” in the room, much like the British sensation novelists were in the 19th-century.

Her voice is uniquely conversational, as if you were listening to her tell the story over coffee, and The Member of the Wedding is a story that I never get tired of hearing. What I love about it is that, almost literally, every sentence is packed with intrigue—whether it is describing one of those walks down the street, or relaying some of the more crucial points of the plot. I mean look at this description of a hotel room:

In the light of the bare electric bulb that hung down from the ceiling, the room looked hard and very ugly. The flaked iron bed had been slept in and a suitcase of jumbled soldier’s clothes lay open in the middle of the floor. On the light oak bureau there was a glass pitcher full of water and a half-eaten package of cinnamon rolls covered with blue-white icing and fat flies.

You just can’t beat that! She also does a lot of the same thing Fitzgerald does—uses unlikely words to create mood, shadows, and lighting (i.e. “blue-white icing”).