Here I am supposed to be working on my writing and getting distracted by ideas of other books.
My excuse for why I am doing this: How F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Overlooked Story Collection Helped Me Write My LA Novel (Literary Hub) made me realize how little I knew about Fitzgerald's short stories. And the vagraies of success. And that a writer has to write.
And The Consensus Sublime ( Los Angeles Review of Books) sealed the deal. Just goofing off, giving myself a minute of time before I started working, and then I got lost. It is a critique of The Guardian's 100 Best Novels list, and I could dismiss it as just another of many.
What distinguishes The Guardian’s list within this long and somewhat dismal tradition is not that it judges—all canons judge—but the specific character of its public-facing authority. Academic canons carry, at least formally, the caution of scholarly qualification. They present themselves as provisional disciplinary instruments. The Guardian list borrows the aura of institutional expertise—“authors, critics and academics worldwide” voted, the editors announce—while simultaneously billing itself as a broad, democratic, cultural event, open to all. It does not offer provisional aesthetic judgments. It offers monuments.
Monuments. That did me in. Yesterday, after the writer's meeting, we got talking about how sequels suck. They keep selling us the same thing with a new package until the life goes out of what is under the package. Monuments are dead things being worshipped. Of course, Gore Vidal got there before me (albeit I should have read the essay mentioned over 30 years ago):
Beneath any such exercise lies a problem almost never seriously engaged: the question of what it means to judge a novel in the first place. Aesthetic judgment, as Gore Vidal observed across a long career of elegant provocation, is neither private mood nor laboratory fact. In his essay “Novelists and Critics of the 1940s,” Vidal argued that critics must proceed as though absolute standards for literary value exist, since without some orientation toward the absolute, relative judgments dissolve into mere preference. But to reify those standards into monuments is disastrous, as literary history repeatedly demonstrates that what one moment consecrates, the next dismantles with humiliating ease.
Here is where I became glad to have read the essay (and pretty much confirms I read the Vidal essay).
Consider what such machinery cannot easily process. There is no Honoré de Balzac on this list. The absence is not, in the first instance, an injustice to French literature. It is an exposure of the list’s narrowed theory of what the novel is.
***
Lost Illusions is a novel about the manufacture of literary value, and in this, it anticipates the very social machinery by which the Guardian list itself was assembled. Vidal, returning in several essays to what he called the missing “Balzacian concern,” lamented that the disappearance of economic motive from serious fiction represented a narrowing of the form itself, a retreat from the novel’s appetite for entangling human consciousness with narrative structure.
In Balzac, money is never merely money; it is the medium through which every other value—love, friendship, artistic integrity, political conviction—is tested and, usually, dissolved. A list that cannot accommodate this novel has quietly decided, without admitting it, that the novel’s proper business lies in moral illumination, perhaps, or psychological interiority, or the production of teachable social empathy. These are not unworthy concerns. But they are not the whole of what the novel, at its most exorbitant and alert, knows how to do.
And Balzac’s absence is not an omission. It is a theory.
***
The omissions that matter most in the Guardian list are not, then, a grievance catalog. They are, again, a theory. Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (1956–57) is absent; so are Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1936) and Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916). These works do not deserve inclusion as diplomatic representatives of their traditions—not that every tradition warrants a seat. These works make formal, philosophical, and affective claims that exceed a significant portion of what the list includes.
Mahfouz’s absence, Hedayat’s absence, Tagore’s absence—these do not reflect regional bias or demographic oversight. They reflect the list’s operative theory of the novel, which turns out, on examination, to be a theory of Anglophone teachability and institutional processability, disguised as universal aesthetic judgment. The omitted novel is not merely absent. It exposes what the list, by its inclusions, silently presupposes.
I was reading Mahfouz, finally, then got sidetracked. More reason to get back to him. And for a call to arms that I cannot resist:
The novel’s actual history is older, stranger, more monstrous, more multilingual, and wilder than any professional consensus can accommodate. A counter-list of the institutionally neglected would only be parochialism reversed, the same divination performed with different auspices. The solution would require a different account attentive to what counts as true novelistic achievement, and that cannot be recovered by a better poll.
It can only be reopened by reading: by the willingness to let unfamiliar formal ambitions disturb the machinery through which recognition, in any given moment, decides what it is prepared to call great.
I have waited too long to be good at what I want to do. But maybe I still have time to do something useful.
Previously, I had read Weekly Readings #228 (06/15/26-06/21/26) - by John Pistelli (THE GREATEST BOOKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY). Which is almost the opposite of trying to make a canon.
What are you going to do?
What are Midwestern writers? When I started Central European writers, I thought I found people in the same position as I was. Reading Mitsuyoshi Numano's Is There Such a Thing as Central (Eastern) European Literature? An Attempt to Reconsider Central European Consciousness on the Basis of Contemporary Literature keeps that idea alive. Take away the difference in a monolingual culture. Indiana is small and torn up by identity issues. We are not Easterners, although much of our past comes from there, and we have our envy of New York. We are not Southerners; for all of those came from there to here, for all of us having some of the same values; and the West is too rough and tumble to be us, even as our own past was just as rough and tumble.
sch 6/25
