The Atlantic, somewhat recently, published a list of fiction that’s pure bait for the literary blogger. A year-by-year selection of the Great American Novels, it’s an annoying book list to end all annoying book lists. Limited to the last 100 years, and including some of my favorite authors, it’s a recommendation gallery for no one. It’s like SparkNotes skimmed the New Yorker for forty years and decided to create a Goodreads page.
Before I continue ruining everyone’s fun, let me clarify that I actually like dumb internet book games! I’m not even as anti-list as other literary snobs. Most such snobs aren’t trying to help other readers find a new book specific to their taste. Most snobs—again, which includes me—think we like only the good books and don’t see any reason to read books which aren’t good and believe everyone else should do the same. There are many excellent novels! Why read bad ones!
As a librarian, though, I’m something like a literary waiter. The average restaurant worker doesn’t want you to eat the bacon-thigh-maker double-cheeseburger special as you dip it in delicious soda to soften the texture. No one wants that.1 But if you tell a waiter that you’d like the biggest, baddest cow-meat on the menu, he’ll point you where you need to go. If you come to my information desk and ask for a dragon romance, an Amish thriller, the latest autofiction about a novelist who’s given up on novel-ing, or anything else, I’ll likewise try to offer you the appropriate read-alike. If you’re a mystery fan, I might steer you toward the higher experience of P.D. James or (for noir) Ross Macdonald, but I will shape my recommendations to your taste.
For this reason, lists can be quite useful. I make lists all the time as part of my job, and who they mostly help aren’t readers, but the librarians and associates advising those readers on what they might enjoy in our collection. Yay (sort of; begrudgingly; only for my day job) lists!
And, in a vacuum, the Great American Novels list from The Atlantic could be worse. It might’ve looked like Esquire’s execrable sci-fi book list. The aforementioned Ross Macdonald, for example, appears with his 1962 outing, The Zebra-Striped Hearse. The Lew Archer series is one of America’s greatest literary artifacts. Hurrah for Macdonald’s literary estate, and congrats to any reader who revisits the noir master because The Atlantic thought to include a stellar example of a truly American genre.
All the same, what this list mostly does is flatter everyone’s vanity to the detriment of useful literary insight. I’ve read Macdonald. I’ve read Lolita. Yay me! Other than that, and even as a hypothetical general guideline, it serves no purpose at all. There is no through-line from Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947) to N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015). There are maybe six people in America who even own both books, and that’s probably because one of them was a gift.2
The editors make it clear in their lighthearted introduction that, “We hoped to replicate that particular joy of a friend pressing a book into your hand and saying, ‘You have to read this; you’ll love it.’” Instead of offering a useful and pointed read-alike map, however, they’ve scattershot titles against the wall, and the result is schizophrenic. “Don’t like House of Leaves? Hm, keep scrolling! Saul Bellow is just around the corner!”
The list, again, is for no one. That doesn’t usually get me going, but if you’re going to play the listicle game, especially with any kind of high-minded sincerity, crafting your guidelines such that House of Leaves receives recognition while Moby-Dick goes unnamed—in a category you chose to call “Great American Novels”—is a waste of time. Go read Toni Morrison. Go read Ross Macdonald. You might even enjoy (3/4ths) of Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.3 But the project is broken as a premise.
Reading:
The Complete Polly and the Wolf, by Catherine Storr
I recently finished this collection of short stories with my daughter. Following a little girl named Polly who lives in England in the middle of the last century, each tale is about a Wolf’s various attempts to eat her. He barges into the house, he tries to talk her into visiting his kitchen, he builds a bomb. Yes, a bomb! Polly is wonderful, but the star of the show is the Wolf.
How do I describe this creature? A fairy-tale villain plopped in post-WWII London, he’s a failure compared to the legends of old. No woodcutter has to cut him open to save Red Riding Hood because he never defeats Red Riding Hood. The first book of stories is called Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, which would be hard enough on him, except the second collection of stories opens with him reading Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf. No one likes to be called an idiot!
But there’s more. The Wolf is Don Quixote for six-year-olds.4 He’s Wile E. Coyote by way of Humbert Humbert. His desire for Polly is funny, usually, but it’s also genuine. He wants to eat her. He wants to eat all the children he sees. The darker, allegorical overtones of this situation aren’t ignored by Storr, but they’re never indulged by her either. The danger of the Wolf might court our fears about the pedophile, but in the end he is a Wolf, and he is hungry.
Interestingly, Storr's career outside of these stories is a kind of distillation of the two sensibilities which make The Complete Polly and the Wolf so rich. First, she wrote several Bible-based picture books for children. The art has that whole Jesus as a beautiful, white hippie problem, but it’s otherwise high-quality. And the stories themselves look well-written. I have no idea what her religious beliefs were in private, but morality matters to Storr. The stakes of doing right and doing wrong are never minimized. The Wolf is almost a cartoon, but never wholly one.
In addition, Storr also wrote Marianne Dreams5, a tale about using nightmares to hurt boys:
In the last Polly and the Wolf story, the Wolf tries to convince Polly that they've had a great time. She’s in a position to rescue him, but first she wants him to promise that he’ll never try to eat her again. He can’t understand why. After all, he does get hungry. Besides, getting chased by him has been fun, hasn't it? Yes, she admits. But it’s also been frightening.
I think short story collections that hit this age range, roughly 5-9 year-olds, are maybe the best medium for the young reader. There are others out there, of course—the original Paddington books, Winnie-the-Pooh, etc.—but most “collections” are usually anthologies. The Wolf and Polly are characters who deserve to be followed from one encounter to the next, and I’m glad we got the chance to do so.
I love you all.
Except me. I now want that.
Reader, I admit that I bought both myself.
I don’t mean to pick on N.K. Jemisin too much. But even if you discount The Fifth Season’s subpar ending or the meh sequels—that is, even if you take the best of her writing as the sole object of judgment—it pretty much invalidates your list to offer some sort of unspeakable equivalency between The Fifth Season and Housekeeping. Several other titles, unsurprisingly from the last twenty years (it’s hard to know what literature will last!), felt the same to me. I promise not to be a grouch next newsletter.
… and not just because of the meta-callback to the first collection of stories. Although that doesn’t hurt!
She’s probably more famous for this title, or she was, than Polly and the Wolf. At least in the UK.