The Guardian's 100 Best Novels List: Some Remarks

The Guardian newspaper recently published their list of what the "authors, critics and academics" they surveyed voted for as the 100 Best Novels of All Time--not just English-language novels of the twentieth century, as with the widely cited Modern Library list, but novels, period. I, personally, do not make much of these lists as judgments of literary worth, for "best" is a slippery concept, too easily and often confused with, for example, the frankly personal "favorite" and historically significant "greatest." However, such lists do interest me as a snapshot of how those who made the list evaluate literature--or at least think that one should do so at a given point in time--with this one no exception.

In discussing the Guardian's list let us get out of the way the fact that it is very predictable for a list compiled by a British media outlet from the responses of the established authorities to which it would be likely to turn. It is overwhelmingly Anglosphere (79 of the 100 books are English-language works), and especially British (44 by authors from the British Isles, or at least naturalized Britons like Henry James). Likewise predictable it is thoroughly middlebrow in its choices, full of standard "Greatest Of All Time" picks that everyone is supposed to read but which almost no one does, while the few who actually read them often only say they love them, like James Joyce's Ulysses, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which are predictably in the top ten, while in line with the canons of the literary priesthood in the English-speaking world today, it glorifies Modernism and postmodernism and slights realism and especially naturalism. (Thus are French greats like Stendhal, Balzac, Zola not represented by even a single work, nor such American devotees of naturalism as Crane, Norris, London, Sinclair or Dreiser, while there is no Lewis, Dos Passos, Steinbeck either, all as the pre-war German novel is represented solely by Thomas Mann, etc..) It also seems predictable that it favors relatively recent books, with only two of the titles from before 1800 (Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy), almost three-quarters of them (73) published in 1900 or after, half (47) after 1945, and almost a tenth (9) from just 2000 on. Where all this is concerned it seems to me significant--and again, predictable--that the works from continental Europe, and for that matter the older books in any language, are generally limited to the best-known examples, and concentrated in the top spots where received wisdom probably counts for more than informed personal opinion in the placement (pre-twentieth century works making up a scarce quarter of the list, but accounting for six of the list's top ten, and twelve of the top twenty, but just fifteen of the next eighty).

However, some of the rankings bespeak the modification of the predictable Anglosphere middlebrow list by certain concessions to the prevailing cultural politics. Most obviously there is how books by women get the two top spots, with George Eliot's Middlemarch a surprising #1, and Toni Morrison's Beloved #2, as Joyce, usually landing the top spot on priestly/middlebrow lists like this one, landed just the #3 spot this time. Meanwhile five of the top ten books were by women, nine of the top twenty, thirty-seven of the lot--much more than one usually sees on such lists. (By comparison the Modern Library's 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th Century list, on which one might expect to find more female authors than a Best of All Time list, had no books by women in the top ten, just two in the top twenty, and a mere eight in the hundred, with many specific titles that made that list ranking rather lower there than here, To the Lighthouse placing at #15 on that list rather than #4 on the Guardian's, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at #76 rather than #31, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence at #58 rather than #38, and not a single work of Toni Morrison's placing at all.) Likewise it is notable that Virginia Woolf was the most honored author on the Guardian list, with five of the top hundred titles (including the aforementioned #4 spot), four of Jane Austen's six novels making the list (claiming three places in the top twenty alone, with most Austen fans' favorite Pride and Prejudice at #9), and Toni Morrison having three here as well. The science fiction reader may note that three of the four post-1945 English-language science fiction titles that are not George Orwell's obligatory Nineteen Eighty-Four (#16) were Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (#36), Octavia Butler's Kindred (#71) and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (#89). Meanwhile even the selection of male-authored books reflected a female-centricity, with two of the five books in the top ten not by women so focused on a female protagonist that the book was named for them--Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina actually ranking ahead of his usual Greatest Of All Time selection War and Peace (Anna and War placing at #6 and #7, respectively), with the same going for Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (#10). As the mentions of Morrison and Butler--and the abundance of "post-colonial" works in the post-1945 collection from V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (#78) to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (#62)--indicate, along with the tilt toward books by women, and more broadly books conventionally expected to speak to women generally, there was also heavy attention to works by "authors of color," and from the non-Western Anglosphere. Accounting for at least fourteen such works out of the hundred (compared with a mere half dozen on the Modern Library list), the works that are not here as well as those which are underline the emphasis. (Where genuine devotees of Joyce might have been expected to remember his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man its title's advertising its being about a man not implausibly put it at a disadvantage with these voters--as for all the postmodernism about one does not see Vonnegut or Pynchon here--and certainly no Philip Roth.)

Altogether the result is the Guardian's list is not just an Anglosphere, British-centric, middlebrow list favoring the recent over the old, but also a very identity politics-minded and especially female-skewing list as well, in that way as well reflecting the preoccupations of the contemporary cultural elite--and one might add, the Guardian editorial line so well aligning with it.