The Guardian's 100 Best Novels List: Some Remarks

The Guardian newspaper recently published their list of what their readers 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, with the definition of novel in this case apparently the very broad one of "book-length work of prose fiction" (as against the narrower definition Ian Watt offered). 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, they 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 a very predictable product of a British newspaper in the early twenty-first century asking about the Greatest Of All Time. The list is overwhelmingly Anglosphere (79 of the 100 books are English-language works), and especially British (44 by authors from the British Isles, at least when counting naturalized Britons like Henry James). It also skews strongly toward relatively recent books, with only two of the titles from before 1800 (Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne's Tristam 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. 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, predictably in the top ten, while in line with the canons of the literary priesthood in the English-speaking world today, Modernism and postmodernism celebrated as realism and especially naturalism are commensurately shortchanged. (Thus French greats like Stendhal, Balzac, Zola are 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 pre-war Germans are represented solely by Thomas Mann, etc., etc..) Where all this is concerned it seems to me significant, and again predictable, that the older books, and the works from continental Europe, are limited to the best-known examples, and concentrated in the top spots where received wisdom probably counts for more than informed personal opinion in their placement (pre-twentieth century works making up a scarce quarter of the list, but accounting for six of the list's top ten, twelve of the top twenty, and just fifteen of the next eighty).

However, some of the rankings bespeak the modification of the predictable Anglosphere middlebrow list by a particular voting pattern. 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, landed just the #3 spot this time. More broadly, 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 #4 spot, which she landed with To the Lighthouse), and 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 as well. The science fiction reader in me noted, too, that three of the four post-1945 English-language science fiction titles that are not George Orwell's obligatory Nineteen Eighty-Four (#16), (science fiction, not weirdo postmodernism), 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 favored female-centricity. Thus of the five books in the top ten not by women two were, if male-authored, 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 (the two 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, often feminist in orientation, and frankly books one would conventionally expect to speak to a feminine sensibility 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 one might imagine that a book which advertised its being about a man with its title was at a disadvantage--as for all the postmodernism about one does not see Vonnegut or Pynchon here.) In short, the Guardian's list is not just a presentist Anglosphere, British-centric, middlebrow list, but a very identity politics-minded and especially female-skewing list, as one may expect in an era in which the dwindling number of fiction consumers is supposed to be overwhelmingly college-educated women, whose education, acculturation, social position greatly sensitize them to the contemporary politics of identity. Of course, all this aligns perfectly with what one would expect of those sympathetic to the Guardian's editorial line today.