Best Overlooked Fiction
Sixty-one American critics and writers (NYT Books) and fifty British writers (Observer) tell us which 85 fiction titles (and a few memoirs) are brilliant and underrated. The American titles are recent, the British are all over the place chronologically.
Andrew O’Hagan’s pick is By the Lake by John McGahern, which I have wanted to read and will now place on an inter-library loan request. It’s “a beautiful, hymnlike epilogue to the life’s work of this Irish master.” A husband and wife move to a Irish farming community, “in which people know each other’s ways intimately, but usually can’t afford to speak the truth directly to each other.”
Some others that look interesting to me:
Achilles by Elizabeth Cook, “a meditative, intense retelling of the life of Homer’s hero, remarkable for its lush artfulness and the subtle intelligence of its prose.”
Experience by Martin Amis, “the cleverest and funniest and most moving memoir I’ve ever read, and each time I reread it I’m simply drunk with pleasure.”
New Perspective (1980) by K Arnold Price, “a short Irish novel which deals entirely with private life; it is a middle-aged woman’s most subtle and sensuous and intelligent study of her relationship with her husband. … [H]as some of the hallmarks of a Bergman movie.”
The Reef (1912) by Edith Wharton: “Edith Wharton’s penetrating observation of the betrayals of self and others in this book may be too uncomfortable for many readers.”
Filed under: readers advisory, booklists, fiction, underrated and overlooked on September 5th, 2007