Ranking We Will Go

About novels and other things

(Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash)

The Guardian published a list of “the 100 best novels of all time,” kicking up a fuss, of course. Before I turn to novels, do you mind if I talk golf? It’s a subject I know better …

Last summer, I began a book review as follows:

Man is a ranking animal. He is not content for there to be a multiplicity of greats, all of roughly equal worth. No, there must be a No. 1, a No. 2, a No. 3 … Man must rank.

I’ll skip ahead:

The ranking fever certainly exists in music. Mozart or Beethoven? Or Bach? In the middle of the 20th century, who was the No. 1 pianist, Rubinstein or Horowitz? Who was the No. 1 soprano, Callas or Tebaldi? A little later, who was the No. 1 tenor, Pavarotti or Domingo?

Couldn’t you appreciate them all, for their various gifts? No fair. The ranking imperative must prevail.

Another few sentences:

The sports world is aflame with ranking. In basketball, who is the GOAT, Michael or LeBron? In golf, is it Jack or Tiger?

A couple of sentences more:

I always say, “I’m not a ranker,” sometimes as a prelude to going ahead and ranking anyway. This parlor game is hard to resist.

Yes, it is.

I was reviewing a book—a very good book—called “The Golf 100: A Spirited Ranking of the Greatest Players of All Time.” Its author is Michael Arkush. Reading this book, you can ignore the ranking, if you like, and simply enjoy the mini-bios—100 of them.

The older I get, the less prone I am to ranking, and the more prone I am to simply appreciating. Appreciating good things, or great things, for what they are. I don’t feel the need to rank, and often not even to compare.

Oh, I’ll still play the ranking game, in sports, music, and other fields—but I tend to feel slightly cheap in so doing.

All right, those novels. We all have our favorite novels, and many of mine appear on the Guardian’s Top 100 list. No doubt many of yours do too. But I have not read enough novels—I am not well enough versed in this realm—to comment with any authority on the list. Or to make my own list.

You know what I could do? I could draw up a list of my favorites. My Top Ten, let’s say, or a Top 25. But those would be merely my favorites. One cannot judge, or include, what one has not read.

If I were to do symphonies, concertos, sonatas, string quartets, operas—those lists would be meaningful. But my knowledge of novels is not wide enough.

Lists such as the Guardian’s are serious, and they ought to be taken seriously. But maybe not too seriously? These lists can be conversation-starters, argument-starters—occasions for scandal. Kind of fun.

I was glad to see A House for Mr Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul, on the list (No. 78). Thanks to his close friend David Pryce-Jones, I got to know Naipaul a bit. I think the last thing I said to him, before leaving his apartment the last time I saw him, was, “I have told you this before, but I will tell you again: A House for Mr Biswas was one of the best reading experiences of my whole life.”

He smiled a wonderful smile.

At No. 16 on the Guardian’s list is 1984. Let me tell you something about my own experience with that book. I read it relatively late. I think most people read it in school whereas I was about 30 when I read it.

I knew that it was an important book—a very important book—in politics, and in 20th-century history. What I did not know, until I read the book, was that it is a damn good novel, as a novel.

What a love story, for instance.

The Guardian has Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy, at No. 6. Maybe I could quote from the appreciation of Norman Podhoretz I wrote last December? Actually, this was a series, in four parts, and I will quote from the third:

No one was more in love with the English language, and its literature, than Norman. In his view, however, the best novel is a Russian one: Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy. No. 2 might be an English one, he said: Middlemarch (Eliot).

Norman read Anna Karenina over and over again. I think he read it about twelve times.

He talked with me about this in one of our podcasts. Not long after, I talked with Roger Scruton, also on a podcast. I said (something like), “Norman says that Anna Karenina is the best novel, with No. 2 maybe Middlemarch.”

Roger agreed on the greatness of Anna Karenina, though “there are some competitors,” he said—including Middlemarch. “But there are weaknesses in the George Eliot, and there are no weaknesses in the Tolstoy,” Roger continued. “Every character is absolutely real, and engaged from the depth of his being in the story. All the details are absolutely right.”

(In his remarks about novels, Roger also named The Brothers Karamazov, Emma, Madame Bovary, and Ulysses. “Those are all books that I read again and again,” he said.)

Middlemarch, by the way, is No. 1 on the Guardian’s list.

Absent from the list is any Waugh at all. I found this curious. I would have expected, at a minimum, Brideshead Revisited to be on the list. William F. Buckley Jr. held Evelyn Waugh to be the 20th century’s best prose stylist in the English language. (That was Bill’s phrase, by the way: “prose stylist.”)

Once, not being able to remember Waugh’s name, Bill said to me, “Who’s my hero, the author of Brideshead?”

I like something that Michael Hersch once told me—Michael Hersch the composer. I’ll quote from an article:

Shostakovich liked to quip, “I like all music, from Bach to Offenbach.” Hersch is the same way—a man who devours music from Gregorian chant to this week. When I press him about favorite music, he says, “For me, late Schubert piano music is where it’s at.” He adds, “The thing about music is, you can go for years without listening to a given composer, and then suddenly have a need to hear him. The music is lying dormant, waiting for you. You can activate it anytime, simply by engaging with it.”

Yes, yes. It must be the same with books, the same with novels: you have a need for different novels at different times. And aren’t we lucky to have them all?