The ten-plus authors club

This week I finished my tenth book by P. D. James: eight novels, a memoir, and a reflection on writing detective fiction. I hope to read every other book by her before I die.

That number got me thinking: with which other authors have I hit the “ten-plus club”? These are the writers I have loved, studied, or learned the most from. Some of them, like James, I hope to “complete” by the end of my life. Others I read in a certain season, for a specific reason. Still others were for work, i.e., they were at one point (and perhaps still are) important to my scholarship.

Who are yours? Here are mine, in alphabetical order:

1. Karl Barth

2. Wendell Berry

3. G. K. Chesterton

4. David Bentley Hart

5. Stanley Hauerwas

6. Mick Herron

7. Christopher Hitchens

8. P. D. James

9. Robert Jenson

10. Mary Karr

11. John le Carré

12. C. S. Lewis

13. Cormac McCarthy

14. Marilynne Robinson

15. J. K. Rowling

16. Kathryn Tanner

17. R. S. Thomas

18. John Webster

19. Rowan Williams

20. Tad Williams

21. Franz Wright

22. N. T. Wright

23. John Howard Yoder

A few comments:

• I’m sure I’ve missed some authors.

• I count an author if they’ve written at least seven books but fewer than ten and I’ve read them all.

• Poets are tricky, so I’ve just gone with my gut.

• Book length matters: if I’ve read nine 1,000-page books by one author, I’m going to count that alongside ten 200-page books by another.

• Fewer novelists than I’d like. Currently trying to rectify that.

• The nonfiction writers here are the ones who live rent-free in my head. Even if I don’t regularly return to their writing—even if I adamantly disagree with or dislike their ideas—their voice, their very words and phrases, resound in my skull whenever I’m thinking, reading, writing, and teaching.

Drawing up this list also got me thinking about which authors are on their way to being added to it. The following list—surely incomplete—includes those who are on my personal “five-book club,” most of whom will very likely be on the above list eventually, in some cases sooner rather than later:

1. Saint Augustine

2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

3. Albert Borgmann

4. Walter Brueggemann

5. William Cavanaugh

6. Ta-Nehisi Coates

7. Ross Douthat

8. Terry Eagleton

9. Richard Foster

10. Stephen Fowl

11. Paul Griffiths

12. Richard Hays

13. Wesley Hill

14. Alan Jacobs

15. Luke Timothy Johnson

16. Tony Judt

17. Immanuel Kant

18. Søren Kierkegaard

19. Peter Leithart

20. Mark Lilla

21. Ian McFarland

22. George R.R. Martin

23. Ephraim Radner

24. Joseph Ratzinger

25. George Scialabba

26. Roger Scruton

27. James K. A. Smith

28. Charles Taylor

29. Miroslav Volf

30. Ben Witherington

Two final thoughts:

First, these lists remind me how many novelists there are of whose books I have read exactly one. That’s true for most people, obviously, but in my case it’s increased by my habit of reading the first entry in as many long-running genre series as I can: e.g., Hammett, Cain, Chandler, Macdonald, McBain, Himes, Stark, MacDonald, Higgins, Block, Burke, Mosley, Connelly, Pelecanos, Lehane … I’ve read no more than one book by each of them, because I have a list of renowned crime novelists I periodically check off for fun. Whereas, at least in my mind, a proper crime aficionado would read each series in its entirety before moving on to another.

Second, the above lists are not exhaustive of authors or books that are important to me. For example, I have read one book by Mary Midgley, no more; but The Myths We Live By and, more important, her intelligence, style, wit, and clarity of thought left a lasting impact on me. And, God willing, I will return to her, though I have no plans at present of making good on that hope. I could say the same about Tolkien, Susanna Clarke, Wallace Stegner, and many others. Some authors write the one great classic that imprints itself on your mind; others write dozens of works that, within the limits of work and marriage and parenting, you just never get around to.

Such is the reading life: here, at least, finitum non capax infiniti.

My latest: on Houellebecq (in Mere O) and Forgiveness (in Comment)

Two new essays for y’all.

The first was published last week at Mere Orthodoxy, on January 7, the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, which came out the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Jake Meador was kind enough to get it up in time for the anniversary—I was surprised not to see any other outlets noting the date—and gave it the title, “A Future Worthy of Life: Houellebecq, Decadence, and Sacraments.” It’s about the insights and shortcomings of Houellebecq’s critique of the West, parallels in other recent novels, and the superior vision (and prescription) found in P. D. James’s Children of Men. (The lesson, as always: James is the queen.)

The other essay came out last month in the print issue of Comment, but it’s been behind a paywall until today. In the magazine it has the title “Promise, Gift, Command”; online it goes by “The Theological Terrain of Forgiveness,” which tracks with the issue’s overarching theme of forgiveness. It’s my attempt at locating, delimiting, and unpacking the Christian doctrine of God’s forgiveness of our sins in Christ, by the Spirit, through the sacraments—and the implications for our own call to imitate this divine action in our daily lives.

Thanks for reading. More soon.

James and le Carré (TLC, 3)

This is an entry in my “Twitter loci communes” series; read more here.

P. D. James and John le Carré are two of my favorite novelists. I’ve written about each of them before. A question occurred to me as I was reading le Carré’s Our Game this week, and that question reminded me of a question I asked on Twitter a couple years ago.

Here’s the first one, sincerely asked by one who lacks the expertise or breadth of reading to know a good answer:

If you wanted to chart the social, moral, and political changes wrought in England between the immediate postwar period and Brexit—not only the Cold War but the brave new world opened up by the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as by the fall of the Twin Towers—could you do better than reading every one of the novels written by James and le Carré?

Put differently: What would you be missing by using their novels as a window onto the successive societal revolutions that sprung up during the reign of Queen Elizabeth—or, say, between Winston Churchill’s final year in office and Theresa May’s first? I don’t mean to suggest that their work is comprehensive, much less to sound reductive. (For example, a writer like Zadie Smith comes to mind as adding something important they’re missing.) I more mean the question as a comment about the sheer expanse of James’s and le Carré’s respective powers of social observation, and the way in which the changing mores of the day reveal themselves in the little details strewn across the dialogue and narration of their stories.

That brings me to my second question, posed on Twitter in June 2019:

Of genre authors working in the second half of the twentieth century, who wrote the best English prose? On the Mount Rushmore, I think P. D. James and John le Carré are nonnegotiable. Who are the other two?

Addendum: By "genre" I mean the fictional sub-groups typically thought of as cheap paperbacks for thrills: crime, fantasy, SF. (Westerns are tough—I'll say no for now, though I'd allow a counter-argument.) Re time frame, I mean *flourished* in final 4-5 decades of 20th century.

In other words I'm framing the question this way because genre is often thought of as non-literary and thus not literature proper, and thus not deserving of literary analysis or praise. But some genre authors write gorgeous prose. Who are they?

While it’s still up, you should go check out the replies. There were a bunch, and some of the suggestions were fantastic. (Everyone seemed to agree with me about James; less so le Carré.) Some of the proposed names included le Guin, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Patrick O’Brian, Charles Portis, Shirley Jackson, Octavia E. Butler, Brian Jacques, Ishigiro, Ballard, Ligotti, Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delaney, and many more. The truth is that any Mount Rushmore is going to be subjective. But perhaps there could be loose agreement on (to switch metaphors) the bullpen from which one would call up this or that writer for the honor.

The queen

Of all the brilliant British women writers who lived to a good old age in the long twentieth century, who is your favorite? The candidates are many; both Mary Midgley and Agatha Christie come immediately to mind. Doubtless Rebecca West is chief among all women and men of English letters during this period. But as for me and my house, we hail P. D. James, or as I affectionately call her, The Queen. Long may she reign, even in death.

Born in 1920, James published her first novel in 1962. From her early 40s to her early 90s she published more than 20 books, one every 2-3 years. Just before her 90th birthday, in 2009, she published Talking About Detective Fiction, a winsome and leisurely stroll through the genre she mastered, having received it from the reigning women before her (Christie, Sayers, Marsh, et al) and made it her own. Born two years after the end of World War I, she lived to see every one of the wonders and horrors of the twentieth century; she then died—to give some perspective on the sheer expanse of her life—some 18 months before the U.K. referendum on leaving the European Union.

The Queen is famous for many things, but most of all, and deservedly, for her series featuring Adam Dalgliesh. The series spans 14 novels written across 46 years. They are, in my humble and mostly uninformed opinion, the finest detective novels in the English language. I’m not a fanatic of the genre, but I’ve read widely across the decades (and across the Atlantic), and I’m not even sure who should come in second.

(I’m reading Gladys Mitchell’s Rising of the Moon right now; perhaps I’ll come to agree that that half-forgotten peer to Christie is a worthy competitor for the throne.)

What makes James’s work so royally perfect? The answer may be boring, but it’s true: she’s a master at the mechanics of what makes a mystery novel work. Put them together, and you’ve got the best of the genre.

First is the prose. It’s readable—she was popular, after all—but crisp, detailed, and stylish, too. More, it’s English: you can tell this is a woman who knows her eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry and novels. The sentences never waste a word, but they take their time. And they always come to a point. In this James was very much a woman of her time; she reads more like Sayers than she does Tana French or Louise Penny. Though she lived into the twenty-first century, she was born closer to the nineteenth, and you feel it in her writing.

Second is the lead. Adam Dalgliesh is the platonic ideal of the English detective. Son of a vicar, widower whose only child and young wife died giving birth, a poet of minor acclaim in his spare time, Dalgliesh is a detective whose reputation precedes him due to his supreme and inarguable competence. Reticent, tactful, passionate, compassionate, and possessed of a rich but private inner life, he lives for the job, and always gets it done.

Third is the plotting. The deaths are rarely outlandish but always complex; they’re also always equally difficult to figure out (though that may just be me, as I’m generally terrible at guessing whodunnit). Again, the mysteries lean more toward the golden age than to contemporary crime novels, so the template is classic rather than realistic: a surprising, even shocking murder; a cast of suspects; three dozen paths criss-crossing the murder scene and the victim’s now-revealed secret lives; a patient narrowing-down of suspects via interviews, alibis, discoveries, and evidence; and the final, climactic confrontation and confession. To watch James weave the web then unravel it is never anything but a joy.

Fourth and finally, and most important in terms of what elevates the Dalgliesh series above its peers, is the social observation and characterization. The plot hooks me; the prose keeps me; the acute eye for human and social detail is what strangely warms my heart. Whatever one’s view of arguments about highbrow versus middlebrow and “art” versus “entertainment,” James’s books bridge the gap inasmuch as they use the occasion of a murder and the form of a mystery to examine the human condition. And the insights invariably illumine.

That social aspect to the Dalgliesh books makes them doubly significant, since the first in the series was written in or around the year JFK was elected; the last, in or around the year Obama was elected. What one feels when reading the books in chronological order is the extraordinary social changes happening in real time in the background of the stories—and James is deeply attuned to them. (As she should be, having spent her girlhood in interwar Britain, raised in a family with so little money she had to quit school as a teenager to go to work.) That aforementioned first entry, Cover Her Face, feels very much a portrait of rural postwar England, itself still bearing traces of the Victorian and the Edwardian. By the sixth Dalgliesh novel, Death of an Expert Witness, published in 1977, the world has turned upside down. The book is littered with casual references to the signs of the times: recession; abolition of the death penalty; women wearing trousers(!); a more or less out lesbian couple living in the Fens (albeit referred to by both the narration and the dialogue solely as “friends”—this is James’s ironic reserve, not prudishness); the rise of the management class; “women’s Lib”; abandoned country churches; even ordinary police use of a helicopter, which ferries Dalgliesh from London to East Anglia the day after the murder.

What suffuses every page, adorning the narrative without ever weighing it down, is James’s lightly worn but deeply felt Anglican faith. She doesn’t require her hero to believe—his familiarity with tragedy and evil both walls him off from and draws him ineluctably toward the religious life—but the presence, or rather absence, of God haunts his every endeavor of detection. Whence law? justice? mercy? She forces her readers, as she does her characters, to wonder. It’s something every good mystery novelist aspires to do. For her part, the Queen never fails to execute.

P. D. James on the sameness, the joylessness of lust

"Dalgliesh walked through Soho to the Cortez Club. With his mind still freshened by the clean emptiness of Suffolk he found these canyoned streets, even in their afternoon doldrums, more than usually depressing. It was difficult to believe that he had once enjoyed walking through this shoddy gulch. Now even a month's absence made the return less tolerable. It was largely a matter of mood, no doubt, for the district is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds. Passing the strip clubs, the grubby basement stairs, the silhouettes of bored girls against the upstairs window blinds, Dalgliesh thought that a daily walk through these ugly streets could drive any man into a monastery, less from sexual disgust than from an intolerable ennui with the sameness, the joylessness of lust."

—P. D. James, Unnatural Causes, p. 173