Friday, April 15, 2022
There was a little game a one-time housemate and I used to play: we'd think of literature courses we'd like to teach. I can only remember one at the moment: English Authors With Big Mustaches, which would have included G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. But for Conrad that could have been English Writers Who Did Not Use Their First Names.
I was reminded of this following my viewing earlier this week of Ragtime, which got me thinking about other novels that seemed like they were likely to join some sort of canon. William Kennedy's Albany Trilogy came to mind, as did William Wharton's Birdy. There's probably an Anne Tyler novel that would fit into this syllabus, and probably also something by Don DeLillo.
I don't mean this as a knock- what these works would have in common, apart from the fact that they are all novels written in my lifetime, is that they all impressed me as wonderful, and then, for the most part, faded from my consciousness. When I am reminded off them, as I was by Ragtime, I think, "Yeah, that really caught lightening in a bottle."
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