100 Best Since 1923

Time magazine has a new list of 100 bests out.  Since I don't get the magazine (that is, I don't receive it in the mail; I think I understand it as well as the next schmoe), I didn't see their movie one.  I do remember hearing some scandalized statements about Gone With the Wind not making the cut, but that's about it.

But naturally a book list isn't going to slip by without catching my attention.  Well, okay, it might have.  Pretty easily, at that.  I don't get out much.  But this one was brought to my attention by someone who has odd ideas about what constitutes a good time.  He showed it to me in the hope that the contents would cause me burst into flames and fling myself into a good sharp rant that would take me all the way up one wall and down another, thereby forfeiting my security deposit.

I hate to disappoint a good friend, so I did my best to throw a nice indignant what-is-the-world-coming-to, literacy-is-dead fit.  My heart wasn't in it at first, though.  That whole "published since 1923" thing definitely put a dent in my style, for one thing.  For me, that's young whippersnapper territory so far as novels are concerned.  I'm not completely stuck in the nineteenth century, but I do tend to hang out there an awful lot.  The last time I read contemporary fiction on anything like a regular basis was back when I was working behind various bookstore counters and had to be able to recommend stuff to customers.  I worked two chains and one independent feminist place, and oddly enough, no one who wandered in hoping for a good read gave even half a damn about how fabulous the Brontes are.  Except the academics, and they already knew.  Conscientiously, I found a few writers who were still alive and ticking and yet were worth reading.  (I learned to my relief that there was no point at all in reading the best sellers.  No one wanted to hear anything about them except where they were, how much they cost, and why there weren't out in paperback yet; and on the off chance that anyone did ask my opinion, it was better to be able to claim honest and complete ignorance about the contents of the latest novel from Mr. or Ms. I Get On The Best Seller List As A Matter Of Course than to have to formulate an answer that wouldn't savage my integrity and also wouldn't get me fired.)

Then, too, getting back to the alleged subject of this essay, I can't get too heated up about Time's opinions about literature.  I don't expect my own to have much in common with theirs.  I tend to be an old-before-my-time, Miniver Cheevy-type crank who was born a solid two decades after the glory days when a brilliant short story by Shirley Jackson in The New Yorker could provoke front-page newspaper stories countrywide, and who firmly believes that the time when just plain really wonderful writing could make people swoon, or swear, is long gone and never to return.  (Not that I'm bitter or anything.)  I also have tastes, bookwise, that seem quirky even to myself.  There are writers I love for no better reason that they happened into my life at just the right place and time; there are writers I know I ought to love who leave me absolutely cold.  I almost never like books that are recommended to me, no matter how well the recommender knows my tastes, and I tend to succeed about as well myself in the recommending department.  When it comes to books, I'm not an elitist; I just tend to be alone in my own odd little corner.  So when I saw titles on the Time list that I happen to absolutely adore (Wide Sargasso Sea The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I was happily surprised; but I would expect such an occurrence to be a pleasant exception on a list claiming to represent anything like common taste, even common good taste.

Besides, a lot of the stuff on the list was wonderfully right -- not just works that I liked, but books that really, really ought to be there.  I especially liked the fact that the writers of the list didn't hesitate to have more than one work by the same author if it was obviously absolutely necessary to do just that.  Animal Farm and 1984 both made the cut; Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse ditto.  I saw quite a few other choices whose inclusion I could not only enjoy, but respect.

Finally, part of me resists any emotional engagement with a list that was surely meant to provoke as much as to please.  Look, the people over at Time have a living to make just like the rest of us; they're not going to attract readers or attention by putting out a list with no more spice or heat in it than a bowl of unflavored library paste.  Sure, they're not going to go completely wacko off-the-mark insane and just throw in titles from the random-author generator; but they have to have some works that make (or don't make) the list solely in the modest hope of getting people talking.  Or screaming.

Not that people wouldn't obligingly flip out even if the concocters of the list had set out to make everyone happy.  Half the population would write in demanding to know where his or her particular absolute favorite novel was, and the other half would be sulking or screaming about the inclusion of Such-And-Such on the list, when everyone knows that book is sexist, racist, lamely written, gimmicky, overrated, or has a premise stolen directly from the letter writer's own novel, which needless to say didn't make it onto the list.

But the writers of the Time list flat-out admit that one of the purposes of their list was to enrage, and they chose the most direct route by failing to include any of the Harry Potter novels on their collection of titles.  (I am at this moment calling every travel agent I know to see if I can purchase a ticket to the alternate universe in which Harry Potter made the cut.  I would dearly love to know if his inclusion would have provoked an equal number of indignant letters.  I rather think not, but one can dream.)  The most striking common characteristic of the We Love Harry Potter crowd, other than the fact that the ones over the age of thirty (which is pretty much all of them) act as if they discovered the novels all by themselves and performed a major archeological feat in doing so, rather than being followers in one of the biggest trends since, I don't know, cooked food or something...

What was I saying?  Oh, right.  Harry Potter fans.  Their most obvious shared characteristic, other than a missionary fervor that becomes positively evangelical when they meet someone who hasn't seen the light and the One True Way and who has lived a long, full, even happy life without the saving grace of Harry Potter -- I mean, I thought the Mormons were the ones who all carried the same book around and pressed copies of it on nonbelievers --

-- seriously, what was I talking about?

Okay.  I remember.  But let me get this out of the way first or it'll just keep popping up like King Charles' head.  (That's a David Copperfield reference.  I told you I hung out with the nineteenth century too much.  The weird thing is, I don't even know if I like Dickens.  Sometimes I'm pretty sure I hate him.  But I still read him all the time.  Not just the normal Dickens titles everyone's heard of, but obscure short stories and huge unending pointless tomes like Little Dorrit and everything.  I reread these like there's going to be a test.  What's really strange about that is that I'm positive I adore Henry James and I never read anything by him.)  Anyway, let me just say here and now to all the Harry Potter fans who keep trying to convert me, which means all the Harry Potter fans who ever find out that I'm not one:  look, I tried to read the damned books, okay?  I got, like, a hundred pages into the first one.  It didn't work for me.  I gave up.  I know how much the boy means to you, and I'm sure you'll be very happy together.  But stop asking me to please finish the first book and the second one and get at least halfway through the third because that's when they really start to get good.  If I ever get that kind of reading time, I intend to work my way through the collected letters of Jane Austen looking for the naughty bits.  So give it up, already.

Okay.  What I was saying, back when I was young and though that topic sentences were important, was that the guys who came up with the Time 100 Best list really knew what they were doing when they left old H.P. off, if they were after some serious public response.  I don't know if they did it because they actually really don't like the books.  I think that even if they adored them, the thought of the riot they'd start by leaving him off would be too tempting to resist.  But they may have taken on more than they can chew.  (I meant that to sound wrong, but it sounded even wronger than I'd intended.  Well, I'm tired and it's staying put.)  Harry Potter fans are not people who tend to keep their opinions about the lad to themselves, and I'm sure the Time folks have their hands and their mailboxes full of indignation and reproaches and warnings that it's not too late to see the Harry light and be saved.  I would be tempted, in a rare moment of kindness and discretion, to leave them alone solely on that account.

But they don't really want me over here quietly catching up with my book group rantings, do they?  The guys who wrote the Time list, I mean.  Of course they don't.  They want me to join in the howling, under any excuse I fancy.  So here goes.

I am going to try with every ounce of my will power to resist the urge to wonder aloud what the hell exactly the guys over at Time were smoking to cause them to include or preclude certain titles or authors.  Of course on a list like this there are going to be books that I wish had made it, books for which I could make an argument so solid that it might even hold up in court.  And there are, just as certainly, books that made it to the list that I'm going to have to try not to scream about, and then I'm not going to be able to restrain myself because I'm not going to see any point in holding back since, as I learned during natural childbirth, howling really can help some kinds of pain so who cares if I scare the neighbors again.  But it isn't my list.  It isn't supposed to be all about me.  Really.  Some things aren't.  And that's okay.

So I'm not going to whine about individual titles.

But you can bet I'm going to go on about categories.  What titles I'd be willing to bet weren't so much as considered because they fall under certain headings, and what titles shouldn't have even been remotely considered because they fell under certain other headings.  That's fair game.

The list had certain parameters.  It could only include novels published since 1923, the year that Time first came into existence.  So my surprise at seeing no Edith Wharton was allayed when I did a quick check and saw that both The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence](1921 -- ooh, so close) were published before the deadline, and though A Backward Glance came out in 1934 and certainly qualifies as one of Wharton's best works, it's a memoir and so couldn't be considered.  (The makers of the list helpfully pointed out that Ulysses another conspicuous absence, suffered an even narrower edge-out than Age of Innocence, as it was released in 1922.  Having just done a slew of reading about Virginia Woolf for the book group, I know for a fact that if she and Leonard had accepted it for publication by their own Hogarth Press when it was offered to them, instead of declining it partly because they weren't sure they liked it and mostly because it's an even longer novel to typeset -- especially when you've only got two people and one clunky old printing press to work with -- than it is to read, it certainly would have come out in, say, 1952, thereby changing the course of history by making it to this list after all and possibly saving Woolf's life by keeping her too busy to commit suicide.  Or else she might have offed herself a hell of a lot sooner, confronted with typesetting Joyce's idea of the English language every day.  But I digress.)

So, having set themselves certain unbreakable guidelines, the boys over at Time (and yes, I'm using the pronoun advisedly -- the list was put together by Richard Lacayo and Lev Grossman) decided that they'd do their best to play fast and loose with them.  And that's where they started to lose me, and where the friend who brought this list to my attention (okay, full disclosure -- he's no friend, he's my husband) got to watch in delight as I stomped ineradicable dents into my floor with my bare feet.

There are certain titles that can be enjoyed by people of all ages.  Reading Oliver Twist when I was ten was a very different experience from rereading it when I was twenty, but it was fun both times.  And there are certain titles that may have been originally intended for children, such as Alice in Wonderland and Little Women, but are now considered perfectly respectable adult fare as well. 

But there are also books that, though they may be absolutely loads of fun to read if you like that kind of thing, are nevertheless just plain flat-out no-question-about-it children's books.  The world of children's literature has many gems and not a few absolute duds, as well as plenty of workaday titles and authors; but it is what it is, and what it is is its own realm. 

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which made the list, is a children's book.  If C. S. Lewis had written nothing but the Narnia books, one might just be able to argue that they are timeless, ageless works that should be considered in their own right and by their own lights.  However, it's fair to point out that, so far as his fiction is concerned, if Lewis had written everything he did except his Narnia books, you would never have heard of him.  His grownup novels have some admirers, but they are few and far between, especially compared to the hordes that adore the Narnia works.  Which he said in so many words that he wrote for children, as opposed to his other equally religiously metaphorical but less skillfully written books.  Yes, I have the entire set of Narnia books on my shelf, and I'm probably going to give them all a good reread very soon.  That's not the point.  The point is, they're children's books, and we all have to cope with that. 

I wouldn't be making half so big a deal about this -- heck, I wouldn't have brought it up at all, since the Narnia books are fantastic and there's something equally fabulous about seeing one of them on a list like this.  The only reason that I'm sitting here being Ms. Grumpy-Gradgrind about their inclusion is they apparently acted as a gateway drug for the admission of the other children's title that made the cut:  Judy Blume's Are You There, God?  It's Me, Margaret.

Okay, now, look.  There are certain titles that call out to the most hardened adult and beg to be taken up again for a pleasurable romp.  Are You There, God? isn't one of them.  It really isn't.  I read it (along with pretty much everything else Judy Blume wrote when I was young enough to read her without excuses being necessary) so many times that I have whole sentences from it still floating around in my head that I can examine, without the bother of going to the library and getting a copy of the actual damned book, for that certain gleam that bespeaks immortality. 

I'm not seeing it, folks.  And I'm looking. 

You think I'm kidding?  I'll quote it 'til I kill you, if I have to.  There's the part where Margaret wakes up really early on a non-school day and decides to neaten up the desk in her bedroom, put all her pens and paper and stuff in order.  "I'm always real organized until about October."  Then her grandma shows up at the door, on a surprise visit.  Margaret wonders how she got there, since her grandmother hates to take the train because it's so dirty.  "So, what's a little dirt?  I'll wash!"  Ooh, and then there's the kissing game at her friend's birthday party.  I'm pretty sure the boy Margaret has a crush on is named Philip.  She does get kissed by him, behind closed doors, and lies about it later, turning one quick kiss into "Three or four.  I lost track," for the benefit of a jealous friend.  And then there's the part where Margaret sneaks into the confession booth at the Catholic church and hears a voice talking to her and doesn't realize for a second that it's just the priest in the other booth and thinks it must be God. 

Stop me now.  I'll do the whole book.

And you know what?  It's just not that great of one.  What I mean is, compared to most children's books being written these days, it's certainly good.  It makes some excellent points.  But there's nothing insanely wonderful about it.  It's just fun.  Especially if you're an eleven-year-old girl.  It's a children's book.  That's all it is.  It isn't good enough to leap out and hit one in the face, insisting on being treated as real literature.

Let me ask those Time boys something.  Do they really want to open that particular door?  Or rather those particular floodgates, since the list of genuinely great and influential children's titles is so huge that it could qualify for a 100 best all of its own?  Did they really consider every children's book published since 1923, or even every really really good one?  Shouldn't they just admit that children's literature is a category of its own and leave it the hell alone?  They're not paying the field any compliment by having a token title or two on their list; quite the contrary.  They're implying that out of the dozens of genuinely excellent novels written for children since '23, only two are worth mentioning.

Plus they made a bad choice.  Do they honestly want to be the ones who went on record as saying that Are You There, God?  It's Me, Margaret is a better book than Charlotte's Web?  Or any of E. B. White's other children's novels, for that matter?  Or the Little House books?  (Seriously.  Read or reread those sometime.  There's some luminescent prose there.)  In terms of sheer, bootie-kicking power, are they sincerely telling me that they think Are You There can and should linger longer in the memory and print than Harriet the Spy, or Bridge To Terabithia?  In terms of literary quality, do they really think it ranks above Sounder  In terms of brilliant dialogue and humor, can it truly hold its own compared to any book with the name Junie B. Jones in its title?

I'm not kidding about that last one.  I will be the first to admit that in that series, there isn't any one book that sticks out as a shining example of "this has to be on the list or I'll kill myself with a wooden cooking spoon."  But in terms of general excellence, has anyone but me noticed what a brilliant a writer Barbara Park is? 

Here.  I'll show you.  Here's a passage from Junie B. Jones and the Mushy Gushy Valentime  Junie's friend Grace is annoyed with Junie B. because Junie keeps pronouncing valentine with an m instead of an n:

"You are not the boss of my words, Grace," I said.  "This is a freed country.  And if I want to say valentime, I can.  And I will not even go to jail."

That Grace looked annoyed at me.

"I didn't say you would go to jail, Junie B.," she said.  "I just wish you would say the word correctly, that's all."

"Yeah, well, we can't always have what we wish for, Grace," I told her.  "I wish valentime had an m in it.  But it doesn't, does it?"

If you're still not convinced, I demand that you listen to this snippet from Junie B. Jones is (almost) a Flower Girl.  Junie B., who is in Kindergarten, has just tackled her classmate Ricardo on the playground and is sitting on his legs:

"Hello, Ricardo," I said.  "How are you today?  I am fine.  Only I just saw you chasing new Thelma.  And so please knock it off.  And I mean it."

Ricardo raised his eyebrows very surprised.

"Why?  How come?" he said.

I sucked in my cheeks at that guy.

"Because, Ricardo.  Because I am your girlfriend.  And you are my boyfriend.  And boyfriends and girlfriends are only allowed to chase each other.  That's how come."

Ricardo kept on looking at me.

I shrugged my shoulders.  "Sorry.  Those are just the rules," I explained.

Ricardo's face turned very glum.

"But I like chasing new Thelma," he said kind of whiny.  "It's fun."

I patted his arm very understanding.

"Yes, well, I don't make the rules, Rick.  I just enforce them," I said.

After some thought, Ricardo gets up, shakes hands with Junie B., and tells her that it's been fun, but he thinks it's time they started chasing other people.  Exactly how many five-year-olds are going to get that kind of humor?  None.  And how many grownups are going to have to stop reading long enough to contract a laughter-induced asthma attack while their children wait in patient puzzlement?  I thought you'd figure it out.

So let's have a little Margaret/Junie B. showdown, shall we?

Margaret of Are You There, God? fame:  grapples with feeling left out and different from other kids because her parents have a mixed-religion marriage and, rather than raising her to be either Jewish or Christian, have told her that she can choose for herself which she prefers when she's old enough to make that kind of decision, which doesn't help her now when people ask her what religion she is.

Junie B. Jones:  faces the terror of a class field trip to a farm when she knows how dangerous farms can be thanks to a babysitter letting her watch the cable television show "When Ponies Attack."

Be honest:  which book do you feel like running out and reading right now?

Well, you'll buy Junie B. Jones Has a Peep in Her Pocket  You'll read it.  And you'll enjoy every word of it. 

But you'll tell people that you read Are You There, God?  It's Me, Margaret.  Because that one has a serious title and tackles serious issues, like religious community and lying about when you got your first period. 

Look, I'm sorry.  (Well, not really.)  But this brings up one of my really big issues (you didn't notice I have them, did you?), which is humor writing being constantly and consistently treated like a poor relation of "real" writing.  All very well and good, and certainly a fine way to while away a few spare moments in the doctor's waiting room.  But nothing that ought to be considered in the same light as "serious" literature.  (Pay no attention to that Mark Twain behind the curtain.  He's the exception that proves the rule.)

I'm tired of it.  I'm tired of the idea that Shakespeare's best tragedy is automatically better than his best comedy just by virtue of being a bummer.  I'm tired of even Jane Austen's admirers wondering if she can be considered as up there with Shakespeare as one of the greatest writers in the English language (or any other, but that's another essay for another day) since none of her novels are tragic.  And I'm really sick of writers who use humor being expected to apologize for its presence in their work, like the parents of a screaming baby on an airplane.  If humor has to be in a novel at all (oh, dear, those groundlings will demand that kind of thing, won't they?), it must be on the excuse that even King Lear had that Fool guy around to lighten things up now and then.

Take a look at the 100 Best list.  Go on, look.  I'll wait. 

Okay.  Notice that dearth of humor?  Oh, sure, there are plenty of novels with comic elements.  Catcher In The Rye, for instance.  Whole pages of funny, there.  Good thing it redeems itself by having a suitably tragic ending.

But where are the just plain comic-for-the-sake-of-being-comic novels?

Off entertaining people who will read them, love them, laugh at them, and blush to be caught owning them.  Set them aside with the excuse that it was a terrible day at work and everyone needs to vegetate with a bit of comic fluff now and then.  You know, when you're not up to reading a real book. 

What strikes me as ironic about this attitude is that this is exactly the way that novels as a group used to be treated, or rather dismissed.  Novels were the books that women would fritter away their time with, rather than reading works of any worth.  Jane Austen, an unapologetic novel reader and novelist at a time when partaking in either pursuit could be seen as a sign of terminal shallowness or clinical insanity, respectively, gave the medium a spirited defense in one of her earliest novels.  The book, Northanger Abbey, also happens to spend a lot of time poking fun at certain types of novels, but never mind.  The "only a novel" passage is as powerful now as it was some two hundred years ago, and Austen's indignant examples of how the novel is treated by readers and writers alike could apply very well now to comic writing:

Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.  From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers.  And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, -- there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.  "I am no novel reader -- I seldom look into novels -- Do not imagine that I often read novels -- It is really very well for a novel."  Such is the common cant.  "And what are you reading, Miss --?"  "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.  "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;" or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

I have asked this before and I will ask it again:  why do people persist in believing that tragedy is better than comedy, rather than simply different?  Why do they believe a great tragic novel is automatically superior to -- well, I can't say a great comic novel, can I?  That's a contradiction in terms.  Is it because they believe that tragedy is more difficult to write -- that it's harder to make people cry than it is to make them laugh?  Tell me a better one.  Making people cry isn't just easier; it's easy.  Yes, it is.  Tell them that your mom just died.  Or your puppy.  Or your puppy's mom -- okay, that's got it.  Now try to get someone to laugh -- not that polite, nervous little noise people make when you've made a good-faith attempt at humor and they want to reward your effort, but a real laugh.  One you jerked out of them almost in spite of themselves.  Ask yourself which you'd rather have to do if offered the choice:  stand up and deliver a moving speech about the plight of the victims of the latest catastrophe, or do standup at a comedy club?

So:  given that humor is really work, and that laughter is necessary and wonderful, why is comic writing treated so shabbily?

The writers of the Time 100 Best list mentioned a lot of writers and novels who were under consideration, but didn't make the final cut.  Obviously they couldn't mention everyone who didn't make it.  But you have to figure they're going to make some reference to the big names that fell by the wayside, right?  The classics? 

For instance: 

I looked for Brave New World on the list.  Didn't find it.  Found Huxley mentioned on the "we thought about him, but..." list. 

I looked for The Group.  Didn't find it.  Found Mary McCarthy in a "close, but no cigar" paragraph. 

I looked for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on the list.  Didn't find it.  Found Betty Smith...nowhere at all.  Not so much as an honorable mention.

Now, look.  That's a title everyone's heard of.  It came out in '43 -- didn't have to hold its breath and suck in its waist to make it into the realm of the eligible with plenty of room to spare.  It's in print and was referred to as being part of "the canon" in the introduction to a recent edition.  I even own a leatherbound edition of it.  It's a real book. 

And I'll bet that the reason it didn't make it to the list is that it was never even considered.

Why?  Is it too close to being a children's book, since it's a "coming of age" novel?  First of all, these guys obviously have no problem with children's novels being a token presence on the list.  And even if they minded, Catcher in the Rye is considered a coming of age work, and no one, not even a curmudgeon like me, could possibly object to the fact that it made the cut.  It's a modern classic.  Like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

But Catcher has a melancholy ending.  A Tree has a happy one. 

A Tree deals with serious, even frightening issues.  The main character's father is an alcoholic, blinding himself to his own unhappiness and inadequacy by drinking.  He dies young, leaving his already poverty-stricken family destitute.  The main character herself almost becomes the victim of a murdering child molester.  She grows up knowing hunger, longing to have a single book she can call her own but too poor to be able to buy even one.  She is sensitive and intelligent and a social outcast as a child.  She has to leave school at a young age, though she adores it, and go to work at a series of back-breaking, eye-straining jobs. 

But so far as both tone and content are concerned in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the comic outweighs the tragic.  So out it goes.  Not serious enough to be under serious consideration.  We regret that the manuscript does not suit our present needs.  Send it by again when monkeys fly.

As I said, I'd never expect a list like Time's to have all, or even any, of my favorite titles on it.  I have weird taste.  I'm the first to admit it.  I just don't like my admiration of comic writing to be counted as one of my odd proclivities. 

I'll damn Alison Lurie with faint praise right now by mentioning that she happens to be a really good writer.  Fortunately for you, I don't have to haul out the lengthy quotes to prove it -- I'll just mention the Pulitzer she got for her novel Foreign Affairs.  I remember that book.  It's the one that I don't reread because the ending depresses the bleep out of me.  All the other Lurie books on my shelf are in shamefully shabby shape thanks to the workouts I'm always giving them.  I have read The Truth About Lorin Jones more times than is probably legal.  I can't help it.  I love Lurie's writing.  Because she has a brilliant turn of phrase, a sense of humor that is tender and sharp by turns.  And because she likes a happy ending. 

Well, cross her off the list, then.

I can see you shaking your head as you read this.  (Yes, I can.  This is no ordinary computer I'm working with.)  I get the same look on my face when my friend starts in on one of his favorite government conspiracy theories, or when my other buddy starts explaining about how yes, as a matter of fact, homeopathic medicine does work and here's why. 

Look, I'm not saying that the guys at Time said to themselves, or each other, "Okay, let's start tossing titles around and get this list going.  But remember -- nothing funny."  What I'm saying is that, unconsciously but definitely, they didn't give real consideration to anything that qualified as purely comic work, regardless of the quality of the work, exactly because it was just plain funny.

You want proof?  Okay.  How about a book that came out a few years ago.  A novel that can be read by itself as a story unto itself, but is a much richer experience if you know the original classic work from which it draws inspiration.  A book that discusses the serious issues women grapple with today, the choices they make, compared to the comparative choicelessness of previous generations.  The loneliness we all face at times. 

I just described both The Hours (inspiration:  Mrs. Dalloway) by Michael Cunningham and Bridget Jones' Diary (inspiration:  Pride and Prejudice) by Helen Fielding.  Which one is going to be tossed out of this particular contest without a second glance, and which might have had a decent chance of making the cut?

You know and I know and the lady down the hall knows that if someone had said to the guys drawing up their list of the best, "Hey, how 'bout that Bridget Jones' Diary -- that was some sparkling writing there?" they'd have looked baffled and blank.  That was just a silly best-seller they made into a movie, wasn't it?  Only a funny novel.

Yes -- a novel with actual laugh-out-loud lines in it such as "It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party.  It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting 'Cathy' and banging your head against a tree."  Let's see -- witty, wryly self-referential and literate!  Can't have that kind of riffraff cluttering up the place, can we?

Of course, comic works aren't the only ones that can't be considered for genuine greatness with a big fat G.  Some books are all too serious -- so serious they're scary.  Which makes them horror novels, which makes them -- well, not quite literature.

Why is horror still so comparatively disreputable?  People aren't ashamed to be seen reading it in public any more -- thank you, Mr. King -- but they won't elect it to greatness.  Why?  Is it because the wish to be scared is such a childish one that we hate to admit we even have it?  Kind of like the longing for a good laugh the best of us suffers from now and then. 

Yes, maybe that's what it's all about.  There's something childishly insistent about saying "I want" so loudly when we pick up a book.  I want to laugh.  I want to shiver.  I want to enjoy myself, and if I don't, I'm taking my ball and going home.  Real grownups don't do that kind of thing. 

It makes me think of an odd little pocket of a scene in The Accidental Tourist, where the main character starts throwing a Frisbee around at a dinner party.  "Before long they had a real game going -- all the guests joining in except Brad's wife, who was still too close to childhood to risk getting stuck there on a visit back."  If we admit that we want to get something back from a book when we give it our time and energy and faith, that we like literature to provoke an almost physical reaction in us, as it does when we're jolted by mere words into merriment or terror -- if we say that we enjoy the primitive but pleasing sensations of laughing and gasping, we might be indistinguishable from the baby who shrieks with equal joy at being tickled and being startled in a game of peek-a-boo.  We might be stuck in permanent infancy as readers, when we've worked so hard to earn our adult status by enduring "real" literature and serious novels.

Stephen King was considered for this best list, the makers of it claim.  I wonder if he would have been, say, twenty years ago, before he cleaned up his act and started insisting that he wasn't writing horror novels any more ever again.  Really.  No, really.  So the guys at Time get to feel all good about themselves because they at least thought about a horror writer.  One.  But he didn't make it -- and neither did anyone else from the field. 

Because there aren't any really first-rate writers who specialize in horror?  It's not the genre, it's the work itself that isn't making the grade? 

Well, let's see who's out there.  I haven't read Dean Koontz since he still had the middle initial.  I enjoyed him, but I wouldn't call him literature.  Whitley Strieber?  Peter Straub?  Ditto. 

Shirley Jackson, on the other hand...yes, it's true, she might have squeaked in under the "better known and loved for short stories" disqualifier that took Flannery O'Connor out of the running.  Her story "The Lottery" is certainly Jackson's best-known and arguably her best work; the short stories that join it in the book by that title make up some of her most forceful writing.  Her body of longer work doesn't fare as well.  Her first two novels, The Road Through the Wall and Hangsaman, are powerful but incomplete.  We Have Always Lived in the Castle is too unstumbling a portrayal of insanity and The Bird's Nest is too whimsical a one to be comfortable reading for many.  The Sundial is what can only be called a perfect eighteenth-century novel, and the fact that it was written and set in the twentieth-century may be why it never stays in print long, more's the pity since the reading of it is some of the purest pleasure I've ever known. 

But The Haunting of Hill House -- now, there's a perfect novel.  Perfect writing, the perfect terror of being trapped in a house that somehow managed to become haunted before it was even built, so that the first human death associated with it seems more like a sacrifice in its honor, or a murder the house itself committed...a haunted house novel written almost on a whim -- "I wanted more than anything else to set up my own haunted house, and put my own people in it, and see what I could make happen" -- in much the same lark-like fashion that Frankenstein was written by a nineteen-year-old girl who thought it would be fun to write a scary story when one of her friends suggested the idea.  (Which is what you get when you start hanging out with the likes of Byron and Shelley on vacation, I suppose.) 

I don't like suggesting that a great work transcends its genre, because I think that implies there's something low or not quite right about the genre -- that the particular work in question blossomed out of dirt, or manure.  But I think the phrase applies in this case because this book is so profoundly fine that it can be read with pleasure even by those who would never ordinarily consider picking up a horror novel.  It is, in the best sense, only a novel.  It is simply a perfect book, arcing beautifully from its coolly formal beginning to its decisive, shattering ending, never faltering between.  The first paragraph is so often quoted that it has become a kind of classic in and of itself:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.  Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

I can see no reason that writing of this caliber didn't make it to the list, or even to the auditioning room, except that it's technically a horror novel, written by a writer who, in spite being quite capable of real humor (not that that would help her much, here), is best known for her dark edge.

Like Daphne du Maurier, another great and underestimated writer.  Yes, see the movie of Rebecca, but read the damned book too and find out how compelling her writing is -- not just how good a story she can tell, but how well she can tell it.  That hushed, level voice is never raised from the first muted chapter -- "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" -- to the ashes in the air at the bitter, unforgettable ending.  (Or, if you're short of time, read the short story "The Birds" and wonder how in the name of heaven or hell Hitchcock came up with the movie, which has nothing in common with its inspiration but the title.  And read a few of du Maurier's other short stories, like "The Apple Tree" and "The Blue Lenses."  Look for the edition of her stories illustrated by Michael Foreman, Daphne du Maurier's Classics of the Macabre -- it's not in print, but check with an online used-book distributor and you should be able to get a copy fairly inexpensively.  It's very beautiful and well worth the effort.)

And how about Ira Levin?  The man wrote two absolutely perfect horror novels, one of which added the word "Stepford" to our national vocabulary.  The other is a lot of fun to read in public when you're visibly pregnant, and yes, I know this from experience.  (My husband says that Rosemary's Baby should automatically forfeit its status as a classic since Levin basically ruined it by writing a sequel, Son of Rosemary so bad that the "and then she woke up and it was all a dream" ending was the most forgivable part of it.  My husband should shut up now.)  Those books are modern classics.  The concepts and execution are flawless.  Maybe that's why they didn't get considered -- Levin makes brilliant writing look too easy.  Or maybe Levin is just too scary for his own good.

Odd that humor and horror could be basically dismissed -- sent to their rooms and only allowed to come out when they promised to behave like grownups -- but that a graphic novel -- a comic book, in other words -- made it in.

There's not enough room in the world for all the screaming I'd like to do about the inclusion of one on this list, so I'll try to keep my objections brief. 

First off, it's like I said before about children's books.  The inclusion of one graphic novel doesn't pay a compliment to the genre.  It just smacks of tokenism. 

Second, cut it out with the "but it has the word 'novel' right there in the description, so it must be a novel."  My fistula.  A graphic novel can be a wonderful thing, but it's not a just plain novel.  You don't get to throw a work that can rely on illustration to set a scene in the same pile as the books by people who are at the mercy of mere words to tell readers just how red a particular sunset or pool of blood is. 

Third -- give me a break, okay?  Just cut it out.  I mean, criminy.  There were real live actual novels out there begging to be let in, and you slammed the door on one of their faces to make some kind of boy-game point?  I hate you.  I spit on your email address.

Sorry.  I'm a little tired.  I've been at this for a while.  You may have noticed.

And now, because I want to reward myself for the self-control I manfully exercised by trying to make some actual points about literature instead of just following my inclination and turning this into one long rant about the books I like and why they're better than the books everybody else likes, here is a very little list of titles I wish had made it to the 100 Best Since 1923:

• Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeannette Winterson
• The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
• Hotel Du Lac, by Anita Brookner
• The End of Vandalism, by Tom Drury
• Ladder of Years, by Anne Tyler
• The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwood
• The Virgin in the Garden, by A. S. Byatt

I could give a good reason or glowing review for each of them -- the turtle soup passage from The Edible Woman fairly begs to be mentioned, as does the fact that The Edible Woman is Atwood's first novel and reads more like her fifth -- but I won't.  Read them and see what pleasures they hold if you like.  They may not hit you the same way they did me -- what am I saying? of course they won't.  That's why you're you and I'm me -- but they're definitely worth picking up.  Or at least considering.

Happy reading.

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