GREAT NOVELS

Below please find a brief description of some novels that continue to influence me toward a deeper conception of life and love. Clicking on the title will take you to their location on the Amazon website.

 
FOOLS CROW by James Welch 
Gros Ventre and Blackfoot writer James Welch reveals the Blackfoot empire at the height of its power, just bordering on White encroachment.  Rendered of an exquisite prose resonant of magic and wilderness, Fools Crow is a tribute to the vitality and sovereignty of a largely forgotten people and to Welch’s great capacity to generate an internal and external landscape that is distinctly native and universally profound.

BARABBAS by Par Lagerkvist 
In clean, spare prose, the 1951 Nobel Prize winner Par Lagerkvist sets one of the most desperate characters in history against a backdrop of belief, personal agency, and the collective search for truth.  His novel imprints human life with love, sacrifice, and the struggle for spiritual survival. 

THE ZERO by Jess Walter 
In this lyrical noir, National Book Award finalist Jess Walter weaves a seamless tale of fractured existence and confusion in the glamour-driven aftermath of American trauma.  People, consumerism, and the machine of Neolithic government compress the anti-hero to a point of ultimate fragmentation, and Walter’s deft prose dances and dazzles with irony, humor, and loss.  The Zero, a novel written just after his Edgar Award winning Citizen Vince, establishes Walter as one of the contemporary master’s of American dark satire, lacing his shattering conclusions with an underlying sense of the human desire for truth.
 
HAPPY BABY by Stephen Elliott 
Chronologically reversed, Happy Baby engages the interiority of its characters with a deep sense of discovery.  The lyrical engine of the novel contains subtlety, torque, and a kind of dauntless embrace of suffering and consolation that succeeds in drawing from the well of terror the water of exultation. In the face of the desolate, Elliott’s art is tender, fearless, lovely.  

GILEAD by Marilynne Robinson 
Known for rich and poetic prose, Robinson’s Housekeeping won her a PEN/Hemingway award and became a modern classic.  Her second novel, Gilead, written some 23 years later, deeply questioned the quick or glibly transactional conception of Christianity proffered by American media during the intensified debate over morality in the contemporary political scene.  This story of the elegant sacredness of the illumined mind in the context of transcendent love garnered the Pulitzer Prize and helped restore our understanding of the nature of faith and dignity.

RESERVATION BLUES by Sherman Alexie 
Every page of Alexie’s Reservation Blues reads with the kind of portent and quake found in Alexie’s great poems of love, fire, and loss.  Humor and wisdom are interwoven to create a braiding effect as sharp with irony as it is quiet and confident with revelation.  Alexie has expressed the anger and desire of an entire generation, unequivocally spat in the face of the elitist regime, and blessed society with a sacred sense of laughter, wholeness, and delight.  Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for War Dances, named as one of Granta’s 20 Best American Novelists Under 40, poet, playwright, and basketball aficionado, Alexie’s art is a grace to behold.     

THE GREAT FIRE by Shirley Hazzard 
A book brilliant in conception, sublime in beauty, and crafted of delicate and profound power, The Great Fire continues to establish Shirley Hazzard as one of the pre-eminent prose stylists and novelists of international reach at work today.  The novel won the National Book Award, and is a striking compliment to her 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award winning The Transit of Venus. 

HOUSE MADE OF DAWN by N. Scott Momaday 
Kiowa, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, N. Scott Momaday broke loose in this his first novel (1966) with a prose ringing of inevitability and explosive fortitude.  The sheer velocity of Momaday’s rhythms and pace when paired with his prophetic understanding of privilege, emptiness, and broken identity give this novel the feel of a house on fire in darkness and a tour de force of American cultural legacy.  

THE SECOND COMING OF MAVALA SHIKONGO by Peter Orner 
Peter Orner’s debut collection Esther Stories received wide critical acclaim and provides the artistic foreshadowing of the reach and scope of his talent, beautifully realized in his first novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo.  Orner navigates persons and cultures not only with significant discernment but with a sense of humility and respect for individual and collective will despite the history of human atrocity that marks the world.  Orner’s writing is potent, devastating, and soulful. 

TO THE WEDDING by John Berger 
Acclaimed British art critic as well as one of the world’s most revered novelists, John Berger casts a refreshing light on the desperation of HIV in this love affair with country and culture that races throughout Europe even as it resides in the heart of humanity.  Winner of the Booker Prize for G. and author of the peasant trilogy Into Their Labors, Berger challenges the human capacity for injury with this elegiac triumph-song of intimacy, healing, and love.  He donated the royalties from To The Wedding to the Harlem United Community AIDS center in New York. 

CHILD OF GOD by Cormac McCarthy 
One among the many of Cormac McCarthy’s luminous early works that created his cult following and positioned him as a modern icon of lyrical precision, Child of God delves into the horrific center of American ignorance and human indignity.  An early counter-cultural reflection of two of his most recent and more accessible works, The Sunset Limited and The Road, Child of God casts the utter depravity of McCarthy’s character Lester Ballard into an increasing dispossession resonant of the dark core of violence that has always accompanied American life.  The title redeems both Lester and the world.