In the novelists-all-poets-oughtta-read category, here are our choices:
1. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
Vintage Books (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Trans. Jay Rubin, Vintage Books, 1998) Murakami may be the best U.S. novelist at work, except he’s Japanese (but somehow, even more “American”—who else would write Norwegian Wood, the novel?). His classic is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. His nonfiction Underground, about the Sarin poisonings in the Tokyo subway, gives the best insight into suicide bombers.
2. Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Noonday Press, 1990) Didion’s sparse prose and searing reporting make her a poets’ fave. Try Play it as it Lays for a dip into the rattlesnake pill shake of Los Angeles before immorality and immortality became forever inextricable. And Didion’s Salvador demonstrates how journalism and fiction go seamless.
3. Paradise, by Toni Morrison
Dutton/Plume (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Dutton/Plume, 1999) Toni Morrison is the force of forces, and while Beloved might be the book that says it all, the more recent Paradise is a multilayered treasure that will walk off with your heart. Especially recommended is Morrison’s own reading in the (abridged) audiobook version (Random House Audiobooks, 1998).
4. City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, by Elmore Leonard
Harper Collins (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(HarperTorch paperback reissue, 2002) “Dutch” Leonard is the only crime writer who gets consistently high marks from poets—I’ve been hooked since Bill Berkson turned me on to Swag. You’ll know Dutch as the author of Get Shorty, which reads better than the movie. His early stuff, especially the reissued City Primeval, written before he went Hollywood-Miami, is a heartpumping blast.
5. Freedomland, by Richard Price
Bantam Books (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Dell, 1999) Price has a fabulous library of 40s poets and novelists; he once showed me a magazine with unknown Joe Gould poems! His first book, The Wanderers, is the best-ever feat of street surrealism. Freedomland is a must read, investigating race, love and loyalty, work, sweat and honesty—themes lurking in most contemporary novels, he throws in your face.
6. Outerbridge Reach, by Robert Stone
Houghton Mifflin (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Mariner Books, 1998) Stone keeps turning out books that oughta be potboilers but end up being holy things. Each has a Transcendent Moment where character and reader suddenly get sucked into the vortex—in Outerbridge Reach on a desert island of the imagination, in Children of Light in a hog pen. And Stone’s Damascus Gate is the best novel around on contemporary Jerusalem.
7. Underworld, by Don DeLillo
Simon & Schuster (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Scribner’s, 1998) Don DeLillo you either like or not... me I do. Take a look at Underworld (the cover—is this view of the World Trade Towers from Nostradamus?) and keep your eye on the ball—Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World ball, that is, as DeLillo exposes every underbelly en route to the heart of the country.
8. Blue Angel, by Francine Prose
Harper Collins (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Harper Perennial, 2001) Francine Prose is stepping away from mod pieces into “novel” novels with her Blue Angel, brilliant satire set in writing-workshop-world.
9. Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
Penguin Group USA (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Penguin Putnam, 2000) Tip Prose’s Blue Angel into J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, to get your dose of student-professor liaisons.
10. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
St. Martin’s Press (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001) Top off your novelistic excursion with the opening chapter of Franzen’s brilliant The Corrections, Best Big Book since Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, (which has not been the focus of hype and award granted to The Corrections, but which poets must also read...).
