A very worthwhile list from our friend, Dr. David Rosenwasser:
All are novels; none are short collections. All are 20th- or 21st-century, with one exception. Dates are approximate.
1. Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
She is the greatest Irish novelist, and there are other novels by her nearly as good as this one about a large woman with a small mother and a brother with a secret. Keane is Protestant Ascendancy and a gourmet chef: her favorite ingredient as a writer is vinegar. 1985 or so.
2. William Trevor, Two Lives
Two novels bound together by the Protestant writer the New York Times called the greatest living short story writer in English. Why does Trevor bind these two short novels together? Well, both feature a 59-year-old woman . . . Read them and think about it. 1999 or so.
3. Anne Enright, The Gathering
A recent Booker Prize winner and the best novel I have read lately. A woman searches her memory to come to terms with her brother, the Irish past, and her own narrative complicity. Beautifully written, oneiric. 2007 or so.
4. Edna O'Brien, House of Splendid Isolation
Part of a trilogy by the grand dame of Irish fiction (Wild Decembers in the same trilogy is also terrific), this novel tells the tale of a May-December love affair between an IRA terrorist on the run (and he is the May!) and an aging, resentful, reclusive woman whose house he crashes. Around 1995.
5. Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
Bowen is the most underrated of the great Modernist novelists in English. She is a disciple of Woolf and a pal of Molly Keane (and like her, an Ascendancy Protestant). This novel, one of her three greatest, inhabits the points of view of two kids in a strange house in Paris. There is a long flashback to Ireland. The ingenue is likened to Alice in Wonderland. Around 1935.
6. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joyce has to be on the list, and although it is not as great as his best work, Dubliners, Portrait becomes great once we realize it is a comedy and not the romantic novel of education some of us thought it was when we were force-fed it in high school. The discourse of Catholic damnation has never been so vividly mocked nor Irishness so subtly sent up. 1915 or so.
7. Roddy Doyle, The Commitments
Thius first slight novel in The Barrytown Trilogy gets better the more seriously you take it and is wonderful to compare with the film, which Doyle co-wrote and changed a lot. A troop of kids on the dole in 90s Dublin form a soul band--and the comedy of cultural appropriation begins.
8. E.O. Sommerville and Martin Ross, The Real Charlotte
S & R are pen names of two Ascendancy women collaborators. This late 19th-century novel is saturated with spite. It is funny, harsh, and unrelenting about Irish men and the women who love them, hate them, and love to hate them, among other subjects. 1893 or so.
9. Flann O'Brien, At Swim Two Birds
Joyce's successor and Oedipal son writes this zany tale about characters who revolt against the novel they are in; the tale is spliced with a brilliant translation of an actual medieval Irish myth, Sweeney Astray, about the anti-hero Sweeney, turned into a bird for opposing Christianity. 1935 or so.
10. John Banville, The Sea
A fairly recent Booker Prize winner and a wonderful novel to compare with The Gathering. A male oneiric voice this time, a recollection of a young love by an old man. Around 2003.
Have any other suggestions? Let us know!
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