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When, last year, the Modern Library announced its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century, the resulting controversy centered on issues of representation: why so few books by women and racial minorities—and why was the panel of judges composed almost entirely of Old, Nearly Dead White Males? Naturally this would be the burning issue; first things first.
More or less ignored in the brouhaha was a much more fundamental question, one that in many circles would be considered too gauche to ask: Why read novels at all?
In the Christian tradition, that question has been asked repeatedly over the centuries, going all the way back to the early church and the heyday of the Hellenistic romances that scholars describe as the earliest novels. Often, the church's answer has been Don't! Don't read novels. Novels, after all, are elaborate lies, blurring the distinction between reality and make-believe. Instead of the plain and simple truth, fiction offers lessons that are indirect and often deeply ambiguous. Novels are often brazenly immoral besides, encouraging sexual license. And even the less reprehensible stories distract us from what really matters. Today many Christians are embarrassed by such responses. But they shouldn't be embarrassed by the question, which remains an important one. Why should we read novels?
To begin sketching an answer, I turned not to the notorious Modern Library list but to the product of another, more modest promotional scheme. Two or three years before the Modern Library episode, the revived Everyman Library—which leaned heavily toward the classics—announced its first contemporary titles, nine books said to represent the best of world fiction in the postwar period: Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe; The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow; One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Catch-22, by Joseph Heller; Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison; A House for Mr. Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul; Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; and Rabbit Angstrom (a tetralogy comprising Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest), by John Updike.
These works certainly represent the dominant traditions of the novel today. If anyone wants to ask "Why read fiction?" this is an excellent laboratory. And so in good scientific fashion I commenced my investigation. (You'll have to take my word for it that I read—or, in some cases, re-read—all nine books, even though here I report only on six.)
The single most influential book on this list may well be Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. When it appeared (in 1967 in Spanish, 1970 in English translation), the hip trend was a highly mannered gamesmanship, a la John Barth: "metafiction," the critics called it, fiction gazing raptly at its own navel. And then, boom! in the middle of this crockery landed a book by a Colombian writer who unhesitatingly accepted the novelist's traditional obligation to invent a world with a savvy and ambitious literalism. He wrote with supreme confidence, as if he had just created the art of the novel from scratch. So the omniscient narrator of Solitude remembers the time when Macondo, the story's setting, was "a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."
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