Resolution

The year I was nine, I resolved to write a novel. On New Year’s Day, I pulled out a fresh spiral notebook, its metal spine burnished and hard, its pages still perfectly flat and creamy, and began the novel from the beginning. I don’t remember the plot in detail–it was a combination of a Nancy Drew mystery I’d read and the storyline from an episode of Night Gallery–but I remember laying on the carpet and writing as fast and hard as I could, trying to think of what exciting twist would come next.

I never finished that novel, but the desire to write one has always been with me. It’s not that I didn’t end up writing a book—I’ve written four, at last count, with another in the works. But I write academic non-fiction. The delicacy of the novelist’s craft, with its foreshadowings and symbolisms and allusions is far beyond the kind of straightforward scalpel work I do in my writing. My characters are all real people, but they quickly become archetypes in my work, illustrations of larger points about the way social life is governed rather than individuals whose erratic natures matter in and of themselves. I work hard to set scenes, and to describe lived experience, but I don’t have much latitude to help you experience the smells that cling to your hair after a long shift in the factory, or the cold night air at the bus stop at two in the morning when the work is done. I envy novelists, who can tell the truth by making up details. I wish I knew more about how their craft is done, and how they can evoke truths about the world not by calling upon grand theory (like I have to do) but by making each person, each place, each scene matter intrinsicially.

So this year, 2008, I’ve decided to come back to the novel not by writing (at least, not by writing a novel), but by reading. And because I want to challenge myself to read quality novels, substantial intellectual meals instead of the junk food and mind candy I’ve been reading, I’ve decided to let somebody else pick the novels. I’m letting the committee that awards the Booker Prize, Britain’s best known novel prize, pick the works. My job? To read all 40 Booker Prize winning novels, in order, from the most recent to the first ever awarded, and to finish them all in 2008. So that I actually think on them, and don’t just inhale them, I’ll be posting thoughts on each novel here.

Feel free to jump in. I’d love to hear what you think of each of the novels. Why did they win? What do they do with language that makes them worth reading? What commentary do they make on the human condition? I’m starting January 1 with the 2007 Booker Prize Winner, Anne Enright’s The Gathering.