The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 ★★★★½

Life with America's Most Wanted

The Great American Novel, it turns out, is a crime story. The Great Gatsby may be known now as refined literature or even worse, high art, but what makes it so immediate and enjoyable is the milieu it sprang from, of gangsters, flappers, body counts and bootleg gin.

That and the fact it is so much fun to read should divest it of any perceived responsibility for uplifting the mind. It has a message, deep if not especially brilliant, but the novel’s main takeaway is the setting and its people, aristocrats basking in the high life along Long Island Sound.

Nick Carraway is a striving bond salesman and Yale graduate who becomes enmeshed when his married second cousin Daisy takes up an affair with Nick’s rich neighbor Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is an enigma; no one seems to know how he got his money, only that he has a lot of it.

White Noise – Don DeLillo, 1985 ★

Embracing the Chaos

Some books I read for enjoyment, others for a challenge. Then there are books like White Noise I read as a kind of secular penance, because every now and then I need something to more or less kick my teeth in.

Punishment literature, I call it. Post-modern literature is the more accepted term. It’s not my scene, but there are post-modern books, even a couple by the same author, that I can find pleasure in reading. White Noise is such a death-obsessed, narrative-splintered drag that I can’t even fake a baseline appreciation for it.

Jack Gladney is a college professor who chairs a department in Hitler Studies at a geographically isolated college. He is married to Babette, with whom he shares responsibility for a number of children (who are either his or hers but not theirs) and an all-consuming fear of dying.

The Beautiful And Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922 ★★½

Casualties at Dawn

The second F. Scott Fitzgerald novel sounds many of the themes as the first, only with greater emphasis on the negative. Youth and beauty fade, wealth is lost, status slips and the mind becomes muddled by wasted opportunity. What is left is something of a fizzle, if a brilliant one.

The weirdest thing about this book is its copyright date. It seems to take in the whole of the Jazz Age. But unlike the later Fitzgerald short story “Babylon Revisited.” which also depicts the ruin of a similarly tragic couple, The Beautiful And Damned was published near the dawn of the Roaring Twenties, not after its end.

Fitzgerald had a prescient view of where the country was going, as well as of his own famous marriage to Zelda Sayre. If only he had a plot!

Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour An Introduction – J. D. Salinger, 1963 ½★

Losing the Plot

After effortlessly crafting a bestselling book by combining two previously published short stories, J. D. Salinger went back to the well. This time, the link between the pair is much less apparent, and the result less happy.

Man, do I hate this book. To be more specific, I really hate the second half, “Seymour An Introduction.” It’s a car wreck of an abortive fictional profile that, instead of making the more disciplined first half read better, magnifies its narcissistic, undisciplined qualities.

John Updike wasn’t kidding when he wrote: “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them.” This is what happens when a previously brilliant writer literally and completely loses the plot.

Franny And Zooey – J. D. Salinger, 1961 ★★★

Pilgrims Progress on the Upper East Side

There are books I enjoy reading that I will recommend to anyone happily, unreservedly, because I feel pretty sure you will enjoy them, too. Then there are books like this, which I find diverting and worthy, but also somewhat dubious of merit and selective in appeal.

It is one of its author’s most beloved works, but is Franny And Zooey any good? I don’t know, I guess, maybe. Sure.

Essentially a novel in the form of a linked short story and novella, Franny And Zooey is where Salinger converted from writer to spiritual advisor. His fluid style always followed its own mystical channels, but this marks a clear break from conventional storycraft.

Three Early Stories – J. D. Salinger, 2014 ★★½

Trickles from a Logjam

The total official literary output of J. D. Salinger was expected to grow considerably following his death in 2010. Legend had it that the famously reclusive writer spent his decades of retirement from public life toiling on fiction only his passing would allow to see the light.

If those manuscripts exist, they remain locked away. But in 2014 there was a brief trickle of posthumous output, three more short stories to add to the nine we have, along with Catcher In The Rye and four novellas.

These, still the newest Salinger stories as of the beginning of 2025, include two of the oldest, first published in magazines in 1940. The other appeared for the first time in late 1944, by which time Salinger was a combat intelligence officer on the Siegfried Line.

Nine Stories – J. D. Salinger, 1953 ★★★★½

Living in the Material World

How many times does one pick up a well-read book expecting one thing only to be surprised? It’s less common for me as I get older, but there are surprises. One of the happiest of them came recently, re-reading this notoriously downgraded staple of suburban libraries.

What you get here is a case for the short story as the supreme form of fiction. Each piece is its own jewel of storytelling economy and creative ambiguity. And as thematically linked ruminations on the human condition, they take on added luster in the form of concept album.

His Vedantic philosophy may not be for everyone, but one doesn’t need to be an acolyte to appreciate J. D. Salinger’s finest hour.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Critical Biography – Mark Van Doren, 1949 ★★★

An Imperfect Greatness

How to rank Nathaniel Hawthorne among the literary giants? He did so much to give serious fiction a uniquely American idiom and character. Yet how many Hawthorne masterpieces are there?

As Mark Van Doren sees it, there are just two. One is widely regarded as the first great American novel. The other, a short story, is just as powerful in the myriad ways it details the evilness of the human heart. Both are majestic, but after that, Hawthorne too often suffered from a willingness to err on the side of comfort, both his own and the reader’s.

Does Van Doren’s minimalist appreciation convince? I don’t think he even tries that hard. But he does offer a bracing way to consider Hawthorne’s deceptively genial legacy from a perspective of eighty years on, a legacy just as bracing eighty years after that.

The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1860 ★★

Mixing Life and Art in the Eternal City

The final novel by the first great American novelist has so much going for it in isolated moments that its undeniable dreadfulness as a whole winds up a thing of wonder.

Imagine a book so filled with magnificent vistas that one feels flush from the radiance of summer mornings that came and went 150 years ago. Imagine lengthy dialogues between a religious believer and a skeptic which genuinely respects the substance of both viewpoints. Imagine social and artistic discursions touching upon centuries of Western civilization.

Then imagine all this being secondary to a plot about whether a man has furry, pointy ears; how a glance can constitute complicity in a murder; and why two bland couples can somehow never find happiness together.

Regina – Leslie Epstein, 1982 ★

Play It Again

An attitude in search of a story, any story, Regina is a frustrating case of an author too much in love with his main character. He uses her to tug at the possibility for hope amid a landscape of harsh desolation. Even if real hope doesn’t exist anywhere, he concludes, at least there is Regina.

Regina Glassman is a moderately famous Manhattan stage actress who has retreated to a life of magazine writing and raising two sons. That is until she is asked to join the cast of a major revival of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Regina made her name playing the ingenue Nora in an earlier production; she can’t say no to a chance to relive the role.

How young she was when she played teenaged Nora back then! How much more, she knows, can she bring to the part now.

The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1852 ★★★½

Subjectivity Triumphs Over All

Unconventional people went by different names in different eras. In more recent history, they were known as “beatniks” or “hippies.” In the mid-1800s, they were known as something else: transcendentalists.

What they were transcending was wide-ranging and amorphous, but their commitment to living in a world free of conventions was clear. For them, nature was a source of truth more powerful than any human creed. Who cared about money or class when there was eternal beauty?

Nathaniel Hawthorne was for a time one of these seekers, making his home for a few months in a utopian community called Brook Farm just outside Boston. While his time there wasn’t long, its impact went deep enough to form the basis of perhaps his most personal novel.

Elbow Room – James Alan McPherson, 1979 ★★★★

A Masterclass in Miniature

When short stories work, it’s not in the way of compressed novels. They follow a different logic, setting in motion more open-ended explorations of the mind. Often, what results is not a concrete conclusion so much as a broader reconsideration of a specific feeling or idea.

At least that is the case in this collection of short stories by James Alan McPherson. A man is embarrassed by the rough life of his cousin. A barber struggles to adjust to a changing marketplace. A naïve woman displays unexpected cunning to beat a drunken-driving charge.

McPherson’s stories center around problems of social isolation. Sometimes they are told in ways that suggest an unreliable narrator at work. Often, there is an aspect in dealings with others that smacks of outright rudeness. A woman in a doctor’s office is accosted by a stranger: “As a concerned person, and as your brother, I ask you, without meaning to offend, how did you get that scar on the side of your face?”

The Snow-Image And Other Twice-Told Tales – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 ★★

Hawthorne's Final Grab Bag

There is not enough fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne; life kept getting in his way. But he wrote more tales and sketches than I once thought.

Much better known are two other short-fiction collections. The first is a recognized classic of American literature, Twice-Told Tales. The second, Mosses From An Old Manse, may be his greatest book. Just recently I found this later collection containing some of the last short pieces Hawthorne wrote.

Just how essential is The Snow-Image, anyway?

The House Of The Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 ★★★½

Gingerbread Gothic

A memorable title and immersive setting are the main takeaways people get from this American classic, which seems fair to me. When a novelist accomplishes one thing so brilliantly, why carp about the characters or story?

A fiction set around a real building, still extant in Salem, Massachusetts, The House Of The Seven Gables concerns the Pyncheons, once a proud Puritan family now brought low by poverty and greed. How low we discover early in the book, when scowling spinster Hepzibah Pyncheon takes the radical step of turning part of the mansion into a cent shop.

She needs money to support herself and her mentally-impaired brother, Clifford. At the moment, the only money in her family belongs to her cousin Jaffrey, a judge and politician who embodies the Pyncheons’ cruel legacy. Hepzibah knows too well not to trust his offers of help.

Mosses From An Old Manse – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1846 ★★★★★

 A Writer Arrives

In the annals of American literature, no eminence put himself down with more avidity than Nathaniel Hawthorne. Titling his second published collection of writings Mosses From An Old Manse after calling his first Twice-Told Tales is a clear sign of low self-esteem.

Which would you rather read? Some choice, right?

Mosses From An Old Manse is the less-known title, but a better book. Though not narratively connected, having been originally published over a number of years, they lay out Hawthorne’s compelling visions for the nature of art in society and the whole meaning of life. Not every short story in it is a masterpiece; not every masterpiece in it is a short story.

The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights – John Steinbeck, 1976 ★★

Random Acts of Meaningless Violence

Sometimes I enjoy a book so much I don’t want to finish it. The tone, voice, and story cast such a spell I fear it can only end in disappointment. Should I put the book down forever, to hold onto that brief feeling before the author drives it off a cliff? Or do I press on?

The only time I actually chose Option A was while reading this. Just 12, I found myself swept away as John Steinbeck retold the legend of King Arthur in all its gnarly glory. As Arthur stood at a riverbank somewhere in England, having vanquished his enemies after a hard fight, I suspected the book would turn grey and depressing. So I put it away.

It would be decades before I returned to The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights. Dammit, I was right:

A Farewell To Arms – Ernest Hemingway, 1929 ★★★

Making the Case for a Subjective Classic

Some books carry associations that have nothing to do with their literary merits. So it is for me and A Farewell To Arms.

Ernest Hemingway’s sprawling tale of love and war was required reading in my final weeks of boarding school. For me, shellfire in Italy and a boozy convalescence became one with cinderblock dorm walls and muddy trails that stretched to and from my classes. Like Frederic Henry at mess hall I watched people I lived with vigorously rag on each other, sensing as he did that I would somehow come to love and miss these days, but wishing in that moment I was somewhere else.

This Side Of Paradise – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920 ★★

Chasing Girls and Glory

“I don’t know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher, I just try everything I can think of.”

I kept flashing on this classic line from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane reading this debut of another young man eager to make his mark. This Side Of Paradise is someone trying everything he can think of.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel runs the gamut from the meaning of life to capitalism. Snappy phrases and clever barbs are in ready supply, as are finely-drawn settings so sumptuous you feel enveloped by them. Yet very much unlike Citizen Kane, there is an overall unpleasant, chaotic feeling about this debut, a preening eagerness to impress by trying to do too much too soon, rather than settle on telling a story.

The Catcher In The Rye – J. D. Salinger, 1951 ★★

American "Classic" Undone by Flaccid Narrative

Before he wrote this, his most famous work of fiction, J. D. Salinger wrote a short story entitled “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise.” Which is funny, because an alternate title here could be This Novel Has No Plot.

It features a problem student stuck in a rut. Either Holden Caulfield is stumbling through serious adjustment problems, or he is pretending they don’t exist, but those issues are there and form the basis of the story.

The real problem is that story, or lack thereof. Salinger’s remarkable abilities at developing characters and settings are on vivid display, because his one and only novel is a dead loss in the plot department.

Old New York – Edith Wharton, 1924 ★★★★½

Casualties in Crinoline 

Short-story collections can be like concept albums where individual pieces flow together to create a thematic whole. At their best, these collections contain dialogues not only within the stories, but between them.

I have seen it happen with Hemingway’s in our time and James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room. In Old New York I got to see it again, in perhaps its most successful version yet. Here are four novellas that, terrific as they read in isolation, develop when read together a unity of setting and message that transports you to another place and time.