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Not every writer writes a great book every time out. Even Shakespeare, who wrote all of those marvelous plays and sonnets, wrote a couple plays so laughably bad you’d have thought they were written by one of his children. Still, great writers are great because they tell great stories, ones that envelope us as readers and carry us along on a narrative wave that can transport us somewhere other than where we are.
But how do we know which books are the best books, especially since the marketing departments at publishing houses put blurbs on the back that make all of them sound like something we absolutely have to read? Here’s a list of seven prominent and prolific contemporary authors and which book of theirs you should read first. Not all of these writers are considered high art, but all of them are considered terrific storytellers, and each of the books recommended below is proof of just how good they are at creating tales.
John Updike
This guy is ubiquitous. He’s written over fifty books, including novels, short story collections, poetry, plays, essays and memoirs, and figuring out where to start with him can be daunting. But if you’re leaning toward an Updike book, it’s important to start with the right one because he’s written a handful (Brazil, Memories of the Ford Administration), which are pretty bad, and some which aren’t nearly as strong as others. The easy answer is to say start with Rabbit, Run, the first in his timeless quartet of books about the character Rabbit Angstrom, but of that quartet, the third is probably the strongest, and you don’t want to start there because by then Rabbit is middle-aged, and you’ve missed the first forty years of his life. The Witches of Eastwick, while being just an average movie, is a very good read that Harold Bloom, of all people, admires, but the best place to start with Updike is his novel Couples, especially if you’re middle-aged. Written in 1968, this book captures perfectly the sort of meaningless malaise that middle-aged life in the suburbs can become. It also brilliantly depicts how evanescent those friendships among married couples can be, how they seem so strong and even essential but in fact are often just ways to pass time until another more interesting couple comes along. Updike’s novels, even the bad ones, are always beautifully written—he’s a master craftsman—and they’re often filled with more than a handful of titillating sex scenes.
Margaret Atwood
Here’s another one of those prolific authors whose row of books in the bookstore stretches wider than your arms can reach. Atwood has some forty books to her name and, like Updike, has written novels, short stories, essays, poems and children’s books. And for the most part, her novels just seem to keep getting better with age. The Blind Assassin is a combination romance, gothic drama and sci-fi fantasy that won the Booker Prize in 2000, and Alias Grace is a gripping fictional recreation of a famous murder in 19th century Canada. But really, the greatest place to start with Atwood is her classic masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, a futuristic tale about an imagined country where the rule is theocratic and the repression of women horrifying. (Not so futuristic if you consider the Taliban or Saudi Arabia.) The story, like all of her stories, is page-turningly gripping, so much so that you find yourself wondering how you can be so enthralled by a world so terrible to behold.
Philip Roth
In 1959, at a mere twenty-seven years old, this guy leaped onto the literary scene with Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and collection of five stories. Since then he has offered a steady output of mostly fiction with some essays and a memoirs, and his total runs to about thirty books. Goodbye, Columbus isn’t a bad place to start, but his work certainly grew more fully realized over the years. Much acclaim has gone to what might be his most popular novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, a rambling monologue of Alexander Portnoy to his psychoanalyst, most of the talking about sex. Roth’s obsession with sex can get pretty tedious, though, and his descriptions of it leave very little to the imagination. Through many of his books he uses the same narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, and in the nineties Roth composed a trilogy about America during different decades, all narrated by Zuckerman though about someone else. The second in this trilogy, I Married A Communist, is a brilliant look at America during McCarthyism and the fifties; the third in the trilogy, The Human Stain, looks at racism in the nineties. But the first book in the trilogy, American Pastorale, is a great place to jump into Philip Roth. It’s about Swede Lvov, a successful Newark businessman who was always successful in life—great high school athlete, great student, great wife, etc. Swede did everything right, but his life was still dismantled by the turmoil of the sixties, specifically the dark and drug-infused road his own daughter traveled down. The book won the Pulitzer, which often doesn’t mean a lot, but in this case it does. What’s more, it’s not burdened by Roth’s sexual fantasies.
Jim Harrison
This guy, with novels, novellas, poems and essays, has quietly been putting together one of the most impressive lists of works in American letters—twenty plus books and counting. He’s also one of the few writers in contemporary literature who not only consistently writes novellas but writes novellas that people read. His novellas come in threes, that is, he puts out books that contain three of them, such as Julip, The Woman Lit By Fireflies, and most famously Legends of the Fall, the title story of which was made into a movie that was actually pretty good. Each book usually contains one novella about a recurring character, Brown Dog, a down-an-out Michigan guy who’s rough-and-tumble and always fun to watch. Legends of the Fall is not a bad place to start, especially the title novella, which is unputdownable, but the best place to start is his novel The Road Home, which is a sequel to Dalva, but they need not be read in order. Though not a Native American, Harrison often writes about Native American characters caught in their tough American situations, and Dalva, who is the main character in these two books, is part Sioux. She’s also one of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction, and her story is at once beautiful and heartbreaking. Harrison is rough, and he can be violent, but he also writes a lot about nature, and his prose is a poetry that soars.
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