Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room is the oldest novel on this list, but it feels just as modern as its peers. It is one of Baldwin’s greatest novels, though mostly overshadowed by his other more famous works If Beale Street Could Talk and his Collected Essays, which include ‘The Fire Next Time’ and ‘Stranger in the Village’. Giovanni’s Room is a small book; it follows the story of a man vacationing in Paris, away from his normal life and wife in America. Totalling 159 pages, this book is slim like a dagger. Giovanni’s Room is a story less about queer love than it is about queer fear, how sufficating and hurtful it can be, this book holds it all. Baldwin’s prose is so searing that it burns away any hesitancy to approach delicate topics of intimacy and pain. It figuratively and literally strips its characters to bare flesh, exposing their vulnerability and studying it under the light. For LGBTQ+ literature, this is a totemic text and is one to be brought forward in queer studies and the queer experience.
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Cusk’s 2014 novel, the first in her trilogy, fractionally changed the contemporary conception of fiction. Outline falls into the genre of autofiction, a form characterised by the slight fictionalisation of the author’s life, moulding it into a narrative with a message and optional changes of names and places. The supposed goal of the form was for the writer to distance themselves from their past life, like a Greek catharsis. In 2014, the term ‘autofiction’ began to resurface in mainstream literary discourse, having last majorly surged in the mid-late 90s, New York. The difference now is that Cusk’s novel prescribes to the autofiction standards, replaying a titled version of her life on paper, but without the goal of soothing emotions towards life hitherto. Outline is a look back at the past, not focused on the person you were but on the places you were and what relations and systems filled that place. Cusk perfectly cuts together social realism with personal viewpoints, like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar merged with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In the novel Cusk’s avatar is used to craft an excellent social realism, told with clear, clean sentences.
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
For a novel published in 2013, McBride’s debut is a strange creature. Its form is typically modernist, told in stream of consciousness, but the subject matter is timeless, or atleast, undesignated to a time. It resists strict definition, and convenient summation. It is about a girl, what she is given and what she wants for herself, and the mutual exclusivity of those things. It is a book saturated with contradictions, at times it reads as difficult as Samuel Beckett. One could say that it is a book about sex and family, but one could also argue it is not about that at all. Does the protagonist’s psychology orbit around pain, or is it dogged by pain? These are the questions. McBride sews in all of the trademarks expected in an Irish story: Catholic tyranny, sexual difficulty and enshrined shame. But its allegiance to nationalism is questionable. It is a great book, one of the greatest Irish books of the last decade, but there is nothing nice about it.
All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
The language of McCarthy’s seventh novel is twisting and expansive. It’s a sensual experience to read All the Pretty Horses. The writer’s focus is on everything and everyone, the candle on the windowsill and the heartbeat of the horse, but that’s not the most compelling reason to read it. The speed and sincerity of the writing is touching, like an outpour of desperate expression. His novel reads a lot like the works of Salinger and Scott Fitzgerald. It is a Great American novel dealing with Great American themes. A man’s bond to the land and his bond with himself. The American need for something new and the American need for something to own.
