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The 100 Best Novels?

© Robert Powers

The verdict is in and the complaints began almost immediately. When a board of judges made their choices for the 100 best English-language novels published this century, howls went up over some of the selections and even louder screams erupted over the books that didn't make the cut.

According to the panel, which included a number of well-known writers and critics (including William Styron, Gore Vidal, Shelby Foote, and A.S. Byatt), the number one novel is James Joyce's comic novel Ulysses. That book, first published in 1922 and subject of a censorship fight in the U.S. that wasn't settled until 1933, has been called "a vast and inspired piece of gossip" by some, and a murky, meandering mess by others. Including this writer.

This week, inspired by its selection as the greatest novel of the century, I made my third stab at reading the massive tome. I trudged farther than ever before, not abandoning the novel until page 150. And that's just a mere fraction of its content. There was no reason, I thought, to torture myself any longer. Reading Ulysses is akin to submitting to a long session of torture.

As you may know, Ulysses chronicles the events of a single day in Dublin, Ireland on June 16, 1904, a day now celebrated worldwide as Bloomsday. It boasts three principal characters, Stephen Dedalus, who has been called home to Dublin because his mother is dying. Then there's Leopold Bloom, often called the most completely drawn character in the history of literature. A 38-year-old Dublin Jew, he struggles with his memories while conducting the ordinary processes of living. Then there's his spouse, Molly, who has been praised as a Mother Earth figure whose interior monologue near the end of the novel was a principal cause for censorship of the book in the U.S.

An erudite friend says he has read Ulysses upwards of a half-dozen times. My comment to him was that he must own an iron constitution or a need for flagellation. To me, while gladly admitting that sections of Joyce's novel are spectacularly written, an overwhelming majority of the book is unnecessarily opaque, obscure, and requires the close presence of an unabridged dictionary.

While there has been a general agreement from the reactions I've seen to Ulysses being picked in the top spot of the list, many have quarreled with other selections. The top five include, in order, The Great Gatsby (one of my favorites, which I have read at least five times), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also by Joyce; Lolita, the spectacular and controversial creation by Vladimir Nabokov about an aging man's passion for a nymphet, and Brave New World, the futuristic satire by Aldous Huxley.

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