For Your Enjoyment
by Eric Olsen
Do you ever find yourself feeling a little too happy? Maybe the threat of sequestration, or the prime-time news, or John Boehner haven’t gotten to you? Hey, not to worry. In the books section of the February 21 edition of The Telegraph, out of England, there’s an article by a chap named Martin Chilton about 20 “great depressing reads.”
On the list are such classics as Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (at the top of the list), and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (at the bottom). Between these are the likes of Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, and The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. And please note how cleverly I lumped together the three titles on the list with “heart” in them, since it figures that if you’re looking for depressing, heart would have to factor in one way or another, if not in the title, then the action.
But on the list are, as well, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and of course Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Chilton also includes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I found less depressing than simply awful. But come to think of it, that in itself is depressing, depressing to think how a guy who’s usually hailed as one of America’s greatest living novelists — the lit crit Harold Bloom even pronounced McCarthy our nation’s answer to Shakespeare — could write something that stunk and still get praised for it.
I don’t know how Chilton organized his list. It’s not alphabetical by author or title or publication date, far as I can tell. He may have ranked the books from least to most depressing, or the other way around, but he doesn’t say, and I’m not sure one could rank them in that way in any case. Certainly I don’t think Jude is more or less depressing than Trial. Perhaps, to paraphrase the opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which isn’t on Chilton’s list, but could well have been — Anna, after all, tossed herself under a train — happy books are alike; each depressing book is depressing in its own way….
But I digress. Chilton, in fairness, isn’t suggesting that these books are an antidote for irrational spasms of happiness. What writer, after all, is ever really happy? Plenty of research suggests that writers as a cohort suffer from depression at significantly higher rates than the general population, though whether they get depressed because they write, or they write because they get depressed, remains to be seen. No, Chilton suggests these titles as an antidote to depression, as “…a sort of literary electric shock treatment. You think your life is bad? Try 400 volts of pure Thomas Hardy and count your blessings that you’re not Jude The Obscure.”
More to the point, Chilton is proposing his list as an alternative to a list of happy books about to be rolled out by doctors and public libraries around England. Rather than prescribe drugs for this or that mood disorder, or in addition to the meds, some doctors in England will soon be prescribing one or more “mood-boosting” books, to be made available at various local libraries. The list, Chilton tells us, includes titles such as David D. Burns’s The Feeling Good Handbook, as well as books by Bill Bryson, Nancy Mitford and Laurie Lee.
Give me one of the books on Chilton’s list over Burns’s Handbook any day. What good lit isn’t in some way depressing, after all? Indeed, Chilton’s list could probably include 200 titles, or 2,000, not 20. “Great art is distilled from suffering,” writes Chilton, who then goes on to quote some of Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to writers: “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” Of course.
Here’s Chilton’s list of 20 great depressing reads. You can find indie booksellers here:
• Thomas Hardy, Jude The Obscure
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• John Steinbeck, Of Mice And Men
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road
• JM Coetzee, Disgrace
• Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
• Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
• Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
• Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms
• Arthur Koestler, Darkness At Noon
• Graham Greene, The End Of The Affair
• Carson McCullers, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
• Joseph Conrad, The Heart Of Darkness
• William Golding, Lord Of The Flies
• Ian McEwan, Atonement
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
• Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• Franz Kafka, The Trial
<<>>
What other depressing reads do you think should be on the list?
Pretty sure literature has lots more depression than elation. A few more for you all.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (this one may have a side effect of insanity)
Watchmen by Alan Moore
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
A Memory of Wind by Rachel Swirsky
Greek Mythology (yeah, pretty much all of it)
A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby
by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Barefoot Gen, Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima (Barefoot Gen #1)
by Keiji Nakazawa (pretty sure the outcome of this never gets much brighter, considering the subject matter)
Hit “Submit” too soon–these are some of MY favorite “depressing” reads. A few on a very long list.
Sara, thanks for your list! Added to Chilton’s list, I’m sure anyone would have plenty of ammunition against irrational spasms of happiness!
If literature and life have taught me anything, it’s that spasms of happiness are terrible inspiration for writing. So you all are very welcome.
I am almost done with Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, and I think maybe it should be a late addition to my list as well. Plus, Star Trek. You’ll understand when you read it.
Sara:
Better add Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock to the list of grims.
From a review by Dan Cryer: “Barely a crossroads southwest of Chillicothe, it’s a little patch of hillbilly Appalachia in southern Ohio – and trust me you wouldn’t want to live there.
“As chronicled in Donald Ray Pollock’s exhilarating debut story collection, Knockemstiff, it’s an alternative universe to the American dream. On these pages, dirt-poor provincials despair of a life lived on junk food in trailers. Jobs are scarce. Sex is brutish and loveless. Fistfights erupt out of the smallest slights, pathetic proof of a man’s existence.
“Drugs, not religion, offer the only solace — however fleeting. Let me tally the scourges in Knockemstiff: – mescaline, speed, crack, Oxycontin. Bodybuilders inject steroids. Nursing home aides steal prescriptions. One down-and-outer sniffs Bactine. Another scarfs up drugs intended for his girlfriend’s stroke-victim father.
“So don’t ever go there … [except to read the stories that are written in] vigorous, high-tension prose and glimpse the other side of the tracks … if Garrison Keillor invites us into a village where all the women are strong, the men good-looking, the children above average, Pollock presides over a community of the uniformly obese, drug-addled and desperate.” (And them’s the pretty ones.)
Johnny Got His Gun — Dalton Trumbo
Sister Carrie — Theodore Dreiser
Breathing Lessons — Anne Tyler
Cat’s Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut
The Member of the Wedding — Carson McCullers
Something Happened — Joseph Heller
1984 — George Orwell
The Iceman Cometh — Eugene O’Neill
A Streetcar Named Desire — Tennessee Williams
Edwin Mullhouse — Steven Millhauser (This is at least as annoying as it is depressing)
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (short story) — Flannery O’Connor
“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (short story) — Flannery O’Connor
Beneath the Wheel — Hermann Hesse
Sophie’s Choice — William Styron
Mother Night — Kurt Vonnegut
“‘night, Mother” (play) — Marsha Norman
“Death of a Salesman” (play) — Arthur Miller
Sara, thanks for the addition of Erdrich to the list. I’m puzzled about Star Trek, though. Do you recommend a particular title in the book series? I worry about Star Trek sometimes, particularly TV episodes like “The Trouble With Tribbles,” which very well might cause a spasm of irrational happiness.
Robert, thanks much for your additions to the list! I’m especially intrigued by Millhauser’s book, “at least as annoying as it is depressing,” you write. Which of course suggests still another list: annoying books….
Dick, now I can’t wait to read Knockemstiff! You can’t go wrong with obese, drug-addled, and desperate.
Eric – more on ‘Knockem’ – from two reviews:
Richard Garn – … a homeless rapist, a woman who carries fish sticks in her purse, a woman who forces her son to role-play an insane intruder, and a man who pumps his son full of steroids that eventually kill him so that he could be, had he survived, Mr. South Ohio …. The blub (Entertainment weekly 2008) had little to do with the book’s content but instead fetishized Pollock, calling him an heir to Raymond Carver, some kind of backwoods redneck who had somehow slipped through the backdoor of the literati’s slowly-crumbling ivory tower.
Pollock humbly responded … by saying that it was better than being compared to Danielle Steele.
Indeed.
Pollock, now in his fifties, is currently an MFA student at Ohio State University. Another angle the little blurb took was pointing out how unlike any other coffee house-type MFA student Pollock, no doubt, is.
One should hope…when Entertainment Weekly compares Pollock to Carver they aren’t far off … there is nothing Chekhovian about these shorts; these are anything but charming slices of middle class life – these are quick, rapid fire pieces that strike like whip cracks.
To compare this to Carver would be like comparing Jack Daniels to Kool Aid. ‘Knockemstiff’ is a setting where Carver would not dare trespass. And if he did, he’d wind up on a milk carton. But Pollock is similar to Carver in one way: much like Carver during his time at the MFA program at Iowa, Pollock, still at Ohio State, could be a major American author on the rise.
David Rodriguez: “… the narrator says, “I found myself wishing I had a loved one who would die and leave me their barbiturates, but I couldn’t think of anyone who’d ever loved me that much.”
Perhaps no other sentence in Pollock’s devastating stories states so movingly the plight of the protagonists and their community … (he) populates it with a huge cast of degenerates, freaks, fetishists, Bactine huffers, bodybuilders, draft dodgers, drug dealers, alcoholics, and the homeless, the obese, the incestuous, and the criminally insane – all of whom share a common dream of escape (and like I said Eric – them’s the pretty ones!) … violence erupts all over Pollock’s town with the suddenness of a Denis Johnson story…
Once Pollock gets in his groove, we’re never relieved of our dread. I’d think it’d be a difficult exercise to tell a group of writers that one character must say, “You’re not gonna screw that, are you?” and then have his friend do something that is even more horrifying than if he had.
This is what happens in “Pills,” the fifth story in the collection and the first where I began to believe that Pollock wasn’t merely a good writer telling … stories with technical proficiency, but rather a powerhouse whose extremely quick, nimble plots (the longest of which is fifteen pages) are as immediate and satisfying, riveting and draining as any new short fiction I’ve read in a while.
I picked this book up because I spent time in a town somewhat like Knockemstiff, and I wanted to see someone capture more than just the Midwest ennui – rather, the feeling of being on a sinking ship, of inevitable failure, of living in a community where no one seems to even be trying anymore to get along.
That feeling is here in these stories … they dream big, act bold, and sacrifice everything to make it to the Ohio border, and you cannot help but relate to them when they say that ‘love is a gift of barbiturates’, because we all want some form of love that will transcend this world we’re trapped in.
So Eric – pretty good no? – Sure makes my hometown public housing projects sound like one of John Irving’s Swiss boarding schools! … Also sure hope going for an MFA doesn’t ruin Pollock; I can see him sitting in the Mill of Columbus, letting a trust-fund swell from Princeton buy him pitchers of Michelob – trying desperately to get this ‘Knockemstiff’ guy to accept an anthology of Henry James to take home – for some badly needed amelioration. dc