The best books that bring together the characters’ life of feeling and their cultural context and moment in history

William Goyen’s The House of Breath—a relatively short, lyric, novel—is a unique creation.

Set in the early 20th century in small-town Texas, it portrays a family of misfits and an almost supernatural world in which a deep well and a river narrate two of the chapters, while other chapters are told in a different voice.

In the family, each of its four wayward grown children is a remarkably distinct character. They differ in their sexuality, and one of the main dramas they have in common is their feeling of wanting to leave the small town in which they were born and go out into the larger, while at the same time longing, in the larger world, for the small town again, and the original house of the family.

The narrative is told in different voices. The house, too, seems a character. I learned from this book (and from Goyen’s short stories) how the intimacy of conversation is one of the great resources of our lives.

I *adore* Katherine Mansfield’s work. She wrote short stories, not novels.

She was still rather young when she died of tuberculosis. Her portrayals of love, family, and especially of children, are for me gloriously wonderful with insight and perceptiveness about relationships. From the New Zealand settings of many of her stories (where she was born and grew up), she emigrated to London, then to France (where she received medical treatment for TB), and Switzerland (also for treatment for TB—unsuccessful).

She seems to me a lonely genius—perceiving deeply not only other persons (of many sorts) on whom she modeled her short stories but also herself. Her seemingly idyllic childhood in NZ is perhaps the core source of her accomplishment—especially the novellas At the Bay and Prelude. But her adult life was difficult and she seems to have been uncertain about her writing, even though to me she seems a genius of fiction. Almost, some say, a Chekhov of the English language.  

I don’t think I could have written my book had I not read Morrison’s extraordinary, brilliant Beloved.

From her book, I learned how to create the historical setting in which characters live, suffer, love, and die. In her novel I also learned the profound capacity of language to create what seems utterly real, even though it is imagined. And real in very complex, dazzlingly full, amazingly perceptive, penetrating, ways.

Style is a novelist’s presence or even identity on the page, and while, for a writer of fiction, imitating some other writer’ style never really works, and is anyway a sort of crutch, there is so much richness in the great writers (like Morrison) that probably every writer who has read Beloved has learned from that book—reading it not only as a person but also a great artist of prose.  

This novel carried me into a culture and ways of thinking that of course I myself had never known firsthand.

I found the experience of reading it inspiring. And the vividness of characters, the brilliance of the writer’s perceptiveness about people, the honoring of traditions and family connections, and the liveliness of feeling and thinking and weeping and laughing—all of this was (again, for a fellow writer)—a marvelous achievement of this fiction-writer’s gift.

Fully absorbing, wonderfully informative, and compellingly insightful, this book has remained one of my touchstones as a writer of prose. I love all her work, but this book in particular—as perhaps a million readers have learned—is unlike any other novel I have read and I cherish its uniqueness. In it, the life of feeling, and the way in which one treats others, are deeply evoked and memorable. 

This massive novel consists of several novellas in which some of the same characters appear.

Each major character is given a novella, and the characters interact among each other in different ways. But the great thing about this novel—which was the first of White’s books that I read (and then I read all the others!)—is that White has an unusual, a surprising, a somehow oblique angle, on human beings and their actions and feelings and fates, that is brought so vividly to life by his stylistic genius.

Some of his long sentences are almost like compositions that could stand alone. He sees so much in people, he delves so deeply into what they themselves don’t even realize they are thinking or feeling or deciding to do. I feel, when reading White, that I am standing behind him and he’s showing me how to understand other human beings. How to perceive each other. How to accept the strangeness and oddity of some persons, and the stark simplicity and frankness of others.

He writes about everyday life but his genius is in his writing about what people believe—about life, about death, about being.