REVIEW: ‘13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read)’ by Christopher J. Scalia
“When conservatives discuss novels,” Christopher Scalia complains in his entertaining and useful 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read), “we tend to mention the same handful of works. We cherish a reliable and sturdy stock that hasn’t been replenished in a generation or two”—a stock that includes The Lord of the Rings, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and, heaven help us, Atlas Shrugged.
It shouldn’t be that way. Conservatives should be widely read literary people. After all, we believe in beauty and the importance of remembering the past—and all writing is, in a strict sense, memorial. We believe in the inescapabilty of suffering—an idea present in every great work of literature or art. “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters,” W.H. Auden writes in “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “how well they understood / Its human position.” And we reject the idea—at least we used to—that politics can address life’s thornier problems, which are presented in literature as enduringly complex.
Yet, we also tend to focus on the tried and true (or, in this case, the read and true), which can make us risk-averse when it comes to literature. This is unfortunate, Scalia writes, because it obscures the “abundance of conservative ideals and principles in literature more broadly.” In short, it makes it seem that literature belongs to the left.
Scalia doesn’t obsess over the question of why conservatives read—or seem to read—so narrowly, and rightly so. (I suspect that conservative reading is broader than what is reflected in the literary references in our magazines or books.) After a short introduction, he gets right to recommending novels in a breezy style that is one of the book’s many pleasures. There is no moralizing about our duty—as citizens in a democracy!—to read difficult books, no browbeating for our louche reading ways. Instead, we have a brief summary of plot and context followed by a pithy discussion of a work’s key ideas and what makes the novel worth our time.
Scalia has a gift for capturing the most interesting elements of these novels in a short paragraph or a single sentence. Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas reminds us, for example, that “enduring … happiness requires well-ordered desire—we need to pursue something of value, and we need to have some goal beyond ourselves to feel satisfied.” Frances Burney’s Evelina suggests that “corrupt manners can have violent, degrading consequences while respect for civil behavior signals broader sympathy and concern for others.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance reminds us simply that “there are no new truths.” The book is an excellent introduction to these—and other—novels for readers regardless of political persuasion.
In addition to focusing on novels conservatives tend to ignore, Scalia has also limited himself to books originally published in English and works of so-called literary fiction. To include works in translation would have made the project unwieldly. “I … couldn’t imagine including Fyodor Dostoevsky,” Scalia writes, “without also inviting Alessandro Manzoni’s nineteenth-century masterpiece The Betrothed, or a contribution by Peruvian Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, or one of French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s controversial works.” The selections also reflect Scalia’s tastes, which are impeccable.
Some of the novels will be more familiar to conservative readers than others. You’ll find well-regarded favorites like Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley and P.D. James’s The Children of Men, but also other works that will be less familiar to some readers: V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts are perhaps two. Yes, Evelyn Waugh is included in the book, but Scalia rightly picks Scoop rather than Brideshead Revisited—a book most conservatives have already read. Scoop is not only one of Waugh’s best novels (my favorite is Decline and Fall, but Scoop is a close second), it is, Scalia argues, the best satire of the press in English: “no satires of the press remain as funny and relevant.”
Scalia provides discussion questions and a place for notes at the back of the book, but even more usefully, he includes an appendix titled “If You Liked … Try …” Here Scalia recommends even more novels. If you like Waverly, for example, Scalia suggests you give Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song a try. “Although it’s an unabashedly socialist work,” Scalia writes, “Gibbon’s novel (the first in a trilogy) is also a touching depiction of a fading agricultural life and the connections between tenant farmers and those who lived on the land before them.” If you like George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, you should also read Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn. Other novels that Scalia recommends in this section include: Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Lee Smith’s Oral History, Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, and Charles Portis’s True Grit. As those titles show, this is a wonderful guide to reading more widely for those who are not regular readers of fiction.
Being well read is a good in itself, but reading widely can also show us, Scalia writes, that we have more in common than we sometimes think with “individuals who don’t seem to think like us.” How could it be otherwise?
13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read)
by Christopher J. Scalia
Regnery, 352 pp., $32.99
Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal and many other publications.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
