Rereading Modern Novels

Hugh Hewitt is discussing the paucity of modern novels that repay re-reading. I think in general he is right that contemporary fiction has fallen on hard times, much of it self-inflicted, some of it a reflection of a marketplace where good writing is remunerated in the movies and television, or, for more literary work, through the writing of biographies or non-fiction books. A writer ambitious to become a cultural lion or just to make a living will stay away from the Iowa Writers' Workshop mentality of contemporary novelists and short story writers, and gravitate toward political writing, historical writing, biography, screenplays, etc.

That being said, Mr. Hewitt requests a list of "modern" novels that I have reread. I suggest:

James Gould Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust
James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor
James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed
John Marquand, Wickford Point
John Marquand, So Little Time
John Marquand, B.F.'s Daughter
John Marquand, Point of No Return

With the exception of Cozzens' By Love Possessed, these are all novels of the 1940s by serious, grown-up writers who wrote for serious, grown-up men and women living in a serious age, not for other academics or the writers' workship crowd --which didn't exist then and hadn't yet corrupted fiction-writing. Cozzens in particular is a major writer whose work does the work of all great novels by making us think deeply about how adults make moral decisions and trade-offs in a complex world. His Guard of Honor, about the management of a World War II air force base in the Deep South dealing with, among other things, the integration of the Army Air Corps, is by far the best book about World War II I have ever read, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, besting Norman Mailer's inferior and overwrought The Naked and the Dead.

Cozzens was also openly conservative, which accounts in large measure for the way the American Lit professoriate has air-brushed him out of 20th Century American literary history.