The Best Books of 1966

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys  ·  1966

Jean Rhys had been working on this novel, in various forms, for most of her adult life. It was published in 1966, when she was seventy-six years old, and won the W. H. Smith Literary Award. The novel is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: it tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, the woman Rochester will marry and bring to England and lock in the attic of Thornfield Hall, where she will be known as Bertha Mason and eventually set the house on fire. Rhys writes from Antoinette’s perspective: a Creole woman in post-Emancipation Jamaica, caught between the white colonial world that does not fully accept her and the Black Jamaican world that distrusts her, married to a man who strips her of her name, her identity, and finally her sanity. The novel moves between Jamaica and England, between Antoinette’s voice and Rochester’s, and ends where Jane Eyre begins.

What Rhys understood, and what makes Wide Sargasso Sea one of the essential novels of the twentieth century, is that the madwoman in the attic has a life before the attic. Brontë’s Bertha is a plot device — an obstacle to the novel’s romance — and Rhys restores to her a full interiority, a history, a language, and a set of losses that make Rochester’s narrative look very different. It is also a novel about the violence of naming: the way Rochester refuses to call Antoinette by her name and insists on calling her Bertha is an act of erasure that the novel makes you feel completely. It has been in print continuously since 1966 and is now considered one of the founding texts of postcolonial literature.

The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon  ·  1966

Oedipa Maas is named executor of the estate of her former lover, Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul. In settling the estate she begins to notice what appears to be evidence of a centuries-old underground postal system called Tristero, operating in secret alongside — and in opposition to — official postal services since the seventeenth century. The more she investigates, the more connections she finds, and the less she can determine whether the connections are real, whether she is the victim of an elaborate hoax, whether she is going mad, or whether the postal system is real and she has stumbled onto something vast and hidden. The novel ends without resolving this question. It is Pynchon’s shortest novel and, for many readers, his most accessible — which is a relative term, but a meaningful one.

Pynchon is asking a question in The Crying of Lot 49 that runs through all his work: what is the relationship between pattern and paranoia? When we find meaning in randomness, are we perceiving something real or constructing it? Oedipa’s investigation is a model of a certain kind of reading — the kind that finds systems everywhere and cannot determine whether the systems are in the world or in the reader. The novel is also a portrait of California in the 1960s, of the peculiar emptiness of suburban prosperity, and of a woman trying to understand a world that was structured to exclude her understanding. It is one of the most argued-about short novels in American literature, and it rewards argument.

Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann  ·  1966

Three women meet in New York in the late 1940s: Anne Welles, who has escaped her New England background for the city; Neely O’Hara, a talented young performer on her way up; and Jennifer North, a beautiful woman who understands exactly what the world values her for. The novel follows them over two decades through careers, marriages, affairs, and their increasing dependence on pills — the “dolls” of the title, a slang term for barbiturates and amphetamines — as the gap between their ambitions and the lives available to them becomes impossible to bridge without pharmaceutical assistance. Valley of the Dolls was published in February 1966. It spent sixty-five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It has sold an estimated thirty million copies. It is one of the bestselling novels of all time.

The critical dismissal of Valley of the Dolls on publication — and the persistence of that dismissal into later decades — is itself a document about whose stories are taken seriously. Susann was writing about women in the entertainment industry, about the specific forms of exploitation and disposal they faced, about what pills were actually being used for in mid-century America, and about the gap between the promises held out to women and the lives they were permitted to live. The novel’s enormous popular success was driven overwhelmingly by women readers who recognised something true in it. That its prose was not Flaubert’s was used to dismiss the recognition. It deserves to be read as the social document it is.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion  ·  1968 (collected); essays from 1961–67

The essays that make up Slouching Towards Bethlehem were written between 1961 and 1967 and collected in book form in 1968, but their subject — California, the 1960s, the dissolution of shared meaning — is inseparable from the middle years of the decade. The title essay, the longest in the collection, is Didion’s account of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the summer of 1967: the flower children, the runaways, the drug dealers, and the five-year-old girl whose hippie parents have given her LSD. The other essays cover John Wayne, the Central Valley, self-respect, going home, the Santa Ana winds, Howard Hughes, and the experience of living in a culture that has lost faith in its own narratives. Didion collected them because she felt they documented something she needed to say about the decade.

Didion’s essays are the best prose written about California and the 1960s, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the collection that established her as a major essayist. Her method — precise, cold, personal, using the first person not to confess but to locate the writer’s position within the argument — was highly influential and has been widely imitated. What has not been imitated is her particular ability to find the social fact in the personal detail: the five-year-old on LSD is not a metaphor for the failure of the counterculture, it is a child, and the observation is devastating precisely because Didion does not explain it. The preface to the collection is itself one of the best short pieces she ever wrote.

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote  ·  1966 (book; serialised 1965)

Serialised in The New Yorker in 1965 and published as a complete book in January 1966, In Cold Blood is Capote’s account of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, and the capture, trial, and execution of the killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Capote spent six years reporting and writing it, travelling to Kansas with Harper Lee, attending the trial, visiting Smith and Hickock on death row over several years, and waiting — with increasing moral complexity — for the executions that would allow him to complete the narrative. The book was an immediate sensation. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, spent months on the bestseller list, and established “literary journalism” or the “nonfiction novel” as a serious form. Capote never completed another book.

In Cold Blood is included here under 1966 rather than 1965 because the book — as opposed to the serialisation — appeared in January 1966, and it is the book that changed things. What Capote did that journalism had not done before was to reconstruct interior states — the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of people who were not available for interview — with the same authority as a novelist. The ethical questions this raises have never been satisfactorily resolved, which is part of what makes the book impossible to stop thinking about. His portrait of Perry Smith in particular, drawn from Smith’s own account of his childhood, is one of the most sustained attempts in American writing to understand how a person arrives at an act of extreme violence.

The Women’s Room

Note: included as The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford  ·  Jean Stafford  ·  1969 (Pulitzer); stories from 1944–69

Editorial note: the sixth essential title from 1966 is The Fixer by Bernard Malamud, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud is set in Kiev in 1911. Yakov Bok is a Jewish handyman — a “fixer” — who moves from the shtetl to the city hoping for a better life. He ends up working illegally in a brick factory in a district where Jews are forbidden to live. When a Russian boy is found murdered, Yakov is arrested on a charge of ritual murder — the ancient antisemitic libel that Jews murder Christian children for their blood — and held in prison for years without trial, in conditions of deliberate degradation, while the authorities attempt to force a confession. The novel is based on the real case of Menahem Mendel Beilis, who was tried in Kiev in 1913 and acquitted. Malamud transposes the case into a sustained meditation on what it means to be innocent in a world determined to find you guilty. It won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1967.

Malamud is writing about antisemitism but also, explicitly, about the wider experience of being made a scapegoat — the novel was published in 1966, when American readers were watching civil rights activists being arrested on manufactured charges in the American South, and the parallel was not accidental. What the novel does at the level of the sentence is austere and precise: Malamud gives Yakov’s suffering a weight without sentimentalising it, and his account of what years of solitary imprisonment do to a person’s mind is one of the most accurate in fiction. The final scene — Yakov being taken through the streets of Kiev to his trial, pelted by an anti-Jewish mob, imagining assassinating the Tsar — is one of the great endings in postwar American fiction.