The Long Voyage: our favorite trilogies and quartets.
The pleasures of reading Solzhenitsyn, Caro, Atkinson, Blumenthal, Fuller, Foote, Karr, Richardson, Branch, Dikotter; Scott, Ferrante, Richter, Barker, Drury, Farrell, Dos Passos, Ellroy, Burgess, Manning, Nordhoff and Hall, and Haruf.
January 6, 2024
Reading an excellent book requires a substantial investment of time and energy, not to mention the long-term effects of thinking about it and assimilating the takings away into one’s understanding of the world. Reading a pair of books—a duet—doubles the effort but rarely doubles the reward. Trilogies and quartets increase the negative odds. The potential reader always asks--why bother? what do they need 3 or 4 books for that can’t be said in one, or, at most two?
If, however, you find an author and a subject that merits that deep investment, the returns are enormous. You commit to a journey of emotional intensity akin to a great friendship. You disarrange your weekly, monthly, yearly or longer schedule just to reach the other shore. You think about the subject and the books often, and may become a bore telling others about it, or maybe just keep it as a private pleasure. You emerge changed for the better—but only if that author and subject are worth it!
Which ones have we found to be worth it? Across our 60 years of reading, a number of trilogies and quartets have drawn us in and refused to let go. We are happy to share our short list, divided into non-fiction and fiction. We hope to convey the magnetic core of the works that make them worth the investment. As for the hundreds of others not listed, well, let us hope reincarnation is true so we can return anew several times over and catch up!
Part 1: Non-Fiction.
1) The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag shares the history and the workings of the Soviet terror regime crystallized in the many-thousand-slave-camps empire. The rotten foundation of the Soviet state is mercilessly exposed, and the traumatic consequences for the individuals and the society are brought into intense emotional focus. Solzhenitsyn said his was a work of ‘Literary Investigation’, and his angry tone is a necessary difference from the dry historian. We read to comprehend the horror but also to search for some shreds of humanity in that darkness.
*Titles: Volume 1; Volume 2; Volume 3.
2) The Civil War, by Shelby Foote. This is easily the best written Civil War history, reading like a movie screenplay rolling over the political and military and social landscapes. The beauty of the writing is cause enough to engage. But Foote was a semi-apostate, a Mississippian who overcame the brainwashing inflicted on southern youth of the time to understand and convey the real issues at stake. In the end we become reconciled to the idea of the just war and necessary killing, and we thank God for the loyal Unionist Americans of that era who midwifed a new birth of freedom.
*Titles: 1) Fort Sumter to Perryville; 2) Fredericksburg to Meridian; 3) Red River to Appomattox
3) America in the King Years, by Taylor Branch. Branch captured the voices of the civil rights movement while the principals were mostly alive. He situates MLK in the full black experience in the late Jim Crow era, not just in his privileged Atlanta corner. He can therefore explain—not just describe—where the strength and courage came from, as well as the tenacity of the whites who by God would not countenance a true equality. Our mind then wanders forward and asks which groups today are held back by law & custom, and what we still need to do to realize the American promise.
*Titles: 1) Parting the Waters 1954-1963; 2) Pillar of Fire 1963-1965; 3) At Canaan’s Edge 1965-1968
4) The Years of Lyndon Baines Johnson, by Robert Caro. At four volumes awaiting the fifth, this magnum opus is about where power resides and how to acquire and exercise it. Or so says Caro. But it is about more than power. It is the formation and moral life and leadership of the 20th century’s greatest president, and most consequential after FDR. Bombastic, crude, and conniving, Johnson emerges as a political genius and social reformer, the equal of Lincoln. Rarely do political biographies make the reader laugh and cry and cheer, but this book achieves that distinction.
*Titles: 1) The Path to Power [1909-1941]; 2) Means of Ascent [1941-1948; 3) Master of the Senate [1949-1960[ 4) The Passage of Power [1958-1964]
5) The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, by Sidney Blumenthal. Who knew that this Clinton political hack had a work of greatness in him? Examining the large scale and wildly fractious adolescent United States political dramas, Blumenthal shows how Lincoln’s rigorous logic and innate humane-ness arrived at just the right conclusions about the Constitution, governmental powers, freedom, and secession that could connect dissimilar factions and forge a war-fighting coalition. The reader thrills to old battles in a new awareness of how a great man is formed and learns to act.
*Titles: 1) A Self-Made Man, 1809-1849; 2) Wrestling with his Angel, 1849-1956; 3) All the powers on Earth, 1856-1860
6) Memoirs, by Alexandra Fuller. Unlike the others in that it is an individual’s memoirs, it shows the life of a white English farm family all-in to keep the racist Rhodesian regime on power, and then their lives after losing and leaving. Fuller writes with great tenderness about their chaotic life and the African bush, and the consequences of growing up to crave action all the time. She is damaged, and volume three about the collapse of her marriage to a good man is heart-rending. Even if she chooses not to discuss certain things like her parent’s racism, this is a funny and wise series.
*Titles: 1) Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight; 2) Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness; 3) Getting Out Before the Rains Come.
Other non-fiction trilogies we have not finished but are greatly enjoying when we dig into them:
7) Memoirs, by Mary Karr. A woman and poet emerges from the chrysalis of working-class Texas, against all odds. No ugly truths are evaded, and an honest soul grows.
*Titles: 1) The Liars Club; 2) Cherry; 3) Lit
8) The US Army in Europe in World War 2, by Rick Atkinson. The men and the organization as it developed from rank incompetence to an overwhelming force.
*Titles: 1) The Army at Dawn, 1942-43; 2) The Day of Battle, 1943-1944; 3) The Guns at Last Light, 1944-1945
9) Mao’s China, by Frank Dikotter. The truth behind the myths, and a rigorous but angry documentation of tens of millions of lives lost and souls crushed. The Mao apologists no longer have any excuse.
*Titles: 1) The Tragedy of Liberation, 1945-1957; 2) Mao’s Great Famine, 1958-1962; 3) The Cultural Revolution, 1962-1956.
10) A Life of Picasso, by John Richardson. A confidante of Picasso over the latter’s final quarter century and of all his close acquaintances, Richardson wraps together Picassos artistic genius, the tectonic shifts in modern art over his lifetime, and his personal magnetism and brutishness.
*Titles: 1) The Prodigy, 1881-1906; 2) The Cubist Period, 1907-1916; 3) The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932; 4) The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943.
Fiction
Global settings
1) The Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott. Takes as his canvas the entire British colonial project in India. Has no time for the Empire’s self-serving rationales. Instead, he investigates the desire to dominate and the affinity for class and caste discrimination. Most importantly, he identifies the psycho-sexual lust that infected the colonial enterprise. Somehow he manages the should-be impossible task of linking the intimate consequences of cross-race desire, and the rising Indian nationalism that will eventually shrug the British off like a worn pair of shoes. Other authors should stand in awe!
*Titles: 1) The Jewel in the Crown; 2) The Day of the Scorpion; 3) The Towers of Silence; 4) A Division of the Spoils;
2) The Neapolitan Quartet, by Elena Ferrante. This best trilogy/quartet of the 21st century traces the enduring effects of growing up in Naples’ slums, as captured in 2 girls who, friends as youth, take paths that unveil modern Italian life as well as the intimate consequences in their own destinies. The lesson is about enduring and finding small victories; there are no fairy tale endings. Of special interest is that the actual author is unknown yet is widely considered to be a man who somehow captured the adolescent and adult feminine spirit in Italy.
*Titles: 1) My Brilliant Friend; 2) The Story of a New Name; 3)Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay; 4) The Story of a Lost Child.
3) The Long Day Wanes [Malayan Trilogy], by Anthony Burgess. Covers much of the same ground as the Raj Quartet, which it preceded by a decade and can claim to have influenced. Set in Malaya [Malaysia] in the terminal years of the British presence. Focuses both on the doomed effort to defeat the nationalists as well as on the internal wars within the British settler class and their moral corruption. Burgess is among the greatest dialogue writers and the pages crackle when the characters go at it. Forms a nice fictional bookend to the Alexandra Fuller memoirs.
*Titles: 1) Time for a Tiger; 2) The Enemy in the Blanket; 3) Beds in the East.
4) The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Hall. Both authors were Americans who fought for France in WW1, and became expatriate authors afterwards. They focus on men under intense, soul-crushing stress, and what it takes to overcome, survive, or die. Mistreatment leads to mutiny; men endure 3000 miles in a lifeboat, and the mutineers island paradise will not shelter them forever. What would you do? is the unspoken leitmotif, the unifying thread in all great adventure works.
*Titles: 1) Mutiny on the Bounty; 2) Men Against the Sea; 3) Pitcairn’s Island.
5) The Regeneration Trilogy, by Pat Barker. Barker has single-handedly kept alive a fictional accounting of the impacts on Britain of WW1, especially via traumatized soldiers. This trilogy builds on the actual circumstances of Seigfried Sassoon, who suffered combat trauma and underwent early psycho-therapy when, by army rule, he could have been shot for cowardice. From this emerges a deft exploration of military violence of all types, mental breakdown and recovery, skillful therapy, and cloistered male sexuality. Rarely have such grand themes been addressed with such empathy.
*Titles: 1) Regeneration; 2) The Eye in the Door; 3) The Ghost Road.
6) The Fortunes of War, comprising The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, by Olivia Manning. Inspired by the experiences of herself and her husband in Romania in 1940-41 [when Britain was at war with Germany but not German-dominated Romania] and the Mid-East in 1942-44, these trilogies neatly stitch the powerful political/wartime contexts with the marital dynamics. The Balkan set is more interesting because of the claustrophobic environment and the greater interaction of the couple; in the Levant they largely live apart. The flyleaf in the first Balkan book shows that the future volumes are under development, so this is the rare planned trilogy, versus those that emerged when the subject expanded beyond the author’s control.
*Balkan Titles: 1) The Great Fortune; 2) The Spoilt City; 3) Friends and Heroes.
*Levant Titles: 1) The Danger Tree; 2) The Battle Lost and Won; 3) The Sum of Things
American settings
7) The Awakening Land, by Conrad Richter. The first 200 years of American frontier settlement occurred in the eastern forests, not the Great Plains. Richter follows a young Pennsylvania family moving into the Ohio Valley, from arrival amid the gigantic hardwood forest to the eventual full-size town. The resistance of nature to man’s desire to farm, and the terrible grueling work and loneliness are the ongoing theme, but we also enjoy the family, especially young Sayward Luckett as she grows. Only Annie Proulx among recent authors can match Richter’s description of life in the dark forest.
*Titles: 1) The Trees; 2) The Fields; 3) The Town
8) A) Studs Lonigan; and B) Danny O’Neill, by James Farrell. The Irish working-class ghetto in early 20th century Chicago is the antipode to Richter’s pioneer settlements. How can anything/anyone blossom in this benighted soil of ignorance, drink, violence, feudal church superstition, prejudice, and bad schools? Well, the community coheres, and the youth hear of the American dream and think it applies to them. They struggle, and some make it like Danny O’Neill, and others fail, noble but doomed like Studs Lonigan. It takes Danny 5 books to escape, versus 3 for Studs to sink. Farrell is a great naturalist writer who deserves comparison with Dickens. Farrell was a favorite of the Kennedy’s and was an honored guest at the 1961 inaugural. He is ripe for rediscovery.
*Lonigan Titles: 1) Young Lonigan; 2) The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan; 3) Judgment Day.
*O’Neill Titles: 1) A World I Never Made; 2) No Star is Lost; 3) Father and Son; 4) My Days of Anger; 5) The Face of Time
9) The USA Trilogy, by John Dos Passos. Dos Passos was the first author to include scenes written as film script, to include biographical sketches of the good/bad/ ugly leaders of the time, and to include collages of newspaper headlines and even popular songs. These are yoked to a sturdy narrative following 10-12 characters across America in the 1920s. He absorbed his Dreiser and Veblen but is immensely more successful in conveying how capitalism and the American mind interact for good and ill. This is a wonderful shortcut one can take in lieu of a dozen history or social science courses.
*Titles: 1) The 42d Parallel; 2) Nineteen Nineteen; 3) The Big Money
10) The Underworld Trilogy, by James Ellroy. Ellroy goes in the muck, finding a motor of American life in criminals and their immoral mirrors in the police and security establishment. His heinous world of the mafia, right wing nuts, and their protectors in the FBI becomes a believable alternative history of the Kennedy and King assassinations. All is delivered in a staccato style modelled on National Enquirer language, augmented by hilarious phony transcripts of gangster wiretaps and Hoover’s prissy interrogations of his agents. Dark comedy and unrelieved cynicism should not be so jolly.
*Titles: 1) American Tabloid; 2) The Cold Six Thousand; 3) Blood’s A Rover
11) Grouse County, by Tom Drury. Grouse County, Iowa is where people try to get out of their own way in order to enjoy just a bit of life. They seek contentment, not riches. In many ways this is classic midwestern fiction. What elevates it is the incredible comedy. Parody poems and songs, causes generating crazy effects, and characters’ desperate attempts to understand themselves create the long belly laughs that make the reader mark dozens of pages so they can return and laugh anew. Kind in intent and generous in forgiveness, this is the antidote to Ellroy.
*Titles: 1) The End of Vandalism; 2) Hunts in Dreams; 3) Pacific.
12) The Plainsong Series, by Kent Haruf. The prior authors ignore religion or treat it as a sociological or political factor. Not Haruf. Each book reflects a devotional moment or type. That spiritual theme is threaded into the lives of hurting families and their circle, all embedded in a Colorado plains city. These families include a reframing of the Marian story as an unwedded pregnant teen seeks shelter with two old bachelor brothers at their ranch; a low IQ family tries to keep their children from being taken as wards of the state; and an old couple hopes to reconcile with an estranged child. The will of God is unknown yet these families strive and survive, and we rise and fall with them while finding light for our own lives.
*Titles: 1) Plainsong; 2) Eventide; 3) Benediction.