This guy called me up yesterday and asked me to put together a list of what I thought were the funniest novels of all time. This is the sort of thing that’s usually a piece of cake for me, and I responded with enthusiasm to the idea. I figured I could come up with the list off the top of my head and knock off the project in an hour.
After I hung up the phone, though, I realized that I honestly had no clue. I pretty quickly tossed off a half dozen titles that were solid to tentative choices, but after that I was stumped. I read way too many books, and find more and more lately that I forget what I’ve read the instant I close the book.
The problem with something like this is that once the challenge is posed I can’t think of anything else and it drives me bananas until I’ve reached some satisfactory resolution –actually, there are never any satisfactory resolutions, but these days I can generally live with unsatisfactory resolutions.
I have no idea how many books I own, but it’s safe to say it’s many thousands, and I don’t suppose ten thousand would even be much of a stretch. I don’t, unfortunately, have a house where I could display even a fraction of the books I have in any sort of an orderly fashion, and even if I did I lack the discipline for orderly systems of any kind. As a result there are crowded bookshelves and books stacked in every room of my house, and there are a couple hundred boxes full of the damn things upstairs, in the basement, and out in the garage. Come by sometime; I’m not exaggerating. I spend more time digging frantically through boxes looking for a particular book than I spend on any other single pursuit, and that also is not an exaggeration.
What I’m saying is that while I’m sure there are innumerable gut-busting novels buried somewhere in my house, I’m unable to simply scan my bookshelves to jar my memory. And my memory, once one of my proudest possessions, is eroding by the month. Whatever the experts might tell you, I feel certain that the human mind only has space for so much memory, and mine has become a boggy compost pile full of all sorts of dodgy and useless material that I cannot even classify as information.
By now, though, after twelve hours of obsessing over this question, I’ve managed to come up with a rough list that feels hopelessly wrong, or at least hopelessly incomplete. I don’t necessarily question most of the choices, but I’m certain that I’m missing many of the funniest books I’ve ever read. And, as is so often the case when I get asked for book lists or recommendations, I’m appalled to discover that there’s not a single woman writer on the list.
I swear to God, though, I’m not one of those guys who only reads books by men. I love women writers. After years of struggling with this problem I’m sure that for many people who know me that smacks of the old Seriously, some of my best friends are Jews cop-out. But some of my favorite writers are women –Alice Munro, Jane Bowles, Djuna Barnes, Dawn Powell, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Parker– and there are many funny women writers; unfortunately most of them (Parker, Fran Lebowitz, Amy Hempl, Veronica Geng) didn’t or haven’t written novels. Wise Blood I guess is funny, and Dawn Powell’s novels are funny, but as much as I love those books not one of them jumps out at me as one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.
You –someone– will help me, I’m sure. Help me out with some novels by women I’ve surely missed, but also help me make this list more definitive. Maybe this is cheating, but I frankly don’t give a rat’s ass. I’ll be haunted if I send this thing out there only to realize I’ve neglected some books that truly made me laugh.
At any rate, here’s where the deal stands at one a.m., and as I’ll no doubt be up mulling for some hours yet I may pop back in here if something else occurs to me. My mind is pretty shot, though, so I’ll probably spend the rest of the dark hours slumped on the floor staring at books of photographs or a 19th century book on noses I picked up the other day. Looking over the list right now it’s glaringly apparent that I have a serious weakness for fiction about losers, and I’ll allow you to draw from that whatever conclusions you want.
John Fergus Ryan, The Little Brothers of St. Mortimer
Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Samuel Beckett, Murphy
Randall Jarrell, Pictures From an Institution
Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
David Gates, Jernigan
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Ed McLanahan, The Natural Man
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
William Kotzwinkle, The Fan Man
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