Great Books Chosen by C.E. Morgan

C.E. Morgan has only published one novel, but already she has been heralded as one of the most significant American voices of recent times. As such she is in great demand by literary interviewers, each wanting to dig into Morgan's life and discover her own interpretations of All The Living. C.E. Morgan has chosen to back away from such interviews, so we are delighted that she has allowed us to take a glimpse at her bookshelf and see her choice of great books.


Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
Hardy was both an exquisite writer of landscape and a persistent explorer of both class and sexual mores. In this way, he prefigures Lawrence (a great favorite) as a father might, passing along his preoccupations to an even bolder, more rebellious son. Lawrence broke forms (to both ill and great effect) through the sheer force and vigor of his language. Though Lawrence, for all his flaws, may have become the greater novelist, I consider Jude the most extraordinary work that either man produced. Excoriated as obscene at the time of its publication, Jude is still often dismissed by many as melodramatic, the common complaint being that ‘so many horrible things couldn’t possibly happen to one man’. To my mind, Jude is a searing reality check for the largely oblivious and complacent upper classes; Hardy is a lone man trying to throw a burning torch into the mansion. Is it so surprising that it was dismissed in its day, and still is? Critics who say Hardy makes his characters suffer are short-sighted; Hardy just demands that one look suffering directly in the face. He dares to impart the truth that all people who grow up without a cushion know: that a slap hurts the same regardless of one’s class, but that for every slap the rich man receives, the poor man is slapped a hundred times.

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest is a roiling, madcap, hyperkinetic meditation on the state of American despair and the resulting drive for entertainment, gratification, and anodyne numbness. Generally a project that requires a month or two of the reader’s undivided attention, Infinite Jest is audacious, expansive, difficult, hilarious, and, ultimately, almost ferociously rewarding. It dares, via its formal arrangement and the complexity of interlocking theses, to follow its refusal of cheap easy pleasure through to its inevitable conclusion: it’s a damn hard book to parse. But through the very real demands of its form with its lexical variety and digressions, not to mention its endless array of characters, a living substratum of meaning is laid bare, which is for me the most interesting of the book (or perhaps any book): an exploration of imagination and its emotional corollary, empathy. I think Wallace was one of our more large-hearted writers, though his strivings toward empathy were complexified by the extraordinary talent and mercurial intelligence and attendant egotism that were his to steward. To read him is to feel the warring of divergent drives: self vs. other, cleverness vs. love. This text is not an easy resting place. But the book is a triumph: for all of its complexities, Infinite Jest is animated by a spirit that I can only describe as good, which is just another word for love.

Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams
A woefully under-read masterpiece, Butcher’s Crossing is a harrowing novel about a last, great Buffalo hunt in Kansas territory in the 1870’s. The protagonist is a young man who has fled the comfort and intellectualism of the East (he has dropped out of Harvard) in search of a more primal, elemental relationship with nature. He joins the aforementioned expedition, and it devolves into a bloodbath; the pretty ideals of the young man are reduced to butchery. Faced with the totality of death and his own capacity for violent action, he emerges from the wilderness wholly changed. The novel’s central preoccupation is the nature of the male journey quest, the thirst for knowledge of self and world that drives young men to test their limits. It suggests that a confrontation with ultimate horror—a process that burns away everything superfluous from a man’s personality— results in authentic masculine maturity. The prose style that illuminates this journey is perfectly judicious, never intemperate, calm. Williams seems aware that his aesthetic equanimity only heightens the horror of what he depicts, and he maintains his dispassionate register no matter how terrible the subject matter. This book also makes an excellent companion piece to McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, whose maximalism represents the aesthetic opposite of Butcher’s Crossing, while exploring similar terrain.

Paradise Lost, John Milton
Paradise Lost is long, mythic, syntactically difficult, theologically complex, and not exactly a page-turner. As a result, it’s not read much anymore, and that’s a shame. It has so much to teach us about the pleasures that reward patience. Milton’s talent was colossal and threw shadows of influence over innumerable poets and writers who came later. To let his work fall by the wayside is to willingly abandon some of the solid ground of English literature, akin to abandoning Shakespeare. Milton took palpable delight in the language, evident in his neologistic, compounded words, and his sinuous, heavily-claused sentences that go on and on and on. He always took his time, readers’ patience be damned. Importantly, his linguistic machinations are complex, but always clear; they offer an antidote to the anti-intellectualism so rampant today that demands easy readability and immediate transparency, which often come at the cost of deeply nuanced, difficult—even agonistic—works. We have enough books that coddle the reader; what we need are more writers willing to shrug off the demands of the market, or of writing teachers, or of editors, or of reviewers in order to write books that may be even freakishly complex and multi-layered, but wholly and remarkably their own.

The New World, Terence Malick (Movie)
The New World is Malick’s interpretation of Pocahontas’ interactions with the settlement at Jamestown, specifically her relationships with John Smith and John Rolfe. Malick is one of our strongest directors, and our very best observer of landscape. The New World reveals a slow, sensuous devotion both to the natural world and to the interior landscape of a young woman, whom we watch mature from early adolescence to womanhood. Her growth is depicted through deeply poetic, sometimes rhapsodic, voice-overs. Voice-over is a technique often clumsily mishandled by directors—too often used to clarify what doesn’t need clarifying in a film—but for Malick voice-over forms the aural center of his work. It is used to brilliant effect in The New World, revealing Malick’s soft, empathetic, profoundly insightful access to a young female heart. Pocahontas’ evolution from girl to adult and her attendant experiences of first love, emotional devastation, and mature love are wholly believable and heartbreakingly rendered. In a nutshell: this film is spectacularly beautiful.

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