Big Screen Love
When I think of Jay McInerney, I think of Bright Lights, Big City. And it will always be so. His new book aims to change that. McInerney describes his upcoming release The Good Life as a love story.
I should add straight up that it’s a story of illicit love, of two characters in midlife, both of whom are married, albeit unhappily, and both of whom have children.
So, we have infidelity and a midlife crisis. Sounds like a guy’s view of romance to me.
As part of McInerney’s newfound love of romance literature, he named the Twelve Best Literary Novels of Love:
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
2. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
3. Emma by Jane Austen
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
6. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
8. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
10. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
11. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
12. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Interesting list. I’m struck by how many of these novels - novels many of us view as some of the greatest love stories of all time - have very unhappy endings. Adds new meaning to suffering for love.
November 23rd, 2005 at 2:36 pm
That’s a great list. My addition to it would be Possession by A.S. Byatt and maybe a few of George Eliot’s novels.
November 23rd, 2005 at 3:32 pm
I have a heck of a time thinking of Anna Karenina as a novel of love, literary or no. It is a great novel but I was never impressed by Anna’s fate.
And just for the record, I preferred the secondary romance in The English Patient.
November 24th, 2005 at 4:36 am
He thought Bridehead Revisited was great? Did he actually read it?