Five Novels That Are Ripe for Rediscovery

by W. D. Wetherell

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5 books

Thousands of books are published every week, thereby creating the problem you'd get if thousands of toothpaste brands were introduced weekly--how do the better ones get noticed amid the flood? All too many remarkable novels are noted, praised, then quickly forgotten. It's up to readers who love serious writing to search the recent past for those works of art that deserve a second life. A publisher seeking to reprint forgotten classics could do worse than start here.

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Disappearances

Howard Frank Mosher, 2014

First published in l977, this is a wild and crazy coming-of-age novel about bootleggers on the Quebec-Vermont border during Prohibition, written with borderline (literally borderline) magic realism. Mosher, after this first novel, would turn in a more realistic, sober direction, but in Disappearances he allowed his imagination to run brilliantly, delightfully amuck.

Carnival for the Gods

Gladys Swan, 2014

First published in l986, this is another timeless novel that brilliantly flirts with magic realism, and cascades with flight after flight of brilliant imaginings. Swan's broken down circus is trying to survive in the badlands of southern New Mexico, as the members of the troupe battle, not just for their futures, but for their human dignity. Swan, still very much with us, is a novelist who deserves to be much better known.

The Night Inspector

Frederick Busch, 2000

Busch enjoyed a considerable reputation back in the day, but his impressive output is less known now, which is a pity. Of all his novels I like The Night Inspector (l999) the best. It's set in the brutal Manhattan of l867; a Union sniper named William Bartholomew returns from the war with a brutal wound, and must make his way in a chaotic world where innocence must be cherished, honored, protected. Busch was wonderful at characterization, so it's fitting that Herman Melville makes a cameo appearance as a memorable character on his own.

The Eight Corners of the World

Gordon Weaver, 1990

A comic World War Two masterpiece (1988) that readers like a cross between Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, and yet is very much Weaver's own. It tells the story of Yosimori Yamaguchi, who races from one picaresque adventure to another, from being a spy in the ROTC program of Oklahoma State University in the l930's, to being on a plane filming the Pearl Harbor attack, to rebuilding his career after the war as the king of karate movies. Written in a voice that combines American hipster jive with Japanese pidgin English, the book is a hilarious romp--and, withal, a serious examination of all the many ironies that have marked U.S.-Japanese relations right from the start.

On Keeping Women

Hortense Calisher, 2013

Calisher was one of the first explicitly feminist novelists to gain wide attention, and in this l977 novel she brilliantly describes the awakening of a bored married woman living in a Victorian mansion along the Hudson River. A familiar enough theme now, but Calisher was one of the first to tackle it, and the book remains worth reading for its intelligence and compassion.