Suggestions for the 1976 Club

For the last few years, I’ve tried to offer some lesser-known suggestions for those interested in taking part in one of the ‘net’s best and biggest collective reading events, Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’s (stuckinabook) semi-annual clubs. This coming October 11-17, they’re inviting you to read and write about books published in 1976.

Looking back, the one book published in 1976 most likely to hold a permanent place in literary history is William Gaddis’s massive wordfest and satire on American capitalism, JR*. However, coming in at nearly 800 pages, it may be a bit more than most readers will want to take on in a week. Even if you choose to listen to Nick Sullivan’s landmark audiobook version, you’re still looking at clocking in over 37 hours or roughly many people’s entire work week.

For 1976 Club suggestions, I decided to look at a couple of the “Books of the Year” features that used to be an annual fixture in newspaper book sections. In these, well-known writers and occasional celebrities were asked to name their favorite books of the year. Although those who participated often showed the professional courtesy of honoring good works by their peers (JR and E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime earned the most mentions), there are always a few unexpected or obscure titles that get mentioned. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, offered his own uncompleted novel The Original of Laura, which didn’t get published until long after his death the next year. John Cheever told The New York Times that he ended the year with George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, though he confessed that he couldn’t read it in the laundromat.

So, here, without further ado, are recommendations from year-end round-ups in The Observer and The New York Times from 1976. (Note that the Agate and Bardin are 1976 reissues of earlier books, but I’ve kept them because they’re both darned good books.):

“Books of the Year” from The Observer, 12 December 1976:

• The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood

“A first novel doing one particular, narrow thing (impersonating a furious, silly woman) superbly.” — Lorna Sage

• A Literary Affair by Marie-Claire Blais

“A short, very fresh, mischievous novel about the adventures of an ingenuous French-Canadian writer in French literary circles. The poor lad, who came to conquer, is picked dry. A Balzacian story that custom hasn’t staled: compressed here and ‘pris sur le vif,’ it has the charm of a classic cautionary tale.” — Mary McCarthy

• Klynt’s Law by Elliott Baker

“A hilarious satire on parapsychology which starts on a ghastly unversity campus and ends with a bang in ghostly Las Vegas.” — Arthur Koestler

• Brogan and Sons by David Batchelor

“In fiction, I most enjoyed meeting a new novelist in David Batchelor, whose Brogan and Sons shows a skilled had, a sense of social comedy, and the gift of being serious without portentousness.”

• Hard Feelings and Other Stories by Francis King

“I didn’t read much new fiction this year, but although as a rule I don’t much like short stories, I particularly enjoyed Francis King’s new collection, Hard Feelings and Other Stories. His combination of wit and unforgiving observation is always a pleasure.”

• The Selective Ego: the Diaries of James Agate, edited by Tim Beaumont

“Consoles me somewhat for not possessing the nine-volume original, that unique Ptolemaic universe of theatre, ponies, literature, golf, music and wisecracks, autobiography and social history combined (“Today for the first time in history I put on yesterday’s shirt”). — Philip Larkin

• The Viking Process by Norman Hartley

“The unputdownable thriller, the one for your last night in the condemned cell … about a sociologist in the clutches of a fiendish whiz-kid conducting a death-grapple between multinationals.” — Maurice Richardson

• The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus

“A crime weirdissimo, three novels dashed off in the Forties by a man who had been a bouncer in a roller-skating rink, is much the best 95p’s worth on the market.” — Russell Davies

• Hotel de Dream by Emma Tennant and An Unreasonable Man by Henrie Mayne

“Two excellent novels about life’s losers: Emma Tennant’s Hotel de Dream experiments with the stange Hitlerian fringe of menaces that hangs around the dreams of those who have failed; Henrie Mayne’s An Unreasonable Man is a more traditional but moving and funny account of the disorder that a typical English eccentric creates in the lives of others.” — Angus Wilson

• The 79th Survivor by Bronislaw Mlynarski

“… has not received the notice it deserves. The author, from a distinguished Polish musical family, was an officer of the reserve captured when the Russians took the Poles in the rear after Hitler’s frontal assault. He should have finished up among the 4,000 of his fellow officers shot by the NKVD in Katyn forest. But he survived. His story of life in Soviet captivity is the more moving for its unassumingness.” — Edward Crankshaw

“Authors’s Authors” from The New York Times, 5 December 1976:

• Adam Resurrected by Yoram Kaniuk

“The best contemporary novel I’ve read this year…. It deals with a half-crazed survivor of the Holocaust who is periodically incarcerated in a rehabilitation center in the Negev desert. The book is laced with surreal black humor and frilliant digressions on the destiny of the Jews. It’s the Israeli counterpart of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” — Francine de Plessix Gray

• The Geek by Craig Nova

“A hard, brilliantly visual novel which is equal in quality to early Hawkes. Few American writers have such a sensuous yet masterfully controlled style.” — William Gass

• Long Distance by Penelope Mortimer

“A stunning book about a bright, sad, witty woman in a state of emotional disarray. Must be read carefully in order to appreciate its nuances, and even then you’ll never be sure you’ve caught them all.” — Richard Yates

• Waiting in Line by David Walton

“Strange stories set mostly in Southern California and therefore surrealist and socially realist at the same time.” — E. L. Doctorow

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* As Robert Nedelkoff has correctly pointed out, JR was actually published in October 1975.