The Underrated Shelf
Books that never had their moment, argued for one at a time.
I.The Argument for Quiet Books
Every year, a handful of novels become the novel. They acquire a gravitational pull — the tote bag, the waiting list, the book club that does nothing else for three months. These are good problems for a book to have, and occasionally the phenomenon is even deserved. But for every book that finds its crowd, dozens of genuinely remarkable ones slip through the floor. They get a respectful notice in one broadsheet, sell modestly, go out of print before the paperback has time to soften at the spine, and then vanish into the charity-shop ecosystem that is, in its quiet way, the great literary afterlife.
The underrated shelf is not a shelf for bad books that deserved better. It's a shelf for good books that got lost in the slipstream. There's a difference worth defending.
II.Some Cases, Argued Briefly
Penelope Fitzgerald's early novels. Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize in 1979 for Offshore, and in later life was celebrated for The Blue Flower and The Gate of Angels. But her first three novels — The Golden Child, The Bookshop, and Human Voices — still get overlooked even by readers who love her. The Bookshop, published in 1978, is a short, devastating account of a woman who opens a bookshop in a small English coastal town and discovers that the town does not want it. It runs to about 120 pages. Almost nothing is wasted in it. If you have an afternoon and a tolerance for sorrow cut with dark comedy, start there.
Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus. Hazzard is not exactly unknown — her 2003 novel The Great Fire won the National Book Award in the United States — but The Transit of Venus, published in 1980, remains criminally under-read relative to its quality. It follows two Australian sisters across decades of twentieth-century life, and it is one of the most architecturally intricate novels in English: the ending is encoded in the opening pages, invisibly, and only becomes visible in retrospect. Readers who find it tend to find it with the force of a conversion.
Tove Jansson's novels for adults. Most readers know Jansson as the creator of the Moomins. Far fewer have found their way to her adult fiction — particularly The Summer Book (1972) and Fair Play (1989). The Summer Book is a series of loosely linked episodes between a very old grandmother and a very young granddaughter on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. It is one of the most quietly radical books about how to be alive that exists in translation, and it takes about two hours to read.
“It is one of the most quietly radical books about how to be alive that exists in translation, and it takes about two hours to read.”
Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Published in 1955, Moore's debut novel follows an unmarried woman in 1950s Belfast whose grip on respectability and faith is slowly, mercilessly dismantled. It was praised on publication and has remained continuously in print, which means it doesn't quite qualify as lost — but it remains far less read than it should be. Moore went on to write more than twenty novels, several of them equally good. Almost none of them get the attention they warrant.
III.How to Use This Shelf
The underrated book requires a slightly different kind of trust than the hyped one. With a hyped novel, the crowd does some of the work — you arrive with expectations already warmed. With the quiet book, you arrive cold. The first few pages have to earn you without the benefit of advance noise, which means you need to extend a little more patience than usual, and resist the urge to check what other people thought halfway through.
The reward, when it comes, tends to feel more personal. Nobody recommended it on a podcast. Nobody is reading it at the same time as you. The conversation about it, if you want one, is one you'll probably have to start yourself. That's not a disadvantage — it's most of the point. Some of the best reading conversations begin with the sentence I don't know if you've heard of this one, but.
The shelf keeps filling, which is the one reassuring thing about the literary slipstream. Good books don't stop being written because attention is elsewhere. They just wait, in secondhand shops and remaindered stacks and the occasional quietly evangelical recommendation, for someone to make the case.
Consider this one.