The Top Ten Novel Titles of All Time
By Sarah Stodola
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Writing a great novel is hard. Thousands try. Few succeed. It’s a timeworn struggle. We treasure the perversity of the pursuit - the great novel is a thing to be treasured, at least in part, because it is so unattainable.
But the great novel with a great title; this reaches beyond what any reasonable person should dream of. Even a merely good novel, blessed with a great title, becomes immortal. A novel requires thousands upon thousands of words. A title is limited to only a handful, at most. The talent to say something great in so few words rivals the more-lauded talent to do so with many.
This is, of course, to take nothing away from those novels like White Teeth, Crime and Punishment, 1984, Lolita, etc., all of which boast perfectly relevant and memorable titles and accompany important books. But although they work with their respective novels, they do not possess great meaning in and of themselves. A great novel title must be able to stand on its own. On the other hand, a great novel title, even though it must be a great string of words in and of itself, must also serve to supplement the overall meaning of the novel. It must embody its novel.
The great novel title is as elusive as the great novel. And it, too, deserves to be honored. The following, then, is Me Three’s list of the Top Ten Novel Titles of All Time, beginning with the honorable mentions, because it makes no sense that they are always listed last…
Honorable Mentions: The Grapes of Wrath, The Name of the Rose, Catch-22, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Great Expectations, White Noise, Gravity’s Rainbow, Sense and Sensibility, Requiem for a Dream, Less than Zero, The Beautiful and Damned, Lost in the Funhouse, and The Importance of Being Earnest.*
10) Of Human Bondage, By W. Somerset Maugham – Maugham took the title of this sprawling novel from Spinoza’s Ethics, Part IV of which is titled, “Of Human Bondage, or Of the Strength of the Emotions.” The novel’s protagonist spends his unhappy youth as a slave to his emotions, and as he grows older learns to approach life and its decisions in a more practical manner. In this way – by escaping the “human bondage” created by our emotions – he finds contentment. In this case, the three words of the title encapsulate the struggle of a character’s entire life.9) Lemon, By Lawrence Krauser – One of just two one-word titles on the list, Lemon works because its potential double meaning. The novel chronicles a man’s demented obsession with, yes, a lemon. In this way, it’s a straightforward title. However, lemon is also a word used to refer to a flop, or an unsuccessful creative endeavor of any kind. Therefore, the reader is left unsure of the book’s validity. Even if you think the novel is terrible, you have to acknowledge that it might be meant to be terrible, and thus, not terrible at all, all because of this one-word title.
8) Fifth Business, By Robertson Davies – In theater, the fifth business is a character who does not play a central role in the story, but who triggers the major events of the plot. And so it is for the narrator of The Fifth Business, a modestly successful man whose actions don’t seem to effect him at all, but instead manage to drastically alter the lives of those who come into contact with him.
7) The Sun Also Rises, By Ernest Hemingway - The sun sets, making the world a dark place. But it also rises. Thus, this is one of the few great novel titles in existence that is entirely optimistic. It drives home the point that no matter how sad a person becomes, there is always optimism to be had. The title spreads a layer of hopefulness over the sense of futility that defines the novel’s characters. At the same time, the word “also” provides the implication that its optimism is a reaction to some sort of gloom.
6) Interstate, By Stephen Dixon – Dixon’s National Book Award-nominated novel opens with a shooting on an interstate freeway. The rest of the novel, though, deals more with the traveling that occurs within the mind as a result of this shooting – the “interstate” of the mind. Or, the mind moving between states. The aftermath of the shooting is told eight different times, each with the man whose daughter was killed struggling with his perception, guilt, and pain regarding the event, revealing that it is often impossible to uncover the true “state” of a situation.
5) A Confederacy of Dunces, By John Kennedy Toole – Jonathan Swift once wrote, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Reading Toole’s only novel is a frantic ride through a New Orleans that refuses to bow down to the brilliant but impossible protagonist – a grown man who still lives with his mother, can’t keep a job, and causes a scene at every turn, but who still manages to make us laugh and, in the end, take his side.
4) Atlas Shrugged, By Ayn Rand - Ayn Rand is to be feared for her ability to justify greed, to even make greed seem honorable. I hate this book, because it is so well-written and so loathsome at the same time. But the title is brilliant. The idea of the god who held the world on his shoulders shrugging creates a spellbinding metaphor. Indeed, in the novel the world is shaken to its core, just as if the person holding it up were shrugging his shoulders with indifference.
3) Infinite Jest, By David Foster Wallace – Wallace takes this title from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and more specifically from a scene in which Hamlet mourns the death of his friend, a man of “infinite jest.” In the novel, a movie circulates on the black market that causes people who watch it to die from pleasure. They become so happy when they watch the film that they no longer want to do anything else. They stop eating, stop going to work. They watch the movie until they waste away. And the jest, therefore, is on them. For infinity. On the other hand, the title can be interpreted as a synonym for life itself.
2) The Bonfire of the Vanities, By Tom Wolfe – New York is a city flowing over with egos. When it all goes wrong for them, as it does in this relatively recent classic, it’s inevitably a spectacle. The vanities of these characters crash up against one another, causing them to lie, cheat, and steal – to do anything to retain their power. In the end, of course, it all goes up in flames, and the egos are destroyed. This title is so good that a paragraph-long explanation of it does nothing to augment its meaning.
1) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, By Milan Kundera - Before reading this book, I didn't want to read it, because I feared that the contents of the book might ruin the perfection of its title. That didn’t end up happening, of course, but it did change the meaning of the title. “Lightness,” here, does not mean light as in light vs. dark, but rather light as in light vs. heavy. This makes the title even better than it was before I read the novel. Life is not this grounding thing, but rather it is a thing that floats away too easily. You can’t hold it down, as much as most of us want to. By the same token, it is this very lightness that embodies life when it is at its very best, making its fleeting nature all the more unbearable.
* The Importance of Being Earnest was excluded from the top ten only because it is not actually a novel. Too bad. Great title.
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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three. She can be contacted at sstodola@methree.net.
© 2004 Me Three