Top ten depressing novels

Over at the American Book Exchange—the only place I buy used books any more—Scott Laming has compiled a list of the top ten depressing novels of all time:

( 1.) Cormac McCarthy, The Road
( 2.) Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
( 3.) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
( 4.) George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
( 5.) Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
( 6.) John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
( 7.) Elie Wiesel, Night
( 8.) Nevil Shute, On the Beach
( 9.) Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
(10.) William Golding, Lord of the Flies

A good list—but some essential titles for the bitter and pessimistic have been left off.

What about Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and the other novels from the ’thirties, that noir decade? I am thinking of Appointment in Samarra, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Butterfield 8, Call It Sleep, and if you include novels written during the ’thirties, though published later, Native Son and The Ox Bow Incident.

After the boom times of the ’fifties, unrelieved grimness came back into style. Flannery O’Connor’s Violent Bear It Away (1960) is depressing unless thoughts of the Apocalypse cheer you. E. L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times, published the same year, is an “anti-Western” without anyone to stand up to the cruel men who rape and murder. Revolutionary Road (1961) put paid to any hope for happiness in suburbia. Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel The Painted Bird is a carefully detailed chronicle of human pitilessness and blank suffering. James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) is terrifying in addition to grim, and then ends on a note of hopelessness.

My favorite feel-bad novel of all time is Charles Willeford’s delightfully amoral Shark-Infested Custard (1993). The novel follows a group of four friends, swinging bachelors in Miami, who start their career by dumping the corpse of an underage pickup and end by facing the same problem—with one of their own number. [Update: More than a year after compiling this list, I finally got around to a full-length discussion of The Shark-Infested Custard.] Willeford is among the most underrated novelists in American literature. His better known “Hoke Moseley” mysteries, although they are not mysteries, uphold a vision best captured in the title of the second book in the series: New Hope for the Dead. No hope at all, in other words.

I am sure I have forgotten some significant entries.