Edward Conlon

last updated 8 January 2015

Ah, Wilderness!, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill was my high school literary hero. I’m still in awe of how he could take a rough and often wretched past and remake it as a nostalgic comedy in Ah, Wilderness!; a brutal naturalistic work like Journey; and, in the most stunning leap, to reimagine his parents’ marriage as “mixed” in All God’s Chillun. There was something terrible and wonderful in each transformation: It meant you could make any kind of story from any experience.

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The Untouchable by John Banville (Vintage, $13). As a stylist, Banville is nearly as fluent as Nabokov, and many of his books seem to aspire to simply be precious, useless objects, like Fabergé eggs. With The Untouchable, however, which tells the story of Cambridge spy Anthony Blount, that mandarin style gains great force through its match with the character. Blount’s was not merely a double life, but a sextuple one, at least: communist and courtier, bisexual husband and father, actor and critic.