The best books you've never read: four literary novels that break the traditional rules of novel writing and one terrific thriller

I studied with Joe Heller at City College in New York, earned my MA in Creative Writing under his tutelage.

Catch-22 is his most well-known and celebrated work, of course; nevertheless, I consider his second novel, Something Happened, his deeply unsettling portrait of Bob Slocum, a mid-level executive in a disintegrating marriage and estranged from his children who is navigating the minefield of his corporate life, and the devastating anxiety, soul-numbing alienation and paralyzing dread his journey produces that bears fruit at last in the tragedy he has expected and feared and sought desperately to avoid for so long, to be his true masterpiece.

It provided me with an essential lesson in the use of narrative tension to engage readers on a deeper, more subliminal level and keep them engaged until the very last word.

Structurally, stylistically, even thematically, echoes of Something Happened permeate my own novel: the often unreliable narrator, the self in perpetual conflict with itself, the interior monologues and parenthetical reversals and asides, the dogged attempt to simultaneously uncover and obscure the protagonist’s authentic self, and the truth of his existence.

The master has left his mark on his student.

I once heard a friend of mine describe Last Exit to Brooklyn as “a significant minor novel.” He was wrong. It’s a good deal more than that.

Set in the same Brooklyn in which one will find Herschel Cain, the main character in my own novel, before he becomes professional wrestler Haystacks Kane, yet light years away, Last Exit is a searing portrayal of life in the raw amongst the American underclass, profoundly disturbing and terribly, terribly sad. It shook me to my core when I read it not long after it was published in the mid-1960s, and has remained with me ever since.

In countless ways, Selby’s novel thumbs its nose at traditional novel structure and the customary rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation in order to present virtually every moment of its bleak and upsetting narrative with a ferocious immediacy rarely found anywhere else.

In truth, it does not merely thumb its nose at all the rules and conventions, it blasts through them with the brute explosive force of a trainwreck in the fog: Words spelled the way they sound in casual, slang-filled conversation—“to hell” as tahell, “you go,” yago; apostrophes in contractions abandoned and replaced by slash marks, abandoned altogether in possessives; paragraphs indented to the middle or even the end of the line.

Those same paragraphs are frequently delivered as a stream of consciousness, fragmentary thoughts, and parenthetical interjections crashing into one another like bumper cars at Coney Island.

Yet despite all the stylistic mayhem—or perhaps because of it—Last Exit to Brooklyn throbs with life. And there is lyricism and poetry in Selby’s writing that shows true sympathy for his characters and their stunted, pain-ravaged lives. It is a powerful work of American literary fiction which confirmed to me that, like all the others, “the rules of good writing” can and were made to be broken in the service of art and the quest to present truth, no matter how devastating.

Not exactly literary fiction, I know. And it breaks none of the rules governing the novelist’s craft. And we all read it back when it came out, didn't we? Or saw the movie, there've been a couple of versions...

So why is it on my list, you ask?

The Day of the Jackal is quite simply the greatest thriller ever written, and should be read by anyone who writes fiction, literary or otherwise—and by the rest of us as well.

Think for a moment: We follow The Jackal’s relentless quest to corner and kill French President Charles DeGaulle for 380 pages, waiting with breath bated to see whether he will succeed even though we know before we ever open the cover of the book (if we know even the slightest bit of history) that DeGaulle was never assassinated—ever!—not by The Jackal and not by anyone in the real world either.

That we are willing to do that—can be made to do that—amounts to an extraordinary feat of prestidigitation on the part of the author that showed this reader that all fiction writing, literary or not, is an exercise in ”magical realism.” For which lesson I am and will be forever grateful.

You rarely hear any mention these days of John Hawkes or his masterful 1971 novel, The Blood Oranges, his sumptuously written exploration of one man’s pursuit of freedom—in particular, sexual freedom—and the costs and consequences of that pursuit for himself, his wife, and the couple they meet, bond with, seduce in more ways than one, and help to destroy. 

Which is too bad. Because it’s truly exceptional.

The story unfolds in an unnamed tropical setting that is rich with atmosphere and heat, literal and otherwise.  Entering its world was like throwing open the doors to a dream, a dream heavy with languorous passion and sexual tension. It was poetry in sensual slow motion, poetry in the guise of fiction, erotically charged but never ever pornographic (one reviewer called its underlying subject “sexistentialism”). 

Hawkes gifts all this to us in voluptuous prose that suffuses the senses; it dazzles and soars. I emerged besotted, as though from an opium dream. His stunning use of language demonstrated clearly to the writer in me the need for language that elevates us and carries us farther than we’ve been before, and the critical importance of a strong sense of place—atmosphere, if you will—in drawing the reader into the fictional world the narrative creates and anchoring him/her firmly in place there. 

Most of all, it confirmed to me that in fiction, if not in life, no subject, no matter how controversial or uncomfortable, objectionable or unsettling, is truly taboo.

In 2025, does anyone actually read The Sound and the Fury anymore?

Consider that it’s soooo very complex and difficult: four narrators, three of them unreliable often enough to be considered suspect; a non-linear narrative structure awash in stream of consciousness and the interior monologue, the narrative devices Faulkner developed along with Joyce; multiple perspectives on the same event that dash any hopes for “objective truth;” an appendix the author felt compelled to tack on after the novel was already in print to make sure his readers could actually understand what they were reading.

It requires intense focus and concentration from beginning to end, work that we are loathe to invest our time in in this jacked-up, high-speed modern age that already demands more of it than we are able to give. I read it while working on my Master's Degree under the guidance of a Faulkner scholar, and it was still tough going, all too often a Sisyphean climb up a very steep hill.

Why bother, then? Because I consider The Sound and the Fury to be the greatest single work of fiction ever written bar none (yes, that’s right, even Shakespeare), and so very well worth the effort.

Faulkner’s tragic tale of the tortured Compsons and their chaotic inner lives moved me both emotionally and aesthetically as I think no other novel ever has. Structurally and stylistically idiosyncratic to its core, dense with symbolism, its seemingly disparate narratives are nevertheless assembled with the delicacy and precision of a fine Swiss timepiece to match the quote from Macbeth from which the novel’s title is taken: “A tale told by an idiot” (Benjy). “Full of sound and fury” (Jason). “Signifying nothing” (Quentin).

I “got it” somehow. It took my breath away. I loved it. And I learned from it, learned the fundamentals of the stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue techniques I now sometimes employ myself to bring my readers deeper inside the inner worlds of my characters; first learned that it is permissible to bend the rules, stretch them, even break them, to get to deeper truths and present them in ways that will allow the reader to see the world afresh and with renewed intensity.  And that more is sometimes more after all.