Martin Amis opens his (excellent) review of Don DeLillo's first short story collection, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, with a thought-provoking suggestion. "When we say that we love a writer's work," he begins, "we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it."
Joyce's reputation, he says, rests entirely on Ulysses "with a little help from Dubliners". All you need to read of George Eliot is Middlemarch. Three out of Austen's six novels are sub-par. Dickens, Kafka, Coleridge, even Shakespeare – all "succumb to this law" ("Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (As You Like It is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with King John or Henry VI, Part III?"). In the end, Amis suggests, there are only two true exceptions to the rule: Homer and Harper Lee. "I stubbornly suspect", he concludes, "that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are."
Is he right? I suspect he may be. Running down the list of my best-loved authors, the law does, by and large, seem to apply. For every Rabbit tetralogy there's a Widows of Eastwick; for every Easter, 1916 there's a Fiddler of Dooney. Gerard Woodward's Jones family trilogy was outstanding; his latest novel, Nourishment, comparatively underwhelming. Alice Munro's 2005 collection, Runaway, ranks among the best books I've ever read, but I was unmoved by 2007's The View from Castle Rock. Even the great Jilly Cooper is not immune. While I will bow to no one in my admiration of Rivals, Jump! is, by anyone's standards, a lemon.
Harper Lee gets away with it by having written just one, perfect novel, but other than that I can't think of a single writer whose works I love in their entirety. Can you?
