Christopher Scalia’s 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read) is a book about books that also functions as an extended book list. It is a collection of essay-length chapters that discuss and recommend some of his favorite novels. And it is a reliable guide to younger readers, suspicious and wearied of politicized works of culture, exhorting them to reclaim their patrimony by making great literature central to their intellectual formation.
Its appeal is immediate. Everybody loves a good list: from desert island books to the best walkable cities, unusual collectibles to the omnipresent ranking’s lists. Lists can help to distill what can seem overwhelming into the digestible. They invite comparison, spark conversation, and, often, stir nostalgia. They can also forge emotional connections between the reader and the books they love most. Think of lists that take deeper dives into Middle-earth lore. In sharing them with friends and fellow travelers, many of us experience a sense of literary community as a result.
At their best, lists instruct as much as they entertain, offering readers entry points into common interests and shared traditions. Even Russell Kirk joined the list-making trend late in life with several chapter-length compilations in The Politics of Prudence. Book list mania shows no sign of slowing. In just the last couple of weeks, I received in the mail two books in this genre: God on Stage: 15 Plays that Ask the Big Questions by the prolific Peter Kreeft, and Great Books for Good Men by the similarly productive Joseph Pearce.
A suggestive list, then, can guide one to an array of richer works that might serve to delight while forming our moral imagination. Christopher Scalia understands this appeal. His 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love is more than a clever catalog—it is a cultural invitation. By drawing together novels that combine artistic power with enduring themes and contemporary resonance, he hopes to reawaken among conservatives the habit of reading serious fiction as both pleasure and inheritance.
Scalia’s 13 Novels is not a work of literary theory. It is not a work of comparative literature. It is not a book in search of that great rarity, the political novel. It is not a book about conservatism per se. And, perhaps more controversially, Scalia did not write a book about 13 conservative novels. Rather, he offers a range of fiction in the Anglophone tradition by writers of a conservative bent that he believes warrant the attention, even affection, of those readers possessed of a conservative disposition.
Scalia encourages his readers to embrace a capacious conservatism—a conservatism animated by the imagination, rather than by the usual satchel of abstract ideas and political bromides. That is a worthy objective in every age. But as the commentators on a certain tired “conservative” cable news station say on command: now more than ever!
Scalia credits thinkers like Russell Kirk and Sir Roger Scruton with introducing him to a world beyond politics, one in which the conservative could also be a literary conservator. Scruton warned that art falters when it is reduced to a message. Kirk believed truly remarkable art has a moral end. Both hold that the ideological novel is propaganda, whereas the enduring novel discloses human nature and conveys some aspect of a moral imagination. Though diverse in setting and style, Scalia’s selections echo Kirk and Scruton and converge around themes often emphasized or grappled with by intellectual conservatives—limits, tradition, realism, rootedness, faith, happiness, and the fragility of order.
It is a great day when one opens a book basically aimed at elevating the reading habits and imaginative life of younger conservatives, and finds selections like Scalia’s. Several are worth mentioning.
Sir Walter Scott’s high romance, Waverly, is the indispensable novel for imaginative conservatives and a reflection on both what we owe to the past and the constant need to reconcile change and continuity. It invented the historical novel genre and stands as a paean to one of the great lost causes in history—the gallant but doomed rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45.
Scalia approaches his list of novels as a continuum of moral imagination.
Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, an eighteenth-century road trip novel where Odysseus meets Plato in the Nile Valley. It is a mix of travelogue, philosophical inquiry on happiness, and character sketch. Scalia puts Johnson first on his list, not merely for the sake of chronology, but because Johnson has a claim to being the first modern conservative, certainly the first Tory conservative. Because his “vision of fiction was to help form its young readers into better people … he focused on educating younger readers about proper moral conduct and certain principles of human nature.” In his own way, this is Scalia’s project in 13 Novels. And so, he begins with Johnson’s story of the restless young prince of Abyssinia, Rasselas, who leaves his sealed-off kingdom, Happy Valley, and sets out with a wise guide and friends to seek the meaning of human nature and happiness so that he might deliberately know and choose the truth of things himself. The result is a brilliant and charming Johnsonian literary-philosophical pilgrimage.
Next, Scalia includes Fanny Burney’s wonderful novel, Evelina. Burney was in some ways a Jane Austen in training, and this novel is a very clever and funny story about how manners shape freedom, civility, and the significance of unwritten rules of behavior. Strangely though, Scalia only refers to her as “Frances” never as “Fanny.” Jane Austen and Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson and Adam Smith, would have.
Scalia rightly includes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-utopian meditation on why no community can escape original sin, The Blithdale Romance. As Russell Kirk put it,
The Blithdale Romance is the history of a fanatic reformer who is determined to redeem criminals by appealing to their higher instincts; and when all is done, he is grimly resigned to attempting the reformation of one criminal only, himself. … This was the substance of Hawthorne’s resolute conviction: that moral reformation is the only real reformation; that sin always will corrupt the projects of enthusiasts who leave sin out of account; that progress is a delusion, except for the infinitely slow progress of conscience.
In his hilarious lampoon of the modern culture of journalism, Scoop, Evelyn Waugh makes media madness into comic opera and proves as only he can that satire can be both delightful and devastating. This addition is particularly germane in today’s climate. As Scalia wrote in a Washington Post article, Scoop’s relevance is suggested by the way Waugh lampoons “fake news” and the herd habits of the press corps. He also perceptively observes, “the novel’s depiction of an insular, gullible and sometimes dishonest press will strike a chord with many readers in the Age of Trump—or in the Age of the Anti-Trump Media.”
A more somber addition is V. S. Naipaul’s stark tale of postcolonial Africa, The Bend in the River. Joseph Conrad might have found a way onto Scalia’s list—Under Western Eyes, Secret Agent, or, of course, The Heart of Darkness are certainly worthy candidates for inclusion. As it is, Naipaul’s haunting book reads like Conrad rewritten for the late twentieth century: civilization under siege, delicate, and taken for granted, a warning “of the thin barrier separating civilization from terror.”
Christopher Beha’s rejection of the technocratic illusion that society and life can be managed like a spreadsheet, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, is another fine inclusion. A liberal writer and former editor of Harper’s Magazine who also possesses a Catholic and culturally conservative disposition, Beha’s Index is a big, ambitious New York novel blending baseball, politics, and family into a meditation on hubris and life’s tragic complexity. It’s a fine contemporary work, but a modern favorite of mine is another Beha novel that is deeper, richer, and more beautifully written, his What Happened to Sophie Wilder. Add that to your list! Or maybe his enjoyable, Arts & Entertainments, Beha’s satire of our celebrity age and a modern moral comedy.
To read these novels is to be wiser, humbled, deepened, and prepared for the common work of sustaining civilization.
From Scott’s historical memory, Burney’s manners, and Johnson’s moral realism, through Hawthorne’s critique of utopian delusion and Naipaul’s tragic vision of civilization, to the Catholic conservative voices of Waugh and Christopher Beha, who satirize and illuminate modernity, Scalia approaches his list of novels as a continuum of moral imagination. He also includes novels by Willa Cather, Muriel Spark, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Lief Enger, and P. D. James. Together, they testify that the permanent things endure amid the flux of modern times.
At the outset of this review, I mentioned that Scalia’s 13 Novels is an extended book list. I might have said that it is an extended book about a book list: at 300 pages, it is too long. In drawing out detailed plot, character, and conservative lessons from each novel—most at substantial length—Scalia risks instructing more than inspiring, explaining away what ought to be discovered. A shorter, evocative approach might have captured more of the “romance of reading” and less of the seminar pitch. Still, if the result is that conservatives pick up works by Johnson, Scott, Hawthorne, Cather, Spark, or Waugh, perhaps the tradeoff is worth it. Though given that less than fifty percent of the US population reads for pleasure these days, the length of the book and each of his chapters might be its biggest challenge.
Another model for this book genre that a lot of young Christian conservatives read in the 1980s—and, if like me, have returned to over the years—is the rich, brilliant, and powerful primer by James J. Thompson Jr. entitled Christian Classics Revisited (1983). Also, a book about books, it fits comfortably in the palm of your hand and comes in at 160 pages. His wise essay meditations on 25 novels were really guides for pilgrims like us on a journey through life in its spiritual, social, and political dimensions. Thompson, who would later edit the Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, in his clarity and concision, managed also to convey the depth of each work within a larger tradition. He had a generation of conservatives collecting those books and talking about them. And marveling at, in addition to the authors he included, how great a writer Thompson was! I hope that reception for Scalia, when he looks back upon how his list of novels was received.
There’s one minor element of the book that I found off-putting. I think Scalia occasionally damages his own cause, and in doing so could give evidence to those who will charge him of making literature a means to a political end. He often descends to speaking in an informal style that clashes with the high tone of his novels and his own analysis. When he does, he is less and not more relevant (surely not a conservative aspiration!). Along these lines, he peppers in pop culture references (which I doubt most of his young readers will understand) and invokes contemporary conservative journalists, pundits, and DC-types that give a possible wink to the accusation that he has a principally partisan political end in mind for his novels.
Still, as we head toward the fall and short, darker days, Scalia’s 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read) can be a warm and enlightening companion, directing unsure readers to some undeniably great works of fiction that are both artistically delightful and morally serious.
At its best, Scalia’s 13 Novels refreshes the conservative literary imagination by showing that great fiction is not hostile to conservative sensibilities but is a deep well of wisdom that affirms limits, memory, duty, and hope. These novels model what T. S. Eliot called in East Coker the “wisdom of humility,” the cultivation of which Kirk believed essential for the renewal of culture.
For young conservatives especially, Scalia’s 13 Novels is not merely a syllabus but an invitation to undertake what amounts to an intellectual pilgrimage. To read these novels is to be wiser, humbled, deepened, and prepared for the common work of sustaining civilization.