Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 92: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1929)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

To the Lighthouse is like a well painted still life, to utilize an image from the book. More accurately it is two moments in life, each carefully cataloged and described. Virginia Woolf has an artistic flair in her use of the English language as her palette to describe the Ramsay household and the extended number of close guests that occupy the action around the house. This is stream of consciousness writing informed by the sensibilities of a highly educated English family. There is a Freudian Oedipus Complex that emerges between father and son in the story, particularly visible in the second act, and there are times where the language and attitudes of the characters become pretentious to a point that it is distracting. It is a world where communication, especially between men and women, seems nearly impossible and much of the drama of the book is the characters waiting for someone of the opposite sex to intuit what the speaker in that moment of the book needs and relieve the anxiety of the moment.  To utilize another image from the book it looks at the image of a perfectly balanced tray of fruit whose appearance is ruined by someone taking one of the pieces away from the platter. The two visions in the story are separated by the death of several key characters during the ten years that separate the interactions. This dramatically change the balance for each character.

Every book is not for every reader, and when a story fails for me, I often wonder what it is that makes me not the best reader of the book, particularly a book other intelligent readers have enjoyed. I appreciate Virginia Woolf’s utilization of the English language and the flow of her words on the page. Stream of consciousness writing has always been a struggle for me. To utilize the image above of a well painted still life, I can admire the artistry the artist puts into the individual brushstrokes but I only want to look at it for so long. Reading is a subjective experience and both the subject matter and the lack of movement of any type of plot made this a less enjoyable read for me. There have been several novels on the Time Magazine Top 100 novels that are set within a highly educated or very well off-English household in the early 20^th Century and this time-period seems a sterile environment for both relationships and life with so much effort being placed into maintaining appearances. I can appreciate the artistry of the book and why so many people consider it one of the great English language novels but maybe I am just not a patient enough reader for the stream of consciousness novels that were popular among the elite of the early 20^th Century.