The greatest novel in English – and how to drink it

Which is the greatest novel in the English language? Let us review the candidates: Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The Bostonians. The other night, someone tried to make a case for Moby-Dick. Along with Tristam Shandy and Daniel Deronda, it is one of my great unreadables. I have tried, but always jumped ship before leaving Nantucket. Clarissa: immense power — if not as much fun as Pamela — yet I have no enthusiasm for rereading it. The Bostonians: again, great power — but what about more matter with less art, and was James really writing in English?

Pride and Prejudice: with Portia and Rosalind, Lizzie Bennet is one of the Three Graces, the most delicious girls in fiction (poor Portia, to think of the long slow tragedy of marriage to Bassanio). For all Miss Austen’s perfection, we are surely in search of a larger scale. Middlemarch has that. But Dorothea Brooke is irritating, while Ladislaw is a bloodless niminy-piminy whimsy: almost makes one sympathise with Casaubon.