Two weeks ago, we asked readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD if they could guess the name of the book we inadvertently left off our first Reading List. It was the fourth novel on a list of great works about money (the other three were The Titan and The Financier, both by Theodore Dreiser, and Framley Parsonage, by Anthony Trollope). The reader who correctly named the missing Fourth Book was to receive a gift subscription.
And the winner is: Nobody! But we did receive some astonishingly literate and interesting guesses:
“The fourth book,” writes James K. Glassman, “should be Balzac’s Eugenie Grander (much better than the over-wrought Dreiser), about how a miser destroys his family. Two Balzacian runners-up: The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birroteau and A Harlot High and Low.”
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, about a 25-year lawsuit, was the choice of two entrants, George Anne Castel of Hillsdale, Michigan and T.B. Connor of Wimberly, Texas.
Two novels by Trollope, Dickens’s contemporary, were also mentioned: The Way We Live Now, about a speculative frenzy in 1870s London (sent in by Ted Levinson of Manhattan) and his first serious novel, The Three Clerks (thanks to Joseph Hamburger of Hamden, Connecticut).
Stephen Miller of Reston, Va., chose The Wings of the Dove by Henry James, “about a couple that needs money, so the would-be wife tells the would- be husband to romance a dying heiress. This is James, so no one would be so crass as to actually discuss money, but money — or the lack thereof — is the driving force of the novel.” Karen Jones of Peekskill, N.Y., guessed Frank Norris’s 1915 McTeague, probably best known for being the source material of Erich Von Stroheim’s silent-film masterpiece Greed. Harrison Flynn of Boston tried Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (which, we must confess, is not one of our favorite books). Quin Hilyer of Washington chose Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (ditto).
Two serious obscurities were submitted. First, The Breadwinners by John Hay, known to Ted Babcock of Janesville, Wisc. and perhaps six other people. Second, The Fairy Godmother by Charles Baxter Clement, a 1981 tome submitted by its original publisher, Jameson Campaigne, of Ottawa, Ill.
Our apologies to all, but the actual title of the fourth book is purely generic: Money, by Emile Zola, the story of a bank in France that seeks to get Catholic depositors to invest in Catholic businesses — an eerie foretelling of the redlining hysteria of the 1990s.
We invite readers to submit reading lists of their own on subjects in the news. The books must be genuine works of literature or possess significant historical importance. Send your entries to: Our Weekly Reader, THE WEEKLY STANARD, 1150 17th St. NW, Suite 505, Washington DC 20036.
