Novels with brilliant, antisocial protaganists that teach you something?

March 7, 2017 8:48 AM

Yes, it's time for your regularly scheduled "what novel is like Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai" question. My husband and I really like quiet novels about intellectual, introspective, somewhat solitary main characters in which you also learn something about a subject you might not have known anything about before. Bonus if it is beautifully written. What are some novels that might scratch that itch?

Novels we both love in this vein:
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
Marlen Haushofer, The Wall
Anything by Haruki Murakami
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

He likes, I don't as much (writing is not as good):
Andy Weir, The Martian

I like, he doesn't as much (too much emphasis on the ensemble and moving the plot forward, not enough on the main character and their inner life):
Donna Tartt, both The Secret History and The Goldfinch
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

posted by LeeLanded to Media & Arts (23 answers total)

I don't think any novel is like The Last Samurai, but these books took me to a similar place:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
The Gold Bug Variations
A Guide to the Perplexed (may have too much plotting for what you want)

For solitary, introspective, beautifully written fiction without an accompanying knowledge dump, I'd recommend everything by Marilynne Robinson
posted by Mchelly at 9:00 AM on March 7, 2017

Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
posted by supermedusa at 9:27 AM on March 7, 2017

Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit. The protagonist is very intellectual and solitary, and you will come out knowing a lot about chess (or at least feeling like you do!).
posted by jeudi at 9:31 AM on March 7, 2017

Red Clover by Florence Osmund
posted by fuse theorem at 9:33 AM on March 7, 2017

Arturo Perez-Reverte might scratch that itch, e.g., The Fencing Master, though there may be more plot than is ideal.
posted by praemunire at 9:33 AM on March 7, 2017

Stoner by John Williams! William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:46 AM on March 7, 2017

Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian is certainly introspective & beautifully written. And for a novel about a Roman emperor it's surprisingly quiet too.
posted by miles per flower at 9:57 AM on March 7, 2017

Probably not what you were thinking of, but the novels of John LeCarre.

Also Robertson Davies.

Also Joseph Conrad.

Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man - James Joyce

The classic "learning about something" novel is Moby Dick, but the thing you are learning about is whaling.
posted by SemiSalt at 10:20 AM on March 7, 2017

Austerlitz by WG Sebald
posted by sagwalla at 10:37 AM on March 7, 2017

2nding Stoner. I read it last year after reading a circa 2013 article in the New Yorker re "the greatest American novel you've never heard of" and I'm currently rereading it. It is just amazing.

Re "learning about something": nothing as tangible as, for example, the details of whaling. Instead, it offers an opportunity to inhabit another's life—to see life through the eyes of someone who has been truly tested. (I'm going to stop here. I cannot possibly do justice to this book.)
posted by she's not there at 11:09 AM on March 7, 2017

Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris and seconding Special Topics in Calamity Physics
posted by entropyiswinning at 11:16 AM on March 7, 2017

Wolf Hall
posted by lousywiththespirit at 11:30 AM on March 7, 2017

A little Cynthia Ozick perhaps?
posted by rdnnyc at 11:41 AM on March 7, 2017

I have not read it, but a podcast I listen to recommended "A Month in the Country" as quiet, introspective and beautiful.
posted by Duffington at 11:42 AM on March 7, 2017

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. I think it's beautifully written, and it made me want to read poetry and appreciate it the way the narrator does.
posted by gladly at 12:00 PM on March 7, 2017

H Is For Hawk is non fiction autobiography but reads like a novel. Really lovely writting.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 12:45 PM on March 7, 2017

You guys seem like you have similar tastes to me (including books I didn't enjoy). I would recommend:

Pearl S. Buck - Pavilion of Women
Yu Hua - The Seventh Day
Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Ruth Ozeki - A Tale for the Time Being

Two more that might be a little more on the plot-driven side and maybe a bit character-heavy, but are excellent:
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
posted by urbanlenny at 1:07 PM on March 7, 2017

Steinbeck: the Winter of Our Discontent.
posted by runcifex at 4:34 PM on March 7, 2017

Definitely the Gold Bug Variations, though I got tired of Richard Powers' novels after reading a few and realizing that I never seemed to get to know the character's inner life any better.

The Adventures of Cavalier & Clay is a great informal (i.e. it's not as obsessive as Richard Powers or Helen DeWitt) introduction to comics and censorship in the McCarthy Era.
posted by tapir-whorf at 4:44 PM on March 7, 2017

Villette, Charlotte Bronte
Doomsday Book, Connie Willis maybe?
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 12:40 AM on March 8, 2017

Thirding "Stoner"
posted by Skipjack at 7:13 AM on March 8, 2017

Orfeo by Richard Powers. (amzn)
Grendel by John Gardner. (amzn)
The Biographer's Tale by AS Byatt. (amzn)
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. (amzn). Maybe too plotty.

Like a Fiery Elephant, by Jonathan Coe. (amzn). This is a biography rather than a novel, but it scratches the same itch for me. (The Quest For Corvo by AJA Symons is often mentioned as an antecedent to this kind of biog: not having read it, I can't judge).
posted by rollick at 7:50 AM on March 8, 2017

Mating, by Norman Rush
posted by languagehat at 8:59 AM on March 8, 2017