Winning Novels About Failure


Victory

By Joseph Conrad (1915)

This category is, of necessity, a crowded one. Novelists are drawn to
failure. Those who prosper, or expect to prosper, in the world as it is
have no need to re-imagine it. The measure of failure for Joseph
Conrad's characters is usually the seaman's code, an expectation of
honor, camaraderie and courage that proves to be beyond them. In
"Victory" the failure is of another sort. Axel Heyst lets no one down.
"No decent feeling was ever scorned by Heyst." But the connections he
makes are remote and ironic. Keeping himself at a safe distance from
life works until he rescues a young woman from humiliation and is forced
into an intimacy entirely alien to his nature. What follows, as he
stumbles against the trust that love requires, is the saddest story. The
victory of the title is the woman's. She dies for him in an exaltation
of romantic love from which his fastidious temperament recoils. Her
victory is his failure.


Joseph Roth
Rebellion

By Joseph Roth (1924)

Joseph Roth's third novel is short and deadly. Andreas Pum is a leftover
from the Great War. He has lost a leg but has been given a medal and is
content with things as they are—a just God and a great and all-powerful
Fatherland. He looks forward to this essential rightness of things
working in his favor: a prosthesis so good that you wouldn't ever know
he'd lost a leg; and a protected future as "an attendant in a shady park
or a cool museum." None of this does he achieve. Instead, humiliation is
heaped upon humiliation. He ends his days assisting in the toilet of a
café, railing against the world, against authority, against God. True,
rebellion is better than quiescence, but this rebellion is of the
bitterly futile.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

By Mario Vargas Llosa (1977)

'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" is a novel on a thousand errands, not
the least of them a sort of spoofing of magic realism while reveling in
its conventions. There is so much comic gusto in the spiraling decline
of Pedro Camacho, a phenomenally successful writer of radio soap operas,
that it is hard to remember that what we're watching is Camacho's mind
"falling to pieces." The joy of the story lies in its brilliant
confusion of Camacho's scripts, as overproduction (10 serials a day)
leads him to forget which characters belong in which soap opera and each
spills uncontrollably into the other. Camacho's hospitalization no more
distresses us than his final demotion to the job of hack reporter. Call
it callousness, but comic failure, too, must have its place. Especially
when, in the telling, it has felt so much like creative success.
Karoo

By Steve Tesich (1998)

A neglected masterpiece, to be explained, perhaps, by its author's
tragic death—of a heart attack at age 53—only months after the novel's
completion. By page 100 you begin to wonder whether you will make it
through to the end alive yourself, so relentlessly is the dissolution of
its hero charted. A man "addicted to himself," an alcoholic who claims
he can't get drunk—though you wouldn't ever call him sober—a
neglectful father, a bad husband, a poor lover, but a good
script-doctor, Saul Karoo can no longer find a single reason to resist
the attentions, the blandishments and the job offers of people he
detests. "The great So What of the soul speaks within me and urges me to
accept." What ensues is hard to bear, but so alive is the writing that
we follow the ruined Karoo willingly into hell.


Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa i
Sabbath's Theater

By Philip Roth (1995)

This is the last of Philip Roth's great hero-as-anathema novels (Mickey
Sabbath himself being his most inordinate creation ever) before Roth
turned to re-imagining his history through America's. Ask how such
exhilaration can be found in a life in which so much has gone wrong and
you touch on Roth's genius. This is Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel
rolled inside "King Lear" and told Jewishly, a spit in the eye of
conventional decency, a luxuriating in obscenity for its own sake but
also with the intention of getting us to consider the role that the
erotic plays in the sacred. Existing in the world as "antagonistically
as he liked" is Sabbath's alternative to collapse, and in his final
refusal of death's easy consolations—"How could he leave? How could he
go? Everything he hated was here"—he blows the very idea of a failed
life clean out of the water.
—Mr. Jacobson's most recent novel, "The Finkler Question," won this
year's Man Booker Prize.