10 Novels for Ladies Who Love America

It may be odd to begin a book list for ladies with a novel written by a man, but it’s narrated by a fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie Ross and, my God, True Grit is as close to perfection as a work of fiction can get.

Mattie is a no-nonsense spinster who tells this story from her youth with deadpan delivery punctuated with humorous asides and subtle wisdom. Set in 1870, it begins when her father is betrayed, robbed, and killed by a no-good drifter named Tom Chaney. Sent to retrieve her father’s body, Mattie leaves her family’s farm in Arkansas set on revenge, armed with her sharp wit and her father’s pistol that’s half her size.

To help her find Chaney, she hires Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed U.S. marshal who doesn’t suffer fools and likes “to pull a cork.” He joins with a petty bounty hunter who wants to bring Chaney to justice in Texas, and they try to leave Mattie out of the chase. With her superior intellect and stubborn devotion to justice, however, she shows them who’s boss.

Mattie’s journey through the wild Indian territory of Oklahoma is at times thrilling, at times frustrating, and at times moving—but always delightful. Ultimately, she shows the men she travels with the characteristics they’ve forgotten: honor, diligence, and gumption.

There’s one word that comes to mind when I think of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: transcendent. No, it’s not a mundane story about the tribulations of women’s work. Rather, it’s one of those rare feats of fiction in which words are used to go beyond words. Just about every sentence crackles with taut energy, capturing the mysterious spark that animates everything in existence.

Nearly devoid of men, and set in a small Idaho mountain town that could be anywhere in the far American West, Robinson creates a mythical atmosphere for this elusive story. It’s narrated by Ruth, whose mom drives herself into a lake where her own father died, leaving Ruth and her younger sister in the care of relatives—a caring grandmother who dies, aloof great aunts who fail, and a transient aunt who can’t keep house.

It’s about the heavy presence death has on the living; the comforting belief of salvation through faith and church attendance; and how people can live together but be alone, isolated in their own minds, quiet and waiting and watching. Discovering the strange pleasure that arises from breaking the bonds of desire, from not fearing hunger, cold, or loneliness.

This novel demands to be read slowly, and savored.

Betty Smith’s gem, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is saturated with nostalgia. Set in the Brooklyn tenements of the early 20^th century, it captures transformation: of a city, of the country, and also a life. Narrated by bookish Francie Nolan, it’s a classic coming-of-age tale, but one in which the environment of urban poverty is more prominent than the protagonist—it’s like an American version of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.

We meet Francie when she’s eleven, reading on the fire escape of her family’s third-floor apartment, and thinking lofty thoughts about the tree that grows in the midst of an urban jungle. With her brother Neeley, she collects scrap metal, pitching in to the family’s meager budget. For though her mother Katie is sober and serious, her father Johnny is a Romantic and an alcoholic.

He sings beautifully, but only as a waiter—we see a lot of wasted talent, and lost opportunity. Francie dearly loves her father, even though he’s a disaster, and she’s devastated by his unsurprising death. Unlike him, however, Francie will make it out of her neighborhood, and out of her social class. For she is intelligent as she is diligent, and rides America’s meritocratic opportunities to college and beyond.

Patricia Highsmith is known for her iconic thrillers Strangers on a Train and the Mr. Ripley series, but I’m including The Price of Salt. Also known as Carol, it’s her most literary work, but she initially published it under a pen name, due to its portrayal of lesbian attraction.

Set in post-War New York, The Price of Salt shows the opulent, romantic, extravagant affluence that’s still seen during the holiday season in Midtown Manhattan, especially at Bloomingdale’s. That’s where Carol Aird—a rich, bored, blond suburban housewife in the city to shop—meets nineteen-year-old salesgirl Therese Belivet.

An aspiring artist, Therese has a boyfriend, but she’s not very into him, nor into sex. Yet she’s fascinated with Carol. So after delivering Carol’s purchases to her home, she brazenly sends her a Christmas card and starts a friendship.

Coincidentally, Carol’s getting a divorce, after having an affair with a female friend. Her husband, a boorish drinker, takes their daughter away. To escape the stress, Carol brings Therese on a road trip out west, subtly manipulating the younger woman. Or is the younger woman manipulating the older one? Either way, their friendship becomes romantic—and documented by a private detective hired by Carol’s husband.

Speaking of detectives, one of my favorite noirs is In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes, which takes place during the same time as Highsmith’s The Price of Salt but is set on the opposite coast, in Los Angeles. The novel is a masterclass of craft, but what struck me most when I first read it is Hughes’s capacity for psychological insight.

In this case, she inhabits the mind of Dix Steele, a World War II vet struggling to be a mystery writer who becomes a predator; the story is told from his perspective, and he immediately admits he stalks and strangles women he finds on foggy nights.

The term misogynist is overused these days, but Dix is a true embodiment of the concept. For not only is he a murderer, he’s so dismissive of the capacity of female intelligence that he falls into a trap set by Laurel, Dix’s femme fatale girlfriend, and Sylvia, the wife of his friend and LAPD detective on the case of the strangler. Flipping the script of the film noir genre just getting underway, Hughes has Sylvia solve the crime and expose Dix as the serial strangler—while her detective husband was oblivious the whole time.

Staying in Los Angeles, next is Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage, which—like all of Babitz’s books—is set in LA during the acid wave. Appropriately, Babitz’s alter-ego protagonist, Jacaranda Leven, is a sandy-toed surfer. Or at least she was, before she becomes a socialite, writer, and alcoholic.

Like Babitz, Jacaranda knows everybody who’s anybody in the late 60s and early 70s Hollywood scene, and sleeps with many of them. At parties, clubs, and cafes, she mingles with artists, screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and sprezzatura aristocrats, casually taking LSD, mescaline, and cocaine. But Jacaranda’s drug of choice is lust. She falls in lust with one hunk of a man after another, as her world centers on desiring and being desired. She’s an irresistible hot mess.

An embodiment of frivolous wit, Babitz was a master of personal essays that captured an era as it unfolded, collected in Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company. Sex and Rage was her first attempt to turn these episodes into a novel, meaning it has a loosely sustained, central plot: Jacaranda becoming a serious, sober, New York-approved author.

But can this incorrigible Angeleno ever become serious? Why would she ever want to?

Babitz’s hippie characters are far out, but Tom Robbins’s are out there, making even the 70s counterculture look conventional. His wild ride of a didactic novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues stars Sissy Hankshaw, a perfect beauty who has gigantic thumbs. Rather than be ashamed of her deformity, however, she embraces her genetic defect as a blessing for a particular activity: hitch-hiking.

Hitching herself out of suburban Virginia and into the American wild, she models in New York City, marries a conservative Mohawk artist, and eventually finds an all-female health spa ranch in the Dakota plains led by a cowgirl calling herself Bonanza Jellybean. Masters of political disillusionment, Bonanza and her radical cowgirls teach Sissy about female liberation, gender role reversals, and whooping cranes.

On a nearby ridge lives “the Chink,” a cave-dwelling Japanese mystic who schools Sissy in crazy Taoist wisdom, a peculiar millenarian group called the “clock people,” and spiritual sex. Never taking anything seriously, he shows her that being anti-dogmatic is also dogmatic, and that any ideological affiliation is a limitation.

As if all that wasn’t zany enough, there’s a chapter consisting of a conversation between the brain and the thumb, arguing over who’s most responsible for human evolution.

Sticking with the zany, let’s head to Florida. Because let’s face it, Florida can be weird. And that weirdness is perfectly captured in Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise. The perpetual sweat. The bizarre animals. The thick, heavy thunderstorms that appear to be bringing the apocalypse. And the people—what exactly is going on with Floridians?

It’s set during the pandemic, when the narrator returns to her hometown near Orlando. She’s a ghostwriter who likes a simple life of reading and writing and not speaking much to her amiable husband. But her mom seems to be leading a cult, and her sister is getting lost to MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device everyone seems to be using. The tech company who makes the device is located nearby, and when the narrator gets a ghostwriting gig for it, she finds out a lot more than she—or the reader—ever thought she would. I’m talking like portals to invisible dimensions.

Only Laura van den Berg can write a novel that incorporates the ominous onslaught of mind-capturing technology, the intimations of destructive climate change, and the psychological phenomenon of apocalyptic cult thinking, and manage to turn it into a celebration of the art of fiction.

Kaui Hart Hemmings is best known for her novel The Descendants, which is set in Hawaii and was made into a movie starring George Clooney. But I like her follow-up novel better. The Possibilities takes place in the class-conscious resort town of Breckenridge, Colorado, and its simple plot is masterfully conceived; it’s one of the few contemporary novels that deeply struck me when it came out, and has stuck with me ever since.

It starts with tragedy: single mom Sarah St. John ceases to be a mother when her son, 22-year-old Cully, dies in an avalanche while skiing. As Sarah gets on with work and the well-wishers who try to comfort her, Hemmings’s writing is unsentimentally sharp, with black humor barbs at the dumb things people say to those in grief. Because how can someone who loses a child be comforted?

As the story unfolds, Sarah discovers more about her son’s secret life. First, was he selling drugs? And second, did he impregnate an awkward girl named Kit? If he did, then this opens up new possibilities: Cully can live on through his and Kit’s child. Sarah can become a grandmother, and mother to Kit. That is, she can have a life again.

Maybe this one shouldn’t qualify, as it’s set in France, but there’s something quintessentially American about an American girl in Paris, isn’t there? In any case, The Dud Avocado is just a damn good, fun, funny, smart, overlooked novel that I think everyone should read.

Why haven’t most people heard about it, then? Perhaps because of the terrible title, which refers to an avocado plant that won’t grow; it’s a metaphor for the topsy-turvy life of 21-year-old Sally Jay Gorce, an aspiring actress living in Paris who just can’t seem to get anything to go right.

Sally is a sexy, stylish, hot mess thirsty to conquer life, and this tale of her champagne-fueled affairs and misadventures presents youth in its full display of possibilities—the particular freedom of an American abroad. She’s dating a married, middle-aged Italian diplomat (who has a contessa for another mistress), when she falls hard for an actor, and then settles for an artist. Everything comes together in the south of France when they all shoot a film—or I should say everything falls apart.

And so, like many Americans abroad with grand ambitions, Sally returns to America, tail between her legs, to start again.