Conservatives looking for a New Year’s resolution might share this one with me: I resolve to read more fiction this year.
In particular, I resolve to read more novels. In aid of that resolution, I finished another non-fiction book published in 2025 that has already been and will be very useful: Christopher Scalia’s 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read). Scalia is a former English professor and the son of the famous Supreme Court justice. His book is useful for all but the most well-read conservatives.
Why read novels? Scalia rightly deprecates the contemporary explanation that they build “empathy.” He rightly notes that many great novels, especially in his book, “are more interested in ridiculing than empathizing.” Instead, he argues that the novel is an art form that is “one of the great achievements of Western culture,” which can do many things in telling stories that movies and television cannot do. In so doing, novels help us explore those philosophical truths we conservatives profess and learn how to tell them in ways that others can hear.
The right is not in the position of liberals, who seem to have read only A Handmaid’s Tale and a few other titles that are useful only insofar as they allow left-wing scolds to compare Republican politicians to this or that literary villain. But while conservatives are generally more open-minded when it comes to literature, there can be a tendency to stick to well-trodden authors: Austen, Tolkien, Orwell, Walker Percy, Ayn Rand, Tom Wolfe, and, for the slightly younger set, Cormac McCarthy.
It should go without saying, concerning those old favorites, to borrow from the sitcom Seinfeld, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” Scalia certainly doesn’t pour cold water on any of the above, but he thinks that it would be good for conservatives to broaden their knowledge of novels.
As he puts it, he didn’t dedicate any chapters to Jane Austen “because I assume you don’t need another person telling you to read her novels.” (Though he does include a chapter at the end, “If You Liked…Try” that adds more selections, including Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, that fit with the novels he does cover.)
Thus, Scalia writes about lesser-known novels from authors whom you might have read, some authors you may not know, older novels, novels published in the 21st century, and novels from men and women written in English but from different countries. The main considerations driving his selections are whether there is something that conservatives can learn from the book and whether he likes the novels himself. He admits he doesn’t enjoy Percy and McCarthy, so he doesn’t include them.
It’s a good strategy for drawing in those who’ve read some novels and those who’ve read a lot. I’m a college English major and consider myself fairly well read, but I had only read three of Scalia’s baker’s dozen of novels for the conservative soul: Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. For each of these, Scalia both refreshed my memory and taught me a great deal. As testimony to how Scalia’s book has already helped me, I will say I paused to read a new one, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, before finishing Scalia’s book.
Each chapter introduces not only the plot and the main characters of the novel but also the writer. Scalia refrains from giving spoilers for novels in which the joy of the plot twist is part of the fun. He tells enough about the writers to let us know about their own political views (if any) and how they are viewed by critics and readers.
While some of the writers politically identified as conservatives in their own time and place, not all of them do. English writers Samuel Johnson and Evelyn Waugh were always seen as conservatives in their time. Willa Cather was a critic of the New Deal. Zora Neale Hurston was something of a black conservative—and derided for it. (Interestingly, she was reclaimed after her death by a broad array of writers of various political points of view.) So, too, with the Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul.
George Eliot was, on the other hand, associated with non-conservative thought even if her personal life had culturally conservative aspects. So, too, with contemporary writer Christopher Beha.
The key to each chapter is not where the writer falls on the political spectrum, but how the novel treats questions and topics with which conservatives have wrestled. Rasselas and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance are especially concerned with the limits humans face and the failure of utopian schemes. Frances Burney’s Evelina treats the importance of manners.
Waugh’s Scoop “remains,” as Scalia quotes English journalist Robert Hutton, “the best description of UK journalistic life.” Insofar as it treats journalists as prone to making things up either to meet deadlines or to match the agendas given by editors, one could say it is also the best description of journalistic life here in America.
Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, meanwhile,wrestles with the modern battle between understanding life according to statistics and understanding life according to other, more subtle categories such as love and morality.
Scalia usually treats these themes in such a way as to open up the universal questions and the particular political debates between right and left, as well as those between the various parts of the right over time. He cites literary scholars as well as canonical conservative authors from Burke to Kirk to Sowell and beyond for understanding.
Scalia is a genial and jocular guide. Occasionally, he might strike readers as too ready to crack wise, but, as a writer of similar temperament, I’m hardly in a place to criticize him. The 245 pages of text (as well as another 20 of discussion questions and further reading suggestions) skip by quickly because of his good-humored discussion and readiness to draw connections between books, movies, music, politics, and philosophy.
Join me in resolving to read more novels. And pick up Chris Scalia’s book while you’re at it.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
