The Canon According to n+1

When Keith Gessen was a Harvard freshman in 1993, a pamphlet, written by Jeffrey Hart, a professor at Dartmouth and a founder of the Dartmouth Review, was slipped under his door. As Mr. Gessen recounts in "What We Should Have Known," a similar pamphlet just published by n+1 magazine, which will be distributed at Columbia this evening, Mr. Hart's pamphlet included a list of canonical books and "a long essay… saying: Everything you'll learn in college will not be true, it will be fed to you by liberal ideologues, and they will try to get you to read strange things. Here is a list of books that you'd be much better off with." (Mr. Hart later turned some of the ideas in this pamphlet into his book "Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education.")

Mr. Gessen, being woefully susceptible at the time to absolutist systems, took Mr. Hart's warning seriously — not so seriously as to actually read the books on his list, but enough to view much of what was assigned to him in college as just so much fashionable theory.

Having long since shed his conservatism, now Mr. Gessen and his colleagues at n+1 have decided to create a liberal version of Mr. Hart's pamphlet, in order to offer college freshmen some guidance about what to read and how to approach their education. The theme of the pamphlet, which consists of transcripts of two roundtable discussions held in n+1's office this past summer, is regret: what they wish they'd read; what they wish they'd known. There is a list at the end of the pamphlet of all the works cited — including those that the participants mocked or that were mentioned because someone regretted having read them. Each of the participants has also contributed a list of around 10 "Books That Changed My Life."

So what do they recommend? Some of the choices would be on any list of the canon: "Moby-Dick," "The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment," "Middlemarch." Then there is a wide smattering of Marxism (Eric Hobsbawm), Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin), post-structuralism (Michel Foucault), feminism (Nancy Chodorow), environmentalism (Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert), liberal journalism (Thomas Frank), developmental psychology (Erik Erikson), and American philosophy (Stanley Cavell).

Eight living writers made these top-10 lists for fiction (though several others are mentioned in the discussions): Philip Roth, Don De-Lillo, David Foster Wallace, J.D. Salinger, Michel Houellebecq, Larry McMurtry, James Salter, and Javier Marías.

What are Columbia freshman likely to make of this pamphlet? Being in the form of two discussions, each among several people, with Mr. Gessen moderating, "What We Should Have Known" is no doubt less overbearing, if also lesscohesive, thanMr. Hart'spamphlet. Since the discussions are framed around regret — and the speakers have many regrets about their education — they have a charming but slightly humid disillusionment, and at times an air of "Education-is-wasted-on-theyoung" futility.

An n+1 intern, Mark Krotov, who is a Columbia senior, will distribute some 500 of the pamphlets around campus tonight — leaving some at Butler Library, which Mr. Krotov said he expects will be packed with students studying for midterms, and sticking others under doors in freshman dorms. Mr. Gessen said he had originally planned to do the initial distribution at Harvard, for sentimental reasons, but n+1's former intern from Harvard said he was too busy and suggested that n+1 hire someone to do the dorm drop. In some ways, Mr. Gessen said, Columbia is a more appropriate point of distribution, since the value of its canon-based core curriculum is continually under discussion.

Like the classical dialogues, the discussions in "What We Should Have Known" have a certain theatrical quality, and some comical moments.

Keith Gessen: Last chance for regrets. No?

[Long pause.]

Ilya Bernstein: I do have one regret. I regret having gone to college!

The men wish they had read books with more sex, or different sex, or that they'd understood that you didn't read Henry Miller only for the sex (there isn't enough). Another wry moment occurs when Caleb Crain suggests that college students should read James Wood, the longtime New Republic literary critic who was recently snatched up by the New Yorker (as well as given a professorship at Harvard), and with whom n+1 has tangled in the past.

Keith Gessen: You really think it's important for 18-year-olds to read James Wood.

Caleb Crain: Well, yes.

Keith Gessen: The world will do that work.

Chad Harbach: They're already doing it.

The n+1 guys have probably already developed a small cult of worshipers at Columbia, and some students will no doubt gladly imbibe their advice, which is offered generously, if slightly self-importantly.

But of course readers will always wish that they had discovered earlier the books that were important to them, and nothing can solve that problem. As Mr. Crain, who offers some of the most humane advice in his discussion (for young gay men: don't read "Naked Lunch"; read "The Line of Beauty"), says:

"Nobody can ever get a proper undergraduate education. You'll never know in advance what that education should be. Regret is the feeling you have when you finally realize what the education is that you want."