Five novels of existential shipwreck

Peter Mann is the author of the novels The Torqued Man (2022) and World Pacific (2025). A longtime resident of San Francisco, he grew up in Kansas City, went to Wesleyan University, and got a PhD in Modern European history before becoming a novelist and a cartoonist.

[Q&A with Peter Mann; The Page 69 Test: The Torqued Man]

At The Strand Magazine Mann tagged "five great, albeit wildly different, novels that explore the theme of existential shipwreck and the drama of staying afloat." One title on the list:

The Sot-weed Factor by John Barth (1960)

This is the greatest comic historical novel ever written. Barth takes the historical seed of a minor early American poet who in 1706 wrote a satirical poem about the then backwater colony of Maryland, and grows it into a sprawling picaresque and bildungsroman, about the misadventures of one Ebenezer Cooke, self-proclaimed virgin and self-appointed poet laureate. We join the poet, along with his spineless servant Bertrand and enigmatic tutor Henry Burlingame, as he travels to the American colony to reclaim his father’s estate and earn his place in the literary pantheon. Naturally, all manner of intrigue and perversion intervenes to throw our hero’s plans overboard and disabuse him of his criminal innocence—literal shipwreck, piracy, buggery, bestiality, Papist skullduggery, Indian uprisings, and the love of a pox-ridden prostitute, to name just a few. Add to this the McGuffin of a secret historical diary by John Smith relating how he once harnessed the tumescent properties of eggplant to woo Pocahantas and you have the makings of a masterpiece.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue