5 Novels that Tell a Complete Life Story

4 3 2 1, by Paul Auster
Auster’s newest is his grandest experiment yet; clocking in at 900 pages, it really does almost feel like you’re hefting an entire life when you pick it up—but it does more than that. It tells the story of four alternate versions of Archie Ferguson’s life. Always starting in the same place, each Archie makes slightly different decisions, or has slightly different luck, resulting in timelines that slowly diverge in huge and interesting ways, while Archie himself and the people around him remain grounded and familiar. Each timeline is numbered (1.1, 1.2, for the first Archie, 2.1, 2.2 for the second, and so on); a chilling touch is the way the numbering continues with blank pages when the Archie in that timeline dies.

The World According to Garp, by John Irving
Irving’s classic 1978 novel goes one step further than simply depicting T.S. Garp’s life from (bizarre) conception to death; it also includes many of the fictional writer’s written works, adding to the sense that Irving’s creation is a real person whose life we are experiencing in a slightly sped-up, edited fashion. With all of Irving’s usual obsessions on display—death, New England, sex and perversion—the novel ends on a powerfully empathetic note, with Garp finding a sense of peace in death after a life marked by paranoia, fear, and compromising weaknesses. It’s a story—and a life—that makes you feel that everything will be fine, even if your own existence is messy and problematic.

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
A bit of a cheat; we don’t meet Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov at his birth, but rather when he’s a young man in the 1920s in Moscow. We don’t follow him to his death, leaving him at an uncertain juncture when he’s in his 60s. In-between, however, we are privy to his existence to the exclusion of almost everything else, following him as he deals with house arrest as an enemy of the state, confined to a luxurious hotel he cannot really enjoy. Outside the hotel, Russia falls under the boot of Stalin, survives World War II, and enters into the uncertain post-Stalin world. Inside the hotel, the former aristocrat becomes a waiter, a conspirator of secret dinners, and eventually a hero to a young girl who becomes his charge. It’s not a complete life, no, but by the end of this magnificent story, you come to realize Rostov’s youth was wasted, and his old age may be more peaceful than intriguing. It’s the decades of exuberant confinement between that matter.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald’s classic short story turns the concept on its head and tells the life story of Benjamin Button backwards; Button is born with the appearance of a very old man, and has the mental capacity of one as well. As he ages, he grows physically younger; initially a blessing, it slowly becomes a curse as Button begins to lose his purchase on his capabilities and, later, his memories in perverse mimicry of the normal aging process. The struggles that Button experiences as he moves against the current throw the human condition into stark relief, especially as we see him literally becoming a sullen teenager as his own children grow into a hardened adulthood. Fitzgerald, who never lacked for literary ambition, makes this odd life well worth revisiting.

In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust
Proust’s nigh-infinite work, in which an unnamed narrator (who briefly hints, once, that he shares Proust’s name) is inspired to recount his life after the taste of a madeleine cake forcibly reminds him of his childhood. What follows is an intricate and mesmerizingly detailed of an entire existence, offered up in a beautiful flow of words that never seems to lack for energy; while many are only familiar with the first volume, Swann’s Way, even the later installments—some of which are clearly first drafts the ailing Proust never managed to revise—crackle with humor, energy, and affection. We’ve all had the experience of sensing something we’ve been without for a while that “takes us back” to our past, and that is but one reason this remarkable novel continues to be studied and celebrated.