Trickle-down review-onomics:
Writer X put out a gorgeous, compelling, instant classic a decade and a half ago. Now, when her publicists email you about her forthcoming novel, they include a line about “new work from Big Prize-nominated X!” Ohhhhh, sighs your temporal lobe. Her name is more than familiar, so when the galley (designed with a font and imagery similar to the cover of their earlier book, so your brain connects the two) arrives on your desk, you trick yourself into believing that there is a high probability this novel, rather than one of the scores teetering in piles around you, will sing.
You read it. It’s … fine. Nothing to pan because the stakes aren’t high enough. Nothing to ravish because it puts out a flat Middle C.
And yet, months later, as The Book Lists shake their jazz hands at you from every corner of the internet, there it is. That Big Name writer. That middling novel.
All of which is to say that this year I started and abandoned new books by Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Strout, and Cormac McCarthy (twice). I read the new Claire Louise Bennett, Jennifer Egan, Maggie O’Farrell, Sheila Heti, Julian Barnes, and Ottessa Moshfegh, but they aren’t on this list for a variety of reasons. (Several of those novels appeared to be lesser copies of work those writers had already produced, like the fourth and fifth iterations of Michael Keaton in Multiplicity, so over-Xerox’d that the words are fuzzy and soft.) Meanwhile, better books — by which I mean more curious books, books interested in wading through new territory, books with urgency — waited patiently in line. (Some are still in limbo; I want to read Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Peter Brooks’ Seduced by Story, Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September, Claire Keegan’s Foster, Jon Fosse’s Septology, and more, more, more, more, more.)
When I finally reached into those stacks, I found the sense of adventure that many of the Big Names had forsaken for their comfortable literary perches.
Some critics don’t like to admit any fondness for list-making, like the very act of ordering and sorting is intellectually degrading. Some people write lists, and other people have deep thoughts, is how the thinking goes, a bizarre binary coming from people who otherwise encourage complexity. But we declare our preferences loudly anyway — that’s what the critic is, a bigmouth with informed opinions — so here are mine.
There’s a caveat, of course. Each year for the past half decade I’ve made or contributed to a Best Of list like this one. A few months later I inevitably read a novel or memoir that recalibrates my entire conception of what the written word is for, and I scrape at my keyboard, annoyed that I misled readers, that I failed to place a laurel wreath around a deserving title. In April 2022 I spent an afternoon with Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, a brilliant 2021 investigation of the lives of various scientists that seeps further and further towards fiction the longer it goes on; it would have zipped towards the top of last year’s list had I picked it up earlier. Any list holds itself as accurate until it doesn’t.
In this newsletter of one’s own, I can break away from the tyranny of ten, so here are five books I read this year that stayed with me. It could have been more (but this was a slow reading year for me, due to a certain baby who arrived on December 27 of last year), and it could have been less. They aren’t ranked, because self-flagellation isn’t my bag. And there’s a series of honorable mentions, because constraints exist to be stretched.
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco)
My mother’s mother died when she was in her late 50s; “I’m an orphan,” she quietly remarked the day after the funeral. No matter your age, she insisted, the day your mother dies the protective bubble around you — one you didn’t even see — pops, exposing you like a fingertip with no nail. Elizabeth McCracken presses on that soft tissue in this pseudo-autobiographical/quasi-autofictive/memoir-ish/anti-genre novel that contains in its sub-200 pages nothing less than the sum of her life as her mother’s daughter. McCracken has written a memoir of grief already (An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, about the death of her baby son) but The Hero of This Book zigs where that one zagged. It brims with her tiny mother’s vitality, with the exasperation of parenting your aged parents, with the vague impossibility of knowing the people who raised you, even if you love them with your entire being. “Your family,” she writes, “is the first novel that you know.”
A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain (Dorothy Project)
Occasionally, a brilliant novel will make me want to give up on reading altogether: Better to abandon the activity (and my career?) than submit my brain to the disappointment of inadequate follow ups. Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night — less an essay collection than a thought catalog — is an antidote: it bubbles over with so many invigorating insights into how fiction reorients our attention that I started a list of her recommended reading: Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich, Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Like Cain, when I read I see a novel first, its colors and sensations, and she writes brilliantly (and succinctly, I admire her dartlike prose) about the sensation of a piece of fiction or work of art engulfing the other reality we live in, how “outside the body and inside the mind, a novel can be like a landscape painting with a character moving through it, all of her violences and joys playing themselves out in only this setting, only this narrative.” Is this the only way to read? Of course not, but Cain’s beautiful hunger for the immersion of reading has left me certain I’ll never run out of fresh material.
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au (New Directions)
Cold Enough for Snow is still. It whispers. If you’ve ever contentedly wandered a dark, chilly street in a foreign city and smelled the electricity of winter, you’ll revel in Jessica Au’s Tokyo. If you’ve ever tiptoed around the intricacies of your maternal bond, you’ll eat up the unspoken energies crowding this brief book. In Cold Enough for Snow a mother and daughter travel to Japan on a long-delayed trip, where they chitchat over meals, gaze across parks, and duck into shops. It’s a choreographed bit, organized by the daughter to provoke connection — but what if the mother won’t take the bait and there isn’t enough propulsion to force a reckoning? Au masterfully leaves out nearly everything of import between the two, tracing an outline around their relationship that neither reader nor characters can fill in. And yet something is there, at every moment, some kernel lodged inside their relationship. Just try to pluck it out.
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (NYRB)
I am contractually obligated to tell you that Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont was published in 1971 and shortlisted that year for the now-Manless Man Booker Prize. But when the NYRB brings back a novel, I like to toss aside the original date and act as if its dead writer has mailed us a lost manuscript from the grave. That sentiment is especially apt for this artfully cruel, digging piece of fiction about Laura Palfrey, a septuagenarian Londoner remaindered to an old-age home in damp, leafy Kensington, where her family hopes she’ll quietly molder until her body gives out and she gives them an eternal break. The Claremont, with its hierarchical dining room and coterie of rascals and sadsacks, is an English village in miniature, with all the attendant snatches of gossip and overblown slights. Taylor goes to great lengths to alienate the reader from Mrs. Palfrey, an indignant, upright, sanctimonious pest of a woman. And in doing so she creates the ideal conditions for a novel about the excruciating loneliness of life’s close, when society has extracted all its value from an individual and now wishes that they’d politely roam off a cliff and save us all some trouble. Watching Mrs. Palfrey physically and emotionally stumble (across the pavement, and into a sad little lie about her lack of visitors, respectively) makes this novel nearly unbearable in just the right way — we’re fond enough of her to go wide-eyed at each new degradation, and freshly reminded that even if we forget about death, it won’t forget about us.
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth)
Wayne has drowned, he’s dead. Wayne is dead again, but this time he’s fallen off a carousel. Then Wayne is dead again. Wayne is dead, dead, dead, but where has he gone? I read Namwali Serpell’s second novel — in which a young girl named Cassandra/Cee/C relives and replays and rejiggers the experience of her brother Wayne’s death time and again — just after the shooting at Uvalde Elementary School. That inescapability, of children dying in front of us and on the page, walloped me, as it should. It also reminded me that we need new fiction for new phenomena — the way Serpell repeatedly brings Wayne back as a (possible) figment of his sister’s imagination elevates The Furrows from a novel that simply translates grief into one that sees death as iterative and unending. Serpell has already written one superior piece of fiction, the techno-futuristic novel The Old Drift; now, with The Furrows, which is as cruel and refreshing as a smack across the face, she’s created a fictional world as glorious and terrifying as the real one.
Other Books (Try’em)
Natural History by Andrea Barrett (W.W. Norton & Company)
Natural History made me read Barrett’s Ship Fever which now has me reading her The Voyage of the Narwhal, a slippery slope into these verdant, vivacious stories about how the scientific world is braided into the smallest moments of our lives.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)
Practically a fable, but one with some of the quietest, most serene prose I’ve encountered.
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
I can’t stop reading and writing about Ling Ma’s special surrealist sauce.
Daybook by Anne Truitt (Scribner)
The last volume of the sculptor’s diaries (she died in 2004) is as clear and upright as one of her radiant columns.
The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips (W.W. Norton & Company)
Aforementioned baby (my second) had me back in that “I can’t do anything/I must do everything” dichotomy of motherhood and artistry, so I wrote about it for The Atlantic.
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press)
If I’m ever young again (🤞), may I fall in first-time love as deeply as one of Douglas Stuart’s characters. (Reviewed this one, too.)
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (Avid Reader Press)
Finally, a Big Bad Cancellation novel without any of the virtue-signaling.
Endpapers
These seem like Christmas tree ornaments Vanessa Bell would have painted and given to Virginia Woolf to hang at Monks House.
Merve Emre wrote this absolutely scrumptious, rotten peach of an essay about Roald Dahl’s limited imagination, and I ate it up.
In my never-ending quest to dress like collegiate Sylvia Plath (yes, I know she wasn’t exactly happy!), I’m hoping someone buys me this skirt for Christmas.
NYRB is republishing this Diana Athill novel in November 2023, and the wild, vivid cover already has me intrigued.
I finally read this flittering dream of a novel about one of history’s most rascally women, Margaret Cavendish.
Your book recommendations are always a delight, thank you for this list!
Thank you for this delightful list, which has inspired me to go on a book-buying binge in a way that none of the other end-of-the-year lists have 🙏