We confess: This month we found ourselves slogging through a lot of bad books in order to bring back the handful of trophies we offer you here. There were lackluster short story collections, novels with no plots, novels with preposterous plots, novels with irritating narrators and novels that just didn’t hang together. But enough complaining because, dear readers, we filter out the dreck so that you don’t have to.
Instead, we urge you to spend your ripening fall evenings wisely — on Julia Leigh’s tough-minded story of a professional hunter tracking the last Tasmanian tiger into the troubling shadows of his own mind, or on Michel Houellebecq’s perverse, corrosive fictional indictment of contemporary hedonism, or on Nomi Eve’s lush family saga or on any of the other great books listed below.
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The Hunter
By Julia Leigh
Four Walls Eight Windows, 176 pages
On the basis of this slim and astringent first novel, Australian Julia Leigh, 30, is being hailed as the antipodal Annie Proulx. It’s easy to see why: Leigh writes the same kind of wintry, even brittle sentences as Proulx; she vivifies her cool, rugged landscapes with tart descriptions of natural arcana; and she gives scant attention to the more tender elements of her characters’ serrated lives, choosing instead to fling them into the pits she creates and then chart, with a kind of forensic detachment, their efforts to claw their way out.
Leigh’s protagonist, in fact, doesn’t even merit the gentle favor of a name. “M,” as Leigh calls him, is a professional hunter who’s been dispatched to a remote corner of the Tasmanian plateau to kill the last remaining thylacine, a Tasmanian tiger thought extinct since 1936. One female is alleged to still exist, and M’s employer, a shadowy biotech company, wants it dead. (An unfortunate implausibility, but we’ll get to that later.) Following the trail blazed by a naturalist who disappeared on the plateau, M establishes his base camp at the home of the naturalist’s grief-wrecked wife, Lucy, and their two unruly children. From there he makes weekly forays into the bush, immersing himself so deeply in the thylacine’s life that after a while he fears he himself is being hunted. And in a way he is: M, who’s made disassociating himself from people his life’s main tenet, finds himself being drawn further and further into the lives of Lucy and her children, hunted by his own humanity — prey, like the thylacine, to his very instincts.
Leigh’s debut resonates with ambitious echoes — she counts “Moby Dick,” for instance, as an inspiration — and almost lives up to them. So much so, in fact, that you want to excuse the novel for its chief shortcoming: namely, the improbably nefarious roots of M’s mission. Leigh tries to tiptoe around that pothole, but it’s a doozy, and mustering up the “willing suspension of disbelief,” as Coleridge famously put it, requires a bit of readerly exertion. But Leigh’s stern, bristly prose is more than reward for that effort; her icy talent warrants heralding far beyond the antipodes.
– Jonathan Miles
The Elementary Particles
By Michel Houellebecq, Frank Wynne trans.
Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages
Michel Houellebecq’s jeremiad of a novel, the notorious near winner of this year’s Prix de Goncourt, is the story of two half-brothers, children of the ’60s, permanently screwed up by their parents’ quest for self-fulfillment — and by teen magazines, globalization, miniskirts, the Rolling Stones, the human potential movement, the cult of the body beautiful, New Age communes-turned-corporations, African dance classes, no-fault divorce, holistic medicine and every other artifact of the Generation Moi that Houellebecq manages to squeeze under his burning satirical lens.
Abandoned as a baby by his communard mother and Buddhist father, Michel grows up asexual, introverted and intellectually precocious. After the end of his one (platonic, teenage) romance and the death of the grandmother who raised him, Michel devotes the rest of his life (when he isn’t debilitatingly depressed) to theoretical biophysics — ultimately, to developing a race of clones, free of human misery and desire, who will render mankind obsolete and take over the world.
Bruno, Michel’s half-brother, has an even lonelier childhood, spent largely at a “progressive” boarding school (where he is literally made to eat shit) and permissive hippie campsites, where his mother hopes he’ll get over his “hangups about sex.” Easier said than done for Bruno, who learns early that the sexual revolution is in fact a war of all against all — and that he is bound to be one of the majority, i.e. the losers. Fat, balding, charmless, bitter and desperate for love, he grows up unable to attract anyone less obviously pathetic than he is. Quietly fired from his job as a schoolteacher for exposing himself to a student (she bursts out laughing); divorced from a wife (and son) he despises; addicted to sex clubs, whores and bourbon, Bruno works as a civil servant by day and by night vents his bile in reactionary, mostly unpublished articles and poems on “the suicide of the West.” What brings these stunted lives to crisis, and finally to grief, is the inability of either man to love when love is finally offered to him — an inability that Houellebecq traces, with parodic pseudoscientism (“A subtle but definitive change had occurred in Western society during 1974 and 1975″), to postwar cultural and economic trends.
French and British critics have compared Houellebecq to Balzac, i.e. they have no idea what to make of him; it shows, in part, how badly our own best recent fiction has exported. American readers, accustomed to radical realism on a big scale, may be less impressed by the size of Houellebecq’s canvas than by the small, sad details that animate it. “The Elementary Particles” is grotesque and fantastical, full of loony physics, half-baked history and sociobiology, bad verse and sputtering misanthropy. It is also very funny, and sharply observed; but what makes it great satire, I think, is its childlike capacity for disappointment. Houellebecq may despair of love in a free market, but he takes love more seriously, as an artistic problem and a fact about the world, than most polite novelists would dare to do; when he brings his sweeping indignation to bear on one memory, one moment when things seemed about to turn out all right for his characters, and didn’t, his compassion can blow you away.
– Lorin Stein
Loving Graham Greene
By Gloria Emerson
Random House, 176 pages
Molly Benson, the protagonist in veteran foreign correspondent Gloria Emerson’s first novel, is a well-meaning, dotty, liberal heiress who lives in genteel squalor in tony Princeton, N.J. Molly spends her inheritance on a small foundation, through which she travels to third world countries to help worthy individuals. She’s driven by a desire to live out the ideals of her hero, novelist Graham Greene, with whom she carried on a polite correspondence following a single meeting, as well as to honor her brother, a foreign correspondent who was killed in Central America.
Upon Greene’s death, the doubly bereaved Molly decides to travel to war-torn Algeria. Her plan is to find persecuted writers and arrange for bodyguards for them, and off she goes, accompanied by her best friend, Bertie, and Toby, a fleshy, voluble, ineffectual British graduate student. (The two women think bringing a man along would be a good idea, and Toby is the best they can come up with.) Needless to say, once they arrive things go haywire almost immediately. They have overestimated the likelihood of two inexperienced Western women accomplishing anything in an Arab country and underestimated the seriousness of the civil war, which places them in grave danger and renders utterly laughable Molly and Bertie’s desire to make a dent in the suffering around them.
If all this sounds too heavy, rest assured that the vessel for these serious themes is a charming one. Emerson — whose “Winners & Losers,” a nonfiction book about the Vietnam War and its effect on Americans, won a National Book Award in 1978 — has a light touch. The novel’s warmhearted, forgiving quality softens the harsh light it shines on the dangerous naiveté of the self-serving Molly and her cohorts. It’s funny, too, full of arch satire of do-gooders and do-nothings alike. In its grasp of the places where world politics and drawing-room politics meet and the folly of individual Americans who try to enact their political and humanitarian ideals overseas, “Loving Graham Greene” is like a delicious cross between Dawn Powell and Martha Gellhorn.
– Maria Russo
Don’t Tell Anyone
By Frederick Busch
W.W. Norton, 320 pages
“I am my own secret now … my darkest, best-held secret.” So said a fictionalized Herman Melville, deep in the long silence at the end of his life, as he is depicted in Frederick Busch’s haunting novel “The Night Inspector,” published just last year. The many characters in “Don’t Tell Anyone,” Busch’s new collection of 16 stories and a novella, are just as fully engaged, as the book’s title suggests, in the quiet containment of truth.
Busch has shifted scenes from the shadowy wharves and gaslit bordellos of Melville’s Manhattan to 20th century New York state, upriver from the big city, predominantly in and around what one character calls “what’s left of Dutchess County.” Here live people like Bob, the narrator of “Bob’s Your Uncle,” who shuttles every workday between his office in Manhattan and, just up the Henry Hudson Parkway, a home life that can be changed in an instant by the revelation of one long-dormant piece of information. The emotionally disturbed son of an old friend of Bob’s wife — a married woman with whom Bob long ago had a secret and profoundly affecting fling — suddenly appears on his doorstep. Before long, the energy of the boy’s imploding family, a force that has propelled him to seek refuge with his “uncle” Bob, will strip away the wrapping on Bob’s old secret adultery and send his marriage over the cliff.
There’s as much adultery and denial going on in the Hudson River towns of Busch’s bittersweet stories as ever was found in Cheever country, just slightly downriver and 20 years further removed in time. And like Cheever, Busch is an immensely intelligent and insightful writer. His dry sense of humor shows itself when a character describes a moment of awkward praise from his father: “He smiled at me as if I had done something noteworthy. That was why he was such a good junior high school principal. He discovered about eleven times a day that people were commendable, and they knew he thought so.”
Melville may have held his secrets close to the vest, but the people in Busch’s stories seem almost uniformly to settle for something less successful, but far more real. In the story “The Talking Cure,” Peter, who finds out about his mother’s affair with a local veterinarian, says of his father: “For the rest of the years of my life at home, I feared his deciding to tell me. He mercifully didn’t.” As in life, where most family secrets are a form of common knowledge kept, by unspoken agreement, just under the table, the characters in “Don’t tell Anyone” yearn not so much to change the past but to keep it in its place.
– Edward Neuert
The Family Orchard
By Nomi Eve
Alfred A. Knopf, 311 pages
Family stories, by definition, can’t belong to a solitary teller; to survive, they must be filtered through more than one consciousness. Nomi Eve’s debut novel, “The Family Orchard,” riffs on this theme as it chronicles six generations of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe, Israel and the United States. The book is written in two voices: Sections headed “I write” are the work of a woman named Nomi, while her father, Eliezer, contributes shorter sections headed “My father writes.” Nomi’s stories of her ancestors’ lives are at times presented in the enchanted, sensual language of fable. In a different typeface in inset boxes, her father relates the hard facts — dates, historical details, political history — in a direct, brass-tacks style.
The two streams of text are potentially a distracting gimmick, but it worked for me, making “The Family Orchard” feel modern and age-old at the same time. By now, the similarities between hypertext and ancient texts with commentary (such as the Talmud) are obvious, and it’s enjoyable to read a book that simply puts the device in play, without pretension or tedious self-consciousness. After all, one of the messages of the novel is that what’s old often becomes new again, especially when it comes to family history.
In the stories themselves, family traits are passed on through the generations in subtle and overt ways. Nomi’s great-great-great-grandmother, Esther, has an appetite for out-of-bounds sex and carries on a secret relationship with the neighborhood baker throughout her marriage. She dies giving birth to a son, who becomes immersed in an illicit passion with his stepsister. Eventually they are found out and allowed to marry. (“Imagine, a father and son married to a mother and a daughter!” writes Eliezer.) Nomi’s grandmother, Miriam, is an accomplished needlewoman who “sewed stories into her cloth,” a precursor to her story-weaving granddaughter. And so on.
Once the family is established in what will become Israel, their livelihood is citrus growing, and Eve makes full use of the metaphorical potential in the business of grafting and caring for their precious trees. At moments, especially as she gets closer to telling of her current life in sections directed to her own husband, Nomi’s heated language and lush imagery are perilously close to cloying and overripe; the book could have used trimming by a strict and unsentimental hand. But she’s hardly a Pollyanna — she records failure and disappointment, too, and painful mistakes that can’t be righted. The story of Nomi’s father’s brother Gavriel, for example, born with profound mental and physical defects and sent by his agonized parents to live in an institution, haunts all who follow in its wake. By deciding to speak his name no longer — to erase him from the family history — they have subjected themselves as well as their other children to a sentence far worse than they could have imagined.
– Maria Russo
The Fisher King
By Paule Marshall
Scribner, 224 pages
If you’re the adventurous and ambitious type, the kind who never quite fits in anywhere, traveling across the globe and blending in with strange cultures is easy. It’s going back home that’s hard. Paule Marshall’s long-overdue new novel is about just such a journey, a tale in which the distances of geography are smaller than the divisions caused by time and emotion.
In the late 1940s, jazz musician Sonny-Rett Payne leaves behind Brooklyn, N.Y., and his scornful, Mozart-loving family for the glamour and freedom of Paris. Decades later, his hometown stages a tribute to his memory, luring back both his 9-year-old namesake grandson and the boy’s caretaker, Hattie, another refugee from the old neighborhood who was once Sonny’s lover. The story weaves in and out between the characters’ memories and their current experiences, between the emotional baggage carried by Hattie and the innocent impressions of the child.
But what sets “The Fisher King” apart from the spate of teary-eyed novels about “healing” and “coming to terms” currently flooding the market is Marshall’s taut, unmelodramatic style and her rich, evocative flair for characters and landscapes. While the bond between young Sonny and his struggling ad hoc parent Hattie forms the soulful core of the story, the dynamics between the supporting players are just as intriguing. Sonny’s fearsome, feuding great-grandmothers are so vivid, they can break your heart even as you understand why they’d inspire their children to run the hell away. And author Marshall, who first wrote about Brooklyn 40 years ago in “Brown Girl, Brownstones,” intercuts skillfully between a romantic, revitalized borough and gritty, rain-soaked Paris to reveal an unexpected but utterly convincing side of both cities.
“There’s all kinds of family, and blood’s got nothing to do with it!” declares the fierce, protective Hattie, and Marshall herself is clearly a believer. As she recounts Hattie’s complicated affair with the misunderstood jazzman and the heartaches that have divided the little boy’s family for far too long, she gently reminds us that home is where we make it. And while kinship is indisputably a matter of random circumstance, it’s also, redemptively, very much one of choice as well.
– Mary Elizabeth Williams
We’ll spare you the overly ambitious sweeping statements. This has been a rocky decade, to say the least, and as many writers showed us just after the Sept. 11 attacks, we often can’t formulate our best thoughts about traumatic events until much, much later. If anything, looking back over the past 10 years of Salon’s books coverage, what’s most striking is the durability of fiction and memoir; the novels and autobiographies we were talking about in 2000 still feel important today, while the bloom tends to fade faster from the nonfiction of the moment.
For that reason, the nonfiction on this list steers away from the most avidly trend-setting treatises (Malcolm Gladwell, we’re looking at you!) in favor of definitive accounts of current events, penetrating histories and explorations of perennial human concerns. As for fiction, the most exciting thing to emerge in the 2000s has been the integration of genre elements into literary fiction: You no longer have to choose between good writing and good storytelling. But if the preceding two decades have seen the dismantling of the tyranny of rigorous realism, there are still masters (like Mary Gaitskill) working in that vein, and following it into rich new territory. The following lists are presented in chronological order.
FICTION
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”
by Michael Chabon
Two nice, mid-20th-century Jewish boys go to work in the nascent comic book industry, where the dreams and nightmares of the real world manifest themselves in the extravagant guise of entertainment for children. This buoyant tragicomic adventure story remains one of the most persuasive and gorgeously written depictions (and vindications) of the way popular culture transfigures our lived experience to become the modern-day equivalent of myth and folklore.
“The Corrections”
by Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert clan tries to figure out a way to live honorably in a world of leveraged buyouts, pharmaceutically engineered moods, dot-com scams, mix-and-match lifestyles and the cult of Christmas. In this saga of a befuddled Midwestern family, Franzen manages to achieve something remarkable and possibly unprecedented: a merciless satirical look at contemporary life that’s also fundamentally generous and human.
“John Henry Days”
by Colson Whitehead
A hack journalist gets hired by a travel Web site to write up a festival celebrating the folk hero John Henry. This brilliant, restless novel is about what happens when a cynical, opportunistic, media-steeped product of the Information Age collides with the mythic dignity of America’s past. The fact that both the hero and the freelancer are black only complicates and enriches this novel’s wit.
“The Fortress of Solitude”
by Jonathan Lethem
A boy named Dylan comes of age in a bohemian household as one of the few white kids in 1970s Brooklyn. To the smooth and sinewy beat of the era’s soul soundtrack, this is a bruised paean to the author’s hometown, a meditation on American boyhood and a cautionary tale about the folly of trying to escape your past.
“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell”
by Susanna Clarke
Capacious, digressive, amply footnoted and very original, this is a classic historical novel — only the history it’s based on is (almost) entirely fantastic. Set in the early 19th century, it describes a Britain where magic was once a fairly common practice and is still the subject of serious scholarly study. With Austenian elegance and glorious imagery, Clarke describes the professional rivalry between the two eponymous master magicians; the result is nothing less than pure sorcery.
“Magic for Beginners”
by Kelly Link
It’s almost impossible to choose between this collection and Link’s galvanizing 2001 debut, “Stranger Things Happen.” Her exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that legends, dreams and nightmares are made of, from pop culture to fairy tales. Some of these pieces are very scary, others are immensely sad, many are funny and all of them are written in prose so flawless you almost forget how much elemental human chaos they contain.
“Never Let Me Go”
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kath, a seemingly ordinary British girl, goes to a special boarding school where she and her friends are groomed for a special fate while enjoying and suffering the loves and betrayals that come to young people everywhere. This odd, heartbreaking novel unfurls age-old conundrums about what it means to be a person; about the grievous sin of treating anyone, however unexceptional, as the means to an end; and about the unfathomable future that awaits each and every one of us.
“Veronica”
by Mary Gaitskill
A model with a fluorescent, dirty past winds up as a nobody with hepatitis who cleans offices for cash and dwells on her memories of an unlikely friendship with an older woman who died of AIDS. There’s nothing feel-good about “Veronica,” but this novel is so alive, so streaked with colors and spiked with sharp edges, that reading it is almost a tactile experience. It’s a perfect, slicing portrait of a sad, once-beautiful woman who doesn’t want — or deserve — our pity, but who ultimately earns our compassion.
“On Beauty”
by Zadie Smith
Conservative black Brits of Caribbean descent move in down the street from a leftish, mixed-race family in an East Coast college town. In Smith’s hands the classic fodder of academic satire becomes miraculously endearing and sympathetic, a tale of two families that explodes with vitality, curiosity, enthusiasm and love for human beings and the perplexing situations they get into.
“A Person of Interest” by Susan Choi
In this Hitchcockian tale, an undistinguished Midwestern math professor finds himself the object of rumors and suspicion when a more celebrated colleague is killed by a mail bomber. A nuanced consideration of what it means to fit in, and of what we owe to the people around us, “A Person of Interest” eschews obvious answers. At once a tragedy of character and a tale of suspense, this novel is a seamless integration of the political and the personal, beautifully written and impeccably unsentimental.
NONFICTION
“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”
by Dave Eggers
Even if you haven’t read Eggers’ memoir about raising his younger brother after the deaths of their parents, you’ve felt its effect. An entire literary generation fell under the spell of Eggers’ playful, ingenious, self-reflective style (and that was only the beginning of a brilliant career as an author, editor, teacher, collaborator and all-around impresario). Often mischaracterized as merely “ironic,” that voice found a fresh, exhilarating way to approach life’s devastating truths without succumbing to knee-jerk pathos or solemnity.
“The Battle for God”
by Karen Armstrong
A year before Muslim extremists brutally invaded the awareness of every Westerner, Armstrong, a former nun, published this essential, lucid consideration of the fundamentalist mind-set and its roots. During a decade when the conversation about religion has degenerated into pointless duels between screeching polemicists, she has brought a measured, open-minded wisdom to questions of faith and its place in the modern world.
“Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”
by Barbara Ehrenreich
At the suggestion of an editor, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich attempted to live for two years on the wages of the average unskilled American worker. She worked as a waitress, maid and Wal-Mart clerk, shacking up in dives and dining on fast food, in an effort to find out how America’s working poor make it. Her answer: A lot of them don’t. If her efforts to suggest remedies are often rebuffed by her own subjects, her visceral dispatches from the ragged fringe of the American dream remain indispensable.
“The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq”
by George Packer
A political liberal covering the Iraq war for the New Yorker, Packer initially supported the invasion as a way to rid the world of a bloody dictator but later came to view it as a wasted opportunity. The result of his reporting is among the most measured, thoughtful and self-examining of the many books on the conflict, taking in not only the theorists who justified it, but also inexperienced soldiers, frustrated reformers, the worried and grieving home front and ordinary Iraqis. Anyone looking for a better, deeper, broader understanding of the war will find it here.
“The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11″
by Lawrence Wright
Six years after Sept. 11, Wright produced the definitive account of the terrorist attacks and how they happened, from the fanatics who conceived and orchestrated the plot to the intelligence agencies that failed to anticipate and thwart it. He developed an expertise on the subject so deep that in time those same agencies tried to utilize him as a source and even tapped his phones. Yet for all the knowledge that went into “The Looming Tower,” it reads as sleekly and compellingly as a top-notch thriller.
“The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”
by Michael Pollan
Inexhaustibly inventive and imaginative, Pollan jazzes up what could have been a dreary jeremiad about the “industrial food chain” by inviting us to view the modern American diet as the triumph of a South American grass that can currently be found in every processed food: King Corn. From the scientist who transformed the world by synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer to a calculation of just how much oil goes into “making” one conventionally raised steer (about a barrel), there’s an observation to blow your mind on nearly every page of this hugely influential exploration of what we eat.
“Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”
by Alison Bechdel
This graphic memoir is an investigation of Bechdel’s childhood, spent in the ornate Victorian house that her father obsessively restored and maintained. After she came out of the closet to her parents at 19, her mom delivered a return whammy: Bechdel’s father had a lifelong history of affairs with men, including teenage boys. Not long after, he died under ambiguous circumstances. Bechdel’s years of drawing a serial comic strip have honed her ability to convey oceans of feeling in a single image, and the feelings are never simple; “Fun Home” shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love.
“The World Without Us”
by Alan Weisman
How would the earth be changed if the human race simply and suddenly vanished? Weisman uses this startlingly elementary question and its fascinating answer to suggest just how artificial our grip on the planet has become. Within days, subway tunnels would flood and collapse, subdivisions would be shattered by frozen pipes and devoured by mold and termites. For some reason, this doomsday scenario is more thrilling than depressing; it beguiles us into doing what often seems beyond our power — picturing a much healthier planet and considering a less drastic way to get there.
“Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” by Mark Harris
Film critic Harris takes the five nominees for the best picture Oscar of 1967, and uses them, and the stories behind them, as lenses to examine the tectonic changes that were taking place in the movie industry and American society as a whole. “Bonnie and Clyde,” for example, embodied the birth of a hip new internationalism, and “The Graduate” spoke for youth culture and its romantic discontents. This is criticism at its best, well- and widely informed, with an enlightening fact, anecdote and insight on virtually every page.
“The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective” by Kate Summerscale
Part true-crime narrative, part cultural history, Summerscale’s exploration of a notorious case of child-murder in 1860 is above all an inquiry into our culture’s lasting and seemingly all-pervasive fascination with detectives and detective stories. Her hero is one of the very first investigators at the newly formed Scotland Yard, who inspired such writers as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Summerscale uses the mystery to crack open not only the allure of the detective as a fictional diviner of guilt and innocence, but also the curious details and ugly truths about everyday family life concealed behind the most respectable facades.
All best-books lists are pretty subjective, none more so than a list of the year’s best fiction. For example, I probably experienced the most unadulterated readerly bliss this year while buried in the pages of Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians,” but then the quirky theme of Grossman’s novel — how a child steeped in literary fantasy like the Chronicles of Narnia comes to terms with the ambiguous nature of adulthood — is virtually the same as that of my own nonfiction book. They even have almost the same title! And the author is a good friend. If that’s not too many caveats for you, dear reader, then you can consider this a strong recommendation.
The truth is, there’s enough great fiction out there that it makes sense to reach for a certain breadth, balance and variety. This year’s Booker Prize short list was so good, it’s tempting to simply reproduce it, but an all-Brit list would be as cockeyed as, say, an all-male one. In the end, we’ve kept the Booker crowd down to just two. Hillary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” was neck and neck with A.S. Byatt’s “The Children’s Book,” but a shade more celebrated, which tipped the balance in favor of Dame Antonia.
Behind all the more ephemeral trends — vampires, Swedish mysteries, etc. — most readers still seek the same thing in great fiction: a sojourn, however brief, into another world and into the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit it. Here’s our list of five books that made that happen in 2009.
“The Children’s Book”
by A.S. Byatt
This ravishing epic of the Edwardian era traces the lives of several interlocking families, at the center of which is Olive Wellwood, who is based on the great children’s novelist E. Nesbit. The novel begins with an idyllic amateur production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the English countryside and winds through a series of often disturbing revelations about the participants. Their shared obsessions include fairy tales, the Arts and Crafts movement, social utopias and sex, but perhaps the most striking of all Byatt’s themes is the drive to create and how it shapes (some would say distorts) the personalities of those possessed by it; nobody writes better about this than she does. This a classic Byatt fusion of fact and uncannily luscious imagery, mixed in the ideal proportions: not too hot, not too cold — just right.
“Await Your Reply: A Novel”
by Dan Chaon
This elegant page-turner begins with three seemingly disconnected characters — a man in search of his long-lost twin, a high school girl getting the hell out of Pompey, Ohio, and a college student succumbing to the criminality he believes is in his blood — all fleeing across forgotten stretches of the American heartland. Its theme is identity and the theft thereof, but also our national dream of jettisoning our old selves and becoming someone new. Chaon is that rare novelist who can combine intricate, suspenseful plotting with fully realized characters and unfussily lovely prose, but his great achievement here is the tenderness with which he explores the enigma at the center of the novel: What does it really mean to have a self, and what do you have left if you’re foolish enough to throw it away?
“Chronic City” by Jonathan Lethem
A great New York novel should aim for the universal by way of the parochial. The Manhattanites in Lethem’s near-future/alternative-now metropolis experience all the crises and travails of 21st-century life in a slightly more concentrated form. (It takes a novelist of exceptional talent and nerve to make you believe that matters of moment can hang on the outcome of an eBay auction.) A former child star coasting on his fading fame, a brilliant but terminally eccentric rock critic, a sarcastic ghostwriter and an activist turned municipal bureaucrat stumble through a city riddled with unreliable rumors, insufficiently explained disasters, dilettante millionaires, imperious celebrities and other signs and wonders. What they — what all of us — yearn for in a world full of engineered appearances and emotions is the truly beautiful and the truly moving. Can they find it, and will they even recognize it when they do? On this you can count: “Chronic City” is the real thing.
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“Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories”
by Lydia Millet
This collection begins with a short story about Madonna going on a grouse hunt, which might sound like an inauspicious start for a book whose theme is loss on an epochal scale. Guess again: With immense confidence, Millet takes a motley assortment of famous or pseudo-famous figures — Thomas Edison, David Hasselhoff, the zoologist from “Born Free,” a Sharon Stone impersonator — and gives each a transformative encounter with an (often imperiled) animal. The result, a cumulative effect formed by all the stories in the collection, draws illuminating connections and comparisons between the trivial and the eternal. Millet’s vision is startling, as often tragic as it is hilarious (and she can be very, very funny), but always shot through with the mystery of existence, a gift we can barely manage to appreciate even as we carelessly steal it from the rest of the earth’s denizens. “Love in Infant Monkeys” is a slyly and unsentimentally profound exploration of what human beings can (but very seldom do) learn from our fellow creatures.
“The Little Stranger” by Sarah Waters
Waters takes one of narrative literature’s most venerable genres — the ghost story — into fresh territory. Haunted houses usually stand as metaphors for misbegotten psychosexual situations. In “The Little Stranger,” Waters masterfully redeploys the gothic tale to address the great theme of the British novel: class. During the lean years after World War II, a rural physician ingratiates himself into the remnants of a local “old family” as they rattle around their decrepit but still beautiful mansion. In time, eerie manifestations of some indistinct yet malevolent force begin to torment the house’s aristocratic residents. What — or, rather, who — is causing the strange noises and mysterious stains? At once innovative and genuinely creepy, “The Little Stranger” is an astonishing performance, right down to its devastating final sentence.
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Books have been important to Salon from the very beginning — that would be 1995, when I joined a team of disaffected newspaper staffers cooking up a new kind of publication for the fledgling medium of the World Wide Web. We’ve reinvented ourselves a few times since then, but telling our readers about enlightening, thought-provoking, amusing and moving new books has always remained central to Salon’s editorial mission.
That hasn’t changed, although how we do it is about to. If you’re a longtime reader of Salon’s books coverage, rest assured that you’ll still be seeing the interviews, commentary and excerpts you’ve come to expect — even more of them, in fact. Over the next week, for example, we’ll be rolling out our lists of the best books of the year and of the decade.
Beginning on Dec. 14, look for the resurrection of one of our readers’ favorite features, What to Read, in a new format. Every Monday, I’ll present a book selected from an assortment of related new titles, tell you why I found this book exceptional and, when warranted, explain why others didn’t make the cut. What to Read will regularly recommend a book we think you’ll really love.
How will this be different from a traditional book review? Let me list the ways.
It’s no secret that the book review is an endangered species in American journalism. Industry-wide changes are behind a lot of this, but reviews themselves had become the dowdy wallflowers of newspapers and magazines long before the current crisis set in. Several factors have contributed to making book reviews a lot less stimulating than they ought to be.
First, there’s the traditional assignment process, something most readers know little about. Typically, a book review editor decides which forthcoming titles sound promising and tries to match each one with a reviewer who might have something interesting to say about it. Editors rarely have time to read the books themselves, so this involves a lot of guesswork. Yet even when the editor finds a title noteworthy, there’s no guarantee the reviewer will. The No.1 reason why so many book reviews come across as colorless is that they were written by people who aren’t especially inspired by their subjects.
Were the reviewer to pick the book in advance, there’s still no guarantee he’d produce an honest assessment. Perhaps he loved most of the author’s previous work and now that he’s finally got the chance to publicly sing her praises, he’s unwilling to admit that the new book isn’t among her best. Reviewers who are authors themselves can be hesitant to criticize because they know all too well how much work has gone into the thing and how badly negative reviews can sting. Often enough, a merely mediocre title gets covered (instead of passed over) simply because the editor and reviewer have already invested so much of their time in the review and have a slot to fill.
What to Read, by contrast, recognizes that most readers want to hear about the books that excite reviewers’ genuine enthusiasm, even if the reviewers have to wade through a lot of unexciting and downright disappointing titles to get to them. If I can’t find a book that’s worth your time (and mine) in a given week, I’ll say so.
Passionate reviews, while more fun to read, can still be unhelpful to readers when they know nothing about the person raving. Is she a sucker for coming-of-age stories or uncomfortable with pointed satire? Does he want every novelist to write like Hemingway or detest any touch of the surreal? As with movie critics, it helps to have a sense of the reviewer’s tastes, but that’s hard to come by when a publication’s reviews are written by an ever-changing cast of freelancers. I can’t promise you’ll always agree with me, but over time, you’ll have a better sense of how my preferences stack up against your own.
Lastly, book review sections rarely take into account the wide variety of our reading diets. We may be up for a challenging literary novel like Roberto Bolaño’s “2666″ every so often, yet blanch at an unending stream of the same. After tackling a serious doorstop we’re more likely in the mood for hard-boiled crime fiction or a breezy memoir. On any given day, we may want science fiction to expand our horizons or a quietly devastating short story collection to break our hearts. A novel that transports you to another world isn’t much good when at the moment what you really crave is meaty nonfiction that will teach you more about this one. Most readers’ shelves are a mix of the serious and the fun, Doris Lessing and J.K. Rowling, Saul Bellow and Elmore Leonard, Tracy Kidder and David Sedaris. I’ll be considering all sorts of good books, without respect to arbitrary genre distinctions.
What to Read will always aspire to do what the best criticism should: steer readers toward books they might enjoy and help them enlarge their understanding of whatever they read. I also hope that it will come to serve as a version of that fabled font of reliable tips, word of mouth — that is, the advice and opinions of a knowledgeable friend, in this case a friend who spends way too much of her time reading new books. By sharing more of the process of deciding which titles to spotlight, I aim to give you a better, fuller picture of my own criteria and tastes. And while the old Latin saying assures us that there’s no disputing of the latter, I hope to learn more about yours, too.
Every year, Christmas is directly responsible for some of the worst books to cross a reviewer’s desk: stale, overfrosted sugar cookies loaded with the literary equivalent of artificial coloring and high-fructose corn syrup. But now all is forgiven because the season has inspired Hank Stuever to write “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” a portrait of the holiday as it’s celebrated in the booming Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. A delicately calibrated combination of rigorous reporting, observational humor and old-fashioned empathy, “Tinsel” is the book that saved Christmas for this curmudgeon. The first two sentences alone, with their vivid evocation of big-box America and the promise of more crackerjack prose to come, did the trick:
Before the Black Friday dawn, the sky is still a mix of dark blue and the sick sodium-vapor saffron of the suburban night. I park by the Beijing Chinese Super Buffet and walk across the lot to Best Buy, where hundreds of people — some in their twelfth or thirteenth hour of standing in line — await the day-after-Thanksgiving doorbuster sale.
“Tinsel” explores the considerable gap between the Christmases most Americans have and the ecstatic holiday nirvana they long for. One of the three Frisco families that Stuever follows is the Parnells, specifically Tammie Parnell, a 44-year-old mother of two whose titanic drive has been insufficiently tapped by the (supposed) dream job of affluent stay-at-home mom. The overflow of her energy goes into a business she calls Two Elves With a Twist (the second elf quit a couple of years ago, but who needs her?), which puts up interior Christmas decorations for McMansion dwellers who are too exhausted or aesthetically challenged to do it themselves. Rocketing around Frisco in an “enormous, Coke-can-red GMC Yukon XL” she calls “Big Red,” Tammie’s conversation reels from rhapsodies about how “blessed” she and her clients are to sassy capitalist mottoes: “Moving the merch! That’s what I’m all about.”
Stuever also got to hang out with the Trykoskis (Jeff and Bridgette), who erect one of those huge synchronized flashing light displays that attract visitors (and traffic) to the neighborhood from miles around. Possibly the most consistently gratified of all Stuever’s subjects, Jeff lives to construct this elaborate system, employing 50,000 lights and “$10,000 worth of sixteen-channel control boards” as well as a short-range FM transmitter so that spectators can tune their car radios to the soundtrack. (The song is “Wizards in Winter,” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a number Stuever describes as “‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the men of America who put tens of thousands of Christmas lights on their suburban homes and program them to blink to music.”) Hired to design the lights for the faux Main Street of a local New Urbanist development called Frisco Square, Jeff becomes so obsessed that by the end of the book he’s buying a shipping container filled with 27,000 sets of LED lights from a factory in China.
Lastly, Stuever spent time with Caroll Cavaso, a single mother of two who has to finance her family’s Christmases on a considerably tighter budget; he meets Caroll and her 10-year-old daughter, Marissa, in the line for that Black Friday doorbuster. Tagging along with her, he attends a megachurch, where the pastor “casts himself as a fast-quipping, badass warrior for Christ. He is not above driving a bulldozer on stage to make his point.” Frisco is crawling with this breed of preacher; Stuever dubs the typical specimen “Reverend True Religion Jeans” purveying “Venus-and-Mars-style jokes about women and men and relationships, with props. (Don’t you hate it when your wife puts the toilet paper on the roll backwards? Don’t you just sit there and say, ‘Help me Lord’?)”
Despite his own aversion to personality cults and self-help pieties, Stuever clearly likes and respects Caroll, who finds much comfort in her church. The “true openness” with which she welcomes the pastor’s nostrums and prefab pep talks moves him. He could be describing his position on Christmas as a whole when he writes, “I believe in little, except, strangely, I do believe in believers.”
Though largely immune to the Christmas spirit, Stuever really does like people, and his generosity and curiosity save “Tinsel” from becoming a bitter and all too familiar diatribe against suburban vacuity. He gets consulted by Tammie on whether a mantelpiece display looks better with two or three angels. (“You’re really starting to understand your garlands,” she tells him. “I need you … You’ve got the eye, mister.”) He sits in on a tense gift-opening session at the Trykoskis’ place. (Jeff’s mother objects to his insistence that “we have to be at our house for Christmas, because of the lights.”) He marvels as Caroll badly sprains both ankles while working as a stagehand on the megachurch’s Christmas pageant and her fellow congregation members respond with self-absorbed indifference.
Stuever may have grown up in a similar Middle American milieu (Oklahoma City), but he’s now a pop culture writer for the Washington Post’s Style section and, furthermore, gay — though if he ever told any of his sources this, he doesn’t convey their response. Instead, he endeavors to insert himself gamely but unobtrusively into the action, helping Jeff with the extension cords, sniffling over a local radio station’s mawkish “Christmas Wish” segments with Tammie and tagging along to the Junior League’s ‘Neath the Wreath holiday bazaar. (Cutesy names are as common as boob jobs in this town.) He’s there when Eitan, a young Israeli working a kiosk at the mall, witnesses the mob assembled for the opening of Santa’s Village: “It’s insane. I have never seen a Santa Claus. He is like Paris Hilton here.”
Stuever spends a lot of time wandering through the Stonebriar Centre mall, and confesses that he enjoys it. Where misanthropes see only a palace of conspicuous and wasteful consumption, Stuever also recognizes that the mall is a place where people gather and wander, sometimes without buying anything. They are “falling in love, or kissing a child … In this carbed-out consumerismo are places and moments of true bonding, places to be seen and to see others, to simply exist.”
This is not to say that Stuever doesn’t recognize the demented poignancy of our Christmas complex. One of the book’s most fetching moments comes when he ruminates on the avid collecting subculture that’s formed around a manufacturer of miniature villages called Department 56, whose products are all Dickensian Victoriana and Bavarian cottages with dollops of painted snow. Department 56 even has a “Christmas in the City” line (featuring the new Yankee Stadium!), but Stuever notes that they have “never issued a Christmas world that actually resembles our own” — by which he means suburbs like Frisco. “There is no ‘box-store village’ series in which to place that Starbucks next to the Chili’s and the FedEx Kinko’s, which could sit on zone ‘pads’ in front of a porcelain Super Target or 24-hour Wal-Mart … There is no tiny Tammie flying down a tiny Dallas North Tollway in her tiny Big Red filled with tiny tubs of tiny garlands.”
For Stuever, the “village making and controlled reality” coveted by Department 56 buffs is “a constant theme everywhere I go.” Frisco — most of which was built in the past decade — is a similarly manufactured environment, purportedly everything its residents want in life, yet not the community they choose when it’s time to construct the perfect Christmas town out of little china knickknacks. Without belaboring any of his points, Stuever gently unveils a place where, in celebrating their most iconic holiday, people long for a past that never existed, beguile each other with bogus sentimental yarns, scare themselves with the imaginary menaces lurking “outside” their sanctuary and try to retreat further into a safety that actually bores them stiff. That’s Christmas, American style: a gingerbread house too small and sweet to move into, but we keep trying all the same.
One woman seating on a bench and looking at two black frames in an art gallery. Concepts: art, museum; culture, space; room; exhibition.(Credit: Claude Dagenais/two Humans) 
