These final dragging days of winter call for hearty fictional fare, something to get the brain cells hopping and the blood pumping. In the pile of new March fiction, amid the usual well-intentioned snoozers, shameless formula rip-offs and flavorless commercial pap, we found a few clear winners. Our picks this month kept us furiously turning pages with their robust combination of brains and storytelling pizazz. There’s a comical look at an endearingly frantic religious quester; a suspenseful tale of a child who murders and the psychologist called to testify at his trial; a sexy, rueful novel of middle-aged lovers; and more. So hunker down, cheer up and dig into our late-winter fictional feast.
Paradise Park by Allegra Goodman
Sharon Spiegelman, the prattling narrator of Allegra Goodman’s new novel, is a spiritual seeker. If you associate that kind of person with a flighty, credulous, smorgasbord-style approach to religion, you wouldn’t be wrong about Sharon, but you wouldn’t be entirely right, either. At the book’s beginning, in the 1970s, Sharon finds herself in a Honolulu hotel room, bereft of money, purpose and the boyfriend, Gary, she’d traveled with across country from Boston. What she does have, though, are “all these questions and ideas about this higher power and this divine spirit, and maybe I would have been dealing with them if I hadn’t been so broke.”
With a guitar, a couple of Indian gauze skirts and a macramé bikini, Sharon launches into a series of adventures, beginning with enlisting, as an untrained volunteer, in a bird-counting project on a remote island with a pack of zoologists. Even as the team’s errand girl, with a headful of mites caught from birds who are “so noble, but also so disgruntled … staring with unforgiving beady eyes,” Sharon hankers after the ineffable. She’s a spiritual Goldilocks, sampling one bowl of porridge after another — from the solitary contemplation of nature to, back in Honolulu, evangelical Christianity, workshop New Age-ism, Buddhism and Orthodox Judaism. Nature is too lonely, the ecstasies of revival meetings too fleeting, the Buddhist monastery too ascetic, academic theological studies too dry, Hasidism too restrictive; in other words, every faith she tries soon turns out to be too hot or too cold. Where’s the religion that’s just right for Sharon?
Goodman, who wrote about the vicissitudes of a hilariously neurotic clan in “The Family Markowitz” and the challenges of Orthodox Jewish life in “Kaaterskill Falls,” has picked a tricky row to hoe in “Paradise Park.” Sharon’s Candide-like dizzyness makes her immediately amusing and endearing, and it’s a delight to see Goodman flexing her considerable gift for humor again after the relatively solemn “Kaaterskill Falls.” The beginning of the book is a deliciously frothy and eminently readable concoction, replete with sly slices of hippie life (pot farms, weeklong acid trips, communal households, a Buddhist monk who keeps slipping back into his old, uptight New Yorker self, rampant hugging) that never stoops to cheap sneers. Goodman makes her questing heroine naive but not actually stupid, with enough of the smart aleck (comparing the women in a Hasidic retreat to the schoolgirls in the Madeline picture books, for example) to make her irresistible as well as maddening. And Sharon’s yearnings are genuine enough, egged on by the (very) occasional glimpses she catches of the infinite.
But like that friend (we all know at least one) who ardently embraces one new enthusiasm after the other, only to cast it aside when she realizes she hasn’t found the ultimate answer, Sharon can be a little wearing. Her encounters with each new religious practice get a tad too predictable toward the late middle of “Paradise Park,” and that’s when Goodman steps up to bat to bring her exasperating heroine home. OK, so the resolution, if you know Goodman’s fiction, is hardly surprising, but as another book critic I know put it, even a not-quite top-notch Allegra Goodman novel is so much better than most other writers’ best efforts, why kvetch? “Paradise Park” is such a pleasure to read, with so many clever, astute touches (Sharon’s letters to her disapproving father are small masterpieces of histrionics, outright lies, manipulation and smothered pleas for love) that to look any farther for a book to recommend for March would make me feel as fickle as Sharon herself.
— Laura Miller
Border Crossing by Pat Barker
Psychological insight is the lifeblood of good fiction, so it’s surprising how few novelists make their characters professional psychologists. Pat Barker is an exception. In her wonderful, masterful “Regeneration” trilogy (“Regeneration,” “The Eye in the Door” and “The Ghost Road”), set during World War I, she imagined the life and work of a real historical figure, William Rivers, a British psychologist charged with the excruciatingly ironic task of helping shellshocked soldiers regain their mental health in order to return to the fighting. As Rivers tried to figure out how to help his patients he often found himself at the crossroads of science and morality — the proper destination, these razor-sharp but humane books suggested, of any psychological inquiry.
In “Border Crossing,” set in present-day northern England, Barker again looks at the dilemmas of a psychologist working with people whose troubled mental functioning has grave social implications. Her protagonist, Tom Seymour, specializes in “youthful offenders” — children who kill. As the novel opens, he and his wife are out for a walk, trying to salvage their unraveling connection, when they see an apparently suicidal young man jump into a dangerous river. Tom leaps in and saves him. In an apparent coincidence, he turns out to be Danny Miller, at whose trial Tom had been an expert witness 13 years earlier. Danny was accused of smothering an elderly neighbor when she’d unexpectedly come home and found him robbing her house. Tom’s testimony made the difference in convicting Danny of the crime — he’d determined that Danny was aware of what he was doing and knew that death was permanent. The 10-year-old was sentenced to a reform school for juvenile offenders.
Now 23, Danny is on parole and has a new identity, but he’s haunted by his past. He asks Tom to begin seeing him so that they can sort out what happened on the day the murder took place. Their free-form sessions — Tom decides that because of the circumstances they won’t be a formal therapy arrangement — cause Tom to reopen the question of whether Danny should have been held responsible for the murder. Restless and out of sorts over the foundering of his marriage, Tom decides to track down the early players in Danny’s story and talk to them. He also has to once again come to terms with the strange effect on him of the strikingly good-looking and intelligent Danny, a master manipulator who craves control at all costs and is expert at inducing authority figures to cross boundaries. But does being a bottomless pit of emotional need make Danny dangerous, or beyond rehabilitation? That’s the kind of morally nuanced question Barker specializes in, and in “Border Crossing” she answers it without passing judgment on Danny or reaching for any falsely reassuring certainty.
One of the ideas Barker wants to convey is that violence tends to occur under particular kinds of circumstances, and that this is especially true — and especially tragic — in the case of violent children. As Danny recounts for Tom his early childhood, spent being beaten and bullied by a drunken father and depressive mother, it’s all too clear how his need for control emerged in murderous form. At one point Tom, too, has a flashback of a scene from his own relatively safe and happy childhood, in which, given too much leeway with an annoying younger boy, he found himself on the edge of committing an evil act. Evil, Tom comes to realize, is not metaphysical, and its perpetrators can still merit therapeutic care. “Evil” is “just the word we’ve agreed to use to describe certain kinds of action,” he tells Danny. “And I don’t think it’s an alternative to other ways of describing the same things. There’s no logical reason why ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ should be alternatives.”
Let me say that “Border Crossing” isn’t Barker at her best — it’s not half as good as any of the “Regeneration” books. (If you haven’t yet, give yourself a treat and read them.) At times there’s a phoned-in quality to the writing, as if she’s rushing to make points rather than structure scenes. She seems impatient with her own story; too often, she sums up or, worse, leaves out crucial connecting points. Still, there’s a palpable excitement to reading “Border Crossing.” Partly that’s due to Barker’s suspenseful plot — we’re never sure whether Danny is a danger to Tom — but it’s also simply exhilarating to read Barker’s vigorous, precise prose. Few writers manage to be so tough-minded, so ruthlessly honest and so compassionate at the same time. And characteristically, she has taken on a crucially important subject, one that sends lesser minds lunging for oversimplified answers.
It’s also more than a little sobering to read “Border Crossing” in a nation like ours, in which a 14-year-old was recently tried as an adult and given a life sentence with no possibility of parole for killing another child when he was just 12 years old. In England and most other developed nations, such condemnation of a still-developing child would be unthinkable. Barker’s story may hinge on the specifics of the British legal system, but her willingness to probe the moral questions raised by children who murder seems even more pertinent to ours right now.
— Maria Russo
My Dream of You by Nuala O’Faolain
There’s blood coursing through the sentences of Nuala O’Faolain’s “My Dream of You.” Whatever flaws can be charged to this big, messy, imperfect and enthralling novel — a shadow plot that is at times too oblique or too obvious, secondary characters who sometimes verge on the “colorful,” a first novelist’s tendency to spell out her meanings rather than trust the reader to discover them, the occasional conflict between commercial and literary impulses — it is never less than alive. “My Dream of You” draws you in and stirs you up. With the emotional savagery that seems the special province of Irish writers, O’Faolain lays her protagonist bare and puts you right into her consciousness. You feel this book in your flesh.
Admirers of O’Faolain’s bestselling memoir “Are You Somebody?” may be disappointed to find that some of its material has been loosely reworked for the novel. “My Dream of You” doesn’t feel recycled, though, for the simple reason that it’s a bigger book, a more ambitious one. It doesn’t have the control or the concision of that picaresque memoir. And that’s exactly as it should be. The book is about the unruly, inconvenient persistence of passion as played out on the landscape of the unruly and inconvenient middle-aged body. Neither of those subjects lends itself to a pretty, minimalist polish. O’Faolain is writing here about the emotional life of one woman, but she goes down so deep that the subject has an improbable heft. She’s a long way from the mastery of her countrywoman Edna O’Brien, but she displays something of O’Brien’s reckless courage at plunging into the whorls of love.
The heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is a travel writer nearing 50, an Irishwoman living in London, who has winnowed down her existence to the co-workers in her tiny office, her meticulous, fussing boss, Alex, and particularly her fellow writer, Jimmy, a gay American, an expat like herself and something of a soul mate. Moving from the cocoon of her dark basement flat to her job, she’s a perpetual tourist in life. As the book opens, Jimmy suddenly dies and Kathleen is shocked into realizing how long she has coasted comfortably. Announcing her retirement from travel writing, Kathleen goes back to Ireland for the first time in 30 years with the idea of researching the real story behind a famous love affair — between an English landlord’s wife and her Irish servant — that occurred during the famine.
What follows is, of course, about Kathleen confronting her own heritage and learning to open herself to life again. But O’Faolain is such a full-hearted and full-bodied writer that it doesn’t feel like too-familiar territory. She has an unexpected way of complicating the issues she raises. Many of the best passages deal with Kathleen’s affair with a man she meets on her holiday, an Irishman a few years her elder, whose adoration helps her reconcile the sexual desire she has never ceased to feel with her own body, which is settling into the unwanted folds and expanses of middle age. No writer I know has come up with a scene like the one in which Kathleen examines the red mark left by her lover suckling her breast and remembers how, in order to be more gentle, he took out his dentures beforehand.
O’Faolain cuts through the cant of writing about middle age, which tends to insist only on either the comfort or the decay. And she does the same with old age. In one remarkable passage, an elderly librarian she befriends during her research says, of John Bayley’s book about his wife, Iris Murdoch, “I read her husband’s book about caring for her in her declining years. I must say I envied her both the Alzheimer’s and the caring husband until I realized that if she had the one she didn’t know she has the other.” When Kathleen tells her that she’s the first person she ever met who envied someone with Alzheimer’s, the woman responds, “Oh no, Miss de Burca … I think any reasonable person would envy those who lose their memory as they approach the end.”
The memories that Kathleen confronts of her troubled relationship with her father are so painful that the prospect of losing them does seem like a blessing. But O’Faolain doesn’t offer Kathleen that easy an out. In a way, “My Dream of You” springs from the afterword to O’Faolain’s memoir, where she talks about letting go of self-pity. In the end, Kathleen sees her pain balanced by the pain of the other people around her. The result is a book that’s both intimate and remarkably un-self-centered, a tough-minded and passionate tribute to the ache that tells you you’re alive.
— Charles Taylor
Martyr’s Crossing by Amy Wilentz
At first glance, Amy Wilentz’s “Martyr’s Crossing” seems set up to embody, in one grand, sweeping tale, much of the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her choice of characters implies this: the handsome Israeli solider; the young, beautiful Palestinian mother; the calculating and patriotic Israeli old-timer; the angry, imprisoned Palestinian terrorist; and of course, at the center of it all, the child martyr. As the novel begins, these familiar figures stand poised to represent all the predictable sides of the story that they do on the evening news.
But it soon becomes clear that Wilentz has a more subtle, and complicated, story to tell. From the beautifully shaded opening scene in which a Palestinian mother tries to get her gravely ill child across an Israeli checkpoint, “Martyr’s Crossing” unravels like a series of snapshots of interior life under great personal discord. Wilentz animates small, resonant moments — the gossip in an Israeli cafe, the folding of a dead child’s laundry, the gross vanity of an old Palestinian leader. Certainly, there are grand statements: Watching her father lying on his deathbed, Marina Raad, an American-born Palestinian who had returned to her romanticized origins, concludes that “we were all victims of history.” Yet “history” serves less as a foundation for the story and more as worn scenery for people engaged in distinct struggles in a beloved, wretched homeland.
It’s not an easy task to avoid stereotypes with this material, considering that the novel also conveys the harsh reality that it’s all too easy for these characters to fall prey to their own illusions about what it means to be Israeli or Palestinian. Yizhar, an Israeli official responsible for putting a positive news spin on the actions of the Israeli army, imagines his country as “a rogue nation riding roughshod over others, trampling norms and shoving aside accepted wisdom. Small but scrappy.” After his grandchild dies at the hands of Israeli soldiers, George Raad, an ailing Palestinian intellectual, pays a visit to his childhood house, which is now occupied by an Israeli family he once knew. As George grapples with his memories, he hears an insistent inner voice: “You have to pay some price for taking away my land and living in my house for fifty years and for eternity.” It’s as if what George experiences is more a reflex of reassurance than a reassertion of truth. The moment comes off as somehow both surprising and painfully obvious, as do many of Wilentz’s sharp depictions of intricately layered pain.
The novel’s success owes much to Wilentz’s judicious crafting and her familiarity with the region. (She was the New Yorker’s Jerusalem correspondent between 1995 and 1997.) At the end of “Martyr’s Crossing,” when the Israeli soldier stumbles into, of all places, a mosque, and George watches his life pass before him in, of all places, an Israeli hospital, it’s a potentially predictable move to have the characters end up in the hands of their perceived enemy. But in Wilentz’s masterful deployment of multiple characters tumbling toward a thrilling finale, their individual fates manage to seem like mere coincidences of geography. Or maybe it’s that the first 300 pages of her book have already convinced the reader how inextricably tangled, like tree roots smothered in sidewalk cement, the fates of the Palestinians and the Israelis really are.
— Suzy Hansen
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.
READ SALON’S REVIEW
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) 
