"The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Díaz
The title character of Díaz' first novel is an obese Dominican-American geek living in New Jersey, with a baleful, dying mother, a devoted punkette sister and a heart full of thwarted romance. With grace and brio, Díaz conjures a world that encompasses everything from streetwise Spanglish to Dungeons and Dragons, campus politics to immigrant family saga. And guess what? It all fits perfectly, because, as it turns out, there is no better analogy for Rafael Trujillo, the fearsome real-life Dominican dictator, than Tolkien's Sauron -- no matter how far Díaz extends the metaphor, it keeps on working; "What's more sci-fi than Santo Domingo?" Oscar asks. And what fantasy could be more heartbreaking than the yearning of an oddball "ghetto nerd" (or anyone else for that matter) for perfect love?
"Sacred Games" by Vikram Chandra"
At the beginning of Chandra's vast, electrifying second novel, Mumbai's most notorious gangster dies in a strange, cube-shaped bunker after a shootout with the police; the rest of the book tells us why. The man in charge of unearthing the truth is a courtly, middle-aged Sikh police detective named Sartaj Singh, who follows the trail through a dirty, maddening, glorious city that rivals Dickens' London in ruthlessness and vitality. Mumbai may be violent and trashy, drunk on Bollywood dreams and choking on its own smog, but it's the real hero of this story; Chandra clearly loves it to distraction even when it horrifies him. The villain is not a criminal, really, but fanaticism in all its forms, and the battle is literally between life and death, between those who understand that this world is necessarily chaotic, flawed and painful and those whose craving for order, calm and purity make them so very, very dangerous.
"Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris
"We, too, thought it would never end," say a group of ad agency employees in late-20th-century Chicago, speaking of the Internet- fueled economic boom. Joshua Ferris, a former adman himself, has written his first novel entirely in the first-person plural, capturing the way a bunch of mismatched strangers, when thrown together in an office, can learn to function as a single, organic entity. Or not. "Then We Came to the End" is a deeper, sharper, sadder version of that popular Thursday-night sitcom, filled with recognizable types -- the office intellectual staying late to work on his novel, the conspiracy theorist, the woman who knows all the gossip, the guy everybody distrusts, the talented boss they all regard with slightly awestruck incomprehension. There are intrigues over Aeron chairs and paranoia once the layoffs begin, as well as intimations of tragedy throughout. Against the odds, and half the time against the will of the people involved, a single, organic entity does emerge, but what to do with it? Ferris has taken one of the unsung experiences of modern life and delicately exposed its complicated, conflicted heart.
"Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson
The Vietnam novel to end all Vietnam novels, Denis Johnson's celebrated (and misunderstood) epic takes all the genre's clichés, from the dangerously naive CIA officer to the feral tunnel rats to the cigar-chomping colonel who thinks he can win this thing, and runs them through a blender. The result recasts the war not as a tale of American hubris and Cold War skullduggery gone wrong, not even as a tragedy belonging to a specific place or time, but as a titanic clash between two fundamentally different ways of understanding the universe and how it works. That collision plays out through shattering battle scenes and sweaty afternoons in tin-shack bars, through the after-dinner philosophizing of deluded spies and the calculations of villagers just trying to make it to the next planting season. Johnson's magnificent vision is less tragic than cosmic, the story of history repeating itself not because we don't understand, but repeating itself whether we understand it or not.
"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon
During World War II, the Roosevelt administration briefly considered resettling Europe's Jewish refugees in Alaska. Michael Chabon's soulful alternate-history novel dreams up what the world might have looked like if that scheme had played out. In a bustling, if well-bundled, Yiddish-speaking community in Sitka, a burnt-out homicide cop named Meyer Landsman investigates the death of a junkie chess-player who might have been the promised Messiah, and gets on the bad side of the district's Hassidim-run organized crime syndicate. The novel offers lots of genre fun -- snappy dialogue, action and suspense -- yet it's all seamlessly married to a searching consideration of Jewish identity. What would it mean to be a Jew in a world where the Holocaust never happened and the state of Israel didn't exist? Are human beings the products of history, or does our essence transcend it? These are weighty questions for a book that's so entertaining, but Chabon's themes never overload his frame. Like the very best dancers and magicians, he makes it look easy.
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