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Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
Salon's picks for the year's finest novels include off-center tales of the '70s, the slavery era and the Lewis and Clark expedition, a battle with troublesome software code, and the purgatory of boarding school.
Jan 10, 2004 | While most of America whiled away its leisure hours on "The Da Vinci Code" (described by one wag as "the worst book I ever loved") and "The South Beach Diet," a few good books did get published in 2003. We can even spot traces of a trend or two. The 1970s emerged as a preoccupation of novelists young (Jonathan Lethem, Susan Choi) and not-so-young (T.C. Boyle), and unreliable narrators continue to pop up left and right. Best of all, despite updated trappings, the time-honored skill of storytelling lives on. These (in alphabetical order) are the books that kept us up late and turning pages in the past year.
"American Woman"
By Susan Choi
HarperCollins
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Choi combines several seldom-mixed qualities -- believable characters, political intelligence, unobtrusively elegant writing and simmering suspense -- in this story of political and personal disillusionment. Jenny Shimada, the daughter of a World War II Japanese-American internee, has gone underground after a few years in a bomb-planting radical group. Her precarious but isolated new life turns upside down after she reluctantly agrees to harbor a fugitive heiress and her erstwhile kidnappers in a safe house in rural Pennsylvania. Based on one of the few figures in the Patty Hearst affair who behaved with a consistent degree of human decency, Jenny has a long way to go before she finds her place in the world, but her journey is never less than fascinating.
"Any Human Heart"
By William Boyd
Alfred A. Knopf
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A bad title and a worse cover seemed to deflect some attention from Boyd's bewitching novel, but there's also the fact that it doesn't sound exciting. It's the "diary" of a fictional Englishman from his boyhood at a boarding school, through early success as a writer and possibly the most pointless espionage gig of World War II, followed by a mysterious, Kafkaesque imprisonment and success as a New York art dealer. Logan Mountstuart is a shoulder-rubber who hangs out with Hemingway and Picasso, abstract expressionists and the royal family, but he's no star himself. Nevertheless, "Any Human Heart" reads like the ideal journal. Frank and unself-conscious, dishy and deep, it's almost impossible to put down once you give it a chance. Boyd makes you feel like you've tapped a hot line into a real, passionate, eventful life, and who'd want to let go of that?
"Brick Lane"
By Monica Ali
Scribner
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Part Flaubert, part Dickens and all contemporary London, Monica Ali reveals herself, in "Brick Lane," to be the foremost practitioner of the classic novel in the multicultural mode. Her heroine, Nazneen, gets married off to a pot-bellied civil servant looking for an "unspoiled girl from the village," and finds herself transported to a public housing project eons away from her childhood home in Bangladesh. Slowly, the alternate reality of life in England dawns on her, and with it comes a set of unruly desires. Will she violate the moral codes she grew up with and face ostracism from her Muslim peers, or will she draw back from the lonely path of Western-style independence? Is her husband really so bad and the alternative really so idyllic? Once you get past the sari, Nazneen's dilemma wouldn't be unfamiliar to the heroines of George Eliot or Charlotte Brontë, and Ali portrays it with an aplomb they'd appreciate.
"The Bug"
By Ellen Ullman
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
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No one writes more eloquently than Ullman (a Salon contributor) about the peculiar mind-set of the people who create the digital tools we use every day, the software that shapes our work lives and in some ways our imaginations themselves. With "The Bug," she follows up the trenchant essays in "Close to the Machine" with a thriller-like tale of hubris and self-destruction that never stoops to cheap tricks. A software tester and the programmer whose bug she discovers lock horns as they struggle to track down and destroy the mercurial glitch. Acidic vignettes of high-tech business culture alternate with meditations on such 21st century preoccupations as artificial life. At stake is not just the program (and its implacably approaching delivery date), but the fragile belief that we can master ourselves and our fates.
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"
By Mark Haddon
Doubleday
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Christopher Boone, the 15-year-old narrator of Haddon's first novel, has an unspecified form of autism that makes most human contact too much to bear and ordinary emotions unfathomable and uninteresting. When the dog who lives across the street turns up dead, Christopher decides to follow the example of his idol, Sherlock Holmes, and solve the murder. In the process, he turns up evidence that he can't interpret but we can, and the true nature of his home life is slowly unveiled to heartbreaking effect. But Christopher is never pathetic; his investigation tests his fortitude and determination to their limits, and in some ways he's the strongest of all the flailing and misguided people in his world. The result is a droll and finally exhilarating mix of ordinary tragedy and eccentric humor.
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