“…We’d talked of Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian author of a six-volume novel (or memoir?) called My Struggle (two volumes of which have been translated thus far). Everywhere I’ve gone this past year the talk, amongst bookish people, has been of this Norwegian.“
– Zadie Smith, in the New York Review of Books.
All I can say is, my New York friends and dinner companions, what the hell???? I have not heard a single one of you say a word about Karl Ove Knausgaard this year.
Zadie, I take back what I have said about you in the past. I wanna have dinner with you and your friends and talk about “My Struggle.” And I want to talk about Tao Lin and Marie Calloway and the literature of Brooklyn anomie. I want to hear smartypants tell me why I should wade through the slushy sentences of Javier Marias (why, why, why?)
I want to wonder quietly, over brandy, if Alice Munro didn’t wait a volume (or two) too long before hanging up her keyboard. I want to put down my salad fork to debate Tom Scocca’s overlong Gawker essay on smarm, and broach the delicate question of George Saunders—is he America’s greatest writer, like Eggers says? Or is he subsiding into smarm?
Zadie, let’s talk in 2014.
My Top 10 in fiction for 2013
Last year, I made a bet with myself to see if I could read nothing but books published that year (along with relevant stuff like other books by the same author.) This year I was not quite so doctrinaire; about half the books I read were published in the preceding 12 months. (Caveat: I count books as read whether or not I finish them.)
This year, more than last, I felt like I missed or deliberately skipped quite a few notable books. For instance, there was “The Son” by Philip Meyer, who claims to have drunk buffalo blood for research purposes; on the other hand, there was “The Circle” by Dave Eggers, who did not do a lick of research (and whose “Hologram for a King” last year struck me having similar issues – unreliably observed.)
Of the ones I did read, these were the best:
No. 1. “My Struggle: Book One, A Death in the Family” by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s almost impossible to describe the appeal of “A Death in the Family” without shrugging helplessly. Who would want to read 700 pages devoted to a smallish portion of an unremarkable life? Well, me, for one, but it’s not something I can imagine recommending.
No. 2. The Dinner by Herman Koch. Two brothers, three sons, four main courses. This novel starts as a family drama but veers into psychological horror. Repulsive, compulsively readable, not what I was expecting in the least.
No. 3. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid. A rags to riches tale told, distractingly and faultily but ultimately successfully, in the second person. Somehow, this book feels more “recommendable” than the first two on the list. Go ahead, read it, you’ll like it.
No. 4. The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. The first American on my list. A salty, unpious portrait of the abolitionist John Brown.
No. 5. Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush. Irritating setup/story, but brilliant writing.
No. 6. Memorial by Alice Oswald. A gorgeous, simple re-imagining of the Iliad, told as a recitation of the dead. Pubbed in late 2012 but I’m counting it as a 2013 title.
No. 7. Big Brother by Lionel Shriver. Powerful but not likable in the least.
No. 8. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I’m conflicted about including this in a “Top Ten” list. There’s some wonderful stuff in this book but my god is it long. I don’t believe a red pencil ever touched the manuscript. Consider this sentence: “She was batting and plucking at the old man’s sleeve, tugging his arm to whisper something in his ear.” Batting, plucking, and tugging. A lot (and yet not much) going on in that sentence. And boyoboy is this a talky book. At the outset, the narrator’s mother discourses, inelegantly, for what feels like 25 pages, about Dutch painting; other characters are given free rein to speak at length about nothing in particular. But it’s a wonderfully inventive narrative.
No. 9. Too Good to Be True by Benjamin Anastas. A cold-eyed and pathetic autobiographical assessment of a life that has run off the rails. This was published in late 2012. I also read an earlier novel by Anastas in 2013, “An Underachiever’s Diary.”
No. 9 and a half. This is a cheat, because it wasn’t published in 2013 or late 2012. It’s Jonathan Lethem’s “Motherless Brooklyn.” Lethem grew up not far from me in Brooklyn, and we are relatively close in age, so I was naturally curious about him, in particular his coming-of-age novel, “Fortress of Solitude.” But my deep familiarity with the world the book described may have led me to read it with an overly critical eye. I didn’t like it much. It didn’t describe the Brooklyn I knew–nor more specifically the Boerum Hill I knew–back in the bad old days of the 1970s. But I was intrigued by the premise of this year’s “Dissident Gardens,” which turned out to be an ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying book; this led me to “Motherless Brooklyn,” which like “Fortress of Solitude” is set right in my old Brooklyn neighborhood. But unlike “Fortress of Solitude” I really loved “Motherless Brooklyn.” The narrator, who has Tourette’s, is an inspired literary creation with a hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, and always energetic voice.
And the rest of the 2013 books I read this year:
Tenth of December by George Saunders. One story in particular, “Home,” was devastatingly good.
Red Doc by Anne Carson. I think Carson is the greatest living writer of English, but she doubled down on the narrative abstraction this time and I felt lost. It was nice to see her (like Saunders) profiled in the New York Times Magazine this year, though.
The queen of North America, Anne Carson.
The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux – Theroux continues, in essence, where he left off in Dark Star Safari, in which he traveled the length of Eastern Africa from Egypt to South Africa, all overland. It was an amazing, foolhardy, dangerous journey, undertaken when he was 60. This time, he reverses the polarity, traveling north along the western coast. Now he is 70 and less adventurous; his trademark, bitterly cold observations seem more like the complaints of a cranky old man. I felt somehow mournful as he made his way to Angola, where he ends his journey early because, he says, the cities of Africa are cesspits unworthy of further suffering on his part. I imagine this is the last of his journeys and that makes me sad. His travels in Africa, Asia, South America, and across Polynesia were wonders of reportage, research, and sheer writerly wit. I wish he could keep scouring the globe forever. But he can’t.
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon. Why do I do this to myself? I have never liked Thomas Pynchon’s work, however brainy it may be. “Bleeding Edge” is a pastiche of New York City cliches packaged in a shaggy detective story. Nothing rings true; nothing remotely original animates the narrative; the cliches flow so fast and loose you can hardly believe the author is not somehow poking fun at you, the reader. What other possible justification could there be for equipping the heroine with a sassy finger-waving black office manager of the “Mmmm-mmmm-mmmm! Don’t you give me no lip, sugar!” type? I mean, seriously, that is awful. But the book kept getting ecstatic praise and I was suckered into trying it.
Dear Life by Alice Munro. It makes me sad to say it but this is just not a good book.
The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer
The Infatuations by Javier Marias and Your Face Tomorrow – Fever and Spear by Javier Marias – Like Saunders and Carson, Spain’s Marias is having a moment on the American stage, with a lot of new translations appearing here. He is a master of digressive description, and the writing is meticulous, but it just doesn’t hit me.
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simison – Fun with Aspergers.
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez – A man struggles with what would probably be called post traumatic stress disorder in the wake of Colombia’s bloody civil war. This is a serious and thoughtful work – but serious and thoughtful in and of themselves do not a good novel make.
Taipei by Tao Lin – A cold, bewildering recitation of the days and mostly nights of a Chinese American poet, Paul, and the many, many drugs he takes, and the several girls he takes drugs with in Brooklyn and on the road. Lin appears in faintly fictionalized form in Marie Calloway’s “What Purpose Did I Serve,” another cold recitation of drugs and sex, for pay and otherwise. Calloway is argued over as a feminist/post feminist icon (at the age of maybe 23), and Lin is getting a lot of press, but these two books left me cold. If you enjoy hearing someone recall an bad dream or drug experience – inarticulate recollections of disconnected events and he said/she said/he said/she said recitatives of bloodless, aimless dialog–then you might like to give these books a try.
The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma – A layered narrative that shifts shape from section to section. It’s sort of an earnest American version of Calvino, not quite successful but readable in the main.
Litle Wolves by Thomas Maltman – Blech.
The Lowland by Jumpa Lahiri – Ditto.
And Sons by David Gilbert
The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard
How Literature Saved my Life by David Shields
There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and he Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya – I loved the first volume of translations of her stories, “There Once Lived an Old Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby,” but this new book just didn’t grab me the same way.
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner – I think I must have given up on this too quickly. It’s had so many positive reviews, I will have to go back and give it another try in 2014.
- * * * *
And all the other stuff, roughly from best to worst:
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Poet in the Laboratory, by Patrick Wilcken – An amazing life, an amazing mind, and an amazing book. Truth be told this was the best book I read this year. And then, I followed it up with A History of Anthropology by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen and The Ritual Process by Victor Turner
Vraiment, c’est une pipe. Claude Levi-Srauss in the wild.
Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto by Gilbert Osofsky
Begin Again by Kenneth Silverman – A biography of John Cage. His life was oddly disconnected. Maybe not surprising for a composer who chose notes based on dice throws.
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson Cowie
The Middle Ground by Richard White – A deeply detailed consideration of the interactions of Indians and various Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Recommended to me by my friend Paul Breidenbach. Thanks, Paul!
Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante Tipped to me by Noah Elkin. Powerful and strange novel.
Ready Player One by Ernest Kline (thanks for the tip, Bill Gannon, this was a lot of fun)
The Gangs of New York, by Herbert Asbury
I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian Mckinty
The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake
The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian Mckinty
The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas
The Informant by Thomas Perry
Come To Grief by Dick Francis
Straight by Dick Francis
The Boyfriend by Thomas Perry
The Great Black Way by RJ Smith
South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray
Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin
The Wonder Bread Summer by Jessica Anya Blau
Possession by A.S. Byatt (finally out in an e-book edition)
Spurious by Lars Iyer
The Man Who Loved Children by Cristina Stead I had been looking to read this one for years. I’m mystified by the appeal.
Photo credit: Faisal Akram, via Wikimedia Commons
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