The Best Novels of 2015

December 18, 2015

This was a great year for readers.

It seemed like anything I picked up, whether a challenging doorstop or a light-as-a-feather diversion, gave me a lot of pleasure. And unlike any year I can remember, there were three new novels that seemed to me to be historically great – each in very different ways.

This post lists my picks for the best three books of the year, the honorable mentions (some really good ones!), and then every other damn thing I read during the year – about 30 books published in 2015 and the rest not.

The Top Three

Outline by Rachel Cusk

“Outline” is a new kind of novel, a narrative with no plot, no metamorphosis, no epiphany. But it’s not experimental in any recognizably “experimental” way.

A woman travels to Athens where she is to teach a writing class. Over the course of perhaps two weeks, she has a series of conversations. These make up the contents of the novel.

Some of these conversations are fundamentally philosophical – considerations of how we live today – but mainly they are psychological: fragmentary portraits of the speaker in that moment of time, portraits of fear or confusion or longing or boredom.

I’ve never read anything like this. It’s an amazing novel.

Unique as it is, “Outline” seems to me to fit into the one coherent, interesting movement that is animating the international literary scene today – which I think of as the new anti-novel. The new anti-novel rejects plot but not character. It rejects the idea of a story and rather focuses on telling the moment. Knaussgard’s “My Struggle” is the avatar of this new anti-novel. Other recent examples include “Happy are the Happy” (see below), Teju Cole’s “Every Day Is for the Thief,” and Ben Lerner’s “Leaving the Atocha Station.”

“Outline” is the best of this very interesting group of novels.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m not sure any book could be more different from “Outline” than Ishiguro’s new novel, “The Buried Giant.” At this point, you probably have heard that Ishiguro re-emerged after a long silence with a novel set in – eh? – post-Arthurian England. That is, England in the years just following Arthur’s reign, a land of dragons and knights but also festering resentments and, puzzlingly, a kind of mental fog that prevents a clear memory of the time when the land was ruled by the late king.

“The Buried Giant” follows an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, who, shunned by their village, decide to seek out their long missing son. The reason for his absence is, like so many other things in this novel, lost in the fog of Axl and Beatrice’s memory.

For me, the pleasure of this book was the gradual understanding of “the fog” and why it exists. This narrative device pissed off some readers, and I get it–it’s a kind of magical/realist version of the noir cliche of the amnesiac narrator. But the revealed truths are profound, and the coda is heartbreaking. The novel’s final chapter not only revealed what I would call a universal truth, but it brought me to tears. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I’ll tell no more.

Like “Outline,” this is a novel of the highest achievement.

The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann

Vollmann has written the American Iliad. I can’t say it any plainer.

This is a work of genius and madness, a novel that certainly can stand beside any American novel – not just this year or this century, but any American novel.

Amazingly, this Iliad is not set during the Civil War (though the colliding lessons and memories of the war animate many of the characters) but rather in the so-called Nez Perce War, which was not so much a war as a series of skirmishes during an exhausting chase across the Pacific Northwest.

The narration is a dreamlike chorus – a profane chorus – of alternating choirs, the US Army and the Nez Perce Indians, with dozens of voices contributing to each side of the story. The individual narrators are never named, and for each the dialog at any given moment may be spoken or may be internal. The effect is something like floating within a collective consciousness of the soldiers and the Indians.

So yes, a difficult book. And a long, long one: something like 1,200 pages, plus hundreds more of notes and ephemera. (As far as I can tell, the novel is scrupulously accurate, in terms of history.)

Not only is it long, but the first section of the book is not strictly focused on the war itself, but rather follows a group of homesteaders heading for Oregon – Nez Perce country. Worse, this section features Vollmann up to his postmodern tricks, showing off the (admittedly amazing) depth of his knowledge, which ranges from library sciences to early generation silver plate lithography.

And then comes the narrative of the war itself, and it is unlike anything I’ve ever read. It captures the futility of the Nez Perce’s flight, the futility of the fight, the inevitability of “The English’s” victory. The voices of the soldiers are varied by class and background; over time, you recognize individuals by their peculiarities, their habits, their perversions, their anger, their resignation. The Indians, too, have individual voices, but tend to speak as “we,” and this in-unison style has caused some readers to cry out “Chauvinism!” but to me the voices not only varied from speaker to speaker but they also seemed real – this might well be how a mistreated, hunted, frightened band of people (ones whose lives not so recently had been semi-nomadic hunting and gathering) really would speak and think.

It’s utterly amazing to me that “The Dying Grass” has been overlooked by the major “best of the year” list writers and, worse, awards committees. I have to assume the sheer length of the book – and Vollmann’s deserved reputation for problematic, vast works – kept many readers from giving the novel the consideration it deserves.

This is the best book of the year. This is a masterpiece. This book demands to be read.

Honorable Mentions

Mort[e] by Robert Repino

If I told you there was a novel about an evil ant-queen who launched a war against humans, would you want to read it? If I told you the the story is narrated by a housecat who has been transformed into verbal/two-legged feline warrior with opposable thumbs, would you want to read it? If I told you the story is mainly the tale of the housecat’s odyssey to find his pal, a pet dog, with whom he once knew the happiness of lying in the sun, would you want to read it?

Well, you should! It’s pretty wonderful.

Pet owners may bristle at the idea that their pets would, given the opportunity (and opposable thumbs), rise up in a murderous rage. But that’s what they do in Mort[e]. By the way, “Mort[e]” is the nom de guerre of the cat narrator, Sebastian, who goes from sleepy cat to cold-blooded assassin.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

This is one of Tyler’s best novels.

The first half is recognizable Tyler territory: a portrait of a loving but hardly well-adjusted family, anchored by a ditzy, goodhearted mother, Abby Whitshank. Abby is really the prototypical Tyler protagonist– a mother who loves the idea of loving her family to the point that she can’t perceive their failings or their resentments.

The second half takes the narrative in an unexpected direction – backwards in time. I can’t think of another Tyler novel to have tried this. It’s impressive that an old dog like Tyler would risk a new trick so late in her career. At first I found the narrative trick irritating–it’s always somewhat irritating when a novel sets aside an existing narrative and picks up a new thread–but soon she won me back into the story.

Ultimately this novel (like all her novels) is about happiness–the reality of happiness, a jewel with dark facets and cutting edges.

The Making of Zombie Wars: A Novel by Aleksandr Hemon

Hemon has written about death, civil war, displacement, and genocide. “The Making of Zombie Wars” is not about these things.

“Zombie Wars” (the title refers to the dream/delusion of the novel’s protagonist) is a bagatelle, a shaggy dog story with an appropriately motley cast of characters.

Hemon has always been a funny writer, but this time there is little or no counterweight of history or tragedy. It’s pretty much all in fun. Nothing wrong with that.

The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya

Ulitskaya is a modern day Tolstoy, a creator of sweeping narratives enfolding many characters and long periods of history. Not for her are the post-modern puzzle-pieces of Viktor Pelevin or the cracked fairy tales of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.

“The Big Green Tent” is a portrait of three misfits, linked in childhood by a common bully-enemy. The novel follows Ilya, Mitka and Sanya through the chaos of post-Stalin Russia. The structure of the book is peculiar, beginning as a traditional narrative, then shattering into non-linear shards.

It’s a melancholy work – how could it be otherwise, given the arc of history? – but it is joyfully drunk on literature, invoking Pushkin and Tolstoy and Tsvetaeva and Blok and Pasternak and, perhaps most affectingly, Josef Brodsky, who makes an appearance in the final section of the novel. (Like Robert Bolaño in “The Savage Detectives,” Ulitskaya has a tendency to rapturously reel off lists of writers. I find this charming but others may be irritated.)

The only flaw is an absurd side trip to California (don’t ask) but a novel this fat and overfull of characters and incident is bound to have a clinker or two.

I Refuse by Per Petterson

I was one of many hundreds of thousands of readers around the world who was much taken with Petterson’s earlier novel, “Out Stealing Horses.” His new novel, “I Refuse,” is a brooding, circular portrait of two friends whose lives unspool in unexpected ways.

It’s a dark and basically humorless story. But it feels real and raw.

Peep Show by Joshua Braff

This has an unpromising premise: The wife of a Jewish strip-club proprietor converts to ultra-orthodox Judaism. Her teenage son finds himself shuttling back and forth from his father’s failing Times Square burlesque theater to his mother’s increasingly observant Jewish household and neighborhood.

The novel is set in 1970s New York, and unlike some recent books that have fetishized the city when it seemed to be in its death throes, “Peep Show” plays it light, not ignoring the city’s decay but not overstating it either. As one who lived through 1970s NYC, I would say Braff gets it mostly right.

This novel is not quite as good as Braff’s earlier novel, “The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green,” but it overcomes the melodramatic confines of its setup and ultimately offers a unique portrait of the contrasting worlds endured by its teenage protagonist.

Happy are the Happy by Yasmina Reza

A series of stories that are related but not particularly interlocked, “Happy are the Happy” sounds unpromising: a portrait of present-day Parisian intelligentsia.

But what the novel encloses is a dense study of modern consciousness – refracted through more than a dozen voices.

Books not published in 2015

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Unlike the rest of the literary globe, I didn’t fall for Ferrante’s tetralogy. Maybe I’ll try it again later.

Daytripper by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon

Inventive, brooding, romantic graphic novel from Brazil.

The Weirdness by Jeremy Bushnell

Charming silliness. If you liked “Ready Player One” you would enjoy this. Recommended!

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

I laughed out loud at this novel’s put-downs of Seattle. Recommended!

The Martian by Andy Weir

I adored this one, which I read back in March. The movie was great but I might have liked the novel even better. Recommended!

Bad Country by CB McKenzie

I am totally done with noir fiction. This western desert mystery/thriller isn’t too noirish. Good read.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

A cult novel whose appeal eluded me.

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Ugh. Just ugh.

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry

I learned about Barry this year thanks to his new book, “Beatlebone,” which is about John Lennon. I didn’t want to read a book about John Lennon but this earlier volume had good reviews. It’s very well written, as far as the sentences go, but it didn’t grab me otherwise.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Re-reading this, one of my favorite books of all time.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Also re-reading this one – not one of my favorites. But Murakami keeps getting mentioned as a Nobel Prize contestant, so I wanted to go back and try it again. I was alternately puzzled, bored, intrigued, and ultimate fed up with it narrative. In the end (or not in the end, I guess you would say) I tossed it aside after maybe 300 pages.

It strikes me as a weirdly (immaturely) misogynistic book – I’m surprised how many women I know like this novel. There’s just a preponderance of violently treated women, and the ones who aren’t are sexualized in odd ways. I don’t think it’s an outright angry or violent book but it’s certainly not a healthy vision. I guess I’ll have to read and/or re-read a few more Murakami volumes.

Jesus Son by Denis Johnson

So many admirable writers mention this book as a desert island pick. I disliked it the first time I tried it years ago and I disliked it again this year.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

Not sure how I stumbled across this fat trilogy, of which I read and enjoyed the first two books. I get the impression this is fairly widely read by women – in particular read when they were teenagers. Set in medieval Norway, it is a surprisingly (to me) frank depiction of a young girl’s affair with a stranger, and the consequences of that.

Confusion by Stefan Zweig

Sort of an interesting companion piece to Kristin Lavransdatter, by which I mean that both novels, written nearly at the same time (1920s), are concern forbidden sex and its consequences. But one, (Lavransdatter) is explicit, whereas the other (Confusion) edges around the topic. I suppose because the sex in Confusion is (partly) homosexual a more straightforward narration was impossible.

I’ll admit I came to the Zweig with the expectation of a very different kind of novel, an expectation fed by the recent Wes Anderson film, “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” I’m a bit of a sucker for the romantic ornament of 1920s mitteleuropa, which Anderson really captured beautifully. But Confusion is a dark book about tortured souls.

The Lost Domain: Le Grand Meaulnes by Frank Alain-Fournier

This is another book of roughly the same vintage as the Undset and the Zweig, but written before the first World War–a crucial difference. It’s set in what to me seemed to be a timeless past – presumably 19th Century France. It’s a magical book – or really, the first half is utterly magical, following a high school boy who essentially gets lost while playing hooky and finds himself an uninvited guest at an elaborate costume party at a country estate where he falls in love.

Professor Andersen’s Night by Dag Solstad

Reading about Karl Ove Knaussgard somewhere, I came across a reference to Dag Solfstad, with a comment along the lines of, “Solfstad is actually the Norwegian novelist you should be reading.” So I did. This is a tense philosophical portrait of a modern man who is somehow unable to act after witnessing an apparent murder. It reminded me of Patricia Highsmith (”A Tremor of Forgery,” for instance, or maybe even more Camus’ “The Stranger,” so this is obviously quite a compelling book – but in the end I think anomie is a dead end topic–there’s just not that much to do with it.

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad

A similarly existential portrait of a modern man.

Manana by William Hjortsberg

Not a good mystery. Sorry.

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

I read two books by Fitzgerald this year, this and “The Beginning of Spring,” and I must say I’ve never read anything like them. “The Blue Flower” is possibly the most extravagantly imagined novel I have ever read. By that I mean, this is a novel set in the 1790s, a historical novel about a German novelist, Friedrich van Hardenberg. And yet the story is not about “Friedrcih van Hardenberg, a German novelist,” but rather the story of young man who falls in love with 12 year old Sophie von Kuhn, a chubby, unworldly, mainly witless creature whose appeal is mystifying to Friedrich’s family (well, with one exception) and, in the main, to the reader, although such is Fitzgerald’s skill that the reader (well, me) tends to think, “What in the world is wrong with this guy?” rather than “This is stupid and not a believable plot.”

Fitzgerald’s description of the late 18th century landscape (and mindscape) is unbelievably dense and knowing. It feels almost like overdetailed reportage – a vintage New Yorker reporter at large where not one observation is left off the page.

I didn’t love this book the way many of Fitzgerald’s fans do, but I was certainly amazed by it.

The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

I started this as soon as I finished “The Blue Flower,” and that was a mistake, sort of like ordering a serving of pie a la mode after eating a slice of cheesecake. Too much to digest in a short period of time.

Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison

I know that the title story is considered a masterpiece but I have to say I don’t know why, exactly. There is a profusion of event and catastrophe and much scenery flows by, but it all just felt like a sketch to me. I’ve liked other Harrison stories much better.

Will Not Attend by Adam Resnick

Bitter short stories, some of them pretty funny.

History, Criticism, Biography, Etc

Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby

King Philip’s War by Daniel R. Mandell

The Invasion of America by Francis Jennings

Indian New England Before the Mayflower by Howard Russell

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Little Failure by Gary Shteingart

Still on the Bedside Table

Crow Fair by Thomas McGuane

The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Far From Brooklyn