Answer? A lot of people, judging by the fact that “Black House” stayed on national best-seller lists all fall. Conclusion? This was not a year in which anyone’s predictions counted for much. A lot of pop fiction published since September 11 did go in the toilet. On the other hand, Jonathan Franzen, his troubles with Oprah’s Book Club notwithstanding, enjoyed a huge success with “The Corrections,” a long, serious, dark novel about a screwed-up American family. Book sales were off this fall, but obviously in a world even more than usually stamped by chaos, a lot of us still found, if not refuge, at least some consolation in the artful symmetries of fiction. Here are NEWSWEEK’s favorites, in no particular order, compiled by Malcolm Jones, David Gates, Jeff Giles, Susannah Meadows and Peg Tyre:
“Austerlitz” By W. G. Sebald; Translated By Anthea Bell (Random House, 352 pages): In “Austerlitz,” the author performs a small but significant miracle: He wrests the Holocaust out of the clutches of stale cliche. He does this without ever showing us a death camp or gas chamber. Instead, this superb novel concentrates on the wreckage of one man’s life. Orphaned as a boy during the Nazi occupation of Prague, Jacques Austerlitz devotes the rest of his life to finding out who he really is and what happened to his parents. This obsession comes close to costing Austerlitz his sanity, and it certainly crowds out every vestige of anything remotely normal in his life. Chronicling this disintegration, Sebald shows us, much as he did in “The Emigrants,” a previous masterpiece on the same theme, that the horrors of mid-20th century Europe have no expiration date. (MJ)
“The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint” By Brady Udall (Norton, 384 pages): If they gave prizes for the best first line of a first novel, Brady Udall would have no competition: “If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.” OK, we’re all paying attention now. But the truly noteworthy thing about Udall is that once he’s got our attention, he knows what to do with it. For while “The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint” could be described as the half-breed Apache version of “David Copperfield,” the truth is, it’s like nothing else you’ve read. There are fall-down funny angles to this novel about a boy who survives a cruel orphanage, a fall off a cliff and a family of Mormons so sweet they make your teeth ache. Other parts are equally horrifying. But one way or the other, Udall makes us care about Edgar, to root for him and believe in him, and he’s so successful that by the end of this very strange novel, the only unbelievable thing is that Edgar Mint is no more than a figment of Brady Udall’s imagination. (MJ)
“John Henry Days” By Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 448 pages): This comic epic starts out as a clever satire built around a 1996 West Virginia folk festival celebrating a new John Henry stamp in the Postal Service’s “Folk Hero” series. At first, the story merely hops back and forth between the mythic story of John Henry digging a tunnel through a mountain in 1872 and the modern story, which is all about press agentry and spin and a black freelance journalist named J. Sutter, who’s struggling to beat the record for the most consecutive days on the freebie junketeering gravy train. But Whitehead is just warming up. Using the stories of blues singers, a black folklorist in the ’20s, a Tin Pan Alley song plugger and a young piano student on Harlem’s Strivers’ Row, Whitehead explores how pop culture destroys legitimate myths, and how black culture in particular has been thinned to transparency. Sometimes his ambition gets the best of him, but if this novel is often a mess, it’s a grand mess, one of those stories where getting there is all the fun. (MJ)
“Mystic River” By Dennis Lehane (Morrow, 416 pages): Anyone who pays much attention to American fiction knows that if you’re looking for realism these days, a good place to start is the crime-novel shelf. Along with writers like Mike Connolly and George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane is one of our top storytellers who’s fearless in the face of hard truths. With working-class Boston as his turf, he’s got near perfect pitch when it comes to capturing the resentments and rage that pitted black against white in the ’70s busing crisis and that today fuels the friction between gentrifying yuppies and the working-class residents being driven out of their old neighborhoods by skyrocketing property taxes. This bleak story, his best yet, describes the hunt for a young woman’s killer, and like his other five books, it is tensely suspenseful, street smart and unrelievedly gritty–in Lehane’s novels, even butter is gritty. Mercifully he’s also got a sense of humor. One of the characters in “Mystic River” is named Just Ray and not because he’s always wise or judicious. It’s simply because when he was coming up, all the colorful neighborhood nicknames–Crazy Ray, Psycho Ray–were already taken. (MJ)
“The Corrections” By Jonathan Franzen (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 568 pages): Just lately, what’s generally called the Franzen Thing (a.k.a. the Oprah Thing) has overshadowed the book itself. But this long, densely detailed novel, which follows in turn each of five members of an American family, should outlast the controversy over whether a snobby writer dissed a benefactor or a principled literary loner fought the power. True, “The Corrections” doesn’t completely hang together, either plotwise or tonally, and some readers and critics–like NEWSWEEK’s own Malcolm Jones–found it overrated. But (speaking as NEWSWEEK’s own David Gates) I couldn’t put the thing down once I got past the admittedly rocky beginning. Franzen really can observe, think and write, and his characters–particularly the easy-to-respect, hard-to-like paterfamilias–eventually come to glow in the light of his evenhanded compassion. (DG)
“Why Did I Ever” By Mary Robison (Counterpoint, 200 pages): Don’t expect a plot trajectory shaped like the ridgeline of Mount Everest, with an epiphany at the peak, or a character who develops like a Polaroid snapshot. Robison’s heroine and narrator, Money (nee Monica), is fully herself from the first words out of her mouth, and nothing much happens to her or her two grown children in the course of the novel that hasn’t already happened. And considering what’s already happened–rape, torture, drug addiction–that’s just as well for them. For us, too: “Why Did I Ever,” written in 500-odd very short sections, isn’t about story: while Money’s life is an experiment in calamity and endurance, Robison’s novel is an experiment in voice and style. Money’s implicit triumph hovers just off the page; Robison’s mastery there right from the get-go. All these years after Hemingway, less is still more. (DG)
“Schooling” By Heather McGowan (Doubleday, 320 pages): A touching, almost bewilderingly beautiful first novel that got less attention than it deserved, presumably because it’s written in a poetic stream-of-consciousness that calls to mind Joyce, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and other not-so-user-friendly greats. “Schooling” is about a 13-year-old American girl named Catrine Evans. After her mother dies, Catrine’s father dumps her at an English boarding school. She founders immediately. Her accent is too flat, her shoes too clunky, her hair too much of a mess. Fortunately–or unfortunately, is more like it–Catrine bonds with a young chemistry teacher named Gilbert. Soon, they’ve become inseparable friends–and they take turns pulling each other toward trouble. Novelist McGowan refuses to pick a villain. Her characterizations, like her prose, is all about shading and subtlety. “Schooling” is a challenging book, but also quite a romantic one. In the lovely, elliptical prose you can hear young Catrine’s mind racing, as well as her heart. (JG)
“Getting a Life” By Helen Simpson (Knopf, 196 pages): This British writer with a cult following in her homeland weighs in with a sharp, funny, unsettling collection of stories about the sort of buyer’s remorse that can hit married folks round about middle age. Simpson’s characters tend to be women who either flee their kids every day and deny inconvenient emotions, or they’re housewives who’ve quit their careers and now resent their self-absorbed husbands as well as the “tempestuous egomaniacal little people” who call them mom. Not one of them has figured out how to balance work and career. It’s exciting to see a fiction writer reclaim territory often left to sociologists–especially a fiction writer who, like Lorrie Moore, can be both corrosive and tender. (JG)
“Almost” By Elizabeth Benedict (Houghton Mifflin, 288 pages): A tremendously engrossing novel about a middle-aged writer and recovering alcoholic named Sophy Chase who gets pulled back into everything she thought she’d escaped. At the outset of the book, Sophy and her married lover are in the midst of coitus when the police interruptus: it seems her depressed husband, Will, whom she’d finally walked out on a few months earlier, has been found dead in his bed on Swansea Island, off Massachusetts. The police are guessing he died of a heart attack. Sophy fears it was suicide. She heads back to Swansea and to a world of complications and old pains–a recovering alcoholic heading literally and figuratively back to the bar. Ultimately, “Almost” is about grief and love, about figuring out who your friends are and what, if anything, you owe everybody else. It’s smart, painfully funny and, at times, deeply moving. (JG)
“Faithless: Tales of Transgression” By Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco Press, 400 pages): Oates’s collection of short stories shows off why she’s such an enduring storyteller: She understood long ago that suspense should not be reserved only for raised-gold-lettering books at airports, but that it is the linchpin of any good storytelling, especially literary fiction that’s so often–and tragically–starved of oomph. Many of the stories in this collection were previously published in mystery anthologies, but they are some of the best short stories–the title story, for example–of any genre being written today. Reading like a microcosm of her career, the book naturally contains some duds. Well worth it for the masterful ones. (SM)
“The Complete Works of Isaac Babel” (Norton, 1,076 pages): The stories here are to be savored. Not only because they are some of the finest, most raucous and delightful examples of the modern short story. But because, as the title suggests, this is all we have of the great Russian writer who was executed in 1940 at the age of 46 by Stalin. Babel was a funny Jewish guy who told stories of his childhood in Odessa, of gangsters and of his stint in the Soviet army. In his writing he could be at once romantic and earthy, making up unusual metaphors to do the dirty work of telling honest stories. His life’s work, which also includes screenplays for silent movies and travel writing, may be relatively slim, but it can–and should–be reread. (SM)
“Look at Me” By Jennifer Egan (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 432 pages): For aging model Charlotte Swenson, her appearance is her life. Then, like the victim of some vengeful God, she is cursed to move through the world, invisible. She has miraculously survived a catastrophic car accident but 80 titanium screws in her face and extensive plastic surgery have rendered her unrecognizable. Uniquely ill-prepared for a life of anonymity, Charlotte looks for the will and the means to begin life again. Her story is entwined with that of an alienated adolescent–also named Charlotte–who is uncovering the secrets of her own seductive power through a dangerous affair with a teacher and her tutorials with a mentally unbalanced uncle. The book is crammed full of dramatic twists and turns that veer dangerously close to well-worn cliches but then Egan goes deeper, surprising us again and again. Egan limns the mysteries of human identity and the stranglehold our image-obsessed culture has on us all in this complicated and wildly ambitious novel. In the end, her dagger-sharp writing keeps the story from crumbling under its own accumulated weight. (PT)
