→ June 22, 2022
→ By

Lemon.

Kwon Yeo-Sun’s novella Lemon made a slew of best-of lists last year, from most-anticipated to top novels of 2021, for its unusual, incisive treatment of what might otherwise have been an ordinary murder mystery. Set in 2002, as the World Cup that took place in South Korea and Japan was coming to a close, Lemon examines the brutal murder of a beautiful high school student and the impact it had on her family, friends, the suspects, and others, while only partially unwrapping the mystery of who actually killed her.

Written through the perspective of three women who knew the victim, Hae-on, Lemon defies the conventions of the modern literary mystery, where a murder or other horrific crime defines the story’s structure and its solution must inform the ending of the book. Da-on is Hae-on’s younger sister, but was the more worldly of the two, often taking care of Hae-on when the older girl seemed ill-equipped to handle reality, forgetting even the most basic personal tasks; after Hae-on’s death, Da-on reacts in increasingly hysterical ways, including undergoing plastic surgery to try to resemble her dead sister. Taerim is the girlfriend of one of the two main suspects in the murder, and her sections are written as her halves of conversations with a suicide prevention line and a psychiatrist, and it becomes clear that she knows more than she has let on. She marries that suspect in question, but their life is shattered by a subsequent tragedy with a subtle connection to the original murder. Sanghui was a new student and classmate of Hae-on and plays the part of the demos from Greek tragedies, standing in for the audience (or the reader) and observing the story as a third party. Within all of these is the possible answer to the mystery, the obliquely described revenge plot Da-on takes on who she believes is the killer, and a powerful exploration of grief and the lack of meaning in this senseless death.

Kwon has won multiple literary awards in her native Korea, but this is her first work to be translated into English, which may explain some of the rapturous praise for Lemon – it’s our first exposure to her voice and style, even though she’s been publishing works in Korean for more than a quarter-century. She weaves poetry into the story, and her prose writing often has the metaphorical quality of poetry, with descriptions that leave the reader feeling like they’re looking at the story from an angle that leaves it shrouded in mist. There are recurring images and symbols, including the lemons of the title, and frequent mention of the color yellow, such as the dress the victim was supposedly wearing on the night of her murder, and meditative passages on appearance and identity or the meaning (or lack thereof) of life.

What the book doesn’t do, and what might frustrate a lot of readers, is give you a clear answer to the murder. The first chapter of the novella’s eight, each of which takes place in a different year, sets up what appears to be the plot of a literary mystery, with a police interrogation of one of those two suspects where the cop tries to coerce a confession, but Kwon defies any of those expectations afterwards. You just have to go with it, and what I believe is the answer is buried within other text without anything definitive, so you might miss it and you certainly don’t get the Big Confession that modern book culture has led us to expect. It’s a good ride because it challenges your reading mind, but if you need clear and unequivocal answers, it’s going to leave you frustrated.

Next up: I just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning book The Line of Beauty.

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→ June 20, 2022
→ By

Top 50 novels of the century (so far).

I’ve been planning to do some sort of ranking of the best novels of this century for at least four years now, but for a variety of reasons never sat down to actually do it. I think one reason is the constant sense that I haven’t read enough books to make such a list, although that’s probably silly given how much I read, and since nobody, not even full-time book critics (is there such a job any more?), can read absolutely everything. I can’t read every book, play every game, hear every album, or watch every movie before sitting down to decide which ones are my favorites.

The Twitter replies to my comment about The Netanyahus being the worst Pulitzer winner in at least 25 years finally got me back to the spreadsheet I’d started in 2018, although I ended up trashing it and starting over, to prepare for this post. I originally had about 67 books on the list, cut a few, ranked 50, and put ten honorable mentions at the end. Then I started writing the blurbs and moved a few books around the rankings too, which is, coincidentally, how I do player rankings for work as well. Sometimes you put down some words and realize you liked something more or less than you thought you did. It’s good to be flexible.

I’ve written the rankings in reverse order, so we’ll start at 50, with honorable mentions at the end. The hyperlink on each title goes to Bookshop.org, for which I have an affiliate account (so I get a small commission for each book sold through those links). They give 10% of earnings to local bookstores, and allow stores to sell via their site and keep all of the profits. If you can’t buy a book from your local independent bookstore, this is the next best option.

So, here we go – as of June 20, 2022, here are my top 50 books of this century:

50. The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey. Full review. A novelization of an old folk tale, The Snow Child tells the story of a couple who move to Alaska after their infant dies, where a girl, Faina, appears to have come to life from the snowchild they made. Is she real? A fairy? A hallucination? Ivey’s tale of grief, loss, and hope is haunting while balancing the possibilities of life against its inevitable tragedies.

49. The Teleportation Accident, by Ned Beauman. Full review. A madcap romp of sex, devil-worship, and, yes, teleportation, this book runs through multiple genres, both paying homage to them while sending them up, along with slapstick and other lowbrow humor, such as the side character who can’t tell a person from a painting of that person and keeps talking to the portraits of his ancestors as if they’re real.

48. All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu. Full review. A love story wrapped in a tale of identity, as we meet two men in an African country on the brink of civil war, with one later fleeing to America, where he falls in love with Helen, a social worker assigned to help him assimilate. Names and dates are left ambiguous or omitted entirely, while the importance of remembering as well as deliberate forgetting hover over both narratives.

47. Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi. Full review. What begins as a straightforward narrative about a high school play and a team-building exercise turns into metafictional, time-shifting story that asks questions about, to borrow a phrase, who lives, who dies, and who tells your story – and specifically who has the right to tell your story.

46. Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff. Full review. A novel in two distinct halves, the first about the husband, the second about the wife, where the second half reveals unseen truths about the first. It’s ambitious yet feels deeply personal, and the surfeit of literary references actually works in favor of the narrative, rather than coming off as showy.

45. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. Full review. The use of the first-person plural is gimmicky, but there’s a reason for the conceit in this novel that looks at the decline of the American workplace more than ten years before COVID-19 (may have) killed it off for good. There’s a related but distinct short story in the middle of the novel that breaks things up in a suboptimal way, but the two parts that form the shell are compelling and prescient.

44. The Oracle Year, by Charles Soule. Full review. The debut novel from comic book author Soule, this work speculative fiction gives us bassist Will Dando, who wakes up one day with 108 highly specific predictions in his head … and they start to come true. It’s imperfect in some ways but incredibly well-told, witty, and intense.

43. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. Full review. I do not agree with the critical and, I think, popular consensus that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is Chabon’s best work; that book is incredibly imaginative and rich with story, but it’s bloated and loses its focus, while this novel, a neo-noir detective story set in an alternate universe where the world’s Jews have been given a homeland in southeastern Alaska, hits similar themes with precision while hewing closely to its target style.

42. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. If you’re going to go sixteen years between novels, the return ought to be something special. Piranesi is far shorter than her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but has the same prose, imagery, and sense of wonder as the earlier work. It’s a mystery in a fantasy novel, as the narrator and the reader try to understand exactly where the narrator is, and how he got there. It’s like reading a dream.

41. HHhH, by Laurent Binet. Full review. Winner of France’s Prix Goncourt Prize, this historical novel has a metafictional element, combining a fictionalized telling of the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 with a story about the difficulty of telling that very story. It’s bold and ambitious, not entirely successful, but highly compelling, and of course there’s some satisfaction in reading about the successful assassination of one of the principal architects of the murders of 8 million Jews, Roma, gays, and other minority peoples.

40. From a Low and Quiet Sea, by Donal Ryan. Full review. A scant novel that tells the stories of three men, with no apparent connection, struggling with grief and sadness, until another catastrophe brings them together in the brief, final section. The novel took some criticism for its portrayal of Farouk, a Syrian refugee, in too-generic terms, but Ryan’s tremendous empathy for his characters ruled the day for me.

39. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Full review. A daring structure that follows ten generations of a family through two separate lines takes the reader from west Africa and the enslavement of its people to modern-day American and back to Ghana where the story began. Gyasi’s debut novel manages to develop and humanize its many characters in just a few pages each, allowing the story to build and grow even with this tenuous framework.

38. The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett. Full review. I thought this deserved the Pulitzer in 2021 rather than Louise Erdich’s fine but not award-worthy The Night Watchman. Inspired by Nella Larson’s novella Passing, which was the basis for the superb film directed by Rebecca Hall, this novel covers a pair of sisters, one of whom chooses to pass for white while the other does not, while exploring critical themes of race and identity in our modern society.

37. All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. Full review. Such a clever concept for a novel – All the Birds gives us two related, intertwined narratives, one from modern fantasy and one from hard science fiction, bringing them together, pulling them apart, and allowing the two main characters to show their flaws as they develop while heading towards a surprising resolution in a world not too far off from our own late-stage capitalist dystopia.

36. Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday. Full review. Halliday takes her romantic relationship with Philip Roth, who was over forty years her senior, and fictionalizes it in this wonderful, multi-part novel that revels in the asymmetry of that affair while giving Halliday’s stand-in, Alice, an unusual agency for the situation. That portion of the novel is followed by an absurdist section on a man with dual Iraqi-US citizenship who gets caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic trap at a London airport, a story with no apparent connection to the first one until the coda brings them together.

35. Blackout/All Clear, by Connie Willis. Full review. Published as two novels but sharing a continuous narrative, this time-travel story, sending historians from future Oxford back to World War II, where they get stuck (as often happens in Willis’s time-travel stories) and involved in the action in ways they shouldn’t, is grand, emotional, and evocative of the great British literature of the era it depicts.

34. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Full review. Diminishing returns set in quickly with its sequels, but Gilead, which was Robinson’s first novel in over twenty years when it was published, is a marvel of simplicity. It’s an epistolary novel, written as letters from its protagonist, a dying clergyman named John Ames, to his seven-year-old son for the child to read when he’s older. It’s a meditation on forgiveness and our limited capacity to understand the plights of others.

33. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter. Full review. I’m stretching the qualifications here, as this novella – it’s too short to properly call it a novel – is a marvel of wordplay and empathy, poetry in motion on the pages of a book. The Crow visits a father of two whose wife has died suddenly, and who is paralyzed by grief just as his sons need him most. Porter does not shy away from the man’s grief, but the Crow is there for a purpose, and the way Porter plays with language to advance the story is utterly extraordinary.

32. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood. My favorite book of 2021, Lockwood’s novel is extremely online – or at least her main character is, and it’s not going well, so when something bad happens IRL, she’s not ready to handle it. The novel varies in style from stream-of-consciousness to poetry to standard prose, jumping around in perspective and playing with language in ways that earned the book comparisons to the experimental novels of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.

31. The White Tiger, by Aravind Ariga. Full review. A dark comedy and satire of the upwardly mobile culture of contemporary Indian cities, The White Tiger gives us one of the great anti-heroes of the century in Balram, who rises from poverty through his own determination and a convenient lack of scruples to prosperity – but not without leaving some bodies behind him, figuratively and eventually literally.

30. The Sellout, by Paul Beatty. Full review. The first American-authored novel to win the Booker Prize, The Sellout is a vicious satire that’s also completely bonkers. The narrator, a Black man who lives in an “agrarian ghetto” in Los Angeles County, stands trial for trying to bring back slavery – the conclusion of a series of ill-conceived attempts to resegregate the area so that his unincorporated town, Dickens, will return to the map.

29. An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon. Full review. Set on a massive spaceship with its own highly structured, race-based caste society, this dystopian novel upends conventions of the child-hero genre while exploring racial power dynamics as well as how elites maintain their grip on society through fear and myth.

28. Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. Full review. From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist comes a light sci-fi novel where refugees can flee through special portals that appear as actual doors and allow passage through to other places on the globe. The story follows a couple fleeing war in an unnamed country in southeast or south Asia through a series of those doors, allowing them to experience the poor treatment and mistrust refugees face across the world, a journey that also tests their feelings for each other.

27. Bowlaway, by Elizabeth McCracken. Full review. McCracken is Ann Patchett’s primary editor, and there’s some similarity in their fiction as both authors show deep empathy and understanding for their characters. Set in a small town outside Boston, Bowlaway follows a cast of characters through multiple generations, starting with the strange woman who appeared in the town’s graveyard with no memory of where she’d been, after which she founds a candlepin bowling alley and hires a couple of the town’s (many) eccentrics.

26. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Full (but short) review. Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle­ remains my favorite of his works, with this follow-up novel second for me thanks to similar themes and literary techniques – notably his extensive use of magical realism in a context beyond that seen in the Latin American or African traditions of magical realism.He doesn’t write women well at all, though, a failing that has become more apparent in his novels since this one.

25. Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. Full review. I’ll quote my own review: “If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.” An epic work of fiction set among the pachinko parlors of Japan, the novel explores themes of alienation and isolation by looking at Koreans living and working in a foreign country that has always viewed them as an inferior minority.

24. The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin. Full review. Jemisin won the Hugo Award for each of the books in her Broken Earth trilogy, but this book, her first after that series ended, is her best so far. Six people find themselves transformed so that each of them is a borough of New York City or the city entire – not metaphorically, but physically, in a sort of transubstantiation, and their personalities match the character of the geographies they have become.

23. Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon. Full review. I have read several Pynchon novels, but none made me laugh like this one did – it’s a sort of slacker noir, a detective novel set in drug-addled California in the 1970s, with a detective who’s seldom sober enough for the job. It is far, far more accessible than Gravity’s Rainbow, and doesn’t require esoteric knowledge to understand it like The Crying of Lot 49.

22. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Full review. As ambitious a work of fiction as any I’ve read this century, Cloud Atlas contains six nested novellas, five of them split into two parts (so that the novella that starts the book also finishes it), with one element tying each one to the next. Each novella has a unique style – I’m partial to “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” a detective story – and Mitchell moves so deftly from one to the next that the whole work remains cohesive.

21. Lush Life, by Richard Price. Full review. Price has written for The Wire and The Night Of, as well as authoring nine novels, including 1992’s Clockers and this one, a broad, gritty piece of highly realistic fiction that follows a broad ensemble of characters through the ramifications of what appears to be an ordinary (if awful) street crime.

20. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. Full review. Another novel with a complex structure, this epic work follows a prospector who arrives in a New Zealand mining town, only to walk into a set of mysteries including a dead hermit, a prostitute who may have attempted suicide, stolen claims, and much more. The structure itself relates to the twelve signs of the zodiac and to the planets in the solar system, although I don’t think you need to see or follow that to appreciate its incredible story and rich characterization.

19. The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. Full review. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction’s guidelines say it is for a work “by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” Johnson is American, but this remarkable novel definitely does not deal with American life – it is about North Korea, and opens a window on to that most isolated nation, following a young boy in a North Korean orphanage through his military service, time in a prison mine, and then a fantastical life after prison that puts him in the crosshairs of the Dear Leader himself.

18. The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. Full review. A novel that finds hope in hopelessness, giving us Leo Gorsky, perhaps the most ill-fated man in the universe, a Holocaust survivor whose lover thought he was dead and married someone else while carrying Leo’s baby. His story intertwines with two others around a book within the book, also called The History of Love, leading to a deeply emotional, unlikely-but-not-impossible conclusion.

17. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. Full review. One of the most acclaimed books of the last twenty years (I think), this book reimagines the network of people, including Quakers, free Blacks, and other abolitionists who helped slaves escape the antebellum South as an actual subterranean railroad that served the same purpose – but that exposes the fleeing slaves of the book to the horrors of multiple Confederate states before they get close to freedom.

16. Wizard of the Crow, by Ng?g? wa Thiong’o. wa Thing’o is a revered Kenyan author, playwright, and Fanonist dissident who was imprisoned in the 1970s for writing a play that criticized the government. He’s written only two novels in the last 30 years, but one of them, 2004’s Wizard of the Crow, is an epic work of magical realism, satire, and scathing political commentary. Set in a corrupt African dictatorship, where allegiances change with the wind, a new power emerges in the form of an inadvertent charlatan calling himself the Wizard of the Crow, who threatens the country’s Ruler in the days after the end of colonialism.

15. Among Others, by Jo Walton. Full review. I first read this book because it won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for its year, but that may undersell it, because it’s far from just a genre book – this is a beautiful if somewhat dark coming-of-age novel with just a hint of fantasy in the setting. Calling it a fantasy novel might deter some people from reading it; this isn’t swords and sorcery, or knights and damsels, just a damn good story about growing up when one of the people who should love and protect you turns out to be an evil witch.

14. Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Adichie. Full review. Adichie has received more attention for her novel Americanah and her non-fiction writing, including We Should All Be Feminists (which, yes, we should), but this is her best work to date – a novel set during the Nigerian Civil War, when the Nigerian government blockaded the secessionist state of Biafra, causing a famine that killed two million people. I don’t see any particular parallels to anything happening today, though. Adichie follows five characters, including two couples, from before the war began through the depths of the conflict, through personal losses and the collapse of what had been a reasonably prosperous society.

13. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. Russo is one of the funniest writers I’ve read, but in this, his best novel, he also works in wry commentary on how economic declines hit blue-collar American towns (this one in New England, like most of his settings) and affect the people in them at a deeply personal level. His characters are well-built and contribute to the sense of a specific place – you may not live in this town, but you understand it, and picture it, and have your favorites among the people in it. And when the big plot point finally comes in this book, one that could easily happen in a novel set today, you’re affected because the characters you care about are affected.

12. All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. Full review. One of the best-plotted novels I’ve ever read, All The Light runs about 500 pages, yet I read it in two days on a work trip because I absolutely could not wait to see how the novel’s twin storylines would come together – and they do, in almost miraculous fashion, as two children, a blind French girl and a true-believer German boy, navigate the closing windows of Europe on the brink of war.

11. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fannone Jeffers. Full review. I’m trying to avoid recency bias here, but this is the best book I’ve read in a few years – if we’re just going off this list, I think it’s the best I’ve read in about five years. Jeffers’ debut novel covers centuries of history through the lens of one Black family, from their ancestors in slavery to the contemporary struggles of three sisters, focused on one named Ailey Pearl, to cope with the weight of their racial history and a very personal trauma that has affected all of them. The prose is beautiful and the characters are rich and compelling, even many of the secondary ones.

10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Full review. Gaiman takes forgotten gods from religions around the world and brings them back to modern-day America in a complex fight for the soul of the country. For some reason, this centers on Shadow, a man just out of prison, who runs into Odin incarnate on the flight home. The book also spawned a related work, Anansi Boys, which is also excellent but not as ambitious as this tour de force, which seems to twist the fantasy genre inside-out along with a wildly exciting, action-packed story.

9. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Full review. Inspired by the takeover of the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, Bel Canto paints a rich portrait of a huge ensemble of characters, both hostages and terrorists, who become a village of sorts, learning about each other as we do, facing their fears and weaknesses, falling in love, becoming oblivious to the outside world. Patchett is always a beautiful writer who creates complex characters and shows empathy for even the worst of them, and her skills were most on display here, a novel she has indicated was inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

8. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John. Full review. How is one of the most lyrical novels I’ve ever read set during a global pandemic that wipes out a huge portion of the planet’s population and leads to the complete collapse of civilized society? Perhaps because St. John focuses so much on the humanity within the crisis, and sees the good and the bad that come about when people are pushed beyond their limits. There’s also a small plot strand that doubles as an ode to the enduring power of great stories to entertain and enrich us.

7. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. Ishiguro wrote two of the best novels I’ve ever read – this one and Remains of the Day, written in 1989. Never Let Me Go starts out like a work of classic British literature, perhaps a coming-of-age drama in the vein of Brideshead Revisited, but then the novel’s big secret is revealed and it turns into a Greek tragedy that confronts impossible questions of identity, ethics, and sacrifice.

6. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. Full review. I read this and The Orphan Master’s Son back-to-back in the summer of 2013, finishing this slim novel in just two days; it was such a great week of reading that I still remember it clearly, with two books that were so great, so compelling, that I was just lost in them. The Sense of an Ending gives us Tony Webster, now retired, divorced, living alone, first remembering a period from his school days with his girlfriend Veronica and his precocious friend Adrian. When Veronica’s mother dies, leaving Tony a bit of money, he reconnects with Veronica, and the edifice in his memory starts to crumble as he learns things he never knew about his own past.

5. In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman. Full review. Rahman’s lone novel to date is a knockout, combining the U.S.’s failed war in Afghanistan and the 2007-08 financial crisis in a story that ranges from delving into the roots of one man’s personal crises to blistering attacks on the power of global elites. It’s postcolonial literature through an entirely different, diasporic lens, and the story moves at a brisk pace despite a lack of traditional action. When the ending hits, it is a metaphorical bomb on the page, and throws everything that has come before into question.

4. Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders. Full review. Saunders is a master of the short story, winning awards for his collection Tenth of December, but didn’t publish his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, until he was 59, and all that book did was win the Booker Prize. Set mostly over the course of a single night in the bardo, a Tibetan term for the Buddhist concept of a state between life and rebirth, and follows Abraham Lincoln through his grief over the death of his son Willie, who died at age 11 of typhoid fever, just a year into his father’s first term as President, while working in snippets from real and fictional news stories of the time. It’s a profound look at parenthood and the unendurable loss of a child, from one of our greatest contemporary prose writers.

3. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. Harrowing, dark, and unforgettable in so many ways, The Road is the most powerful book I have ever read on what it is like to be a parent and be willing to give up everything, including yourself, for your child. Set in a post-apocalyptic America where society is gone and humanity may be headed for extinction, The Road follows the Man and the Boy as they walk down abandoned interstates towards the sea and an unknown, possibly nonexistent, hope. It is graphic and horrifying, often difficult to read for its content, but it is the exemplar of how fiction can illuminate core truths about life.

2. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. Full review. Out of the 1200+ novels I’ve read in my life, this is the one about which I have most changed by opinion from my initial reading. I was so unused to Smith’s incredible storytelling style, dubbed “hysterical realism” by critic James Wood in his review, that my first response was rather negative – but that’s because I was used to very specific styles of literature. The more I thought about the book after finishing, over days and months, the more I realized the incredible genius of it. So much literature of this century owes a debt to Smith and White Teeth and Hortense’s many root canals. It will defy your expectations for a novel in all of the best ways and its themes are both very much of its moment and utterly timeless.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. A fantasy novel, yes, but so much more, and the fastest 1000-page novel I’ve ever read. (The Executioner’s Song was close, but it’s also not really a novel.) The two characters of the title are magicians in 19th century London, the latter an older, curmudgeonly man who proves that magic still exists centuries after its decline in England, and the former a younger upstart who becomes Norrell’s pupil. The two clash over magic’s use and end up engaged in a public battle of philosophies, while Norrell’s bargain with an underworld fairy known as “the gentleman with the thistle-down hair” has brought curses upon many within London, including Strange’s wife, Arabella. It is a work of stupendous imagination, written very much in the style of literature of that period, but with the very modern touch of fabricated footnotes that contain much of the book’s great wit. The book was also adapted into a seven-part BBC series that contained one of my favorite TV lines ever, and that hewed closely to the story and characters from the original text. Clarke has created a world like ours and yet so very unlike it, with two of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered, and uses fantasy as her vehicle but not her raison d’être (d’écrire?): Magic just lets her tell this majestic story of two men and their egos, fighting each other over philosophy while the world around them burns. It is gripping right until the end, and will leave you wanting more.

Honorable mentions, in alphabetical order:

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→ January 24, 2022
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Klara and the Sun.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the greatest novelists currently writing in English, a deserving winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker Prize (for The Remains of the Day), and author of two of the hundred best novels I’ve ever read (Remains and Never Let Me Go). His latest novel, Klara and the Sun, made the longlist for the Booker, finds him revisiting themes from several of his earlier works in another light science fiction milieu, in a work that is beautifully written but often seems too remote from its real subjects.

Klara is an Artificial Friend, an android that parents buy to serve as companions for their children, since school is now held remotely. Many children are also ‘lifted’ in what appears to be genetic engineering, but it’s a devil’s bargain – children must be lifted to have a chance of going to a suitable school, but there’s some risk of negative side effects, even death, from the procedure. Klara finds herself chosen to be the companion of Josie, a child who’s been lifted but is suffering significant illnesses because of it, and it’s implied that the lifting is part of why her parents are divorced. Artificial Friends get their power from the sun, so Klara comes to believe that the Sun is a god, or the God, and that this omnipotent being will be able to cure Josie – if Klara does something in return.

Because Klara narrates the book, we only get a superficial take on everything that happens, and details you might expect are not forthcoming (do not forthcome?). I’m just assuming ‘lifting’ means genetic engineering of some sort, for example. It arises that someone else in the world of these people has died, and we are left to infer the cause. There are great novels narrated by children or childlike characters – To Kill a Mockingbird is the most obvious example – but they amp up the level of difficulty for author and reader alike. Klara’s commentary is robotic, by design I assume, and it is the first way in which Ishiguro holds us at a distance from the text.

Klara and the Sun might be the loneliest novel I’ve ever read. The mere idea of Artificial Friends seems conjured out of a cloud of loneliness, and every character in this novel comes across as almost desperate in their lack of connection with others. There are few interactions here that don’t involve Klara, who is, to be clear, not an actual person. Josie’s parents are alienated from her as well as from each other, and their nearest neighbors, who live a mile or so away, are further separated from them because Rick, who is Josie’s age, was not ‘lifted.’ This near-future, which also includes replacement of even highly educated workers by robots or automation, seems neither that distant from ours nor that improbable, but it sounds apocalyptic in its isolation.

Klara’s relationship with the Sun feels like a parody of religious faith, or at least of a child’s concept thereof; Klara assumes that anything she doesn’t understand must be the Sun’s doing, and that the Sun can change anything if Klara simply believes enough – or makes an appropriate sacrifice. She also has a child’s conception of the world, seeing one small construction belching out smoke and assuming it is the only source of pollution on the planet. Klara convinces several other people to help her in her odd quest to appease the Sun and save Josie, but, without spoiling the ending, I’ll say that the outcome leaves Klara with next to nothing in the end.

Ishiguro’s prose never fails to amaze; even in The Unconsoled, by far my least favorite of his novels even though its ambition is evident, he still writes beautifully, evoking rich images of time and place. It’s jarring in Klara and the Sun to see such classic, almost poetic prose used for a story that is relentless in its reserve. Klara had to be the narrator, and yet her childlike view of the world, including a limited emotional vocabulary, means that the novel lacks the emotional punch of Ishiguro’s other works – even Never Let Me Go, which had a similarly dystopian setup and story, but had a huge emotional payoff. Klara has the same distinctive voice and meticulous setup as I’ve come to expect from Ishiguro, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

Next up: I’ve just finished Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, which lived up to its billing.

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→ December 17, 2021
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The Luminaries.

Eleanor Catton won the 2013 Booker Prize for her massive novel The Luminaries, becoming the youngest-ever winner of the prize, all the more remarkable for how much the novel sounds like the creation of a much older mind. It’s part mystery, part historical fiction, a dash of picaresque, and at times a bit of a mess, with one of the most untidy endings I can recall in a novel of this magnitude.

The Luminaries takes us to 1866, to New Zealand’s South Island, and walks us into a gold-rush town called Hokitika with the newly arrived prospector Walter Moody, who is there to pan for gold, and instead wanders headlong into a series of interconnected mysteries in the town involving a corrupt sea captain, a missing goldpanner, a dead hermit, an opium-addicted prostitute, a possibly-bogus will, a vendetta, Sinophobia, a M?ori miner, and more. The twelve men he meets are all caught up in the web of mysteries in some way, with their connections forming an elaborate tapestry that puts Moody (and the reader) well into the weeds before any resolution appears. The mysteries are gripping, but they’re far better because of the strength of all of the characters Catton has created; if anything, Moody is this novel’s Nick Jenkins, the observer character who is himself not all that interesting.

The central mystery revolves around that dead hermit, Crosbie Wells, and his unknown relationship to the conniving captain Francis Carver, and their shared connection to Anna Wetherell, the prostitute who was found unconscious, possibly as a result of a failed suicide attempt, on the side of a road the same night that Wells was found dead in his hovel. That question drives the plot, but the way Catton unfurls it, character by character, shows incredible plotting for such a young novelist, and allows her to give the reader a cornucopia of fascinating and often weird characters, most sympathetic, a few decidedly not so. You come for the mystery, but you stay for the weirdos.

Catton did make two significant structural choices in the novel that didn’t quite work for me. She used the signs of the western zodiac and other astrology tidbits to title the chapters, and the twelve men are supposed to correspond to those signs. Astrology is woo, and if there’s a real connection between the zodiac signs and anything in the book, I missed it, and I’m not terribly sorry about it. She also concludes the novel’s main narrative somewhat abruptly, and then jumps back in time to provide a mostly linear narrative of what actually happened before Moody arrived, an answer key of sorts at the back of the book. Doing so is not an inherently bad choice – every mystery needs its solution – but the switch was sudden, and after the climax of the main story, which has an unexpected event that triggers the end, we get very little resolution or explanation of what happened or how the main characters react to it.

I’ve read plenty of 800+ page novels, but few are actual page-turners. The Luminaries flew by, with prose that evokes the 19th century without sounding like it was written in the 19th century – there’s some formality, some nods to colloquial English of the time, but the majority of the prose reads like it was written more recently. That central narrative gripped me from fairly early on in the story, and Catton increases its complexity (and thus the reader’s confusion) quite well before the gradual revelations of different characters’ parts in the overall drama. The Booker Prize winners’ list is a real mixed bag, but this is one of the better ones I’ve read – and one of the most readable, too.

Next up: I’m partway through this year’s Booker Prize winner, The Promise, by Damon Galgut.

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→ June 10, 2021
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How Lucky.

As a general rule, I don’t review books by people I know. For one thing, I know a lot of people who write books. I’m a writer, and I wrote some books, and either of those things would probably put me in contact with lots of people who also write books. And life beyond that has also put me in contacts with people who write books. Sometimes people I didn’t know were writing books write books. There are a lot of books in my world. It’s a good thing I like to read.

Anyway, I’m going to break my own rule for a moment – not the first time, I think, but it’s rare – to talk about Will Leitch’s novel How Lucky. Will’s a longtime friend, and someone whose work I enjoy. He’s also one of the most prolific writers around, and when I see his newsletter come in on Saturday, I just can’t get over how many words he writes each week. I would never tell you that writing is hard for me, but I feel like an absolute sluggard compared to Will.

How Lucky is fabulous. It’s not what it seems to be, at first, and I wonder how well the book world will appreciate it for what it truly is – a character study of the highest order, full of empathy, insight, and humor. There’s a Rear Window-ish mystery here, and Will does a fine job executing that plot without resorting to too many clichés, and when the main character is in danger (as he must be, at some point, because the conventions of the genre say so), it doesn’t last too long. There are also some fun side characters who add a lot of humor in addition to giving the protagonist some sort of foils against whom he can work. But this is about Daniel, the narrator, the star, and eventually, the hero.

Daniel works from home, handling some social media work for a fictional, regional airline in the southeast, which means he’s extra busy on college football game days. He also has spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic, progressive disease that has him using a wheelchair and unable to speak without the aid of a speech-generating device. He lives in Athens, Georgia, and gets help a few times a day from a home health worker named Marjani, as well as frequent visits from Travis, Daniel’s best friend since childhood, a sort of lovable stoner right out of Inherent Vice.

Daniel’s days have a predictable routine, and over the few weeks right before the novel starts, he sees a University of Georgia student, whom we later learn is a recent arrival from China named Ai Chin, several mornings at the same time as she’s walking and he’s on his front porch. One morning, however, she gets into a tan Camaro Daniel hasn’t seen before, and within a day, there are reports that she’s gone missing, and Daniel suspects that he saw her abductor. The story becomes a little less straightforward than that as it moves along, but that is all secondary to what we get from Daniel. The mystery exists in service to the main character, to give Leitch more room to expand on Daniel’s personality and thoughts on his life in a body that is betraying him a hell of a lot faster than the rest of our bodies are betraying us.

The conceit that Daniel, despite being what most people would probably consider unlucky to an extreme degree, doesn’t see himself that way is central to the book. Will mentions in the acknowledgements (where, full disclosure, I am also mentioned) that he and his family are close with a family in Athens whose son was born with SMA as well, which introduced him to the community of families dealing with this disease. SMA is progressive, and degenerative, so while the life expectancy of children born with it has increased substantially over the last few decades, notably since the approval of a drug called Spinraza in December of 2016, it is ultimately terminal, and people with SMA see a faster decline in their quality of life as the motor neurons in the spinal cord shrink and lose function. I can’t speak for anyone with SMA, or even as a family member of someone with it or a similar disease (like ALS), but I didn’t find Will’s portrayal of Daniel here to be facile, or overly optimistic. Daniel strikes me as a realist, just a life-positive one. He’s not denying what’s happening, or what’s in front of him. He’s just determined to make the best of it, and appreciative of what the world – especially his mom, Travis, and Marjani – has given him. He combines that with some dry wit that, because I know the author and have listened to lots of his podcasts as well as read quite a lot of his work, is very much Will’s, and I heard much of Daniel’s inner monologue in Will’s voice.

I tore through How Lucky in just three days, even though I was pretty sure how the plot itself was going to conclude – not down to the details, of course, but in general, there are a limited number of ways Leitch could end this book, and one in particular that made the most sense given the rest of the novel. I just couldn’t get enough of Daniel’s character. Will has created a memorable, likeable protagonist whose voice is unique and who stands out especially today in the era of the antihero. I’ve seen comparisons of Daniel to all sorts of main characters from literary history, but he reminded me quite a bit of one of my own favorites, Miles Vorkosigan, the hero of Lois McMaster Bujold’s series of sci-fi adventure novels, himself born with a genetic disease that limited his growth and left him with brittle bones. Miles’ novels all work pretty much the same way: He throws himself into ridiculous situations, often with insufficient regard for his own well-being, and uses his brains to work his way out of trouble. It’s formulaic, but a formula I can’t help enjoying. Daniel is more well-rounded, and as the narrator, he gives us far more insight into his personality than Bujold gives us into Miles over multiple novels, but they share the same general outlook on life, and while Miles never says it explicitly, I think he’d echo Daniel’s view. We are all just lucky to be alive, and to experience the world with each other is one of life’s greatest gifts.

Next up: I’ve just finished Nella Larsen’s Passing, a film adaptation of which will appear on Netflix later this year.

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→ June 4, 2021
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The Vanishing Half.

Brit Bennett has popped up as a favorite to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, to be announced next Friday, June 11th, for her second novel, The Vanishing Half, which HBO is already planning to adapt into a limited series. It is a fascinating work about “passing,” where lighter-skinned Black people pass as white (itself the subject of a novel, Nella Larsen’s Passing, that will appear on the big screen later this year), but with multiple dimensions of intersectionality as well, exploring what happens when two twins take divergent paths because one passes and the other does not.

Desiree and Stella Vignes are identical twins who live in a peculiar town outside of New Orleans called Mallard, a Black enclave where all the residents have relatively light skin – to the point that Mallard looks down on Black people with darker skin tones in many of the ways that you might associate with subtle white racism, even though Mallard residents themselves face racism subtle and unsubtle from white people from surrounding towns. That touches the girls’ lives when they’re seven years old and white men lynch their father as they watch, hiding with their mother, the devastation of which leads indirectly to their decision to run away from home as teenagers. They move to New Orleans, barely able to take care of themselves at first, but eventually settle into menial jobs, one of which comes to Stella because she can pass as a white woman, and the hiring person doesn’t even consider that she might be Black. Stella becomes the vanishing twin of the book’s title, leaving New Orleans without giving her sister any warning, leaving no trace of herself and cutting off any contact with her remaining family. The novel traces their two paths, and how each has one child, a daughter, the two of whom will eventually come into coincidental contact in California, forcing both Vignes sisters to confront their pasts, both shared and separate.

For a novel that isn’t very long – 343 pages, and a brief read for that length – The Vanishing Half has a lot to unpack, starting, of course, with its core examination of race and identity. Race is a social construct, and Bennett uses that as a launching point for the very unparallel lives first of the Vignes sisters, who find themselves in very different circumstances as they move into adulthood, and then their daughters, two cousins who come back together as if driven there by fate. (How Desiree’s daughter, Jude, first encounters and recognizes the aunt she’d never met requires some suspension of disbelief.) The interplay between race, identity – can you be who you are if you shed the race society first thrust upon you? – and later social status is the clear strength of the book, but it becomes muddled in places as Bennett’s approach becomes more intersectional, bringing in additional characters who are well-developed for secondary players but who aren’t additive to the main story. The narrative is more potent when she’s using the two sisters’ stories to explore different aspects of race and racism in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, which seems like the most likely argument for this book to win the Pulitzer.

Of the two main characters, Desiree seems the more developed, although there might be some primacy bias at work there – we get a few chapters of her story before we meet Stella at all. It’s also likely that Bennett left Stella more inscrutable by design, the “star” who is always just far enough away to remain somewhat impossible to truly know. Desiree’s daughter, Jude, shares a name with the Biblical figure who wrote about how God would punish false prophets, those who preached in his name without his truth, imploring the faithful to stand up for their beliefs – which she does, pursuing Stella and Stella’s daughter Kennedy with the tenacity of a true believer. As the twins fade into the background, it’s Jude who emerges as the novel’s most complete and compelling character, dealing with the consequences of both sisters’ choices in life, and a society that imposes such a cost on Blackness that her aunt chose passing – and giving up her sister, her mother, and her own identity – rather than continue to pay.

Next up: My friend Will Leitch’s first novel, How Lucky.

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→ June 1, 2021
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The Ardent Swarm.

Tunisian author Yamen Manai’s slim fable The Ardent Swarm first appeared in the U.S. this February to wide acclaim, as the longtime novelist’s work hadn’t appeared in English before. Set in an unnamed country that bears a strong resemblance to Tunisia in the wake of the overthrow of the dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the story follows the humble beekeeper Sidi, who sees one of his colonies of bees (whom he calls his “girls”) ravaged by what we all now know as murder hornets – Vespa mandarinia, the Asian giant hornet, which preys on honeybees. When he discovers the cause of the collapse of his colonies, two of his friends offer to fly to Japan to gather queen bees of the Apis cerana japonica subspecies, the only honeybee with a known defense mechanism against the murder hornets: the “ardent swarm,” where the honeybee workers surround the invader, exhale more carbon dioxide, and beat their wings furiously to raise the temperature up near 50 Celsius, cooking the hornet to death.

In Manai’s novel, the dictator, just referred to as Handsome One, has been deposed just as Ben-Ali was.  In the wake of his overthrow, various factions are competing for power, including the military and a radical Islamist group called The Party of God that tries to buy votes by distributing free food to rural villagers – a more extreme depiction of the Islamist party Ennahda, which won the most seats in the first parliamentary elections after Ben-Ali’s ouster, although secularist parties took power in subsequent elections. Sidi resists the The Party of God’s inducements, only to discover that they bear responsibility for the deaths of his “girls,” forcing him to make a choice that stands as a metaphor for the choice that faced Tunisia – and that other countries faced in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, often choosing less wisely than the Tunisians did.

The Ardent Swarm is an obvious parable, with obvious parallels to the Arab Spring while also serving as a lament and a warning over our cavalier relationship to our environment, and how fragile the ecosystem on which our species depends can be. We depend on these pollinators, including domesticated honeybees and wild bumblebees, to maintain our food supply, but a combination of stressors from parasites (notably the Verroa mite), habitat loss, and pesticides appears to be contributing to the decline of domestic stocks in North America and Europe. Minai ties the corruption of the Party of God to a breakdown in this historical relationship between humans and the land, short-circuiting it in a way that will leave people dependent on their government for basic needs – and thus more compliant to its demands – if they can’t, or forget how to, take care of themselves. Sidi stands nearly alone in his resistance to this pressure, and faces extremely difficult odds when trying to resurrect his colonies, an effort obstructed by further corruption by Islamist authorities in the government and in the university where one of his allies works.

A cynical take on The Ardent Swarm might compare it to the over-the-top fables of Paolo Coelho, which are well-written but simplistic. I saw this more as a modern and less oblique twist on the short novels of Italo Calvino, one of the greatest fabulists in literary history, an author very concerned with the relation between person and place. There’s wit here that reminded me more of Calvino, or even a little of Murakami, but with the seriousness of the French satirists of the mid-20th century. The Ardent Swarm is a plea, for democracy, for our environment, and for a different future than the one towards which we’re heading. It deserves a wider audience.

Next up: Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, one of the favorites to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when that award is announced next Friday.

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→ April 12, 2021
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The Oracle Year.

I’m not sure how I first heard about The Oracle Year, the first prose novel from graphic novelist Charles Soule, but I believe it was a positive review rather than a reader recommendation. It sat unpurchased on my wishlist for some time before I gave up and bought it myself, and then tore through the novel’s 400 pages in less than four days. It’s weird and improbable and incredibly compelling, with so much velocity to it that I could forgive its faults, and never could put the book down for long.

Will Dando is a more or less unemployed bassist who wakes up one morning with 108 oddly specific predictions about the future in his head, and when he writes them down, he realizes that the first few were accurate, so with the help of his friend Hamza, he dubs himself the Oracle, sets up a site (called the Site) to publish certain predictions, and sells a few others for a massive profit. This endeavor leads to substantial and largely foreseeable consequences, not the least of which is that he’s attracted the attention of the FBI, religious leaders, and a few other folks who would like to know his secret or just generally shut him down. For reasons that even he doesn’t fully understand, however, Will can’t just stop being the Oracle, even when it’s clear that doing so is his best shot to save himself, Hamza, and Hamza’s pregnant wife Miko, both of whom become deeply involved in the Oracle’s undertakings. Eventually, those predictions lead to real-world violence and many preventable deaths, sending Will into an existential crisis and opening up questions of free will, the inevitability of history, and just who sent Will those predictions in the first place.

The Oracle Year is nuts, and I mean that in a very good way. The pace never lets up, and Soule has managed to populate the book with interesting and strange characters – not many with depth, but at least with enough complexity to make them seem real on the page. There’s the Protestant televangelist Hosiah Branson, who fulminates against the Oracle from his pulpit, only to find that one of the 108 predictions is about him. There are two feds who clearly loathe each other but who have to work together to find the Oracle, because their boss says so. There’s the fixer named the Coach, the most intriguing and wonderful character outside of Dando – I’d read an entire book about the Coach, but I won’t spoil any details about them here. There are also a lot of people here who completely lose sight of their own humanity in trying to figure out who the Oracle is or what he’s doing or how to profit from his predictions, including, I’d argue, Hamza, even though much of what he plans as Will’s “business partner” turns out to be prudent. And then there’s Leigh Shore, the frustrated gossip reporter who latches on to the Oracle as a story and ends up (unsurprisingly) directly involved in the plot, a character who has one dimension, her ambition to get the story that will make her career, but it’s a good dimension for a character who ends up proving somewhat critical to the resolution of the story.

Where the plot goes is both extremely clever, reminiscent of good time-travel fiction like that of Connie Willis, and a little bit too easy. Soule has a very strong grasp of a storyline that could easily spin out of control, and brings back earlier elements to help close the story in a way that feels tightly plotted. He also has Dando and some of the other characters talk their way out of trouble that might not play out quite so easily in the real world – it’s not completely implausible, but at the least, Soule rushes through some of the dialogue where Dando (or someone else) argues a point and his antagonist concedes too quickly despite having the upper hand. It’s a small complaint for a novel that so engrossed me that I had to slow myself down to make sure I wasn’t skipping whole sentences, but I definitely got a sense near the end that I knew how this was all going to work out, and that it probably wouldn’t be wholly satisfying. But man did this thing hum along in a way few novels do, and Soule is obviously quite intelligent and tech-savvy enough to make some of the ways in which Hamza and Dando protect the Oracle’s identity credible.

Next up: Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.

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→ February 14, 2021
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The Shadow King.

Maaza Mengiste’s 2020 novel The Shadow King was nominated for the Booker Prize last year, making the shortlist before losing to the Scottish novel Shuggie Bain. An epic war novel that also comes across as deeply personal – which, it turns out, it is – The Shadow King also tells a forgotten story of the roles women play in wartime, roles that are not limited to staying home waiting for the men.

Set in Ethiopia in 1935, the main narrative revolves around Hirut, an orphaned girl taken in as a servant by a neighboring couple, Kidane and his wife Aster, as well as the nameless cook who also works for them. Kidane was friendly with Hirut’s parents and agreed to care for her, but Aster sees her as a romantic rival, and becomes increasingly abusive to Hirut through the novel’s first section. The cook has her own complicated, longtime relationship with Aster, and now tries to protect Hirut, as the two share cramped quarters while the vain Aster appears to live in relative luxury, demanding material rewards from Kidane and clutching them like heirlooms.

Then war arrives, in the person of the Italian fascisti, as the Italian tyrant Benito Mussolini attempted to annex the kingdom of Ethiopia, which they had tried previously to control via two prior wars and a disputed treaty. Their arrival leads Kidane to head off to war, but rather than waiting behind, Aster also grabs a gun and departs separately, also intending to fight, bringing Hirut and the cook with her. While at the front, they meet Minim, a poor man who happens to bear a strong resemblance to the Emperor, Haile Selassie, who ruled from 1930 to 1974 and was the last in a dynasty of rules that dated back to the 13th century. Selassie had fled to England, where he was ruling in exile (and comfort), so the leaders of the Ethiopians’ untrained army, with simple weapons and no armored vehicles (compared to the Italians’ modern weapons and tanks and highly trained soldiers), realize that seeing their king would help motivate the soldiers, so they use Minim as a stand-in so the fighters would believe Selassie had come to join them at the front.

Mengiste sets you up to think Hirut will be the downtrodden heroine with whom you should sympathize, with Aster the antagonist, but the novel isn’t that linear in plot or purpose. Aster takes on a new role when the war begins, while Hirut also just becomes less central, and Kidane turns out to be less a protector than Hirut originally thought. Mengiste also introduces a second subplot around the Italian photographer Ettore, a Jewish man who is serving a government he knows may choose to end his liberty or his life at any time, and that he learns has likely killed his parents, even as he continues to document the war and the army’s killings by photographing every Ethiopian they execute in their final moments. His story and that of the women will, of course, intersect before Ethiopia falls and the novel ends.

This is a war novel, and a feminist one too, but in no way does Mengiste let the latter mitigate or soften any part of the former – her women are strong, and unwilling to be limited by any social customs that keep women from fighting when the country’s existence is at stake. The Shadow King is brutal and violent. Her descriptions invoke the dry, hot, dusty climate where the soldiers gathered to plan guerrilla attacks and futile defenses – the Ethiopians fought for about 16 months, but succumbed in 1937 – and where Minim takes on the role of body double. They also add to the sense of desperation around Ettore, a noncombatant in the service of a country that views him as less than human and that will, soon enough, be willing to send him to his death, but who is every bit the stranger in a strange land in Ethiopia and visibly an intruder and enemy to the native population. The juxtaposition of the stories can be jarring, certainly incongruous, but their intersection is one of the novel’s most powerful moments, combined with the return of Haile Selassie from exile and the aftermath of the Italian occupation. I haven’t read Shuggie Bain and can’t comment on whether this is better, but I easily understand its nomination.

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→ December 4, 2020
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Piranesi.

Has any novel been as long-awaited as Susanna Clarke’s sophomore work Piranesi? Her first novel, 2004’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is one of the best books I’ve ever read, perhaps the best written this century so far, a brilliantly rendered epic about rival magicians in the 1800s, complete with the funniest footnotes I’ve ever seen. Clarke fell ill after writing it, and other than one book of short stories, published nothing until this year, when Piranesi appeared, as if from another world, in September. While it’s quite unlike her first novel, Piranesi is remarkable – brilliantly rendered, again, but in a completely new way, with a new voice and an atmosphere of mystery and dread throughout.

Piranesi is the name of the narrator, although we come to learn that his story, and his name, are more complicated than they first appear to be. He lives alone in a gigantic castle of hundreds of rooms, some sort of labyrinth, and the only person he ever sees is one he calls the Other, who seems to be conducting some sort of research on Piranesi and the house. As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that there’s far more to Piranesi than even he realizes, as his memories start to come back to him in dribs and drabs, and he realizes there are other people in the world besides himself and the Other.

The less said about the story, though, the better. This is book about memory and loss, and it’s best to recover Piranesi’s memories, and learn the truth about him and the House that he treats as a sort of god, along with him. Clarke has, once again, created an immersive, dreamlike otherworld that will pull you in, even though this one is as nebulous as the world of Jonathan Strange was clear and familiar. It was easy to look at her first novel and see her influences in 19th century British literature and to understand where she was gently parodying the books she obviously loved from that era. Piranesi, however, is unlike any novel I’ve ever read. The closest comparisons I can think of – David Mitchell’s Slade House came to mind – aren’t really that close.

While the mystery of who exactly Piranesi is and what he’s doing in this house – which floods often, and doesn’t appear to have any exits – unravels, Clarke gives the reader ample time and fodder to consider his plight. He’s alone most of the time, yet oddly at peace with his situation, even though he’s in frequent peril from everything from the rising waters to lack of food. (The Other brings him gifts, including food, although Piranesi largely seems to live off dried seaweed and fish he catches.) There are the bones of 14 other people in the House, and Piranesi seems to think they speak to him, somehow, as do the various statues. Was he always mad? Did solitude drive him to madness? Why isn’t the Other trying harder to help him? And who is 16, the person whom the Other warns Piranesi to avoid at all costs?

The House is a character of its own in the book, especially given how Piranesi interacts with it, and could stand as a symbol for any of several real-world analogues. It’s a dream world, in the sense of the endless structure of dreams, but even more resembles the human imagination – a fractalized rendition of the world of our minds in a series of rooms that might be changing each time Piranesi visits them, in a total space that might have an end that Piranesi hasn’t actually found. There’s a sense of incompleteness within the House that feels like the sort of dream you get when you’re not completely asleep, but where impossible things creep into your mind enough that you know after that you weren’t completely awake, and how within those semi-dreams you can also feel trapped by your own confusion. I’ve had more of these experiences during the pandemic, for some unknown reason, and while Piranesi was in progress long before COVID-19 existed as a pathogen in humans, it takes on a different meaning eight months into the ongoing plague.

There might be a bit too much exposition in the middle of Piranesi, where Clarke has to break the spell a little bit to explain to the reader just how Piranesi got to the House and what might be coming next, but the resolution is gripping and veers from the expected in multiple ways, not least in the timing of events towards the novel’s end. It isn’t Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell because nothing could be, and perhaps it’s for the best that Clarke’s follow-up isn’t in that same universe, as she’d once promised. This new creation of hers is just as magical as the first, but in its own, memorable way.

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