Best novels of the year

Matt Haig

My last post awarded superlatives to a dozen books read during this year, yet without mentioning some of the best novels I read in 2021. So I want to mention them here.

I have become a big Richard Russo fan in recent years, and Everybody's Fool did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for his work. A sequel to Nobody's Fool, it shifts the focus to different characters, especially the hapless police chief obsessed with discovering the identity of his late wife's lover.

Rules of Civility by Amore Towles is a wonderful novel about pretense and how manners can give a person something to hide behind.

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a stunning and subtle novel about a young Irish woman's struggle to free herself from the influences of others to discover her own path.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler makes a house a character in a story about the people who live in it.

May Doria Russell's Epitaph won't be the last word on the Gunfight at OK Corral, but the novel is good enough to be.

Ann Patchett. like Anne Tyler, puts a house at the center of her novel in The Dutch House. But while Tyler's house brings people together, Patchett's house divides them.

Beaming Sonny Home by Cathie Pelletier tells of a woman who watches her son's life unravel on television, while her own life begins to come into focus.

All these are terrific novels, yet were I to choose a Novel of the Year it would have to be one I did mention in my last post, Matt Haig's The Humans. It sounds like science fiction, a new variation on Jack Finney's Body Snatchers theme, but in fact the novel becomes a beautiful mediation on what it means to be human.

2021 superlatives

Next time I may write about some of the best books I read this year, but today I want to focus on other superlatives, some of those suggested by J. Peder Zane in his book Remarkable Reads.

Most Enchanting Book: That would have to be Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick DeWitt. Here's a witty, moving novel that reads like a fairy tale, something akin to The Princess Bride. There's a giant, a castle, true love and a Very Large Hole.

A still from the film version of Fahrenheit 451

Most Important Book: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, published in 1951, seems as important as ever.  In Bradbury's vision, firemen don't put out fires but start them, especially for the purpose of burning books. In 2021 in America, there were hints that his vision might actually be coming true, with even Dr. Seuss books being stripped from shelves for being politically incorrect.

Most Daunting Book: Edward Dolnick's Down the Great Unknown is daunting only in the sense that to read it is to accompany John Wesley Powell, at least in one's mind, on the first boat ride down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. It's interesting to consider that the only members of his team to die were those who abandoned the expedition because it was too dangerous.

Wisest Book: This title goes to Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath. Gladwell makes the case that the weak sometimes have the advantage over the strong because their weakness forces them to look for unconventional ways to win.

Most Familiar Book: I read Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King for the third time this year, so by now it is a very familiar book. It's the story of a wealthy man who knows something is missing from his life, and he goes to central Africa to try to discover what it is.

Most Incomprehensible Book: Sam Taylor's The Amnesiac turned out to be too surrealistic for my taste.  There's a chunk of his life that James Purdue cannot remember, and the novel is about his search to discover the missing pieces. S.J. Watson explores a similar plot in Before I Go to Sleep but with greater success.

Most Beautiful Book: I purchased a copy of William Trevor's short story collection A Bit on the Side when I visited England in 2005, but didn't read it until early this year. I was amazed by the beauty and tenderness of these stories.

Most Fearless Book: Because of its subject matter, Lolita was a fearless book when it was published in 1958, and a new collection of essays about the novel, Lolita in the Afterlife, seems no less fearless.

Most Surprising Book: I expected  Larry Watson's short novel Montana 1948 to be a good book. What I didn't expect was a great book.

Most Disappointing Book: The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem has been around for a number of years, so I thought this collection of stories about literary feuds and arguments would be more entertaining than it turned out to be.

Most Unpleasant Book: Usually I discard unpleasant books long before I finish reading them, so I have to interpret unpleasant in a different way. My choice is The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas, which is about the crew of an American submarine stranded at the bottom of the sea. Sounds terribly unpleasant to me.

Most Luminous Book: My vote here goes to Matt Haig's incredible novel The Humans, which is about a monstrous being from another planet who takes the form of a human in order to destroy all traces of a dangerous mathematical formula. This requires him to learn to be a human, and in so doing he becomes a better human than the man he replaced. This was a contender for the wisest book of the year.

Game for readers (2021 edition)

For more several years now I have played a game at year's end where I pose a series of questions — the same questions each year — and answer them by using only the titles of books read that year. It's a game any reader can play, although it helps to read a lot of books and keep a list of them. True answers are, of course, optional. Because of my move to Florida, I read 20 or 30 fewer books than usual in 2021, but let's see how I do.

Describe yourself: Everybody's Fool

How do you feel: Something to Live For

Describe where you currently live: Sun Going Down (I live near the Gulf Coast of Florida, which is where, in Florida at least, the sun goes down)

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Kingdom by the Sea

Your favorite form of transportation: Mystery Ride

Your best friend is: Moonwalking with Einstein (OK, that's weak)

You and your friends are: All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (at least that's what I fear, having left so many of them back in Ohio)

What's the weather like where you are: A Clearing in the Distance (Unbelievable would also work, this being Florida in December)

What is the best advice you could give: Accidence Will Happen (yes, that spelling is correct)

Thought for the day: We'll Always Have Casablanca (or maybe Anything Goes)

How would you like to die: Before I Go to Sleep

Your soul's present condition: Surprised by Paradox (or perhaps Imponderables)

Ghosts of Christmas Past

We all inhabit multiple time zones. We have the world of our daily present, which usually claims most of our attention, but we are also wrapped in shadowy bands of the past.

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies

This observation by Sven Birkerts may be especially true at Christmastime. Ebenezer Scrooge is not the only one haunted by Christmas Past. This haunting may for most of us be a good thing, as we are flooded with memories of Christmas mornings spent with parents and siblings, Christmas meals shared with our extended family and Christmas parties enjoyed with friends and co-workers. The older we get the more Christmas Past dwells on our minds, even as Christmas Present demands our full attention.

Birkerts makes the point in The Gutenberg Elegies, as I have often thought myself, that each of us is not just the age we happen to be, but every age we have ever been. We can be a helpless baby, a pouting child, an awkward teenager, a responsible adult and, if old enough, a fretful senior citizen, all in the span of a single day

Our memories enable us to dwell in the now, while at the same time being an excited child discovering an array of gifts under a brightly lit tree, a young lover thrilled at spending our first Christmas with the one we love, a parent giving joyful memories to our own children just as our own parents did for us and a grandparent doing it all again with grandchildren. Not everyone's memories are that pleasant, but in any case we can return in our minds to the person we once were, experiencing again how we felt, what we thought and what we did.

This is all true every day of the year, but perhaps especially true at Christmas.

Small novel, big punch

You might not expect much from a short novel (just 169 pages) with a title like Montana 1948 (1993). I didn't, but having read two later novels by Larry Watson, I should have known better. The title may sound like a book of regional history. The book itself may look like an ambitious tourism pamphlet. But this is Larry Watson, and the man can write.

This coming-of-age story set in northeastern Montana in the summer of 1948 is narrated by a boy who is the son of the county sheriff, Wesley Hayden, who is himself the son of a sheriff. David Hayden's grandfather is a blustery, powerful man used to getting his own way, both in his family and in Mercer Country. He has never made it a secret that his favorite son is not Wesley, who gave up a career practicing law to enforce the law as his own father did. The favored son is Frank, a handsome and charming war hero who is now a prominent doctor in the community.

This last summer in Bentrock, Montana, begins to unravel when Marie Little Soldier, the Indian woman who lives with the Haydens and watches over David, becomes ill. When calling a doctor is suggested, she protests, but Frank is called in anyway. Mariel screams in fear when he arrives.

Eventually David's mother learns from Marie that Frank has a reputation of sexually molesting Indian women. She persuades her husband to investigate, which he does, first with reluctance and then with determination to see it through, whatever the consequences.

And those consequences turn out to be profound for everyone involved.

This may be a little novel with an odd title, but it packs quite a punch.

Conformity first

No matter how rebellious, the poet has to account for what has come before.

Peter Roy Clark, The Art of X-ray Reading

We have all been influenced by somebody else, no matter how independent, how original or, as Peter Roy Clark puts it, how rebellious we may think we are. To rebel, one needs something or someone to rebel against. To be independent, one needs something to be independent from. To be original, one needs a contrast.

As ideas go, this one is hardly original, let along rebellious or independent, yet it seems important to recognize the debt we owe to those who have influenced us, whether to follow in their footsteps or to set off on our own path. Different influences would likely have turned us in different directions. Nature is vitally important — our talents, our aptitudes, our genes — yet nurture plays a role as well. We can never entirely free ourselves from either.

Clark is writing specifically about writers, and I will do the same. Writers are shaped by the language they heard as children, by the books they read when young and had read to them, by their teachers (perhaps especially their English teachers), by the writers who most moved them in their youth and, perhaps most significantly, by their own everyday experiences — their loves, their disappointments, their griefs, their successes. What writers (especially fiction writers) write usually reflects in some way their own lives. Novelist Richard Russo has admitted that he can't seem to stop writing about his own father, although most of his readers might never realize that.

Young writers often imitate other writers, whether consciously or not. Only gradually do they develop their own styles. Before rebellion comes conformity. You learn how others do it before you can discover your own way to do it.

Reading extensively

In an essay called "The First Steps Toward a History of Reading," Robert Danton makes a distinction between intensive reading and extensive reading. Basically this means either reading a few books often and well or reading many books once and then, in most cases, soon forgetting most of what what we read.

There was a time, before the 20th century, when most homes had very few books in them. These few probably included the Bible, Shakespeare's plays and perhaps an anthology of poetry and something by Dickens, Twain, Eliot or whomever. When you had a few moments to read, this is what you read. Or reread. Or reread again. Chances are you could quote passages by heart. They would come to mind at certain points of your life, and when you recited them, others would know their source and perhaps even finish the quote with you. 

Sven Birkerts calls this "desert island reading" in his book The Gutenberg Elegies. If you've ever made your own list of books to take with you to a desert island, they were probably books you thought were worth reading more than once. Since so few of us ever wind up on a desert island, we tend not to actually reread those books, although we may still keep favorites on a shelf somewhere just in case. We have too many other books we want to read first.

Today most of us read extensively, meaning we read more books than people once did, but we don't get to know any of them as well. After a few months have passed, we barely remember plots or characters. Mostly we just remember whether we liked the book or not. We certainly couldn't quote passages.

We have both gained something and lost something with this shift from intensive to extensive reading. We now have exposure to a much broader spectrum of writers, writing styles and ideas. Different books appeal to different people, so we now have something for everyone on our bookshelves. Each time we open a book we can expect to find something new.

What we've lost is common ground. When we don't all read the same books, it becomes more difficult to talk about books without joining a book club. That's why people are more likely today to discuss movies or television shows around a table, although now we are even less likely to watch the same movies and television shows. Our viewing habits have become more extensive as well.

Mostly what we've lost is the deep knowledge that comes with reading something multiple times. Some people do still make it a practice to read a portion of the Bible each day or to reread a favorite book, such as Pride and Prejudice, every year or two. Most of us, however, when we reach for a book, reach for something new. That is our blessing and our curse.

David wins, again

When a boy named David slew a giant named Goliath, it was not the oddity we might think it was. So says Malcolm Gladwell in his book David and Goliath (2013). It happens all the time. The underdog upsets the champion. The outnumbered defeat superior forces. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan send the United States fleeing, just as the Colonies once did to the British.

With greater size, strength or experience often comes overconfidence and erroneous assumptions. David doesn't stand a chance, the thinking goes. Yet apparent weakness in the conventional sense can force someone to discover a hidden strength, just as David thought to use his sling, a wicked weapon at a distance, against a giant with a sword, a wicked weapon up close.

Gladwell gives several examples. A basketball coach with no experience and even less knowledge of the game led his group of untalented girls to the championship game. He did this by emphasizing defense and full-court pressure. Teams have just so many seconds to get the ball inbounds and so many seconds to get it across the half-court line. If they can't do that, your team gets the ball. These girls prevented this from happening again and again and again, rarely giving more talented teams opportunities to even take a shot. Their complete lack of ability, says Gladwell, "made their winning strategy possible." More talented girls would never have worked that hard.

Many top business leaders have dyslexia, Gladwell discovered. Even now, at the top of their professions, they still have difficulty reading. How did they do it? By listening carefully and remembering what they hear and what, with great effort, they are able to read. "Dyslexia — in the best of cases — forces you to develop skills that might otherwise have lain dormant," he writes.

There's more than one way to win a battle or a war. Swords — or bombs and heavy artillery — are one way. But slings — and guerrilla warfare and simply refusing to surrender — are another way. Passive resistance made the civil rights movement successful. Forgiveness can be more powerful than revenge. Attending a state college can be better for your career than attending Harvard or Stanford. Gladwell covers a lot of ground in a 300-age book, all of it fascinating stuff.

The second invisible man

H.G. Wells beat Jules Verne to the punch with The Invisible Man, published in 1898. Probably inspired by Wells, Verne soon began writing his own novel about invisibility, which he called The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz. It was not published in France until after his death, but only after his son had badly mangled it with substantial editing and rewriting. Several of Verne's other late books suffered a similar fate.

Not until a decade ago was Verne's novel restored to the way he wrote it and, unlike so many other Verne novels in the past, given a decent English translation. The result is a book that, even if it came after the much more famous Wells book, is original and entertaining in its own way.

Henry Vidal travels from France to Hungary for the wedding of his brother, Marc, to a lovely young woman named Myra Roderich. Myra had previously spurned a proposal from Wilhelm Storitz, the son of a noted, if mysterious, Prussian scientist. Wilhelm has vowed to prevent the marriage of Marc to Myra from ever taking place.

As the wedding approaches, mysterious things begin to occur, such as disembodied voices and objects seemingly moving by themselves through the air. When it finally becomes clear that Wilhelm has found the secret of invisibility, panic overtakes not just the wedding party but the entire city. How can anyone be confident of privacy ever again? How can any secret be safe? How can Wilhelm be found, let alone captured, when he cannot even be seen? The story reaches it crisis point when Myra herself disappears.

Myra's importance to the plot is one reason this novel is considered noteworthy among Verne's work. Mostly he wrote books for boys, who had little interest in female characters. This novel appears to have been written more for an adult audience, especially as it contains romantic scenes and wedding details. Yet Verne perhaps does women no favors by making both Myra and her mother so fragile that they faint and must be carried to bed because of the shock caused by events. 

I won't discuss Verne's dramatic ending, one of the things that his son had badly rewritten, except to say that it is exceptional. H.G. Wells may have wished he had thought of it.

Let us imagine it

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.

Stephen King, On Writing

When we read a novel, there are some parts of it — dialogue, for example, and action scenes — that we focus on intently, while there are other parts we may just skip over or skim or read without really giving the words our full attention. And these parts are likely to be description, especially description that continues for more than two or three words.

Are we really interested in exactly what a character is wearing? Do we care what color a house is, how many windows it has or what kind of shrubbery stands in front of it? Some writers are actually quite good at description, and entire paragraphs of it may be worth our attention. In most cases, however, the less description the better. It can get in the way of the story. And it can get in the way of our imaginations.

And that is Stephen King's point in the comment quoted above. Good writers, he argues, describe just enough to fire the reader's imagination. We all imagine characters and scenes in our minds as we read. I mentioned once before about being disappointed when, after imagining a female character as a blonde,  the author belatedly revealed her to be a brunette.

"I'd rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well," King says. "If I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can't you? I don't need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown."

Just as an author's description can interfere with a reader's imagination, so can a movie version of a novel. The other evening I watched the film based on the novel Before I Go to Sleep, reviewed here last month. Both Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth were excellent in the major roles, yet both were jarring somehow because they were not the characters I had pictured while reading the novel. The actor playing the doctor was especially unsettling because he is a younger man in the novel. Had I seen the movie first, I would have pictured the actors in my mind while reading the book, and that too would have been jarring when the author's descriptions didn't match my film-shaped imagination.

And that may be why reading a story is better for us than watching it on a screen. It leaves more to our imagination.

View from the rear

I was organizing Christian novels in a church library with a friend a few months ago when I noticed how many of the covers — the majority I would guess — had illustrations showing figures, in most cases women, from the back. Many of the illustrations were almost identical. They were attractive designs, yet all attractive in the same way. They all suggested mystery. Who is this woman? What does she look like? Where is she going? What is she thinking about? This is good, I suppose, but why did they all have to look the same?

It turns out I am not alone in noticing this book-cover trend. I recently visited Killer Covers, a website that shows and discusses paperback covers past and present. The Nov. 14 post, called "Bringing Up the Rear," shows a sampling of 59 recent covers showing the backs of figures, most of them walking away, often in darkness, in mist or in shadows. Many of these books are by authors of note, including Harlen Coben, David Baldacci, Charles Todd (most of Todd's Bess Crawford novels have covers like this) and John Le Carre.

This may be just a fad in the book publishing industry, something like using the word daughter or girl in a novel's title. Fads tend to burn out sooner or later. 

This fad may have staying power, however. Faces, like hands, are notoriously difficult for artists to draw realistically. With a rear view, both of these features can be avoided. And as I already noted, these images can be visually striking. They set a mood and hint subtly about the nature of the story inside. They also don't give too much away. That person looking away from us might be attractive or not, white, black or Asian. We all like to picture ourselves in a story. That is easier to do when we have no idea, at least until the author tells us, what this character looks like.

At some point, however, even publishers who prefer to follow each other may come to realize that these covers all look the same. Some art director with imagination may be encouraged to break the stereotype and give readers something different, something original. We can only hope so.

The life that matters

In some ways I am reading the novel as I walk, or nap, or drive to the store for milk. When I am away from the book it lives its shadow life, its afterlife, and that, as the believers have always insisted, is the only life that matters.

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies

Writing doesn't just happen while words are being put down on paper or on a screen. Writers write while they are walking, driving, reading, preparing a meal or even sleeping. Writing stems from thought, and thinking, much of it at the subconscious level, can take place anywhere at anytime.

What is true for writers is also true of readers, as Sven Birkerts points out in his book The Gutenberg Elegies.  You don't stop reading when you put down the book, at least not if the book has in any way engaged you. If it's a novel you are reading, you may wonder why the characters did what they did. Or what will they do next? What is the significance of this or that in the plot? A work of nonfiction, especially something full of ideas, might provoke thoughts of another kind. Can this be true? What does it mean? What does it mean for me? How does this change what I think about that?

Birkerts calls such thoughts about a book its afterlife. A good book's life does not end when the last page is turned. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, it produces ripples. These ripples may continue for minutes, hours or days. Sometimes they can affect us for the rest of our lives. We never stop reading the book, even if we never open it again.

Familiarity breeds cliches

The difference between originality and cliche is familiarity. Those expressions we think of as cliches are that only because we have heard them so many times before. The first time we heard them, they probably seemed clever.

This occurs to me while browsing through Happy as a Clam, a collection of similes more than 200 pages long complied in the 1990s by Larry Wright, an owner of a bed and breakfast along the Mississippi River who obviously had lots of time on his hands.

Take the expression "good as gold" as an example. A cliche? Yes, indeed. But it probably wasn't back in the 19th century when Charles Dickens put it in one of his books. How about "easy as falling off a log"? I'll bet it was thought original and amusing when Mark Twain first used it. Twain also wrote "easy as playing hooky," which may still sound amusing to us because we probably haven't heard it as often.

As for "happy as a clam," that is apparently so old that Wright couldn't find anyone to attribute it to. "Happy as a lark" goes back to Anne Bronte. Other similes may seem better to us, in part, because they less familiar: "happy as a new millionaire" (Margaret Mitchell), "happy as a pig eating pancakes," "happy as a kid with a new astronaut suit," "happy as a fly in a molasses factory," "happy as a lizard on a sun-washed rock" (Dean Koontz).

"Read him like a book" is now hopelessly cliched. But not "read him like a fifty-foot 'See Rock City' sign" (Robert R. McCammon). McCammon, the author of horror novels, pops up often in this book, an indication not just of McCammon's gift for clever similes but also Wright's reading taste. Both Stephen King and Dean Koontz are also well-represented here. King has given us "hard as trying to swallow a doorknob," "glared at each other like motorists with tangled cars" and "useless as talking to an empty cat food can."

Short similes, such as "happy as a clam," seem more likely to turn into cliches, simply because they are easy to remember and repeat (even if we have no idea why a clam would be happy). Meanwhile, "rear end as wide as a bank president's desk," also by Stephen King, will probably always bring a smile because it is too long to repeat endlessly.

Writers who read, or not

Should a writer of fiction read the fiction of other writers? There appears to be two schools of thought on this question, perhaps three: 1) Yes, you might learn something. Besides writers should like to read. 2) No,   you don't want other writers influencing what you write. 3) Read, but do it between your own writing projects. Most writers always seem to have a project in the works, so I don't know how practical the third option may be.

James M. Cain

I recently came upon an interview with novelist James M. Cain, author of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, published in 1983 in The Armchair Detective. Cain recalled meeting Dashiell Hammett without realizing at the time that the man was Dashiell Hammett. The stranger had complimented Cain's work, and Cain said he faked a polite reply. He not only didn't recognize Hammett, but had never read his books.

"I am often somewhat embarrassed talking to other novelists because I haven't read their work," Cain admitted. "Partly because I'm afraid to."

Cain explained, "I don't read a novel just to be reading it. When I read a novel, I'm rewriting it in my own mind, I'm tearing it down, I'm building it up ... it exhausts me."

Then he added that writers who admire other writers can sometimes start imitating them,, whether deliberately or not. He mentioned Rudyard Kipling writing like Bret Harte and Ring Lardner writing like Frank Sullivan. Many writers have copied Hemingway's style.

I happened to meet Mark Winegardner shortly after reading his novel Crooked River Burning, and I commented that the book's style reminded me of John Dos Passos. Winegardner admitted that he had been reading Dos Passos just before he wrote the novel. I wish I would have asked whether the style choice was deliberate or whether he was just under the Dos Passos influence when he wrote the novel. Winegardner later wrote some successful Godfather novels, proving that he is skilled at copying another writer's style.

Other writers could never refrain from reading books by other writers as Cain did. They simply enjoy reading too much. They like seeing how other writers solve writing problems. Or they earn extra money by writing book reviews or even by teaching college literature classes. Obviously no one answer to the question above works for all.