| 11/22/63. By Stephen King. (2011) (Open New Window) Throughout his career, King has explored fresh ways to blend the ordinary and the supernatural. His new novel imagines a time portal in a Maine diner that lets an English teacher go back to 1958 in an effort to stop Lee Harvey Oswald and - rewardingly for readers - also allows King to reflect on questions of memory, fate and free will as he richly evokes midcentury America. The past guards its secrets, this novel reminds us, and the horror behind the quotidian is time itself.  |
| 666. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated By Natasha Wimmer. (2008) (Open New Window) Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast of beguiling characters - European literary scholars, an African-American journalist and more - whose lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered. |
| Absurdistan. By Gary Shteyngart. (2006) (Open New Window) Shteyngart's scruffy, exuberant second novel, equal parts Gogol and Borat, is immodest on every level - it's long, crude, manic and has cheap vodka on its breath. It also happens to be smart, funny and, in the end, extraordinarily rich and moving. "Absurdistan" introduces Misha Vainberg, the rap-music-obsessed, grossly overweight son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia. After attending college in the United States, he is now stuck in St. Petersburg, scrambling for an American visa that may never arrive. Caught between worlds, and mired in his own prejudices and thwarted desires, Vainberg just may be an antihero for our times. |
| All the Light We Cannot See. By Anthony Doerr (2014) (Open New Window) With brisk chapters and sumptuous language, Doerr’s second novel follows two characters whose paths will intersect in the waning days of World War II: an orphaned engineering prodigy recruited into the Nazi ranks, and a blind French girl who joins the Resistance. Tackling questions of survival, endurance and moral obligations during wartime, the book is as precise and artful and ingenious as the puzzle boxes the heroine’s locksmith father builds for her. Impressively, it is also a vastly entertaining feat of storytelling. |
| American Pastoral. By Philip Roth. (1997) (Open New Window) This novel is a lament for the death of the dream of assimilation that was precious to the children of Jewish immigrants of Philip Roth's generation. Nathan Zuckerman returns to New Jersey for a high school reunion and meets again his boyhood hero, Swede Levov, the admirable athlete who dutifully took over the family business, married a beauty queen and grew rich. But after Swede dies, Zuckerman undertakes an imaginative investigation into this success story and finds disaster. Swede's only daughter at 16 had joined the Weathermen, planted bombs in public buildings, lived destitute in hiding for years, became a radical devotee of an Oriental religion and finally returned to New Jersey, where Swede has a shocking meeting with her shortly before his death. What this beautifully elaborated tale dwells on is the deaths she caused, the damage she spread through her family, and on an insistent question: how is it possible that these good parents could raise this dislocated person? A hint of an answer is heard in an apparently innocent little contest, when the girl was very young, between Swede's father and his wife's Roman Catholic mother for the soul of their granddaughter. The themes the old people sound reverberate in virtually every conversation among other characters here, exchanges that have nothing to do with religion but ask just as pointedly how much we can share without losing our souls. Thus the tone of this allegory -- a remarkable mixture of rage and elegy. |
| Americanah. By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (2013) (Open New Window) By turns tender and trenchant, Adichie’s third novel takes on the comedy and tragedy of American race relations from the perspective of a young Nigerian immigrant. From the office politics of a hair-braiding salon to the burden of memory, there’s nothing too humble or daunting for this fearless writer, who is so attuned to the various worlds and shifting selves we inhabit — in life and online, in love, as agents and victims of history and the heroes of our own stories. |
| Anatomy Lesson, The. By Philip Roth (1983) (Open New Window) This is the third part of Philip Roth's fictional trilogy of Nathan Zuckerman, American Jewish novelist. In the first, ''The Ghost Writer,'' Zuckerman the beginner tastes critical approval without popularity; in the second, ''Zuckerman Unbound,'' he attains fame and wealth with ''Carnovsky,'' a novel like Roth's own ''Portnoy's Complaint''; now, in ''The Anatomy Lesson,'' he suffers from internal demons and constant physical pain that may or may not have an organic base. In a succession of brilliant monologues, the hero portrays himself as a bankrupt writer, bereft of ideas, subject matter and self-confidence, but still bound to his profession as he is to his aching body. Despite the funny high and low comedy, this Zuckerman finale has had a mixed critical reception. |
| Arabesques. By Anton Shammas. Translated By Vivian Eden. (1988) (Open New Window) Despite its autobiographical qualities, this book,by a Christian Arab who writes lyrical Hebrew and considers himself an Israeli, is called a novel By its author perhaps because its real aim is the discovery, or creation, of a self, not merely the story of a self already made. In an arabesque of movement between two voices called the Teller and the Tale, Anton Shammas conducts a hunt for a heritage that rivals anything in Dickens. He creates a world in which the present searches into the past even as the past peers into the future. His tale is set in a time of vengeful troubles when state security, religion and economics dictate death; suspicion, bravery and betrayal are everywhere; and violence is as common as climate. But Mr. Shammas is a true artist who keeps his heart clean and his eye clear, so that these conditions rise around us naturally as we read. |
| Art of Fielding, The. By Chad Harbach. (2011) (Open New Window) At a small college on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, the baseball team sees its fortunes rise and then rise some more with the arrival of a supremely gifted shortstop. Harbach's expansive, allusive first novel combines the pleasures of an old-fashioned baseball story with a stately, self-reflective meditation on talent and the limits of ambition, played out on a field where every hesitation is amplified and every error judged By an exacting, bloodthirsty audience. |
| Atonement. By Ian McEwan. (2002) (Open New Window) When Ian McEwan appears to be mellowing, it is a good idea to keep an eye out for what's coming up behind you. This novel is shaped as a triptych, each part changing our perspective as it opens up. First, Briony, a bright 13-year-old English girl, her imagination inflamed By a romance between her older sister and a poor college student whose mother lives on their estate, tells a lie about a crime on the property and destroys the student's future. In section two the student, now a British soldier and the lover of the older sister, who has become a nurse, dodges Nazi fire in France in 1940. McEwan's evocation of the desperate determination of French farmers trapped in the battle zone and of the sense of emptiness in wartime London is haunting. And Briony? Estranged from both of them, she helps patch up mangled bodies in an army medical ward and writes fiction that explores how other people's minds work. Finally, Briony, in old age an honored writer, tries to convince us that everything we were told before was an illusion. The writing in "Atonement" is triumphant -- unexpectedly, even sensuously, tender about these characters in their youth, and brilliantly alert to the sneaky moral injuries war works on the human memory. The old McEwan -- who delighted in twisted plots that made readers feel whiplashed and manipulated their emotions with irritating confidence -- seems subdued through two-thirds of this book. So the sense of outrage that rises when Briony sets out to sabotage the story at the end is perhaps a peculiarly fitting tribute to the author. |
|
Aunt
Julia and the Scriptwriter. By Mario
Vargas Llosa. (1982) (Open New
Window)
|
| Austerlitz. By W. G. Sebald. (2001) (Open New Window) Memory is moral treachery in the works of W. G. Sebald, and in none is it more threatening than in this one. His protagonist, Dafydd Elias, grew up in Wales and is past 50 before he finds he is really Jacques Austerlitz, whose Jewish parents sent him from Central Europe to Britain at 4 to escape the Holocaust, in which they perished. That would suggest he is like leading characters in several other Sebald novels, for whom missing the Holocaust left holes in their lives. But this man's name signals that Sebald is on a much more far-reaching quest this time. Napoleon's brilliant victory over Russia and Austria at the Czech town of Austerlitz in 1805 was taken By poets at the time and many historians later as a sign that a European political and social order dating from Charlemagne was gone, and that the pursuit of transcontinental imperial power had taken a new form. In this novel Austerlitz, the character, is an architectural historian whose meditations on the past dwell on monstrous buildings and fortifications, some of them instrumental in the fate of his parents, as if the natural end of empire was Terezin or Auschwitz. As so often in Sebald's fiction, direct connections are never highlighted in the vast loops and sudden knottings of his rhetoric, but the reader cannot escape the inference that in the long sweep of history the Nazis were not alone, but that an inquirer searching for meaning is. |
|
Bech
Is Back. By John Updike. (1982) (Open
New Window)
|
| Before Night Falls. By Reinaldo Arenas. (1993) (Open New Window) In this memoir, Reinaldo Arenas -- a gifted, untaught novelist who was denied recognition in Castro's Cuba, and imprisoned and tortured as a homosexual before he escaped from the island in the 1980 Mariel boatlift -- links his personal history with a political meditation on his country, told from the point of view of an abandoned son. The role is right: Arenas, who had AIDS, committed suicide in New York in 1990, leaving a note that accused Fidel Castro not only of Cuba's tragedy but of his own. His book reveals Cuban officialdom as unprincipled and corrupt in its liteary politics, and in its macho sexual pretensions. Arenas was one of the world's great loners, and was almost as alienated in America as in Cuba, finding the very Americans he wanted to be closest to -- intellectuals and gay men -- morally flabby. What makes his memoir so poignant and haunting is what he never acknowledges explicitly: that his standard of liberation was absolute, his innocence made him vulnerable to unending hurt, and the freedom he sought exists nowhere. |
| Being Dead. By Jim Crace. (2000) (Open New Window) There is no hint of paradox in the title of this brief, elegant novel. Jim Crace's point is that even though in the view of a scientific materialist an individual ends forever at death, for a time being dead is a state of tumultuous life. Celice and Joseph, both zoologists, are dead in the first paragraph, murdered naked in the midst of sexual fulfillment on a salt dune By the sea. Crace then weaves together three strands of narrative to create a startlingly beautiful vision of life. One, backward running, revivifies Joseph and Celice and takes us through their lives in science and their long marriage; though each has often disappointed the other in their 30 years together, in this regressing story losses become hopes and we see that they have never forgotten the electric moments that bound them together, beginning with one on the very dune where they died; they had returned to live their first ecstasy again. Another strand traces the ''disassembly and decay'' of their bodies through six days, and its precise revelation of the ''inert wars of chemicals contesting,'' along with the fascinating choreography of whole classes, orders and species of microscopic carrion feeders, is a mesmerizing celebration of the infinite ingenuity of nature. The third strand follows the efforts of the estranged daughter of Celice and Joseph to find out where they've disappeared to. What seemed at first to be a determination By Crace to show how ephemeral love is in the face of death turns out to be a splendid revelation that love is an achievement life does not erode or death diminish. For the naturalist as for the believer, there is a peace that passes understanding. |
| Beloved. By Toni Morrison. (1987) (Open New Window) By turns rich, graceful, rough, colloquial, eccentric and lyrical, this novel about bondage and freedom lets us know American black slavery as those who experienced it did - in a parentless, childless and spouseless world where the sudden disappearance of people was quite legal. A survivor, Sethe, is trying to build a new life when the ghost of her little daughter, Beloved, appears. Ghosts are treated with the same magnificent practicality that transforms everything in this book, and it is the return of Beloved that allows other characters to reveal the pain of the past and Sethe to achieve a self-accepting peace. Toni Morrison's verbal authority compels belief; she blends a knowledge of folklore with a highly original treatment that keeps the reader guessing, and discovering, right up to the last page. |
| Billy Bathgate. By E. L. Doctorow. (1989) (Open New Window) A story of a 15-year-old boy's journey to adulthood with plenty of cliffhanging adventure, "Billy Bathgate" is E. L. Doctorow's shapeliest novel. In the Bronx of the 1930's Billy links up with the legendary mobster Dutch Schultz. Schultz, who becomes something of a capricious parent to the boy, is one of many characters who walk right off the page. Mr. Doctorow has the ability to encompass events in their entirety; the novel is packed with complex and oddly beautiful street scenes, filled with grime and color. Billy, the narrator, may be unnaturally eloquent, but the reader who grants Billy his gift of language is rewarded with passages of writing so intense and vivid that the story is wholly trustworthy and compelling. |
| Blue Flower, The. By Penelope Fitzgerald. (1997) (Open New Window) Penelope Fitzgerald's early novels were comedies of contemporary British eccentricities so sharp that she got a reputation as an almost disreputably enjoyable author. As she moved on to stories about other countries and other eras, her habitual insight and authority carried over naturally into these more historically complicated settings. Her new novel makes the greatest leap of all; it is her most recondite and challenging book, and as authentic a piece of imagination as one can find about a writer -- in this case the great German Romantic Novalis (1772-1801). Here he is a philosophy student in the 1790's, his mind exploding with ideas and his heart falling captive to a spirited teen-age girl. There is no better introduction than this novel to the intellectual exaltation of the Romantic era, its political ferment, its uncertain morals, its innocence and refusal of limits. It is also a wholly convincing evocation of that notoriously difficult matter, genius; its presence in Novalis and his siblings fairly crackles in these quiet pages. The book also reaches far beyond its story, becoming an interrogation of life, experience, human horizons and love (its reminders of what it feels like to be in love the first time are luminous). As always, Fitzgerald's economy is next to miraculous, and the language is an enchantment: without a hint of mimicry, she uses virtually undetectable shifts in emphasis and phrasing to conjure up the tone of the German of 18th-century Saxony; it rings true. |
| Bonfire of the Vanities, The. By Tom Wolfe. (1987) (Open New Window) Tom Wolfe's first novel positively hums with energy. Mr. Wolfe thoroughly understands what he writes about in this big, bitter, funny book about New York City and its denizens: Wall Streeters, politicians, policemen, jailbirds, sleazy lawyers and con men in television and journalism. And he knows how to tell a story; the novel's pace is so fast it is like falling downstairs at times. His characters may lack depth and his attempts to make the reader hear their accents can be downright annoying, but this novel has scores of fine scenes, set pieces, a strong story line and some psychologically penetrating writing. Dozens of minor characters speeding along different tracks of admirably complex plot are kept in perfect control while the major ones spiral in on one another toward the last explosive moment. |
| Brick Lane. By Monica Ali. (2003) (Open New Window) Leaving home is a journey without end in this novel about Bangladeshi immigrants in London's East End. The story turns on itself like a winding spring. An 18-year-old woman from Dhaka in an arranged marriage with a man of 40 is practically immured in their flat, with only one neighborhood friend, bearing children and listening to her husband's dreams of being a success and then returning home. But her sister's letters from there tell her, in hints and silences, that the Dhaka of memory is gone. Her husband's loss of work, and then of his savings to a moneylender, forces her into garment making, and she falls in love with the man who delivers and collects her piecework. In the deep background, scarcely mentioned, Islamic culture is challenged By Western values and personal choice battles fate. It is the emotional force of the woman's brief affair that releases the spring, and the deep tensions of the story erupt in front of us. When the husband returns to Dhaka, resigned to failure, she stays on with her daughters, learns English from them, and By the end seems to be sailing out into the universe on her own. The expansive generosity of the last pages is a remarkable achievement, especially in a first novel. |
| Bring Up The Bodies. By Hilary Mantel. (2012) (Open New Window) Taking up where her previous novel, "Wolf Hall," left off, Mantel makes the seemingly worn-out story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn newly fascinating and suspenseful. Seen from the perspective of Henry's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, the ruthless maneuverings of the court move swiftly to the inevitable executions. Both this novel and its predecessor were awarded the Man Booker Prize. Might the trilogy's forthcoming conclusion, in which Cromwell will meet his demise, score Mantel a hat trick? |
|
Building Stories. By Chris Ware. (2012) (Open New Window) |
|
Burning
House, The. By Ann Beattie. (1982)
(Open
New Window)
|
|
Cathedral.
By Raymond Carver. (1983) (Open
New Window)
|
|
Chaneysville
Incident, The. By David Bradley. (1981) (Open
New Window)
|
| Chronic
City. By Jonathan Lethem (2009) (Open New Window) Lethem's eighth novel unfolds in an alternative-reality |
| Chronicle Of A Death Foretold. By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (1983) (Open New Window) The Colombian novelist is best known for his ''One Hundred Years of Solitude'' and his 1982 Nobel Prize. His new novel, ''Chronicle of a Death Foretold,'' is a short, strange and ingeniously conceived metaphysical detective story in which the detective, Garcia Marquez, reconstructs the events associated with a murder that occurred in a Caribbean town 27 years before. Thus, as a character in his own novel, the author interviews people who remember the murder, studies documents assembled By the court, accumulates many kinds of data - dreams, weather reports, gossip, philosophical speculation - and creates a chronicle of what happened. This murder will stand among the many in modern literature as one of the most powerfully rendered. |
| Cloudsplitter. By Russell Banks. (1998) (Open New Window) How do you survive upbringing by a fanatical prophet? You don't. That is the story in Russell Banks's huge novel about the abolitionist John Brown, whose 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry was one of the fuses that detonated the Civil War. Banks seems to take his cue from the assertion By some modern historians that history is not an account of what happened but of what people think happened. This domestic drama is told early in this century, nearly 50 years after Harpers Ferry, By Brown's son Owen, a spiritual tag-along to his father. Slowly, deliberately -- the storytelling often assumes the leisure of timelessness -- Owen draws a magnificent picture of the older Brown as an unmoved mover, a man of giant ambitions whose biblical learning makes him eerily worldly; his absolute righteousness is a religious mystery, not a neurosis, but a mystery that still brings madness and death to his children and pain to some escaped slaves for whom he is ready to kill if need be. Next to him Owen appears emptier page By page; he knows he died with his father on the scaffold. Banks's analysis is moral, not psychological. The result is that the closer John Brown gets, the more he too appears a ruin -- drawn By Piranesi, to be sure -- scorched and gutted By the purity of his vision. Fittingly, Banks brings the whole world to witness Brown's fate: revolutions, the fall of empires, the grandeur of the earth; indeed, the American landscape is virtually a character, heralded By the book's title, the name of a mountain. |
| Corrections, The. By Jonathan Franzen. (2001) (Open New Window) The important thing to know about Jonathan Franzen's novel is that you can ignore all the literary fireworks and thoroughly enjoy its people -- a retired railroad man whose mind is going, his addled wife and their ill-assorted children, all in midlife, whose sometimes bizarre behavior does not erase their inheritance of humanity from their parents. After they have found their ways through a fiendish puzzle of subplots -- which take us with impressive authority through the worlds of finance, medicine, haute cuisine, Eastern European politics, cruises, drugs and much more -- all of them turn out to be likable. Franzen conceals nothing about the weaknesses of these people, but neither does he satirize them. This generosity carries us along even when the author is sending a stream of coded postmodernist messages to a long list of other writers he admires, or doesn't. And Enid, the mother of the brood in the novel, is so vividly realized she could eventually have a life of her own in the conversations of people who have never read the book; she is a great character. Beyond that, Franzen is a writer with old-fashioned virtues: he loves witty wordplay; his command of detail in an enormous range of interests is unassailable; he has a painter's eye for depth and contrast; and he creates characters whose emotions reach us even when they are hidden from the people feeling them. |
| Counterlife, The. By Philip Roth. (1987) (Open New Window) ''The Counterlife'' turns on itself halfway through and reads itself front and rear, before and after, like a swing. The daring structure of Philip Roth's novel, in fact, is likely to make it continually surprising even on rereading. Returning here, and writing his own (posthumous) story, is Nathan Zuckerman, who was supposed to have been all wrapped up in the trilogy-plus-novella ''Zuckerman Bound.'' Zuckerman, himself a creator of Rothian characters, is really the creation of Peter Tarnopol, the novelist in ''My Life as a Man,'' we are assured. Are we to believe it? There are twists and turns in ''The Counterlife'' that disabuse us of easy belief; down its byways we hear all of Mr. Roth's fictions whispering to one another. His old themes and concerns are here, but now we understand them differently. But do we? Mr. Roth's sport with the nature of reality becomes an exhilarating contest for his reader. |
| Dept. of Speculation. By Jenny Offill (2014) (Open New Window) Offill’s slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and motherhood and infidelity; and especially love and the grueling rigors of domestic life. Part elegy and part primal scream, it’s a profound and unexpectedly buoyant performance. |
| Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words. By Milorad Pavic. Translated By Christina Pribicevic-Zoric. (1988) (Open New Window) This ebullient and generous celebration of the reading experience should be read just about any way except cover to cover. Milorad Pavic assembles not one but three dictionaries (Christian, Islamic and Hebrew), in which each entry is a story about a lost people who lived in the Balkans 1,000 years ago. With its chronologically disturbed entries and cross-referencing, it looks complex but surrenders easily to any reconstructed reading you choose. From this feast of folkloric anecdotes and legends, you make your own story, or hundreds of them. And what stories they are, about such things as a hen that lays ''time eggs,'' seasons that contain two years going in opposite directions, dream hunters who plunge into other people's dreams and purloin bits of them and a man who turned his soul inside out and slipped it on like an inverted glove. The novel gives a tantalizing life-after-death illusion of an inexhaustible unending text. |
|
Dinner
at the Homesick Restaurant. By Anne
Tyler. (1982) (Open
New Window)
|
| Disgrace. By J. M. Coetzee. (1999) (Open New Window) The title of this subtle novel refers to the fate of David Lurie, a divorced professor whose affair with a student gets him exiled from academia. He takes refuge on the farm of his daughter, Lucy. Soon after, three youths invade it and gang-rape her. She resists his appeals to abandon the place; for her, living with danger is the price whites must pay for living in the new South Africa. He too stays on, discovering a reality that a scholarly lifetime had not made him even suspect. The range of concerns raised in 216 pages is huge, and the novel's structure makes the lives of Lurie and his daughter suggest a story that is untold but wholly clear. Something more important is at work: the entire novel is in the present tense; as it ends, its characters' lives are simply going on. Their fate, and their country's, seem not determined but improvised, and the grim episodes of the book are lifted up By the exhilaration of accident and surprise. Coetzee always avoided writing directly about apartheid, his country's disgrace, but in this, his most expansive novel, one feels the presence of a profoundly political mind meditating on the meaning of the unspoken. |
| Door, The. By Magda Szabo. Translated by Len Rix. (2015) (Open New Window) In Szabo’s haunting novel, a writer’s intense relationship with her servant — an older woman who veers from aloof indifference to inexplicable generosity to fervent, implacable rage — teaches her more about people and the world than her long days spent alone, in front of her typewriter. Szabo, who died in 2007, first published her novel in 1987, in the last years of Communist rule; this supple translation shows how a story about two women in 20th-century Hungary can resonate in a very different time and place. With a mix of dark humor and an almost uncanny sense of the absurd, she traces the treacherous course of a country’s history, and the tragic course of a life. |
| Drop City. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (2003) (Open New Window) Is T. C. Boyle mellowing? Well, the debris left scattered up the entire West Coast of North America in this novel is as frightening and spectacular as any he's ever dropped on his readers -- wasted people, bears, goats, wolverines, dogs, a horse, bulldozed houses and wrecked rolling and flying machines. ''Drop City'' is a 1970's California commune of hippies who migrate to Alaska believing that the lawless tundra will let them live high as kites forever. Of course, it takes only a few months of early winter to make flower power fade to black. But Boyle's compassion for the oddballs, and even a few losers, is striking; he has not often achieved such emotional complexity. At the heart of this novel are two love stories: one involving two middle-class newcomers to the commune and the other a solitary Alaskan trapper and a woman from Anchorage who seeks him out as the only safe haven in a world melting down. The cranky, passionate attachments of these couples spread warmth through the book; Boyle's joy in sharing the music of the age gives it a nostalgic tone; and his delight in evoking the effects of a rainbow of narcotics endows it with authority -- he's obviously no amateur. (The music and dope seem to have inspired him to coin a witty word, one spoiled By a typographical error in the book. We find spacey hippies ''dancing like moonwalkers to the drugged-down testiduneous beat,'' when surely what he wrote was ''testudineous.'' You won't find either word in your dictionary, but look up ''testudo'' or ''testudinata'' and you will catch his intention.) |
| During The Reign Of The Queen Of Persia. By Joan Chase. (1983) (Open New Window) The queen of this novel's title is Gram, an intractable old tyrant who has cursed and battled through a difficult life in rural Ohio and won her way to the promised land of bingo games and movie matinees and who rules her household of women - daughters and granddaughters - with a hard and knobby hand and a tongue like a rasp. ''During the Reign of the Queen of Persia'' is a Norman Rockwell painting gone bad, the underside of the idyllic hometown, main-street, down-on-the-farm dream of Middle America. This first novel takes its place with other important contemporary fictions that depict the condition of the American woman. |
| Emperor's Children, The. By Claire Messud. (2006) (Open New Window) This superbly intelligent, keenly observed comedy of manners, set amid the glitter of cultural Manhattan in 2001, also looks unsparingly, though sympathetically, at a privileged class unwittingly poised, in its insularity, for the catastrophe of 9/11. Messud gracefully intertwines the stories of three friends, attractive, entitled 30-ish Brown graduates "torn between Big Ideas and a party" but falling behind in the contest for public rewards and losing the struggle for personal contentment. The vibrant supporting cast includes a deliciously drawn literary seducer ("without question, a great man") and two ambitious interlopers, teeming with malign energy, whose arrival on the scene propels the action forward. |
| English Patient, The. By Michael Ondaatje. (1992) (Open New Window) Four people left behind in a Tuscan villa as World War II sweeps north out of Italy grapple for a truth no human being can ever find: an Englishman slowly dying of burns from an airplane crash, a Canadian nurse stubbornly caring for him, a friend of her family who is a professional thief turned military spy and a Sikh soldier in the British Army charged with defusing hidden German bombs and mines. These people are so brilliantly drawn and singular they seem like icons in a mosaic, representing innocence, passion, loss and endurance. The kinesthetic quality of the descriptions of air warfare and bomb disposal in the novel gives an eerie beauty to scenes that make chills run through a reader, but the author's probing of his characters' inner passions fills one with even more apprehension. In the end this intensely theatrical tour de force reveals, if not a great peace at the heart of the human mystery, a vision of how heroic the struggle is. |
| Euphoria. By Lily King. (2014) (Open New Window) In 1933, the anthropologist Margaret Mead took a field trip to the Sepik River in New Guinea with her second husband; they met and collaborated with the man who would become her third. King has taken the known details of that actual event and created this exquisite novel, her fourth, about the rewards and disappointments of intellectual ambition and physical desire. The result is an intelligent, sensual tale told with a suitable mix of precision and heat. |
| Family Life. By Akhil Sharma (2014) (Open New Window) Sharma’s austere but moving novel tells the semi-autobiographical story of a family that immigrates from India to Queens, and has just begun to build a new life when the elder son suffers severe brain damage in a swimming pool accident. Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender, the book chronicles how grief renders the parents unable to cherish and raise their other son; love, it suggests, becomes warped and jagged and even seemingly vanishes in the midst of mourning. |
|
Flag for
Sunrise, A. By Robert Stone. (1981) (Open New
Window) |
| lamethrowers, The. By Rachel Kushner (2013) (Open New Window) Radical politics, avant-garde art and motorcycle racing all spring to life in Kushner’s radiant novel of the 1970s, in which a young woman moves to New York to become an artist, only to wind up involved in the revolutionary protest movement that shook Italy in those years. The novel, Kushner’s second, deploys mordant observations and chiseled sentences to explore how individuals are swept along by implacable social forces. |
| Fortress Of Solitude, The. By Jonathan Lethem. (2003) (Open New Window) Everyone seeks his own Garden of Eden, but who would think to find it in a single block of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, in the 1970's, when New York City was going down the tubes? In Jonathan Lethem's new novel it is there for Dylan, a white geeky boy, and his friend Mingus, a hip black neighbor. These boys' knowledge of life comes in piles of hoarded comics; graffiti, which they streak together as if By a single hand across the borough; unending black and white confrontations of will on the street; and black music, from jazz and blues to hip-hop. If Dylan, who seems to be Lethem's alter ego, looks like the threatened outsider among the black kids on their street, what he gets from them makes him a prophet of cool among whites he later meets in college, but since he ends up a pedantic music critic, the cool must have worn off. It was Mingus who was the outsider all along; from Day 1 he had a lashing knowledge of the great world and he emerges out of a long silence at the novel's center as the tragic figure of the book. If at times this sometimes disheveled novel strikes one as a meander through memory, magic and regret, his fate gives it a bitter bite. |
| Foucault's Pendulum. By Umberto Eco. Translated By William Weaver. (1989) (Open New Window) Brilliantly translated By William Weaver from Umberto Eco's Italian, this novel is an intellectual triumph. Its pages are crammed with information - appropriately, since Mr. Eco is a semiotician, a professor of signs, codes and hidden meanings. No one should know as much as he does, but he shares it all - mountains of learning sculptured into grand landscapes on which the ultimate conspiracy, one to synthesize all conspiracies, is played out By bands of modern-day Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, Masons, Jesuits, Nazis and diabolicals of many stripes who are trying to seize not power over the earth but the power of the planet itself. Mr. Eco fakes nothing. The novel teases, amuses, baffles and enchants one, but every detail is authentic. "Foucault's Pendulum" is an encyclopedic detective story playfully constructed By a master manipulating his own invention - a long, erudite joke. |
|
Freedom. By Jonathan Franzen. (2010). (Open New Window) |
| Frolic of His Own, A. By William Gaddis. (1994) (Open New Window) Even if the reader has to pay close attention to the continuous, minimally punctuated speech of dozens of characters that makes up the entire narrative of this exceptionally rich novel, the payoff is worth it. In this misanthropic and often hilarious comedy, William Gaddis holds up the legal profession, its minions and dupes, to mockery, and then extends the ridicule to a wide spectrum of contemporary American culture -- presented with Swiftian glee as an unholy stew of greed, ignorance, illiteracy, corruption and childish folly. His powers of mimicry allow him to flesh out the distinct, often appalling, personalities of his characters through nothing more than their spates of words, and readers who laugh their way right through to the end may find it impossible to get the rhythms and sounds of those voices out of their imaginations. |
| Gate at
the Stairs, A. By Lorrie
Moore (2009) (Open New Window) |
| Gertrude And Claudius. By John Updike. (2000) (Open New Window) She is too loving and, perhaps more dangerously, too lovable, the young woman in John Updike's novel, whose father offers her, against her wishes, to the older warrior king he admires. But she learns to love her husband, and loves her son too uncritically, turning him into a self-centered brat with a poisonous mouth. In middle age she remains what she had always been, but more amply, more open and warm. Which is perhaps why her husband's brother, quick-witted, subtle and daring, intuits his chance with her and takes it, sparking a white-hot anger in the phlegmatic warrior that the brother realizes can be doused only By the murder of the older man. After that the brother can marry the woman. There is stunning luxury here, not all of it, as the son thinks, in sinful sheets. Updike's language is as rich as any Elizabethan's, and as sensuous as any he has ever written, when he conjures up this woman in love. His evocation of the palaces, feasts and royal excursions, and especially of the woman's clothes, have the opulence of a late medieval Burgundian book of hours, a reminder that art was Updike's first trade. But he is cunning. These people are, of course, Queen Gertrude, her two husbands and her son Hamlet, and this gorgeous entertainment is a sapper's tool undermining the play in which we think we know them. To construct his story Updike uses the same chronicle Shakespeare's source relied on, and ''Gertrude and Claudius'' ends just as the play begins. You will never again understand ''Hamlet'' the same way or think of the brooding prince without a shudder of revulsion. Orestes, you had better watch out! |
| Gilead. By Marilynne Robinson. (2004) (Open New Window) This grave, lucid, luminously spiritual novel about fathers and sons reaches back to the abolitionist movement and into the 1950's. |
| The Goldfinch. By Donna Tartt. (2013) (Open New Window) Tartt’s intoxicating third novel, after “The Secret History” and “The Little Friend,” follows the travails of Theo Decker, who emerges from a terrorist bombing motherless but in possession of a prized Dutch painting. Like the best of Dickens, the novel is packed with incident and populated with vivid characters. At its heart is the unwavering belief that come what may, art can save us by lifting us above ourselves. |
| Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel. By Jeannette Walls. (2009) (Open New Window) In her luminous memoir, "The Glass Castle,"
Walls told of being raised By eccentric and unfit parents. Now, in a
novel based on family lore, she has adopted the voice of her maternal
grandmother, Lily Casey Smith - mustang breaker, schoolteacher, ranch
wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider and bush pilot. The
result reanimates a chapter of America's frontier past.
|
| Handmaid's Tale, The. By Margaret Atwood. (1986) (Open New Window) In the Republic of Gilead the female population is divided into classes based on functions - the Marthas (houseworkers), Econowives (workers), Handmaids (childbearers), Aunts (thought controllers) and Wives. Men (the Commanders) run the nation. Margaret Atwood's cautionary tale of postfeminist future shock pictures a nation formed By a backlash against feminism, but also By nuclear accidents, chemical pollution, radiation poisoning, a host of our present problems run amok. Ms. Atwood draws as well on New England Puritan history for her repressive 22d-century society. Her deft sardonic humor makes much of the action and dialogue in the novel funny and ominous at the same time. |
| Headlong. By Michael Frayn. (1999) (Open New Window) Michael Frayn uses his skills as a dramatist to heighten the suspense in this improbably funny novel about, among other things, scholarship. A devious country gentleman with a young wife asks his neighbors -- Martin, a philosopher, and his wife, Kate, an art historian -- for an opinion of paintings he's thinking of selling. Martin suspects one is a lost Bruegel and schemes to get it. He fails to tell Kate of his suspicion, which, along with a few flirtations, allows Frayn to try new dissections in his continuing exploration of the shadows of married life -- he's especially sharp about spouses' nuanced silences -- but the heart of the story is Martin's effort to authenticate the painting. As he researches we learn about the political and religious strife of the 16th-century Netherlands and about disputed questions concerning Bruegel's allegiances and beliefs. Frayn's triumph is making this scholarly work exciting, delightful and often surprising. Of course, for Martin this is learning as gambling and he raises the stakes until he is betting his life, marriage and future. Frayn keeps winding up not only the comedy but the anticipation, in the manner of a detective story. The end may exasperate some readers, but that is a small price for so much fun. |
| History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters, A. By Julian Barnes. (1989) (Open New Window) Post-modernist but accessibly straightforward, Julian Barnes's fifth book may seem less a novel than an assembling of fictions and essays. This comedy of ideas has much to do with transforming journeys - from the story of Noah through one about a young woman who sets to sea on a raft to escape nuclear Armageddon and another about a film star re-creating a missionary's disastrous trip down a Venezuelan river to an account of an astronaut who finds God in space and returns to earth to find what he thinks are Noah's remains. The centerpiece is a luminous meditation on Gericault's painting "The Raft of the Medusa" in which the picture of the doomed craft emerges as a transcendent allegory. The many stories here are given their dominant tone, and humor, By an undercurrent of gentle, self-reflective irony. The book demystifies its subjects and mocks its own ambition; it is a playful, witty gathering of conjectures By a humanist who loves ideas. |
|
Hologram
For The King, A. By Dave Eggers. (2012) (Open
New Window)
|
|
Housekeeping. By Marilynne
Robinson. (1981) (Open
New Window)
|
| Human Stain, The. By Philip Roth. (2000) (Open New Window) Coleman Silk, the central character in Philip Roth's new novel, may be the most interesting person Roth has ever invented -- a black man of such light hue that he decided simply to pass for white, left his entire family behind and went into the world as a Jew who became a distinguished classicist. But at the height of his career, one day in a lecture he mentioned ''spooks,'' meaning ghosts, and found himself denounced as a racist and forced to resign. Deeply embittered, he turned to his old friend Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter mind (not alter ego, he insists), for help in writing a book. Zuckerman does not help him write, but he discovers Silk's whole story and finds out too late the strange retribution lying in wait for Silk: he has been marked for death By a rabid anti-Semite. ''The Human Stain'' is part of a loose trilogy that started with ''American Pastoral'' in 1997 and ''I Married a Communist'' in 1998. It is the least finished novel of the three, but in many ways the most powerful. Now and then it stops to let us watch Roth ride his hobby horses, which is not great sport. But when Zuckerman and Silk are together and testing each other, Roth's writing reaches an emotional intensity and a vividness not exceeded in any of his books. The American dream of starting over entirely new has the force of inevitability here, and Roth's judgment clearly is that you can never make it all the way. There is no comfort in this vision, but the tranquillity Zuckerman achieves as he tells the story is infectious, and that is a certain reward. |
| In The Lake Of The Woods. By Tim O'Brien. (1994) (Open New Window) On the surface this novel is a mystery story about a woman who disappears after her husband's political career collapses when his great secret -- as a soldier he had been at the My Lai massacre in Vietnam -- is exposed. But, like Tim O'Brien's other novels, it traces the line between a literal but unknowable truth and a truth whose only evidence is the story containing it. Here he turns his concerns about truth, time and responsibility inward, letting them weigh on one character, the husband, whose inner architecture is more emblematic than personal. There are sections of conventional narrative; others that collect evidence on the case from interviews and excerpts from books or public records; and others obsessively puzzling over what really might have happened. At bottom, this is a tale about the moral effects of suppressing a true story, about the abuse of history, about what happens to you when you pretend there is no history. |
| Independence Day. By Richard Ford. (1995) (Open New Window) Frank Bascombe, the antihero of "The Sportswriter" (1986), is back -- no longer a writer but a real estate salesman, 44, divorced ("I wanted somebody with a true heart," his ex-wife says; "that wasn't you"). Personal relationships, especially with women, puzzle him more than ever; it is not, he says, as if he doesn't exist, just that he doesn't "exist as much" as other people. So his attempts to turn his current affair into something deeper fizzle out, and his efforts to help his troubled teen-age son during a Fourth of July weekend trip veer toward tragedy. If the novel's story line is thin, the character sketches are brilliant work By a master of the craft. With wisdom and wry wit, Richard Ford makes Bascombe a man who takes his place alongside Willy Loman and Rabbit Angstrom in our literature. |
| Information, The. By Martin Amis. (1995) (Open New Window) Midlife crisis is something else in Martin Amis's dazzling novel about literary envy in London. Richard, a failed novelist, can't stand the huge success of his best friend, Gwyn, whose stinking-bad novels make him a fortune. Richard, indignant and resentful, tries to redress the cosmic imbalance with the help of some of Mr. Amis's usual menagerie of dangerous netherworlders, who turn Richard's dicey game against him. All the characters become pawns in an accelerating chess match they have no control over. Mr. Amis, the prince of hip, is in top form; his humor is more daring than ever, and his mastery of phrase and metaphor makes his gorgeous, dark invention crackle. He is also smart about being smart: at just the right moments he sinks the blade of his satire into himself. |
| Ironweed. By William Kennedy. (1983) (Open New Window) The third in a series of three Albany-set novels, following ''Legs,'' about the gangster Legs Diamond, and ''Billy Phelan's Greatest Crime,'' ''Ironweed'' concerns Billy Phelan's father, a former mechanic, major-league third baseman, lush and murderer, who is now back in Albany after 22 years on the lam. The time is the Depression, and the supporting cast includes crooks, bums, cons, gamblers and working stiffs. William Kennedy practices a tough-minded and defiant humanism that will leave many readers chastened but feeling good. |
| Island Of The Day Before, The. By Umberto Eco. Translated By William Weaver. (1995) (Open New Window) This grand and deliriously writerly novel is a book of many books that regenerates literary traditions as it unfolds a tale of warfare, romance and shipwreck during the most exciting period of our intellectual history, the mid-17th century. Umberto Eco's narrative surface is sensually alluring, cool and glittery, but for all its lucidity and charm, there is always something else going on: if the plot turns on blood, ambition, intrigue, spying, love, death and damnation, there is a profound agenda here that urgently if playfully makes us aware of the steady continuity of human thought -- the conspiracy of the world to be known. This novel is really a book about telling, reminding us that the only clarity we are capable of reaching is the story we tell to compel time and the universe to take on meaning. |
| Jazz. By Toni Morrison. (1992) (Open New Window) With her customary virtuosity Toni Morrison brings us into the heart of Harlem early in this century, a Harlem permeated with the thrum of the music evoked By her title, a Harlem to which black people fleeing from fear in other places came to find their riskier selves. Her episodic novel, played out in intense prose rhythms, is about three people who came together simply because they were put down together -- powerless innocents enchanted and deceived By the music of the world, who believed life would be good to them. A cosmetics salesman, the son of a wild cave woman, purveys illusion until he himself is caught in a romantic illusion spun By a foxy teen-ager whom he kills. His wife, luxuriating in the thralldom of jealousy and obsessed By longing for the baby she never had, seeks to possess the image, memory and soul of the dead girl. Ms. Morrison always conjures up worlds with complete authority; this time it is a world without soft lights or shadows, drawn in the bold strokes of a poster. |
| John Henry Days. By Colson Whitehead. (2001) (Open New Window) The ambition of Colson Whitehead's second novel is to define the interior crisis of manhood in terms of the entire pop-mad consumer society, and it succeeds so well that if there are a few omissions they are not easy to find. The sumptuous writing has the structure and quality of music, and it is that eloquence that keeps a reader moving, despite a few passages that run out of control. The John Henry of the title is the black railroad worker of the ballads, who won a tunnel-drilling contest against a steam-powered drill even though the effort killed him. Against the backdrop of this 130-year-old myth Whitehead gives us his protagonist, J. Sutter, and a gang of his friends and competitors -- young, educated, glib operatives in the publicity and celebrity machine of a modern world that values a man for what he buys and wears and doesn't give a damn about performance. Whitehead relishes slashing through the mindlessness of the age in a voice so intelligent and an idiom so imaginative that it can lift a reader right out of his chair. But he is not remorseless. He likes these people and respects their longings. They have no moral compass, but he has, so we can laugh at them but still grieve for the loss of so much possibility. You may feel you can never get to the end of this novel, not because it often meanders but because it goes on speaking after the last sentence and you want to head back in to argue with it, question it and listen to it. |
| Judge on Trial. By Ivan Klima. (1993) (Open New Window) Ivan Klima's book, first circulated as an underground text in the 1970's in Czechoslovakia, is likely to survive as the key version of the late-20th-century Eastern European political novel, rivaled only By the work of Milan Kundera. Conceived with great intellectual and moral ambition, this many-layered story about a man on the inside of the old regime who acts prudently in his emptiness places the moment of Communist repression in a vastly larger history and thus raises hope for the political orders of the future. This is work in the tradition of Elias Canetti and Arthur Koestler, an honest examination of the agonized pain of Middle European history that suggests that it still has something to disclose to the moral future. |
| Kafka On The Shore. By Haruki Murakami. (2005) (Open New Window) This graceful and dreamily cerebral novel, translated from the Japanese By Philip Gabriel, tells two stories - that of a boy fleeing an Oedipal prophecy, and that of a witless old man who can talk to cats - and is the work of a powerfully confident writer. |
| Known World, The. By Edward P. Jones. (2003) (Open New Window) What makes this novel so startling is that the situation Edward P. Jones imagines was reality in parts of this country in the 1850's: there were black slave owners, more than a few, and a few were pretty well heeled. Jones's story, centered on one such man in Virginia, exposes the heart of slavery; there are few real villains in this book, because slavery poisons the entire society, white and black, and for the same reason there can be no real heroes. Until now Jones has been a writer of short stories, and this first novel often reads like an assemblage of stories within stories. But he has a sharp ear for speech and a gift for spotting individualizing gestures; ''The Known World'' is crowded with individuals who refuse to get lost in the vast picture of humiliation and disgrace it presents. Jones knows how to create dramatic confrontations that appall us and will not let us escape, as in the treachery of a traveling white con artist who returns a freed black man to shackles By a despicable trick and thus sets the novel on a course to its tragic end. The book has an epic feel, and the seductive force of folk tales. |
| Lay of the Land, The. By Richard Ford. (2006) (Open New Window) The third installment, following "The Sportswriter" (1986) and "Independence Day" (1995), in the serial epic of Frank Bascombe - flawed husband, fuddled dad, writer turned real estate agent and voluble first-person narrator. Once again the action revolves around a holiday. This time it's Thanksgiving 2000: the Florida recount grinds toward its predictable outcome, and Bascombe, now 55, battles prostate cancer and copes with a strange turn in his second marriage. The story, which unfolds over three days, is filled with incidents, some of them violent, but as ever the drama is rooted in the interior world of its authentically life-size hero, as he logs long hours on the highways and back roads of New Jersey, taking expansive stock of middle-age defeats and registering the erosions of a brilliantly evoked landscape of suburbs, strip malls and ocean towns. |
| Libra. By Don DeLillo. (1988) (Open New Window) The richest novel so far By Don DeLillo pitches into the history of the assassination of President Kennedy from angles that at first disorient us and finally leave us feeling we have understood something - about ourselves and history and the nature of perception - that can only be grasped from history on the margins, what people don't want to know. Mr. DeLillo has a merciless ear for language and a mastery of people's elliptical speech that allow him to turn commonplace moments into the work of genius. It is the accumulation of those moments that makes his portraits of Lee Harvey Oswald and many others moving and frightening, and the Kennedy murder as tragic and dramatic as are the catastrophes of the great classical tragedies, but with an entirely American twist. |
| Life after Life. By Kate Atkinson. (2013) (Open New Window) Tartt’s intoxicating third novel, after “The Secret History” and “The Little Friend,” follows the travails of Theo Decker, who emerges from a terrorist bombing motherless but in possession of a prized Dutch painting. Like the best of Dickens, the novel is packed with incident and populated with vivid characters. At its heart is the unwavering belief that come what may, art can save us by lifting us above ourselves. |
| Life & Times Of Michael K. By J. M. Coetzee. (1984) (Open New Window) It is South Africa, certainly. Michael K, who knows only what is emotional and obvious and has no capacity for abstractions or philosophy, is a victim of a cruel society, certainly. The official country is at war with a large part of its own people, certainly. Yet these certainties, added up, make up but a small part of the great story that emerges from J. M. Coetzee's short tale, in which small moral disclosures pile up from page to page until the book becomes an overwhelming indictment of the self-deceptions of human stupidity. Michael K is a man whose only sustenance, ''the bread of freedom,'' in the end cannot be found. As in his earlier ''Waiting for the Barbarians,'' Mr. Coetzee proves himself an absolute master of moral fiction. |
| London Fields. By Martin Amis. (1990) (Open New Window) Martin Amis has taken the apocalyptic genre into sinister byways in this bitter tragicomedy of life in a world going noisily to hell. His dark vision of life has always been relentless, but this novel, a virtuoso depiction of a wild and lustful society in a dying world, is a large book of comic and satirical invention. It offends every imaginable sensibility. Mr. Amis's mordant satire turns his characters into caricatures, but those caricatures have a vitality and erotic intensity seldom found in modern fiction. "London Fields" is not a safe book; it is moved not By plot but By the density of its language and its language is demonically alive. |
| Love in the Time Of Cholera. By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated By Edith Grossman. (1988) (Open New Window) This shining and heartbreaking novel may be one of the greatest love stories ever told. Inspired By the long pursuit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's mother By his father, it is the tale of a vow of love that takes 51 years to fulfill. Writing with impassioned control and out of a maniacal serenity, the author creates language at once classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, that is able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and soar. Mr. Garcia Marquez redeems the silences of history about a Caribbean haunted By centuries of war and disease that have brought so appallingly many people down. This may be the only way to write about love; without the darkness there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera - all also present in this book - but not the Big L. There is nothing like the final chapter, symphonic, sure in dynamics and tempo, moving us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy to an end that makes us realize this novel can return our worn souls to us. |
| Love Medicine. By Louise Erdrich. (1985) (Open New Window) There are seven narrators and twice that many unforgettable characters in this lyrical first novel about an American Indian family in the Middle West. Miss Erdrich is a poet, and she uses the different voices to compose a cumulatively wondrous prose song filled with sorrow and laughter. In her hands the tawdry world of her heroes and villains becomes a shining place of baroque decay. Her writing is meticulous - every word and sentence is perfectly placed to achieve the effect she wants. The voices in this rich tale belong to characters who will not leave the imagination once a reader has let them in. ''Love Medicine'' is a brilliant debut. |
| Machine Dreams. By Jayne Anne Phillips. (1984) (Open New Window) The machine dreams are nightmares that pass from father to son and then, after both are dead, to daughter in this complex first novel in which family legends rise to the level of myths. The machines belong mainly to wars, the one the father survived and the one the son did not, but they are also the kinds of vehicles a deus ex machina rides. In this case, the reference is ironic, since the god never rescues the actors from fate. Their concerns are familiar, and the novel's thrilling shocks arise from ordinary moments that suddenly burst with deep meaning we had not anticipated. |
| Man Gone Down. By Michael Thomas - (2007) (Open New Window) This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer's life |
| Manual for Cleaning Women, A: Selected Stories. By Lucia Berlin. Edited by Stephen Emerson. (2015) (Open New Window) Berlin, who died in 2004, left behind a substantial but little-known trove of stories that in her lifetime appeared mostly in literary journals and small-press books. This revelatory collection gathers 43 of them, introducing her to a wider audience as an uncompromising and largehearted observer of life whose sympathies favor smart, mouthy women struggling to get by much as Berlin herself — an alcoholic who raised four sons on her own — frequently did. With their maximalist emotions and sparse, unadorned language, Berlin’s stories are the kind a woman in a Tom Waits song might tell a man she’s just met during a long humid night spent drinking in a parking lot. |
| Mason & Dixon. By Thomas Pynchon. (1997) (Open New Window) Thomas Pynchon's finest novel is a book of heart, fire and genius. Its structure is classic comedy: the astronomer Charles Mason, as straight man, and the surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, to whom the madcap is just a reflex, bumble along in the mid-18th century drawing the line that separated Pennsylvania from Maryland and West Virginia, the North from the South. The narrator says history needs tending By fabulists, counterfeiters and cranks, and Pynchon gleefully joins the company. The story of this map-making becomes an investigation into the order of the universe, aiming to convince us that reason is inadequate to penetrate the world's mysteries. The book's abundant humor balances on the thin edge of anachronism; history, myth, anecdote and hyperbole are perfect equals. The style is bumptiously Fieldingesque, but subversively pumped up with allusions not only to yesterday and today but to Pynchon's other novels and many 20th-century masters of fiction; the allusiveness and self-awareness are a good part of the fun. The robust characters -- merchants, prostitutes, barmen, Indians, caffeine addicts, a talking dog, cabalists, sailors, poets, clerics, along with historical icons like Washington, Franklin, the Penns and Baltimores -- wrestle with a reader's understanding. As for Mason and Dixon: they are Pynchon's deepest creations; we know them from youth to death and, for all their confusion, surliness, resentment and loneliness, they inspire sympathy, perhaps even affection. |
| Master, The. By Colm Toibin. (2004) (Open New Window) A novel about Henry James, his life and art -- beautifully written, deeply pondered, startlingly un-Jamesian. |
| Mating. By Norman Rush. (1991) (Open New Window) Norman Rush's first novel, about a woman anthropologist seeking perfect love and the perfect lover, another anthropologist who has created a utopia in Africa, is one of the wisest and wittiest fictional meditations ever written on the subject of mating. It illuminates the nature of true intimacy. At their happiest, the lovers arrive at a state that is exalting in its seeming inexhaustibility. All this is presented in an allusive, freewheeling first-person narrative of impressive intelligence. The reader's education is tested and expanded By the fast and self-conscious company of the narrator and her beloved, people whose mordant wordplay is sly and pleasantly unobtrusive. If such brilliant writing is not enough, this woman's quest is a grand adventure across a land that assaults and seduces all the senses. |
| Mercy, A. By Toni Morrison. - (2008) (Open New Window) The fate of a slave child abandoned By her mother animates this allusive novel - part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song - about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Morrison's farmers and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured whites and captive Native Americans live side By side, often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe American Eden that is both a haven and a prison - an emerging nation whose identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions and New World appetites and fears |
| Middlesex. By Jeffrey Eugenides. (2002) (Open New Window) At the opening of this colossally curious, shaggy and exuberant novel the narrator mimics the first line of the "Iliad," calling on his Muse to sing -- in this case about his genes. Take the hint. This story is epic -- in spirit, scope, and definitely in organization. Jeffrey Eugenides dares to base the plot on genetic theory, so if Homer is a distant ancestor, Darwin is another. The narrator's recessive gene makes "transgender" the governing word here. How he got the gene is traced through three generations of immigrants who escape the Turkish massacre of Greeks in Smyrna in 1922 to live through 80 years of bootlegging, Depression, war, race riots and counterculture in Detroit. Eugenides gets the scientific theory right and lets us understand it in laughter and astonishment. The ideas take shape in a tug of war between destiny and personal freedom among dozens of characters so richly imagined they almost overwhelm our senses. They may be incestuous, criminal, crazy or vengeful, but Eugenides loves them as though they were family -- which some of them could be. When they move, they fly; in fact, the flight of the narrator's father in his last seconds of life is as spectacular as the fiery globe-girdling swoops of Homer's gods spiraling down from Olympus. That a novel so sprawling, episodic and discursive succeeds is a sign of how soundly it is made; recurrent motifs, vibrant writing and the comic instinct of its author keep it tight. It ends, like the "Iliad," with a funeral. Here two brothers, who always knew they were siblings but had no idea they were brothers, meet as men; this birth on the verge of adulthood is a quiet miracle. |
|
Midnight's Children. By Salman Rushdie. (1981)
(Open
New Window)
|
| Moor's Last Sigh, The. By Salman Rushdie. (1996) (Open New Window) No retort to tyranny could be more eloquent than Salman Rushdie's new novel, his first since he went into hiding after ''The Satanic Verses'' inspired Iranian religious leaders to call for his execution in 1989. Ostensibly this is the picaresque saga of the rise, decline and extinction of an ancient Portuguese family in India, told By its last member. The family is marked By lunacy, betrayal, wild sexual confusion and crude lusts for power. The watershed events of Indian history intrude. The denouement is pyrotechnical. But hidden in this carnivalesque wrapping is a bitter cautionary tale. The cataclysm occurs when the family, its once strong religious beliefs now terminally weak, encounters the new absolutist religious spirit arising in India. It is obvious Mr. Rushdie is dealing, subtly and By analogy, with the situation that created his own predicament. What else is here? A biting parody of the family saga novel; a celebration of Bombay in its cosmopolitan years; a masterly rendition of jokey, punning Indian English; a dark assessment of Indian religious nationalism; and a mordant reflection on the future of serious art. If the language of the novel is heavily ornamented, the brio and wit make all the dazzle seem quite natural. |
| More Die of Heatbreak. By Saul Bellow. (1987) (Open New Window) The calamitous wit of ''The Adventures of Augie March'' and ''Herzog'' is back in this refreshingly youthful novel about people rearranging one another's lives as they attempt to rescue their own. Here the relationship between a 35-year-old citizen of the world and his uncle, a world-famous scientist who has married a woman 20 years his junior, is the vehicle for exposing widening circles of betrayal, deceit and conspiracy over sex and money -the stakes in a kind of cosmic con game. Amid the laughter there is Saul Bellow's customarily serious purpose; the mind of this writer always stands outside itself, mercilessly examining its own workings and tracking the great issues of the age. The comedy runs deep here because the characters, even the most brutally venal, have a tragic capacity. |
| Mr. Palomar. By Italo Calvino. Translated By William Weaver. (1985) (Open New Window) In these adroit and witty meditative fictions, if Mr. Palomar is a lens to let Italo Calvino look at the phenomena of the world, the lens often turns into a mirror that reflects the reflecting intellect back on itself. And if Mr. Palomar is discovering his place in the world through a series of disquisitions on visual experiences, cultural developments and the cosmos, those discoveries dissolve under his intellectual scrutiny. Calvino is on the high wires, on lines of thought strung out above the big international circus. What is impressive about ''Mr. Palomar'' is a sense of the safety net being withdrawn at the end, of beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination being carried off not so much to dazzle an audience as to outface what Philip Larkin calls ''the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do.' |
| My Son's Story. By Nadine Gordimer. (1990) (Open New Window) In this unnerving tour de force, a "coloured" boy in South Africa stumbles into the secret life of his father, a leader of the movement to end apartheid. He is stunned By the casualness of the infidelity and By the expectation that he will become a conspirator of silence. His perplexity gives way to a sardonic voice that keeps reminding us that this novel is meant to look with nuanced force at moral complexity, ambiguity and hypocrisy. But Nadine Gordimer, who has a keen eye for the exceedingly precarious moral situation of everyone in her violently unjust country, has an uncanny ability to portray each of her characters with sympathy and subtlety. She can expose the evil of the world without damning the people caught in it, people we come to value as we know them. |
| Name of the Rose, The. By Umberto Eco. (1983) (Open New Window) Imagine a medieval castle run By the Benedictines, with cellarers, herbalists, gardeners, librarians, young novices. Imagine that, one after the other, half a dozen monks are found murdered in the most bizarre ways. Imagine that a learned Franciscan is sent to solve the mystery and at the end of the narrative it turns out that all these horrible crimes were committed for highly ethical and cultural reasons. These are the bare bones of a first novel By a famous Italian practitioner of semiotics (the philosophy of signs and symbols). ''The Name of the Rose'' has been a best seller in Europe and, shortly after the publication of this excellent translation By William Weaver, went to the top of the best-seller list here. Imagine! |
| Netherland. By Joseph O'Neill. (2008) (Open New Window) O'Neill's seductive ode to New York - a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its belief "in its salvific worth" - is narrated By a Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan existence is upended By the events of Sept. 11, 2001. When his wife departs for London with their small son, he stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly buoyant world of immigrant cricket players, most of them West Indians and South Asians, including an entrepreneur with Gatsby-size aspirations |
| NW. By Zadie Smith. (2012) (Open New Window) Smith's piercing new novel, her first in seven years, traces the friendship of two women who grew up in a housing project in northwest London, their lives disrupted By fateful choices and the brutal efficiency of chance. The narrative edges forward in fragments, uncovering truths about identity and money and sex with incandescent language that, for all of its formal experimentation, is intimate and searingly direct. |
| Out Stealing Horses. By Per Petterson. (2007) (Open New Window) In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude. |
| Outerbridge Reach. By Robert Stone. (1992) (Open New Window) An unsettling moral proposition can be glimpsed behind this novel: that seeing through everything and believing in nothing may be the most stupid way to cheat oneself of life. An advertising copywriter for a boat company -- he is a middle-aged Vietnam veteran and a parody of a Hemingway hero -- volunteers to sail solo around the world in a race after the company's owner, who was to make the race, disappears. The adman's wife suppresses her fears about the adventure and decides it may revitalize her husband and their marriage. But a film maker producing a documentary about the boat has an affair with her while her husband battles the sea alone. Even richer in literary allusions than Mr. Stone's other books, and told in a gritty idiom, this shapely novel has great power. Like a thriller it makes us care intensely about what will happen next and who will be hurt. And it is impossible to read the last dazzling hundred pages without feeling something terrible has happened and no one is to blame. |
| Outline. By Rachel Cusk. (2015) (Open New Window) Cusk’s subtle, unconventional and lethally intelligent novel, “Outline,” her eighth, is a string of one-sided conversations. A divorced woman traveling in Greece, our narrator, talks — or rather listens — to the people she meets, absorbing their stories of love and loss, deception, pride and folly. Well-worn subjects — adultery, divorce, ennui — become freshly menacing under Cusk’s gaze, and her mental clarity can seem so penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure. |
| Perfect Spy, A. By John le Carre. (1986) (Open New Window) A tense balance between the narrative drive of the plot and the artfulness of the style makes this espionage novel perhaps the best in John le Carre's oeuvre. Many readers have come to expect Byzantine plotting in his fiction, but here the structure is straightforward, although in its vivid characterization and spiraling story line the novel is modeled on Dickens. But its greatest force derives from its autobiographical aspects. The protagonist, a spy named Magnus Pym, reveals a haunting picture of his father, Rick Pym, a tantalizing presence but not much of a father. It is his need to fill the void in himself created By his harrowing relationship with the vacant Rick that drives Magnus to the high-pressure world of spying. Mr. le Carre mines this vein deeply, creating parallelisms, symbols, psychological motivations and complex metaphors that echo and expand in this epitome of the literature of paranoia that is so exactly suited to our times. |
| Plot Against America. By Philip Roth. (2004) (Open New Window) An ingenious ''anti-historical'' novel set during World War II. Charles Lindbergh is elected president on an isolationist platform, and a Jewish family in Newark suffers the consequences. |
| Poisonwood Bible, The. By Barbara Kingsolver. (1998) (Open New Window) Zeal is mere termite food in Barbara Kingsolver's novel about a white American clergyman's religious mission to the Congo in 1959. At least ostensibly, this is Nathan Price's story. But it is told By his wife, Orleanna, recollecting years later on an island in Georgia, and her daughters, writing in Africa -- an epistolary novel from places so remote the letters might have been sent to sea in bottles. The picture of Price is merciless; Kingsolver implies that his story is only the one men always tell. There is a load of political message here, but ultimately this is a novel of character; the women discover themselves as they lose faith in Price and find another one, each according to her kind. The tone of Orleanna's reminiscences is ironic, and Kingsolver's use of her unconscious dissembling to reveal her pain is masterly; the mother confides in Ruth May, her baby, the catalyst for breaking up the family, and there is wisdom in every sentence. Rachel, the first daughter, is the brainless soul of American materialism. A younger sister, Adah, is hemiplegic, limping and nearly speechless, but a verbal gymnast whose wit sets fire to her diary and lights up the true nature of anyone she notices. Her twin, Leah, is the conscience of the novel, always measuring the distance she has to go before she is worthy of Africa. Perhaps the greatest character is collective, the Congolese, whose perfect adaptation to the harshness of their lives amid drought, hunger, pests and diseases is simply beautiful. Their rejection of American salvation feels triumphant. |
| Possession: A Romance. By A. S Byatt. (1990) (Open New Window) A plenitude of Dickensian surprises awaits the reader at the end of this novel about competing academics who come into comically mortal combat when one of them discovers that two Victorian poets, a man and a woman, whom they all guard jealously as their idols and the sources of their incomes, had more than a passing interest in each other. A. S Byatt is a gifted observer of details and she uses them brilliantly in this very Victorian "romance" of a detective story that satirizes academia but also becomes a concoction in the manner of Jorge Luis Borges. She creates characters who might have stepped out of Dickens or P. G. Wodehouse directly into a post-modernist novel and, along the way, writes fine Victorian verse and prose, and opens every narrative device of fiction to inspection without ever ceasing to delight. |
| Prep. By Curtis Sittenfeld. (2005) (Open New Window) This calm and memorably incisive first novel, about a scholarship girl who heads east to attend an elite prep school, casts an unshakable spell and has plenty to say about class, sex and character. |
| Preston Falls. By David Gates. (1998) (Open New Window) Boomers go bust in this scary novel, the whole generation of them. Doug Willis is a New York public relations executive, and his wife, Jean, a successful designer; they live in Westchester County and own an old getaway house upstate. He is a maelstrom of male vanity whose obsessive irony has left him with little but a withering reflexive consciousness and the cynicism he hopes will prevent him from going missing in the middle of life. Jean's form of denial is keeping up an illusion of normality no matter what happens; she is no wiser than he is, but she is nicer. She's also nicer than their two children. When Willis takes two months off to work on the old house, a family fight on the first weekend lands him in jail, and the lawyer who springs him turns out to be a drug trafficker who brings Willis into the trade. Briefly the dope is a whiff of youth, but then Willis, in a panic about what he is doing, flees the country life without telling Jean where he's going. From there till the end of the novel the suspense about his fate is brilliantly maintained. David Gates has a superb reporter's precision, an analyst's ear, a teen-ager's glee in exposing deception and a moralist's eye that is as unforgiving as Evelyn Waugh's. Here the entire culture is deception, and as these characters betray themselves ever deeper into it, the very possibility of trust, of reliable understanding, is worn away. A reader ends up wary of looking at the book again once he's finished -- because anything could happen and whatever does is likely to be irremediable. |
| Rabbit at Rest. By John Updike. (1990) (Open New Window) With this, the most brooding, most demanding and most concentrated of all of John Updike's longer novels, the Rabbit quartet, and Rabbit, come to an end. Its final word, spoken By Rabbit himself, is "Enough." Navigating the stumble toward death of this antihero, one can only think of Schopenhauer's definition of walking as "arrested falling." Inevitably, this novel will make one reflect also on the previous three and what becomes most clear is that the being which most illuminates all four books is not Rabbit or any other character but the world through which he moves on his long decline, meticulously recorded By one of the most gifted American realists. The Rabbit novels, for all their grittiness, make up Mr. Updike's surpassingly eloquent valentine to his country. |
|
Rabbit
Is Rich. By John Updike. (1981) (Open New
Window)
|
| Redeployment. By Phil Klay (2014) (Open New Window) In this brilliant debut story collection, Klay — a former Marine who served in Iraq — shows what happens when young, heavily armed Americans collide with a fractured and deeply foreign country few of them even remotely understand. Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis. The collection is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad: the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.
|
| Regeneration. By Pat Barker. (1992) (Open New Window) Pat Barker has been the model of a working-class realistic novelist, but here she leaps the lines of gender, class, geography and history at once. And she takes another daring chance: her novel is about real people who published their own memoirs. "Regeneration" is the story of the British poet Siegfried Sassoon, a World War I combat hero who in 1917 writes a highly publicized letter protesting the war and is sent By a baffled Government to a hospital where the distinguished neurologist and psychologist W. H. R. Rivers is pioneering treatments for shell shock. As an intense father-son relationship develops between the men, Ms. Barker's themes -- war and madness, war and manhood -- make the madness of war more than metaphor. But, in the tradition of literary realism, she confronts reality without polemics, anger or artifice. Her story becomes a magnificent antiwar novel and a wonderful justification of her belief that plain writing, energized By the named things of the world, will change readers profoundly By bringing them deep into imagined lives. |
| Remains of the Day, The. By Kazuo Ishiguro. (1989) (Open New Window) This strikingly original novel By a young Japanese-British writer is a beguiling comedy of manners that imperceptibly becomes a heart-rending study of personality, class and culture. A straitlaced butler makes an obliging narrator as he reveals in wry and funny ways aspects of his character he would try to hide if he could even recognize them. Kazuo Ishiguro's command of the butler's corseted idiom is perfect in the progressive revelation of unintended ironic meaning. Underneath what the butler says are a moving series of chilling revelations about his own buried life and, By implication, a critique of the social machine of Britain at a time (1956) when the nation has just lost its world power. With affection, humor, irony, compassion and understanding, Mr. Ishiguro presents the butler - and Britain, its politics and culture - from every point on the compass. |
| Roger's Version. By John Updike. (1986) (Open New Window) Its title suggests there might be very different versions of this story from the one told By its narrator, a professor of divinity, and clues planted in the text seem to warn the reader not to trust him, especially when he imagines in great detail the affair his wife is having with a graduate student in science (even as he is pursuing the young daughter of his own half sister). The unresolved enigma at the heart of John Updike's challenging novel makes the arguments the professor and the scientist, who is a fundamentalist Christian, have about faith and reality deep and disturbing. It also gives Mr. Updike's characteristic preoccupations with eroticism, theology, domestic realism and vivid physical description an illusory quality - as though the author is daring the reader to question the reality of his own perception of everyday life at least as acutely as he might doubt the existence of God or the reality of the unseeable, possibly unimaginable, world of physics that scientists so confidently manipulat. |
|
Room. By Emma
Donoghue. (2010) (Open New Window) |
| Roscoe. By William Kennedy. (2002) (Open New Window) Is this, the seventh novel in William Kennedy's Albany cycle, a valedictory? It has that feeling. Like Roscoe Conway, its protagonist, it is haunted By history. The other characters here -- state officials, mayors, madams, businessmen, gangsters -- live on the vice of politics. But in 1945 Roscoe, the boss, bagman and brains of the machine, is ill and tired of the game. He not only has to fix every office and vote; he must unfix mis-fixed cockfights (oh, what scenes!). He still has time for consummation of a love affair he thought had slipped away decades before. But there are shadows about, a governor's threat of investigations, rebellion By Young Turks, the creaks and groans of power shifting away. The date suggests we think about the long reign of the boss Daniel O'Connell and his wily frontman, Mayor Erastus Corning. But Kennedy isn't a captive of history, and there was a lot of rascal history in Albany before O'Connell, a deep river of memory flowing ever since William Marcy and his gang started the machine called the Albany Regency 180 years ago. Kennedy's characters say they make up a lot of their own history. They do it brilliantly, with fine rhetorical flourishes and rapier wit -- talk almost as rich as Roscoe's food and drink. Some critics grouse that no real pols talk like Kennedy's. So what? After a C. S. Lewis lecture on Shakespeare in the 50's an Oxford undergraduate sneered that "no one talks like Romeo and Juliet," and Lewis snapped back, "They would if they could." |
| Sabbath's Theater. By Philip Roth. (1995) (Open New Window) Out of the way, all you afternoon trash-talk television show hosts, and Madonna too -- kids, mere kids. In the great game of sex and outrage, Philip Roth remains unchallenged. To feel tumultuously alive, touch the nasty side of existence, says the protagonist of "Sabbath's Theater," Mr. Roth's richest novel. There is plenty of the nasty in this virtuoso performance By our best literary stand-up comic. But the menacing sense of last things in the story of an aging man leaving his wife, going to a funeral and arranging for his own death gives a depth and resonance to the jokes and rascally fun found in none of his other books. The verbal play is almost tactile, like slaps, as the narrative moves from third-person comic to first-person perverse confession, but there is a polemical energy that lifts it beyond verbal playfulness; at times the message is painful. |
| Satanic Verses, The. By Salman Rushdie. (1989) (Open New Window) Salman Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers; in this novel he draws on resources ranging from Homer to Joyce to "Saturday Night Live." His central characters - Gibreel, the angel Gabriel turned satanic, and Chamcha, a hapless victim with horns and a tail - fall from an unlikely heaven to an unlikelier hell in Bombay and London. But their real world is in nightmares, the dreams of Gibreel that make up the spinoff narratives that keep the novel whirling. And the tale of Chamcha and his father forms a novel within the novel. In the imaginative avalanche of stories that fill the book Mr. Rushdie probes our ability to conjure up monstrous descriptions of one another, to create monsters in fact. At its strongest, it is burdened with history and politics; the most vibrant scenes are those in which the author looks history in the eye, scenes of expatriation and political exile in which the magical veil Mr. Rushdie throws over the whole book does not conceal the hard realism underneath. |
| Saturday. By Ian McEwan. (2005) (Open New Window) As bracing and as carefully constructed as anything McEwan has written, this astringent novel traces a day in the life of an English neurosurgeon who comes face to face with senseless violence. |
| Schindler's
List. By
Thomas Keneally. (1982) (Open
New Window) Among the carpetbaggers who followed the German Army into Poland in 1939 was a young Sudeten German named Oskar Schindler, who had a reputation for womanizing and giving lavish parties for his influential friends. He was rewarded with one of |
| Sellout, The. By Paul Beatty. (2015) (Open
New Window) This year’s most cheerfully outrageous satire takes as its subject a young black man’s desire to segregate his local school and to reinstate slavery in his home — before careening off to consider almost 400 years of black survival in America, puncturing every available piety. Sharp-minded and fabulously profane, Beatty’s novel is a fearless, metaphorical multicultural pot almost too hot to touch. |
| Snow. By Orhan Pamuk. (2004) (Open New Window) The forces of secular and Islamic Turkey collide in this prescient, complexly orchestrated novel, begun before 9/11 and completed shortly thereafter. |
| Special Topics in Calamity Physics. By Marisha Pessl. (2006) (Open New Window) The antic ghost of Nabokov hovers over this buoyantly literate first novel, a murder mystery narrated By a teenager enamored of her own precocity but also in thrall to her father, an enigmatic itinerant professor, and to the charismatic female teacher whose death is announced on the first page. Each of the 36 chapters is titled for a classic (by authors ranging from Shakespeare to Carlo Emilio Gadda), and the plot snakes ingeniously toward a revelation capped By a clever "final exam." All this is beguiling, but the most solid pleasures of this book originate in the freshness of Pessl's voice and in the purity of her storytelling gift. |
| Star Called Henry, A. By Roddy Doyle. (1999) (Open New Window) This novel is so deep and ambitious that even without a clue what the rest of the promised trilogy will offer, it is clear that Roddy Doyle has risen to a whole new level. The Henry here is Henry Smart. He starts with the century in the Dublin slums, is swept up as a teenager into the blood and defeat of the 1916 Easter Uprising, and recruits soldiers for Michael Collins's rebel army By day while assassinating enemies of Collins for three years before he turns 20 and leaves Ireland at the book's end. Not far along one notes that a lot of what should be familiar isn't. Doyle is playing serious games with history, the narrative of the professional historians. It is undermined in almost every sentence. The uprising appears as a distracting background to the vivid sexual awakening and hard class conflict of Henry's coming of age, and the textured irony of Doyle's prose is delicious. It turns dark and soaring as Henry goes out to do Collins's killing, until he finds out some of his victims were themselves old rebels now blacklisted. His awakening before he decides to escape to England is one of the really fine epiphanies of modern fiction, and Henry leaves us at water's edge impatiently waiting. |
| Staring at the Sun. By Julian Barnes. (1987) (Open New Window) The magic of this brilliant novel is masked By the almost reportorial language Julian Barnes uses to trace the life of a woman who, at the age of 100, comes to a breathtaking literary epiphany in the next millennium. The book flashes between extremes of enchantment and disenchantment as Mr. Barnes breaks the barriers of conventional time and genre and creates characters from ideas and language. Italo Calvino once said the reader, knowing the future, is wiser than the writer. Mr. Barnes has taken the risk of leaping into the future and pre-empting the reader's advantage. A disenchanted God and an enchanted technology (a computer called The Absolute Truth) enter his heroine's life, but it is she who is the true sorceress, one who escapes her ''second-rate life'' and shows us a spectacular vision that turns out to be not mere trickery, but reality. |
| Story of the Lost Child, The: Book 4, The Neapolitan Novels: “Maturity, Old Age”. By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein. (2015) (Open New Window) Like the three books that precede it in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, this brilliant conclusion offers a clamorous, headlong exploration of female friendship set against a backdrop of poverty, ambition, violence and political struggle. As Elena and Lila, the girlhood rivals whose relationship spans the series, enter the middle terrain of marriage and motherhood, Ferrante’s preoccupations remain with the inherent radicalism of modern female identity — especially, and strikingly, with the struggles of the female artist against her biological and social destiny. |
|
Swamplandia! By Karen Russell. (2011) (Open New Window) |
|
Ten Thousand Saints By Eleanor Henderson. (2011) (Open New Window) |
| Tenants of Time, The. By Thomas Flanagan. (1988) (Open New Window) This masterly historical novel is centered on an Irish village for half a century up to 1908, but it is a novel of the world and time and there are scenes in London, Paris, Dublin, Venice, Chicago, and literary references that reach back to myth and forward infinitely. It teems with hundreds of characters and stories within stories and is told in a vast choir of voices, each distinct and eloquent. All these appealing and annoying and strange and familiar characters are seeking to recover their own past By the end we tend to agree with them that history cannot be captured and yet we have to acknowledge that Thomas Flanagan has in fact just written it, in a magnificent piece of fiction. There is scarcely a single assumption any reader will come to this book with - whether about historical fiction or the history of England and Ireland or the proper conduct of great Victorian women - that will not be shaken to the core. |
| Then We Came to the End. By Joshua Ferris. (2007) (Open New Window) Layoff notices fly in Ferris's acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle. |
|
Tiger's Wife, The. By Téa Obreht. (2011) (Open New Window)
|
| Toward The End of Time. By John Updike. (1997) (Open New Window) From Word 1 John Updike undermines readers' -- and critics' -- logical assumptions in this novel, for the text is the journal of a 66-year-old man, Ben Turnbull, who at the end of his own time seems freed of time. His journal reveals not only the world but the wanderings of his wits. So what if a woman turns into a deer his wife had wanted him to kill? So what if he jumps from a United States in the next century, disintegrating after a war with China, to ancient Egypt, or to virtual reality? So what if characters appear and disappear like phantoms in a dream? Our sense of logic rises from time, and here time is drizzling into a black hole. Turnbull's journal is like ''Walden'' gone haywire; Ben is brilliantly observant of nature, but if Thoreau's gaze is innocent, Ben's is a gritty-eyed squint. And unlike Thoreau, Ben has women: a wife (the unvoiced struggle as each watches for the other to croak first is an entrancing game); a middle-class slut, or a deer, who inspires lust, guilt and longing for lost youth as they rollick through contortions of very Updikean sex; and a barely nubile gang moll who brings back to Ben his prepubertal self. No matter; soon enough time melts Ben's potency to ooze, and he is as ruthless in describing decay as he was in depicting his sexual romps and obsessions. Indeed, if Ben's ruthlessness is evenhanded, so is his alarming intelligence; it falls on every scene, person, object and thought in the book, giving it an eerie ambiance. |
| Tree of Smoke. By Denis Johnson. (2007) (Open New Window) The author of "Jesus' Son" offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War. |
| True History of The Kelly Gang. By Peter Carey. (2001) (Open New Window) Peter Carey, widely recognized as one of the most engaging historical novelists alive, surpasses himself in this novel about the Australian version of Jesse James. Here the author becomes historical impersonator: the chapters are 13 packets of narrative written By Ned Kelly to his baby daughter at a time when he knew his violent life was coming to its end, to give her his version of himself and his family and friends, who were seen By 19th-century Australians as thugs and killers. The voice, untutored, ungrammatical and often comically colloquial, becomes intoxicating, poetic and sinuous enough to reflect the highly idiosyncratic conversations of others without ever losing its own character. That alone would make this novel perhaps the most compelling reading on this list. But there is a kind of defiant bravery in Carey's attitude toward Ned. Kelly is a disarmingly candid young man driven to lawlessness By the corruption of the ruling establishment. In his own view he is almost always innocent, and his actions reveal what one can only call a native nobility; next to him Robin Hood looks frivolous. It is as if Carey were daring the reader to desert him as a romantic and a sentimentalist. He wins. The domestic scenes and the appalling education in crime of the boy Ned and his siblings are searing explorations of poverty, fear and ignorance; the one romance in Ned's life is wholly convincing; and the breathless chase at the end, as the vengeful constabulary closes in, is as heart-stopping a story as you can find. |
| Unaccustomed Earth. By Jhumpa Lahiri. (2008) (Open New Window) There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans - many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs who can't quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta. With quiet artistry and tender sympathy, Lahiri creates an impressive range of vivid characters - young and old, male and female, self-knowing and self-deluding - in engrossing stories that replenish the classic themes of domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement and family discord. |
| Unbearable Lightness Of Being, The. By Milan Kundera. (1984) (Open New Window) With cunning, wit and elegiac sadness, Milan Kundera, the celebrated Czechoslovak emigre writer, expresses the trap the world has become in this relentless novel about four people who are born of images in Mr. Kundera's mind - a doctor and his dedicated wife and a frivolous, seductive woman painter and her good, patient lover. The stories of this quartet, all of whom die or fade from the book, are engrossing enough. But this writer's real business is to find images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime. He uses the four pitilessly, setting each pair against the other as opposites in every way, to describe a world in which choice is exhausted and people simply cannot find a way to express their humanity. |
| Underworld. By Don DeLillo. (1997) (Open New Window) Don DeLillo has always been a harshly original writer, rich in dangerous alienation, with great gifts of eye, ear, nose, palate and fingertip. But his reputation was cult-borne. With ''Underworld'' he fills the sky. In this novel he diagnoses the debilitation of the cold war, By probing into how people rearranged their lives around the moral void of an absurdity, mutually assured destruction. From its opening, at one of baseball's greatest games, to its inspired epilogue in a Central Asian institution filled with radiation-misshapen humans, it surges with magisterial confidence through half a century. But its true locations -- test sites -- are not on maps, and its characters live, psychologically, downwind from them. Here bland, hopeful American life glows with the sick light of betrayal, innocence abused; everyone's better feelings take a beating, and ambient moral fear pinches everyone -- not only his invented characters but a host of cultural heroes who appear, from J. Edgar Hoover to Lenny Bruce. The protagonist is an entrepreneur of waste; the novel bursts with witty and dramatic conjurings of garbage, voidance, slag. The dialogue is a rockingly comic attack on our mental excreta: the distortions and sound bites of the television age. DeLillo was absent from his fiction before, an unbodied intelligence, but here is an undertow of personal pain he has never touched. This is his most demanding novel and yet his most transparent, giving the reader the privileged intimacy that comes from seeing a writer whole. |
| Veronica. By Mary Gaitskill. (2005) (Open New Window) This mesmerizingly dark novel from the author of ''Bad Behavior'' and ''Two Girls, Fat and Thin'' is narrated By a former Paris model who is now sick and poor; her ruminations on beauty and cruelty have clarity and an uncanny bite. |
|
Waiting
for the Barbarians. By J. M.
Coetzee. (1982) (Open
New Window)
|
| War of the End of the World, The. By Mario Vargas Llosa. (1984) (Open New Window) Revolution is not all it is cracked up to be. Mario Vargas Llosa's novel, based on a real millenarian uprising in northern Brazil in the 19th century, is such a powerful tale of adventure, peopled By such resplendent and horrifying characters, that it needs no moral - but it is hard to avoid that one. The revolutionary sect he creates seems to spring naturally from the basic tenets of Christianity and humanity's shared longing for freedom, but it becomes the enemy of order and the church, and it consumes itself. The passionate eloquence of the Peruvian novelist drives his story through history and across the world, but his own faith in reason is as clear as his vision of the rarity of individual freedom in a world threatened By the sleep of moral imagination. |
| War Trash. By Ha Jin. (2004) (Open New Window) A powerfully apposite moral fable whose suffering hero passes from delusion to clarity as a Chinese P.O.W. in Korea. |
| Wartime Lies. By Louis Begley. (1991) (Open New Window) In this masterly first novel, Louis Begley, a Manhattan lawyer who as a boy managed to escape the Nazis in his native Poland, tells the tale of Maciek, a Jewish boy who also survives, but at enormous cost. The boy is too young to judge the cruelties he suffers, and his voice has a fine, unguarded authority, especially since the story is framed in the perspective of the cultivated and wary middle-aged man he later becomes. Maciek, whose mother died at his birth, spends the war years in the care of an aunt fiercely determined to survive. From her he learns the terrible discipline of deception at an age when deceit costs him his soul but failure to deceive would cost his life. At the end the man in midlife, faithful to the dark irony of little Maciek's fate, confines his childhood to the empty realm of lies and thus, without saying so, underlines the saving value of fiction, in which lies can be reconciled with truth. |
|
White
Hotel, The. By D. M. Thomas. (1981) (Open
New Window) |
| White Teeth. By Zadie Smith. (2000) (Open New Window) Here is a perfect John Rocker Christmas gift -- a sunny celebration of the mixed races multiplying out of control everywhere and shaping the future of the crowded world. In Zadie Smith's magnificent first novel they are found in a North London neighborhood teeming with immigrants from India, the Caribbean and Asia in various stages and generations of assimilation, along with spongy British liberals floating like leaves in the swirling winds of all this hopeful energy. The story is centered on members of two families, one British and one Bengali, all of whom are a bit ridiculous in their own ways, as are all the other characters who pop up in this raucous book. Smith uses the methods of satire, but ''White Teeth'' is not satire; Smith loves these people and makes us laugh with them more than at them. Their passion for belonging, while at the same time escaping the cultures their families are rooted in, could easily be reduced to ridicule or pathos. But here the conflicting impulses amount to a kind of civic virtue as these people pull together to remake England into a patchwork and pleasant land. Smith has been compared to Salman Rushdie, but her lightness and humility are all her own; her art is one of glances and smiles, not arm-wrestling. Above all, her ear is miraculously attuned to the voices of different races, generations and dispositions. There is no mediation here; they speak directly to us, with personal urgency. |
| World
Without End. By Francine du Plessix Gray. (1981) (Open New
Window) A ''lush and sinewy tale'' of the quest for adult love by three ''friends-lovers'' whose lives are traced over a 30-year period. ''Ample, generous and mature, the book is stocked with the goods a novel best provides.'' |
| World's End. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (1987) (Open New Window) Viking. A lively career that had produced mostly superior literary horseplay in language-intoxicated works since the late 1970's is transformed By ''World's End,'' a novel that indicates T. Coraghessan Boyle has no foreseeable limits as a writer. In this story that pulls together two worlds 300 years apart, there are dozens of characters - Indians, merchants, hippies, many others - who come fully to life not as clowns or victims, but as agents in Mr. Boyle's visionary treatment of power, manipulation and treachery. There is a ceaseless reaching for broader contexts. The themes Mr. Boyle develops as his story shuttles between epochs make us grasp in new terms their connection with the American social and political experiment. His mastery of history is the secret of the accomplishment here. Mr. Boyle has lost none of the qualities that marked him a wit writer before, but now he has challenged his own disengagement; passion, need and belief breathe with striking force and freedom through this smashing good novel. |
| Yellow
Birds, The. By Kevin Powers. (2012) (Open
New Window) A veteran of the Iraq war, Powers places that conflict at the center of his impressionistic first novel, about the connected but diverging fates of two young soldiers and the trouble one of them has readjusting to life at home. Reflecting the chaos of war, the fractured narrative jumps around in time and location, but Powers anchors it with crystalline prose and a driving mystery: How did the narrator's friend die? |
| Zuckerman
Unbound. By Philip Roth. (1981) (Open
New Window) A story about an author who has ''become rich and notorious through the publication of a satyric novel'' much like ''Portnoy's Complaint'' -''masterful, sure in every touch, clear and economical of line as a crystal vase.'' |