I have a harsh, unsatisfying and generally abusive relationship with new fiction; it keeps kicking my ass and I keep going back for more, hoping it’ll be different the next time. As far as books go, I tend to be a woman who knows what she likes but I also don’t want to be one of those people who is seen as only wanting to ready old books because it’s cool or something. I truly want there to be awesome new literary fodder coming into the world. And so, I push forward, reading and reading and mostly feeling like I’ve wasted my time.
This year, however, I had an unexpected number of pleasantly surprising reads. So, ya know, rock on, 2009 writers. I’m leaving this year with papers cuts and smiles. In hopes that you will as well, here are my picks for best fiction to come out this year:
Tinkers
By Paul Harding
Sigh. I typically get the pukes when I read sappy, deathbed memory books. It’s like, “yeah, yeah, there you go, playing on my emotions. How predictable.” I mean, I don’t want to be cynical or anything but it’s pure emotional porn, which doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that those cheap thrills are usually an excuse for a writer to get lazy about the subtle grace of narration and the beautifully tiny tensions that make a novel great. They expect you’ll be crying too much to notice.
Tinkers is not one of those books. Paul Harding is a skilled and aware enough writer to pull off a deathbed book with originality and style.
The Believers
By Zoë Heller
Ahhh, I love books (and movies and whatever) about hilarious Jewish New Yorkers. Especially whole families of them. This book is tremendously witty, without being shallow. If you like narratives that pick apart families, read Heller’s latest.
The Vagrants
By Yiyun Li
I never thought that 1979’s provincial China would pull me in like this but it has with this novel. Li manages to pull off bleak like no one I’ve read in a very long time. It’s centered around the execution of a Chinese counterrevolutionary, so, naturally, it’s a brutal read. But if that’s your thing, this is a seriously great way to get your fix.
The Cry of the Sloth
By Sam Savage
Maybe I have a weakness for quietly tragic portraits of people giving in to the weight of existence (it makes me happy.) or perhaps I just relate, in some weird way, with the subject-at-hand, but this book (which is really a series of letters sent by the editor of a literary magazine) and it’s heaps of existential-crisis-in-slow-action seem perfect to me.
The Little Stranger
By Sarah Waters
Yay for WWII books! Yay for revenge books! Yay for creepy, haunted house books! Yay for sad, falling-from-prominence Southern families! Yay for everything about this book!
