As far as my reading goals go: once again I did pretty well about gender parity. 56 of the 111 authors I read were women. I did a little worse this year than last in my ongoing quest to read a book from each country. Last year I read eighteen new countries; this year I read ten: Albania, both Congos, Ghana, Israel, Mongolia, Mozambique, Singapore, Syria, and Ukraine. I'd like to do a little better than that in 2024. Of course, that's the best thing about a project like this one--there's always another year. Here are the best things I read in 2023.
Honorable Mentions:
Lover Man by Alston Anderson
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Voices Made Night by Mia Couto
The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick
Back by Henry Green
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Ice by Anna Kavan
10:04 by Ben Lerner
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Oh! by Mary Robison
Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng
Olav Audunsson: Vows by Sigrid Undset
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Top Ten:
10. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin - Lucia Berlin's funny, downtrodden stories seemed to me to bridge the gap between those of old masters like Grace Paley and Mavis Gallant and modern ones, like Joy Williams--which I think is no small praise. But perhaps it short-changes Berlin, whose rollicking, somewhat peripatetic life is transmuted in these stories into something totally unique. As the title story indicates, Berlin's gift is in portraying the lives of working class: cleaning women in Oakland, Native American elders waiting around at laundromats, Mexican girls in need of abortions, New Mexico nurses, alcoholics. Each one revolves around a fictionalized version of Berlin herself, whose voice animates the stories--they feel real because we sense they are taken from a real life, colorfully lived.
9. Jawbone by Monica Ojeda - I have a soft spot for books that are almost bad: the prose teeters on purplishness or grotesqueness, too many ideas are juggled, the structure is absurd--and yet, the book is saved by a spark of genius, because genius is closer to disaster than it is to mediocrity. Jawbone, a book that draws mainly from Slenderman creepypastas and horror exploitation, is just such a book. About a pair of Ecuadorian teenagers who are drawn, by online stories and their own fevered imaginations, into Grand Guignol games of sexual violence and humiliation, should go too far, be too strange. But somehow it uncovers something true about the horror of puberty and the body's transformation, and how it engenders both fear and excitement. Of all the books I read this year, this one might be the boldest, take the biggest risks.
8. A Turn in the South by V. S. Naipaul - More than any other book I read this year, Naipaul's memoir of traveling through the American South made me see familiar things in a new way. First among those was Naipaul himself, who, despite being a notorious crank, writes about the ordinary people of the South with extraordinary openness. (Sometimes, when he converses with racists, you wish he'd be a little less open.) But the other, of course, is the South, which Naipaul depicts as a kindred to the post-colonial, post-slave societies of the Caribbean he knew so well. The final chapter, in which Naipaul travels through N.C. with a poet and scion of a tobacco farming family, plucked strings of pity and love for the place I was born that I barely knew were there. I was born a little less than a year after Naipaul passed through, and part of me felt like in reading A Turn in the South that I was reading about myself.
7. A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan - Speaking of North Carolina, here's a book that illuminates a part of the state that few people--unless they're from here--either visit or think about: the rich black coastal plain that stretches out from the cities of the Piedmont to the coast. This is North Carolina's (and South Carolina's and Virginia's) Black Belt, more rural and more poor than those "New South" cities, and Randall Kenan wrote about it as lovingly and critically as only a native son could. When A Visitation of Spirits opens, its hero, a teen struggling with his same-sex attractions, is choosing a bird from a book to transform into. There is no transformation ceremony, of course--it's not that kind of book--but the fact that young Horace believes in one illustrates the depth of his despair and isolation. It's Horace who is the spirit, the young man who haunts the preacher-principal who failed him, and whose guilt is at the book's heart.
6. Free Day by Ines Cagnati - "As for me, when I was little, I would have liked to be a little calf. I would have been loved, like everybody." [Sound of intense, ceaseless weeping] I read Free Day on Brent's recommendation, and he was right about it: it's one of the saddest, heart-wrenching novels I think I've ever read. Its heroine, Galla, is an Italian immigrant girl in a French boarding school; when she takes a day off school to go home, she finds herself locked out of the house, unwanted, so she wanders the stinking fens around her house, meditating on the various tragedies that have befallen her and her family. It's a little like Ferris Bueller if everybody hated Ferris. But its Galla's voice--wise and naive, defiant and defeated--that make it so sad and so strange.
5. During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase - Let's start here: I've never seen a writer use the plural first person "we" as well as Joan Chase does in this novel, whose protagonists are a quartet of cousins on an Ohio farm run by their demanding and domineering grandmother--the titular Queen. In one way, the point of view lends itself perfectly to a broad story of growing up and growing apart; witness the way each girl is "peeled away" when she becomes estranged or resented by the others. But During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a specific story about a strange family, and it centers especially on the slow death by cancer of one of the family's most beloved. Take away the point of view, and it's still an extraordinary--but more familiar--realistic novel, with the bread and butter of realism: sharp characters and accomplished prose. It often felt to me like an Alice Munro story stretched out to the length of a novel--which is one of the greatest compliments I think I could give.
4. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer - I think there's a good chance, a decade from now, The Wall will be the book from this year I'm still thinking about. The premise is so strange, but so simple; the book is so simple but so compelling: while alone at an Alpine chalet, an invisible wall cuts a woman off from the rest of the world. Her only companions are a few animals: a cat, a dog, a cow. Caring for them keeps her alive, and she becomes estranged from the old world of cars and contraptions, becoming more herself. In a way, The Wall is a version of Walden shorn of high-mindedness, sentimentality, and even cynicism--all things that the narrator has left behind in a former life.
3. The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams - Now, you know I'm one of Joy's Boys. The story omnibus The Visiting Privilege cemented my opinion that Williams' work is among the best and most consistent of any living writer; she simply doesn't miss, not on the macro level and not on the sentence level. She's literally never written a boring sentence. The world of The Visiting Privilege is made up of Florida resort towns, nursing homes, desert outposts, dusty museums. Its characters are one step removed from murder and madness, from death row. There's one story about a support group for the mothers of committed murderers; another is even narrated by the father of Jared Lee Loughner, who committed a mass shooting in Tucson. My favorite is "Congress," which is difficult to even summarize here, but it involves a paralyzed man, a lamp made of deer hooves, and a mystical taxidermy museum. Talking about Williams' work often makes it sound silly, but it isn't; it's terrifying on a deep existential level. Each of the stories in The Visiting Privilege is like getting another finger stuck in a pool drain and knowing no one's coming to extricate you.
2. No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod - If you've ever been to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, you know it's easy to imagine an unbroken connection between its rocky headlands and those its Scottish immigrants in the old world. No Great Mischief is about that unbroken connection, traced back through the narrator to his grandparents, who have faced immense tragedy and loss before they even step off the boat. No Great Mischief reverberates with loss: the narrator's parents, who disappear in a hole beneath the ice, and the cousin with the same name who is killed in a mining accident. In the present, the narrator makes a weekly trip to Toronto to provide his alcoholic brother with the booze he needs to stay alive: sometimes the reverberations of loss look like delirium tremens. And all this in MacLeod's quiet, elegant--and if you don't mind me saying--quite Canadian prose. A book like a sheet of ice, under which dark waters churn.
1. The Vivisector by Patrick White - Patrick White is one of my favorite writers, but I'm almost certain this is the first time one of his books has topped my year-end list. The Vivisector is something that's very hard to pull off: an art novel. But White, who manages to bridge the gap between the physical and the numinous, the physical grit and slurry of the paint and the intimation of the divine, is one of the few authors who can really pull it off, I think. The aging painter Hurtle Duffield struggles with exactly this opposition, the grotesque world of the physical and the life of the spirit. His story of being adopted away from his washerwoman mother into a wealthy family is an (obviously intentional) send-up of Great Expectations; his new hunchbacked sister Rhoda, toward whom he feels both deep attraction and revulsion, is maybe the platonic ideal of a Patrick White character. White's vision of the artist who is compelled to create, even as creation entails destruction, somehow both possessed by God and possessing God, is unforgettable. One of the greatest books ever written about the creative life--and the best thing this year.
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