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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Best Books, 2004: Fiction
"Case Histories"
By Kate Atkinson
Little, Brown
Order from Powells.com
One difference between genre crime fiction and literary fiction is that the first kind of book is usually concerned with what happens to the people who commit crimes while the second cares more about the people they hurt. Although Kate Atkinson's addictive "Case Histories" has three murders and a detective in it, it's really an exploration of the loss, grief and misplaced guilt that torment three clients who hire Jackson Brodie, an irresistibly grumpy divorced father working as a private investigator in Cambridge, England. Two middle-aged sisters who can't forget the toddler sibling who disappeared decades ago; a father haunted by the possibility that the maniac who killed his daughter might have been after him; a woman in search of the niece she adopted after the girl's mother went to jail for killing her father -- all three case histories are heartbreaking, and sometimes Atkinson's novel is, too. Then, a few pages later, some very funny observation about contemporary life or an expertly drawn (and entirely believable) minor character will make you laugh. Atkinson writes such fluid, sparkling prose that an ingenious plot almost seems too much to ask, but we get it anyway. If Lorrie Moore decided to write a genre-busting detective novel it might resemble "Case Histories," a book in which people take precedence over puzzles and there's no greater mystery than the resurrection of hope.
"Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell"
By Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury
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Susanna Clarke's capacious, digressive, amply footnoted and very original "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" is a classic historical novel -- only the history it's based on just happens to be entirely fantastic. Set in the early 19th century, it describes a Britain where magic was once a fairly common practice and is still the subject of serious scholarly study. The two eponymous master magicians start out as conservative teacher and dashing pupil intent on reviving English magic, but eventually they become rivals. They meddle in politics and the Napoleonic Wars, run afoul of a high-spirited "gentleman" with sinister powers and quarrel over the reputation of a mysterious Medieval monarch, the Raven King, who was either the fountainhead of English magic (says Jonathan Strange) or the cause of its downfall (according to Mr. Norrell). Unlike most fantasy novels, this isn't about a quest, and it's not really a love story, either. "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell," like all good epics is really about the psyche of a nation. Though Clarke has been compared to Jane Austen, the inspiration for her elegant, imperturbable wit is clearly several centuries of superb English historians and biographers, from Gibbon to Lytton Strachey. As for her wondrous, image-rich depictions of her heroes' spells (ships made of rain, a twilight land accessible only through mirrors), that's nothing less than pure sorcery.
"Happy Baby"
By Stephen Elliott
McSweeney's/MacAdam Cage Order from Powells.com
Most fiction about petty criminals, lowlifes, drug users and sexual deviants is so pleased with itself for depicting such people that it never gets around to saying anything interesting about them. Stephen Elliott's "Happy Baby" brings a rare degree of intelligence and literary accomplishment to the story of Theo, a veteran of brutal Chicago group homes, hopelessly mangled relationships and random violence. When we first meet him, he's sporting cigarette burns on his hands courtesy of a sadomasochistic relationship with a married woman, and he briefly entertains fantasies of killing an ex-girlfriend's coddled infant son out of sheer envy. Each subsequent chapter jumps backward in time, depicting a raw, often sexually explicit sliver of Theo's life by way of showing us how this essentially sympathetic man wound up in such a wretched state. "Happy Baby," though fiction, is told in the lean, emotionally terse language of the contemporary trauma memoir, but there's not a speck of self-pity here, just a wincing, dogged search for the truth. What's brave about Theo isn't his willingness to examine and detail his own sufferings; it's his determination to understand how they have shaped him and his refusal to allow them to define him.
"The Line of Beauty"
By Alan Hollinghurst
Bloomsbury
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Although it's about a gay man living in Margaret Thatcher's England, Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" is an old-fashioned psychological novel of manners in the best sense of the term. Of this year's several novels preoccupied with Henry James, Hollinghurst's is the only one that attempts the Master's literary specialty: the dissection of the layered ironies that result when people of exquisite sensibility harbor desires in direct conflict with their cherished morals. The novel is the story of middle-class Nick Guest, the epitome of the young man from the provinces, who attaches himself to the upper-class family of a Tory politician. Nick is infatuated with the Feddens' easy, aristocratic style, their beautiful old houses and their ready access to power and glamour. He's also on a path of sexual discovery that will eventually lead him into direct conflict with the coldblooded ideology and social policies of Thatcherism. The encroaching tragedy of the AIDS crisis, a distant menace at first, but one that eventually swells to blot out the novel's horizon, ups the stakes to an almost unbearable degree. The pursuit of the beautiful and the fine often exacts an ugly price, but readers of Hollinghurst's novel will find that with this book, at least, magnificence is here for the taking.
"Snow"
By Orhan Pamuk
Knopf
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What's it like for a disillusioned secular idealist to witness his nation losing faith in the future and sliding back into the rigidity of religious fundamentalism? American readers with a new appreciation for such quandaries will find a kindred spirit in Turkeys most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk. In "Snow," perhaps Pamuk's most accessible book to date, a Turkish poet returns to his homeland after over a decade of living in Germany. (He fled fearing government reprisals for his leftist activism). Ka (the poet's pen name -- and the Ancient Egyptian word for the soul) visits a mountain town near the Russian border, ostensibly to cover the mayoral election and a rash of suicides by young girls, but mostly to persuade a long-lost love to marry him. In this snowed-in backwater, Ka encounters a microcosm of Turkey's social malaise: separatist Kurds, homicidal jihadists, paralyzed intellectuals, conflicted secular authorities, cronyism, corruption and a kind of free-floating despair. Most of the town's residents ransack their lives in an increasingly frenzied search for meaning. Others just succumb to the snow. For a novel full of sadness and wisdom, "Snow" has a remarkable amount of energy. If Pamuk can't supply his countrymen with a purpose, he brings a great novelist's enthusiasm to describing their struggle, and to letting the world see just how universal it is.
