Memorable Novels 2010

I read with intent and interest quite a few novels this year, notably those New York Time Book Review front pagers, and for all of the complaints about the imperiled state of publishing and the apparent evidence of a lack of good novels out there, I must conclude that the hype in that hallowed reviewed selection is often well-deserved. I thought about making a best of list this year, but I always find that it’s too difficult to narrow down, and ignores the likelihood of reading selectively. So here, in lieu, are five standout novels that I found memorable and generally enjoyable this year. The recession may be dipping again, but the novel is alive and well in 2010.

Tom Rachman’s first novel, The Imperfectionists, with its intersecting character stories, conveys a historical mosaic of the lives of journalists working for a fictional Herald-Tribune-like paper based in Rome, and is compelling for its readability, humor and O’ Henry type blunt traumas. Rachman’s journalism background, with an emphasis on the concrete and the compressed, helps him to keep the numerous and at times confusing character’s stories--surprisingly dialogue heavy--from fading. Initially, I thought this was a misleadingly marketed “novel in stories,” though in fact few of the chapters could stand alone very well. The international locales give its occasionally flat characters a welcome dose of color, though the misery he inflicts on some of them has tinges of unnecessary cruelty.

Adam Ross’s Mr. Peanut, also a first novel, which drew me in by its persuasive opening, almost doesn’t fulfill its promise. Ross carries through the premise of his story, however, a la, “Did David kill his wife?--and if so, how?” and is deft at calibrating the interactions of the main couple, David Pepin and his obese and ambivalently adored wife, Alice. The compounding details paint an evocative though wildly unbelievable event, and the use of the competing narratives of the two policemen who also happen to have a desire to dispatch their wives into oblivion, is overly contrived, but Mr. Peanut holds its sway in spite of the loose tying together that concludes the novel with a thud.

Ian McEwan’ Solar is an indulgent feast of satire that harkens back to Amsterdam, operating in a comedic-tragic register which recalls the bold mischief of his early short stories. There, the characters are young and depraved, making sense of the world from a limited understanding of it. What those life lessons earn the protagonist of Solar, Michael Beard, is a deficit. Youthful curiosity and glory is eventually replaced with the fading returns of post-middle-age survival. Beard isn’t a character easy to like, but he seems prototypically human, and it is as easy to laugh at him as it is to have hope for him in his failings.

Skippy Dies, by Irish novelist Paul Murray, is one of the best written, compulsively enjoyable books I’ve read all year, and possibly my favorite long novel (at 600 plus pages) of the year, of the kind that I couldn’t stop reading and yet didn’t want it to end. The story takes place among a boys’ boarding high school (here known as a “College”) with its resident students, teachers, and the complications of the much longed for creatures glanced across the lawn of a neighboring girls’ school. What almost halts some of the pleasure of the tale comes after Skippy does finally die, a foregone conclusion from the opening pages. But what works is Murray’s well-drawn characters, specifically Skippy and the inner torment of a pill popping fourteen year old mediated in a Joycean stream of consciousness.

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is a welcome step beyond The Corrections, though the novel that will probably top everyone’s best of lists has a few false logic notes with some of the character’s traits, and takes one through an oddly chosen many pages long narrative of the main character’s unlikely autobiography written in third person. For its many flaws, the novel is engaging, especially when the stakes are high and the specter of social grievances--infidelity, politics, and alcoholism--rear their subtextual heads. To use a broad adjective that Franzen seems so enamored of that it serves as an ineffective short-hand for the character’s assessments of each other, the novel is interesting. Franzen has a comic timing for hilarious turns of phrase, and the novel is at times guffaw out loud funny. The broad scope and convergence of the Bergland family’s self-involvements and misapprehensions of their own desires as they attain and rail at their freedoms, keep the novel rolling entertainingly forward.

Feast Of Excess

There is a notion that a novel has to be as healthy and bland as kale or else it isn’t literature. As if the unspoken rule is that it must only be sternly serious and if it happens to be enjoyable, then that must be an oversight on the writer’s part. This seems to be the root of a lot of the criticism of Ian Mc Ewan’s Solar, for what it is not.

That Mc Ewan’s novels are elaborately constructed marvels of prose and entertaining is a testament to his skill. (This could be lost on this NYTimes book reviewer.) If Solar does not reach the same high watermark that everyone was expecting after Atonement or On Chesil Beach, the writing is the epitome of Mc Ewan’s stylistic precision. Still, Mc Ewan is going for a laugh any time he describes a glutton’s eagerly anticipated meal:

“She took away the bowl with the three cold lozenges and set the main course down before him. Four wedges of skinless chicken breast interleaved with three minute steaks, the whole wrapped in bacon, with a honey and cheese topping, and served with twice-roasted jacket potatoes already impregnated with butter and cream cheese.”

Solar is an indulgent feast of satire.

Solar harkens back to the style of Amsterdam, operating in a comedic-tragic register which also recalls the bold mischief of Mc Ewan's early short stories. There, the characters are young and depraved, making sense of the world from a limited understanding of it. What those life lessons earn the protagonist of Solar, Michael Beard, is a deficit; forever after he will go to extremes to avoid humiliation at the hands of an associate, using whatever vengeance at his means, getting away with whatever he can. Youthful curiosity and glory is eventually replaced with the fading returns of post-middle-age survival. Beard isn’t a character easy to like, but he seems prototypically human, and it is as easy to laugh at him as it is to have hope for him in his failings.

Mc Ewan wallows in Beard’s excesses. This is the opposite of the life-saving and affirming protagonist in Saturday; Beard is a man who on the face of his accomplishments (Nobel Prize winning physicist) might be enviable, but is flailing with a dangerous lack of scruples. Maybe the degree to which a reader is willing to follow this reprehensible character is how much he or she recognizes the folly of human endeavor.

Self-consciousness drives Mc Ewan’s protagonists; he has consistently perfected the limited third person point of view, or, as James Wood has it, free indirect style. In particular, this consciousness allows Mc Ewan to confront moral quandary and force the character to interact with their world on a finite scale. The depth of this consciousness can be almost uncomfortably perverse and unbridled, backed up by the scientific mind that allows Mc Ewan to focus in on the protagonist’s whims with a dissecting knife. That this consciousness is rendered in more depth and literary-ness than the person having the experience would probably have is playing to the satire.

The rendering of Beard’s gluttony is anachronistic, almost indecent details applied to a novel of a lofty and timely subject (Global warming). The effect is ornate overstatement, words larded on because Mc Ewan can, that feels defiant--in a sense, he’s showing off--but it’s a sure-footed, often hilarious, touch.

Much of the narrative of Solar relies too readily on the withholding of information. In a more high minded work it might be considered manipulative, but this is light treatment of a heavy topic. The problem for Mc Ewan is taking a subject too earnestly and becoming heavy-handed, bogged down in technical jargon and plot machinations as he did in Saturday. In Solar, he applies his research to make the stakes relevant, though the reader may find that these stakes are largely misconstrued. Beard is the center of his own universe.

Solar begins tentatively, with a back-story summary, though this exposition provides signposts for the novel’s departures. If a novel is a journey, there are enough clues from Mc Ewan that the reader will be taken on an adventure. And ultimately, Solar achieves what a novel should, engaging the reader in a world that suspends in wonder, be that wonder at the skill of the writer, or at the anticipatory pleasure of what is to come. The repast can be a feast to binge on, or a satisfying meal to savor. It’s all good.

McEwan On Process

Ian McEwan, during his visit to San Francisco to promote Solar, was on KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny this morning, and he responded to a few questions I asked about craft and process. I’ve transcribed his compelling response here:

“My important bit of process is hesitation. If I get an idea, I sit on it. I don’t do anything with it. If it’s a good idea on Monday, it better be a good idea three Mondays later. And often it isn’t. What can seem like a fantastic idea one end of the week, will fade by the other end. So I am a great hesitator, I pause, I brood. Sometimes I don’t even allow myself to take notes about a scene that I’m going to write because I don’t want to start crystallizing it into words. So I carry a lot around in my mind. I am someone who can sit by the delayed luggage carousel for twenty-five minutes quite happily just turning over the stuff that’s there; I don’t need a notebook.

On the other hand . . . I’m a great one for writing the opening paragraph for novels I need never actually complete. Knowing I don’t have to write them confers a great deal of freedom on me. And I’ve started one or two novels that way recently, just idly turning out a sentence or a paragraph that intrigued me.”

A link to the full audio mp3 of the program is available here.

McEwan Over London

"Whichever direction his gaze fell, this was home, his native corner of the planet. The fields and hedgerows, once tended by medieval peasants and eighteenth-century laborers, still visibly patterened the land in irregular quadrilaterals, and every brook, fence, and pigsty, virtually every tree, was known and probably named in the Domesday Book after all-conquering William in 1085 conferred with his advisers and sent his men all over England. And ever since, named again with greater refinement, owned, used, costed, traded, mortgaged; mature like a thick-crusted Stilton, as richly stuffed with varied humanity as Babel, as historical as the Nile Delta, teeming like a charnel house with ghosts, in public discourse as dissonant as a rookery in full throat. One day this brash and ancient kingdom might yield to the force of multiple cravings, to the dreamy temptations of a giant metropolis, a Mexico City, São Paulo, and Los Angeles combined, to effloresce from London to the Medway to Southampton to Oxford, back to London, a modern form of quadrilateral, burying all previous hedges and trees. Who knew, perhaps it would be a triumph of racial harmony and brilliant buildings, a world city, the most admired world city in the world.

How, wondered Beard as his plane at last quit the stack on a banking hairpin tangent and lined itself up north of the Thames to begin its descent, could we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appeared, at this height, like a spreading lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mold enveloping a soft fruit--we were such a wild success. Up there with the spores!"