In Part I of my blog on my Favorite Fiction from 2010 I talked about some great works by Richard Bausch, Joshua Ferris and Jonathan Franzen. Let’s get right to Part II of my list of the year’s best in fiction.
A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore
It feels odd to recommend a novel when you’re a big fan of the writer (and the writing is excellent), but you don’t think the latest effort is the author’s best work. It happened last year for me with Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, and I find myself in the same situation with A Gate at the Stairs. I love Birds of America, Lorrie’s Moore collection of short stories (which includes the widely anthologized and unforgettable “People Like That Are the Only People Here”) and you frequently find her fiction in The New Yorker. In A Gate at the Stairs, we meet Tassie Keltjin, a Midwest college student looking for baby-sitting work—on the surface this seems like a simple coming-of-age story, but stay with it and see how quickly things get complicated. Great characters and a lot of wisdom in this very funny, very sad novel.
Willing
Scott Spencer
Most people know of just one Scott Spencer novel: Endless Love—yes, that Endless Love, the one they made into the terrible movie with Brooke Shields—but did you know the book got great reviews? No less than the great Joyce Carol Oates said, “No description of Endless Love can do justice to the rich, startling and always intelligent tenor of [Spencer's] prose.” In Willing, Avery Jankowsky is a struggling freelance writer (are there any other kind?) whose life is, well, a mess. Coming to the rescue is Uncle Ezra and his offer to get Avery on a high-priced, worldwide sex tour of Nordic countries. This novel is certainly not for everyone, and reviews were mixed, but I really enjoyed it, especially when everything begins going horribly, comically wrong on the tour. It’s also a satire on masculinity, the Internet and what happens when we get what (we think) we wish for.
Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Stories
Amy Bloom
Like Richard Bausch, Amy Bloom is a writer more famous for her short stories (although her last novel, Away was a national best seller) than her novels. The title here is very appropriate because the stories in this collection are all about love: physical love, broken love, unrequited love, enduring love, complicated love. The characters in Where the God of Love Hangs Out are all believable and memorable (especially the two sets of couples in the beginning stories) and the writing is fantastic.
An Object of Beauty
Steve Martin
Man, is there nothing Steve Martin can’t do? Stand-up comic, actor, screenwriter, magician, playwright, virtuoso banjo player, essayist–and novelist. This is Martin’s third novel (the others were the widely praised Shopgirl and one that I really loved, The Pleasure of My Company). In An Object of Beauty , Lacey Yeager is a beautiful, hyper-ambitious dealer set to make her name in the high-end art world of New York City (Martin is also a knowledgeable and avid art collector). Not as comic as you might expect, but great writing and, for those art philistines like myself, a mini-lesson in some of art’s masterpieces and insight into the world of art dealing and collecting.
P.S. Who says the world of literature can’t have juicy drama? Click here to read about last week’s big to-do when Steve Martin visited the 92 Street Y and the audience got mad that he wasn’t the “wild and crazy” guy, but instead spoke about art and his novel.
Noah’s Compass
Anne Tyler
Those familiar with Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons) knows she writes about the everyday in a simple, elegant way. In Noah’s Compass, Liam Pennywell is a sixty-year-old, humdrum fellow who has just been laid off from his teaching job. One night he’s attacked in his apartment and loses all memory of what happened. When he begins searching for answers about what occurred during that missing time, he’s also confronted with the history of his disappointing life. Anne Tyler is so easy to read and (like all of her work) Noah’s Compass is a winning mix of comedy and sadness.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet
David Mitchell
I’ve been fortunate enough to read all of Mitchell’s other novels (Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green are especially great), and it’s hard for me to recall another writer with such amazing range—he really creates a totally different novel each time out. The Thousand Autumns is one my favorites, and one of this year’s best. I do the novel a disservice by trying to fit it in a category, but I would say this is like a top-notch, literary, historical adventure (so unlike two of his previous novels, Number9Dream and Ghostwritten which were more surreal and experimental). Jacob DeZoet is a clerk in Japan working for the Dutch East Indies Company around 1800. His hope is to make his fortune and be worthy to win his beloved Anna back home, but the culture and people of Nagasaki, as well as the beautiful, damaged Orito Aibagawa, change everything for him. My only complaint is that Jacob is such an interesting character, yet we leave him for long stretches of time. Still, it’s a really great novel and I highly recommend it.
Please help add to this list. I’d love to hear what novels made your list in 2010!
