Speak the words “top-ten list” and another word, “gimmick,” floats to mind. Gratitude, the kind that one feels for a book that resides temporarily in one’s body, is an awfully personal feeling to try to pass off as a public judgment. Add a pandemic and the act gets even trickier. I’ve wondered how art might best meet this moment: with gentleness or rudeness, distraction or challenge. I’ve thought, too, about what I’ve asked of literature recently. Sometimes, when the world is dumb, it’s mental stimulation that I’m hungry for, or, when the world is ugly, beauty, or, when it’s exhausting, refreshment. As consumers of fiction, we have needs both diverse and inconstant; meanwhile, the “best of” lists gallop on, kicking up clouds of strained comparisons. This year’s pronouncements arrive shadowed by melancholy and, even more than usual, a vague illegitimacy.
For instance, I am writing this list from the kitchen table of a woman who says that, in 2020, she could abide only cozy mysteries or escapist fantasies. But I’ve found that, for me, literature’s draws finally exist independently of plagues or coups. What’s changed for many of us is perhaps our relationship to other types of fictions, which don’t necessarily come from novels. Narratives of American innocence, competence, and fellowship have eroded in the time of Trump’s Presidency, COVID-19, and the George Floyd protests. Letting go of these stories might cause one to crave tidy whodunnits, or it might simply make one stubborn, intolerant of pretense. Having found myself in the second category (stubborn), I regret to announce that I will not be declaring the ten best fiction books of the year. Such lists are malarkey. I’d be delighted to boss you around—I assume that’s why you’re here, to receive direction or fight—but please just think of the titles below as ten worthwhile books, milestones of a sort, published in this Very Weird Year. And then read them.
“The Glass Hotel,” by Emily St. John Mandel
You should read this book because it is an intensely satisfying novel of ideas, which suggests that our identities are as fragile as our circumstances. Vincent is a bartender whose relationship with a white-collar criminal wafts her into a charmed existence; when her boyfriend’s Ponzi scheme collapses, she signs up to be a cook on a cargo ship. Her ne’er-do-well half brother, Paul, also craves a fresh start. Mandel expertly threads these and other story lines together, focussing on the ease with which a person can slip out of one life and into another; the novel is translucent with ghosts. “We move through this world so lightly,” one woman observes, like a voice from Beyond—she sounds amazed, dismayed, and a little relieved.
“Leave the World Behind,” by Rumaan Alam
You should read this book because it makes your skin tingle, like stepping into a deep, dark pool of present-day anxieties. Amanda, an advertising executive, and her professor husband, Clay, take their teen-age son and daughter to an Airbnb in a picturesque recess of Long Island. Their vacation is interrupted when an older couple, Ruth and G. H. Washington, arrive at the door, claiming to be the house’s owners and warning of a power outage in Manhattan. From there, the text veers between two novels: a sharply drawn social satire, replete with love-to-hate bourgeois accents—including the most critically acclaimed grocery list of 2020—and a disaster tale, with the texture of a nightmare. There are spiders and blood; the imagery of repressed horror, when it erupts, is shocking. Still, Alam maintains an arch tone through his omniscient narrator, who describes omens of ecological ruin with the same chilly detachment that he brings to Amanda’s polite racism. (The Washingtons are Black.) Such dryness differentiates Alam from Mandel, whose visions of disaster have a more sorrowful resonance, and yet the two authors are charting similar territory: the place where realism and surrealism meet, and life “as we know it” dissipates into life as we’ve never imagined it could be.
“Where the Wild Ladies Are,” by Aoko Matsuda
You should read this book because it pairs the delicate eeriness of traditional Japanese folklore with a kooky, contemporary sensibility. Each of Matsuda’s stories updates an old tale about the ghosts and fox spirits known, in Japan, as yokai. Here, though, the yokai work alongside the living at a mysterious incense company. Matsuda’s agenda is mischievously feminist. She likens women’s potential to an otherworldly force—shape-shifting project managers complain about Japan’s glass ceiling—and her male characters tend to come off looking ridiculous. (“I don’t have any exceptional talents,” one helpfully says.) There is, too, an undertow of late-capitalist weariness: the workday, which makes spectres of the living, does not pause for the dead. The cheerful oddity of these tales reminded me of the writer Sianne Ngai’s theory of the “zany.” Zany art, Ngai suggests, blurs the line between play and labor, arousing feelings of suspicion, attraction, and exhaustion. But Matsuda’s book also possesses a simpler appeal: her yokai say things like “Okay, that’s cool,” and, sometimes, they lose their tempers. Ghosts: they’re just like us!
“The Office of Historical Corrections,” by Danielle Evans
