In an off year, the printed page thrived
Our list of favorites, fiction and nonfiction
You knowwhat didn’t fail in 2020?
Books. The publishing industry had rough spots, like everyone. Bookstores closed, most struggled. But the medium— unlike themovie business, live theater and the artworld— never quite stoppedmoving. Ancient technology, like jigsawpuzzles and journalism, trudged on. Whichwas good. We needed to understand politics, race and apocalypse fast — or so said bestseller lists. In fact, as I glance atmy favorite books of 2020, I see: We didn’t turn to books for escape. Or at least, I didn’t.
“Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains” by Kerri Arsenault: Ever driven through an industrial nook— say, aNorthwest Indiana, or anywhere the vibe is smokey and lonesome— andwondered howpeople live there? The town ofMexico, Maine, the small remote spot in Arsenault’s hybrid of memoir, history and investigation, is not ugly. It’s bordered by the green mountains and epic wilderness of centralMaine. Arsenault grew up there, her fatherworked in its paper mill for decades, as did extended family and much of the town. Her father also retired with toxins in his lungs. Though you assume another hand-wringing over environmental deregulation, what unspools is much richer and more affecting. Using her father’s death as catalyst, she digs into state history, the town’s decline and the mill’s legacy. She brings the outrage of a furious native, tearing down years of “Vacationland” tourism, yet deeply homesick for the place she once knew. What gave her hometown its meaning once— industry, deregulation, community— is precisely what devoured it.
“Stateway’s Garden” by JasmonDrain: There have been a lot of good books fromChicagoans (and former Chicagoans) lately— far more than in a typical 12 months. And yet the story collection fromthisKenwood resident, overlooked and unassuming, would be an understated gem most years. Because here’s nothing overtly surprising: He links together characters who share an address, the long-demolished Stateway Gardens housing project in Bronzeville. (Raymond Carver’s interlocking stories come to mind.) Even the mid-’80s setting is a touch familiar. Still, it’s ages since fiction recreated an overcastworkaday Chicago so evocatively, without sentiment or piety. Drain’s specificity has a palpable heartache for a place and time, with clear-eyed understanding of opportunities and limitations. It’s also, line for line, beautiful, exacting: “Mother clenched me with her left arm and used her right to pull out her keys.” Even that apostrophe in the title, easy to look past, plays like a
nod to Stateway’s origin as a planned utopia, and the sad result.
“BeginAgain: James Baldwin’s America and ItsUrgent Lessons for OurOwn” by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.:
The author didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election. Critical of Obama Democrats and a failure to connect with many in Black America, he left the line blank. In this bracing mash of moral reckoning and literary biography, he writes: “I was stupid enough to overestimate white America.” Like others in the zeitgeist— the Oscar-winner “If Beale Street Could Talk,” the landmark “Between the World andMe”— he turned to Baldwin for a roadmap to Trump’s America. But what Glaude Jr. foundwas more than a bunch of prescient quotations. He found an argument for “re-envisioning” the nation itself, and a provocative reminder of what bearing witness actually means. Likewith Baldwin himself, there’s a lot to argue with here. And that’s the idea.
“The Abstainer” by Ian McGuire: One of our best-kept literary secrets has been masquerading as a virtuoso of a longsnubbed genre, the historical novel. McGuire, a British champion of soot-covered 19th-century realism, is too nimble for such leaden shoes. His latest propulsive tale focuses on a haunted police officer whowatches the execution of Irish nationalists and knows revenge is coming: “A clever man will never underestimate the motive power of dust and bones.” LikeMcGuire’s other masterpiece, “TheNorthWater,” a 19th-century Arctic Circle adventure from2016, all roads here point to blood. Specifically, a veteran of theU.S. CivilWar, who returns to Ireland to avenge the executions. What follows has a Hollywood-y cat-and-mouse certainty. McGuire, though, has the irony ofDickens and grim leanness of CormacMcCarthy, and uses them so confidently, it’s
hard not to remind yourself: Dickenswas once pop culture, too.
“Why FishDon’t Exist: ATale of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life” by Lulu Miller:
It’s better to not explain the title, but fear not: Before it’s over, you’ll understand. Miller, a fixture of “Radiolab” and “This American Life,” tells a story as eclectic and diverging as the best storytelling from public radio, beginning with science but veering into thoughts on stubbornness, the psychology of self-doubt and the good old meaning of life. Her main subject is obscure, David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University and an influential ichthyologist. He cataloged thousands of fish species and believed, before itwas widely accepted, thatDarwin’s theory of evolution (not the fixed hand of God) was the truth. Hewas also a proponent of eugenics, a probable murderer and his researchwas destroyed so often that, in Miller’s effortless prose, his story is a rabbit hole of ideas on how farwe will go to create order out of the inevitable disarray.
“A Children’s Bible” by Lydia Millet: It begins with the idyllic hush of a young-adult classic: “Oncewe lived in a summer country.” A group of teenagers and their neglected siblings wile away vacation at a lakeside rental, ignored by parents preoccupied with liquor and liaisons. After a climate cataclysm upends the landscape, the kids leave for an adventure marked by strange arks full of animals and odd infants found in mangers. The adults, meanwhile, study the fine print on the vacation lease and drink themselves numb. Rather than a howl of realism and reproach about a fast approaching future, Millet, an almost-winner ofNational Book Awards and Pulitzers, settles into an ageless, old-fashioned tone, marrying a parable of complacency to something surreal and hilarious— theweirdness ofwatching yourworld end. It’s just what you’re looking for: a
light lift, yet so sharp you never fortify yourself for an endgame of mythic profundity.
“Nothing isWrong and Here Is Why” by Alexandra Petri:
There has been a library of books about the chaos unleashed by the Trump years, and someday, when the president is honored with a library, let’s hopeWashington Post columnist Petri is quick with a card catalog of its contents. As for her own book: Are these original, stinging essays shelved in nonfiction? Or everyday surreality? Non-magical realism? Her pieces veer fromfunny funny to sad funny to furious funny— better known as Tuesday in America. The subjects—#MeToo, guns, family separation policies, Melania Trump’s holiday decorating (“Nightmare Forest of Cursed Trees”)— are rendered as snappy satires of contemporary jargon and official evasion. TheMueller Report receives a book report: “Oneway inwhich this book did not succeedwas its lack of female characters.” ADeep State FAQ explains its aim as “a very clear and secret thing, only known to Deep Staters and people who leave comments on conspiracy websites online.” Howspot-on is Petri? Her piece about Trump’s federal budgetwas (mistakenly, I guess) included in aWhiteHouse newsletter. Among its lines: “Affordable housing is a luxury and we are going to get rid of it.”
“Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadowof Music” by AlexRoss:
Grandiose and sprawling asWagner’smasterworks, here is cultural history that ties together politics, philosophy, sex, war and race, making pitstops for VirginiaWoolf and “Star Wars.” “The highest and the lowest impulses of humanity” found a home in the composer’s voice, writes Ross, classical critic for the NewYorker, and the result flooded the culture forever after, a kind of “chaotic, posthumous cult” flowing through architecture, literature and, of course, fascism. Ross is particularly good at picking apart contradiction— and the legacy of anti-Semitism— infamously embodied byWagnerian ideas. But this is not a biography of a man. It’s a tracing of an aesthetic, one overwrought and foundational, and Ross chips away geologic layers to identify the rot. You’ll see yourworld differently.
“Superman Smashes the Klan” by Gene LuenYang:
I suppose thiswas intended for kids; it’s colorful and rendered (by artist collective Gurihiru) with the doe-eyed cheer of Japanese manga. The title alone suggests an elemental explainer of bigotry. Yet Yang, aMacArthur “genius” whose parents immigrated to theUnited States from China and Taiwan, uses pop culture to explain the generational tug of systemic racism with more complexity than a newspaperworth of think pieces. It’s a dual narrative: A Chinese American familymoves fromChinatown toMetropolis and attracts the cold glare of aKKKchapter. Among their supporters is Superman, here (in the 1930s) still a relative newcomer whose powers arewelcomed by some as an argument for white supremacy. But ClarkKent, not unlike the Lee family, has learned to downplay his origins and abilities. Yang is riffing on a footnote: A popular 1946 Superman radio showsometimes credited with mainstreaming the Klan’s image as dangerous foolswearing silly costumes. What he lands on, though, is a very 2020 take on influence, money and families.
“African American Poetry: 250Years of Struggle& Song,” edited byKevinYoung:
Simply, a landmark. It’s easy to read that as hyperbole, and yet Young, a major poet himself (not to mention incoming director of the Smithsonian’sNationalMuseumof African American History and Culture), spent six years assembling what amounts to an overwhelming, and often fun, thousand-page refocusing of our literary legacy. Legends and laureates arewell represented— Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, TracyK. Smith— but where this collection excels is adding centuries of the lesser-known greats whosework was steady and remarkable, sometimes made furtively, sometimes with a touching thankfulness for ancestors. Together, it’s a kind of history of American history— jazz, Emmett Till, slavery — but also a celebration of arts movements (the Chicago Renaissance gets its due) and a lively conversation across decades. You hear, for instance, Chicago’s Brooks resonate in Chicago’s Eve Ewing. You hear both schoolyard rhyme and modernism. You hear wordplay on food and lyrics on boredom and acts of witness written against the backdrop of police shootings. It’s addicting, and refreshing, and no doubt, the sort of holiday treasure a family hands down for generations.