10 great reads lost in the noise
Has anyone checked on the debut novelists to make sure they’re all right? Amid a devastating pandemic, a steep recession and an attention-sucking black hole of an election, authors who might otherwise have been rewarded for timeless brilliance were overlooked even in the casualty count. Publications focused on politics, not prose. Visits to bookstores dwindled. And a lot of smart, important, moving literature was lost in the chaos. Here are 10 books that deserved our attention and our readership in 2020; give them some in 2021.
“Topics of Conversation” | Miranda Popkey
There is more than a dash of Rachel Cusk’s Faye trilogy sprinkled over Popkey’s debut novel, another story told entirely in conversations. Each chapter follows the unnamed narrator into a new foray, first as a teenage nanny to a wealthy family, then into her marriage to an “endlessly supportive” man whose loyalty smothers her and on to the darkness of single motherhood. Popkey isn’t merely replicating Cusk’s formula. This is a formal experiment gone very right, an artful mixing of the intimate and universal and a timeless story about female (dis) satisfaction. Knopf: 224 pages, $24
“Breasts and Eggs” | Mieko Kawakami, Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd
Published in Japan in 2008, Kawakami’s novella won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. It was worth waiting 12 long years for the English release. Kawakami’s determined exploration of the neuroses women carry about their bodies contains three stories: Natsu is single and hunting for a sperm donor; her sister Makiko researches breast augmentation; and Makiko’s daughter Midoriko crosses the lonely plains of puberty. These women push and pull on one another’s judgments and expectations. Kawakami is a bright young star in her home country — and should be here, as well. Europa: 448 pages, $27
“Austen Years” | Rachel Cohen
There’s something unfashionable about admitting that novels offer lessons in how to live, but who cares? In this memoir-essay hybrid, Cohen reads and rereads Jane Austen’s work and tells us not just what it all means but also what it does for us. There isn’t an ounce of kitsch or flowery claptrap. Instead, Cohen overlays a personal account of grieving her father with the help of Austen’s fiction, emerging with one of the most emotionally astute understandings of the novelist’s work, period. FSG: 304 pages, $28
“Migrations” | Charlotte McConaghy
If you push off “climate change novels” because you have enough cause for despair, this one will offer instant relief. “The animals are dying,” it begins. “Soon we will be alone here.” But from there it’s a story of remarkable hope. “Migrations” follows ornithologist Franny Stone as she joins a fishing crew to search for the world’s last flock of migrating arctic terns. It’s a wily sea tale in which the glories of the wild are celebrated and mourned in equal turn. Flatiron: 272 pages, $27
“Collected Stories” | Shirley Hazzard
Election day 2020 was perhaps not the best moment to publish a collection of any kind, never mind this posthumous monument. These 28 stories by the wondrous Hazzard, who manages to write about heartbreak as if it’s never been done before, cover several distinct phases in her career. There are hilarious tales of bureaucratic ineptitude from her time working at the United Nations and sad ditties about ambivalent midcentury Americans abroad. But most poignant are the remarkable love stories. “A Place in the Country,” for one, rivals any classic. “Love,” its protagonist thinks, “is supposed to be enriching; instead I am poisoned.” FSG: 368 pages, $28
“The Appointment” | Katharina Volckmer
In the form of one long confession, our unnamed German narrator lies back on an examining table and spills out her personal, political and emotional history to a doctor performing a vague procedure. There are jokes about sleeping with Hitler, jabs at her countrymen and some sexual unbosoming that would make D.H. Lawrence blush. Which is (part of) the point. Volckmer, writing here in a second language, wants us to feel the correct amount of discomfort as citizens of this mad world. Avid Reader: 144 pages, $22
“Self-Portrait” | Celia Paul
Paul’s memoir will disabuse you of any notions about the glamour of being an artist’s muse. She met Lucian Freud in 1978, when she was 18 and he was 55. She fell in love with him, and he painted her for a decade; in the meantime, her own creativity dried up entirely. In “Self-Portrait,” she writes about that stalling out, and then of how she came to create her later portraits, creamy and alive. It’s a captivating mix of memories, notebook pages and musings, proof that while Freud may have captured her on the canvas, she owns her image on the page. NYRB: 216 pages, $30
“Drifts” | Kate Zambreno
When writers aren’t writing, who are they? The too-often underestimated Zambreno has written a novel about the wanderings of a writer’s mind — her mind — as it tries to pin down a slippery new idea and turn pinballing mental ramblings into something as concrete as a hardback book. If this sounds distant and remote, do not fear: “Drifts” is as embodied as novels come. Riverhead: 336 pages, $26
“Igifu” | Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Jordan Stump
In “Grief,” the final story in this trim collection, Mukasonga writes about a young woman very much like herself, abroad in France in the early 1990s when she receives a letter from her native Rwanda. It contains a long list of names, “her father, her mother, her brothers, her sisters, her uncles, her aunts, her nephews, her nieces. ... This was now the list of her dead.” Mukasonga has been writing autobiographical stories about her upbringing and Rwanda’s genocide for years, but “Igifu” may be her brightest, most eye-opening work yet. Archipelago: 160 pages, $18
“Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency” |
Olivia Laing
I like to think of Laing as a tour guide into the caverns of my brain where anxiety dwells. Her writing never fails to elicit a little soul-searching about the quirks of one’s psyche that release or bind up creativity. This collection of essays about subjects as varied as the Grenfell Tower fire in London and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla. coheres into a soothing survey of what has collectively agitated us all over the last four years, a meditation on how art can respond to even the worst of times. Norton: 368 pages, $27