South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Top 10 books of the year
From a thousand-page novel to a slim volume of essays on A Tribe Called Quest
The most important book of 2019 was available to Americans for free.
Its cover was indistinguishable from the starkest of corporate reports, large chunks were redacted and the prose that was readable carried all the warmth of an Apple licensing agreement. It was a 400-something-page epic that somehow played smaller and less satisfying than the year’s other page bombshell: “The Testaments,” Margaret Atwood’s hit sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Still, of everything published this year, it’s hard to think of more compelling lines than these, early in “The Mueller Report”: “The president slumped back in his chair and said ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m f—.’ ”
“The Mueller Report,” as literature, was not one of the best books of 2019, yet it holds one of two passages I remember with any clarity. The other is from Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick: And Other Essays”: “Thick where I should have been thin, more when I should have been less, a high school teacher nicknamed me ‘Ms. Personality,’ and it did not feel like a superlative.”
That first passage is about decline, the second about asserting your place.
If there was commonality among the best books of the year, it could be found between those poles, in the ebb and flow of institutional erosion followed by fresh voices. Memory, and how it can mislead and sustain us, became the subject of the year.
Fiction
“Ducks, Newburyport”
by Lucy Ellmann (Biblioasis , 1,020 pages, $22.95 ). I won’t lie: To get through this, I enacted a plan to read an hour a day for a month. I finished in two weeks.
Nothing about this Booker nominee is as expected: Ellmann takes on the state of who we are
now, and what we think, regardless of content. It feels shockingly to the minute. For a thousand pages, which unfold as one sentence, we’re privy to the thoughts of an Ohio housewife thinking of Trump, childhood, the cinnamon rolls she has to make for a bake sale, the plot of “Air Force One” — anything rattling around up there. It is work, and who knows if it’ll endure (there’s a swing-for-the-literaryfences Joycean quality hard to ignore), but it’s also an addicting and funny joy.
“Lost Children Archive”
by Valeria Luiselli (Knopf, 383 pages, $27.95). The Mexican-born Luiselli, a journalist/novelist/volunteer interpreter for unaccompanied children in immigration court, follows an American couple traveling with their kids to the Southwest border, intent on documenting children who are crossing. Categorically, it’s a novel, but between those covers lay fiction and essay, road-trip narrative, Cormac McCarthy, Bowie, magic and, as the title promises, archives.
Bleak as it sounds, alongside virtuosic writing Luiselli is playful with structure, one moment inspiring your anger, the next delivering an exhilarating questioning of storytelling itself.
“The Memory Police” by
Yoko Ogawa (Pantheon,
274 pages, $25.95). Trouble finding your keys? What if you forgot what keys were? What if birds themselves came next, then roses? What if you were a writer and began to forget what paper was? Worse, what if there were enforcers, who carried guns and riffled through stuff for evidence of trace memories, ensuring memory loss, phasing out the world you knew?
First published in Japan in 1994 and only now making its American debut, what had been written at the dawn of the digital age emerges now, presciently and chillingly, as part
“1984,” part “Fahrenheit
451” and part 2019 — a masterful fantasy about the melancholy of forgetting. You forget birds one day, possibilities the next.
“Growing Things” by
Paul Tremblay (Morrow, 352 pages, $25.99). Is this a collection of horror stories? Or just masterful writing about the inevitable? Stephen King himself has said that Tremblay “scares the hell” out of him, perhaps because Tremblay’s work is rooted and disquieting, always of this planet.
He writes with the popimmediacy of King minus the comforting distance of vampires and ghouls. A vacationing family watches society break down; a dog walker leaves unsettling notes; the title story is about sisters trapped by an invasive weed. Tremblay, like Philip K. Dick, Elmore Leonard or even King, strikes the latest blow against the usual, knownothing snobbishness toward genre fiction.
“American Spy” by Lauren Wilkinson (Random House, 294 pages, $27). There are so many great novels by African Americans about living without being seen or “passing” in plain sight as someone else, it’s strange how rare it is to encounter a spy thriller that isn’t about a white guy.
Here is the Cold War story of a black female intelligence officer directed to ensnare the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso. Wilkinson’s first novel is closer to the personal conflict of Graham Greene than the political machination of John le Carré . Or as the spy’s father says on the day of her FBI graduation: “I’ve been a spy in this country for as long as I can remember.”
Nonfiction
“Go Ahead in the Rain” by Hanif Abdurraqib (University of Texas 216 pages, $16.95). Music books are rarely the kind of books about music we really need
— the ones that remind us what it feels like to fall in love with a song or band so totally that you’re joined for life, riding an artist’s highs and lows as if they’re wayward family.
Abdurraqib, a great poet and even better music critic, fills this book with jazz and memories of the rap magazine The Source, childhood crushes and, of course, a warm history of the legendary group A Tribe Called Quest. It’s that rare vivisection that cuts cleanly and deeply, leaving the subject more alive than when we found him.
“The Yellow House” by
Sarah M. Broom (Grove, 376 pages, $26). “There was too much detail for my eyes to make sense of,” Broom writes in this gorgeous, ambitious and rigorously considered memoir about what it means to internalize a home. And not just any: the working-class blocks of New Orleans East, devastated during Hurricane Katrina, now haunted by generations of splintered families and civic neglect.
Broom doesn’t give just her story but a sibling’s, her mother’s, her city’s. As she told The Atlantic: “When we boil Katrina down to a weather event, we really miss the point.”
“How to Hide An Empire” by Daniel Immerwahr (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 528 pages, $30). As cleverly conceived and surprising as it is, its conception may seem obvious: a history of American expansionism, those territories and possessions that are part of the United States but exist outside of the traditional map and many Americans’ idea of what their country looks like. Meaning, military bases, Puerto Rico, Manila — lands that consistently refute the nationalistic fairy tale of an anti-colonial U.S. But Immerwahr only begins there; the rest is not a condemnation but rather a surprising take on foreign policy.
“Good Talk” by Mira
Jacob (One World, 368 pages, $30). A graphic novel in which every character may look black or white, yet nothing is so easy. The format is a pleasant collage of found photos of Jacob and family, and that title is more meaningful than it sounds: Jacob identifies as South Asian and has a mixed-race son, and the conversation that ensues — about being brown in America, from the discomfort of her in-laws’ politics to arranged marriages — is disarmingly blunt, full of tender acts of grace and effortlessly engaging.
“Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday, 441 pages,
$28.95). This 10-best list is alphabetical by author, but here is my No. 1. Keefe, a New Yorker staffer known for his dives into minor characters who illustrate worlds, tackles no less than the Troubles, the strife between governments and tribes that defined Ireland in the 20th century.
Starting with famously contentious material, he structures it ingeniously as true crime, starting with the murder of a mother of
10, then spiraling outward into a story that leaves you struck by the youthful resolution, utter waste and political forgetfulness of its participants.