Books of 2022 Part 4: Top Ten

 Alright, final post to wrap up 2022 so I guess... happy 2023 now! After this, I'll see you next year to do all of this again.

10) Two Girls, Fat and Thin - Mary Gaitskill

I had this book on my to-read list from a long, long time ago - long enough that I haven't the foggiest clue now why it was there in the first place. I remembered it was there and I succumbed by requesting this on inter-library loan: there's a mildly curious side-story about how I got it via inter-library loan in the end but the point is, I got it. And having read it now, I'm even more in the dark as to why it was on my to-read list, mainly just because it was quite an odd book. The key descriptor I'd have to use is quite extremely, polarisingly ambivalent, but also ambiguous. There's just a lot of really elusive psychology and emotion in this book that's really hard to pull apart, so the ultimate feeling of having read it is simply I don't really have a clue how to feel. It tells the story of two women - Dorothy Never and Justine Shade - who represent the 'fat and thin' of the title. Justine is a journalist who interviews Dorothy as part of an article she is writing. The article concerns a thinly-veiled stand-in for Ayn Rand called "Anna Granite", a right-wing writer/philosopher whose inner circle Dorothy was once part of. After their initial meeting the book takes us back in time on a journey through both of the women's childhoods: Dorothy as a fat, unloved girl whose father verbally and physically abused her and who felt friendless throughout her school time, and Justine, a thin, beautiful girl who was part of the popular crowd who tormented girls similar to Dorothy. The book jumps back and forth in time, telling the story of how Dorothy was drawn to Anna Granite's work and became part of her clique, while also exploring the present day, and how both Justine and Dorothy are simultaneously repelled by and drawn to each other. Therein really lies the central ambiguity of the story. While one half of the story (Dorothy's) is very pro-Ayn Rand (via Granite) and explores rapturously her two great novels, The Bulwark and All the Gods Disdained (try and work out their analogues in the real world), Justine's side of it is a bit unclear throughout how she feels about it all. There's a confronting and again elusive attitude in this book towards sex, both consensual and otherwise, and the inner workings of the young girls' personal turmoil and how that turmoil manifests when they reach adulthood is actually quite disturbing. Not just because Gaitskill's writing is explicit yet emotionally detached, but because the ambivalence in the characters' attitudes towards the torment they endure - at the same time painful and exciting - is told in such a matter-of-fact way that I can't help but be largely confused by the characters and their experiences. At the end of the book that's very much why I'm left feeling ambivalent: both towards Ayn Rand (/Anna Granite) and her alleged value as a writer and a thinker, and towards what the book is trying to tell me about the psychology of the characters and the pathology of their neuroses, and in particular why those neuroses draw them inexplicably towards each other. But within that ambiguity is very much a fascination to me, in that I appreciate how elusive the meaning here is and how it provides a whole number of provocative, challenging questions with no easy answers.

9) The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy

I remember seeing this book years ago in my not-quite-local library, but the one that's linked to my most-local library (so I can borrow from both) but I still needed to read All the Pretty Horses which I did read in 2018, so when I visited that library again I snapped this up. Note for those thinking that you need to read Pretty Horses first to understand the ‘trilogy’: you don't. I mean this book stands apart as its own masterful work even though together they form very different portraits of young men living life on the 'edge' of the border between the US and Mexico. In this case we're told the story of 16-year-old Billy Parham and his travels into Mexico to return a wild, pregnant wolf to her homeland, and then his further travels when he returns home to find his own parents murdered. Cormac McCarthy has certain writing tics that are unmistakeable: one is his use of "and" to create run-on sentences particularly describing characters' actions. Another is his use of fairly basic Spanish language dialogue without translation (Google Translate was on-hand throughout my reading here) but with a general sense of what was being conveyed written in English. Neither of those things are weaknesses; in the end his writing is so matter of fact here that it's kind of astounding how efficiently he conveys so much. There's little profundities hidden so discreetly through this novel that you could completely miss them if you weren't paying attention: among others the thing that struck me was just a side-note about the fact that blind people "do not seek each other's company" which gave me quite a pause for thought. Along with his matter-of-fact style that parcels out these deep truths with no ceremony, there's certainly an ambiguity to his character's motivations: Billy takes three quests into Mexico, and in each case we're not really clear on what is really driving him on even though each time he declares a purpose. His quests, like the landscapes and the people McCarthy depicts, are detached from regular humanity and exist on their own plane with their own rules, and I felt them very strongly even while I didn't quite believe in them. It's hard to compare this with All the Pretty Horses since it's been a few years since I read that and if truth be told I don't feel that story so strongly either, but I think this is an immensely striking book, containing all the lawlessness of the old west but seen through the eyes of a boy who can't quite understand his place in the world but knows enough to mistrust it. McCarthy writes it all with efficiency but also intricacy, and knows enough to scatter depths throughout it that can't be avoided.

8) The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

I don’t know if I should have loved this book as much as I did, but… yeah, I loved this. The main reason for my reservation is that I’ve often rejected things that felt like a soap opera, and this - at least in its closing passages - certainly feels that way. But part of the way through, it felt Dickensian to me in its revelations, the twists and turns, and it reminded me of the fact that really, Dickens invented soap operas and pretty much all of his stories - bar none, in fact - could be reframed as one. More to the point, as much as this ends in a satisfying way where everybody ends up pleasant and reasonable, there’s some interesting and not-often-covered territory here that makes it more worth the while. This is a story about black identity, told through the story of twins Stella and Desiree Vignes who grew up as pale-skinned black women in a tiny town known as a haven for pale-skinned black women. One of the twins, Desiree, yearns for the black side of her nature and is attracted to the darkest-skinned boys she can find. The other, Stella (oh um kinda spoiler alert) decides instead to pass for white which she is able to do due to the paleness of her skin. Bennett presents the twins as essentially torn between their identities, Desiree unhappy but strangely content and Stella settled and happy but extremely unstable and vulnerable. Moreover in true soap opera style, there are other key players, namely Stella and Desiree’s two daughters, one styled by the townsfolk “blue-black”, as black as they come, and the other raised rich and white. Throughout the various stories Bennett maintains the resonant themes of race and identity, in particular the idea of yearning to be somebody you’re not but also raising the question of what really determines who you are? She manages to pose these interesting questions without shoving them down the reader’s throat. Who determines your identity? How much are you able to defy and even lie your way out of the fates set before you by virtue of how you were born? This book ultimately contains three varied love stories: two based on raw, unvarnished truths, and one based on nothing but lies. While they all have emotive resonance, Bennett pushes no judgment but presents them all as examples of people yearning for something outside of themselves. I do feel the story wrapped itself up a little too nicely and conveniently to affirm its characters as ultimately united in a common goal to make the best of the life they’ve been given (even if that’s a sense of being united by radically changing course), but the questions still linger regardless. And what’s more, it’s actually reassuring - without being glib or saccharine - to read a story about the struggles of being black and of wanting to be someone you’re not that’s also life-affirming.

7) The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead

Found this one by chance in the library and since I enjoyed The Underground Railroad a couple of years ago, thought it was fair enough to give another Colson Whitehead story a chance. Truth is, just to telegraph the conclusion of this writeup a bit, I found The Underground Railroad effective, but mostly compelling as a bit of pseudo sci-fi and the commentary on black history was a bit too metaphysical in its case to be truly fascinating. By contrast, this book through its relative simplicity, really cemented for me Whitehead as a scintillating chronicler of the contemporary black experience, again told through its history. In this case Nickel refers to a fictional reform school for boys where our protagonist, Elwood, finds himself sentenced through a series of unfortunate mishaps. Whitehead chooses to frame the story around Elwood's future, knowing from the prologue that he made it out of this place and went on to make a relative success of his life, which device makes the story of how he ended up there and suffered through his time there feel somewhat detached and incidental (since we know whatever he suffers, he makes it out the other side). What narrative tricks Whitehead pulls though are incredibly effective and powerful; the story acts out as a sort of revenge story, where Elwood finds himself suffering injustice at the hands of white men and the white system, and repeats quotes from MLK to himself as a kind of mantra to continue resisting and continue hoping in the face of his own and others' suffering. We know that Elwood makes it out the other side, and the successful life that he builds for himself is portrayed as a sort of revenge, that despite all his bad luck and injustice, the fact that he ends up making a bright future for himself is a middle finger to the system that tried to destroy him. The exact nature of that revenge though, the form it takes and how it stands as an indictment to post-Jim Crow America, is not fully apparent until the very end, and it ends up being far more powerful and poignant than I could have guessed. It's a remarkably subtle subterfuge that Whitehead enacts, and it's testament to his gift as a storyteller that I was so moved and taken by its conclusion.

6) Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

It feels almost too on the nose to suggest that this book feels like a follow-up to Never Let Me Go. I can't really avoid making comparisons but in the following writeup I will attempt to keep direct comparisons to a minimum while unpacking both what makes this book special but ultimately, inferior to Ishiguro's earlier work. To begin with, there is no subterfuge in this story the way there is in the early stages of NLMG: our narrator Klara is not at all ambiguous about the fact that she is an 'AF' - Artificial Friend - whose sole purpose is to be a companion for a boy or girl throughout their teenage years, and essentially to help them with their transition into the socially defined norms of 'adulthood' in this world. As in NLMG, although not done in the service of any great plot twist (although for the record, I maintain that NLMG doesn't actually have a plot twist, even though it absolutely and even explicitly feels that way), Ishiguro spends very little time on world-building, and our picture of how this society differs from our own and indeed what has changed between our now and their now comes to us purely from small observations or from conversations between the characters. The key reason and benefit of this of course is that Ishiguro is not interested in world-building, but rather in an exploration of humanity seen through this outsider lens. Outsider both in the sense that this world is different from our own but is still populated by humans, and in the sense that Klara, the artificial friend, is our first-person guide into this world. Klara's voice is essentially that of a child trying to find her way in the world, who takes on board what people tell her but tries to interpret it all in her own innocent and simplistic way. Her raison d'etre is not - as in other sci-fi about artificial intelligence - simply to 'serve' but rather to be a constant companion, and therefore she bears more resemblance to David from the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Note I haven't read the short story on which it's based) in the sense that her sole motivation is to love and be kind to Josie, the teenager who chooses her from her shop and who is suffering from a mysterious illness that renders her weak for days on end. This book very much achieves the same levels of poignancy and bittersweet beauty as NLMG, with my main criticism being that here a lot of the questions about humanity and those themes are outlined quite explicitly in dialogue between the characters, and there is definitely more opportunity here for Ishiguro to leave these more open for us to bring our own interpretations. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly an achingly beautiful portrayal of Klara and her flawless capacity for observing and understanding mankind better than we can understand ourselves. The cast of characters - from the underprivileged boy Rick next door and his slightly unpolished, tactless mother through to the delightfully blunt and protective 'Melania housekeeper' who looks after Josie and her mother - are all very real, deep characters whose interactions with Klara and each other feel like a periscope into their souls even when they talk more casually. The fact is that, for all of Ishiguro's slightly unsubtle expositions into the questions he's interested in, I feel the most interesting theme is left unwritten but becomes the ultimate question of the book: Klara is capable of only one thing - love - and isn't human. Therefore I'm left wondering: is she really capable of love by being capable of nothing else? Or does what make us human not so much the capacity for love, but the capacity for hate? Inasmuch as, by choosing to love the things we do rather than hate, is that really what makes us human? Hmm I think I'll call the suicide hotline and ask.

5) Dear Life - Alice Munro

Picked this up after loving the edited collection of Munro stories Lying Under the Apple Tree two years ago, and this one is a complete collection as it was originally published, rather than a compilation of several collections. As such I found this a much more rewarding experience because it contained a more unified set of themes throughout the stories and together made a fascinating, profound and nuanced examination of life. It’s hard for me to pick a favourite story here, or a highlight, because there isn’t a low point for one thing, and also because the stories are so unassuming and subtle in isolation but together pack quite a monumental punch. At times they feel like different versions of the same story: they all make some commentary about life in small-town Canada, about life during the depression and world war II, but above all they’re all stories about life as a woman. Of particular interest to Munro is women who strike out on their own, against society’s expectations for them, against their family’s wishes, or against the lot that’s been dealt them in life. Often this leads to some kind of misfortune, but most of the time what it tends to lead to is life, and how life sometimes just happens. That’s key to the writing here, Munro has a very detached, deromanticised view of life which somehow makes it all the more moving and profound because of all the wistfulness and sadness the characters don’t reveal. She has an extraordinary ability to let her words flow so fluidly that the mood will suddenly change or suddenly ten years have gone by in the story but I don’t notice the abrupt shift because it’s all part of the rhythm of life that she’s drumming. It’s a book that’s beautiful, yet completely unadorned, and cutting without any obvious punchline or twist. I could happily have read another two dozen of this same collection if they existed.

4) Baba Dunja’s Last Love - Alina Bronsky

This was quite a wonderful, heartening read, whose only real flaw is the fact that it’s so short. I mean, story wise and narrative wise it’s as long as it needs to be, but there’s definitely potential in here for more. It tells of the village of Tschernowo, abandoned due to being in the exclusion zone around the site of a nuclear meltdown, but now inhabited by the affectionately named Baba Dunja, who returned to her home to live out her twilight years, along with a ragtag bunch of old folks who followed with the same goal. Baba Dunja is our narrator, and similar to an Alice Munro narrator she has a very no-nonsense way of narrating as well as seeing the world. She sees the ghosts of people and animals around her; they speak to her and tell her things. What emerges from her narrative voice and these sorts of quirks is a wonderful sense of nostalgia but without the usual tinge of sentimentality. Her view of the present day is all sentimentality but coupled firmly with a sense of the real and practical, resulting in a lovely poetic portrait of the theoretical late life stage that Erickson called ‘Ego Integrity’, being at peace with yourself and your place in the world you’re leaving behind. The ghosts are not haunting her, longing for life or making up for past mistakes; they’re just there, hanging around the way her living neighbours do. What made me want more from this is firstly that the story of the events that unfold is told in a somewhat haphazard way. Because she concerns herself with the fairly practical details, she deals with events in a reactive way, without looking far ahead to what they may mean or lead to. What that ultimately results in is more of a series of ‘sketches of life’ in a radioactive village, and that means there’s plenty of room for more stories, more events and more side characters than the cobbled together narrative we get here. At the same time, the culmination of the plot and its denouement also felt like they could have been drawn out more to go into greater deliberation. These critiques though are more to do with how much I enjoyed what I got here and the fact that I wanted to spend more time within this setting with these eccentric people shouldn’t take anything away from how efficiently Bronsky gets her point across, while drawing us deep into the world of these vibrantly breathing and feeling people.

3) Kindred - Octavia E Butler

Found this quite a compelling read, and it too brought to mind Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad except of course this book predates it by several decades. The comparison comes in because it’s a very similar modern look at slavery through a lens of magic realism. In this book Dana, a black writer living in 1970s Los Angeles, finds herself transported to antebellum Maryland at an opportune time to save the life of the son of a white plantation owner. What begins as a bit of a conceit remains a conceit, but it opens the door to a fascinating modern examination of race relations and our understanding of slavery as a concept. Dana, when transported back, makes no pretence of her modern sensibilities, so largely dresses ‘like a man’ in long pants, does not hide her unheard-of ability to read as a black woman, and makes no secret of her objection to the whole concept of slavery. All of these things make her a compelling figure to Rufus, the youth she saves and is connected to in more than one way, while her 20th century ways frequently land her in trouble in the past where she’s expected to know her place both as a black person and as a woman. What I think Butler does so well is draw a subtle line of inquiry from 1819 (or whenever) to present day 1976, probing as to what the progress undoubtedly made really amounts to, and how much of the subservience she sees in her black predecessors is part of human nature, to avoid conflict and accept our fate. When there really feels like no future, then all people succumb to desperate measures to avoid their fate, while others see themselves as having no choice but to surrender. Dana, and her white husband Kevin, become the conduits for this examination, feeling compelled to play along with the grotesque masquerade while viewing it with an outsider lens and knowing that they should be doing more to change the course of inevitability. It’s mostly a tragic and challenging read, but its provocations are timely and essential even fifty odd years after its publication.

2) Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry

This was another one I got from Interlibrary loan. I can't really remember why it was on my to-read list specifically except that I think it comes up quite frequently in discussions about the great American novel, and I know of Larry McMurtry for this among other beloved works I haven’t read but have seen adapted on film (Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show) so I felt this was worth reading. My first reaction when the librarian brought it out from the office was "bloody hell, that's long, isn't it" (I actually said this out loud to the librarian). Because yeah, this book is a long read. But to cut to the chase: it's very much worth it, but moreover it doesn't feel long. McMurtry plays a bit of a trick in some ways, because the book starts out really quite jovially and casually, introducing us to the ‘Hat Creek crew,’ a group of four old Texas rangers led by Captains Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae, along with their chef Bolivar (a former Mexican bandito) and a young orphan boy Newt who's been effectively raised by this crew. The interplay between Captain Call and Augustus (or Gus) is the first key selling point, and the two immediately brought to mind (just through recency bias) the characters played by Jesse Plemons and Benedict Cumberbatch in Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog: Captain Call is Cumberbatch: aloof, no-nonsense, a bit hard to read, and relishes his solitude (I’m not going there as I have much more to say but a reading is certainly possible that he’s a closeted homosexual as well), while Gus is jovial, well-liked, albeit prone to like an argument. The trick that McMurtry plays is that that convivial atmosphere is played for full comic value through the early stages set in the Texas border town of the title - Lonesome Dove. When the crew is reunited with Call and Gus' old rangering buddy Jake Spoon on the run from the law, they decide to go on a long cattle run to the fabled prairies of Montana, of which Jake speaks so highly. So while I knew the comic, convivial atmosphere wouldn't last on this dangerous frontier, the violence when it comes is really quite confronting. It's confronting on its own terms but it's more shocking because it's so abrupt and mostly because it happens to characters who I've come to like and whose company I've come to enjoy. Make no mistake: there's definitely a cast of very likeable characters but McMurtry intersperses them with bloodthirsty psychopaths as well whose deeds are unpleasant and starkly contrasted with the good nature and adventurous spirit of Call and Gus. Being the old west of course, there is a phallocentric spirit here juxtaposed with the presence of Lorena, a prostitute whose blonde presence becomes the lovesick obsession of many of the company hired on to help drive the cattle from Texas to Montana. There's also an unfortunate but inevitable racist element to McMurtry's narrative wherein Native Americans are reduced to either warmongering savages or peaceful exotics whose motives are more a cause of mystery to our crew. As much as I'd like to call it symptomatic of the time the novel was written, the fact is the novel was published the same year I was born, and I feel there is a self-awareness in McMurtry's writing in the sense that he's aware of the racism and is writing it deliberately as a commentary of the times it's set in. My criticism is merely that he's exploiting the mythology of the old west and holding up the white frontiersmen as heroic and brave while more importantly they are the only characters given enough depth to be seen as fallible humans. The depth and fallibility of them is quite palpable though, and it's through the characters that the story really draws all of its strength. Above all else thogh, what was most intriguing to me about this is that it reads to me very much like an old Norse saga but set in the American west: there's a strong theme of 'luck' throughout, of characters whose luck sees them through many a trial where other people perish, but when that luck runs out it feels like fate is drawing them to an inevitable doom, even at the hands of people who were formerly their comrades in arms. There's the same sense of exploration, and the ubiquitous theme which I was going to examine in the PhD I applied for but never accepted: the contrast between dying young as a hero or living long enough to become either a villain or a worthless old coward. I can’t imagine that McMurtry was in any way influenced by old Norse sagas in writing this, but it's a fascinating observation of how storytelling traditions can get passed on through generations and across cultures, because in every sense this story follows the same trajectory as a cross between Egil's Saga and Brennu-Njal's Saga and I found it all the richer for it.

1) A Heart that Works - Rob Delaney

I ordered a copy of this book on a whim one night, basically feeling an uncharacteristic surge of bravado thinking I could handle this book's subject matter. In case you've been living under a rock, let me just summarise the premise: Rob Delaney, one of the funniest people in the world, had a son who was diagnosed with brain cancer at 1 year old. He underwent treatment, became somewhat disabled from it, the cancer returned, and he died. For background, I did dive into the book expecting it to be excruciating, devastating, and borderline unreadable. But the truth is, while it's definitely the first two in absolute spades, Delaney manages to make the book not only readable but compelling and ultimately a strange, bittersweet delight. Yes, the unbearable pain of losing a beloved child is there on every page and on every word. It can't not be: it's part of who Delaney is now, it's a constant companion for him and a big part of his everyday existence. He narrates his pain, his anger, his suffering, and how it's never going to go away, with solemn and savage beauty along with his characteristic blunt and at times absurdist humour. But yes, I described this book about constant pain and sorrow as a delight, and the reason is that the pain is not really what this book is about. While Delaney focuses plenty of the book on dealing with his grief, dealing with the anger during the situation, the vast majority of the narrative is about the pure joy of what his son Henry brought to his and his wife Leah's lives. He zeroes in on the kindness that he experienced through the ordeal of going through cancer treatment with a 1-2 year old, all of the endlessly patient and caring people who looked after Henry, and all of the people who brought joy to Henry's short life through their compassion and kindness. Delaney also focuses a great deal of his time talking about his two elder sons, how much love they had for their little brother and how hard it was on them while at the same time what absolute champions they were dealing with so much at a young age. Yes, the book made me ugly-sob with gasping breaths frequently, but in spite of Delaney's obvious and understandable woe, by far the most profound and affecting thing about the book is the joy that kids bring to our lives and how important it is to cherish that joy, however fleeting it may be. It's also a very timely reminder to remember that lesson, because dying - sometimes unjustly, sometimes way too early - is always going to be a part of life, so having a deep appreciation for the lives of those we love is essential at all times.