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Remembering the best of 2001
Should auld acquaintance be forgot? Definitely not -- especially if you've become acquainted with a good book. Here at BookPage, where we're usually looking ahead to find the best new books, we decided to start the year by looking back at some of the books we enjoyed in the year just passed. Several titles made it onto our own in-house list: The Body Artist by Don DeLillo; The Crusader by Michael Alexander Eisner; Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold; Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand; Call Each River Jordan by Owen Parry; Fraud by David Rakoff; Comfort Me With Apples by Ruth Reichl; and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.
I liked Akhil Sharma's first novel, An Obedient Father, for its line-by-line grace and intelligence, for its deft blending of the personal and the social, for its unearthing of comedy in the nastiest of situations, and for its unsparing and yet oddly sympathetic portrait of a monstrous father.
The book I liked the most this year was Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon. Not only was it very funny, but he captured the differences between Americans and the French perfectly, in turn reminding me of my own expatriate experience and why I still feel American after 17 years in Britain.
My favorite was Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken. Her writing is both exquisite and hysterical, a very tricky combination to pull off. She has a completely original voice. I think she's writing the best books around these days.
Daniel Woodrell's The Death of Sweet Mister. The author is one of those rare literary writers who is unafraid to tell a ripping good story. Here, Woodrell completely and authentically captures the voice of his 13-year-old narrator and delivers a stunning, classic American novel.
My favorite novel this year was Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which seized me with both language and story from the opening words. Nothing's better than an outlaw tale, and this one, told in the voice of Australia's famed Ned Kelly, is distinct and urgent in tone and for inventiveness is the equal of Larry McMurtry's Anything for Billy.
An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma. It's a first novel, brilliantly written, that manages to create a character who is both utterly loathsome and strangely sympathetic and at the same time describe a great deal of modern Indian history in all its complexity. It's an amazing book and all the more impressive knowing it's a first novel by a young writer.
Simon Schama's book on Rembrandt, Rembrandt's Eyes, puts me in touch with another time as if I had visited there myself. I also found Open Minded, Jonathan Lear's book on Freud and the classical philosophers, a book that engaged my puny brain to the extreme upper limits of its capacity.
The best new book I read this year was The Practical Heart, four superb novellas by Allan Gurganus. Two of these -- the title piece and "Saint Monster" -- both stand as masterpieces of recent American fiction. The book as a whole demonstrates breathtaking range and has all the largeness of heart and emotional fearlessness I associate with Gurganus's work. This is one of the handful of terrific books (Dan O'Brien's memoir Buffalo for the Broken Heart is another) lost in the rubble of 9/11, but I've no doubt it will rise again. |
