Best Novels of the Year 2011

The Best Novel of the Year was Alex Shakar's LUMINARIUM, which is a hell of a story and smartly technological, neurological, and metaphysical at the same time, the big ideas in witty, sharply written prose.

Good tandem reads were this year's The Spiritual Doorway In The Brain:  A Neurologist's Search For The God Experience by Kevin Nelson, M.D., and last year's My Stroke Of Insight by Harvard scientist Jill Bolte Taylor.

Luminarium was also my year's Best Book About Brothers, with Patrick Dewitt's darkly humorous western, The Sisters Brothers, runner-up in this category.

Best Literary Westerns of the Year:  Susan Froderberg's OLD BORDER ROAD, Craig Johnson's HELL IS EMPTY, Patrick Dewitt's THE SISTERS BROTHERS, and Denis Johnson's TRAIN DREAMS.

Best Literary Mystery/Thrillers of the Year:   Craig Johnson's cross-genre HELL IS EMPTY (which is also a runner-up for the Track of the Cat Award), and Declan Burke's dark and funny ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL.  A longer descriptive list of the year's ten best crime novels will appear here later this week.

The Best Time Travel Novels of the year 2011, from a banner crop, were: Stephen King's 11/22/63, Felix J. Palma's THE MAP OF TIME, and Thomas Mullen's splendid thriller, THE REVISIONISTS.

These three reminded me of all the great time travel novels and movies:  Jack Finney's best work and the Back to the Future trilogy, Richard Matheson's Somewhere In Time, Audrey
Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, and several other good ones dealing with time and fate.

The one anachronism I noted in Stephen King's novel was when the gatekeeper calls the protagonist the "mf" epithet, this in 1958. That ugly term did not enter common vernacular until a few years later when Richard Pryor and some other comedians started using it. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think so.

Perhaps it was merely a clue that the drunken gatekeeper of the rabbit hole (who reminds me of Shakespeare's gate porter in MacBeth) is an out-of-time character.  Later, the protagonist talks with another gatekeeper whose name is something like a play on Auld Lang Syne.

These three time travel books are not to be missed.  A Map of Time also reminds me a bit of the movie Time After Time, starring Mary Steenburgen and Michael McDowell, as H. G. Wells.

And speaking of H. G. Wells, the Best Biographical Novel of the Year goes, hands down, to David Lodge's A MAN OF PARTS.  Lodge illuminates the darker, sexier, least known parts of Wells' biography with an informed and well-imagined light.  The runner-up in this category was Ann Napolitano's novel, A Good Hard Look, which featured events in the life of Flannery O'Connor.

This year's Track of the Cat Award, going to the best literary work featuring a big cat in a symbolic way (fiction or creative non-fiction) goes to Tea Obreht's elegant fable, THE TIGER'S WIFE.  A worthy book to rank with the stellar past winners in this category such as Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, and last year's The Tiger by John Vaillant.  HELL IS EMPTY takes second-place here in this category.

Obreht's novel is chock full of animals, and just as you might say that the book's real literary familiar is Kipling, the literary familiar for Johnson's Hell Is Empty is Dante.     

I read three fine novels by Irish author Alan Glynn this year:  WINTERLAND/THE DARK FIELDS/BLOODLAND.  The Dark Fields was made into the movie, Unlimited, which I also reviewed a while back.  Winterland and Bloodland share some of the same characters, so I suppose yet another ----land novel is in the works, making a trilogy.  Bloodland has been named Irish novel of the year and deservedly so, but there were so many excellent Irish crime novels this year that a dozen of them each could have won it. 

The Best Civil War Fiction Award goes to William S. Kerr's THE SHIELD THAT FELL FROM HEAVEN, a novel of ideas which presents a creative alternate view of the generally accepted political lay of the land.

The Best CountryNoir/SouthernGothic/BlueCollar Story Fiction Awards go to VOLT: STORIES by Alan Heathcock, THE OUTLAW ALBUM: STORIES by Daniel Woodrell, and CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA: STORIES by Frank Bill.    

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach won for Best Baseball Novel of the Year.

Contending novels worthy of mention here include Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga, the author of the wildly comic and worthy Man Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger.  A bit too wordy in this one, but Adiga again demonstrates his grasp of situational power politics with a keen sense of human nature, illustrated with off-edge comic irony.  Recommended.

Another solid entry was Jim Harrison's The Great Leader.  On the surface, Harrison's flawed Janus-faced protagonist chases his own shadow/animal self.  I loved its inspired nuances and little quirky moments, all of which add up to the usually great Harrison novel.  Read Pete Dexter's funny review of it at this link.  But I liked it much more than he did.



You might seek out Rohan Wilson's The Roving Party, which was touted as Blood Meridian-like.  I loved it, though it is not nearly as deep (nor as dark) as McCarthy's masterpiece.  It is similar in surface plot, attitude, punctuation, dialogue, cadence, and vocabulary, though not in philosophy nor symbolism and it is based upon an entirely different history.  I'll review it at length one of these days, when the mood strikes me to read it again.

Most novels being compared to Cormac McCarthy are no such thing, of course.

Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone and other good ones, when asked (in this interview) about the reviews which compare him to Cormac McCarthy, replied:

"Well, I've certainly read and admired Cormac. However, the books that influenced him also influenced some of the rest of us who are always getting hit with that 'sounds like Cormac' thing. I've read Shakespeare and the Bible and Hemingway and Faulkner as well, and so if that means I have echoes that sound like Cormac it doesn't necessarily mean it comes from Cormac. It comes from the original source. I don't think I'm that much like him, to be honest, but it does come up a lot."

There are two other novels I've recently read that are especially worth mentioning.  Both of them would have made my best lists if I'd been lucky enough to read them when they first came out.  The first is Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, which brims with spacey humor and lovely poetic turns of phrase.  The second is Teddy Wayne's Kapitoil, which I passed on last year, probably because it was a trade paperback and I wanted to read it in hardcover.

These two are not to be missed in any format, both of them charming, insightful novels.  Detailed reviews of them are not hard to find, but with these, the less you know ahead of time, the better.

This year's winner in the general Best Book Art category was Felix J. Palma's novel, THE MAP OF TIME, dustjacket, frontispiece, title page, and choice of fonts.

The Best Dustjacket or Cover Art of the Year winner was Patrick Dewitt's comic western, THE SISTERS BROTHERS, which has to be seen in person to be fully appreciated.  Runner-up here is Adiga's Last Man In Tower.

Christmas Eve:  My selections of the year's best non-fiction are at this link..

Wednesday's Western: HELL IS EMPTY by Craig Johnson

Wow!  HELL IS EMPTY is a tour-de-force, a cross-genre literary parable, something to shout about, and I'm shouting as loudly as I can.  This is seventh in Craig Johnson's series of mystery/westerns, and while the others are very good cross-genre yarns, this one is something else again.

In this blog, I often discuss the use of the trinity in literature, that universal so eloquently described by Emerson--including  (here), (here), and (here). 

 As in Walter Van Tilburg's  The Track Of The Cat (Western Literature Series), the trinity is often stylized with a spiritual man, an animal man, and a middle man, torn between the extremes of his spiritual/animal nature.  All three are one, the human condition.

Some literary works place a duality on top of the trinity, splitting them, Zeus-like, into two trinities, one light and one dark.  The three in the light are the better angels of our nature, while the three in the shadow self are the furies.


The furies appeared in Virgil’s work, as well as in Dante’s INFERNO, and they were a trinity composed of Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera (blood vengeance, righteous anger, and jealousy). The furies represent the shadow self, the repressed animal nature of man.  Sopholcles used the furies in the Oedipus plays.


At one of the links above, I pointed out how Joseph Conrad used the furies in Victory, and about how Austin Wright used the furies in Tony And Susan, and about how Cormac McCarthy used the furies in Outer Dark.  All of these furies are also trinities--dark animal man, dark middle man, dark spiritual man; you might see them as a stylized shadow side of id, ego, and superego.  All also used the cat as a symbol of our dark or animal nature.

Along comes Craig Johnson's Hell Is Empty.  I was expecting a high quality genre novel.  It's that, but like the three novels mentioned above, it is also a literary parable about the nature of man.

We are introduced to the furies in the first chapter, a dark threesome headed by the dark spiritual man, a pathological animal man.  When you look into the darkness, the darkness looks back, and the protagonist recognizes some of his own nature in this animal man whose name is aptly, Raynaud Shade:

"I'd been distracted by my thoughts for only a second, but when I paid attention again his pale eyes were studying me from under the dark hair.  He had this unnerving ability that whenever you refocused your eyes on him, he was there with you--like a cat in a cage."

The book is highly ambitious and although I might wish that it was a bit more subtle in its references to Dante's Inferno, I cannot fault it at all.  It is a towering achievement.  Bravo!  A genre western/thriller on the surface with literary nuances galore.  How rare is that!

I've long been a supporter of Craig Johnson's writing, and now even more so.  You don't need to have read Dante or Austin Wright or Joseph Conrad or Cormac McCarthy.  If you haven't read Craig Johnson yet, do yourself a favor and send for Hell Is Empty while it is still available in first edition.  You won't be sorry.

Some Books To Read This Holiday Season

E. E. Cummings' SANTA CLAUS: A MORALITY. I've read this already, and it is very good. There was a time when I saw no connection between Halloween and Christmas, when I thought THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS an impossible conjunction. But as Ray Bradbury and many others have noted, the season is about life, death, and rebirth.

And beyond that, love. E. E. Cummings said it well in this 1946 play, which is revised and revived in Terry Pratchett's own eccentric way in HOGFATHER, also excellent. Death-in-life and Santa, same/same.

Christmas used to be the designated time for ghost stories, as at this link, and the most enthralling ghosts of all in Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL and its many derivatives.

THE DREADED FEAST: WRITERS ON ENDURING THE HOLIDAYS edited by Michele Clarke and Taylor Plimpton, with an introduction by P. J. O'Rourke. Includes essays by Lewis Lapham, James Thurber, Roy Blunt, jr., Robert Benchley, David Sedaris, Charles Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, Dave Barry, S. J. Perelman, Jay McInerney, John Cheever, and many others.

I'M DREAMING OF A BLACK CHRISTMAS by Lewis Black. I read this one yesterday, a quick rant of a read. He was reluctant to write a book ranting about Christmas, being Jewish, but I'm glad that he did. The last chapter is a memoir of his participation in the USO tour to Afghanistan along with Kid Rock, Lance Armstrong, and fellow comic Robin Williams.

THE FAT MAN: A TALE OF NORTH POLE NOIR by Kent Harmon. At first I took this to be comparable to Christopher Moore's THE STUPIDIST ANGEL, but this looks like a much better book. And something of a collector's item in first edition. Like Scott Phillips THE ICE HARVEST and others at this link, this must be something of an anti-Christmas novel. We'll see.

Earlier this year, I read Clancy Martin's excellent HOW TO SELL: A NOVEL, and if you're looking for a darkly humorous read for the holidays, I highly recommend it.  The first part of the novel ends at Christmas, and it is a darkly humorous indictment of capitalist greed.

CHRISTMAS AT THE MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP, edited by Otto Penzler. The proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop commissioned stories for this collection by Ed McBain, Lawrence Block, Michael Malone, Donald Westlake, Thomas H. Cook, and other mystery authors. It looks good to me.

Ed McBain's DOWNTOWN and MONEY, MONEY, MONEY. The former is a stand alone novel, a thriller that doesn't take itself seriously occuring on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, neither predictable nor logical, but fun if you can grasp the little jokes and topical references, contemporary when this was published in 1993 but now dated. The latter is a suitcase-full-of-money 87th Precinct novel which takes place over the holidays, one of McBain's best novels.  THE RAP sheet was kind enough to carry my long review of it, here.

R. D. Wingfield's FROST AT CHRISTMAS. After reading his HARD FROST that takes place from Halloween to Guy Fawkes Day. His series protagonist is British and a sexist, but his political incorrectness seems intentional/satirical rather than blind.

A FATAL GRACE by Louise Penny. I read her first novel, STILL LIFE, which takes place over (Canadian) Thanksgiving, and her main characters all continue into this novel, which takes place during the Christmas holidays. Louise Penny has garnered a lot of awards.  STILL LIFE seemed too implausible for my taste, but maybe I'll find her later novels more interesting.

HOLIDAY GRIND by Cleo Coyle. Another cozy murder mystery taking place over the holidays, this one containing "recipes and coffee-making tips."  It's gotten some good reviews.  We'll see.

PANDORA'S CLOCK by John J. Nance. A thriller set during the holidays involving an airplane with a virus on board and Christian countries which refuse to let it land.

Craig Johnson's THE COLD DISH which takes place in the winter (and over the holidays) in snowy Wyoming. 

IN THE DARK STREETS SHINETH by historian David McCullough.  A handsome hardcover with small print but a mighty thin book.  It comes with a DVD which we watched on Pearl Harbor Day.  He briefly tells some stories of the 1941 Christmas in the United States and also gives the background behind two Christmas Carols.  Nicely done, and the Mormon Tabornacle Choir sings in the background.