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..

The Best Thanksgiving Story - Thanks to Richard Russo and Stephen King

This is a Thanksgiving story you no doubt missed, but one that you'll be delighted to read.

It comes to you by way of The Best American Short Stories of the Year 2007, selected by Stephen King.  The story itself is entitled "Horseman," and was written by Richard Russo.  It begins with part of a nursery rhyme from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses:

Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the moon is high,
All night long through the dark and wet
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Whenever the trees are crying aloud
And ships are tossed at sea,
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then,
By he comes back at the gallop again.

The poem easily adapts into a song, and Shawn Colvin has recorded a version of it with just those words.  The poem becomes an earworm for the protagonist, a graduate student, after her husband begins reading it to their child every night.  We aren't told her interpretation of the poem, but in the first paragraph we're told that this earworm runs through her mind even when she is jogging in the woods behind her New England college, making her as melancholy as if she were "jogging not through the woods but through an endless cemetery."

End of paragraph one.

It is two days before Thanksgiving, with the bare November tree branches swaying all over campus, the nearest branch "scratching insistently, like a memory" against the protagonist's office window.

The protagonist is confronting one of her male comp students whom she has caught in flagrant plagiarism.  She shows him the evidence, and he responds like a belligerent jerk.  It is a beautifully written scene.  We see her mixed feelings, but we also see her restraint, despite the macho arrogance of the student.

"A moment before she had been feeling both anger and self-righteousness.  These were easy, unambiguous emotions to which, in the present circumstance, she felt entitled.'

"She was angry, and rightly so, that students cheated more often in her classes than in those of her male colleagues, just as they were more often tardy, more openly questioning of her authority, and more often gave her a mediocre evaluation at the end of each term.  Even worse, the fact that they held her to a higher standard was unwitting.  Had anyone asked them if they were prejudiced against their female professors, not one would have answered yes.  Hooked up to a lie detector, every one of them would pass."

The story then goes into italicized flashback, with the protagonist being confronted by her professor.  A parallel situation in a way yet nothing of the sort, as the professor is only criticising her for being too withdrawn, too formal in her writing, for not putting enough of herself, of her own passion, into her work.  Although this only makes her angry at the time, eventually she comes to see the truth of it, that she has distanced herself--not only from work but from other people as well.

We see her transform through her reading, as well as through her contacts with other professors and students, all of them flawed in their own ways.  She decides to avoid condemning the plagiarist and instead she gives him another opportunity to write his own essay, a chance to redeem himself.  We don't see how it turns out.  Perhaps the student is just going through an adolescent phase and will learn better, or perhaps he is a psychopath who cannot be reformed.  No matter.  The teacher tries to do her job; she tries to teach him rather than punish him.

She reconsiders empathy; she reconsiders forgiveness; she reconsiders gratitude.  She even invites a lonely obnoxious old professor to have Thanksgiving at her house with her family.

The story has a hopeful ending.  It is a parable, but unlike so many parables that we see on television during the holiday season, this one seems less sentimental and more real, truer to life itself.  You should read it yourself; my synopsis of it here does not do it complete justice.

There is a flashback in her memories to a beautiful scene at a bar where the professors take turns nominating the greatest lyric poem ever written.  When it is her professor's turn, he recites Stevenson's "Windy Nights," the poem above.  When asked for an explanation, he replies, "Because when I speak those words aloud, my father is alive again."

This professor also recognizes that literature gives us the chance to see what life is like for someone else.  What it feels like.  Literature.  Life.

An appendix to the volume gives each author a chance to comment on the writing of his selected story, and Richard Russo's comments must be read.  He says that the protagonist is loosely based upon a fellow academic, a woman who was smart and attractive, but also "guarded in the extreme, the way academics can be."

"In the language of Star Trek, she'd diverted all power to her shields, which was probably why I was so startled one night when I saw her with her defenses down. . ."

"It came to me--slowly, the way these things do--that she was like many academics I'd observed over the years.  You'd think that the life of the mind, especially the liberal arts, would make us better if not happier people.  But too often it doesn't.  The study of literature had what I believed to be a salutary effect on my own character, making me less self-conscious and vain, more empathic and imaginative, maybe even kinder.'

"Perhaps it's an oversimplification, but as I've gotten older I've come to wonder if this is what reading all those great books is really for--to engender and promote charity.  Sure, literature entertains and instructs, but to what end if not compassion?"

Indeed.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Tuesday's Transcendental Movie: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

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The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a highly acclaimed movie that spins trinities in parable and speaks of man's inhumanity to man and of the redemption in forgiveness.

The main trinity evolves with Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones's character) as the spiritual man, Melquiades Estrada as the mental man, and with Mike (Barry Pepper) as the mind-numb border patrolman.  They are spirit, mind, and body.  Mike is shown as being especially narcissitic, with a masturbating scene and another love-making scene with his beautiful wife which might as well have been masturbation.

Mike mindlessly shoots and kills Melquiades Estrada and buries him in an effort to cover up the crime.  The body is discovered and buried for the second time in the town cemetery.  The cover-up that occurs mimics a real incident of this nature upon which Guillermo Arriaga wrote his novel (upon which the movie is based).  Melquiades Estrada has thus been buried twice.   

The plot then is driven by the promise Perkins had made to Melquiades Estrada to see him buried in his own village.  Thus the movie becomes a tribute to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which is driven by the same motive--with the same results.

The trinity then evolves.  It is present, past, and future; father, son, and holy ghost; for Melquiades Estrada is then the eternal past, shown only in flashback, while Norton and Perkins are the present and future.  Perkins, the surrogate father, is teaching Norton, the son, of his ties to the common humanity of things.  At one point, he drags Norton through a river, in symbolic ritual of baptism.  The closer they get to the third burial, the closer Norton and the ghost of Melquiades Estrada become until they are inseparable.

They never do find Estrada's actual village, but at this point of realization all villages are one and true forgiveness is universal.

Melissa Leo is excellent as a part of the Eternal Feminine trinity in the movie.  She followed this with Frozen River and The Fighter, for which she is nominated for an Academy Award.  Levon Helm played an excellent supporting part, just amazing.  And Dwight Yoakam was surprisingly good.   

The movie was well reviewed everywhere, but my favorite review of it was Roger Ebert's, at this link. Very early on, Ebert had pointed out the connection to William Faulkner and the high quality of the movie in general.  Famous novelist Stephen King, in Entertainment Weekly, said of the movie, "Tommy Lee Jones channels Cormac McCarthy...and it works."