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..

Saturday's Best Book Diary: Susan Froderberg's OLD BORDER ROAD

Susan Froderberg's Old Border Road: A Novel turned out to be a gorgeous, multi-layered novel. Whiffs of Cormac McCarthy's trilogy style abound, but I see far more traces of other authors here, particularly in the style of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping: A Novel.  The title resonates with its timeless Old Testament kicked-out-of-paradise motifs.


Her epigraph is a famous line from Plato:


"What is that which is and has no becoming
And what is that which is becoming and never is?


In this interview at BookPage, she acknowledges her influences:


Are there any particular authors who inspire you or that you feel have had a notable impact on your own writing?


"Certainly Schopenhauer, as I mentioned earlier. And absolutely Emerson. Add to the list Frost and Stevens, Joyce and Beckett, O’Conner and Robinson, among others. To my mind, there is no greater American writer alive than Cormac McCarthy. All of us, as writers—as artists—come out of some Petri dish, and I will admit to coming out of his. There is no such thing as the innocent eye, or the innocent ear, no matter what anybody tells you. On the other hand, we are each of us necessarily what no one else can possibly be."


Do you find your philosophy background has enriched your writing?


"Probably, as the opportunity to study philosophy has enriched my life. But I’m happier being a writer than I would have been if I were doing philosophy work, as writing has set me free in a way that philosophy—specifically, Western philosophy—could not have. For in Western philosophy you must follow formal logic—if A, then not B. In fiction, you may have both A and B, if you so choose. You can be exhausted and you can be exhilarated at the same time: one state need not negate the other. Or you can be derived and you can be unique, without contradiction. This is not to say we can do away with logic: there would be no language without it. But in writing, it’s possible to bend language toward a more Eastern way of thinking."


Plato's thought, that follows from the epigraph of the book, is:: "There are forms that have always existed, forms that are pure and immutable and eternal; they are and they never become. All that follow are composite and ephemeral and mutable; they become but they never are."


When reading Old Border Road: A Novel again today with my critical "I," I can't help but keep that in mind. This novel strikes me as the real thing; it did so the first time through, and more so now. I'm a bit intoxicated with it; trying to read it again slowly without gushing too much about it, wanting to give it distance and perspective.


Old Border Road: A Novel has sections of McCarthy-like cadence but it is at the same time very unMcCarthy-like, for it is told in the subjective first-person feminine. That feminine voice is like the feminine voice of the protagonist in True Grit: A Novel by Charles Portis in that the teller puts her own rhetorical style into the words of the other characters in her narrative. This may be off-putting to some readers, but I looked forward to it, especially since the rhetorical style here is sometimes a deep-dish Old Testament Cormac McCarthy. Sometimes the voice rises up to the Eternal Feminine, seeing form above the composite and ephemeral and mutable:


"We step outside the rented tent into the greater tent of a tinseled, starlit night. Above our heads is a spread of lost heroes and creatures of make-believe, a spiral of spiraling galaxies, a curtaining glow of aurora, a soffit of planets and stars. In skies to come, there will be more and different views and still but a speck of all there is, wombed inside this universe as we are, with our vision so hindered."


On another night, about form, she says:


"The night is filled brimful as a night sky can be, lit brightly as it is with clusters of planets and pulsating stars and marriages of galaxies, all of it within a wobble of dust and gas and debris unseen. There are the Dippers Little and Big tonight, a lovely Pleiades, and a throbbing red star out like a tiny heart. This is the stuff of which we are made, I say to Son, all that is of us is above us. We stand together looking upward, our mouths hung open as if to swallow what's above down and into us. Looking out at the past in its far distance, where from there, here we are not."


The protagonist tells us that her favorite subject in school was astronomy, and throughout the novel the heavenly movement and its cosmic significance reminds us of Cormac McCarthy's sky in Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West.


Susan Froderberg is no kid; she is very well read, has a doctorate and enough life experience to go on; and this novel is an assured piece of work. To put it in better perspective, I read again, not McCarthy, but Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness: Stories,  another underestimated gem which is also a parable of archetypes and male/female relationships.


Susan Froderberg's protagonist listens to the radio: "We sing along to what songs have always been about--beginning, going on, breaking up, forgiving."


Pam Houston's protagonist says: "I listened to country music all the way to Cody, Wyoming. The men in the songs were all either brutal or inexpressive and always sorry later. The women were victims, every one." She then determines to step out of the pattern through an act of free will (some might call it self-realization), something that resonates with the end of Froderberg's novel.


Everything cycles, turn, turn, turn. Birth, growth, death, and rebirth. Froderberg's protagonist, Katherine, wants to hold on to things, but her world is not made that way. She says: "We keep on going on, believing, I suppose, only in the going-on in us."


There is much more to be found in here.  A synopsis of the novel makes it seem far too simple and, as I say, I think that the reviews underestimate its considerable depth, which I've just begun to fathom.  I'll want to reread this one and spend a lot of time mulling it over in the time before Susan Froderberg's next book comes out.  Hopefully that won't be long.

Books For January: Susan Froderberg, Alan Glynn, Sven Hassel, Raymond L. Atkins, Barbara Hunt, Nevada Barr, William Kent Krueger, George Sheehan

I read good books all year long, but I'm also something of a seasonal reader.  Gardening books tend to be put off until the spring, hunting books until hunting season, and some Halloween and Christmasy books that I didn't get to last year will be put off until the holidays come around again.


This last year, mystery writer Patricia Abbott (pattinase) started the FRIDAY'S FORGOTTEN BOOK feature on her blog, and a number of other writers joined in the project.  Her summing up of the reviews of these books, with links, is here.  My sole contribution was a review of Ed McBain's Money, Money, Money: A Novel of the 87th Precinct (87th Precinct Mysteries), which The Rap Sheet carried as a part of its THE BOOK YOU HAVE TO READ series. 


Besides Forgotten-Book-Fridays, in this space I intend to celebrate Off-And-Running-Mondays, Transcendental Tuesdays, Western Novel Wednesdays, Literary-Analysis-Thursdays, Freezing-Weather-Fridays, Sports Book Saturdays, and Southern-Gothic-Sundays.  Among others.


Just a few of the books I've tentatively scheduled to post about in January include:


Barbara Hunt's A Little Night Music, not to be confused with the Stephen Sondheim musical of the same name, although there ought to be clowns.


This is a 1947 hardcover that is a little-known gem, way ahead of its time, being obscure to begin with and long out-of-print.  Never mind her other books, which were of hoary scope and witchy horrors.  She wrote like an inspired intellectual angel in this one.  On forgotten-book-friday, I'll post a long synopsis and analysis of the book.  This is one that the NYRB needs to pick up and reprint in a new edition in its series of rediscovered and significant books.


This is the month I'll read Sven Hassel's Legion of the Damned (Cassell Military Paperbacks).  My copy is the 1957 first American edition, the first and most autobiographical in a series of novels which became famous in Europe.  The author, under his real name, was a reluctant conscript in a German penal company, fighting for his life with the Nazis against the Russians in the dead of winter.  This seems like the best month to read such a novel.





Raymond L. Atkins' Sorrow Wood has a wonderful dustjacket, a falling down barn, gothic and surreal, with almost metalic blue floral designs in its title font.  A southern gothic novel with social satire and reincarnation, it says.  We'll see.


William Kent Krueger's Heaven's Keep: A Novel (Cork O'Connor Mysteries) has been on my to-be-read shelf for a long time.  January seems like the right time to read this snowy novel that seems to include thoughtful mystery and heartbreaking longing.





I've saved Alan Glynn's Winterland for January.  It comes highly recommended by Emerald Noir novelists Declan Burke and Adrian McKinty, whose blogs I follow almost daily.  They say it's a paranoia novel that reminds us once again of the corrupting influence of bureaucracy.


Nevada Barr's Winter Study (An Anna Pigeon Novel).  I didn't get to this in my naturalism reading binge in November, but this will fit as well in January.  Last year, I read Nevada Barr's Seeking Enlightenment... Hat by Hat: A Skeptic's Guide to Religion, and she soars in my estimation.  The title may be misleading; it is a very insightful and spiritual book.  A bit like reading Marilynne Robinson.





I've sent for Susan Froderberg's Old Border Road: A Novel, off of this review, link.  She writes with the rhetorical word-magic of Cormac McCarthy, they all say.  Well, I'm willing to be convinced.  I may read it later this week.


I also plan on reading Scott Spencer's newest one, Man in the Woods.  A thriller-of-conscience and a dog story too.





Once a runner, always a runner, but January is the time to start getting in shape again.  I plan to start by being inspired by George Sheehan's  Running & Being: The Total Experience once again.  Other running, fitness, and diet books will no doubt follow, most of them with literary nuances.


The next significant holiday at our house is Valentine's Day, which we celebrate Groundhog Day (Special 15th Anniversary Edition) through Valentine's Day itself.  But that involves next month's reading, so more on that later.