The Best Books I Read in 2016

Sorry about the absence of anything like a "blog post" lately. But things have been, you know, whatever. Anyhow, I'm back with this, my annual list of The Best Books I Read This Year. As always, these books more likely than not were originally published in years other than 2016 (although there are three 2016 books this time around, which may be some kind of record). Of all the books I read this year, of whatever type and of whatever vintage, these are my favorites. No particular order, except for the last two, which are my two favorites of the year.

The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley - This thriller was something of a sensation in the UK, but somewhat less so here. Who can say why, though its fairly reserved pace might have something to do with it. Hurley's story is about a church's annual trip to a gray and windswept UK island nicknamed the Loney. The previous year, something happened on that trip which haunted the then parish priest until his death. The new priest, rather less strict and more easy-going than his late predecessor, wants this year's trip to be somewhere more light-hearted, but he bows to pressure, and off to the Loney they go. While there, the mystery of the island is solved, in a manner of speaking, and the truth is genuinely disturbing.

For some reason, I was resistant to The Loney at first, but it wasn't long before Hurley's simmering, moody novel got hold of me. Previously, he'd published two collections of short fiction, which I'll be looking into soon.

Herovit's World by Barry N. Malzberg - One of at least two novels by deeply respected yet nevertheless cult science fiction writer Malzberg in which his subject, or target, is science fiction itself (for the record, the other one is Galaxies).  Published in 1973, when SF was still in the throes of its New Wave boom, Malzberg's short novel is about Herovit, an SF writer whose heyday was several years earlier, and who now barely survives regurgitating what he and other Golden Age writers had already hammered to death before the 60s had even begun. As his marriage fails, and a smugly comfortable sell-out compatriot insists that Herovit is incapable of more than what he's doing now, Herovit begins to break down. Not so much a science fiction novel as a feverish psychodrama, Herovit's World is one of the most damning genre examinations ever written.

Silence by Shusaku Endo - A novel of such intense moral and spiritual complexity that I hardly know what to say about it in this space, Endo's 17th Century-set classic is about two Portuguese Catholic missionaries who travel undercover to Japan to give comfort to persecuted Japanese Catholics, and to find Father Ferreira, another missionary who, it's been said, denounced his faith under torture by the Japanese authorities. Silence is a novel of great brutality, the suffering of the innocent is relentless. How is it possible to hold onto one's faith when your cries of mercy are met with silence? This, of course, is the central question, not just of the novel but of religious faith, and Endo -- himself a Catholic -- attacks it with a clarity, and a determination to not fall for a simplified version of either the question or the answer, that is pretty much unheard of now.

Mr. Fox by Barbara Comyns - For what I'm pretty sure is the fourth year in a row, Comyns has made this list (a status much desired by deceased British writers all over). Comyns's fiction is occasionally bizarre (see The Vet's Daughter for example), but other times, as in Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and Mr. Fox, it depicts the simple complexities faced by characters who are struggling through the days, weeks, months, and years of their lives. Here, Caroline Seymour, a young single mother (her husband decided one day to leave) meets and sort of befriends a shady businessman named Mr. Fox. They soon decide, for the sake of financial expediency, to live together (platonically), and for several years their lives intertwine and separate: Mr. Fox goes back to London while Caroline takes a demeaning job as a live-in housekeeper for a rude, demanding woman and her brat of a daughter; Caroline moves back in with Mr. Fox when he buys a building and becomes a landlord (though much of the actual work is done by Caroline). Mr. Fox devises a scheme to buy used pianos and sell them for a profit. Much of this goes on during World War II, so in the midst of this they have to worry about German bombing raids.

Mr. Fox was Comyns's penultimate novel, but I could detect no slip in her talents. If anything, while I don't consider this her best, necessarily, her skills here are as fine-tuned as they ever were. The humor and the tragedy are delivered in the same tone, and this story about domestic tension and the dramas of employment, somehow moves at a headlong pace. And regarding that domestic tension, most of that comes from how Caroline views Mr. Fox, how the reader views him, how the reader is meant to view him, and how we take it all by the end. It's handled exquisitely, because the reader never sees it being handled.

Dispatches by Michael Herr - Herr's book, one of the seminal pieces of 20th Century war journalism, has sort of had everything said about it that could possibly be said at this point. All I can tell you is that I've never felt the ungodly stress and fear of the Vietnam War, to the extent that only reading about it can make me feel anything of the sort, as I felt within the first ten pages of Dispatches. It's like you're breathing it in, while wondering how any of the men you're reading about, journalists as well as soldiers, could have ever survived twenty minutes, let alone months and years. This book has an incredible, undeniable texture to it. Even if it was just spoken words, I'd still feel like I could hold it in my hands.

Cigarettes by Harry Mathews - Considered by more than a few people to be Harry Mathews's masterpiece, my expectation was that Cigarettes would be a stylistically dense piece that, however rewarding, I would have to pull myself through. And indeed it is dense, but not in terms of language, which is quite straightforward. Where Cigarettes is dense, and maybe the word here is rich, is in its incidents and characters, the former of which span decades (and slip in and out of the worlds of finance, horse ownership, and art, with sex being the main thread connecting them all) as do some of the latter, who cross paths with each other, or are related to each other, or sleep with or betray or steal from each other. Though it could be described as a class satire, which I suppose it can't not be on some level, the novel is just too unusual to be merely that. The story itself is rambunctious, but somehow in the telling of it, Mathews himself refuses to be, which lends to the novel an air of biography. Which is perhaps the key to the satire.

The Lake of Darkness by Ruth Rendell - This is how Ruth Rendell begins this, one of her typically skin-crawling novel about a psychopath who mixes his life with those of naive, unsuspecting, every-day nitwits:

Scorpio is metaphysics, putrefaction and death, regeneration, passion, lust and violence, insight and profundity; inheritance, loss, occultism, astrology, borrowing and lending, others' possessions. Scorpians are magicians, astrologers, alchemists, surgeons, bondsmen, and undertakers. The gem for Scorpio is the snakestone, the plant the cactus; eagles and wolves and scorpions are its creatures, its body part is the genitals, its weapon the Obligatory Pain, and its card in the Tarot is Death.

Finn shared his birthday, November 16, with the Emperor Tiberius. He had been told by a soothsayer, who was a friend of his mother's whom she had met in the mental hospital, that he would live to a great age and die by violence.

If that's not the kind of writing you're looking for, then buzz off, friend! Like Barbara Comyns, Ruth Rendell's talent is one that is so expected that it tends to be taken for granted. In truth, we didn't know how good we had it.

Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze - My experience with crime fiction this year has mostly been one of reading very bad books by good writers. It's been disheartening, but there have been a few exceptions, the most striking of which is this one. I wrote about it here.

I Am Jonathan Scrivener by Claude Houghton - In this novel, originally published in 1930, a young man with no prospects named James Wrexham answers an ad in the paper looking for someone to catalogue the library of one Jonathan Scrivener, while Scrivener is out of the country. Wrexham gets the job for reasons he can't quite figure out and discovers that Scrivener has already left the country so the two can't meet before Wrexham begins work. Furthermore, he will be living in Scrivener's opulent apartment, and his pay will be extremely generous. Over the course of the next few months, Wrexham will meet several of Scrivener's friends, none of whom knew Scrivener was leaving the country, and none of whom have known the strange man very long. Wrexham is hoping they can tell him something about Scrivener, and Scrivener's friends are hoping Wrexham can do the same.

A fascinating mystery in which much of the evidence gathered is done so through conversation or by making assumptions that may or may not turn out to be true, I Am Jonathan Scrivener is a singular book, a sort of metaphysical suspense novel about the way people choose to live, and whether or not that was ever really a choice.

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth - For a long time, I counted this as the Philip Roth Novel I Wanted To Read The Most, and so I did. As you may know, this one's fairly notorious, even infamous, for its graphic and depraved (I feel pretty confident this is the right word for some of the stuff that goes on here) sexual content. Mentioned less often is the emotional wallop that stuff carries when read in context. The novel's about an aging puppeteer named Mickey Sabbath who has betrayed every woman he's ever been with, ever married, and as the novel opens he's become sexually obsessed with his latest mistress, also married, and who dies of cancer. This sends Mickey on an aimless, amoral, rather disgusting journey that left me pitying and hating him in...well, I won't say "in equal measure" because that would be a lie. Anyway, the last line of the novel says everything, and there's a sequence about halfway through where the reader is made to jump back and forth between a footnoted phone sex conversation between Sabbath and his mistress, and, on the top half of the page, a long passage about Sabbath's wife, and the life he's left her to live. Sort of takes the heat out of the phone sex, I'll tell you that.

The Late Breakfasters by Robert Aickman - "Griselda de Reptonville did not know what love was until she joined one of Mrs Hatch's famous house parties at Beams, and there met Leander." So begins the great Robert Aickman's only full length novel (he also wrote a novella called The Model). As far as I'm concerned, Aickman is the greatest horror writer the 20th Century-plus ever produced, so it's somewhat curious, and therefore interesting, that his longest piece of fiction isn't horror at all. Of course, by "at all" I mean "mostly not"-- still, though, there's a ghost, and sinister goings-on in cemeteries. Otherwise, though, The Late Breakfasters is a wonderful, if sometimes deeply off-kilter, English Country Estate novel, full of the kind of sly humor and devastating characterizations you'd expect from the best of that form. Until, you know, the action leaves the country estate, and more than half of the damn thing becomes a different kind of society novel. With further strangeness to come.

"Those, if any, who wish to know more about me should plunge beneath the frivolous surface of The Late Breakfasters." I found nothing frivolous about The Late Breakfasters myself, but I did find that the mystery of Robert Aickman, for me, had deepened.

My Father, the Pornographer by Chris Offutt - Offutt's 2016 memoir has at its deeply fascinating center Andrew J. Offutt, Chris's father and one-time mainstream science fiction writer, turned, after a while, full-time pornographer. What's incredible are the details: that his father wrote his pornographic novels openly, regardless of his many pseudonyms, that his wife typed all his many hundreds of manuscripts, that he talked openly around the house about his work in porn, that he was at the same time a serious writer, or anyway considered himself to be (he had a short story published in Harlan Ellison's famous anthology Again, Dangerous Visions), that he gave up a lucrative, if hated, career in insurance in order to write pornography full-time, and that he wrote it all from a house in Appalachian hills of Kentucky. Clearly not a good man in the, er, traditional sense, Andrew J. Offutt (who died in 2013) had an enormous impact on his family, not least on Chris, his writer son, whose task upon his father's death, was to dig through and catalogue the thousands upon thousands of pages his dad had produced over the decades. In doing so, he forges a new relationship with his dad as a fellow writer, something that never happened while he was alive. Chris Offutt becomes Andrew Offutt's most insightful, and possibly most generous, critic, while relating stories of family and childhood that are sometimes funny, but generally awful, humiliating, terrifying. My Father, the Pornographer ends with a revelation that I regarded with horror, but which Chris tries to make the best of. It leaves Andrew Offutt as a figure I'm glad I never met, but also as a man I can't help but pity.

The Difference by Charles Willeford - The best way to describe this, crime writer Willeford's lone Western, is that it is exactly the kind of Western you'd expect Willeford to write. This is a compliment. Telling the story of Johnny Shaw, a young man determined to exact revenge on a rich land baron and his sons (and who, when we meet him, has already killed one of them and is on the run) for taking the land Shaw thought was his. Initially portrayed a sympathetic kid with good reason to be outraged, eventually, in classic Willeford style, Shaw is proved to be a pure sociopath. If the men he's feuding with are also villainous, they perhaps at least have human blood in their veins. Shaw doesn't. He doesn't even rise to the level of snake.

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald - Labeled a memoir but in fact a novel, Norm Macdonald's Based on a True Story may be the best book ever written by a stand-up comic. Loosely structured around Macdonald's (the character) iffy plan to gamble and win big in Vegas and taking the form of a road novel, Macdonald (the writer and comedian) has used the basic facts of his life to build a hilarious, dead-pan alternate universe in which, for example, yes, he was a cast member on Saturday Night Live, but he achieved this primarily by taking advantage of Lorne Michaels's morphine addiction. But this is not at all a linear tale, and Macdonald digresses constantly, talking about his friends in show business (he is sincere and heartfelt when talking about Chris Farley), and dropping the occasional bombshell. For instance, it turns out that, though he was a successful comedian, Rodney Dangerfield was plagued his whole life by the fact that no one ever gave him any respect. Macdonald writes about being told once by Dangerfield that a hooker once said to him "Not tonight, I have a headache." Then Macdonald asks "Can you imagine hearing something like that from a prostitute?"

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe - Perhaps the most intellectually stimulating book I read in 2016 is this one, my first by Nobel laureate Oe. About a writer with an autistic son, much like Oe, whose ambition is to write a book of guidance and definitions for autistic children. Weaved into this is the writer's, and one presumes Oe's, relationship with the poetry of William Blake, whose enormously complicated philosophy, language, and spirituality inspire the writer, and will possibly guide him through his difficult task. Present also is the writer's memories of another writer he once knew, referred to only as M in this book but who is clearly meant to be Yukio Mishima (whom Oe himself knew, and whom Oe had many issues with). And so on. It's both easy and more than likely a mistake to regard Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! as a piece of fictionalized autobiography, but even if it is exactly that, it's no less rich for the fact. I read this back in February, and it still pops into my head from time to time.

Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore - Beginning with a fifty-page story of deceit and murder among what I guess you'd have to call cavemen, written in a syntactically fractured language that, well, takes some getting used to, this book, comic book writer Moore's first novel (his second, the 1,300 page Jerusalem, came out this year. I'll get to it) is a series of short stories that are connected by theme and imagery, and occasional references to what we've seen before, but more than any of those they're connected by geography. Spanning thousands of years (the last story takes place in 1996, the year the novel was published), the whole novel takes place in the stretch of land that would become, and now is, Northampton, where Moore has lived his entire life (and where Jerusalem is also set, by the way). As the title suggests, Voice of the Fire is infernal and apocalyptic, and the imagery is at times terrifying. Individual chapters could be lifted out and work as historical horror stories. It's quite an unnerving piece of work.

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson - As it happens, earlier today I watched, for the first time, Andrei Tarkovsky's film The Sacrifice, which, in simplified terms, is about a group of people living, or visiting, a Swedish country house when the news breaks that a nuclear war is about to begin. Transplant that basic idea (also remove the nuclear weapons and make the danger something closer to the Apocalypse) to a village in the United States and you have The Sundial, Shirley Jackson's fourth novel, from 1958. Another major difference (there are quite a few others, of course) is that of tone: while The Sacrifice is somber (if also occasionally absurdist and fantastical), The Sundial is actually closer to The Late Breakfasters -- sardonic, cutting, funny. If anything, Jackson is more acidic in portraying her characters than Aickman, but then again, Jackson's characters are, by and large, more awful. In essence, The Sundial is about a bunch of passive-aggressive shits waiting for the world to end, an event they're sure they're going to survive. If that doesn't sound like a good book, I don't know what does.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey by Brian Moore - It seems like every year, I read at least one novel about a down-on-his-luck family man trying to find a job so he can support his family, but constantly getting in his own way. Obviously some of these are better than others. The Luck of Ginger Coffey is possibly the best one I've ever read, and maybe the best one it is possible to write. About an Irishman, Ginger Coffey, who moves with his wife and young daughter to Canada, only to find the job prospects that led him there collapsing almost instantly. When I learned early on that the money he'd set aside for the trip back home to Ireland, should Canada not work out, and which Ginger's wife Veronica believed was never in danger, had been almost completely spent, and Ginger still jobless, I think I caught my breath. Ginger has some small victories here and there, and he's not without ambition (he wants to become a reporter), but whatever ground he gains he quickly loses, or gives away, and soon enough he's drinking way too much, there's no ounce of happiness at home, and your heart just breaks. In the early stages of the novel, Ginger believes, perhaps even correctly, that his one friend in the world is a young boy who lives upstairs, who likes to play games with Ginger. How that relationship ends just about destroyed me. And then the ending of this novel actually made my eyes well up. Books never make me cry. Except this one.

The Best Books I Read in 2015

Please excuse my recent lag in posting. Maybe I've just been gearing up for this goddamn marathon of a thing that always drains all of my strength and will and happiness! But I'm determined to see this through. I've already uploaded all the pictures.

For those of you who don't know, this is my Best Books of the Year post, and the way I do it is, I don't focus on new books. I don't read enough new books in a year to make up a list (though a couple that I did read can be found below) so I just choose the best and/or most interesting books of whatever sort, or written in whatever year, that I read in the last twelve months. Some of these I've written about on the blog, most I haven't. Also, there are far more than ten, so it's not a top ten list, and for the most part these aren't ranked, until you get to the last four, which I feel safe in saying were the four best books I read in 2015. Okay, here we go. Enjoy it, you bunch of assholes!

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis - It's fitting that Tevis is best known as the author of the novels The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth, because his six novels are split evenly between three works of science fiction (the other two being Mockingbird and The Steps of the Sun) and three more-or-less realist novels that revolve around the world of obsessive, destructive professional sports, or games. Pool in The Hustler and The Color of Money, and in The Queen's Gambit, chess. The story follows chess prodigy Beth Harmon from the age of eight to eighteen. She learns chess from the janitor of the orphanage where she lives until early adolescence, by which point she's already developed a taste for opiates. But she's an ingenious chess player, and at times disturbingly mature as she herself gets her professional chess career rolling, and learns, or tries, to control her addictions.

Less a plotted novel than an unsentimentally precise chronicle of ten years in the life of Beth Harmon, spanning from Kentucky to Mexico to New York to Russia, the crux of the character, and of the novel, comes about a third of the way in, as Beth, at thirteen, is blasting her way through her first professional tournament:

An hour later she drew Goldmann and Board Three. She walked into the tournament room at exactly eleven, and the people standing stopped talking when she came in. Everyone looked at her. She heard someone whisper, "Thirteen fucking years old," and immediately the thought came into her mind, along with the exultant feeling the whispered voice had given her: I could have done this at eight.

The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff - Wolff is one of the great living American writers. He's known mainly for his short fiction, at which he excels beyond any contemporaneous writer I can think of, and his memoirs, which in full disclosure I have not yet read. But there's one great novella that has sort of fallen through the cracks, this one, The Barracks Thief, from 1984, that people should seek out. In about 90 pages, Wolff takes three paratroopers from a stupidly brave moment of bonding to a time when one of them reveals his weakness and sadness and illness and potential for violence, and portrays it all like, from the point of view of an outsider, as just something that happened. That's what Wolff can do -- he can write about devastating things as though they're just something that happened, and make them no less awful for that.

Night and the City by Gerald Kersh - Discussed here.

The Queen of the Night by Marc Behm - One of seven novels written by Behm, The Queen of the Night isn't exactly what you might expect from a guy who boasts writing credits on both Help! and Charade. This novel would, perhaps, make more sense coming from Christopher Isherwood, if Isherwood had been a lesbian writing pulp fiction in the 1970s. And maybe not even then. At any rate, what this thing is, is a novel that takes its lead character, a beautiful German woman who early in her life begins promiscuously engaging in lesbian sex while also reluctantly hitching her star, for pragmatic reasons, to the rising Nazi party, from Weimar Berlin to the end of it all. She claims reluctance anyway, but she's not at all a wonderful person; here and there she commits terrible crimes that she justifies to herself. She hates the Nazis and she's not anti-Semitic, so she's in the clear.

The novel is full of sex, and the violence reaches a level of brutality that reminded me a little bit of Kosinski's The Painted Bird. Not to compare the two, because let's not go nuts, but The Queen of the Night is both extreme pulp exploitation, and a rather serious and well-written moral novel. It's also crazier than a shithouse rat.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson - This story of two sisters, Lucille and the narrator, Ruthie, who are raised first by their grandmother and then, finally, by their deeply eccentric aunt, after their mother drops them off and intentionally drives her car off a bridge, is the premiere masterpiece by Robinson, who has had a Malick-like approach to writing fiction. Housekeeping was published in 1980, and she didn't publish another novel until Gilead in 2004 (she did write and publish non-fiction in the interim, and like Malick her production has picked up a bit lately). It was her first, and she was 37 when she wrote it, which isn't the same thing as writing a book this exquisite when you're 21. But what can match having written a novel this exquisite at 37? Or any age? Ironically, words almost can't do it justice. Everything you've heard about it is true.

The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin - This is the first book I read in 2015. The novel, which Werner Herzog loosely adapted into his film Cobra Verde, struck me as so masterful almost a year ago that I wondered if any novel I would read over the next twelve months could possibly match it. Obviously some have, but this is writing of such simple beauty and violence that I can recall the impact it had on me one year ago and some sixty books later. If you aspire to write prose, what Chatwin was able to accomplish with so few words isn't just humbling -- it's humiliating.

My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes - At the beginning of this novel, our unnamed narrator, a screenwriter, is at a party he's not enjoying, so he goes outside and sees a beautiful young woman walk into the ocean. He saves her, and becomes linked to the pitiful and predictable end of her Hollywood fantasy. She lives in a nothing apartment, she drinks way too much, she tried to kill herself. To the uninitiated, this sounds, I'd wager, pretty run-of-the-mill. Except that Hayes, himself a screenwriter (and check out these credits: Paisan, Clash By Night, The Left Hand of God) was, and pardon me for doubling up on the word "writer" in this sentence, I can find no way around it, a goddamn writer. I just opened up My Face for the World to See, and this is literally what I found:

Failure was always present; it changed its aspect, it acquired new forms. Did one ever go from success to success? But one went, simultaneously, from failure to failure. What was it that I'd once thought intolerable? In a few years, it had become tolerable. The reasons for living changed. At the end, the great pang would be that death deprived one of the very, very simplest things: the simpleness of sight, the mechanical marvel of breathing. Ah, she mustn't feel the way she did. Nothing catastrophic had really happened. What one was good at didn't always and continually give one pleasure. Appetites died; ambitions expired; desire put on a different skin. She'd see, if she'd only give it time.

Sweetheart, Sweetheart by Bernard Taylor - The horror boom of the 1970s and 80s allowed a lot of unforgivable shit to get published, because then, as now, horror sold, no matter how awful it was. But it let in a lot of great fiction too (would T.E.D. Klein have ever enjoyed mass publication without it?), and one of the writers whose cult reputation following that boom has most intrigued me is Bernard Taylor. This is his signature novel, and it couldn't be more classical in structure or concept: as the book opens, David Warwick, and Englishman living in the US, has recently learned of the death of his brother. This happened very soon after the brother got married to the mysterious Helen, who herself has just died. So David travels to rural England to deal with the estate, his estranged father, and the mysteries surrounding the deaths of Helen and his brother.

Sounds good and all, but what distinguishes Sweetheart, Sweetheart from the mass of forgotten mass market paperbacks with skulls and shit on the cover is a genuine talent for writing prose, just for starters, and an absolute control of his story so that the casual pacing eventually reveals itself to be not so much languid as a depiction of a slow descent into Hell.

Albert Angelo by B. S. Johnson - At this point, B. S. Johnson must be best known as the subject of Jonathan Coe's biography Like a Fiery Elephant. That book won awards and such, and is considered a masterpiece of its genre, but Johnson's own writing is essentially unknown. He wrote seven novels, few of which are still in print, and used copies of his first and last are going for exorbitant amounts of money. You can find this one, though, his second, written when he was 31 (Johnson was dead by 40) about an aspiring architect and, in the meantime, substitute teacher, much of this novel dealing with the horrors and dissatisfactions of teaching children. Johnson was, I guess I'd have to say, "post-modern," though this implies that Johnson was thinking along those lines. Maybe he was -- there's one bit where there's holes in the pages, so you see through to a passage later on -- but I doubt it was so conscious. The phrase "like a fiery elephant" actually comes from this novel, and it's pulled from a long section of, essentially, teacher evaluations the protagonist has allowed his impossibly difficult students to write up, without fear of punishment. And you wonder if he's the problem. You also wonder, or I did, by the end, what's really been going on here, and I do wonder if David Foster Wallace ever read B. S. Johnson. He must have. I don't know of any other writer who could, like DFW could, say to the reader "We both know what's going on here" without finally undercutting the emotion at all.

The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane - Discussed, along with Sloane's To Walk the Night, here.

The Whites by Richard Price - I fear that the strangeness of this being a full-on Richard Price novel that has somehow been credited to "Harry Brandt" (here's the story) might have distracted some from the fact that this is, quite simply, a terrific Richard Price novel. Price has been writing crime fiction since his 1992 masterpiece Clockers, and The Whites shouldn't be approached as a departure. The story about a group of cops who each has a criminal in their past they couldn't put behind bars, and who each harbors a desire for some kind of social revenge, a balance of justice, sounds potentially like pulp -- and it is, but can't it be more? Price shows that it can be (there are a lot of ways The Whites is more complex than I've described), and that while being more than pulp, it can still be pulp. One of the best pure reads, as well as one of the best novels, of the year.

Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns - I believe this is the third time Barbara Comyns has made one of these year-end lists. There's a reason for that. This one was discussed here.

Neighbors by Thomas Berger - The primary travesty of John G. Avildsen's atrocious 1981 adaptation of Berger's novel -- about two sets of neighbors, one normal, I guess you'd say, and one abnormal, I guess you'd say, who spiral into a Kafkaesque nightmare comedy -- is the way it turns chicken when it comes to the ending. I'm not going to ruin it here, but the book, which is a relentlessly paced comedy of utter absurdity, frustration, hypocrisy, and lunacy, is a book that once or twice tested my patience for absurdity, frustration, hypocrisy, and lunacy. When I realized that the story took place over the course of about 24 hours, I did honestly question Berger's ability to sustain it. But of course Berger knew better than me, and Neighbors is quite propulsive. It's that ending, though...that's the horror, and the mystery. That's what makes it really linger.

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard - If you're a fan of the horror writer Thomas Ligotti, you may know that he considers Thomas Bernhard one of his great literary influences. Woodcutters is not a horror novel, but in its eerily mad depiction of a dinner party that recalls both Beckett and Bunuel, a certain disturbance is achieved. There's no violence, but there is a lot of contempt, as well as general disgust. But should the reader side with the narrator or against him? The disgust pours from him, but what is he? "What" as opposed to "who." He just thinks, sitting in the wing chair.

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter - I'm pretty sure I bought this novel almost entirely because it was a reprint by NYRB Classics that sounded like something I'd like. Subsequently finding it mentioned in Read 'Em and Weep, Barry Gifford's collection of short essays about his favorite novels, and being urged to read it by my friend Glenn Kenny, convinced me, like a year or two later, to finally check it out. And brother, I wanna tell you. It's similar to Tevis's The Queen's Gambit in that it doesn't feel plotted, as such (although I'm sure it was), but instead follows the lives of a few characters to some logical point -- death, or otherwise. In this case, it's primarily two men, Jack Levitt, a white man, and Billy Lancing, a light-skinned black man, who meet as irresponsible, stupid children (another connection to Tevis is they meet at a pool hall, and Lancing is a great pool player) whose dumb behavior, spurred by desperation and dissatisfaction and fear, eventually land them in prison. But the two lives meet and split apart and meet again -- that Jack and Billy aren't chained together the whole novel is part of the power of Hard Rain Falling, and part of its brutal reality, as is the love they find together in prison, and the strange aftermath of it all. It's a novel that is, as they used to say, rich in incident.

Watership Down by Richard Adams - Can you believe it took me this long? Discussed, briefly, here. But really, it knocked me out.

Dark Reflections by Samuel R. Delany - One of the few truly unique writers in America today is Samuel R. Delany. I don't really have anywhere close to the space necessary to go into why that is, but if you don't know, he's moved from one of the most preternaturally gifted science fiction writers of the New Wave era, and has become since then one of the truly curious and original social and critical figures in American literature, writing whole books analyzing one Thomas M. Disch short story, for one example, and writing horrifying pornographic nightmares (or dreams, let's leave that to him) for another. This novel, from 2007, is probably about as mainstream as Delany gets these days. It's the story of a poet, Arnold Hawley -- black, and gay, though so shy and worried about sex as to be almost asexual -- who when we meet him has won an award. He's also a professor, but his income is so slight that the monetary side of the poetry award makes enough of a difference that he can, for a time, decide to see a movie without worrying about the cost. At another time, he sees one of his poetry books in a used bookstore and thinks that someone "could live without it."

The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge - This one's a bit hard to talk about. It sort of needs to just be read. All I'll say is that it's a withering, even frightening black comedy about two women who live together, and who both work at a bottle factory, the employees and managers of which plan an outing. From there, you're on your own. It's now considered one of the great British novels of the 20th Century, and it lost the 1974 Booker Prize, which is bullshit.

Fat City by Leonard Gardner - Incredible stuff. Discussed here.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro - This new novel by the author of The Remains of the Day was one of the most anticipated books of 2015 and was met mostly with shrugs and dismissal. As I recall, Joyce Carol Oates, Fine Purveyor of Fucked Up Opinions, used her review in the New York Review of Books to employ the word "awkward" as often as she could without ever explaining what she meant by that. My own guess is, nobody who was eager for a new novel by Ishiguro was expecting a barely-post-Arthurian fantasy about, not the horrors of war, but the sadness of war, as well as the sadness of old age. I bow to no one in my love of The Remains of the Day, and I've read all but two of Ishiguro's other books, so I consider it significant, at least as far as my own relation to the thing goes, when I say that The Buried Giant is a beautiful novel, every bit the equal of his early masterpiece.

Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis - I love Kingsley Amis so much I named a cat after him, and this might just be his masterpiece. Discussed here, along with Amis's also outstanding novella Ending Up.

The Best Books I Read in 2014? Here Are They!

This year, as I do every year, I read some books. I also kept a list of what those books were called so that, as January 1 drew near, I could, as I am now doing even as I write this, compile into list form those books I thought were really just A-1 tops in my opinion. Most such lists tend to focus on the best books that actually came out in 2014, but as always I generally don't read enough new books in a given year to do that, so my lists is made up of the best books I read, whatever their year of publication. However, this time my list includes two novels from 2014. Unprecedented!

Another thing is that this year's list is pretty long. I never limit myself to ten choices, but I generally top out at about fifteen or so. For whatever reason, maybe because I read more books this year than I normally do, I had a hard time paring it down. I decided to just go with it. That being said, I did leave out one or two books that I liked about as well as one or two I did include, partly to keep things manageable, and partly because while I genuinely enjoyed the hell out of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, for example, I think you all have probably already heard about that one by now.

One more thing before we begin...well, two more things. The first thing is that this year, two non-fiction titles made my list, which I don't believe has happened before. Make of that what you will. The other thing is that, as always most of this list isn't really ranked until you get to the top two or three, at which point you might notice that my very favorite books of the year all share a specific theme, or subject. Of that you are also invited to make what you will.

And so!

Seven Footprints to Satan by A. Merritt - Probably best known for Creep, Shadow!, his final novel from 1934, this novel, Merritt's fourth from 1927, is remembered more for the 1929 film adaptation directed by Benjamin Christensen, who also made Haxan ("best known" and "remembered" being relative terms here, unfortunately). Anyway, the novel is, as they say, a hoot: a towering, ominous, hedonistic figure claiming to be Satan forces the men and women he kidnaps to play a game of chance that will win them immortality and endless pleasure, or doom them to death and/or horrific torture. One man and one woman decide to fight back. Seven Footprints to Satan is absurd in exactly the right way, which is to say that it's absurd but I found it impossible to laugh at it. I was too gripped by suspense, and by the wish that all classic pulp fiction was this propulsive. And it earns bonus points, of a sort, by being only occasionally racist...

Harriet Said... by Beryl Bainbridge - When I do these lists, I like to find especially good or interesting or strange cover images for the books in question, and I would mark the above pictured cover for Beryl Bainbridge's first (or is it third? This is a somewhat confusing question) novel as "strange." Also "misleading," implying as it does that this novel has sleazily hitched itself to a sleazy misunderstanding of Nabokov's Lolita. Harriet Said... is not that, however. It's based on the same true crime story that inspired Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures, though Bainbridge's inspiration was of a much more general sort. In her novel, two adolescent girls on vacation attract a fair amount of male attention, and they find themselves drawn to one particular man. Their intentions towards this man are appalling, but what Bainbridge, who tells the story from the point of view of the girls, never states but which we understand anyway, is that the man's intentions towards the girls aren't any better. The fact that everyone's intentions are thwarted for something even worse is to be expected, and Bainbridge lays the path towards that end with events that are deceptively matter-of-fact and written with a casual precision that lends to the story the air of the everyday that must always precede such terrible crimes in real life.

North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud - I first heard about Ballingrud when I came across his short story "The Monsters of Heaven" in editor Ellen Datlow's horror anthology Inferno. I read that story, and loved it (and wrote about it here), but I didn't get around to reading Ballingrud's story collection that contains it until, oh, about a week ago. Over about the past year or so, I've gathered that North American Lake Monsters is something of a favorite among serious contemporary genre writers -- I keep seeing it praised by the respectable likes of Jeff VanDermeer and Laird Barron and so forth -- and it's not hard to see why. If I had to compare what Ballingrud is doing here to anything, I'd have to say his fiction is akin to to work of Larry Brown or Daniel Woodrell, but with monsters. See "The Monsters of Heaven," for instance, or more directly the title story, or best of all his werewolf tale "Wild Acre," which uses genuine werewolf horror as the backbone for a story about a man on the cusp of economic ruin, and does all this while still treating the werewolf element seriously. I admit that I don't love every story here -- I didn't love the non-genre "S.S." or "The Way Station," his curious take on the ghost story -- but pretty much everything else is a success, including "Sunbleached," a pretty terrific, even somewhat traditional, vampire story, and "The Good Husband," the last story, and the one that arguably packs the collection's strongest emotional kick in the teeth.

Joe by Larry Brown - Speaking of Larry Brown, the release of David Gordon Green's film version of Brown's 1991 novel Joe spurred me to finally pick that book up, as preparation, I told myself, for Green's movie, admiring that filmmaker as I do. Well, Green's adaptation suffered for my decision, as hoping for anybody's film to match up to Brown's extraordinary novel is hoping for too much.  The story, about a violent, drunken, but fundamentally decent man named Joe taking into his protection a teenage boy whose poverty-stricken family is headed by a patriarch of endless vileness, is the kind of thing that people sometimes call mythic, which I think in this context means that it is, in the hands of a writer as stunningly gifted as Larry Brown, deeply satisfying. Brown's prose is gorgeous in the way that makes me demand to know how language so apparently simple can be put together so that what is being depicted and thereby communicated reaches down to your bones. What I'm trying to tell you is that this a good book and you should read it.

The Land Breakers by John Ehle - Reviewed here.

King of the Hill by A. E. Hotchner - I talk a little bit about Hotchner and his memoir of his childhood spent with a younger brother, loving mother, and shady, infuriating father during the Great Depression in this post, which is mostly about Steven Soderbergh and his film adaptation. You can get the gist from that, but to repeat one point I make there, what makes Hotchner's King of the Hill so terrific is that it's not written as though by a grown man looking back, but rather as a young boy living it as it happens. It's very difficult when putting these lists together to go back and find suitable passages from these books, some of which I read almost a year ago, to quote, but here's one I easily found from King of the Hill; easily, because it's one of my favorites:

...[N]ine times out of ten [my mother] asked me if I had to put that dirty thing on my head. That dirty thing happened to be the best old Feltie in the neighborhood. My father called it a skullcap. I found this really great fedora in the trash can in the park, and cut out the crown and cut designs in it, and I had some really nifty buttons stuck all over it, especially this one of Mr. Herbert Hoover smiling, which, believe me, was some rare button.

People Live Still in Cashtown Corners by Tony Burgess - Canadian author Tony Burgess is kind of a horror writer, though he might not be considered one because he's pretty clearly not beholden to the restrictions of formula that too many writers, and readers, consider the genre's defining characteristics. His best-known book would have to be 1998's Pontypool Changes Everything, his insane, undefinable sort-of-episodic novel about a sort-of zombie virus that spreads through language. That book (which made my 2009 list) was successfully turned into a film, if you can imagine such a thing, called simply Pontypool, by Burgess and director Bruce McDonald -- they succeeded, I believe, by being extremely free with the adaptation. Supposedly the two are re-teaming to adapt People Live Still in Cashtown Corners, his 2010 novel about a mass murderer named Bob Clark, who kills as a means of understanding. To try and summarize the book's perverse psychology would be too difficult, but perhaps this passage, following the first murder, will give you some sense of it:

We enter into battles without understanding the terms of our survival and when we do survive, when we do what is necessary, when we pull up strong, then all the rest, this cost, this remainder of my life, is only lessened because we did so much more than all the others. We stood while God hammered the sky and we never stopped walking while chainsaws milked our legs and we did something very wrong and awful, but at least it cleared the air. It lifts those that come after. It was us we offered up and no one will ever know this but us.

Or perhaps this:

My mind isn't snapped or anything. I'm not particularly afraid of what I've done even though I do know that now, whatever happens, at some point down the road I'm going to have to listen to someone tell me what I've done.

And if you think Burgess is (figuratively) sacrificing innocent lives so that he can more easily sympathize with their killer, you're mistaken.

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye - This slim volume of linked short stories is Kiesbye's second book, after his novella Next Door Lived a Girl, which I haven't read but which I'm damn well going to now. Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone is set in Germany, at a time that is mostly undefined, though by the end the reader has an idea. The characters are all children, and almost every story ends with, or at some point involves, something appalling being done by one or more of them. Is it all just slaughter, the senseless cruelty of children? In a way, which sort of explains what's happening. I've seen many descriptions of this book that compare it to various other things, with varying degrees of accuracy and absurdity, but the comparison I've seen that gives the best idea of what you'll be dealing with if you pick up Kiesbye's eerie novel is the one that calls it a cross between the Brothers Grimm and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. As a metaphor for what I'll bet you've guessed it's a metaphor for, Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone is fascinating.

The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon - In 1972, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley and others appeared in a film called Night of the Lepus which, as I remember it, is about giant mutant rabbits who kill people. THE END. That film was based on a 1964 novel by an Australian writer named Russell Braddon, who by that time had made a name for himself by writing a memoir about his four years as a POW in Singapore during World War II, two other books of non-fiction chronicling the heroism of British spy Nancy Wake, and a few other novels. Nowadays, The Year of the Angry Rabbit is his most famous work of fiction, and it's struggling to be remembered as a thing separate from the ridiculous movie, which took the killer rabbit idea and that's all. Braddon's novel skates by what is inherently laughable about the idea by, in fact, being a satire in the mold of, and I'm not kidding, Dr. Strangelove. I'm not going to claim The Year of the Angry Rabbit is as great as Kubrick's film, but it's a fascinatingly strange story about the power to dominate all other nations suddenly falling into the lap of Australia's Prime Minister, who seeks world peace via threats of total destruction. It's a singular, and singularly weird book that is now hard to find, and it deserves a better legacy than Night of the Lepus.

There is a Happy Land by Keith Waterhouse - Waterhouse is one of those writers who will always be defined by one book. In this case, that book is Billy Liar, which -- and don't think I haven't noticed that this is sort of a theme in this post -- became a famous film in 1963, directed by John Schlesinger. But Waterhouse wrote a bunch of novels, and this one, his first, is well worth tracking down (as it's been reprinted by Valancourt Books, that should be easy enough to do). There is a Happy Land is one of those realist one-thing-after-another novels about childhood that British writers of a certain era wrote with such apparent ease and skill. About a young boy who lives in a public housing estate, and the end of his closest friendship, as well as what's going on with the strange, obviously crazy -- obvious to the adult reader anyway -- bike-riding adult who seems most comfortable around children, There is a Happy Land is both funny in its close observations of childhood, and the odd logic of children's minds, and eventually tragic and sad for those very same reasons. It's really wonderful, and it's one of those books that comes together to the fullness of its power in its final pages.

Angels by Denis Johnson - I read, I think, seven novels by Denis Johnson this year. I loved most of them, and choosing one among the best of those -- Train Dreams, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Nobody Move, Angels -- was a difficult prospect that I chose to simplify by choosing the one I read most recently. This is nevertheless not an arbitrary choice. Angels was published in 1983 and is Johnson's first novel. It is infuriating that a first novel can be this good. It's a novel that I shouldn't summarize, beyond saying that it's about a woman named Jamie who takes her two young daughters and leaves her husband, and who, on the bus to Hershey, PA meets an ex-sailor and current drunk and petty criminal named Bill Houston who Jamie is lost enough to find romantic. You know this won't turn out great, but where it goes is impossible, I think, to guess. In fact, it does recall certain films, though if I named them I might as well tell you how it ends. But while that journey is partly what reading this novel is all about, there's obviously much more to it. The thing about Angels is that late in the novel, Johnson describes something that he could not have possibly experienced, and that I could not have possibly experienced, but which Johnson's prose illuminates and imagines in a way that is gorgeously terrifying, and feels impossibly, exactly right. It's the kind of writing that humbles you.

Consumed by David Cronenberg - Reviewed here, though I'd like to add that my sense is that not enough people are reading this, and of those who are reading it, not enough are liking it. This is a terrific book. Being a fan of Cronenberg's films may be a necessary first step, but with that accomplished the rest should be clear sailing. Get on this one, you pricks!

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm - My appreciation for Janet Malcolm's extremely controversial examination of journalism and what she believes is inherently unethical about it, has little to do with the potential guilt or innocence of Jeffrey MacDonald, the doctor and Green Beret convicted of murdering his wife and children in 1979. I don't know if he did it or not, and solving that mystery (if that's even what it is) isn't what interests Malcolm either. She examines journalistic ethics through the lens of Fatal Vision, writer Joe McGinniss's true crime bestseller about the case published in 1983. In The Journalist and the Murderer, McGinniss comes off as hideously mercenary in how he dealt with his subjects, but if Malcolm were only interested in writing a hit piece I doubt it would be on this list (although who am I kidding, it might be anyway). Malcolm isn't even interested in taking down journalism. What interested her, and for her troubles she became something of a pariah among her colleagues, was questioning not just the occupation itself, but the received wisdom that a journalist is virtuous by dint of being a journalist. And Malcolm, a journalist, doesn't spare herself. She is ruthless in a way that few people are willing to be about who they are and what they do.

Red Shift by Alan Garner - A science fiction novel unlike any other I've ever read, Alan Garner's 1973 masterpiece tells three stories from three different centuries: one about deserters from an ancient Roman army; one about a man desperately trying to defend his village and those he loves during the English Civil War; and another, set in 1973, about a teenage couple in love, and how the boy is potentially going to fall apart when the girl leaves for London. Geographically, the stories take place on top of each other, and so, in a way, in Garner's way, are happening simultaneously. This reminds me of many things, including the ancient Roman source of Arthur Machen's nevertheless very British horror story "The White People."  Red Shift isn't horror, but it is brutal -- the violence of centuries past is depicted by Garner is something that was as natural as one animal killing another for food -- and though a science fiction tone is achieved through a kind of psychological time travel, it's the spirits of the dead that live on in the rocks and soil that form the guts of this highly unusual novel.

In Hazard by Richard Hughes - Hughes wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, A High Wind in Jamaica from 1929. I read that book several years ago, and it took me quite a while to read anything else by Hughes, and I'm not really sure why. But now that I have I can say that In Hazard, Hughes's second novel, from 1938, utterly failed to disappoint. The novel, about a cargo steamer caught in an ungodly hurricane, is written with the same sardonic eye for human frailty, heroism, cowardice, and tragedy that you'd expect from him. In this brief novel, Hughes sketches a large handful of characters with a deftness you simply don't see now, and tosses them into a seemingly unwinnable situation. Then he stands back like God and watches to see how they make out. That in doing so Hughes somehow finds room  -- this book is only about 120 pages long -- to appear to be racist before revealing itself to be exactly not that, while also telling the story of the making of a Chinese Communist, while also...well, that's enough out of me. Hughes wrote very few books, he was notoriously slow, but the two I've read so far are unlike anything else I can think of.

Nosferatu by Jim Shepard - Reviewed (eventually) here.

Loving by Henry Green - This novel from 1945 is set on a country estate in Ireland during World War II.  When the elderly head butler dies, a servant named Raunce, who seemingly looks out primarily for himself, is promoted. Over the course of Henry Green's masterpiece, an item will be stolen, the servants will be left alone on the estate for a time, two of them will fall in love. Meals will be prepared and served, drinks will be drunk. Servants will leave. People will speculate about what this war will mean for Ireland. What a lifetime of reading fiction has conditioned you to expect from such a novel will not be fulfilled. Loving is a gentle novel while being anything but soft -- it's about as clear-eyed about life as it's lived, at least by these people in this house, as any writer has managed before or since. In his interview with The Paris Review, Henry Green famously described the conception of Loving this way: 

I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: "Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers." I saw the book in a flash.

So there you go.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns - A novel about a plague of violent madness long before writers thought they were being original by spinning off that concept from the zombie subgenre (oh how weary I become), Barbara Comyns' bizarre, funny, and unnerving 1955 novel about how one family fails (I'm simplifying) to bravely face the devastation of their village is about as damning a look at humanity in crisis as I've ever read. Not that it's ostentatiously "about" that -- let's just say that Comyns, who, what with this and The Vet's Daughter, which I read a couple of years ago, I'm beginning to think was a genius, is dubious about a few things. Can you imagine such a novel being written now in which the primary parental figure within the story's central family is not only not heroic, but a heroic character isn't introduced to take their place? In addition to that, if you want to pin down Who Was Changed and Who was Dead, it's a novel about death in which daily death is sort of gotten used to:

During the afternoon Ives went to Grandmother Willoweed, who was sunning herself in a basket chair on the top path.

"Baker's dead, ma'm," he shouted down her trumpet, "and Mrs. Fig's got the madness or else it's the D.T.'s, and the little old peacock's dead too; we haven't got one now. But my ducks is alright," and he turned away towards the river to make sure this was still so.

The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson - Jackson will be remembered only for this novel. Even those who seek to not let us forget that this was a novel, and not just an Oscar-winning film from Billy Wilder, seem content to let this and a handful of short stories stand for Jackson's life and career, and let the other novels and stories disappear. My plan is to read all of Jackson's fiction -- there's not a ton of it, just two story collections and four novels -- and in addition to The Lost Weekend I've also read his second novel, The Fall of Valor, which I liked. But fair's fair: it's not The Lost Weekend, which is simply the greatest novel about alcoholism I've ever read. It's not just that -- I feel like it's the best novel about alcoholism that it's possible to write.  As Don Birman promises sobriety to himself and others time and again, only to collapse into a river of booze each time, it's possible for the reader to find himself alternately hoping that Birman either be refused that next drink, or to be offered all the booze he desires. No writer has ever made the horror experienced by a drunk both when he gets his drink and the horror experienced when he can't as palpable, immediate, and terrifying as Jackson does. It's a merciless and deeply frightening novel.

The Tunnel by William H. Gass - Well, what can anyone say about this? Though Gass has written significant books following its publication in 1995, The Tunnel is genuinely, literally, the life's work of one man. Several decades in the writing, The Tunnel is possibly the most difficult novel I've ever read, and for a while it felt like reading it was going to be my own life's work. The idea behind this novel is that it is, all 600-some pages of it, ostensibly the introduction to the narrator's massive scholarly work Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany. That narrator, the author, is William Frederick Kohler, and in trying to introduce this major book, he ends up telling, in a manner of speaking, his life story, a story that includes his decision to dig a tunnel in the basement of his home, a project he has taken up at the same time as the writing of this "introduction." Which is a mad, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes utterly opaque, swirl of Midwest childhood lived in the early part of the 20th century with a mean father and a drunk, depressed mother, who dies from a hemorrhage in her throat, her blood draining back into her body "like a sink." Strange sexual encounters mix with Kohler's insistence (though he's not proud of it) that he took part in Kristallnacht...but would he have been old enough? And these then mix with an examination of the other professors in the history department where Kohler is tenured, his hatred of them, his envy of them, mixed again with memories of eating ice cream and car accidents he witnessed as a child, mixed again with a consideration of the assassination in 1938 of Nazi Ernst vom Rath by Polish refugee and Jew Herschel Grynszpan, leading finally to a final fifty pages that are among the saddest and most beautiful I have ever read. In its own way, The Tunnel contains the whole of the 20th Century.

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski - I realize that there is some controversy surrounding Kosinski and The Painted Bird, having to do with accusations of plagiarism. At one time I knew a bit more about the specifics, but I've forgotten all of it now. The controversy is not something I now dismiss, if the accusations are fair, but I'll re-investigate all that at another time. For now, I can only consider the novel, published in 1965, about a young boy, possibly Jewish, possibly a Gypsy, sent away by his parents because they believed he would have a better chance of surviving the holocaust sweeping over the country on his own than with them. And so off he goes, suffering or witnessing one atrocity after another, as the novel becomes a living, breathing, walking, seeing Hieronymus Bosch painting, even though it remains words on a page. It's literary minimalism put to the use of the grotesque and horrible, which is never-ending, or seems as if it will be. But this novel is about a real horror that we know did end, and even here, even in this most terrible novel, there is before the horror, just a little, and there is the horror, and there is after the horror. Just a little, but it's there, on the other side.

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis - While thinking about these last three novels in this best-of list, of which Gass's The Tunnel was the first and now The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis's 2014 declaration that the literary world dismisses him at their own peril, is the last, I do have to ask myself which of them I truly think is the "best." Such a stupid question is answered reasonably with "It doesn't matter." If The Tunnel is the most unapproachably (in a sense) impressive, and The Painted Bird is the most awe-inspiringly painful, Amis's novel is the most entertaining while being simultaneously the one novel I read this year that most regularly took my breath away: I've heard The Zone of Interest described as "an office comedy about Auschwitz." Which it sort of is, I guess, at least for a while. The novel tells the story of life in Auschwitz from the point of view of a, let's say, skeptical Nazi named Golo Thomsen (he's Bormann's nephew!); a true believer Nazi commandant named Paul Doll, who is married to Hannah Doll, who hates her husband and whom Thomsen loves; and Szmul, the Jewish Sonderkommando, who worked with the Nazis in the camps and as a result enjoyed certain benefits; those Jews who occupied Primo Levi's "grey zone." But oh no, a love triangle? Is Amis trivializing the Holocaust? No, because the idea behind The Zone of Interest is to show what such things looked like against this backdrop. It's similar to Cabaret in this sense. And yes, it's funny, though over the years Martin Amis's idea of a comic novel differs from pretty much everyone else's: he's funny because he can't not be, because humor is his mode, his style. And it's not a matter of "laughing so that you don't scream" -- it's not that simple. You laugh while you scream. But it's also not that simple. Here's how Amis writes now -- here's what's funny to him now...or here's what's "funny" to him now -- this, from Szmul, reflecting on the life of the Sonderkommando:

It would infinitesimally console me, I think, if I could persuade myself that there is companionship -- that there is human communion, or at least respectful fellow-feeling, in the bunkroom above the disused crematory.

A very great many words are spoken, certainly, and our exchanges are always earnest, articulate, and moral.

'Either you go mad in the first ten minutes,' it is often said, 'or you get used to it.' You could argue that those who get used to it do in fact go mad. And there is another possible outcome: you don't go mad and you don't get used to it.