Best Fiction of the Decade In My Amateur Opinion

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Best Fiction of the Decade In My Amateur Opinion

A handful of my friends ask me periodically for fiction recommendations (usually around vacation time and holidays) and a few of the same books keep appearing on my recommendation lists, even though I try to tailor books to the reader.

It’s starting to look like I should have a handy list of them somewhere, so here’s my top 10 with a few ground rules:

Rule no 1: Recent contemporary fiction only. The book must have been published in the last decade. There’s no point in recommending Dubliners to you. I know it’s a good book. You know it’s a good book. Classic canonically respected books don’t need recommendations from anyone.

Rule no 2: Take it for granted that I think all of my friends’ books are fantastic. Because I do. You should buy them all. Those are automatic buys, so I’m purposely including only people I don’t know from Adam. (Or Paula, Sloane, etc.)

Rule no 3: Novels and short stories only. No nonfiction, creative non-fiction, or memoirs.

So here’s my list, though it’s not really in order of preference—except for maybe the St. Aubyn, which is still my favorite:

10. Typical by Padgett Powell. Credit where credit’s due: @boyfriend is responsible for this one. He recommended it to me. Having been overexposed to Southern fiction growing up (drowning in Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner) I tend not to pick up much Southern fiction at all. But Powell is worth it. His stories are tonally gothic in the way you almost expect all Southern fiction to be, but the narration is unique to Powell and the dialog is more recognizable to me as being authentically of the time and place than anything I can think of in the same settings. It’s the sort of thing you’d want to read aloud for the proper effect.

9. Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. I like Coetzee generally, and Disgrace deserves its accolades. But I’d recommend Elizabeth Costello on a different basis. It’s straightforward critique in the guise of fiction. And it works. The protagonist is a wheelchair-bound novelist and philosopher in the last stages of her life and her story is told through a series of speeches. It’s a thoughtful, heavily layered story and upon re-reading, I always find something new that I missed.

8. Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead—a novel about a “nomenclature consultant” asked to re-brand a small town with a complex history. Colson Whitehead fans maintain that The Intuitionist and John Henry Days are better books, but I’m a sucker for the branding angle. Whitehead’s a beautifully lyrical writer and it seems almost effortless. For that, I enjoy reading his fiction even though he’s a Brooklyn writer and Brooklyn writers are almost always insufferable. Which I can say now that I’ve moved back into Manhattan. (I’m kidding… Sort of.)

7. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. For people who haven’t had a lot of exposure to short stories (congenital novel-readers, people who “don’t have time for fiction”), I always recommend Lorrie Moore. It’s hard not to get pulled into her best stories, even if you’re otherwise disinclined. Hand any young would-be creative person a copy of “How to Be A Writer” and see if they don’t finish it. Moore is probably best known for her wit and wordplay, but I’ve always liked her for the icepick-in-the-stomach moments where her characters realize that the worst thing they feared is actually happening. The best of example of this, from another collection: “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” in Birds of America.

6. You Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett. The beginning story in this debut collection, “Notes to My Biographer,” is brilliant and moving and the first time I read it, it absolutely crushed me. Haslett has since been swallowed up by law school and is, I suppose, pursuing a primary career in that field. (A waste, I say!) But he has a novel coming out in February. I’m looking forward to it.

5. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Fair warning: Don’t read this one without a bottle of Prozac handy. It’s brutal and devastating. It’s an epistolary novel written from the viewpoint of a mother whose son kills several of his classmates. She wrestles with her ambivalence as a mother and whether it contributed to her son’s behavior as well as her beliefs about the nature of evil. It’s incredibly well done. Shriver is such a gifted writer. This one gets the award for Worst Book Cover, though. The paperback cover makes it look like some sort of feel-good-y women’s fiction book, and it’s dark (as it in pitch-black), violent and disturbing. But holy crap, is it good.

4.The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. I have a love/hate relationship with Houellebecq, but he never bores me. I think he categorically overuses unconventional sexuality for provocation in way that seems—to me, at least—easy and cliched, but there’s always a larger idea at work that deserves some exploration. In The Elementary Particles (the alternate title was Atomized) he uses the sex lives of his characters as vehicles for some interesting ideas about the nature of humanity—scientifically, culturally and spiritually. To employ another cliche, it’s a “big idea novel.” And a good one.

3. Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre. This was the surprise winner of the 2003 Booker. It was written an Australian under a pen name, and it’s about a working class public school kid in small town Texas whose best friend, Jesus, goes on a Columbine-style shooting spree. Given that, it seems awkward to suggest that it’s funny, but it is. It’s also heartbreaking. The character has no real family except his self-absorbed mother who uses bribes from national media people for interviews about her son to buy things she can show off to her friends. Michiko Kakutani hated it because she thought it was condescending to working class Southerners (how dare that Australian!) As someone who actually grew up in a working class Southern family and town, I’d say it is hands-down the best satire/indictment of Southern materialism I’ve seen in contemporary literature to date. I feel a bit weird that this is the second book I’m recommending that involves a high school massacre, especially given that it’s not exactly a common plot point, but the two books have nothing in common otherwise. Don’t choose one over the other. Read them both.

2. Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders. Saunders is another writer I’d recommend All Of. He only writes short stories and far fewer of them than I’d like. This collection contains seven stories, all of which are funny, a bit surreal and focus on the essential fucked-up-ness of modern life. A sampling of features from the Amazon page: “a field full of braying mules toppled over from bone marrow disease; a tourist attraction featuring pickled stillborn babies; and cows with Plexiglas windows in their sides.” Saunders has a unique vernacular that is all his own stylistically, and people who don’t like him enjoy referring to it as “gimmicky”. To which I say, gimmicky is fine if the gimmick is original. And it is here. (See also, Joshua Ferris.) The gimmick only begins to seem unoriginal when people copy it—and there are a lot of ersatz George Saunderses out there. I attribute this to the fact that Saunders is one of the most imaginative writers we have right now and some people mistake replicating style and tone for replicating creativity. But you can’t really replicate George Saunders.

1. Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn. If I’ve never given you a book recommendation before and you ask me, I’ll probably start with this. It’s a scathing, acerbic novel about a young family (told from several viewpoints, including that of Robert, the five-year-old son)—plutocrats in decline—visiting the protagonist’s mother, who’s been seduced by a New Age guru. It’s nasty and witty and I wish my writing were even a fraction as sharp. St. Aubyn’s fairly well-known in Europe, but less so here. I think I read somewhere that he hates this comparison, but he reminds me very much of Evelyn Waugh—especially the darker novels, including my favorite, A Handful of Dust. I could in good conscience recommend everything he’s written but most of his books are unavailable here. I should also mention his trilogy Some Hope, which is published by Open City and is available here, is to date the most-frequently-lended-and-least-frequently-returned book in my library. Which means I’ve bought fifty or so copies of it. (You’re welcome, royalty-earning author!) And people who read it tend to like it—so much so that they keep it forever.

When I think of my own writerly models, I think primarily of Kurt Andersen, for various reasons. But St. Aubyn’s writing is a close second.

So that’s my list.

What? No Roth? No Bellow? No Didion? Not even a Mary Gaitskill?

Look, I like their books. But the ones above are more memorable to me, in part because there was something about each one of them that seemed new when I read them. I have eleven or twelve Philip Roth books on my shelf and at some point they become indistinct from each other and the rest of my library. I’d recommend Roth in general but not in the way that makes you grab someone by the arm and say, “you have to take a look at this.”

Also: Four of these are short story collections, which are hard to sell and tend to have less longevity than full-length novels, so I have a bit of bias in promoting them. And their lack of commercial appeal is a shame, because there are so many interesting short story writers out there, and you’d think that in the age of shrinking attention spans, short stories would be more popular. I hope that in the future they will be.