Some readers have waded through category after category of a higher-than-normal volume of recommendations just to get to the only genre they care about. For you lot, here are the novels. I didn't set out to love sad novels this year; it just happened.
Best of the Year: Fiction
The Dutch House, Ann Patchett, 2019
Hoo boy. This being an Ann Patchett novel, it's brilliant and beautifully written. And yet, it's so incredibly sad. The tale unfolds of a gorgeous, opulent, unique house outside Philadelphia and the relationship of a multi-generational family and how they orbit through it and around it. To say more about the plot might spoil it, but it's always easy to describe an Ann Patchett novel the way she does: an unlikely group of people get drawn (thrown?) together by circumstance, and the story develops from that departure point. The characters here are finely drawn as are the locales. I found myself thinking I could look up the Dutch House on Zillow at some point before remembering that all of this sprang from Patchett's unmatched brain. The novel plays with time, but in a narrative way, not a magical one (phew). Starting from one point on the string as it must, the story bounces back and forth, slowly revealing more and more about how the characters had arrived at that starting point and where they went from there. Paige and I agreed that cinematic writing defines the book. There's too much here for a movie, though. Netflix option for a European-style miniseries, perhaps? Sometimes the sadness did get to me, but I would still recommend this to all readers.
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi, 2016
Honorable Mentions
Less, Andrew Sean Greer, 2017
Real Tigers, Mick Herron, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment