Books of 2022: Fiction

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

While reading this book, I mentioned to Paige, who was among those who had recommended it, how sad it was.  She could not recall the book being sad, which is interesting because the story covers the wrong that befell generations and generations from African slavery to the 21st century in Africa and the US.  It's incredibly sad.  And yet.  And yet, Yaa Gyasi's gifted, evocative storytelling and weaving in of reasons to hope might very well change a reader's memory after the fact, even if a current reader gets weighed down by the sadness.  I kept rooting for something to break right or even non-oppressive in one of these generations. Gyasi takes the reader to the deep complexity where Africans are both enslavers and enslaved.  Her research seems strong and sturdy in that the depictions of village and regional 19th-century African culture come across as authentic.  If nothing else, they're densely detailed and transportingly visual.  Homegoing is a difficult but meaningful, even enjoyable, read in the end.

Honorable Mentions

Less, Andrew Sean Greer, 2017

Real Tigers, Mick Herron, 2016