FAVORITES OF 2018

No one can read everything, so there are undoubtedly some terrific books I missed in 2018. But the dozen below are titles I would love to sit down and read all over again, especially the fiction, just to get a better angle on how the authors did it. Underlined titles are linked to the full-length reviews I wrote for various newspapers.

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      “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous” by Christopher Bonanos (Henry Holt). We know the name: Weegee. And we know the photographs – most famously, “The Critic,” in which two opera-goers, all dolled up in furs and jewels, are oblivious to a drunk woman at their side who’s spitting pure venom at them. But most of us don’t much about Weegee himself. Christopher Bonanos’ superb “Flash,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for best biography, reveals how the man born in an eastern European shtetl as Usher Fellig in 1899 re-invented himself as a chronicler of the seedier sides of nocturnal Manhattan in the 1930s. The book is steeped in the history of photography (Bonanos’ first book was “Instant: The History of Polaroid”) while creating an indelible portrait of its subject. The private life behind Weegee’s puckish public persona was sketchy, especially if you go by the standards of the #MeToo era, and he wasn’t much concerned either with his work’s artistic merit or implicit social commentary. “I have no time for messages in my pictures,” he insisted. “That’s for Western Union and the Salvation Army.” To his later admirers, though, he saw and said more than he ever cared to admit.

      “My Sister, the Serial Killer” by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday). This debut novel by a Nigerian writer is a Hitchcockian comedy of menace propelled by a furious resentment of the way that the power of beauty, for most men, makes questions of character a secondary concern. Korede is a nurse working at a Lagos hospital who periodically has to deal with phone calls from her sister Ayoola announcing she has killed another of her lovers and needs help disposing the body. How does Ayoola get away with it? Because her looks are so stunning that no man seems immune to them – not even sensible, empathetic Doctor Tade who works with Korede. (“You’re going to make someone an awesome wife,” he tells Korede, plainly ruling out the possibility that he might be that “someone.”) After gorgeous Ayoola crosses Tade’s path, Korede desperately tries to warn him of the danger he’s in – to no avail. He’s as susceptible to her allure as all his predecessors were. Braithwaite’s macabre tale of a conscienceless homicidal beauty and her dowdy accommodating sister (“Ayoola needs me; she need me more than I need untainted hands”) is an acid-edged urban fable of sinister power. 

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      “Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society” by Tracy Daugherty (University of Texas Press). Billy Lee Brammer – whose 1961 novel, “The Gay Place,” is an under-sung classic of American political fiction – was a one-time aide to Lyndon Johnson when he was the Senate majority leader in the late 1950s, and the novel’s dominating character, Texas governor Arthur “Goddam” Fenstemaker, is clearly LBJ-based. But Brammer’s own preposterous life might strain all credulity if you were to translate it into fiction. Happily, we have Tracy Daugherty’s terrific biography to detail that life’s highlights – including the fact that Brammer accidently shared a mistress with JFK, was turned onto LSD by Ken Kesey, and then proceeded to turn all of Austin, Texas (including Janis Joplin, who was living there at the time) on to acid. He also had a passing acquaintance with Jack Ruby, and briefly wrote anti-communist pamphlets for a CIA program where his boss was Gloria Steinem. "Leaving the Gay Place," is riveting stuff and the most eye-opening literary biography of the year.

          “Washington Black” by Esi Edugyan (Knopf). It’s not every slave narrative that delivers a sentence like this: “The visit to Wolcott and Sons was delayed until our return, and Goff was left unhappily with the task of sourcing eelgrass.” Granted, that comes toward the end of Esi Edugyan’s extraordinary third novel (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; a winner of Canada’s Giller Prize). But it’s indicative of the globe-hopping leaps and detours the book takes as it tells the tale of a boy raised in brutal servitude in 1830s Barbados who winds up seeing more of the world than he ever anticipated. “I became a boy without identity, a walking shadow,” he says, “and with each new month I fell deeper into strangeness.” The shapeshifting narrative takes Edugyan’s narrator to ante-bellum Virginia, the Canadian Arctic, Nova Scotia, England, the Netherlands and Morocco. His observation that “the nature of what happened isn’t fixed; it shifts and warps with the years” is borne out time and again. Edugyan is a marvelous writer – lyrical, fanciful, subtle, fond of paradox – and “Washington Black” reads like a picaresque epic laced with persistent threat as her young hero attempts to bridge the gap between what he has to offer the world and how the world sees him.

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          “The Monk of Mokha” by Dave Eggers (Knopf). Dave Eggers’ special strength, over the last dozen years, has been taking dramatic stories of American immigrants – a Somalian “Lost Boy” struggling in Atlanta in “What Is the What,” a Syrian-American family caught in the chaos of Hurricane Katrina in “Zeitoun” – and putting his own writing chops in service of their voices. In “The Monk of Mokha,” a book that reads like a political thriller with an insanely optimistic Horatio Alger type skedaddling through it, he does it again. Young Yemeni-American Mokhtar Alkhanshali, who grew up in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district, becomes obsessed with reviving the coffee trade in Yemen just as the country is sliding into civil war. The odds of Mokhtar’s scheme succeeding are ludicrously long, of course. But high spirits, it seems, can sometimes prevail even in the most dire geopolitical mayhem.  “The Monk of Mokha” may read like outlandish fiction, but it’s fact-based and Eggers is candid about his working methods. “In researching this book,” he writes, “I conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Mokhtar over the course of almost three years. Whenever possible, I was able to corroborate his memories with the help of others who were present, or with the historical record.” He sees Mokhtar’s story as “chiefly about the American Dream, which is very much alive and very much under threat.”

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       “A Terrible Country” by Keith Gessen (Viking). Gessen’s second novel, “A Terrible Country,” brilliantly captures the daily rhythms, allures and challenges of Moscow life in 2008-2009, in a tale that’s as personable as it is political. Its 33-year-old narrator, who shares some of Gessen’s history (born in Moscow in 1975, moved to the U.S. at age six) is sensitive, alert, but not always clued in. “I wasn’t really an idiot,” he says. “But neither was I not an idiot.” Through his eyes we get glimpses of the authoritarian undertow of Putin’s Russia while always staying grounded in the grind of ordinary Muscovite existence.  Gessen’s narrator is a fish out of water, but not entirely an innocent. Only a lack of funds prevents him from developing a prostitute habit, and his Facebook visits trigger unseemly spasms of envy of his former fellow graduate students’ flourishing careers. While a part of him remains indissolubly American, there’s enough Russian in him to make him feel implicated in everything he sees, especially as he grows more acutely aware of Russia as a country where everyone, at one point or another, has been on the wrong side of history. The result is a wily, seductive, deeply affecting book whose hybrid narrator – half insider, half outsider – sheds light on a society that, now more than ever, we need to understand better.

       “At the End of the Century” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Counterpoint). This new selection of short stories by a Booker Prize-winning author best known for her screenplays for Merchant-Ivory films (“A Room with a View,” “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge”) offers plentiful evidence of her brilliance as a writer of short fiction. Most of the tales are set in India, with a few taking place in New York and Los Angeles. Almost all of them are informed by a sense of being suspended between cultures. Some characters desperately want to escape their native circumstances. Others just as obsessively want to lose themselves in alien surroundings. Quite a few of them, regardless of how they’re positioned culturally, find an utterly unexpected freedom within the constraints of marriage and filial connection. Betrayal and adultery, for instance, can be exactly what a household needs to stay functional and happy. Jhabvala has Alice Munro’s gift for making you feel you’re reading a novel in miniature as she distils broad expanses of geography, personal history and time to 30 pages or so. She’s astute on how subtle the shifts in power dynamics between two people can be. She also has a sharp eye for how helplessness can be wielded as a weapon in personal relations. Best of all, she has a healthy respect for the riddling aspects of human behavior. She doesn’t explain contradictions or self-destructive impulses away. Instead, she simply presents them as something strange, real and troublesome. The results are captivating.  

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      “The Great Believers” by Rebecca Makkai (Viking). It’s an odd sensation when you’ve lived long enough for the years of your youth to become historical-fiction fodder for younger writers. Not all of them succeed. But Rebecca Makkai’s magnificent third novel, “The Great Believers” doesn’t set a foot wrong as it alternates between an AIDS-stricken circle of friends in mid-1980s Chicago and a handful of straight and gay survivors in 2015 Paris. Makkai is cannily aware that Big Public Events – the ones that make it into history books – are often mere background noise to those living through them, and the Zeitgeist, when it’s on your radar at all, is seen through a haze of tensions with your family, uncertainty about your boyfriend, excitement about a project at work, and/or plans to have drinks with a friend. By its end, this Pulitzer Prize finalist offers a grand fusion of the past and the present, the public and the personal. It’s remarkably alive despite all the loss it encompasses. And it’s right on-target in addressing how the things that the world throws us often feel gratuitously out of step with the lives we think we’re leading.  “I hate that we have to live in the middle of history,” one character says late in the novel. “We make enough mess on our own.”

      “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean (Simon & Schuster). This glorious book by the author of “The Orchid Thief” takes as its starting point a 1986 fire that devastated the Los Angeles Public Library, before touching on all aspects of the library’s operation and history. Whether she’s recalling her earliest book-borrowing excursions with her mother or observing the library’s role in offering sanctuary to the homeless (“Every problem that society has, the library has, too”), Orlean keeps her focus on “the bigger puzzle the library is always seeking to assemble — the looping, unending story of who we are.” Along the way, she delivers a brisk history of the city of Los Angeles and serves up a steady stream of portraits of L.A. eccentrics past and present, including the aspiring actor and compulsive liar who may have been the arsonist behind the fire. 

      “The Overstory” by Richard Powers (Norton). Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel contrasts human time with arboreal time, pits human intelligence against plant-world ingenuity, and is by turns visionary, exhortatory and doom-stricken, as it asks what we’re doing to our planet. It’s too heady, too rhapsodic, too strange to be characterized as agitprop fiction. But it does have a sobering message. As one character puts it: “We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.” That strategy, Powers clearly believes, isn’t sustainable. Juggling the personal dramas of his far-flung cast with vigor and clarity, he evokes their progress over the decades from crusading passion to a muddled sense of regret and failure. But it’s the extra-human elements that are the novel’s most striking features, thanks to the extraordinary imaginative flights of Powers’ prose, which persuades you on the very first page that you’re hearing the voices of trees as they chide our species. “All the ways you imagine us,” they say, “are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.”

      “Strike Your Heart” by Amélie Nothomb, translated by Alison Anderson (Europa). Franco-Belgian writer Nothomb’s taut, compact novels (“Fear and Trembling,” “Life Form,” “Tokyo Fiancée”) are predictable in the best sense of the word: You can always count on her luring you into twisted territories of the heart with a steely comic verve. “Strike You Heart,” Nothomb at her best, charts the life of a young woman, Diane, who succeeds in the world as a cardiologist despite having been raised by a mother so riddled with jealousy of other women that she can only see her daughter as a rival. As she enters adult life, Diane seeks out friends and mentors where she can find them. The suspense of the book stems from whether the people who cross Diane path are really what they appear to be and whether Diane can hold onto her innately generous nature when key figures around her thoughtlessly let her down. Nothomb’s writing is sharp, even curt, and her eye for her characters’ psychological foibles is penetrating. 

      “Frankenstein in Baghdad” by Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright (Penguin). Four beggars who seem to have strangled each other simultaneously … A soul that doesn’t know how to return to a body that’s been blown to bits by a car bomb … A “Tracking and Pursuit Department” that uses occult methods to hunt down a serial killer on the loose. These are a few of the elements at play in Iraqi author Ahmed Saadawi’s fascinating novel, which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the Arab world’s equivalent to the Man Booker Prize. The novel takes the premise of Mary Shelley’s classic novel – a tortured being composed from various scraps of human bodies is brought to life – and transposes it to American-occupied Baghdad in 2005, where frequent suicide bombings supply no end of body parts. Striking a feverish balance between fantasy and hard realism, the novel concentrates on the concerns of ordinary Baghdadis as they try to make a living, find a decent place to live, and seek female companionship. Random bombings and scary encounters with American soldiers are so routine to them that some simply shrug them off. Roaming all over Baghad, the novel drops in on the lives of realtors, hoteliers, street vendors, café owners, journalists, photographers, neighborhood gossips, astrologers, fortune-tellers and the occasional djinn, delivering a vision of a war-mangled city that’s hard to forget.

       “The Maze at Windermere” by Gregory Blake Smith (Viking). Smith’s fifth novel is historical fiction unlike any I’ve ever read. Set in Newport, Rhode Island, it portrays the city in five different eras, from the 1690s (as seen through the eyes of a young orphaned Quaker woman uncertain what to do with the female slave she has inherited) through its picturesque present-day incarnation (where a washed-up golf pro falls for a quirky heiress suffering from cerebral palsy). Stops along the way include the British occupation during the Revolutionary War, where a malicious English aristocrat attempts to seduce a Jewish merchant’s daughter; the Civil War-era family retreat of a young Henry James, who’s reluctant to return the affections of a woman who fascinates him; and a Gilded Age playground for the rich, where a cash-short gay dandy is trying to marry for money. Each narrative voice Smith invents is pitch-perfect, and the book offers huge formal pleasures as he peels back successions of communities like archaeological layers, connecting their inhabitants in ways that they don’t necessarily register.

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