The ten novels on this list all substantiate the belief that books are
the most elastic, introspective, human and entertaining form of media
that exist. Not movies, not music, not art, not the theatre. A famous
author once said that novels are the best way for two human beings to
connect with each other. I believe this, and I believe that people who
do not find pleasure in words have never had the opportunity to read one
of the great novels. The first introductions students often have to
literature are stale century-old books that do not translate well to
this new modern era. Frankly they are boring, and a lot of kids drift
into the living room and turn on the television and stay glued for the
rest of their lives. So, here I will present the ten greatest novels of
the last twenty years, without apologies.
10. Music for Torching
First Sentence: ”It is after midnight on one of
those Friday nights when the guests have all gone home and the host and
hostess are left in their drunkenness to try and put things right
again.”
As the only woman on the list, A. M. Homes deserves recognition for
her amazing writing skills, her unique voice and her gloomy view of the
world. Homes shines when writing about screwed-up, out-of-love or on the
brink of out-of-love couples. Torching is no exception. The married
couple, Paul and Elaine, first appeared in a short story in The Safety
of Objects, and then took on a life of their own. Married in suburbia,
with two young boys, we follow them in their search for happiness, or
some form of contentment, which they never seem to find. Smoking crack
in the dining room, having affairs, trying to burn down their own
house…nothing seems to change their boredom and disappointment. They’re
stuck. They’ve become strangers to each other, to themselves, to their
children.
Homes makes this common enough theme of suburban ennui feel real with
her shining prose, a secondary cast of interesting plots and
characters, and lack of a fairy-tale ending.
9. Fight Club
First Sentence: “Tyler gets me a job as a waiter,
after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step
to eternal life is you have to die.”
Of course, Palahniuk had to be on this list. And while he may have
written better novels than Fight Club (see Survivor), this is the one
that brought him to the show and inspired a new, fed-up generation to
push back. I won’t insult you by giving a summary of the plot, but I
will say that nobody in the world writes better, sentence to sentence,
than Palahniuk. His quick, intelligent prose keeps the attention of the
worst ADHD-sufferers, and the themes in Fight Club of revolt, of going
back to zero, of anti-consumerism are universal, accessible and
desperately needed in the world we live in today.
8. House of Leaves
First Sentence: ”While enthusiasts and detractors
will continue to empty entire dictionaries attempting to describe or
deride it, “authenticity” still remains the word most likely to stir a
debate.”
Words to describe this novel: Dazzling, original, mind-bending,
genius, heart-breaking, addicting, wonderful, jaw-dropping. The list
goes on and on and on. No other novel has created its own world quite
like Leaves. Danielewski made us question our own sanity. He led us
through the 3-and-a-half-minute hallway and then left us there,
shivering and alone, waiting for the monster, who we’ve only ever felt,
but that we know (for certain for certain) is the most terrifying thing
in the world.
The main plot follows a family who moves into a new house that they
quickly find out is haunted. Sounds simple and cliché right? Imagine
if you will a book that you have to take over to your mirror to read
passages written backwards. Imagine twenty-two page rants about the
origins of the word echo. Imagine endless footnotes dripping with blood
and perfectly normal characters slowing getting drawn deeper and deeper
into neurosis and insanity until they can’t find their way out, until
you can’t tell the characters in the book from the people reading it.
Imagine.
The house is alive. It breathes. Don’t go any further. Forget you
ever read this. Go on with your life, and move down the list. Do NOT
read this book. You’ve been warned.
7. We Don’t Live Here Anymore
Dubus is considered by many the greatest short story writer of the
20th century, and there is fairness in this claim. This book consists
of three novellas, woven together and taken from earlier Dubus
publications. It is also a wonderful movie starring the enigmatic Laura
Dern and Naomi Watts. It’s about two middle-aged couples who can’t
seem to keep their pants on. Affairs are had, feelings crushed,
epiphanies thwarted, friendships tested.
But what makes this one of the great books is the “realness” it
elicits from the reader. It puts the reader in every character’s mind,
and it puts us right there in the bedroom, in the woods, or on the back
porch. Not only does “We Don’t Live Here” entertain us, it gives us a
rubric of how to live our own lives. Shows us that nobody ever has
anything figured out, not really. That what we do and feel morphs and
shifts. Shows us what to do when everything we’ve held on to for so
long goes away, how to bear it. It’s about desperation, and love, and
marriage. It’s about paralyzing loneliness, kids, and housewives, and
betrayal. Ultimately it’s about what it’s like to live in a world where
we get to make all the decisions, and have to bear the repercussions of
what those decisions mean. It does what a great book is supposed to
do: it makes us feel.
6. The Road
First Sentence: “When he woke in the woods in the dark and cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.”
Cormac McCarthy is one of the greatest novelists still alive today (a
phantasm of Faulker), and his newest book, The Road, clearly
exemplifies this claim. It’s full of McCarthy’s terse dialogue, minute
detail (but not TOO much, like Blood Meridian) stream-of-consciousness,
masculinity, and an excruciatingly intense violent plot (win!). Not to
mention that, in addition to all of these things, it’s also
overwhelmingly sad, which is not an easy thing for a novel to be. It’s
the perfect combination of everything, with exact measurements dolled
out like a recipe for brownies.
It’s about a father and a son walking south to Mexico, to find warmth
in a post-apocalyptic world, whose journey is beset on all sides by
cannibals, and hunger, and the freezing cold. The sun is gone behind
clouds of black dust, and the only light comes from the father’s love of
his son. Without each other, all will be lost. This book is
heart-wrenching, desperate and mesmerizing. The intensity of their
journey, of the book itself, is indescribable, so I won’t even try. Let
me just say that I was literally in tears in the middle of a crowded
Barnes and Nobles, trying to pretend like there was something in my
eyes. You will not be able to breathe until you finish it. It’s a fast
read, because you have to see have to see have to see what happens
next.
5. Rules of Attraction
First Sentence: “And it’s a story that might bore
you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew
it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or
actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this
was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in
bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin’s room,
because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, she
remembers, a Senior or a Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend’s
place off-campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but
who was actually either some guy from N.Y.U., a film student, and up in
New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie.”
This is the second novel from Ellis, of American Psycho fame. It
doesn’t depart much from the style (run-on sentences, sex, drugs, 80’s
MTV music videos, more drugs, more sex, some violence thrown in there)
of his other works, except that here it works throughout the whole book.
Here he gives us a little more to work with, like allusions (Howard
Roark!), different narrators, a setting that’s not L.A, and a
semi-coherent plot. His talent is endless and the sentences run on
seamlessly until you’re almost disappointed when a sentence actually
ends. Nobody in the world can write like Ellis, though many have tried,
and failed miserably. Yes, Ellis is a deranged person (has to be), but
he’s also a prolific, talented writer whose put his time in. And here
he shines.
It’s about sex and drugs and horrible, self-absorbed, incomplete
people, trying to get laid and quit smoking in a fictional University in
New England. The things they do are despicable and immoral. There’s
nothing redeeming about any of the characters in the entire book, no
hope, and yet this book stings because nobody could write this well
about people like this if they did not, in fact, exist in real life.
When’s the last time you went to college? What do you think happens in
Universities around America? What do you think most people are really
like? This is a documentary of lost, attractive young people falling
into the void. And nobody cares and nobody cares and nobody cares.
4. Strong Motion
First Sentence: “Sometimes when people asked Eileen Holland if she had any brothers or sisters, she had to think for a moment.”
Another second novel. As always Franzen’s scope is immense, and his
talent is clear on every page. If Palanuick is the very best writer,
sentence to sentence, then Franzen is clearly the best living novelist.
This story involves one Louis Holland, and a Harvard seismologist named
Dr. Reneé Seitchek, and it revolves around abortion activists, big
corporations, and strange sudden earthquakes appearing near Boston,
which every Harvard seismologist knows is very strange indeed. It
writes about the evil of corporations, but in a stronger, more mature
way than Palanuick. Franzen is a historian, and he tells us exactly why
the world is bad, how it came to be that way. He goes all the way back
to the colonization of America, but not in a preachy or boring way. He
personifies a raccoon for five pages, which is strangely one of the
most poignant parts of the whole book.
The two main characters are what make the book. The
medium-attractive Renee’ Seitchek and the lonely, lost Louis Holland,
who fall for each other but seemingly never at the same time, and have
painful rubbing sex as the earth shakes underneath them.
Franzen is a master and a genius; he builds and constructs. He
creates suspense, and makes us wait for whatever’s going to happen. He
makes us work for it. As with the #1 author on this list, you can
imagine him standing behind a door somewhere laughing at all of his
readers. He’s smarter than us, and God can the man write. This novel
succeeds where The Twenty-seventh City fell a little short, and The
Corrections overthrew.
3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
First Sentence: “They say it came first from Africa,
carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of
the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that
it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was
cracked open in the Antilles.”
This book reverberates with originality, authenticity and
craftsmanship. It follows generations of a Dominican-American family,
the struggles they encounter in the Dominican Republic, and the curses
that follow them to America. The main protagonist Oscar is a 300-pound
nerdy, RPG-playing guy in America, who desperately wants to find love.
We follow him in his constant struggle to find it, and bear witness to
his countless rejections. No girl wants anything to do with this
sweaty, obese nerd, and at some point our pity turns to admiration, as
we root for him to succeed, screaming “You can do it Oscar. You can do
it!”
Now go back a few decades to when his mother was the hottest thing in
all of Dominica, and broke guy’s hearts by just batting an eyelash.
Who eventually falls for a gangster (Why Beli, why?) involved with the
Trujillo (evil dictator) regime that raped and murdered and tortured
like it was going out of style. Then go back a little more to her father
(Oscar’s grandfather) and see what happens to a respected surgeon who’s
looked away from all the raping and torturing going on in his country
until Trujillo himself sets his eyes on his beautiful daughter. Then
you might just believe that there really are “fuku’s” (horrible
unbreakable curses) and that this family’s got a BAD one
.
Diaz blends Dominican history and folklore, humor, love, sex, death,
revolutions, Castro, and dictators into one of the best freshman novels
of all time. He employs current pop references, historical footnotes, a
bad-ass original refreshing writing style, a mysterious narrator,
Spanish, a blazing humor, age-old plot devices, and one of the most
heart-breaking characters in existence to make this an instant classic.
2. Tree of Smoke
First Sentence: “Last night at 3:00 A.M. President Kennedy had been killed.”
This mammoth odyssey about the Vietnam War transcends all other
attempts to write about Vietnam, and makes them look like Hallmark
greeting cards. It follows Skip Sands, working for the psychological
operations department of the CIA, and his larger than life uncle
“Colonel Sands”. It takes us everywhere in Southeast Asia, and even
back to the United States. Johnson depicts a war where nothing is
clear, where friends and enemies are indistinguishable, and where myths
are created out of the land itself.
With a cast of half-a-dozen supporting characters, he portrays the
war from the perspective of both sides of Vietnam, from two G.I.
brothers from Arizona (who appeared in Johnson’s Angels), from a widowed
Canadian nurse who can’t stop reading Calvin, from a Sergeant who seems
to be perpetually tripping on acid, from a German hit-man, from a
priest in the Philippines who thinks he’s Judas, from a “civilian”
war-hero Colonel who’s trying to implement his own unorthodox campaign
against the Vietcong.
Spanning thirty years, and over 700 pages, it’s still a
disappointment when you arrive at the last page. This is Johnson’s
masterpiece – a book you can imagine him writing under a succubus’s
spell in a fallout shelter—hair long, unshaven, chain-smoking, frenzied
to get the words out.
1. Infinite Jest
First Sentence: “I am seated in an office surrounded by heads and bodies.”
So here we are. While it was very difficult indeed to rank the other
nine books on this list, deciding where to put this book on the list
was as involuntary as breathing. This is by far the best, the longest,
the most difficult, the most frustrating, the most entertaining, the
most rewarding book on this list.
The term Infinite Jest is an allusion to Hamlet, as well as the title
of a film by auteur Jim Incandenza, that circulates throughout the book
causing anyone who’s unlucky enough to watch it, to want to do
absolutely nothing else but watch it again and again and again, even if
that means starving to death, or going to the bathroom on themselves, or
not taking their insulin and going into epileptic shock. Ultimately,
this book is about addiction in every form you could possibly imagine:
Heroin, alcohol, cannabis, crack, cocaine, Diludiad, Percocet, sex,
sports, cleaning, and on and on and on.
With a cast of hundreds, and almost 400 footnotes, coming in at a
whopping 3 lbs, Jest focuses mainly on a halfway house in the Boston
suburbs, and the adjacent Enfield Tennis Academy. Wallace spent hundreds
of hours going to AA meetings, and this book is considered by many to
be the most realistic account of drug addiction and the Alcoholics
Anonymous program in either fiction or non-fiction.
Wallace created his own world in Infinite Jest. This is not just a
big novel with big ideas. It’s not just a grand achievement by a writer
with the greatest voice of his generation. This is not something you
finish and then say, “Well that was a really great book,” and then move
on with your life. This book deserves its own cannon. It cannot be
categorized. This book genuinely redefines the boundaries of what a
novel can do.
Wallace hung himself in late 2008. Infinite Jest is his second, and last, finished novel.
The ways we try to improve ourselves may range from minor external
changes, such as a new suit or a new look, to more serious internal
changes, as we try to improve our outlook on life or our ability to
interact with other people.
