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Do you ever find yourself looking for some good fiction to read? We know it when we read it, don’t we? The barriers dissolve. It draws us right in. Here is my favorite fiction from 2009:
“American Rust” by Philipp Meyer (Spiegel & Grau, 367 pages, $24.95): The steel mill shut down long ago in a decaying river town in Pennsylvania. Two friends wander into an abandoned building. They encounter strangers. A random act of violence occurs. Innocence fractures. Meyer forges a magical story, part crime novel, part road novel. These two young men are hurled upon dire trajectories. One runs off. The other ends up in prison.
Poe, the character who is headed to prison, ponders the unreality of it all: “I am giving up my life, he said out loud. But still the words brought nothing to his mind, no description, only a very faint feeling, he might have been saying I would like a glass of milk.”
“Ravens” by George Dawes Green (Grand Central, 325 pages, $24.99): Two young men from Piqua get burned out on their jobs providing technical support for computer users in the Dayton area. They head south with the dream of joining a fishing crew in Key West. Then their junker car breaks down in Georgia.
They pull over at a filling station and one of them catches wind of a huge lottery windfall that has just been won. He hatches a plot to extort some of that money from the family that has hit the jackpot. “Ravens” is a dark farce that takes readers on a roller coaster ride of lottery fantasies that don’t always turn out for the best.
“Rain Gods” by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster, 434 pages, $25.99): How does James Lee Burke do it? He has been putting out exceptional novels for decades and they just keep getting better.
His latest, “Rain Gods,” dredges up a character who Burke hasn’t written about in years. Hackberry Holland is the sheriff of a little Texas town on the Mexican border. As the book opens he has happened upon a grisly crime scene. The perpetrator of this horrific crime is the nastiest villain Burke has ever imagined. One key witness, an Iraq War vet, flees the scene. In an interview Burke described the state of this veteran’s mind after he returned from Iraq: “he comes home with a head full of snakes.”
“Love and Obstacles” by Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead, 210 pages, $25.95): Hemon’s book “The Lazarus Project,” was one of my favorite books from 2008. This new collection of short stories was written during the same period that he was writing that other book.
The author is a native of Bosnia. His stories take readers through some odd locales — to an embassy in Africa, on a train trip across Yugoslavia to buy a freezer, the icy streets of Madison, Wisc., and selling magazine subscriptions door to door in Chicago. These stories dazzled me with their wry humor and glittering language.
Next week I’ll have my favorite non-fiction from 2009.
And on further reflection I am realizing that there are four more compelling reasons why I chose these four books as my favorites; I interviewed all four authors - and for me that caused a more significant engagement with these works of fiction. There’s nothing quite like talking to writers about the creative process that nourishes the wellsprings of their writerly muses.
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 12/21/09; 11:06:57 PM
from the dept.
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