CHICAGO — Imagine a holiday party, attended only by books. If it helps, give them little arms and legs. That’s the way to think about the best books of the year. You’ve invited a bunch of books that you can’t get out of your head to a Christmas blowout, and there were so many, it’s crowded and loud. Some guests are wild and drunk off their asses; some are formal; some are thick and popular. A few guests corner you and insist that you love them; they chew up more time than you like. You glance past them, you scan the room.
You spot themes. You notice our future squashed tightly against our past — and everyone mingling with our nervous present. You see many good books on climate change. You see history and 2023 huddled in a heated conversation that never ends.
Anyway, that’s what I see.
And by the end of the night, when I’ve kicked everyone out, 10 books linger. Actually, 12; unable to help myself, I asked three titles, seemingly conjoined, to stay. I would like to ask more to hang back, but this is the after-party, and soon the sun will rise on 2024.
So, in no particular order, the best of 2023:
- “Biography of X” by Catherine Lacey: Without explicitly crafting an epic recipe for America circa 2023, Lacey — a former Southern transplant who recently left her adopted Chicago home — bottles the real political and cultural histories of the 20th century, then blurs them into fictional pasts, reimagining a country still trying to crawl past its contradictions and animosities. “X” is a fictional multidisciplinary artist who worked alongside Tom Waits and Christopher Walken, hung with Annie Leibovitz, emulated Cindy Sherman and Bowie. A year after her death, her wife, a writer, begins the definitive biography of the famous spouse. Except basic details, like real names and birthplaces, are not easily found in a nation that, after World War II, split into three states — one liberal, one religious, one libertarian. Lacey’s author delivers a history that footnotes writers who exist and articles that don’t, yet, ambitious as this sounds, it blends effortlessly into hard, brittle truths about people and countries: Some things, we read, are “too complicated to sit still inside a narrative.”
- “The Fraud” by Zadie Smith: A new Zadie Smith novel is an event for the same reason her literary influences — particularly Martin Amis, who died in May — made headlines in another age: They took our temperature, several hundred pages a pop. So what are we to make of a historical novel by Smith? The same. She makes no overt nods to 2023 or well-known frauds in our midst. She doesn’t have to. Inspired by a 19th century trial that transfixed London, she tells the story of an Australian butcher who claimed to be heir to a fortune, was shown consistently to be lying, but, despite the unlikeliness of his claim, won fans for his sheer shamelessness. The butcher is defended by a man prone to “whining, ranting, swearing, sermonizing,” followed obsessively by a housekeeper (Smith’s main character), and impacted by the testimony of a former slave. There’s money, sex, the Catholic Church, hypocrisy. Charles Dickens makes a walk-on. Mrs. Touchet, the housekeeper, is a marvel of the past informing the present: She doesn’t buy the butcher’s story, but being a clever writer herself whose talents will be wasted in a culture that can’t abide a clever woman writer, she knows a terrific story when she hears one.
- “Small Mercies” by Dennis Lehane: Employing the violence and racism of Boston’s school-busing protests in the 1970s as a thoughtful backdrop for his latest crime novel, Lehane — best known for New England-set mysteries such as “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island” — returns to ferocious form. Mary Pat, his protagonist, an even-more hardened Frances McDormand of sorts, is at first a familiar Southie archetype — proud, tribal, defensive, reflectively racist. But then her daughter disappears, a Black teenager turns up dead, and, with harrowing headlong pace and a pitiless eye on claustrophobic neighborhood enclaves, Lehane digs into the moral corrosion (and exploitation) of unexamined lives built on a mirage of assumptions.
- “Chain-Gang All-Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: Ever feel so unsettled by a novel that, as you look up from the last page, your world lands differently? Adjei-Brenyah, one of our finest young story writers, delivered a first novel as thrilling as it was questioning of those same thrills. Set in a dystopian America where the mass incarcerated fight for parole in televised gladiator rings (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment), it follows two superstar “Links” — Loretta and Hamara — facing the end of their relationship on- and off-camera. One, about to be released, does not want to leave quietly, with fellow Links in a violent limbo. Adjei-Brenyah leaps from prisoners to protesters, to corporations that privatize the whole show, to, pointedly, the reader: The exciting battles put you in a ringside seat and it’s hard to sit on your hands.
- James Kennedy’s “Bride of the Tornado,” Daniel Kraus’ “Whalefall” and Victor LaValle’s “Lone Women”: None of these wonderful, improbable novels should work. Even by the fantastical standards of surrealism (Kennedy), adventure (Kraus) and horror (LaValle). Yet they sing — like intoxicated karaoke performances so bracing, you sit up straighter with each heartfelt moment. Kennedy, a sometime young-adult novelist from Chicago, tells the story of a resourceful teenager in a Midwest town hemmed in by sentient tornadoes; its dream logic unfolds into an epic, bound up in a simple tale of leaving home. LaValle, arguably the best new horror writer in decades, centers on Adelaide Henry, a Black homesteader alone in 1915 Montana, settling free land promised by the government; her burden, and security, is barely contained in the mysterious steam trunk she drags behind. Kraus, an Evanston resident and fixture of Chicago’s lit scene, writes about a diver still struggling with his father’s death when, whoops, he’s trapped inside a 60-ton whale. Each succeeds wildly by suggesting that genre — particularly, metaphor, parable and illogic — has become the only true reporting now in a world that makes little sense.
- “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” by Claire Dederer: If there’s ever a book to throw across a room, retrieve, continue reading (then repeat), here you go. Someone had to write the best book yet on great art by bad people. Dederer, a Seattle-based memoirist, resists becoming a pious moral calculator — can I still watch “Annie Hall” if I follow with two movies by silenced directors as penance? She lets no one off the hook, especially herself. Instead, with wit, grace and nuance rare to this cultural thorn bush, she tick-tocks through the expected (Polanski, Picasso) and less expected (Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis), tussling with real-life contradictions and ambivalence located far from loud polemics. How do retain who you are when artists who shaped you now unsettle you? The glory here is not in a step-by-step how-to but in gray zones most of us reside in.
- “Motherland” by Paula Ramón: If the sheer flood lately of sad, seemingly intractable stories of Venezuelans settling in Chicago and elsewhere have taken on a predictably impersonal, monolithic tone, here is a small miracle of context: Ramón, a Venezuelan journalist living now in Los Angeles, traces the economic, political and moral rot of a country falling to authoritarianism, bit by bit then all at once. She does this in plainly stated prose, tracing the story of her own family. It’s less a tale of immigration than a window into what it means, day to day, to live in a place where supermarkets go spare, electrical grids collapse and aging parents stay behind and become, for their transplanted children, far-off voices on a telephone.
- “King” by Jonathan Eig: At times, reading the Lakeview-based biographer’s monumental history of the civil rights activist — the first game-changing Martin Luther King, Jr. portrait in decades — you seem to experience pivotal moments of American history in near-real time. His assassination, in particular, races across with the pulse of a thriller. (No wonder Steven Spielberg bought the screen rights to the book, for Chris Rock to direct as a feature.) Eig talked to everyone still alive who knew the man, weaves in FBI reports and revelatory unpublished accounts, and warns readers his King “may trouble some people.” But that’s only because Eig’s instant classic gives us a theatrical King, a depressed King, a lecherous King, a thoughtful King, a committed King who, like most historical figures, seem distantly related to the stamp, statue or holiday we celebrate.
- “The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial” by David Lipsky: In a year bursting with major reporting about the fragile environment — Gary J. Bass’s “Bathysphere Book,” John Vaillant’s “Fire Weather,” Jake Bittle’s “Great Displacement” — Lipsky, a longtime magazine scribe, delivers a fresh, infuriating epic using the cultural, technological and political roots of why climate disasters are so routinely dismissed as business as usual. Lipsky, best known as the journalist whose travels with David Foster Wallace became the film “The End of the Tour” (he was played by Jesse Eisenberg), chews off a lot, ambitiously going as far back as inventors (Tesla, Edison) who created industry. Then he relays through character sketches and turning points a history that reframes why the difficulty in explaining climate science to the public eventually became the bad-faith campaigns of the charlatans and self-interests who benefited from doing nothing. He writes entertainingly, with a snap that makes no bones: He wants this story as absorbing and approachable as a Netflix binge. Our future, he argues, depends on it.
- “The Deadline” by Jill Lepore: What appears to be a 600-page clearinghouse from the Harvard professor and New Yorker staffer’s past decade of writing — a period in which she became our best resource of historical context — gathers steam into a generalist’s clarifying profile of a country and its concerns. We get changing views of the Second Amendment, but also a startling snapshot of copyright infringement (as seen through lawsuits about Barbie and Bratz dolls). There’s barely an issue — distorted facts, sexual predators, police violence, Supreme Court appointments, disruptive tech — Lepore doesn’t lend a fascinating frame that draws out a longview continuity between past and right now, “a time that felt like a time,” she argues.
