In a typical year, in this space, Washington Examiner readers would find a symposium from editors and contributors to this magazine, recommending some of the best books of the year or perhaps some old favorites to pick up for the occasion. This year, I am exercising a prerogative that a books section editor should only use a couple of times in a career to do something a little different: I am just going to tell you what book you need to get. It’s a short novel called Whole by Derek Updegraff, published by a tiny conservative press called Slant Books, and it is the most astonishingly good piece of new fiction writing I have encountered in years.

I picked it up at random two months ago, expecting very little from it. Eleven pages in, I started reading paragraphs out loud to my wife, almost alarmed that maybe my critical faculties had failed me. Uhh, is this as good as I think it is? I kept asking. Keep reading, she kept saying. Then I gave it to a visiting friend, who meant to read just a few chapters but stayed up and read it in one night.

Whole follows the not hugely eventful travels of a guy living in California’s Inland Empire as he lives his life, drives around, works his job making sandwiches, and desperately hopes things work out with the girl he’s dating, an adjunct at a local Christian college. He’s an underemployed slacker, in other words, which gives the book its Big Lebowski feel, with maybe a dash of Confederacy of Dunces. Only he’s not a bum, nor is he a grandiloquent narcissist. He’s a thoughtful guy, trying to be fundamentally decent and ordinary despite having every reason to dissolve in the bitterness and shyness some tough breaks in childhood seeded in him. Fatally, as the story begins, he accidentally strikes a homeless man with his car. What happens from there has no obvious shape or plot as such, only the feel of hearing about a few months of someone’s life as he tells the story of trying not to fray while he tries to pull himself together. Yet there is a careful, morally thoughtful thrust to everything that happens in the book’s 140 pages that pays off tremendously.