Fiction finds itself in a curious position in 2017, when the favored form of disparagement is to accuse opponents of peddling fake news. But fake news is a nearly perfect characterization of a good novel or short story, and fiction writers have proudly refined its production to an extent that makes pundits and politicians look like pikers. Art, said Picasso, is a lie that makes us realize truth, and here are some of the books in which the lies are most seamlessly spun and the truths most profound.
The collection Bad Dreams and Other Stories is deceptive in the way of all Tessa Hadley’s books. Like her forerunners Barbara Pym and Anita Brookner, Hadley is often pooh-poohed as an anodyne writer of dowdy drawing room mini-dramas. But accompanying her domestic settings is a dark and unnerving understanding of human nature, especially concerning the enigmas of girlhood. The stories here are all smiles until the moment they slide in the shiv.
In Who Killed Piet Barol? Richard Mason continues the adventures of the titular Barol, fiction’s most likable libertine since George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman. Mason’s intricate, sensually told tale is an homage to the delights of the bedroom and dinner table, but it’s also a bracing and informed portrait of South Africa in the early 20th century. You don’t need to have read the previous Barol book, The History of a Pleasure Seeker, to enjoy this one, but odds are that if you haven’t you’ll want to.
The disputes roiling college campuses get their first serious dramatization in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Devil and Webster, set in a small New England college whose quad has been taken over by outraged student protesters. Korelitz takes on the third-rail subjects of racism and censorship, but her touch is so light and humorous, and her plotting so adroit, that the story never descends into political spleen.
In a year teeming with imagined dystopias, none was flat-out weirder than Tomoyuki Hoshino’s ME, in which a shiftless Japanese bachelor discovers that hundreds of his clones—in spirit if not likeness—are living throughout the city, swapping identities. An eerie exploration of the comforts and terrors of conformity, ME is part parable, part nightmare, part slapstick comedy, and part something I’m not sure has any label at all.
The opposite ends of family life are beautifully depicted in Kristen Iskandrian’s Motherest and Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break. Iskandrian’s debut, about a reclusive college freshman who stumbles into motherhood long before she’s ready, transmutes the usual material of millennial despair into a story of bravery and hope. Midwinter Break relates the Amsterdam vacation of a long-married, retired couple wondering whether to continue living together or risk their last years alone and on their own terms. MacLaverty, at 75 years old, writes with the tempered poetry of a man who has seen everything of the world and is still in love with it.
Hearteningly, today’s novelists have continued to draw inspiration from the Greek myths. Brian Van Reet’s intense and multifaceted Iraq war novel Spoils updates the legend of Cassandra, while Jesmyn Ward evokes the Odyssey in Sing, Unburied, Sing, her emotionally charged road-trip novel through a Mississippi crowded with historical ghosts. Colm Tóibín’s House of Names imposes an almost otherworldly detachment on its retelling of the keening, blood-drenched story of Clytemnestra. The conversations these books hold with the ancient texts invite the best kind of readerly engagement, so that even their missteps are fascinating.
Jarett Kobek’s novel The Future Won’t Be Long turns back to the more recent mythological age of pre-Giuliani Manhattan. The East Village squats, the underground club scene, the drugs, the expensively tailored nihilism, Bret Easton Ellis: It’s all here, rendered with just the right mixture of nostalgia and disdain. Kobek carries his story through the years with propulsive speed, and his interest is less with the gaudy touchstones of the era than with a central friendship that survives even the most self-destructive fads.
Bradford Morrow stages an academic mystery with real historical sweep in The Prague Sonata, which follows a musicologist’s quest to restore the movements of a beguiling classical composition that was broken up and hidden from the Nazis during World War II. And with Forest Dark Nicole Krauss serves up her own intellectual confection, imagining an alternate reality in which Kafka survived his tuberculosis, emigrated to Israel, and left behind a pile of unpublished writing. Morrow’s novel is plotted and scored like a golden-age film, and its triumphant ending will rouse you to applause. Krauss’s book, fittingly for a Kafka tribute, is more mysterious and circular, sending you back for careful rereadings.
How to describe the experience of reading the stories in Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The World Goes On? Their long, whirlpooling sentences enfold you like a Gregorian chant or a Steve Reich composition. Their relentless progression toward epiphany is reminiscent of some newly excavated Gnostic gospel. But whatever likeness you think of for these vignettes and snatches of memory, they are undeniably the work of a visionary whose art exists only on the poles of the sacred and the profane.
Finally, for pure sentence-level beauty it’s hard to top All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan, the Irish writer with the best claim to the mantle passed down from the master stylist John McGahern and, before him, Frank O’Connor. This compact story, about the saving friendship of two outcast women, blends Ryan’s delicate gifts for description with the colorful speech of the Irish countryside to generate a music of irresistible complexity and grace.
Sam Sacks writes the Fiction Chronicle for the Wall Street Journal and is a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly.
