I missed out on some of 2016’s biggest books, but still read a lot of wonderful books. My favorites all did a lot of veering from present to past and back again.
Here they are:
As I began this novel, I was skeptical: another satirical portrait of a failed writer who’s stuck teaching English to moronic college students, another heartless skewering of our social-media- and online-gaming-obsessed culture. But this book turned out to have a ton of warmth and heart (as well as a ton of pages, more than 600). The story runs through many threads and characters, and it zips back and forth in time, back to the 80s, the 60s, and the 30s, but the two main POV characters are Samuel, the sad failed writer, and Faye, Samuel’s mother, who abandons Samuel when he’s just a kid. The heart of the book is Samuel’s search to understand why his mom left him all those years ago, and what happened to her in her youth and later in life. I admired but didn’t love Hill’s long, almost stream-of-consciousness passages to get us into a character’s head or to set a scene, decade- and culture-wise. Hill plots like a wizard, bringing threads together in an improbable yet completely plausible way. And he makes us care for Samuel and Faye, and to happily stick with them for all those pages.
In this memoir, novelist Hisham Matar tells how his father, an exiled Libyan who fought to end Muamar Qaddafi’s regime, was kidnapped by Qaddafi agents and held for decades in a notorious Libyan prison. Matar, also a longtime expat, returns to Libya in his forties to find out what happened to his father. There he reconnects with extended family, some of whom are involved in the more recent Libyan uprising. It’s a bleak and terrifying story, but also gorgeous and delicate in its portrayals of family, of exile, and of Libya itself. It’s one that stayed with me and kept me thinking about it for a long time. (I reviewed this memoir for BookPage: here’s the link.)
MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, Elizabeth Strout
A spare, brief, beautiful novel from Elizabeth Strout. The narrator, Lucy Barton, remembers her time in the hospital many years before, during which her mother comes and stays with her. Strout delves into some of the same themes she explored in previous novels, like poverty, depression, loneliness, and the power of brief moments of connection. Lucy Barton is a writer, and her efforts to learn to write inform her ability to observe, but this is a novel about a writer unlike any other that I’ve encountered.
Another amazing novel from Patchett, a two-family story, the long aftermath of divorce and remarriage. The novel opens in the early 70s, on the hot afternoon an affair begins, and its chapters go back and forth in time, and from character to character. It’s a fairly short and spare novel, yet Patchett covers a remarkable amount of ground with these two families, the siblings and step-siblings. She is a master plotter, and the surprise she reveals late in the novel is subtle, but devastating.
I love Hadley’s short stories, reminiscent of Alice Munro. The Past (which I think came out at the end of 2015 rather than 2016) unfolds over a few weeks as four grown siblings gather at their old country house, originally the home of their grandparents. Plenty of family dynamics here: three fractious sisters, all perceiving themselves as failures of one sort or another, and their brother Roland, who arrives with his sleek foreign wife and his teenage son. The present alternates with the past, dropping back to the late 60s, when the siblings’ mother leaves her philandering, jackass husband and returns to her parents’ house with her little children. It’s a quiet but intense novel, with some wonderful character studies, and evocative descriptions of the house, the overgrown wilderness around it, and the nearby towns.