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Four Overlooked Books of 2009
Taylor Antrim picks the best fiction ignored by The New York Times—can’t-put-down books about sex and baseball, class bias, lust on the farm, and drug-addicted misfits.
With space for book reviews in newspapers and magazines shrinking ever closer to zilch, odds are depressingly high that worthy novels and books of short stories will slip through unnoticed. That’s the theory, anyway. Believe it or not, there are still a few paid book editors around—at least enough to field a softball team—whose job it is to read widely, to winnow down the published field, and allot space to the most interesting books of the day. The optimist in me wants to say: Pick up any major newspaper—despite dwindling book coverage, it’s probably reviewing more fiction than you can keep up with.
And what if that newspaper is The New York Times? All things being relative, the Times is still a book-review bonanza. Between the Sunday section and the daily reviews, the Times assesses half a dozen or so works of fiction every week. A selective list of more than 300 novels and short-story collections every year? Surely that covers the bases.
Robert Boswell has impressive range: With “Skin Deep” he’s given us what has to be the most erotic two-page story ever written.
Well, I wonder. Maybe I’m too optimistic. An experiment seemed in order: I stacked up 10 novels and collections published within the last four months that The New York Times has (so far) ignored—and started reading. If I wasn’t hooked by page 50, I set the book aside and moved on. Two weeks later, I have my list: four first-rate books, at least one of them (The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards) as good as any I’ve read in recent memory.
The Slide. By Kyle Beachy 304 pages. The Dial Press, $13.
The Slide. Why was this book published in January? Kyle Beachy’s first novel is soaked in the humid atmospherics of summer. College graduate Potter Mays comes home in June to St. Louis, to his parents’ disintegrating marriage, to an untrustworthy best friend, and to a hell of a lot of loneliness. Mays gets a minimum-wage job and tutors the sexy (and underage) girl next door—it’s familiar material, the disorientation of being a young man in between stages of his life. But Beachy has a distinct and very funny voice, and the book’s mood of confused longing sticks with you. The Slide is about heat, baseball, chasing a girl, and making a lot of mistakes, but maybe just maybe living to tell the story. It’s affecting and a little bit strange—and when I was done I vowed to read whatever Beachy writes next.
Security. By Stephen Amidon 288 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25.
Security. I’d never read Stephen Amidon before, but I wasn’t surprised to see—once his new novel had gripped me—that the guy’s a seasoned pro. Security (published in February) is Amidon’s seventh novel, a lean, meticulously observed story of a small college town. It races along from the first page: The head of a home-security company receives an alarm from a rich client’s house late at night and drives out to investigate. Meanwhile, the writing instructor at the local college is sleeping with his student, and an alcoholic electrician may or may not have exposed himself to a young girl in town. When there is a sexual assault, it’s not clear who is the culprit. Amidon has a lightly satiric touch that recalls Tom Perrotta, and he deftly reminds us how class bias and gossip can roil the placid surface of a quiet, prosperous town. The novel is crowded with incident, but the pacing is brisk and the intersections of the characters artfully handled. Stuck on a stalled train last week, I sank into Security and the hours whizzed painlessly by.
All the Living. By C.E. Morgan 208 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $23.
All the Living. Here’s a moving and graceful first novel that seems built out of almost nothing: A young woman lives on a Kentucky tobacco farm with a man she’s sleeping with, but not sure she loves. Passing the time playing the piano at a nearby church, Aloma is drawn to a handsome preacher, and must choose between them. Typically an impatient reader, I found myself settling easily into this book’s measured, meditative pace. Morgan (whose writing reminded me of the recent Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout) is refreshingly frank about Aloma’s youthful selfishness, her sexual need, but she also composes complex and vivid portraits of the rural landscape. The future looks bleak for Aloma, but lo and behold the novel offers a quietly hopeful ending.
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards. By Robert Boswell 288 pages. Graywolf Press. $24
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards. Boswell’s collection, his eighth book of fiction, came out less than a month ago, so it’s possible the Times will give it some recognition. I hope so—though the chances feel slim. This is a story collection after all, published by a small press, about ordinary people faced with ordinary hardships. It also happens to be the best book of fiction I’ve read in a long time. Boswell teaches writing at several MFA programs, but his stories are anything but “well-made.” They have an appealing unruliness, a wicked, almost sociopathic air. Boswell refuses to judge his misfit characters and relates devastating cruelties as simple facts of life; it’s an even-handedness that becomes unsettling in the powerhouse title story, when two members of a house full of drug addicts lazily kill one of their own. Boswell has impressive range: He can do light and funny (“In a Foreign Land”), and knotty and contemplative (“A Walk in Winter”) and with “Skin Deep” he’s given us what has to be the most erotic two-page story ever written. It’s already been a good year for fans of short-story collections. Boswell’s book is just one more reason to celebrate.
Plus: Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.
Taylor Antrim is a critic for The Daily Beast and the author of the novel, The Headmaster Ritual.
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Taylor Antrim is a critic for The Daily Beast and the author of the novel The Headmaster Ritual.
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Taylor Antrim is a critic for The Daily Beast and the author of the novel The Headmaster Ritual.
It is complete mythology that the New York Times picks books to review based on any sort of sane measuring instrument whatsoever. Literary or otherwise. The New York Times Book Review IS A SATIRE DESERVING OF A SATIRE.
Can you get it.
Like the rest of publishing, who and what this esteemed group of ephemeral twits reviews is based upon a catty, incestuous, creepy, mean, pompous, arrogant, subjective, snotty, clubhouse, contemptible, appalling, backscratching agenda of backstabbing commonality of class; the upper crust of aristocratic scumbags let-us-keep-the-group-the-group.
But why.
Oh, he's just saying that because he's miffed with them. They refused to review his books.
Actually, I begged them to not review my last book.
They review all my books. There is no more room on my walls for frames. They've even put said books (all frauds) on their "notable" list. I was a "token" whore just like the other ethnic "token writer whores" they review so they can have some bizarre claim supportive of a politically correct diversity that is, in fact, a fellowship of delusion.
Their nose is stuck so far up into the lofty (no oxygen to the brain) stratosphere, they wouldn't recognize diversity if it sat on their tasteful faces.
Their so-called "reporter," Motoko Rich, was assigned to books from the real estate section. Does that say anything to you.
As an intrepid journalist, Miss Rich claims (I am coughing here) that I do not, in fact, exist. She has no idea.
The woman seems to know how to call up book publicists on the phone. Posterity will remember every word she writes.
And I am Marie of Romania.
The biggest part of this literary delusion is that if they review you, it sells books. A fantasy kept alive by the truly nauseating sight of writers crawling all over one another to make it into such exalted print.
Fiddledeedee.
As someone who has been reviewed there as a writer, and has also been a book editor whose projects have been reviewed there, I, too, suffered from this noblesse fairy-tale (until I woke up). It is a disease. There is only one cure. Get on a bus. Leave Manhattan. Never look back. Publishing couldn't be publishing without the lies that go to its imaginary worth. The reality (not one writers or Manhattan editors and certainly not publicists in their Manolo Blahniks want to look at) is that this squeamish rag doesn't sell a single copy of a single book.
Oh, no, it can't be so.
It is so. Get a grip. Get a clue. Get a life.
The merry-go-round of the New York, New York, New York, New York book critics clubhouse of circles and jerkles goes round and round and thar-she-blows and where she stops no one nose whose face she will tweak next.
Writers running madly in her exhaustive wake wired to read and eat her entrails.
The other stupid book reviewers in the other (fortunately their numbers are declining as they get what they so richly deserve) stupid American publications all drooling over one of these real newspaper book review jobs. It is a sight worthy of an aristocratic zoo cranked up on crystal meth.
Of course, you aren't a real writer until you make it to one of the real lists of best-selling book bumpkins.
The New York Times book section finds me "disturbing."
Do tell.
I framed that word -- disturbing -- in gold and put it on my wall. I may be many things, but I am not one of t-h-e-m. They do not know disturbing. They are not disturbed enough.
In reality, I am neither a token or a cheerleader for the literary status-quo. The New York Times Book Review is the enemy. When it finally goes down the sychophantic, psychophantic, parasitical, desideratum, financial tubes (preordained), all the little Manolo babies in Manhattan can sit around the lunch table at Elaine's with Tina, wringing their lady-like hankies that such social ravening was never truly appreciated by us intellectual slugs. Oh, poor us.
We will truly miss these querulous cretins telling us what books to buy and read. Ho hum. Pity the hobbyhorse of ambition and success. Hot titles and the latest epicurism to be squeezed out of Manhattan like an anus squeezes fate.
"We do not entertain ad hominem attacks upon our persons," reads my latest email from one of these editorial gnomes.
My eyes to the sky.
The arrival of this email caused me to fall on the floor under my desk as I was seized by convulsions of laughter and disturbing hilarity.
In fact, I printed this email out, framed it, and put it on the wall next to my other pithy and insightful reviews.
I really need to pretend to be an ethnic chicklit writer from Chicklitonia, an ethnic island in the Ethnic Literary Sea of Tranquility and win a few more literary awards. A friend of Charlie Rose. Who would be pleased to have me sit at this table. Who has written her memoirs of abuse, literary drug addiction, incarceration, marriages to tycoons and Jack Welch, raped by her uncles, but who, nevertheless, rises up from the depths of raunchy pornography to the lofty, drunken literary heights that the highest, high, high, high heels, Manolo Blahniks, can propel and launch her forward, stumbling into a real job as real estate reporter for the New York Times.
http://le-too.blogspot.com -- Tim Barrus, Cinematheque Films, Amsterdam
I haven't read Security yet, but became aware of Amidon's previous novel, Human Capital, and tried to buy it at one of my local chain booksellers here in the Midwest. I tried B&N, Borders and B-A-M and found nothing. (The booksellers were heavy on the unbearable lightness of Skinny Bitch in the Kitch and Don't Swallow Your Gum, but light on anything heavier.)
One special order later and I'm sold on Amidon's writing. Human Capital was written in 2004 and is set in a pre-9/11 Connecticut town, but nowhere have I seen a novel that better captures the hedge fund mentality (and amorality) that brought us to our current economic meltdown. Amidon shows the competitive, winner-takes-all dark side of the American Dream and how it touches different classes and generations. Brilliant, prophetic, clear-eyed; this is a book to cherish. It's an easy read, but like a Don DeLillo novel, there is much more going on beneath the surface.
Anyone who loves literature should order Human Capital or Security or another of Stephen Amidon's novels, just to get them back on the radar and onto the bookshelves where they belong.
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