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Fall Books

From Jonathan Franzen’s hyped novel to an art-comedy from actor Steve Martin, Janice Kaplan picks the 10 must-read novels of the fall. View a clip of Kaplan discussing her selection on Good Morning America.

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Miles Heller endeavors to find a future in the detritus of the past—but the random wounds and accidents of life continue to betray him. When complications with his too-young lover make him flee Florida, he joins three other twentysomethings struggling as squatters in Brooklyn. With deft strokes but no post-modernist tricks, Auster illuminates the pain and predicaments of his characters with brilliantly accessible prose. If you’ve given up on Auster before (I plead guilty), the compelling and deeply moving Sunset Park will make you a fan of his insight, wisdom, and grace.

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Most thrillers are quick page-turners, but the masterful John le Carre expects readers to do some work, too. In his latest, Our Kind of Traitor, a money-laundering Russian connects with an English couple on a tennis vacation and the British Secret Service wants to know why. As in the real world of spies, motives aren’t always clear and the ending doesn’t neatly tie up all the ends. As one character thinks, “Half-truths. Quarter-truths. What the world really knows about itself, it doesn’t dare say.”

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Newark, New Jersey, the summer of 1944. Roth returns to his roots with the story of Bucky Cantor, a 23-year-old kept out of the war in Europe but facing equal savagery as polio sweeps through the inner-city playground where he works. He escapes to an idyllic camp in the mountains with his girlfriend, but finds no comfort. Polio may be the nemesis, but so is God, “a cold-blooded murderer of children.” His repudiation of religion “in the face of such lunatic cruelty” is as devastating as the disease. Roth’s anguish gets more painful with each book—would a Nobel Prize finally cheer him up?—but the extraordinary intelligence that shines through the despair in Nemesis is piercingly powerful.

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In this oddly brilliant book , a young boy believes his father has gone to Iraq and now lies dying in the local VA hospital. He tries to find Frederick Exley, his father’s favorite author, believing Exley’s bedside presence will save the wounded man. The boy and his psychiatrist alternate as narrators—neither is terribly reliable—and the luminously engaging plot reveals the deceptions we cling to in order to survive. “I’m telling you the truth,” the mother tells her son at the end, to which he replies, “Please don’t.” The long-dead Exley appears, though everyone understands he’s not real, and Clarke’s breathtaking creativity gives unexpected power to his quirky, touching story.

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Already the most talked about book of the year, Franzen’s extraordinary portrayal of suburbanites Patty and Walter Berglund is also the story of modern America struggling with war, lies, and the environment. The couple meet in college when she lusts for his musician roommate, and the burgeoning of their love and family and despair is engrossing on every level. Though a middle-aged Walter laments that “he didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to live,” Franzen quietly dazzles with insights into the needs and confusion that drive us. The only false note in this profound book is the title—too big and pretentious for a novel that, like the best of John Updike or Saul Bellow, delivers a compelling story to illuminate bigger truths.

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Five-year-old Jack lives with his Ma in an 11x11 room where they play games and read books and she tells him about Outside. Though Jack is happy, something is wrong.  Ma had been kidnapped seven years earlier and wants to escape from their captor. Once they manage that, life is different—but is it better? Told exclusively through Jack’s eyes, Room is a totally new view of the meaning of the mother-child bond and the bafflements of childhood.

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Actor-comic Steve Martin charmingly details the rise and fall and rise again of the New York art world over the last 20 years, complete with photos of his favorite paintings. Told through the antics of Lacey, a Sotheby’s assistant who gets her own Chelsea gallery, Martin provides plenty of plot, but potential bombshells (art fraud! deception!) fizzle quietly away, allowing him to focus on the characters in their social milieu. Like Tom Wolfe, who blurred the line between novel and nonfiction, Martin is a worthy chronicler of culture. His smart critique of how money, pretension, and lust get confused with art, An Object of Beauty is a worthy followup to Wolfe’s 1975 The Painted World. Oh wait... wasn’t that nonfiction?

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The very best characters in this book aren’t quite human but they’re a lot better. A lab studying how bonobos use language is bombed, and scientist Isabel Duncan badly hurt. The peace-loving, sex-focused apes are whisked off to a TV reality show, and an old-fashioned media war ensues to get the story. The human personalities in Ape House are stiff and stereotypical, but the warm and deeply understood bonobos more than make up for them. Gruen has enough thriller-worthy techniques to make you turn the pages—and enough compassion for our nearest relatives (along with chimps) to make you want to meet them.

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A family whose possessions were plundered by the Nazis, a poet who disappears in Chile, and a man whose wife is dying in London seem to be connected only by the massive writing desk that haunts all of them. But in Great House, Nicole Krauss interweaves these stories of loss so their combined power is poignant and unforgettable. The rich tapestry of her writing makes the whole even bigger than the sum of the very beautiful parts.

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This old-fashioned saga opens with a young Welsh boy descending into the coal mines in 1914 before cutting quickly to the very rich English family that owns them and is lax about their safety. While King George is visiting the wealthy family’s estate, an explosion occurs at the mine and he gets involved. Follett adds a couple of Russian brothers to the mix, along with an American law student and a German spy, so when WWI breaks out, the elements are in place for a soap-opera view of war and wealth. Follett knows how to tell a story that makes Fall of Giants a simplified world of aristocrats, servants, and soldiers feel like the real one. He ambitiously calls this 1,000-page book the first of his “Century Trilogy.” The five families (or their descendants) will live on.