The Best Books I Read in 2022, Part 1
Literary Fiction
Every year, I read about 120 books. What’s my secret? you may be wondering. Insomnia! More often than not I am awake between 2 and 6am (at 6am I finally give up and get up), and so I have a lot of extra time for reading. As we like to say in our family, it shouldn’t be a total loss.
Anyway, because I am an avid reader and also really terrible at choosing gifts, I like to give books as holiday gifts. This week and next, I will share my recommendations for books you can give as gifts—or enjoy for yourselves. I’ll discuss my favorite works of literary fiction today, and next week’s topic will be nonfiction and genre fiction. While a few of my recommendations are showing up on everyone’s lists, I hope that these two articles will introduce readers to several other excellent books that are more off the beaten path.
The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Set in Moscow in 1913 and written in beautiful, spare, and often dryly funny prose, this novel tells the story of Frank, an Englishman whose wife abruptly leaves him and his three young children. He sets about rebuilding his life with mixed success. Interspersed among the events in the main story are hilarious set pieces—for example, a student shoots at Frank, and for some inscrutable reason the Russian authorities decide that the student is now Frank’s responsibility. And hanging over the whole story is a feeling of irony and doom, because we know that very shortly after the story closes, the First World War will begin, and the characters’ idyll will end.
The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan
Egan’s long-awaited follow-up to her masterpiece, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a set of interconnected stories that riff on the themes of memory, the dangers of social media, and our craving for love and authenticity. Egan somehow manages to convincingly inhabit such diverse characters as a thirteen-year-old girl caught up in friendship drama, an autistic genius who works for a shadowy corporation, and a slightly unbalanced woman who feuds with her neighbor. As in A Visit, Egan uses multiple narrative styles, including a series of text messages and a list of instructions for a spy (but no PowerPoint presentations this time, alas). Egan’s novel is much more successful (to me, anyway), than similar works warning about the dangers of social media (ahem: Dave Eggers’s The Circle), because in Egan’s novel we care about these characters and their fates.
Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen
I know it is fashionable to hate Franzen, but please give this book a chance! A sweeping chronicle of the influence of religion on an American family, this novel puts all its characters at a crossroads. As in the blues song from which the novel takes its title, some characters make a deal with the devil, while others are saved. You won’t like all the characters, but Franzen challenges us to reserve judgment and to extend even the apparent villains a bit of understanding and compassion. This is the first of three books in a trilogy that will take the family from the 1960s to the present day; I suspect that the second book will show up on my list next year.
Italian Life: A Modern Fable of Loyalty and Betrayal, by Tim Parks
You know how sometimes your book club is reading something you have no interest in whatsoever? And so you skip that meeting or go without having read the book? A recent experience has convinced me that giving the book a try instead can be wonderfully rewarding. When a woman in my book club proposed that we read Italian Life, I confess that it didn’t sound all that promising to me. I went to our local bookstore to see if it was in stock, thinking that if they didn’t have it, I would have the perfect excuse not to read it. But they did have it, so, good soldier that I am, I read it—and was so glad, because this book is wonderful!
Italian Life straddles genres; it is simultaneously a bildungsroman about a young woman from a poor family who makes her way in the upper-class university world of Milan and also a thinly-disguised memoir about Parks’s experience as a professor of English at an Italian university. While ostensibly about a narrow slice of Italian society, in fact the book is about a theme that affects us all: How petty tyrants rise to power, and how ordinary people attempt and sometimes fail to thrive in their regime.
Liberation Day, by George Saunders
I almost didn’t need to read this book before putting it on the list; every year that Saunders has a new book out, it makes my list of best books. Saunders’s early stories were clever and satirical and a lot of fun, but his last several books, while still clever and satirical, are also deeply moving and spiritually profound. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Saunders often sets his stories in a wacky and disturbing future world that reflects our own world back to us, but always with generosity toward our human frailties. In Vonnegut’s words, they put bitter coatings on sugar pills.
Take this example: “The Mom of Bold Action” starts out with an overprotective mom who is constantly narrating stories in her head (“The Boy Who Lay Feebly Calling Out for His Mom,” for example, or my personal favorite, “Henry the Dutiful Ice-Cream-Truck Tire”). It is fun to laugh at her, until suddenly we’re not laughing at her anymore. Instead we’re thinking about moral luck, how difficult it is to be a good person, and our tendency to love, and to lash out, and to forgive.
All the stories are like this: Hilarious, relatable, harrowing, horrifying, and compassionate. In the last story of the collection, two old men have been engaged in a pointless wrangle about a house. On the final page of the book, the narrator writes a letter to his rival that leaves us with an insight into how we can live with one another in peace and understanding:
I am going, friend, I am all but gone, I believe you prideful and wrong but I have no desire, now, to cure you. Your wrongness was an idea I had. I am all but gone. My idea of your wrongness will go with me. Your rightness is an idea you are having. It will go with you. For all of that, I hope you live forever, and if the place falls down around you, as it seems to be doing, I hope even that brings you joy. It was always falling down around you, everything has always been falling down around us. Only we were too alive to notice.
The Love Marriage, by Monica Ali
Yasmin, the daughter of two Muslim Bengali immigrants, is a London doctor. She is eagerly planning her wedding to Joe, a handsome, upper-class Englishman who is the love of her life. Her parents’ marriage was a love match too, and except for some conflict between her brother and her father, everything is happy and perfect in Yasmin’s life. Or so she thinks.
In truth, Yasmin doesn’t have the first clue about herself, her family, or her fiancé, and the book tells the story of what happens when she learns that life is more complicated than she had realized. Ali’s first novel, Brick Lane, was rightly celebrated. While Brick Lane was in many ways a tragedy, The Love Marriage is a comedy, with some enjoyable light social satire and believably sympathetic characters. I devoured this 450-page book in a day and a half because the plot is so effective at roping readers in.
The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell
I first learned about O’Farrell when I judged a high school speech and debate tournament a few years ago, and one student read the last chapter of O’Farrell’s memoir, I Am I Am I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. “What WAS that?! Wow!” I thought, and raced after the student to ask her for the book’s title. I have been an O’Farrell superfan ever since, and, as with Saunders, every year she has a book out it makes my best books list. (Last year’s O’Farrell entry on the list was Hamnet, her breakthrough novel in the US.)
The Marriage Portrait tells the story of Lucrezia de’ Medici (1545–61), who is married off at age fifteen to the mysterious and mercurial Duke of Ferrara, a powerful man twice her age. Readers familiar with Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” (or who have observed that only sixteen years elapse between the dates of Lucrezia’s birth and death) will know Lucrezia’s fate, but while Browning’s Duke thinks Lucrezia had “a heart . . . too soon made glad” and wishes to extinguish her “spot of joy,” O’Farrell has an alternate, and fascinating, explanation for what happens to Lucrezia.
I love this book because O’Farrell writes so compellingly about how a young girl struggles against the forces that attempt to destroy her. She identifies with the tiger captive in the menagerie in the cellar of her father’s palace. Even in dire peril,
Lucrezia feels, within her, the rise of what she thinks of as her spirit—the unfettered part of herself. . . . It lives somewhere deep inside her . . . mostly hibernating, as if under a covering of leaves, until called into action. Then it might uncurl, crawl out into the light, blinking, bristling, furling its filthy fists and opening its jagged red mouth.
The Pleasing Hour and Writers and Lovers, by Lily King
Because I recently learned that Lily King is the friend of a friend of mine, I have been on something of a Lily King kick this year. King became a bestselling author and received critical acclaim for her fourth novel, Euphoria, about Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. I enjoyed Euphoria, but I love King’s earlier novels even more. In The Pleasing Hour, King’s beautiful and heartbreaking first novel, a young woman, fleeing heartbreak after giving up her baby for adoption, goes to Paris to work as an au pair. King lets us inside the minds of each character, so that we understand the reasons behind their actions, which are—no surprise—never quite what the stereotypes would suggest. This novel is also the source of the desert island ethical puzzle that I discussed a few months ago. Read the book to see which characters’ solutions to the puzzle are most similar to your own!
And if you read and loved King’s first book, you will enjoy Writers and Lovers too. King’s 2020 novel is the semi-autobiographical story of her rocky start as a new writer. Casey lives in a potting shed, waits tables to chip away at her monumental student debt, and mourns her recently dead mother. Somehow Casey is convinced, in spite of too many people who doubt her, that she has something to say. Come for the love triangle, and stay for the wrenching but ultimately uplifting story of a young woman who is starting to figure her life out.
Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
Atkinson writes detective novels (the Jackson Brodie series) as well as literary fiction. Shrines of Gaiety fits both these genres. Set in London’s underground club scene during the Roaring Twenties, the novel explores what happens in a society when people break free of constraints. There’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll (well, jazz). Several very young women, in pursuit of fame and fortune, disappear into London’s maw. I loved both the good-hearted detective and the indomitable young woman who goes undercover to find two fourteen-year-old girls from her hometown who have run away to London. There’s even a love triangle in which the heroine can’t decide between a handsome, mysterious cad and a kindhearted, solid man. Who among us hasn’t at some point in our lives had a thought like this: “She must stop comparing them, she chided herself. Frobisher never came out best, when really he should”?
Skinship, by Yoon Choi
Choi’s powerful, eloquent stories ring changes on a single theme: The way that members of a family can love one another and still fail utterly to communicate that love. All of Choi’s main characters are Korean American, either themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants. All of them struggle to adapt to American culture and ideas about family. And while the characters fail to understand one another, Choi performs a brilliant act of literary imagination, getting into the head of an autistic pianist, a man struggling with dementia, a girl who is keenly aware of the social dynamics in her Queens public school, a recent high school graduate who is shadowing a hospice nurse and trying to figure out what to do with his life, and many others, all of whom are compelling and have something to teach us.
How about you, readers? What were the best books you read this year? Please share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments!
The Tidbit
Enough with all this literature! Let’s turn our attention to math for a change! Tee hee!
Haven't read any of these! But you've given me a good idea for a gift for my wife. Excellent stuff!
I'm late commenting here, but am glad to get this list. I've lately been disappointed by the books I read and so am happy to have great recommendations. In fact, I just bought HAMNET and look forward to reading it soon. As for me, the best book I read recently was WALKING THE BOWL, a nonfiction book about the street children of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Parts of it are very hard to read, but it's an incredible window into another part of the world, and by the end, some hope at least has been restored. The promise of the parable of "walking the bowl" is powerful. Full disclosure--I read the book on my way to, and while in, Johannesburg, and spent an afternoon in Lusaka a few days later. That made the book very relevant to me personally, but I believe it has broad appeal.