I especially loved two deliciously strange novels this year: Victor LaValle’s Big Machine and Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Running Away.
Big Machine was an impulse buy at the bookstore, after I read jacket copy describing a “band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard what may have been the voice of God.” For obvious reasons, I was hooked by the description and curious as to how LaValle would manage to pull all this off.
But pull it off he does. From the first sentence, I fell happily under the spell of the novel’s protagonist, Ricky Rice, and soon I was deep in the world of janitorial duties at Union Station in Utica, New York, and secret orders in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and haunted pasts. This is a novel of tremendous ideas and tremendous heart—and, for me, an extraordinary introduction to LaValle. One of my New Year’s resolutions will be to read everything he’s ever written.
Running Away had an equally hypnotic effect. Previous Toussaint novels—Television in particular—had already made me a fan, and Running Away struck me as being at once very Toussaint-esque and startling new. While Television is largely concerned with stasis, Running Away is devoted to movement. Set in China and the Mediterranean, this novel bounds from one locale to another, laying down connections that are bewildering and enigmatic and, in the end, perplexingly enduring. A side note: the book is worth reading just for the final act, which takes place in Elba. Holy god, it’s amazing.
Both Running Away and Big Machine resist practical logic; they cannot be “made sense of” in the traditional manner. And that was precisely why I found both books to be profoundly transporting: I was so swept away by Toussaint’s and LaValle’s worlds, I stopped caring about the hows and the whys and the what ifs, about matters of plausibility; I only wanted to be there.
More from a Year in Reading 2010
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
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