First, inventive contemporary work: Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit About Carlotta, by James Hannaham, who continues his exploration of marginal American lives with this masterpiece about a Black trans woman’s re-entry to her Brooklyn neighborhood after twenty years in prison. Hannaham manages to write in first and third person simultaneously…Lord knows how. Gish Jen’s Thank You, Mr. Nixon is a hilarious and provocative piecemeal reflection on a Chinese-American family’s relationship to China decades after emigration. Dani Shapiro’s Signal Fires is a wonderfully intricate examination of the ways chance and tragedy reverberate through a constellation of suburban American lives. And Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers is a multi-perspective tale of dementia that made me cry.
I’m always reading older stuff, too, much of which I find by prowling around used bookstores. Some more obscure standouts: The Leavenworth Case, by Anna Katharine Green, an excellent 1878 whodunnit by an American author who allegedly inspired Agatha Christie. Shriek With Pleasure by Toni Howard, a boisterous account of a female American journalist’s work, and pleasure, covering postwar Germany. Chandler Brossard’s Who Walk in Darkness is a fascinating, moralizing 1952 portrait of Beatnik Greenwich Village, in which Anatole Broyard seems to make an incognito appearance. And Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, though uneven, contains pricelessly damning scenes of nineteenth-century American life that are all too reminiscent of the present.
Being an audiobook addict, I’ll mention a few titles whose recordings I especially enjoyed this year: The Death of Roger Ackroyd, an Agatha Christie I’d never read that is now officially my favorite of hers, flawlessly embodied by the voice of Hugh Fraser. The Art of Stillness, Pico Iyer’s powerful argument for slowing down, read by Ayer himself. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a crime classic narrated in perfect weary wiseguy-speak by Mark Hammer, and Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories read by the incomparable Michael York.
