When I think of all the books I read and loved this year — and there have been so many — I think the one I found most striking was Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers. It was the sheer originality of the thing, the absolutely unique style and voice. It might fairly be described as a western for people who think they don’t like westerns. Two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, make their living as hired killers in the employ of a shadowy man known only as the Commodore, on the Gold Rush-era western frontier. But while Charlie enjoys killing, Eli, the narrator, is troubled by their ever-rising body count, and finds himself beginning to question the Commodore’s explanations for why the men they’re hired to kill have been marked for death. It’s a mesmerizing, precisely-written, sad, and very violent tale, with unexpected flashes of humor.
Others: Susanna Moore’s The Life of Objects was a marvel of clarity and beauty, as was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I’d somehow never read The Great Gatsby before this year. I almost wrote “I don’t know why it took me so long,” but obviously I do know what took me so long: I was busy reading other books. The elegance of the work stays with me, its clockwork plot. I’ve been reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life this year, thinking about talent and dissipation.
Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis was profoundly beautiful and disturbing and continues to haunt me. Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker was a delight. It’s hard to imagine two books less similar than Necropolis and Angelmaker, but the common thread, I realize, is that both writers are willing to take considerable risks. They walk their respective tightropes successfully.
I loved Lauren Groff’s Arcadia. Her novel is impressive in the way that The Great Gatsby is impressive: you recognize, reading it, that you’re in the presence of a writer with absolute command over her material. It’s a beautifully written book.
More from A Year in Reading 2012
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
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