The most memorable fiction I read in 2017

Looking back on all the books I read in 2017, these are the ones that weigh the heaviest, meaning I think about them during class changes, on long runs, in the shower, or while making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They weren't all published in 2017, but a handful were. As always, thanks for reading.  

Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie (1996)

This book is so many things: American satire, urban crime thriller, reservation punchline after reservation punchline, artifact from America’s ongoing culture wars, the collected chromosomes of so many shared literary lineages, from Leslie Marmon Silko to Washington Irving and Ernest Hemingway. The plot moves quickly through Noir alleys and collegiate classrooms, and then Alexie lands an Epilogue from the top rope that makes all the pain and tragedy from the book’s plot shrivel into nothing more than one rotten fruit born of many, and perhaps that’s the saddest truth of all: “The tree grows heavy with owls” (420). 

The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder (2016)

I wrote a few paragraphs about Bachelder’s novel back in April. The novel is good and quick. If you see your high school and college friends less than you once did, the book may serve as a brief escape into the past. And, when that dream ends, you will awake to the echoes of Joe Theismann’s leg snapping in and through all time.  

I Know Your Kind by William Brewer (2017)

The first poem in I Know Your Kind is “Oxyana, West Virginia,” and the poem is perfect in all its executions. This perfection is also devastating, as Brewer’s poems are the sad euphoria of West Virginia’s opiate epidemic. That first poem starts:

None of it was ever ours: the Alleghenies,

the fog-strangled mornings of March,

cicadas fucking to death on the sidewalks, (1)

and neither the single poem nor the book lets go, much like the substances they attempt to vanquish.

The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang (2016)

This book is a beautiful map of the Wang family’s many possible futures and their trans-Pacific past. Um. Maybe. Reverse that. This book is a beautiful map of the Wang family’s trans-Pacific futures and their many possible pasts. Jade Chang wrote a really beautiful book, and this book sat on a shelf in our house for about a year before I read it. I was a fool to wait so long, although the ending was perfect for wishing 2017 good riddance and welcoming 2018. The book is funny, astute, and sincere in its efforts to reverse the American vantage point from the European voyages across the Atlantic to Chinese journeys through the Pacific is brilliantly refreshing, like The Big Lebowski, Blood Meridian, The Great Gatsby, or anything really in reverse.  

A couple other notes: One, this book’s discussion about minority voices in the world of American standup is both humorously depressing and thought-provoking and, two, the hospital scene where the Great Wall of China and the Pacific Ocean are reduced to a thin curtain is so obviously brilliant it’s almost hard to imagine it wasn’t already in existence in somebody else’s book. Well done, Jade Chang, well done indeed. 

So Much Blue by Percival Everett (2017)

Percival Everett is either a chameleon or a genius, and I’m not sure which label is more complimentary. So Much Blue is a beautiful book telling the story of a family and a marriage in three different genres. Whereas so many of Everett’s past books are satirical sendups of particular styles and genres, the writing in So Much Blue is so sincere that the seams between a suspense thriller set in Central America and New England domesticity vanish into thin air. 

The Magician King by Lev Grossman (2012)

Better than the trilogy’s first installment in my opinion. Here, Grossman continues to write an epic tale via backdoors and trapdoors that continue to renovate what a fantasy series can be while somehow managing to wax nostalgically about all that we probably loved about fantasy series as young adults and children. Also, my nephew liked it, and I’ll stop there before dropping an awful C.S. Lewis joke that is really neither here nor Narnia. 

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016)

I wrote about Gyasi’s novel in April. A little bit after that I ran into someone else who had read it and questioned whether the book is actually a novel. I don’t know what else one would call it—it’s totally a novel and a beautiful one at that. Navigating in the wake of European colonialism and Chinua Achebe’s African Trilogy, the novel covers 300 years in 300 pages.   

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (2015)

Awe-inspring are the grounds and depths Lisa Dillman’s translation of Herrera’s book covers in 128 pages. Every word and sentence is deceptive as a shadow, meaning the size and proportion of both the menace and the beauty are difficult to describe accurately. The nameless young girl leaves home in search of her missing brother. She enters a world of crime. She enters a mythological hellscape. She crosses from northern Mexico into the United States. The film would probably be directed by Guillermo del Torro, except the book is too real and rooted in a material strangeness to be allegorical.
  

News of the World by Paulette Jiles (2017)

This book finds the love and the calm that are so fleeting in John Ford’s The Searchers or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. An old Civil War veteran who reads newspapers for a living ends up responsible for a young girl once kidnapped by the Kiowa. He aims to return her to her family of German immigrants, and amid all the violence that Jiles delivers in cinematic set pieces is the hybridity of Texas often lost in the legal maps and claims to those once wild territories.

Where the Light Tends to Go by David Joy (2015)

Some sentences struck me as posturing. Then again, the book’s narrator and protagonist is a kid trying to live up to his father’s expectations, so how could the voice not be posing, stretching, and cracking into something other than what it was? That same mutinous mechanism carves into all the dreamlike innocence in the book, leaving nothing but a violent conclusion reminiscent of the New Hollywood’s fatalism or Harry Crews at his slithering best.

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy (1968)

Tracing (or even retracing) Cormac McCarthy’s steps from southern Appalachia to the Southwest Borderlands and eventually into an apocalyptic future is, in my opinion, time well spent, especially as these earlier novels, as well-written as they are, are not quite what the writer will deliver in his later works when his manuscripts appear chiseled in volcanic rock.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy (1973)

The more I read McCarthy, the more I wish I could sit down with him and ask questions about his favorite movies. I don’t know how honest or sincere he would be in handling such questions as, “C’mon, that ____________________ (insert scene or detail) had to be influenced by ___________________ (insert particular film)?” but trying to see him not tip his hand would be everything, because, after all, that’s what his books manage to do so often. He writes in such a way that his writing appears older and truer than its referents—like his pen etched the landscape it draws upon.

I am sad I no longer have any of his books to read for the first time.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

I first read this book in 2014 and included it on whatever list I did at the end of that year, but when you teach a book, you understand better how it works, doesn’t work, is or isn’t interpreted. I taught this book last spring for the first time, which meant I also had to reread it. It goes without saying that I saw more than I did the first time through it, but I was also amazed by what my students did and did not see in it, especially how some students denied the book a chance to serve as either a lamp or a mirror. On the other hand, I watched some students respond to the book as if it had always been part of their lives and could never cease being so. 

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2017)

I have yet to read Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, so I cannot compare these eight stories to highly regarded debut. I do know the story “Fatherland” is a powerful dissection of a Vietnamese family split and torn by oceans and war. Part of the family resides in the United States, while part of the family has stayed in Vietnam, where the whole country has become a park for tourists and Viet Cong tunnels are an amusement park ride as much as any Ferris wheel, at least in the eyes of the nation’s American guests.

If you’re a teacher, then Nguyen’s unique perspective and particularly the book’s coda is well worth integrating into any sort of Vietnam War unit that typically revolves around Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Lastly, this collection is memorable for its consistency. “I’d Love You to Want Me” is an incredible story about how love ages in the fog of forgetfulness.

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)

I didn't love the book, but I also didn't hate the book. Regardless, I can't stop thinking about the book, which means I can't dismiss the book. And yet, when I do think about it, I mostly end up thinking about images from the 1961 film The Exiles, which chronicles the lives of young Native Americans trying to find some compromise with modernity in mid-century Los Angeles. 

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)

Jesmyn Ward is an incredible talent. She writes male and female characters equally well. History and geography nurture her plots, and her stories bloom with a particular prescience that in the hands of a lesser writer would turn trivial and trite. Maybe she could be faulted for always writing a simile, but the similes are always coherent and true. While Sing, Unburied, Sing tells a tale that includes multiple perspectives, a road trip over geography and through generations, as well as a rough-edged blending of crime noir and the Southern Gothic, the novel’s delivery remains somewhat haunted by all the great Southern writers who have already dredged these waters, from Toni Morrison to William Faulkner to the Jesmyn Ward who wrote Salvage the Bones only a few years ago. In other words, the novel is good, if not that good, and maybe such a slight only matters in the slightest because Ward clearly can deliver a book that is that good. 

 Isn't that always the dilemma? 

Bryan Harvey tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey.