Top Five Novels of 2010

By this, I mean the top five novels I read in 2010; only one of them was actually published during the year. Fiction became an important refuge for me from the freaky new adult world after my sort-of graduation from college last May, and while I don't believe I made any particularly bad book choices, some novels made more lasting impressions than others. Seeing as good fiction has the power to help us to see and understand ourselves and our humanity better, it is for your edification, and for the sake of holding on tightly to the imago Dei, that I present to you my top-five of twenty-ten list, with an honorable-mention addendum at the endum.

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1. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan 

This book blew me away. Remarkably, Egan manages to craft a deeply felt story out of unpretentious prose that nonetheless sparkles with intelligence. The structure is subtly profound, the characters are sympathetic, endearing, and relatable almost without exception, and the eschewing of temporal linearity (which could have torpedoed the whole story) in the end only serves to deepen our emotional bond to the various inhabitants of Egan's complex world, by bringing the scattered roots of their personalities to light in such a way as to make even their most selfish actions intelligible to us as the actions of deeply flawed, deeply human people. I read it in the two days after Christmas, picking it back up at every opportunity like an addict. "Time is a goon, isn't that the saying?" Even if the delivery elicits continuous laughter, the content is serious; my experience with A Visit From the Goon Squad was emotionally rich and multifaceted. Few books are able to get at the mystery of time's erosive passage like this one does. 

2. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

I read Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin on the recommendation of my friend and roommate Dan during the middle of the summer. It's a post-9/11 love song to New York, but set in the seventies, in the days and weeks surrounding the audacious spectacle of a french funambulist who danced across a line stretched between the towers of the world trade center. Like Egan's book, it's a tightly wound, character driven story that stretches and grows like ivy vines around the central edifice of the high-wire act. The primary theme is connection; all twelve characters, with disparate but totally convincing voices, are given space for their stories to unfold, and it becomes clear with each addition to the swelling ensemble that every character's life touches the life of every other character, even if only in some fleeting or glancing way. McCann is a talented stylist to boot; portions of the book drove me to tears with their urgent and desperate lifting up of love and the possibility of love in a cold, unfeeling, and violent world. 

3. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Certain of my friends, whose opinions I esteem, don't like this book. I don't care. Simply put, Gilead is beautiful and profound. Written as the "endless letter" of elderly congregationalist minister John Ames to his seven year old son, whose adolescence and adulthood he will never see as a result of his old age and declining health, this book quietly takes on depth and weight as our narrator directs a steady procession through a century of struggle and defiant hope in a remote Iowa town. I had to read sections out loud to myself to better appreciate Robinson's florid diction. Out of necessity, several times - looking out over a lake in northern Wisconsin just before the setting of the sun - I had to put the book down, take in the view, and try, unsuccessfully, to articulate the powerful new feelings it had evoked in me. Gilead will not leave a sensitive and open reader unchanged.

4. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

After familiarizing myself with Walker Percy's nonfiction, particularly his thorny and befuddling anti-self-help book Lost in the Cosmos, I picked up The Moviegoer to see if he had anything important to say through fiction. I was not disappointed. Percy's real strength in my eyes is his psychological acuity; he just understands why people do the things they do, and he uses this special prescience to great effect in telling the story of a cool, classy, and privileged son of New Orleans who is on "the search." Percy leaves a residue of his insightfulness on Binx, his protagonist, whose struggle for meaning reflects, somewhat deliberately, the presence of several of Percy's intellectual and literary forebears, among them Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. While it's undeniably heavy most of the way through, The Moviegoer is also steeped in hope and a special kind of humor; I laughed out loud through three pages dedicated to a carefully implemented program of flirtation just because it was so experientially accurate. 

5. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm a sucker for whimsy, off-kilter humor, and verbal dexterity. Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel Everything is Illuminated does magnificent work in each of these categories. Told in alternating narrative halves dedicated to, on one side, a Jewish writer (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) on a search in the Ukraine for information about the woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis, and on the other side, his grandfather's shtetl community through centuries of its wacky communal life, Everything is Illuminated is the kind of book that can kill you with laughter just before reducing you to abject grief over the fact of human wickedness and brutality. Foer adroitly uses whimsy and irony to create opportunities for his characters to obliquely and unexpectedly hit his readers right in the heart, and they do it again and again. By the way, have I made it sufficiently clear that this book is hilarious?

Honorable Mentions (not ordered):

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
Toibin's straightforward and unadorned prose tells the story of Eilis, a young Irish woman who immigrates during the 1950's to New York City primarily because she has no reason not to when given the opportunity. Her life is hard, but she grows up, learns how to make choices for herself, and gradually takes her place in the world. Through her, Toibin speaks clearly, directly, and reassuringly to those who find themselves similarly caught in a murky transition into adulthood. 

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The second book of Chabon's for me after The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay presents the exciting, expansive, and quirky journey of two misfit Jewish kids to the heights of the 1940's comic book industry and back. The writing is lush, the characters are unique, and the momentum of the completed story left me feeling as though I was still rolling along with Kavalier and Clay after I'd closed the back cover for the last time, like a kid in bed at night who feels like he's still on a trampoline. 

Home by Marilynne Robinson
A slower moving book than Gilead, Home is also less ornate and self-conscious; fortunately, in many ways, it is just as rich. Written as a kinda-sorta sequel, Home is primarily concerned with Jack Boughton,  John Ames's perceived young antagonist. Jack is one of my very favorite characters in literature for, among numerous traits with which he is skillfully endowed, his wry perspective, his enigmatic comportment, his unmediated love for the few good things in his life, and his lifelong acquaintance with shame. He, his father, his sister, and their attempts at living together in a spiritual dusk compose the central cord of strands woven through the book. Their story ends up being a small, but meticulously definite, good thing. 

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

This is one of those big important books. Franzen is a talented writer; he can be psychologically insightful like Walker Percy, but generally operates on a bigger scale, enmeshing a dysfunctional midwestern family in contrasting layers of familiar familial hurt and pettiness, bizarre international intrigue, and constant anxiety and insistently spiritual questioning. It ends on a redemptive note that justifies most, if not all, of what precedes it. Franzen's characters are some of the most substantial and well-defined of any that reside between the covers of books on this list.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
It's as brutal and dark as everyone told me it would be; it's also so compelling that I had to stay up all night to finish it in one drawn-out, frightened reading. A father's love for his son and will for him to live is made manifest in the starkest of circumstances so as to set it in high relief; the relationship between them is Platonically simple and pure as a result. McCarthy is kind enough to allow the macabre beckoning of despair to abate once in a while, and these little gifts of momentary well-being to his characters are made all the more meaningful and significant by the otherwise unrelenting grind of their plight. 

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Murakami's most well-known novel is charming and immersive. Kafka, the Japanese teenage protagonist, is a precocious runaway whose flight to an old, mysterious library involves him in an unfolding chain of events destined to produce enormous cosmic and metaphysical consequences. It is by turns sensual, dramatic, thoughtful, exciting, funny, and horrifying; it ends in esoteric mythological obscurity, but the collective journey of its various characters makes the weird ride worth it. This book may bend your mind and even your heart around like telekinetically animated spoons. I mean that in a good way.

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Ah, I love me some books. I hope you treat yourself to one or two of them, and that they bless you abundantly for it. 

Things That Suck

• School loans entering repayment

Gah.

New Experiences: Weight Room

So: today I timidly entered our apartment complex's fitness center hoping no one else was interested in working out on a Thursday in the mid-morning, but just my luck, there was a girl using a treadmill near the door who looked like a serious exercise person. This cut down my options; I was no longer interested in using any of the machines in the fairly large zone of her peripheral vision, but fortunately for my insecurity, there was a tucked-away alcove in the middle of the room that contained a few items I hoped I knew how to operate.
I powered one up after an initial period of confusion over the instrument panel. The next three minutes were spent adjusting the speed, from trudging to walking to fast-walking to competitive-fast-walking to jogging to running to sprinting to running to jogging, where I stayed for the remaining ten minutes. I tried to read an Economist someone had left, ostensibly for the purpose of reading while running, but vertigo cut me off at the first paragraph and I almost fell, to my death. Being hopelessly far from a remote and in the middle of a grueling 12-minute mile pace workout, I was left to ponder the blank wall in front of me and the curious question of why someone would have left a magazine to read on this treadmill if running and reading at the same time was such an obvious deathwish.

Soon, I was in trouble. The jogging was going okay, but new exercisers had entered the room - buff dudes in their thirties, talking about important deals they had recently made. They walked through with duffels to the locker room, and I realized that my time was limited. I had to figure out how to use the other machines before they got back, so that I could at least look as though I knew what I was doing. This would make up for the itty-bitty weights I would be pumping. Either incompetence or tiny weights could be individually excused, but together, they could only result in my being laughed out of the place, never to seriously pursue physical fitness again because of the embarrassment.
I swallowed my pride and stepped back into the peripheral range of treadmill girl. She doled out what I expected, a dismissive glance, so with this behind us we entered into a comfortable new phase of relationship, characterized by disinterest (real on her part, affected on mine).  I applied myself to learning how to use four very simple machines.
All I have to say is, thank God for pictures, and machines designed for ease of use. It's like they knew I was coming when they built the place.

The buff dudes emerged after a couple of minutes ("yeah, and you know about our recent huge purchase with the SC corp, the fiasco that turned into, am I right? But hold on, where did that go wrong again? Well of course, the thing about...") to the sight of a totally competent skinny dude, flawlessly operating the Bench Press, Bicep Curl, and other strength-building devices, doing a normal number of reps at a low weight. Even treadmill girl, in her trips to the water fountain during my relentless workout regimen, seemed to implicitly give me some measure of respect. The buff dudes went over to the alcove I had so recently inhabited, with their special gloves and sleeveless shirts, to get warmed up on stairmasters. The trio ran in place while I furiously worked my twiggy arms and tried not to think about other people.
Sure enough, a few minutes after the buff dudes came out, my routine got too intense for me to care any more what the other exercisers thought, and it was at this point that I was able to experience some kind of liberation - the kind I imagine all exercisers feel, when they are able to transition out of a concern for their appearance as they exercise (not helped by the walls of mirrors) and into a concern for their fitness, or health, or whatever it is that causes them to do these terrible things to their bodies. This was a great experience, but for the agony.

I finished several sets of reps and could barely stand. Not sure if this was normal, I made as quick an exit as I was capable of, slouching past the buff dudes and treadmill girl who all carried on as though I was just another exerciser, staying fit like I had been for my whole life, no big deal. I just hope they didn't hear the sirens soon enough after I left to associate them with me.

Intermittently-Risky Business

I suppose I would very loosely characterize risk (v.) as the act of opening oneself up to the possibility of loss, ideally in the pursuit of a goal. It is an important thing to be able to do! But in me, and probably in many people, the muscle for it has atrophied.

There is no way to eliminate risk from one's life. All of us are subject to chance events and cannot guard against all possible threats to our well-being. However, if one thing is true about the human species, it is that we are creatures capable of profound self-deception. Awareness of the inherent risks of living is something that can be willfully suppressed easily enough. Certain ways of life seem to involve little to no risk, and it may be true in one sense - negligible amounts of possible loss may be apparently involved in one or another venture - but the hidden risk wound up in decisions primarily made out of a desire for comfort and safety is enormous: it is the possibility for damage to be done to the human spirit. For serious.

I think it is a kind of violence to ourselves, to will to believe that it is possible and desirable to go about life without putting much on the line. And the more I practice that willed belief - the more I live and act out of it - the deeper the problem for me becomes. I don't want to believe that I do this even as I write about it! But there's not much that I would count as seriously risky in my past actions, especially in the last couple of months.

So I suppose the question is: how does a person get back into a healthy relationship with risk? Obviously not all risks are good ones, but the thing is, tons of them are good, and healthy to embrace. Some risks are even necessary to consciously accept - for example, the risk of utterly failing in front of an audience is a necessary one to take on for a person who desires to be a performer.

If there is a muscle for it, then maybe working it out will do the trick. And certainly another important aspect of changing an attitude towards risk would be a re-articulation of the constellation of goods involved in a given decision - a re-appraisal of the comparative value of different options, and a reconsideration of the things that lend those options their value. But who knows, really? Maybe at some point a person just gets forced into opening herself up to the possibility of greater losses than she is comfortable with, and when things turn out okay, she ends up with a new mindset. That would be pretty great. But to hope for that also seems rather passive, and passivity is part of the problem.

My brother is the one who has been provoking me to think about risk and my attitude towards it. Recently he got really angry about all the opportunities we (he and I) pass up because they're too risky. Here is a picture of him:

That expression pretty well sums up his outlook right now. May he inspire us all to take greater risks in the course of extraordinary pursuits. In fact, if you want to find me in the next couple of hours, just look for a lot of huge dangers. Wherever that place is, Jon will probably be there too, probably late.

The Future, Anxiety, and Love

Today I spent some a lot of the afternoon with a group at a restaurant. My friend John is visiting from New York, and the conversation at one point turned to the the open question of his future plans. John is torn between staying at home in Queens with his family, where he is in an LSAT study program, and moving out here to be around other recent grads and people whom he loves. It was difficult for him to talk about because of the tension between the strength of his desire to come back to this area, and the total reasonability of staying with his parents. In part, he feels unable to commit to returning here because he doesn't (yet) have a grand plan or design for his life.

Some days it feels like everyone around us (us = me and my friends, all early 20's and recently graduated) expects us to have our whole futures worked out, down to the minutiae. We're given a lot of mentor-y advice, and hear a lot about discerning the will of God and figuring out one's particular "calling" and "purpose." I am pleased for my friends for whom discerning the will of God for one's life is a reasonable undertaking, but I don't speak for a niche minority in suggesting that purpose and calling and God's will can be tricky things to apprehend, even with a lot of hard spiritual work and the best intentions.

Sometimes all you have to go on is a love or a desire, and sometimes that love or desire is for something that is unmistakably short-term or even imprudent. However, I think it is appropriate to borrow an insight from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger: that care is our most basic, foundational stance towards the world, and what we care about (even in the short term) can go a long way towards telling us who we are and what we should be doing. For some Christians, embracing a love or a desire may be essential for them to be able to develop a less-mediated relationship with their idea of the Good - one that isn't as densely filtered as "I'm going to have to consult with my pastor and check the scriptures to see if it's acceptable for me to work part-time as a performing artist," or a similar theologizing cul-de-sac. Some Christians seem to believe that if God doesn't call them up to give them specific clearance for pursuing something, that thing must not be a part of his perfect over-arching plan for them and therefore ought to be abandoned.

I believe in total depravity; I also believe in God's continually working to redeem and transform desires in the lives of those whom he has redeemed and is transforming. To question desire automatically in every case is a symptom of unfreedom. So, I told my friend John that he should return here, maybe even without a life-plan, in order to get a job, be with friends, and allow himself to pursue, for the time being, one or two of the things that he loves. Who knows, perhaps a big-picture plan could emerge out of the provisional pursuit of a deep-rooted desire.