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. 

BOOKS!1! Also TJ & Dave. Also Promissory Notes.

So: in the last several months, I have read a lot of books. Primarily fiction, but with some other things thrown in too.
I love books. The printed word is one of my favorite media. There's something about turning pages that just jives with my jabbers, and you know, reading is great too. Anyway, to start, here's a near-comprehensive list of the things I've read since, perhaps, May, in no order:

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Home by Marilynne Robinson
Whose Community? Which Interpretation? by Merold Westphal
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose
Wittgenstein's Poker by David Edmonds & John Eidinow
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime by Mark Haddon
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
The End of Memory by Miroslav Volf
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
i told me so by Gregg A. Ten Elshof
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Scott Pilgrim Series 1-6 by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I also read a bunch of poetry books and plays but they're for some other post.
This is what I would like to do: write up sparkly little blurbs for most of these in the next couple of weeks. I adored them almost without exception, and would like to give thoughtful recommendations with specific reasons why they would be worth your time.

FURTHERMORE

Wednesday night I got to see my favorite performing duo, TJ and Dave, at the usual time and place, and afterward went to a little all-night coffee shop to catch up with some friends. It was very late. Dave walked in after we arrived and used the bathroom there! Then he came out! THEN I mustered my courage! AND THEN I approached him, told him how much I admired his work and have been influenced by it, and he shook my hand and said, "thanks!" All in all, it was a wonderful night. 

Here is a picture of TJ and Dave. They are by far my favorite improvisers, and are more or less why I am still interested in improv at this point in my life. I love them. If you see them some Wednesday night in Chicago, you will understand why. I intend to write a lot about them in the future. 

Dave is actually on the left, TJ on the right. They are in a typical pose.





FURTHERMORE

From now on, readers may expect at least one non-sequitur per post. Like "jives with my jabbers." Well, either a non-sequitur, or plain old-fashioned gibberish, I guess, but yeah. 

Sufjan Stevens, Etc.

I have come around to loving his new album. It took a while to get past the bombastic flautistry and what-have-you, but honestly, I love it, even with how slight the reserves of my patience are for most electronic and techno music. This is the age of adz, and it is awesome. 

My favorite album of the year, however, is still Hadestown by Anais Mitchell and friends. I never thought folk opera would be my thing, if I ever knew it was a thing (I'm pretty sure I never knew it was a thing), but this contemporary retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice won me over on a first hearing. Perfectly cast, perfectly arranged, and beautifully written. Thanks be to Dan for introducing me to this indie diamond. 

I love me some music. 

Love, Desire, and Humanity Swirled Into an Expansive Harry Frankfurt / Jonathan Safran Foer Marble Cake

You'll need some time and patience for this one.

Harry Frankfurt's hugely important paper "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" is one of those pieces of philosophy that's helped me to understand myself and other people better. His basic thesis is that the essential feature of "personhood" is a certain quality of the will, which is a condition for moral accountability as well as the basis for the peculiar sort of respect that we give to other persons. (Personhood has empirically only ever comprised members of the human race, but theoretically it could extend to other species as well if certain conditions obtained.) Frankfurt argues that this certain quality of the will is the possibility for regulative self-evaluation; basically, we have first-order desires (think: hunger, thirst, libido, etc, but also less strictly-biological yearnings, like a longing for a father's approval), and second-order desires that actually have our first-order desires as their content.

Persons, then, are the sorts of beings that are concerned with the desires that they have; beyond mere calculation in the pursuit of first-order desires, we also have the ability to reflect on our desires and choose ones in particular that we desire to be aligned with our will. Charles Taylor, in typical brilliant fashion, takes this characterization one step further by arguing that second-order desires also involve what he calls 'strong-evaluation', a moral (in a very broad sense of the word) judgment that is informed by an idea of the sort of person that one wishes to become.

Persons, on this account, are creatures that are concerned with the sorts of creatures that they are, and the sorts of creatures that they are becoming. Interestingly enough, this is more-or-less in line with Martin Heidegger's phenomenological description of da-sein (the sort of being-in-the-world of human beings), but conceived almost entirely within the analytic tradition. The key element here that I wish to emphasize is the desire for other desires.

Now I will geek out in a different direction. I'm reading a great novel by Jonathan Safran Foer called Everything is Illuminated. The story is divided into alternating narrative halves: the first is the ongoing personal account, in hilariously broken English, of a Ukrainian translator who has been hired to work for an American writer intent on finding the woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The other half is the story being written by the American, which traces his grandfather's lineage in a remote shtetl community back to the late eighteenth century; it is whimsical and delightfully droll. The chapter I just finished deals with Brod, the American writer's great-great-great-great-great grandmother, who as a baby was rescued from a river after it swallowed her family's wagon as well as the rest of her family. She is adopted by Yankel, a seriously misfortunate but big-hearted old man, who does his best to raise the precocious and beautiful girl in a community filled with men that obsess over her.

Several pages dedicated to Brod and Yankel's relationship touch on a common human problem which refers us back to Frankfurt and second-order desires. Though Brod and Yankel are attentive to one another and seem to cherish one another, Foer writes (and it is worth quoting at length)

But my very-great-and-lonely-grandmother didn't love Yankel, not in the simple and impossible sense of the word. In reality she hardly knew him. And he hardly knew her. They knew intimately the aspects of themselves in the other, but never the other. . .

But each was the closest thing to a deserving recipient of love that the other would find. So they gave each other all of it. . . when Yankel said he would die for Brod, he certainly meant it, but that thing he would die for was not Brod, exactly, but his love for her. And when she said Father, I love you, she was neither naive nor dishonest, but the opposite: she was wise and truthful enough to lie. They reciprocated the great and saving lie - that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things - willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

There is a lot worth going over in this passage, especially the brief riff on 'otherness', but I want to focus on the theme of love for love. Earlier in the chapter, Brod discovers that the world does not meet her expectations, and she cannot find anything that deserves to be loved by her, because her love is perfect and tremendous. And so, in need of an object, her love turns in on itself, and her relationships with the things in her life becomes mediated by her meta-love; she loves her love for things primarily, and the things themselves secondarily. Brod cannot sustain an un-mediated love for an imperfect object, and so cannot love the world she finds herself in or its contents. Yankel's love for Brod is founded upon his various emotional, spiritual, and psychological needs; when he was much younger, his wife left him without a reason, and he was additionally dishonored in his community for reasons that are not made clear. He gives himself over to his care for Brod as a way of giving his waning life purpose and direction, and so his love is similarly mediated.

As Frankfurt argues that a capacity for second-order desires are partially constitutive of our personhood, Safran Foer obliquely points towards this capacity as a source of our loneliness and sorrow. Second-order desires have both a positive and negative aspect, and the negative looms larger than the positive; second-order desires call into question our first order desires, and lead us to make choices against the majority of them in the pursuit of one that we would wish to identify with our will. However, this choice is susceptible to weakness and a lack of resolve, so even our positive willful affirmations do not result in success in every case. Frequently, we don't have the heart to do what we want to do (in this, there are echoes of a Pauline lament). We are self-regulative creatures, but therefore, we seem also to be creatures that are largely incapable of fully embracing our desires, and of sustaining direct and unmediated loves for things. Fear and disappointment prevent these important human happenings from happening.

The reason for today's post is my growing unease over mediated loves and truncated desires in my life and the lives of those around me. An insightful article from a Spring '10 issue of Harper's Magazine identified this problem with late-stage post-modern capitalism. The logic runs like this: 19th century industriocentric capitalism had essentially to do with the production of goods. Modern 20th century capitalism had essentially to do with the production of desires. Late-stage postmodern capitalism, our particular digitally-affected variety, has to do with the production of identity. Advertisers and marketing execs use psychological research to figure out what's cool or classy, and sell people an ideal image of themselves (a classic apple-polishing fallacy, but when since the 1800's have advertisements operated on a logical level to make an appeal?). Of course, intuitively it seems that mediated love in particular is a more human, less particularly economic, problem, but perhaps it has been compounded and intensified by our current social and cultural moment, allowed to grow large in the toxic commercial-psychic water we're all swimming in (but not drinking or using to bathe, at least not at my house, nope).

It takes a lot of guts to love something that is imperfect for its own sake, and not for the sake of loving your love for it or the appearance of loving it. And the full embrace of desire - the affirmation that it is good (desire itself, but obviously not all desires), and the commitment to the pursuit of it - is almost impossible, in the face of our nervy regulative self-evaluation, doubt, and concern for who we are in the eyes of an unknowable 'public.' But, reiterating a Heideggerian theme from an earlier post, care is the most basic human posture towards the world, and in this vein it is our loves and desires that give our lives thickness, richness, and depth. I would choose to love in a gutsier and more whole-hearted way, because that is humanizing, and to allow my desires to be full-sized and compelling to me, because that is also humanizing - but the risks involved are too significant to ignore. To give this problem a Nietzschean spin: why choose to explore the heights and the valleys of human life when the comfortable lazy plains present themselves? This is the pressing question for people in our epoch, I would suggest, and the denigration of theistic resources in the service of an answer may directly correspond to the growth of the postmodern malaise of inarticulate anxiety, boredom, and purposelessness.

So here's to love, desire, and everything else that makes us human, and a prayer for the miracle that would be full, unmediated love for things and an embrace of the desire that is eternal and infinite in scope.

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.

LIBRARY SALE

Purchased:

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, also by Chabon

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen

Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure by Martyn Lloyd-Jones (for whom I am named)

Total amount spent:

$18

. . .

God does love us!