It’s a warm-blooded yet brooding novel about the neurobiology of love.
It’s about a young, underemployed and ill young woman, and how she is slowly drawn into an experiment that involves facial recognition software and electromagnetic pulses that can make a person weep or flush. On a certain level, this is a dystopian project it borders on science fiction. In this, her second novel, she sweeps you up in the formidable current of her thought and then drops you down the rabbit hole. They glow like the artist Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light tubes. Lacey writes sentences that are long and clean and unstanchable. ‘THE ANSWERS’ By Catherine Lacey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). It’s about the author’s intense friendship with a girl who grew up to be a stripper and spend time in women’s shelters, and it has the sinister propulsion of a Mary Gaitskill short story. This book’s first essay, in particular, is a knockout, a lurid red heart wrapped in barbed wire. One of its themes is the way Florida can unmoor you and make you reach for shoddy, off-the-shelf solutions to your psychic unease. Gerard’s book deserves to be talked about in this company. Thanks to books by John Jeremiah Sullivan (“Pulphead”) and Leslie Jamison (“The Empathy Exams”) and a handful of other young writers, the essay collection has new impetus and drama in American letters. ‘SUNSHINE STATE: ESSAYS’ By Sarah Gerard (Harper Perennial). This is an old-fashioned page-turner, tweaked by this witty and sophisticated writer so that you sometimes feel she has retrofitted sleek new engines inside a craft owned for too long by James Jones and Herman Wouk. It primarily tells the story of Anna Kerrigan, a young woman who works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women have been allowed to hold jobs that belonged only to men. Egan’s immensely satisfying new novel, the follow-up to “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, is a dreadnought of a World War II-era historical novel, bristling with armaments yet intimate in tone. ‘MANHATTAN BEACH’ By Jennifer Egan (Scribner). Cusk’s writing offers the iron-rich pleasure of voice instead of style. We watch Faye move through her days, speaking to friends, old lovers, real estate agents, salon employees, fellow writers, construction workers.
Faye, the divorced writer who is the narrator of Cusk’s transfixing latest novel, is the same woman we met in the author’s previous novel, “Outline.” These two short books are part of a projected trilogy, and together they’re already an achievement: dense, aphoristic, philosophically acute novels that read like Iris Murdoch thrice-distilled. ‘TRANSIT’ By Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Adiga’s take on the world makes you consider what the apocalypse might sound like as reported by the BBC’s Hindi service. It’s a book about religion and its tribal cruelties, and it bears bad tidings. This is a cricket novel that maintains a running critique of the sport, and a moving novel about fathers and sons. He is not merely a confident storyteller but also a thinker, a skeptic, a wily entertainer and a thorn in the side of orthodoxy and cant. This is Adiga’s third novel, and it offers proof that his Man Booker Prize, for “The White Tiger” in 2008, was no fluke. ‘SELECTION DAY’ By Aravind Adiga (Scribner). This year, among other noteworthy books, Kakutani reviewed George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West,” Omar El Akkad’s “American War” and Ayobami Adebayo’s “Stay With Me.” - John Williams, Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer Dwight GarnerĮach of these books, in a hard year, was one I didn’t know I needed until it appeared. Kakutani began her role as a critic in 1983, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Michiko Kakutani stepped down as our chief book critic in July. The year in books included a historic change at The Times. Janet Maslin, a former staff critic who remains a frequent contributor to The Times, also lists her favorites. Below, The New York Times’s three daily book critics - Dwight Garner, Jennifer Senior and Parul Sehgal - share their thoughts about their favorites among the books they reviewed this year, each list alphabetical by author. There were several worthy works of escapism, of course, but the literary world mostly reflected the gravity and tumult of the larger world. Novels about global interconnectedness, political violence and migration deeply reported nonfiction accounts of racial and economic strife in the United States stories both imagined and real about gender, desire and the role of beauty in the natural world.
This was a year when books - like the rest of us - tried to keep up with the news, and did a pretty good job of it.