Beyond the Modern Library: The 25 Greatest Novels of the 21st Century (so far) (2010 update)

Brilliant!

A quick note: the following 10 novels will not appear on

Drivel!

this list. It’s not your list. You might think these are great. I think they are overrated, whether because they are simply badly written (The Historian, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter), pretentious McSweeney’s-esque prattle (Absurdistan, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Everything is Illuminated), boring (Life of Pi), overrated due to serious subject matter (Lovely Bones), well written but uninteresting (Bee Season, Wickett’s Remedy), or fatally flawed due to oversimplification of a truly horrid situation (The Kite Runner). They’re not here so don’t ask for them. Also not here are the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde, which are fantastic, but, like Douglas Adams, not quite great writing, or the Jump 225 Trilogy, which I love and was written by a friend of mine, but isn’t quite up there and isn’t done yet. I have done away with the English language requirement for this list, because my previous list was done to Modern Library standards to match up against their list. Only two of these are foreign language novels anyway. Here’s my list:

Before I get to the list, I feel I should point out that it’s now up to 29 books.  That’s because I have added some updates over the last couple of years and didn’t feel the need to delete the books at the bottom of the list.

25 – Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man (Joseph Heller)

He set the literary world on notice with Catch-22 and then waited until he was dead before he finally released his second best book. Overlooked, as many posthumous novels are.

24 – Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)

Going back to the science fiction ideas that fed into her dystopian masterpiece, A Handmaid’s Tale.

23 – Bridge of Sighs (Richard Russo)

His first novel in six years continues his exploration of forgotten upstate New York.

22a – Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon) – added 5 August 2009

Inherent Vice - the most readable Pynchon novel in decades

This slots in here as it just came out yesterday and this list is now a year old.  This is vintage Pynchon, somewhat of a cross between Crying of Lot 49 and Raymond Chandler, a kind of stoner-detective-noir with a detective who is a bit like Dirk Gently.  Like much of Pynchon, it is full of cultural references, but it flows much more smoothly than any of his books have in a long time.

22 – American Gods (Neil Gaiman)

The best novel from Britain’s fantasy master, it’s a fascinating combination of American mythos and Norse mythology.

21 – The True History of the Kelly Gang (Peter Carey) – Booker Prize

Australia’s master novelist explores the legendary outlaw who is Australia’s Billy the Kid.

20 – The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen) – National Book Award

Very well written, though a novel completely devoid of anything even resembling a likeable character.

the British cover

19 – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling)

My favorite is Half Blood Prince, but this is the best as she moves away from the “school year at Hogwarts” formula, that includes truly terrifying moments, truly wonderful moments, and one moment that made my wife wake me up in the middle of the night, crying, the first time she read it.

18 – Middlesex (Geoffrey Eugenedis) – Pulitzer Prize

A bit uneven at times, but so well written, and the opening scenes in Greece are so fascinating.

17 – The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)

Gets overshadowed by the fact that she’s written the two best short story collections since Dubliners, but this is a great first novel.

16 – Everyman (Philip Roth) – PEN/Faulkner Award

Much like a Murakami novel, a character without a name takes us through a life.

15 – Exit, Ghost (Philip Roth)

Supposedly the final Zuckerman book, and combined with Ghost Writer, The Counterlife, American Pastoral and The Human Stain, makes the finest series of books involving one character.

14 – Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

A fascinating work that really couldn’t have been written by anyone else.

13 – On Beauty (Zadie Smith)

A new version of Howards End, set in Boston that fantastically reworks the original novel into a modern setting.

12 – Snow (Orhan Pamuk)

This novel is a major reason that Pamuk won the Nobel Prize two years ago.

11 – The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood) – Booker Prize

The best novel from the best writer Canada has ever produced.

World's greatest living writer? Or 2nd behind Rushdie?

10 – The Plot Against America (Philip Roth)

He’s been the best living American novelist for ages and has pretty much won everything but the Nobel Prize. Can we just give it to him, finally?

9 – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (Mark Haddon)

The debut novel that set everyone talking. The book that everyone had to read.

8 – Shalimar the Clown (Salman Rushdie)

Given that Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have won the Nobel Prize, in my mind, this is Roth’s only serious competition. His best book since Satanic Verses.

7a – Fun Home (Alison Bechdel)

the best graphic novel this century

I missed this when I originally wrote the list because I focused on traditional novels. This is a graphic novel and it packs one hell of a punch. For years, Bechdel has shown us how great she is with character development with her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, but this was a genuine surprise as she mines the tragedy of her relationship with her closeted father and explores the issues that helped make her into who she is. It’s a bonus how much it draws on literary history.

7 – Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) – PEN/Faulkner Award

My mother hates the ending, but can’t deny the book is brilliantly written. I like the ending.

6 – No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)

Everyone went nuts over The Road, but this to me, is the book everyone should have been talking about. And for those who think the ending of the film is odd, please note, it’s word for word the end of the book.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen - the book everyone is talking about - even before it comes out

5b – Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)

Back in 2001, in one of the great years for literature, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (#20 on this list) won the National Book Award.  It lost out on the PEN/Faulkner Award to Bel Canto (#7 on this list) and, though a finalist for the Pulitzer, lost to Empire Falls (#5 on this list).  It was a very well-written book, that, unfortunately, didn’t have any sympathetic characters.  It was hard to find anyone to like, so while it was easy to admire, it was hard to enjoy.

Flash-forward nine years and we finally see the release of a new Franzen novel.  The first two chapters were featured in The New Yorker and it has gotten amazing pre-publicity (including a rave from Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times and Franzen’s face on the cover of Time (all of which has been frustrating seeing as how the book won’t be released for another week and a half).  The pre-pub is deserved.  It is a truly phenomenal book.  It contains all the majesty and scope of The Corrections in terms of its story of the long downfall of a family and their horrible dysfunctionality.  For a long time, as I read it, I thought, uh-oh, shades of The Corrections.  It’s hard to really like anybody.

But then something amazing happens.  You go through the tunnel and come out the other side.  All of the characters end up with varying degrees of sympathy.  You get to understand and even like all of them.  The story, like The Corrections, goes places you would never expect and because this is Franzen, a horrible-comic kind of tragedy is waiting around every curve, but by the end, you have really gotten to love these characters.  It truly is a phenomenal novel and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes only the second novel in history of manage to win the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award (only Rabbit is Rich has managed to do that).

So why have I not said it’s the best book of the year?  Because as amazing as it is, I still feel it is the second best book I have read from 2010.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman - my choice for the best book of 2010

5a – The Imperfectionists (Tom Rachman)

People keep asking me for a good book at work and I keep saying, The Imperfectionists is the best book I have read all year.  It doesn’t hurt that the style seems to deliberately be a version of Winesburg, Ohio – using several short pieces, all of which easily could stand on their own as short stories, to tell a novel-length tale.  It is not just that the stories are inter-related (all of them deal with a failing international newspaper set in Rome and each story focuses on a different person at the paper, one of whom isn’t an employee but an oddly dedicated reader), but that the stories build on each other.  That is what turns it into an amazing novel.  You can read any story at any time and it will be enjoyable, with wonderful characterization and story-telling.  But when read in order, they tell a magnificent tragic tale of this poor paper and its inevitable slide into decay.

The Imperfectionists is a first novel and has gotten amazing press and word-of-mouth (including a front page review on The New York Times Book Review), but sadly, it is not over-shadowed by Franzen’s novel.  But this is like last year’s Oscars.  My personal choice was Inglourious Basterds, but The Hurt Locker was so close, I was okay when it won Best Picture.  The Imperfectionists is still my personal choice for the best novel of the year, but when it comes down to it, if Franzen wins all the awards, I’m okay with that.

5 – Empire Falls (Richard Russo) – Pulitzer Prize

Given a fantastic treatment by HBO with their miniseries, but even that still can’t capture the epic scope of the novel.  You can also see a much longer review here where I listed it at #70 in my list of the Top 100 Novels of all-time.  As you can guess, the other four novels on this list ranked above it will also appear on that list, but I haven’t gotten to them yet.

4 – Atonement (Ian McEwan) – National Book Critics Circle Award

Only three books on the list have been filmed (plus two television miniseries), all three of them in 2007, all of them faithful, and two of them were the two best films of the year. It’s not a coincidence.

3 – White Teeth (Zadie Smith)

There are three debut novels in the top 10. We have a lot of great things to look forward to. This book went places I never expected it to, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

if you don't like reading comics, read the novel about comics

2 – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon) – Pulitzer Prize

Before The Dark Knight redefined what a comic book film could be, this was the novel that brought comic books into the mainstream.

1 – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Suzannah Clarke)

An amazing combination of 19th century narrative with 20th Century fantasy and a whole world of British mythology thrown in makes for the best novel so far of the 21st Century.