Best of 2004: Books

Preacher confessions, separated twins and Rick Moody bashers among year's best lit

By John Ziebell

Every year at this time I spend a lot of energy ridiculing "Top 10" lists, so it's only fair that I let somebody else tell you what the "best" books of 2004 were. Here, though, are a few of the year's literary efforts that I believe are worthy of attention. Some might be a step or two from the mainstream, but I guarantee you'll find them at least stimulating and well-written--and aren't those fairly good rewards?

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Gilead is an equally passionate but radically different second novel from Marilynne Robinson, who won the PEN/ Hemingway award for her 1981 debut, Housekeeping. Gilead's narrator, Reverend John Ames, is a third-generation preacher in a small Midwestern town who, at 76, is dying of heart disease. The novel is ostensibly a rambling legacy that Ames is writing for his 7-year-old son, part memoir, part history, part confession. Religion is the novel's central focus, and its cast of characters is limited, but it would be unfair to imply that the world Robinson creates is either claustrophobic or incestuous. Ames' letter--or his soliloquy, if you will--is both seamless and seductive.

The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq by Christian Parenti. The Freedom embraces a tradition of war reportage that begins by resisting the media status quo, blending the analysis of Shirer's Berlin Diary with the blunt gallows honesty of Herr's Dispatches. Some of this work has appeared in The Nation, but when collected becomes greater than the sum of its parts; a book sacrifices some level of immediacy to privilege reflection, but that's something we could use more of these days. Too many of us confuse what passes as news with reality; Parenti is here to remind us of our sins. He has an eye for the perfect image, a wonderful ear for dialogue and a prose style that floats across the page. He consistently conveys gut-level connections made with real people who are in the mix, and whether he's talking to fundamentalist insurgents or SAW gunners or dissemblers of media disinformation, we instinctively realize we're plugged into a parallel universe, and that the truth of that world is a whole lot different than Dan Rather's.

Runaway by Alice Munro. There's certainly nothing new to say about Alice Munro; year after year, book after book, she just keeps turning out the finest short fiction imaginable. Her stories are nearly all studies in conflict and contradiction, set most often in rural Canada and usually involving women who are somehow trapped, either literally, metaphorically or both--by love, by the past, by tradition, by their situations. There's grace in her figurative images, and a dark undercurrent that beats like a pulse through her prose. Munro is a consummate stylist; you won't find a word out of place in these stories.

Hatchet Jobs by Dale Peck. Title aside, this is the freshest collection of literary criticism in recent memory. Novelist and essayist Dale Peck attempts to do for fiction what Dave Hickey does for art: refocus our frayed aesthetic sensibilities on the essence of the product rather than its origins, intentions or affectations. Peck will live in literary infamy for one sentence, no matter how perfect it is or how well he justified it: "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." This is the kind of statement that, taken out of context, will always haunt a writer who is simply too smart for his own good. Peck is an outstanding stylist and a deeply inquisitive reader; while I don't agree with him on everything, even when he's wrong he's engaging and entertaining, and you sure can't say that about many of the contemporary writers he critiques. Like Rick Moody.

You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon. In two story collections, Dan Chaon earned a reputation as one of the few writers who can be stylistically elegant, hilariously insightful and truly weird on the same page. It's perhaps too easy to say that his first novel, You Remind Me of Me, is about damage, both physical and psychological, but trauma is a central concern. The tale of two brothers separated at an early age effortlessly weaves its way through three decades of entwined chronologies, and no matter how bizarre things might become as the story progresses, the characters are invariably both believable and unique. What's amazing here, as in Chaon's short fiction, is how he can change us as readers, reforming our perceptions over a matter of pages to favor the accidental felon and the socially inept loner, victims crippled by lost pasts, indistinct desires and limited critical facilities.

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz. In case you missed this for Christmas, The Nutshell Studies is one of the most heinously compelling photo books ever. In the 1940s, Chicago heiress-turned-criminologist Frances Glessner Lee created an ensemble of 18 death scenes, modeled at 1:12 scale, as training aids for homicide investigators. Based on actual "unsolvable" deaths, the dioramas were designed to force cops to pay attention to the kind of forensic minutiae that could put killers behind bars, and are complete to the tiniest detail--like miniature pencils that write, or a doll with a broken arm. Botz came across the models at the Baltimore medical examiner's office--they're still used for training--and created this detailed photographic record, complete with case data and floor plans.

Sayonara, Gangsters by Genichiro Takahashi. Sometimes it's okay to love a book just because it's not like everything else. Sayonara, Gangsters isn't exactly a crime novel; the title is actually the name of the narrator and protagonist, who teaches poetry in a four-seat classroom. In this world lovers name each other, City Hall sends black-bordered postcards to residents scheduled for death and rivers flow on the upper floors of buildings. "Letter to the Corinthians" plays on the radio every day, a ferris wheel commits suicide...but it's also about poetry and love and metaphysical teasers like who defines what we are, the kind of book that can quote Kant and Foucault in the same joke. The novel abandons reality immediately and without reservation to exist in a place where metaphor matters and images, no matter how surreal, develop such resonance that they become their own reasons for being.