James Wood on the Books of 2009 Posted by James Wood

December 9, 2009
James Wood on the Books of 2009 Posted by James Wood

I was excited, this year, by Lydia Davis's "Collected Stories" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a beautiful collection of original writings. Though Davis is the least confessional of writers (in some ways), her presence is insistently and increasingly felt in this collection, which develops the aspect, almost, of a commonplace book, or book of Montaigne-like essays. (Several late stories deal unsentimentally with the deaths of her mother and father.) Davis is funny, tart, self-deprecating (even self-loathing), and very playful.

In a slightly similar vein, Geoff Dyer's "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi" (Pantheon), seems confessional—it is about a journalist named Jeff who goes to Venice and Varanasi, places that the real Geoff Dyer has traveled to—but is never quite identical with its author. What it does get from its author are the usual Dyer qualities—louche, lounging humor, terrific observations, a nicely philosophical way with paradox, and a wily prose style.

censoringiranian.jpgShahriar Mandanipour's novel "Censoring an Iranian Love Story" (Knopf) is gentle and charming—it reminded me of early Rushdie (without the annoying stuff). In the novel, Mandanipour, who is now in exile in America, is trying to write a love story about two Tehran University students. But he cannot do so, because Iranian society won't allow the young couple to be alone together; and because the Iranian censor will always delete anything suggestive of intimacy or eros. Mandanipour's ingenious idea is to write his love story anyway, but to black out those portions of the text which would have offended the censor. The reader is allowed to decipher the words, because they are crossed out, but not erased. Thus we are forced to stumble over something that we naturally do every day, and take for granted, in the West. The novel is full of lively comedy, despite the darkness of its theme.

Three books of fiction I have immensely enjoyed, but was not able to review (because I got to them too late):

Daniyal Mueenuddin's collection of linked stories, "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders" (Norton), set in contemporary Pakistan. These are beautifully limpid and luminous, reminiscent of early Naipaul, and range across society with enviable ease.

The Australian novelist Helen Garner's "The Spare Room" (Henry Holt), a devastating novella about a friend who is dying of cancer, and who comes to stay with the novelist (she is called Helen in the book), who realizes, after a while, that she cannot stand the presence of her ailing and needy friend. Garner should be better known in this country. Utterly unsentimental, facing death without shyness, rightly praised by Peter Carey, "The Spare Room" is a far more powerful re-writing of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" than Philip Roth's much more self-pitying "Everyman."

The "scary fairy tales" of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (Penguin), selected under the title "There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby." The title is slightly irritating, complete with funky Jonathan Safran Foer-style lettering on the cover. But the stories are a revelation—it is like reading late-Tolstoy fables, with all of the master's directness and brutal authority, but fables set in an alternative reality which has a just-recognizable Soviet bleakness. A wonderful book.

savinggod.jpgThe non-fiction book I most enjoyed this year might be a stocking-stuffer for both atheists and believers (it is slightly more likely to appeal to the former, but would certainly intrigue believers willing to think about their belief). It is "Saving God: Religion After Idolatry" (Princeton University Press), by the Princeton philosopher Mark Johnston. This book demolishes, with far greater precision and elegance than anything by Richard Dawkins, all reasons for conventional religious belief—which Johnston considers idolatry, and a form of "resistance" to real religious apprehension. Johnston has no time for any aspect of supernaturalism (he does not believe in life after death, for instance, or in Jesus's divinity, or even in God, as conventionally understood), but he does believe in "salvation" (which he defines as our re-orientation toward "another world": not a world to come, but this world, transfigured by love.) It is rare to read a contemporary philosopher (and a logician, at that, who studied under the formidable Saul Kripke) so passionate about what is effectively a form of redemption. I don't agree with Johnston's theist conclusion, but I am moved by the way he reaches it; which is the exact opposite of how I feel about the work of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.
James Wood on the Books of 2009: The Book Bench : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/12/james-wood-on-the-books-of-2009.html
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