EDITOR’S NOTE

FICTION | Laurie Muchnick

The Best Fiction of 2021

This year had its ups and downs, but through it all, people were reading fiction. Sales of print fiction titles were up a whopping 30.7% in the first half of this year, according to NPD Bookspan, the largest jump in any category. And there were lots of great books to dig into. The titles that prompted perhaps the most discussion (some contentious!) came from 30-year-old Sally Rooney and 62-year-old Jonathan Franzen—two highly self-conscious novelists from different generations—and Kirkus loved both of them. Beautiful World, Where Are You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 9) is “a novel of capacious intelligence and plenty of page-turning emotional drama,” according to our review, while Crossroads (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 5) “is amusing, excruciating, and at times unexpectedly uplifting—in a word, exquisite.”

The three most recent Pulitzer Prize winners all had new books out this year, and they were all trying something a bit different. Louise Erdrich used her experience as the owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis in The Sentence (Harper, Nov. 9), an often funny novel about a bookstore that’s haunted by the ghost of its most devoted customer as well as by a legacy of racism against Black and Indigenous Americans. Our review says, “Erdrich’s love for bookselling is clear, as is her complicated affection for Minneapolis and the people who fight to overcome institutional hatred.” In Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, Sept. 14), Colson Whitehead shifts gears to give us a crime novel that is “as audacious, ingenious, and spellbinding as any of his previous period pieces.” And in Bewilderment (Norton, Sept. 21), Richard Powers has written a more intimate story about a widower and his 9-year-old son, who’s neurodivergent. According to our review, it’s “a touching novel that offers a vital message with uncommon sympathy and intelligence.” There were several tremendous debuts this year. At more than 800 pages, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper, Aug. 24) is tremendous physically but also thematically: “If this isn’t the Great American Novel, it’s a mighty attempt at achieving one,” according to our review. We enter deeply into the life of Jeffers’ protagonist, historian Ailey Pearl Garfield, and also become acquainted with Ailey’s forebears in Chicasetta, Georgia, where her Black ancestors were enslaved. The stories in Yoon Choi’s debut collection, Skinship (Knopf, Aug. 17), explore the lives of Korean American families; they’re “both closely observed and expansive, a feat of narrative engineering that places her next to Alice Munro.” Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties (Ecco, Aug. 3) was published months after his tragic death at age 28; his deeply funny and humane stories feature Cambodian immigrants and their American-born children. “Even when these stories are funny and hopeful, an inescapable history is always waiting,” said our review. Some books took us on a journey. In The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (Viking, Oct. 5), two teenagers hit the road in the 1950s, taking the reader along on what our review called “an exhilarating ride through Americana.” Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (Knopf, May 4) follows an aviatrix born in 1914 on an audacious roundthe-world flight that our reviewer found “so damn entertaining.” Jesse McCarthy’s “intellectually stimulating” fiction debut, The Fugitivities (Melville House, June 8), finds a young Black American man on a trip through Brazil “loaded with discoveries, epiphanies, and, occasionally, physical peril looming.”

In Golden Girl (Little, Brown, June 1), Elin Hilderbrand gives her heroine, a novelist who’s just died in a car crash, the opportunity to spend one last summer watching her family—and meddling a little bit—from that great greenroom in the sky. “If novelists are auditioning to play God,” our review said, “Hilderbrand gets the part.”

All the writers on our list of the year’s best fiction conjure worlds you’ll be happy to spend time in, even if you can’t meddle yourself.

defensive grid, and her characterization of the Hermes-analog as a shuttle pilot named Freddie (as in Mercury).

Richly developed and profound, able to serve both as a stand-alone and a surprising follow-up to the previous work.

WHAT STORM, WHAT THUNDER

Chancy, Myriam J. A. Tin House (330 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 5, 2021 978-1-951142-76-6

Survivors and victims tell their powerful, moving stories in this fictional account of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. On Jan. 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck the island of Hispaniola, changing the face of Haiti forever. Between 250,000 and 300,000 people are estimated to have perished, many of them in the crowded capital of Port-au-Prince, while 1.5 million others were left homeless. In her searing new novel, Chancy, who spent years talking to survivors, sifts through the wreckage of this inconceivable calamity. She has shaped the stories of the living and the dead into a mighty fictional tapestry that reflects the terror, despair, and sorrow of the moment as she examines questions of Haitian identity in a world that doesn’t seem to care. Among her unforgettable characters are a desperate husband who abandons his grief-stricken wife in a sprawling, dangerous tent city; a sex worker who steps out of a hotel moments before it collapses; a drug trafficker trapped in an elevator who begins to reassess his life; a wealthy businessman who left Haiti and has returned to make a deal at the worst possible moment; a teenage girl terrorized by a former classmate in the refugee camp; a Haitian cab driver in Boston who has discovered religion and the perils of being Black in America; and an architect who returns home from Rwanda, where she’d been working for an NGO, only to find herself stymied by bureaucracy and unable to help anyone. The thread that connects these voices is Ma Lou, a market woman who has witnessed the tides of fortune in Port-au-Prince for decades and who holds no illusions about the future. The stories are not always easy to read, but they shouldn’t be. Chancy offers fleeting redemption for some characters, but she does not deal in false hopes. “We all look away unless it’s us, or someone we love, going up in flames,” one character muses. In this devastating work, Chancy refuses to let any of us look away.

A devastating, personal, and vital account.

LAND OF BIG NUMBERS Stories

Chen, TePing Mariner Books (256 pp.) $15.99 paper | Feb. 2, 2021 978-0-358-27255-7

An astonishing collection of stories about life in contemporary China by a Chinese American writer. Chen, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has an eye for the wry, poignant detail in her fiction debut: Elderly men who meet in the park to play chess bring their pet birds along, hanging the birdcages from tree branches while they play. Most of the stories are set in China. In one, a young girl who works in a flower shop becomes dangerously interested in one of her customers. In another, an older man in a remote village tries to build a robot and, later, an airplane. Whether her characters are women or men, young or old, Chen displays a remarkable ability to inhabit their minds. She is gentle and understanding with her characters so that their choices, desires, and regrets open up, petal-like, in story after story. Often, in the background or off to the side, a hint of violence will make itself known: A young man’s twin sister is arrested and beaten by the police; a woman’s abusive ex-boyfriend appears without warning, and she remembers his old penchant for harming animals. A young man borrows money to invest in the stock market, and as his hopes begin to plummet, he learns the details of his father’s traumatic past. Again and again, Chen reveals herself to be a writer of extraordinary subtlety. Details accrue one by one, and as each story reaches its inevitable conclusion, a sense emerges that things could have gone no other way. Still, there’s nothing precious or overly neat here. Chen’s stories speak to both the granular mundanities of her characters’ lives and to the larger cultural, historical, and economic spheres that they inhabit. She is a tremendous talent.

Chen’s stories are both subtle and rich, moving and wry, and in their poignancy, they seem boundless.

SKINSHIP Stories

Choi, Yoon Knopf (304 pp.) $25.95 | Aug. 17, 2021 978-0-593-31821-8

The rare story collection that draws you in so completely that the pages turn themselves. That’s the happy experience of reading Choi’s debut book of eight luxuriously long stories that chronicle the lives of Korean American families. Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Choi’s families aren’t unusually unhappy, but her characters bear the weight of the

small indignities, compromises, and sometimes great sacrifices that families require. In “The Church of Abundant Life,” Soo spends her days behind the counter of the store her husband bought when he immigrated to the United States. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance from South Korea makes her reflect on her somewhat impulsive choice to marry one man and not another—who then married her acquaintance— and the tragedies both couples have borne. “The Art of Losing” (selected for the Best American Short Stories in 2018) captures the tenderness and brutality of long marriages. “Sometimes,” the wife observes, “she felt that patience and kindness could be stretched so far in a marriage as to become their opposites.” Similarly, in “Song and Song,” a sprawling piece about losing a mother and becoming one, the narrator realizes that mothering is an act both of forgiving and being forgiven; though her children haven’t brought her the happiness she expected, “they have taught me all I know about the meaning of life.” Choi’s stories are both closely observed and expansive, a feat of narrative engineering that places her next to Alice Munro. Nearly every one builds to what feels like an epiphany, or a pearl of wisdom, only to rush on for more pages as though to remind us that life does not stand still, that flux is the normal state of things, and loss always lurks on love’s horizon.

An exceptional debut.

THE NETANYAHUS An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

Cohen, Joshua New York Review Books (240 pp.) $16.95 paper | June 22, 2021 978-1-68137-607-3

A campus novel set in 1959 that explores a footnote in the life of Benzion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin Netanyahu, the then-future Israeli prime minister.

Cohen’s narrator, Ruben Blum, is an economics professor at a college in upstate New York (a thinly veiled Cornell); he specializes in the hilariously boring field of tax history, and he is the lone Jewish faculty member in his department. As the token Jew, he is assigned to lead the committee considering whether to hire one Benzion Netanyahu. As Blum considers Netanyahu’s case, he receives letters from various colleagues and associates of the candidate about the man and his scholarly work, which lead him to peruse Netanyahu’s scholarship himself. This scholarship and these accounts—vastly varied as they are—illuminate the foibles, strengths, and contradictions (ranging from the minor and humorous to the significant and existential, and every combination in between) of a fascinating individual and, on Cohen’s part, a richly imagined character. Netanyahu’s foibles, strengths, and contradictions in turn illuminate the complexities of Jewish history and sociopolitics; the result is a wide-ranging, truly original novel that limns these topics from what feels like infinite angles. Cohen has taken on a hugely ambitious project, and if each element that his narrative explores—Jewish history, the history of Zionism, the history of antisemitism, the status of Jews in higher education, the conditions and results of Jewish American assimilation—is a proverbial stone, Cohen’s project involves not just leaving no stone unturned, but also thoroughly inspecting each stone first. The result is a densely intellectual novel, and if it is at times pedantic, the pedantry is rarely unwarranted; it is simply a function of this conscientiousness. Formally, the novel’s style is as energetic, expansive, and exploratory as its content; Cohen is an extraordinarily skilled writer, and his nearly manic prose is well suited to this ambitious and expansive, yet masterfully controlled, novel. If this sounds complex, that’s because it is. But the complexity does not diminish the novel’s readability; it is in no way a lightweight work, but it is a delightful and gratifying one.

A novel that is as enjoyable as it is intelligent: a truly brilliant book and a remarkable achievement.

RAZORBLADE TEARS

Cosby, S.A. Flatiron Books (320 pp.) $26.99 | July 6, 2021 978-1-250-25270-8

A lean, mean crime story about two bereaved fathers getting their hands bloody. Coming from the right author, genre fiction has a rare capacity to touch on any number of big ideas: love, death, hatred, violence, freedom, bondage, and redemption, to name just a few. Cosby’s latest fits the bill. Fast on its feet, by turns lethal and tender, the story takes place in small-town Virginia, though it could be the backwoods of a great many places. Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins, both ex-cons haunted by their pasts, wouldn’t ordinarily mix, largely because Ike is Black and Buddy Lee is White and a casual racist. But the two men are tragically linked. Their sons were married to each other, and they were murdered together, shot in their faces outside a fancy Richmond wine store on their anniversary. The dads are both homophobes, but they also love their sons, so when the police investigation quickly stalls, Ike and Buddy Lee decide to crack a few skulls on their own. Cosby gives us both the charge of once-bad men getting back in touch with their wild sides and the sad reluctance of relatively straight-and-narrow lives turning to vengeance. These old-timers have done bad, bad things, and they’ve done the time to prove it. Now they’re ready to do those things again in the name of a thorny father-son love that neither man is quite comfortable with. Here’s Buddy Lee after a long, hard night with his new friend: “Chopping up your first body is disgusting. Your second is tiresome. When you’re doing your fifteenth it’s all muscle memory.” This is a bloody good yarn with two compelling antiheroes you’ll root for from the start, and not only because their enemies, or at least some of them, belong to a White nationalist biker club with murderous

“Brilliant prose and piercing insights convey a dark but compelling view of human nature.”

second place

ways of its own. Lean and mean, this is crime fiction with a chip on its shoulder.

Violence and love go hand in hand in this tale of two rough men seeking vengeance for their murdered sons.

WHAT’S MINE AND YOURS

Coster, Naima Grand Central Publishing (352 pp.) $28.00 | March 2, 2021 978-1-5387-0234-5

Coster, a Kirkus Prize finalist for Halsey Street (2018), returns with an intergenerational saga of two North Carolina families inextricably connected by trauma and love.

In a city in the Piedmont in the fall of 1992, Ray is baking croissants, preparing for the day that’s supposed to change his life: A reporter is coming to profile the cafe he co-founded that has since become “his everything.” If business picks up afterward, he already has a list of things he’ll do. Buy his girlfriend, Jade, a ring and marry her. Buy Jade’s 6-year-old son, Gee—who is, for all practical purposes, also his son now—a chest of drawers. Take them on a trip. None of it will happen: That afternoon, Ray is shot and killed. Jade’s cousin owed money to a guy; Ray was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then Coster skips forward a few years, to the outskirts of that city, where a woman named Lacey May Ventura is trying to raise three daughters on no money while her troubled husband is in prison; an unrelated story, on the surface, a single mother making compromises to get by. The story of the past, though, is then interrupted by dispatches from the present: In the Atlanta suburbs, Noelle, the oldest of the Ventura girls, is now a theater director in a disintegrating marriage. Jumping backward and forward in time and bouncing between families, Coster weaves together a gripping portrait of generational pain. But the details of her plot—carefully constructed, if not especially subtle—pale in comparison to her characters, who are startling in their quiet humanity. Coster is an exacting observer but also an endlessly generous one, approaching her cast with a sharp eye and deep warmth. The overlapping pieces fit together, of course, but it’s the individual moments that are exquisite, each chapter a tiny snapshot of a whole world.

Tender but—miraculously—never sentimental.

SECOND PLACE

Cusk, Rachel Farrar, Straus and Giroux (192 pp.) $25.00 | May 4, 2021 978-0-374-27922-6

Riffing on D.H. Lawrence’s famously fraught visit with Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico, Cusk chronicles a fictional woman’s attempt to find meaning in other people’s art.

Readers need not know anything about that literary-history byway, however, to enjoy this brooding tale. Highly praised for her recent, decidedly nonlinear Outline Trilogy, Cusk here rediscovers the joys of plot. Narrator M sets a dark tone with her opening recollection of how a meeting with the devil on a train leaving Paris opened her eyes to “the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things.” Then she pulls back to her encounter the day before with an exhibition of paintings by an artist she calls L that spoke of “absolute freedom” to “a young mother on the brink of rebellion.” Now, years later, divorced from her hypercritical first husband and a subsequent period of misery behind her, she is happily married to quiet, nurturing Tony and lives with him in “a place of great but subtle beauty” remote from the urban centers of whatever country this is. (Details are deliberately vague, but bravura descriptions of marshes and brambles evoke a fairy-tale landscape rather than New Mexico.) M clearly feels some dissatisfaction with this idyllic retreat since she writes to L through a mutual friend and invites him to stay in their “second place,” a ruined cottage they rebuilt as a long-term refuge for guests. After some coy back and forth, L turns up on short notice with an unannounced young girlfriend in tow, forcing M to move her 21-year-old daughter, Justine, and her boyfriend, Kurt, to the main house. L clearly knows that M wants something from him (Cusk elliptically suggests a desire to be welcomed into an imaginative life M feels inadequate to enter on her own) and is determined not to provide it. Increasingly tense interactions among the three couples form the seething undercurrent to M’s ongoing musings on art, truth, and reality. The inevitable big blowup is followed by reconciliations and relocations, capped by one of Cusk’s characteristically abrupt conclusions with a bitter letter from L.

Brilliant prose and piercing insights convey a dark but compelling view of human nature.

special issue: best books of 2021