Critic James Wood's Favorite Books of 2013

Favorite Books of 2013

Posted by James Wood

I was excited, this year, to read the work of Elena Ferrante. This reclusive Italian novelist (she writes pseudonymously, and does not make public appearances) is a savage talent. Her formidable novel “Days of Abandonment” tells the story of an Italian academic and writer whose husband suddenly leaves her for another woman. You might expect something along the lines of an Iris Murdoch book, or what used to be called. in England, “a Hampstead novel” (middle-class lives, book-lined sitting rooms, and the spice of adultery). But Ferrante’s novel is closer to Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel” poems: a desperate, brutally honest, at times slightly repellent, powerfully self-analytic cry of pain. Unlike many novels that treat similar material, this book doesn’t request your sympathy so much as your gasping assent. I’ve read little else like it; the pages are on fire.



Europa also recently published the first and second volumes of Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy, “My Brilliant Friend” and “The Story of a New Name.” These wonderful novels are less claustrophobic than “Days of Abandonment,” and they bring to life an entire Neapolitan working-class community, from the nineteen-fifties to the nineteen-seventies. What they share with Ferrante’s earlier work is a tender bleakness—an extraordinary honesty, an absolute commitment to the avoidance of sentimentality, and beautifully spare, lucid prose. Reading these books, which are so full of struggle, ambition, and the desire to escape a rich but stifling community, I was reminded of the work of the Sicilian master Giovanni Verga, and of mid-twentieth-century neorealist filmmakers, like Rossellini and De Sica.



Two American writers thrilled me this year, Rachel Kushner and Jamie Quatro. Many of the stories in Quatro’s first book, “I Want to Show You More,” like Ferrante’s earlier work, deal with marriage and adultery. And Quatro is as original in her way as the Italian writer. She writes very short stories (some only three of four pages long), and her work is less about full-fledged adultery than blocked, impossible relationships—long-distance affairs, barely sustained by text and Skype, kept alive erotically with raw and rude selfies, texted snapshots, phone sex. Quatro is interesting because she plays this world of adventure and appetite against a context of theological prohibition: her female narrators and characters tend to have discernible Christian backgrounds, and their references are Bible-saturated. They hover on the edge of transgressions that are made both more sinful and more exciting by inherited religious traditions.



Rachel Kushner’s “The Flamethrowers” has rightly received much praise. Her story, of a young woman from Reno, Nevada, who is making her way in the Greenwich Village art scene of nineteen-seventies New York, has elements of the traditional bildungsroman, and also usefully deploys the Flaubertian flâneur. (As in Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education,” the protagonist roams the city, noticing and listening.) I was entranced by Kushner’s cool intelligence, by the passionate exactitude of her language, and by her seemingly inexhaustible supply of stories.



The second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir-novel, “My Struggle,” was published this year, and it’s as good as the first one. The Norwegian writer ranges prosaically, across all sorts of subjects: being a husband, a father, and a writer; the Norwegian postwar social compact; masculinity; mental health; religious belief in a secular age; Dostoyevsky; nineteenth-century Romanticism; literary theory.… There’s a bit more Thomas Bernhard in the second book than in the first, and that misanthropic edge makes it funnier and more mordant than its predecessor. (Knausgaard on the idiocy of children’s parties—or, rather, the idiocy of parents at children’s parties, and the ensuing glacial boredom—is cherishable.)



Two books of literary criticism are worth mentioning: Thomas Pavel’s “The Lives of the Novel: A History,” and Gary Saul Morson’s “Prosaics and Other Provocations.” Pavel has written the most interesting and subtle one-volume history of the novel currently available. He is especially intelligent on the way in which of narration and belief (both formal religious belief and the particular quality of belief needed to make a stake in an imaginative fictional world) interact with each other. Morson, in a tremendous collection of pieces, extends his ongoing interest in what he calls “prosaics”—basically, a way of attending to fictional prose that makes room for the messiness, the loose ends, and the improvised form that one finds in the great realist writers (for Morson, especially Dostoyevsky).