Five Books of the ’oughts

In writing about Richard Russo’s Empire Falls the other day, I described it as “easily one of the five best American novels” from the first decade of the twenty-first century. Which raises the question, naturally: what are the other four?

They are all by women:

(2.) Francine Prose, Blue Angel (2001). A send-up of creative writing—the best ever written—Prose’s tenth novel is a harrowing account of sexual slavery. Like Professor Raat of Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel and Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film, Ted Swenson falls under the spell of a woman, but Angela Argo is not a cabaret singer; she is one of the students in his writing seminar, and his passion for her sweeps him away against his interests. Not because of Angela’s physical charms, however; she is a skinny redhead with multiple body piercings. What holds him in thrall is her novel. The distance between the most powerful literary art and what goes on in creative writing classrooms has never seemed greater.

(3.) Cynthia Ozick, Heir to the Glimmering World (2004). An incredibly difficult book, not in formal experimentation nor in language—for, indeed, Ozick compares self-referential fiction to idolatry—but in its meaning. Her fifth novel is as thickly layered as a page of the Talmud, and equally as elusive. In 1935, a young orphan, herself a Jew, goes to work for the Jewish family of Professor Mitwisser, the scholar of Karaism. He insists upon the definite article. The household is soon joined by James A’Bair Jr., son of the late author-illustrator James Philip A’Bair, whose series of Bear Boy books will remind more than one reader of Winnie the Pooh. As Hillel Halkin wrote in Commentary, “Heir to the Glimmering World advances slowly, its progress delayed by the mysteries that block its way and must be dismantled.” Each step of the way is fascinating in its own right, though, and written in the sort of prose that converts readers to a lifelong devotion to books. The mystery of the novel’s meaning lingers for nearly as long.

(4.) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004). Written in the form of a letter from a 76-year-old small-town Iowa preacher whose heart is failing to his six-year-old son, Robinson’s second novel traces the family’s history—but also the career of Christianity on the prairie—from the Civil War to the late ’fifties. John Ames seeks to instruct his son to become “a brave man in a brave country,” and no previous American novel had succeeded in demonstrating so clearly and convincingly the share of religion in the settling of the land. And except perhaps for Frederick Buechner’s Godric (1980), about a medieval Anglo-Saxon saint, no better account of the religious life, as it is experienced from the inside, has been written in America.

(5.) Zoë Heller, The Believers (2009). What can I add to my enthusiastic review of this terrific novel? After finishing Robert Cohen’s Amateur Barbarians and Russo’s latest, which assume it is so self-evident as to deserve no further comment that the best minds are on the Left, I remain astonished by Heller’s novel, which anatomizes the Left without ever betraying its author’s political convictions.