The Best Books of 2012

Gone Girl

Gillian Flynn  ·  2012

Nick Dunne calls the police on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary: his wife Amy has disappeared. What follows is a novel told in two voices, each of which turns out to be less reliable than it first appears. Flynn constructed something genuinely new here — a thriller that uses the conventions of domestic fiction as a weapon, and a portrait of a marriage in which both parties are performing versions of themselves for each other and for the reader. It is one of the most discussed novels of the decade and one of the best.

What makes Gone Girl worth reading now, over a decade later, is not the twist — which everyone knows — but the architecture underneath it. Flynn is writing about performance, expectation, and the gap between who we are and who we present to our partners. The unreliable narrator is a technical device, but here it is also the subject. This is the book that made the domestic thriller a serious literary genre.

Mastery

Robert Greene  ·  2012

Greene examines the lives of historical and contemporary figures — Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust — and argues that mastery is not a product of innate genius but of time, attention, and a specific relationship to apprenticeship and failure. He traces the common paths that exceptional people took to become exceptional, and identifies the habits of mind that separated them from their peers. It is a long book that earns its length.

I have this on my shelf and return to it regularly — not for motivation, but for the structural argument it makes about how depth happens. Greene is not interested in shortcuts. He is interested in what it actually looks like when someone commits entirely to a field and what they discover there. In an era of productivity advice that promises results in ninety days, Mastery is a useful corrective.

Read my full recommendation →

Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel  ·  2012

The second volume of Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy follows Cromwell through the fall of Anne Boleyn and the manoeuvres that bring her to execution. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2012, making Mantel the first woman and the first author to win the prize twice. The prose is written in an unusual second-person present tense — “you” are Cromwell — that creates an intimacy with a man whose inner life history has largely left blank. It is one of the finest historical novels written in English in the last fifty years.

Read Wolf Hall first, then this. Mantel does something that few historical novelists attempt: she makes the past feel genuinely foreign rather than like a costume drama. Cromwell’s world has its own logic, its own emotional grammar, and Mantel never lets you forget that its people did not know how the story would end. The result is a kind of dramatic irony that builds across 600 pages until it becomes almost unbearable.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Katherine Boo  ·  2012

Boo spent three years in Annawadi, a slum on the edge of Mumbai’s international airport, and produced a book that reads like a novel — driven by characters, scenes, and dialogue — but is entirely reported. It follows the lives of several families in a community where aspiration and corruption exist in a proximity that makes both comprehensible. It won the National Book Award in 2012 and is widely considered one of the best works of narrative nonfiction of the century so far.

This is the book I recommend most often to people who want to understand what poverty looks like from inside it rather than from outside. Boo is not sentimental and she is not distant — she found a way to write about people whose lives are structurally invisible that makes them structurally impossible to ignore. The methodology note at the back of the book is worth reading for what it reveals about how the reporting was done.

NW

Zadie Smith  ·  2012

Smith’s fourth novel follows four people from the same northwest London housing estate whose lives have diverged in ways they did not anticipate and cannot entirely explain. It is formally ambitious — each section uses a different narrative mode, from stream of consciousness to fragmented lists — and is one of the most honest novels written about class, aspiration, and the gap between where you come from and where you are trying to go. It is a harder read than White Teeth and a more interesting one.

Smith is asking a question that does not have an answer: what do you owe to the place that made you when the place that made you is not somewhere you can afford to stay? NW is not comfortable and it is not resolved, which is precisely what makes it accurate. The formal experimentation is not decoration — the fragmentation of the prose is the fragmentation of identity that the novel is about.

This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Díaz  ·  2012

Nine stories about love, loss, and infidelity, most of them narrated by Yunior — the character who runs through Díaz’s fiction — as he accounts for the damage he has done to the women in his life and tries to understand where it comes from. The prose mixes Spanish and English, street slang and literary reference, in a way that feels entirely natural and is technically very difficult to pull off. Díaz is writing about masculinity and its failures from inside it, which is rarer than it should be.

This is a book about the stories men tell themselves about why they behave as they do, and what it costs the people around them. Díaz does not let Yunior off the hook, and he does not explain him away. The self-awareness in the narration — Yunior knows what he is, which does not stop him — is one of the most honest portraits of a particular kind of self-destruction that fiction has produced.

The Round House

Louise Erdrich  ·  2012

Thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts’s mother is attacked near their reservation in North Dakota and refuses to say what happened or who did it. The novel follows Joe’s attempt to find out, and in doing so becomes a book about justice, sovereignty, and the specific ways in which the American legal system fails Native women. It won the National Book Award in 2012. Erdrich has been writing about the Ojibwe people and the land they occupy for decades, and this is among her very best.

Erdrich writes about injustice without making it abstract. The Round House is a coming-of-age story and a legal thriller and a meditation on what happens when the law does not protect the people it is supposed to protect — and how children understand that before adults are willing to say it. The anger in the book is precise and the grief is specific, which makes both more affecting than they would otherwise be.

Dear Life

Alice Munro  ·  2012

The last collection of stories that Munro — who won the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year — has published. Fourteen stories about women in small-town Ontario, about the decisions that define a life and the accidents that alter it, about what remains unsaid between people who have known each other for decades. The final four stories are explicitly autobiographical, a form Munro had not used before, and are among the most moving pieces she ever wrote.

Munro is the writer I return to when I want to remember what the short story can do that no other form can. Dear Life is her final word, and it is measured and exact and quietly devastating. The autobiographical stories at the end — in which she writes directly about her mother and her childhood — read as a kind of summation, not of the stories, but of what the stories were always trying to say.