The Best Books of 1966

What Rhys understood is that the madwoman in the attic has a life before the attic. Brontë's Bertha is a plot device, an obstacle to the romance, and Rhys restores to her an interiority, a history, a language and a set of losses that make Rochester's narrative look very different. It is also a novel about the violence of naming: Rochester's refusal to call Antoinette by her name is an erasure the book makes you feel completely. Continuously in print since 1966, and now one of the founding texts of postcolonial literature.

Pynchon is asking the question that runs through all his work: what is the relationship between pattern and paranoia? When we find meaning in randomness, are we perceiving something or constructing it? Oedipa's investigation is a model of a certain kind of reading — the kind that finds systems everywhere and cannot tell whether the systems are in the world or in the reader. It is also a portrait of the peculiar emptiness of Californian prosperity, and one of the most argued-about short novels in American literature.

The critical dismissal of this novel on publication, and the persistence of that dismissal for decades, is itself a document about whose stories get taken seriously. Susann was writing about the specific forms of exploitation and disposal women faced in the entertainment industry, about what pills were actually being used for in mid-century America, and about the gap between what was promised to women and what they were permitted. Its enormous success was driven by women readers who recognised something true. That the prose was not Flaubert's was used to dismiss the recognition.

It is here under 1966 rather than 1965 because the book, as opposed to the serialisation, appeared in January 1966, and it is the book that changed things. What Capote did that journalism had not done before was reconstruct interior states — the thoughts and perceptions of people unavailable for interview — with a novelist's authority. The ethical questions that raises have never been settled, which is part of why it is impossible to stop thinking about. His portrait of Perry Smith is one of the most sustained attempts in American writing to understand how a person arrives at extreme violence.

Malamud is writing about antisemitism and also, explicitly, about being made a scapegoat — the novel appeared in 1966, when American readers were watching civil rights activists arrested on manufactured charges in the South, and the parallel was not accidental. At the level of the sentence it is austere and exact: he gives Yakov's suffering weight without sentimentalising it, and his account of what years of solitary imprisonment do to a mind is among the most accurate in fiction. The final scene, Yakov taken through the streets to his trial, is one of the great endings in postwar American fiction.

Didion's essays are the best prose written about California and the 1960s, and this is the collection that made her. Her method — precise, cold, personal, using the first person not to confess but to locate the writer inside the argument — has been imitated endlessly. What has not been imitated is her ability to find the social fact in the personal detail: the five-year-old on LSD is not a metaphor for the failure of the counterculture, she is a child, and the observation devastates precisely because Didion does not explain it. If a strict 1966 list is what you want, leave this one out and read Le Guin's Rocannon's World instead.