Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 1996
1996 was the year David Foster Wallace published a 1,079-page novel and changed what the phrase “serious American fiction” could mean. It was also the year the Booker Prize shortlist contained three novels of such quality — Atwood’s Alias Grace, Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance — that the winner (Graham Swift’s Last Orders) became one of the most controversial decisions in the prize’s history. Frank McCourt published a memoir of his Limerick childhood at sixty-six and won the Pulitzer. And a roman à clef about a presidential campaign appeared under the byline “Anonymous,” set off a year-long guessing game, and turned out to be written by a journalist who had been travelling with Bill Clinton since 1992. In any other year, any one of these books would have been the story of the season.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Memoir · Published 1996
Infinite Jest
It is some point in the near future. Years are no longer numbered but named after corporate sponsors: the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the Year of the Whopper. North America has been reorganised into a single political entity called O.N.A.N. In a suburb of Boston, a tennis academy and a halfway house for addiction occupy the same hill. At the centre of the novel is a film — referred to only as “the Entertainment” or “Infinite Jest” — so pleasurable that anyone who watches it becomes unable to do anything except watch it again, until they die. Wallace spent six years writing the book. It is 1,079 pages long, contains 388 endnotes (some of which have their own footnotes), and has no conventional resolution. It was immediately polarising: some critics called it the most important American novel in decades; others called it an exercise in literary narcissism. Both positions have been maintained with great conviction ever since.
The question of whether Infinite Jest is worth the investment of time it requires is one that serious readers still argue about. My own view is that the book earns its length not through the plot — which is deliberately fragmented and incomplete — but through its accumulation of voices, moods, and insights into the phenomenology of addiction, entertainment, and loneliness. The halfway house sections in particular are among the finest sustained prose Wallace wrote. The tennis academy sections are funnier than most explicitly comic fiction. And the central argument — that entertainment designed to maximise passive pleasure produces a kind of death — has only become more prescient since 1996.
Alias Grace
In July 1843, Grace Marks — an Irish immigrant servant, sixteen years old — was arrested in connection with the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery at their farm in Upper Canada. Her fellow servant James McDermott was hanged. Grace was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. She maintained throughout her trial and imprisonment that she had no memory of the murders and did not know whether she had committed them. She became one of the most written-about criminals in Canadian history. Atwood spent several years researching the historical record before writing her novel, which follows Grace in prison as she is interviewed by a young American doctor named Simon Jordan, who is attempting to establish whether she is telling the truth, whether she is mad, and whether those two questions are even separable. Atwood does not answer these questions. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a Netflix miniseries in 2017.
Atwood’s great insight about the Grace Marks case is that the uncertainty at its centre is not a gap in the evidence to be filled but the point. Grace’s account of herself is constructed for the audience she is addressing — she is a woman whose survival has depended on performing versions of herself for the various institutions and individuals who have held power over her. Whether any version of Grace is the true one is a question the novel asks but declines to answer, which is both historically honest and formally precise. The interviews between Grace and Simon Jordan are extraordinarily well-written, operating on multiple registers simultaneously.
Angela’s Ashes
Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Irish immigrant parents. When the Depression made it impossible to survive, his family returned to Limerick — to a city and a time where poverty was structural, Catholic guilt was omnipresent, and his father’s alcoholism consumed what little the family had. The memoir covers McCourt’s childhood and adolescence: the deaths of three siblings, his mother’s survival by any means available, his father’s repeated failure to stay in work or stay sober, and McCourt’s own determination to get back to America. He was sixty-six when he published it, after thirty years teaching in New York schools. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Carnegie Medal. It sold over four million copies and spent 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
What makes Angela’s Ashes last is not the suffering — which is extensive and at times almost unbearable — but the voice. McCourt writes his childhood from the inside, with the clarity of a child who does not yet have the categories to explain what is happening to him and the dark humour of an adult who has survived it. The Limerick sections in particular are a feat of sustained tonal control: the misery is real and the comedy is real and they occupy the same sentences without cancelling each other. It is one of the finest memoirs written in the twentieth century.
The Autobiography of My Mother
Xuela Claudette Richardson is the daughter of a woman who died in childbirth giving birth to her, on the island of Dominica. Her father, a policeman of mixed Carib and Scottish descent, places her immediately with a washerwoman and does not return for her for some time. The novel is Xuela’s first-person account of her own life — her childhood, her various households, her relationships with men, her deliberate decision never to have children, her refusal of love as a form of self-defence — told from the vantage point of extreme old age. Kincaid writes in a prose style that is incantatory, circular, and builds meaning through repetition in ways that are closer to poetry than to conventional narrative. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996.
Kincaid is writing about colonialism, but she is doing it by refusing the categories through which colonialism is usually discussed. Xuela does not resist — she refuses. She will not be shaped by the expectations of any of the systems that attempt to organise her: the Catholic Church, marriage, motherhood, racial identification. Her refusal of love is not coldness but a response to the specific history of what has been done to the people of her island — the way love and ownership have been made indistinguishable. The novel is demanding and sometimes brutal, and it rewards the difficulty it asks of you.
A Fine Balance
India, 1975. The Emergency has been declared. Indira Gandhi has suspended civil liberties, imposed press censorship, and is ruling by decree. In an unnamed coastal city — understood to be Bombay — four people find themselves sharing a small apartment: Dina Dalal, a widow trying to maintain her independence by taking in lodgers and running a tailoring business; Maneck Kohlah, a student from the mountains sent to the city by his parents; and Ishvar and Omprakash Darji, two tailors of Untouchable caste who have fled their village after violence against their family. The novel follows all four across eighteen months as the Emergency tightens, corruption spreads, and each of them is ground down by forces they cannot individually resist. Mistry was born in Bombay and emigrated to Canada in 1975; the novel draws on historical research and personal memory. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection.
A Fine Balance is one of the most emotionally punishing novels on this list — it does not offer consolation and it does not allow its characters the outcomes they deserve. What it offers instead is something more difficult: a precise and compassionate account of how human beings maintain dignity and connection under conditions that are specifically designed to prevent them from doing so. The title comes from a Balzac epigraph: “Holding on to hope in a world where all hope seems lost requires a fine balance between the heart and the mind.” The novel earns that epigraph across every page of its five hundred.
Primary Colors
A roman à clef about the presidential primary campaign of Jack Stanton — a Southern governor running for the Democratic nomination who is charming, brilliant, sexually reckless, and almost supernaturally gifted at making individuals feel that their concerns are the only concerns that matter. The novel is narrated by Henry Burton, a young Black political operative who joins the campaign and watches it at close range. Published in January 1996 under the byline “Anonymous,” it became an immediate bestseller and set off a year-long guessing game about the author’s identity. Stanton was widely understood to be Bill Clinton; the novel’s details were accurate enough to suggest the author had been inside the 1992 campaign. Newsweek journalist Joe Klein denied authorship repeatedly for months before being identified through handwriting analysis and finally confessing in July 1996.
The authorship controversy tends to obscure what Primary Colors actually is: a serious and intelligent novel about what political talent actually looks like from the inside, and what it costs people who are close to it. Stanton — Clinton — is written with genuine complexity: his gifts are inseparable from his self-destructiveness, his idealism is real and his cynicism is real and they exist simultaneously rather than one explaining away the other. Henry’s growing disillusionment is not the loss of naïveté but the discovery that he knew what he was signing up for and did it anyway. It is the best American political novel of its decade.
How to navigate this list
If you want the most ambitious novel
→ Read Infinite Jest — but commit to it. The book opens slowly and builds. The halfway house sections alone are worth the investment.
If you want the most emotionally powerful novel
→ Read A Fine Balance. It does not offer comfort and it does not flinch. It is one of the finest novels written about India in the twentieth century.
If you want the finest memoir
→ Read Angela’s Ashes. McCourt’s tonal control — misery and dark comedy occupying the same sentences — is extraordinary.
If you want the best mystery on the list
→ Alias Grace — Atwood does not tell you whether Grace Marks was guilty, and that refusal is the point.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1996
What books were published in 1996?
1996 produced several landmark works of fiction and memoir. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace appeared and immediately polarised readers — it remains one of the most debated American novels of the twentieth century. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize. The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid was shortlisted for the Booker. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry was also shortlisted for the Booker. And Primary Colors — the anonymous roman à clef about a presidential campaign, later revealed to be by journalist Joe Klein — became the year’s most talked-about political novel.
What is Infinite Jest about?
Infinite Jest is set in a near-future North America where years are sponsored by corporations and entertainment has become a weapon. The novel follows two main narrative threads: students and staff at a tennis academy, and patients and counsellors at a halfway house for addiction in the same Boston suburb. At the centre is a film so pleasurable that anyone who watches it becomes catatonic — unable to do anything but watch it again. Wallace spent six years writing the novel. It is 1,079 pages long and contains 388 endnotes. It is one of the most formally ambitious American novels of the twentieth century and one of the most divisive.
What is Alias Grace about?
Alias Grace is based on the true story of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant servant who was convicted in 1843 of the murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada. Grace maintained that she had no memory of the murders. A young doctor named Simon Jordan interviews her in prison, trying to establish whether she is telling the truth. Atwood does not resolve the ambiguity. Grace’s guilt or innocence remains genuinely uncertain at the novel’s end — which is historically accurate, since it has never been established. The novel was adapted into a Netflix miniseries in 2017.
What is Angela’s Ashes about?
Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood in Brooklyn and then in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, where his family returned after his father could not find work. The book describes the death of three siblings, chronic poverty, his father’s alcoholism, and the particular combination of Catholic guilt and dark humour that McCourt deployed to survive it and then to write about it. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 and sold over four million copies. McCourt published it when he was sixty-six, his first book after a thirty-year teaching career.
What is A Fine Balance about?
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is set in India during the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975, which suspended civil liberties and allowed the government to rule by decree. The novel follows four characters whose lives intersect in a small apartment in an unnamed Indian city: a widow renting out a room to support herself, a student from the mountains, and two tailors from an Untouchable caste who have fled their village after violence. The novel follows them across eighteen months as the Emergency tightens. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996 and is widely considered one of the finest novels written about India in the twentieth century.
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