The Best Books of 1999

Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee  ·  1999

David Lurie is an adjunct professor of communications at Cape Technical University who has an affair with a student thirty years younger. When it is reported and a committee invites him to show remorse, he refuses — not because he does not understand what he did, but because he will not perform a contrition he does not feel. He loses his position and retreats to his daughter Lucy’s remote farm in the Eastern Cape. A violent attack on the farm — three men, an afternoon, consequences that neither character can speak about directly — forces both father and daughter into a confrontation with what South Africa has become and what it demands of the people who live in it. Disgrace won the Booker Prize in 1999. Coetzee had also won in 1983, with Life & Times of Michael K; the second win made him the first writer to take the prize twice.

The difficulty of Disgrace is its refusal to be comfortable. Lurie is not sympathetic and the novel does not ask you to sympathize with him — but it asks you to understand the full moral complexity of a country in which history has made every position untenable. Lucy’s choice after the attack is the hardest thing in the book: you can see exactly why she makes it, and it is a choice that offers no satisfaction to anyone. Coetzee is one of the writers who has understood most clearly that literature does not exist to provide solutions.

Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri  ·  1999

Nine stories about Indian and Indian-American characters navigating the distance between where they came from and where they live. A couple in Boston copes with a stillbirth during a nightly power outage. A tour guide in India hears a confession that changes what he understands about the family he is showing around. A Bengali woman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adjusts to a life she did not entirely choose. Lahiri writes about loneliness, miscommunication, and the particular difficulty of intimacy across cultural divides — not just between cultures but between people who share the same one. Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 and remains one of the finest debut story collections published in the last thirty years.

Lahiri’s prose has a quality that is very hard to achieve: it is entirely unshowy and entirely precise. Nothing in her sentences is there by accident, and nothing announces itself. She writes about displacement without sentimentality and about intimacy without false resolution — her characters come close to each other and then do not quite manage it, in ways that feel exactly true. The title story is the best introduction to what she does: quiet, devastating, and impossible to put down.

Elsewhere on this site: Authors like Jhumpa Lahiri →

Atomised

Michel Houellebecq  ·  1998

Two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, share a mother who abandoned them both in favour of a series of communes and free-love experiments. Michel becomes a molecular biologist whose emotional life is essentially non-existent; Bruno becomes a secondary school teacher whose sexual obsessions destroy him. Houellebecq uses their parallel lives as the framework for an indictment of the individualism and sexual liberation of postwar Western society — the argument being that the freedoms the 1960s produced have left people more isolated and more miserable than before. Published in France as Les Particules élémentaires by Flammarion in 1998, it reached English readers in Frank Wynne’s translation in 2000 — as Atomised in Britain and as The Elementary Particles in the United States.

Houellebecq is a writer who is very easy to dismiss and very difficult to ignore. Atomised is not a comfortable book — the prose is deliberately flat, the sexual content is explicit, and the central argument is deeply pessimistic about the possibility of human connection under the conditions of late capitalism. But the pessimism is not cheap. Houellebecq has thought carefully about why modern life produces the loneliness it produces, and his diagnosis, however bleak, is serious. Whether you agree with him or not, the novel stays with you. On the dates: this is not, strictly, a book of 1999 — the French edition is 1998 and the English one is 2000. It is here because 1999 is the year it was being argued about, and a list of what people were reading at the end of that decade without Houellebecq in it would be a tidier list and a less honest one.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier  ·  1999

Griet is sixteen years old when she enters the Vermeer household in seventeenth-century Delft as a servant, after her father is blinded in an accident and the family can no longer support itself. She is given the task of cleaning the painter’s studio, which requires her to learn to see as he sees — which pigments to mix, which objects to move and which to leave, how light enters a room and what it does to everything inside it. The novel imagines the story behind Vermeer’s most famous painting: who the girl with the pearl earring was, how she came to wear it, and what it cost her. Chevalier wrote it after sixteen years of living with a poster of the painting on her wall, wondering about the girl’s expression.

What Chevalier understood about this painting is that the girl’s expression is ambiguous — not quite looking at the painter, not quite looking away, something between invitation and accusation. The novel preserves that ambiguity. It does not resolve the central relationship between Griet and Vermeer into something definite, and that restraint is what makes it last. Chevalier is also very good on what it is to work for someone whose perception of the world exceeds yours and who cannot quite explain why what they see matters.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky  ·  1999

Charlie is fifteen and writing letters to someone he does not know, about his first year of high school after the suicide of his best friend. He is quiet, observant, and struggling — with something he cannot yet name, something that happened when he was younger and that he has not been able to think about directly. Through a group of older students who take him in, Charlie encounters books, music, parties, and the particular difficulty of being on the edge of life rather than in the middle of it. Chbosky wrote the novel as a series of these letters, which gives it an intimacy and an immediacy that a conventional narrative would not have achieved. Published as an MTV Books paperback in February 1999, it found its real audience gradually, over the fifteen years that followed.

The reason The Perks of Being a Wallflower has lasted is that Chbosky understands something true about adolescence: that the hardest part of being fifteen is not knowing what is wrong with you. Charlie is dealing with something serious, and the novel is careful not to name it too early — the revelation, when it comes, lands exactly because of everything that has been built around it. The book is also unusually good on the experience of encountering art and literature for the first time and understanding that it is possible to feel less alone because of what someone else wrote.

Waiting

Ha Jin  ·  1999

Lin Kong is an army doctor in China who has been married to a village woman, Shuyu, since before he went to medical school. In the city where he is stationed, he has fallen in love with a nurse named Manna Wu. Army regulations let him divorce without her consent only after they have been separated for eighteen years; every year Lin goes home to ask Shuyu to agree, and every year she refuses at the last moment. The novel follows eighteen years of this arrangement — the waiting, the accumulation of small decisions, the way lives are shaped by structures that no one has chosen. Ha Jin wrote it in English, his second language, after leaving China in 1985 to study at Brandeis and deciding, once the Tiananmen Square massacre came, not to go back. It won the National Book Award in 1999.

Ha Jin’s prose is spare in a way that is easy to underestimate. He writes about institutional constraint and private longing without melodrama, and the effect is cumulative — by the time Lin finally gets what he has been waiting for, the novel has made clear that waiting for something and getting it are two entirely different things. Waiting is a book about what bureaucratic structures do to private life, and about the particular melancholy of a desire that has been deferred so long it has changed shape.

Nonviolent Communication

Marshall B. Rosenberg  ·  1999

A method in four parts, set out in two hundred pages: say what you observed, say what you feel, say what you need, and make a request instead of a demand. That sounds like very little until you try it, at which point it becomes clear how much of ordinary speech is none of those four things — how much of it is diagnosis, or accusation, or a demand wearing the grammar of a question. Rosenberg was a clinical psychologist who worked in rooms where people had stopped being able to talk to each other, in Rwanda, Nigeria and Sri Lanka and in rather more ordinary rooms containing two people and a marriage. He founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication in 1984 and taught the method in workshops with two hand puppets — a giraffe for the language he was teaching, a jackal for the one everybody already speaks. PuddleDancer Press published the first edition in 1999.

A book that promises a method invites suspicion, and this one promises a method. What earns it a place here is that the method is small enough to remember and hard enough to actually do. The distinction it turns on is the one between an observation and an evaluation — “you have not answered three emails” against “you are ignoring me” — which reads like a debating trick until you notice how seldom the first one gets said. For a book about how to speak, it is also remarkably free of jargon.

A note on the title. The 1999 first edition was subtitled A Language of Compassion. The subtitle A Language of Life, which is on every copy sold today and in most citations of the book, dates from the second edition in 2003.

Elsewhere on this site: Marshall Rosenberg →  ·  Books on nonviolent communication →

On my list of the best books for stress relief →