The Books I Loved in 2015

Last year, along with several contemporary books, I hugely admired two novels that were not published in 2015: Dag Solstad’s “Shyness & Dignity,” and Jenny Erpenbeck’s “The End of Days.”

Shyness & Dignity” is one of only three novels currently available in English by Dag Solstad (born in 1941), who is probably the most eminent living Norwegian novelist, and the author of nearly thirty books. (In Norway, Solstad is as celebrated as, say, Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison in this country.) “Shyness & Dignity,” which was the first Solstad book I read, seems a good place to start. First of all: can we agree that the novel has a great title? Opaque, abstract, strange; and with that slightly forbidding ampersand… And the story is both simple and fierce: one day, an unremarkable, middle-aged high-school teacher named Elias Rukla walks out of the class he has been teaching, on Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck.” After years of dutifully teaching the same text, he has been obscurely moved by a detail in it that he has never properly attended to before. But on this special day, when Elias feels that he has something remarkable to communicate, his class of teen-agers is as lumpen and bored as ever, and, in frustration, he quits the school and walks toward the center of Oslo. The rest of the novel, another hundred pages or so, unfolds as Elias stands at a traffic circle near Bislett Stadium, in Oslo, and just thinks: about how he will never return to the school where he has worked for twenty-five years; about what he will tell his wife, Eva Linde, and how they will live without his salary; and, most importantly, about human relations.

Thinking about his wife prompts Elias to recall his best friend, Johan Corneliussen, because Elias first met Eva in his company. The story of the two men’s friendship becomes both the explicit and the submerged story of the rest of the book. Johan was always the more dynamic and impressive of the two—an intellectual star, a brilliant philosopher, while Elias was just plodding through university, on his way to becoming a schoolteacher. Johan had no difficulty attracting girlfriends, including the beautiful Eva Linde, while Elias lacked the necessary charisma. Elias was always grateful to be Johan’s friend, flattered that he had been noticed and plucked from obscurity, content to play fiddle on the second or third desk, well behind the leader. Though Johan did not, in fact, fulfill the promise of his student days (he was going to write the “great book” on Kant, but never did), and despite the fact that the beautiful Eva eventually left the glamorous man for the less glamorous one, Elias cannot rid himself of a lingering sense that he has lived his entire adult life in the shadow of his brilliant college friend—that he is a man who “had not distinguished himself in any way whatsoever in his life, which did not bother him, since he had never imagined that he would distinguish himself in any way.”

But the novel subtly works against the apparent calm of this compromise with mediocrity: what Elias’s hundred-and-forty-page interior monologue actually reveals is a man struggling with his own lack of distinction, a man quietly yearning for something more—perhaps for the very escape he has set in motion by walking out of Fagerborg High School. Solstad writes in long, probing, repetitive sentences (clearly influenced by Thomas Bernhard, but lacking the extremity of the Austrian writer) that tend to circle obsessively around a character’s personal anxieties and tribulations. (Those sentences are wonderfully rendered in English by the distinguished translator Sverre Lyngstad.) I find him an utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer. For me, 2015 was The Year of Solstad.

I was sorry not to write about Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel “The End of Days,” but got to it a few months after its publication, at the end of 2014. (New Directions will publish the paperback in February of this year.) Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin, in 1967; herself a witness to some fairly turbulent European history, she is drawn to long perspectives and political temporalities. Her last book, “Visitation” (2010), sketched a history of much of the last century by telling the story of a Brandenburg house, rather as Virginia Woolf tells the story of the First World War through the decline and salvation of the Ramsays’ place on the Isle of Skye, in the “Time Passes” section of “To the Lighthouse.” Erpenbeck is a less lyrical writer than Woolf, but she shares with the English modernist a demanding, experimental, serious aesthetic. (Erpenbeck’s prose, intense and fluent, is luminously translated by Susan Bernofsky.)

“The End of Days” seems, at first, as if it merely combines two familiar elements: the protagonist who lives through most of the twentieth century, and whose experiences record the passage of history’s cargo; and the counterfactual novel that explores hypothetical possibilities—all the lives that a protagonist might have had, if different roads had been taken. Erpenbeck uses both tropes, but reinvents them, so that they seem anything but formulaic. The novel opens at the graveside of a Jewish girl, born at the turn of the twentieth century, at the far reaches of the Habsburg Empire. Driven apart by misfortune and grief, the girl’s parents separate: the father leaves for America, the mother falls into poverty and prostitution. But what if the girl had not died? Perhaps she moved to Vienna, where we find her as an unhappy teen-ager, in 1919. And perhaps she was unhappy enough to commit suicide in Vienna? But then again, if she did not die in Vienna, perhaps she grew up to be a fervent communist, and moved to Moscow in the nineteen-thirties. And there, eventually, she got caught up in the Stalinist purges, and died. But if she hadn’t died in Russia…. Thus the novel proceeds, repeatedly killing off and resurrecting its unnamed heroine (unnamed, that is, until the novel’s final section), so that, in the course of the book, she inhabits multiple possible lives and historical selves, from Galician outcast to successful East German writer, from transplanted Muscovite to frail nonagenarian with a failing memory who has seen the fall of the Berlin wall.

Erpenbeck uses her narrative resurrections to reflect on historical contingency and accident. But “The End of Days” is not so much a meditation on the mysterious possibility of life—the more obvious emphasis—than a wise consideration of the unmysterious certainty of death. Here, the novelist seems to say, this is how our heroine might have died: like this, or like this, or like this. “Some death or other will eventually be her death. If not sooner, then later. Some entrance will have to be for her. Every last person, every he and every she, has an entrance meant for him, for her.” And though the novel is very much one in which a character witnesses the large events of the twentieth century, that character is hardly the coherent self of a more traditional historical novel: fractured into old ends and new beginnings, she seems an assemblage of history rather than a free agent of her times.

In recent years, the English writer Edward St. Aubyn has received a good deal of attention and praise for his novels about the Melrose family—these books are characterized by their atmosphere of dry emergency, the brilliance of the dialogue, the acerbic wit of the authorial observation, and the way that St. Aubyn generates bitter ironies from his ruthlessly observed social reality. St. Aubyn indeed deserves all this attention. But, in fact, I have also been describing every story in David Gates’s new collection, “A Hand Reached Down To Guide Me” (Knopf), which the Times Book Review inexplicably deemed to be not one of the notable books of 2015. Gates offers all the pleasures to be found in St. Aubyn, and more, because where the English writer is formal and elegant, Gates brings a loping, loose-limbed, colloquial American rhythm to his fiction—his stories are generally narrated by the protagonist, in the first person, which allows space for digression, parenthesis, idiomatic waywardness, and internal rumination, not to mention a good deal of rueful wit. Indeed, the first thing you probably appreciate when you read Gates is how funny the writing is. The narrator of “An Actor Prepares,” an aging actor who has been working in Germany and who is now on his way to do “Twelfth Night” in Vermont, says, in passing, to the reader: “My little German adventure is a whole other story, but you’ve seen ‘The Blue Angel.’ ” In the same story, another character describes “the new NPR Vermont” as a place where “it’s now a hate crime not to have David Sedaris on your iPod.” The narrator of the longest piece in the book, a novella titled “Banishment,” fills in her background thus: “I grew up in Saddle River, New Jersey. Richard Nixon moved there a couple of years after I went off to Yale, and my mother claims she spotted him once, through the tinted glass in a black car, and gave him the middle finger, all of which I doubt. She’d gone to Smith, where she majored in English and made obsessive visits to Emily Dickinson’s house. … My father was the executive vice president, whatever that is, of a company that manufactured speaker systems for movie theaters, which I suppose made both of them artistic people.”

The reader learns how to settle into the distinctive tone of a Gates story—his characters (especially his male narrators) are wary, self-ironic, amused, unillusioned, and almost always about to do something foolish or scandalous. But you also settle into the Gatesian voice at your peril, because he is a master of the unsaid and the implied: his characters speak to each other in a reticent code, and relations between men and women (Gates’s favored territory) can change and darken in an instance. I doubt there is a better writer of conversational dialogue at work in America. Readers who haven’t encountered Gates’s work would do well to start with this book’s beautiful title story, about a middle-aged musician who agrees to take in and nurse his dying mentor, an old bluegrass mandolin player. It’s a very tender story, more overtly emotional than some of Gates’s other work, and none the weaker for it.

My Documents” (McSweeney’s, translated by Megan McDowell), a collection of stories by the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, was, for me, one of the great discoveries of the year. “My Documents” is the fourth of Zambra’s books to be published in English. They are all brief, charming, funny, and preoccupied in a postmodern way with the burdens and complications (and pleasures) of writing fiction. Zambra’s protagonists tend to be contemporary versions of the nineteenth-century “Superfluous Man”— young men who have difficulty engaging or connecting with other people, who seem to look in at life rather than live it, who appear to have spent far too much time inhabiting parallel universes (reading and writing fiction, playing on computers). So far, so familiar: perhaps we’ve all had enough of such (almost always male) characters. But whereas in Zambra’s earlier work the metafictional element, though appealing, was a bit automatic and weightless, as if Zambra were working off necessary debts to his fellow Chilean Roberto Bolaño, and to Paul Auster, “My Documents” is at once metafictional and vibrantly turned out to the world. Zambra reflects on the obligations of writing fiction in a country tormented by heavy political realities (he was born in 1975, two years after the coup that brought down President Salvador Allende and installed the murderous General Augusto Pinochet), and “My Documents” is full of wonderful, sparkling, vital human details. In “National Institute,” to take just one example, the author reminisces about his own school days at Chile’s oldest school. (Many Chilean politicians also attended this school, including the deposed Allende.) He begins by listing seemingly random memories from his days at the National Institute, each opening with a repeated “I remember.” He recalls severe teachers and nice teachers; fights and quarrels and slights and crushes; and old friends, in particular a brilliant, troubled boy who committed suicide. One day, near the end of the author’s time at the school, the boys get into a fight, and are brought before Mr. Musa, the school’s inspector general. He pompously tells the kids that he isn’t going to expel them, but that instead he is going to give them some words of wisdom, words which they will never forget. The author’s ironic commentary? “I forgot it immediately. I sincerely don’t know what Musa told me then.” The story is beautifully handled: what starts as a gentle exercise in autobiography and reminiscence becomes steadily more political (Allende, the famous alumnus, is mentioned); and finally the story becomes one about how unofficial, personal memory (the author’s “I remember”) takes triumphant precedence over official, bureaucratic memory (Mr. Musa’s vain “You will never forget this”). And, like everything by this author, it is so sweetly, lightly done!

The Green Road” (Norton), by the Irish novelist Anne Enright, is one of the truest and most beautiful fictions about the family I have read in a long time. It’s a book about that most archetypical of family dynamics: a clan’s dispersal and reunion. Rosaleen Madigan, who keeps the home going, in County Clare, is the widowed family matriarch, and Enright sees her with a rigorously cold eye: she is possessive, domineering, blackmailing, loving, tyrannical, and narcissistic. She “did nothing,” Enright writes, “and expected everything. She sat in the house, year after year, and she expected.”

Like all great family tyrants, Rosaleen exerts a monstrous gravitational pull on her various children, now grown up: her eldest, Dan, who disappointed his mother by declining to become a priest, and who left home for America; the older of two daughters, Constance, who also went to America for a while, and is now back in Ireland, unhappily married, and with three children; the second son, Emmet, who ends up working for an N.G.O. in Mali; and, finally, Hanna, who struggles to make it as an actress in Dublin.

The book opens in 1980, when the Madigan children are still young, and as it moves through the years and decades we follow the development and the escape (often geographical) of each child. A climactic and harrowing final scene, set in 2005, reunites the Madigans for Christmas. Enright is wise and truthful about how siblings who have grown up together might hardly know each other as adults. Dan, for instance, was fond of his brother, Emmet, as a boy, “but, grown up, the man bored and frightened him.” When Constance collects Dan at Shannon Airport, he has been living in Toronto and is on the verge of marrying his partner, Ludo. But Constance knows nothing about Dan’s life, its realities and textures, and knows nothing about Ludo. For Constance, Dan’s reality is the one he had for her when they were children. They are just two middle-aged people linked by biology and a now-distant shared memory. “In the place where Constance loved Dan,” Enright writes, “he was eight years old. … This was the boy who ran alongside her in her dreams. Constance, asleep, never saw his face exactly, but it was Dan, of course it was, and they were on the beach in Lahinch coming round a headland to find something unexpected.”

Writing as compassionate and lyrical as this can indeed sustain one throughout a long year.