“Please, not another piece on the role of the critic,” Wilfrid Sheed writes in Max Jamison, his 1970 novel about a splenetic drama critic going through a series of personal and professional crises. Sorry, Sheed: as I started thinking back on my year in reading, I started thinking about what the critic is doing in 2024—or, at least, what this critic aimed to do in 2024.
In his just-published book Stranger Than Fiction, Edwin Frank argues on behalf of what he calls “descriptive criticism.” This style of criticism, exemplified for Frank in the work of writers like Elizabeth Hardwick and T. J. Clark, “arrives at its insights by sticking close to the work at hand while also seeking (struggling) to find words of its own to describe the work and the feelings and thoughts it evokes and contends with.” With each year, I too see the critic’s job as less about judgment than about description: showing how a piece of art works; giving the reader a sense for what this poem or novel or film is like; quoting intelligently so as to recreate the work’s tone and texture. This isn’t to say that such criticism leaves judgment behind entirely. But it is to say that such criticism reminds us that we’d do well to spend more time on description and the virtues associated with it—attentiveness, judiciousness, sympathy—than on judgment and the vices it often brings with it: peacockery, meanness, the tendency to think that castigation and celebration are the only two options available.
In 2024, I made judgments in my reading life. Some were in agreement with the rest of the literary world: I too was puzzled by Rachel Cusk’s Parade. Some differed from what other critics had to say: I was disappointed by Percival Everett’s James, a good novel by a legitimately great novelist. When I say that the following were my favorite books of the year, I mean that they’re the books that I most enjoyed trying to re-describe to my friends and students, the books that gave me delight when I tried to figure out what made them tick. These are all books that I didn’t get a chance to write on, and for each, I’ve offered a passage that I think exemplifies what makes them worth attending to.
Greg Gerke, In the Suavity of the Rock (Splice, $24.99, 292 pp.)
Gerke’s debut novel reminds me of Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1970 Sleepless Nights. Like Hardwick’s masterpiece, Gerke’s In the Suavity of the Rock features a writer protagonist, a style that is at once crystalline and chromatic, and a formal adventurousness that continually surprises at both the level of the sentence and the level of the scene. The book is jumpy both in location (it starts on the rocky Irish coast before moving to the French countryside, to Buffalo, to New York City, and finally to Oregon) and in time (from the narrator’s time as a father back to his life before marriage and forward to his days at the end of life). It’s a novel of memory and memorialization: Proust is one of the book’s tutelary spirits. Emerson is another lodestar, and one gets the sense here, as in Emerson, that thinking is happening in the space between sentences and words. Gerke is a gifted critic and this is a critic’s novel.
A helpful voice reminds me to keep centered on what is interesting to others, not blurting out a sentence from Emerson. And not to burrow into the memory of that bench in Paris and certainly not that cross woman standing next to it, indecisive about sitting. But these are never concerns for writers. If it happened in my imagination, it has to be interesting, at least until I throw it away; but maybe I can paste it on the internet, maybe I can fold it away until my eyebeams look at it in matured light. To write is to encyclopedize memory, but everyone has to order their memories, to choose some delicate meat from the hindquarters or shank—parse, reallocate, filigree, ambuscade—and finally desert before a later recombination in a being who has stood long enough to know that you only live once and that all decisions are paid in full to eternity.
Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations (Hogarth, $28, 272 pp.)
Another debut; another critic’s novel; another book whose elegance is matched by its intelligence. Great Expectations is narrated by a Cunningham-like young man who finds himself working on the presidential campaign of a “senator from Illinois.” In an episode of the Commonweal Podcast, Cunningham talked about the theological implications of fiction. Great Expectations has thrilling set pieces on religious belief but also on political rhetoric, race, and the stylistics of Paul Pierce.
Most of the painters I like create a kind of blur with the brush, a zone of uncertainty between one item and the next, but here—and in some others by Renoir; I recalled one: hundreds of blushing faces at an outdoor party—things proceed from one another, are in some way elements of one another. The result is that everything glows and floats. Everything casts a halo. No trick of light was ever so complete.
I thought of Renoir’s Catholicism, then of my Jesuit middle school principal (he’d made a point of not liking me; too much of a smart-ass, too little of a jock), and how, in his religion class, he’d taught a poem by Hopkins—”The world is charged with the grandeur of God / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil”—in order to teach us what he meant by a sacramental view of life. Not only the wine and the host but trees and sunrises, sea and sand could act as a kind of portal into the action of the Trinity, he said.
Catherine Barnett, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (Graywolf, $17, 96 pp.)
Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space continues the loosening of form exhibited in Barnett's previous collection, Human Hours. There, Barnett occasionally moved away from her usual, compressed mode (she loves couplets) in a series of prose poems called "Accursed Questions." Taken as a whole, that sequence both ironized and seriously examined our drive to consider things of ultimate value. "So much depends upon the kindness of questions," Barnett wrote. "And the questions we cannot not speak of."
In Solutions, Barnett again moves between short lyrics—"Envoy" is an exceptional poem in couplets about moths, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the desire "to look a little less like myself / and more like other humans"—and a sequence of prose poems. The tenth and final of these is dedicated to the late poet Saskia Hamilton. It describes this friend, nearing the end of her life, as "already in two places at the same time." In moving between prose and poetry, dark comedy and high seriousness, Barnett likewise occupies multiple places—affective, formal, and philosophical—at the same time.
My mother once told me painters look backward
and forward at the same time. Since then
it's years and yet feels shorter than a day,
and I still don't understand. Or maybe
I do, yes, I cannot do otherwise.
Tricia Romano, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture (PublicAffairs, $35, 608 pp.)
This oral history makes the convincing case that to understand America in the twentieth century, you have to understand the Village Voice. The Stonewall riots? The AIDS crisis? Performance art? The rise of rock criticism in the 1960s and of hip-hop in the 1980s? The Village Voice was there. Come for the fist fights over story placement and word counts (the book is worth reading just for its Stanley Crouch anecdotes), stay for the sad account of how a once-great magazine got killed by changes in technology (thanks, Craigslist) and corporate structure.
At the Voice, I wrote the way I felt like writing, and that was my writer’s voice, whatever it was. I remember telling Ross Wetzsteon once that a friend of mine wanted to write for the paper, and he just said, “Tell her not to imitate our style.” It would never have occurred to me to try to imitate what that person might perceive as the Voice style. They wanted people to write in their own voice.
Garth Greenwell, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28, 320 pp.)
A new direction for Greenwell, Small Rain puts aside his previous books’ erotic and geographical promiscuity. Instead, it focuses on the narrator’s time in the hospital, suffering through and recovering from an unexpected and painful health crisis. It also features my favorite passage of the year: an extended and bravura close reading of George Oppen’s poem, “Stranger’s Child.” Such a thing shouldn’t work in a novel. Somehow, it, and pretty much everything else, does in Small Rain. (I talked with Greenwell on the Commonweal Podcast.)
Read it again, I would tell my students, read it more slowly, when they looked up baffled by a poem, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, maybe, whom I loved, baffled not because anything was difficult or unclear, but because nothing seemed to happen, because, they almost always thought and sometimes said, what was the point. Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students.
Danielle Chapman, Boxed Juice (Unbound Edition Press, $25, 90 pp.)
Chapman’s poems often start with a bang: “Then one day the earth shucked itself and quivered / clear animal”; “I will not quarrel or cry out, nor call anyone Hitlerian / Nor label Merrill mandarin nor note the egg-sucking / Satisfaction of The Poetry Queen reading People magazine.”
The music in her second collection is exquisite, from the sibilance and internal rhyme on the first page (“Surely I sought strangeness when / I ought to have sought repetition”) to the spare grandeur of the poem’s concluding couplet-as-prayer: “Let my shortcomings be laid / at my own door.” And yet always something can be sensed beyond the music, a haunting—by the past, by illness, by grace—that is both embodied within the language and points us past it.
I’ve met one named Phoenix Jiránek,
ringleted and effusing “contuition”
as gaily as a Franciscan in a boat
eating honeycakes with an angel.
Thus the Lord showed me both ways,
the austere and the hospitable, are good.
Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (Scribner, $28, 464 pp.)
Spufford is one of the most consistently pleasure-giving writers alive. Cahokia Jazz offers an alternative history of the United States in which the ancient Indigenous city of Cahokia, located near St. Louis and abandoned by 1400, instead survived and thrived. Set in the 1920s, this noirish novel follows the complex political and cultural dynamics existing between the city’s sizable Native, Black, and white populations. My wife perfectly described it as “The Wire meets Laurent Binet’s Civilizations meets Raymond Chandler.”
The world turns, but it is not a clockwork mechanism, detective. It is a circular dance, from birth to death to resurrection, through arches of flowers, and arches of bread, and arches of skulls. We dance the turning world, and it dances us.
Nicolette Polek, Bitter Water Opera (Graywolf, $16, 128 pp.)
Bitter Water Opera is, in many ways, a rather traditionally plotted novel of religious conversion. The narrator, Gia, begins the book at loose ends both professionally (she’s taken a leave from her job as a professor of film studies) and personally (she’s recently ended her relationship with her longtime boyfriend and has left her hometown and childhood faith behind). By the end of the novel, she’s had a visionary experience, has a new job, and is spending time both with her previously estranged mother and in prayer.
Gia summarizes her spiritual and psychological plight as “living limerently”: “It was my limerence for other people that afflicted me, my limerence to be in the future, limerence for the so-called past, limerence for other places I had no business living in, limerence for stew when I was eating pie, a limerence so strong that I was always in a world that didn’t even exist.” The restlessness of desire is a very Augustinian notion and, like the Confessions, Bitter Water Opera seems to end with Gia having found, or at least having come to believe in, the presence that lies beyond this ache of absence.
And yet Bitter Water Opera is far messier than such a summary suggests. (Augustine’s Confessions are too, of course.) It’s a novel of conversion in which emptiness remains the prevailing note. It’s a novel of details (Polek is very good on the absurdities of academic life and the sublimities of the desert) that moves towards that which lies beyond the particular and time-bound. It begins with a somewhat whimsical ghost and ends with a totally sincere belief in the Christian God: “A mysterious thing that precedes itself, and continues past itself, a master of ceremonies who stands outside the beginning and end.”
I ambled back into the lobby, flush-faced. The shock turned to ecstatic giddiness. Who could I tell this to? I thought. God’s touch! Everything else in comparison was gray-washed. The mycelium of heaven, beneath everything, making small plush things grow from din.
Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection: Fiction (William Morrow, $28, 272 pp.)
Houellebecq if Houellebecq were still funny; Notes from Underground if Dostoevky’s narrator consumed online porn; Roth if he were 10 percent nastier and had a Twitter account. Tulathimutte’s characters are very online and very unhappy: by their lack of sexual fulfillment, by the trap of the identity-industrial complex (“Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology; at its worst, a patriotism of trauma, or a prosthesis of personality”), by technology and the kind of self—endlessly performative, torn between trolling and virtue-signaling—it has helped create. Tulathimutte’s linked stories are dark, disturbing, and hilarious.
I have no friends. Which is why I loved Twitter: an open, rhizomatic forum where you could aggravate existing mental illness, shop for new ones, violate your Miranda rights, and get fired. A place to be judged on the character of your content, driven by rubbernecking and spite, where fame is a millstone and names are bad op-sec. Twitter was the right word for it, birdsong being a Darwinian squall mistaken for idle chatter, screaming for territory and mates. An improv class, press conference, intervention, Klan rally, comics convention, and struggle session all booked in the same conference room.
Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (New York Review Books, $19.95, 416 pp.) and Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable and Other Writings (New York Review Books, $18.95, 288 pp.)
No “best of” list is complete without a title from my favorite imprint. I started by quoting Edwin Frank, the editorial director of the indispensable NYRB Classics, on “descriptive criticism.” I won’t even attempt to describe these two singular books, Cohen’s a group biography of over thirty writers and artists, Campo’s a collection of essays on fairy tales, modernist poetry, and Catholic mysticism.
Norman Mailer was still in exactly the right mood. He took it all in, in jail, where he was held overnight. He made a phone call to his wife, who told him that [Robert] Lowell, worried, had called several times. He went before a judge and extricated himself from a five-day sentence. And when, finally, he was released on his own recognizance, he paused outside the jail and, surrounded by reporters, gave a brief, incomprehensible speech about the faith that would eventually reunite America, by which he really only meant that he had been glad to discover that he and Robert Lowell were on the same side after all, and then he was allowed to go home.
…
Poetry, too, is attention. In other words, it involves reading, on multiple levels, the reality around us, which is truth in images. And the poet, who takes these images apart and recomposes them, is also a mediator: between man and God, between man and other men, between man and the secret laws of nature.
