This time last year, one of my favourite American authors had a book due out in the UK from a relatively small publisher. I wondered why she was not better known here – her novels had been highly praised and widely sold in the US, and this new one had had a sweeping success there.
Well, it didn’t take long for Britain to be crowded with converts. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad became possibly the most talked-about novel of the year. Quite apart from the critical plaudits and mentions on the reading lists of luminaries it received, I heard more people bring it up in conversation than I saw pulling David Nicholls’s One Day out of their handbags on the train. Egan’s new fans will be delighted to hear that Corsair have plans to publish her backlist in 2012.
Ostensibly set in and on the fringes of the music business, Goon Squad uses pop music, with its fast fading fashions, as a way of showing the effects of time. Characters look at themselves, and each other, and wonder how they got “from A to B”. In fact, one dying musician wants to call his last album A to B: “That’s the question I want to hit head-on,” he explains. “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat f--k no one cares about?” A 13 year-old boy is obsessed with timing the pauses in pop songs, and when his exasperated father eventually shouts at him about it, his mother explains on the boy’s behalf: “The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and That. Time. The. End. Is. For. Real.”
Over the course of the novel, we witness a drowning, kleptomania-in-progress, addiction recovery, betrayal, anger, regret, desire, and the violence of all these things. There is a virtuosic formal inventiveness to Goon Squad – it is composed of interlocking stories with segues embedded in them like small shiny coins – and there’s a playfulness in the voices that at first suggests an ironic view of the world. Yet this is combined with a breathtaking range of empathetic gifts on Egan’s part. Reviewing it in the New York Review of Books, the novelist Cathleen Schine remarked that Egan had disguised her book as a postmodern novel but given us a “great, gasping, sighing, breathing” 19th-century epic underneath.
“Time’s a goon” is the phrase that gives the novel its title. “You gonna let that goon push you around?” the producer Bennie Salazar asks one of his ageing musicians. “The goon won,” he replies. In a sense, this is what the best novels can do – if you really want to document time, it’s not historical facts you need, but some form that will render the way time blurs and skews and gets to you.
This is the subject of Julian Barnes’s Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. In Tony Webster we have a narrator who advertises his unreliability – as you get older, he observes repeatedly, there are fewer people to corroborate your version of the past – but he’s even more unreliable than he thinks he is. After all, his life has been significantly characterised by avoidance. “I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded,” he says. His articulate blindness is what gives the book its mastery and sting.
My admiration for The Sense of an Ending is unreserved. Some of those who have liked the book less have complained that the character is “just Barnes”. Even if this were true I don’t think it would matter, as long as he was doing it best, and in defence of the book I’d like to point out, perversely, a minuscule flaw. Very occasionally, the narrator will quote someone and not appear to know the attribution (“Who was it who said…?”; “Someone once said…”; “Some Englishman once said…”). At those moments I felt a tiny tug from the author, a sense that Barnes knows where it comes from but knows Tony Webster can’t know. The strongest of these is when Tony gives a French recipe (attributed to his ex-wife) for “chicken in half-mourning”. The metaphor is heavy, and takes up a paragraph, and afterwards Tony apologises to the reader (“Sorry, that’s a bit off the track”). If it’s only at these times that the narration becomes transparent – you think you can see through to the author – then it proves that the rest can’t possibly be “just Barnes”, and that his technique is otherwise unimpeachable.
I should mention more briefly other books I’ve enjoyed this year – I’ve restricted them to fiction because I’ve had a peculiar year in that regard, having been on the jury of the Man Booker Prize, but you can read a more impartial view of the year in books from our critics at telegraph.co.uk/books.
Patrick McGuinness’s The Last Hundred Days is set in extreme historical conditions – the final months of Ceausescu’s power in what the narrator calls “Europe’s saddest dictatorship”. The setting is a city-wide theatre of the absurd, yet while McGuinness is adept at conveying the poetry and comedy of Bucharest on the road to extinction, the passages that prove the varied strength of his writing are those about the narrator’s parents, both dead, briefly recalled with aching twists of bitterness and never revisited.
Hisham Matar’s Anatomy of a Disappearance and Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz both convey with rawness the effects of sex – not the act itself, but its insidious, corrosive, heart-altering relatives. An adolescent boy feels an invasive longing for a woman who will eventually marry his philandering father. We witness a married woman’s futureless fall into apparent excitement. The Forgotten Waltz and The Anatomy of a Disappearance trade in the kind of human enquiry that has no resolution. The plot is all resonance, which is why these rather compact, evocative novels have a life beyond their pages: they are more true to life than to fiction.
Enright manages to tell her story through a spiky narrator who is gripping but not altogether likeable. And that’s not dissimilar to a striking achievement of two other novels published this year, Anna Funder’s All That I Am and Nicole Krauss’s Great House.
Both books shift between narrators and cover a broad period, yet perhaps most memorably, these relatively young writers have projected themselves into, in Funder’s case, the crusty wit and wisdom of Ruth, an old woman looking back on her fight against the fascists (“I have found, with increasing age, that humility suits me less”); and in Krauss’s case the contorted self-consciousness of Nadia, a writer who speaks of “making use of the pain of others for her own ends”, and dismisses a moral compass as “ridiculous and misguided”.
Few narrators this year have been funnier than Eli, one half of Patrick De Witt’s eponymous duo The Sisters Brothers. His drawling, dark, laconic and heartbreaking voice turns a wry Western into a work of great strangeness and verve. The Stranger’s Child is a novel of such ambitious scope that it’s possibly a little short-sighted to focus on Alan Hollinghurst’s sense of humour, particularly when the knockabout pastiche of the early part of the book is designed to be offset by the sophisticated historical inquiry of what comes after. But there’s no better sign of a natural writer than a line by line layering of character through gentle comedy. “My mother’s a natural leader of men,” Cecil explains of the woman he calls “The General”: “But she’s a sweet old thing once you get to know her, wouldn’t you say, George?” George, meanwhile “thought Lady Valance the most terrifying person he’d ever met, dogmatic, pious, inexcusably direct, and immune to all jokes even when explained to her; her sons had learned to treasure her earnestness as a great joke in itself.”
Lastly, I’d like to mention something that’s not yet published in English. While I was in Colombia, at the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias earlier this year, I stumbled across a posthumous collection of Julio Cortázar’s unpublished prose. Cortázar, an Argentinian who spent a large part of his life in Paris and died there in 1984, was a master of the short story. He wrote what would become Antonioni’s film, Blow-Up. Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique is heavily indebted to another of his creations. Yet while his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges has remained as much a part of the international literary landscape as Kafka, Cortázar is now obscure here. The posthumous collection carries the magnificent title of Papeles inesperados – literally “unexpected papers”, but since in Spanish to wait or expect is also to hope, there is an effect of these manuscripts magically appearing long after you’d given up wishing they would. For now, I would urge you to dig out the stories Cortázar published in his lifetime.
