Journey, Mortality

It8217;s been an unusually good 12-month for the American novel. Here are some of the best of 2006

The Road
Cormac McCarthy

A father and son are making their way, as winter approaches, from a northern state in the US to the southern coastline. A nuclear catastrophe has just occurred and, en route, they forage in ghost towns for any supplies that could keep them going. They must also protect themselves against marauding packs of survivors, and the father must construct stories of good and evil to keep his son ethically sane. McCarthy8217;s sparse writing conveys the bleakness amidst which a spark of humanity is being sought to be protected.

The Lay of the Land
Richard Ford

Another road journey, in this third of the Sportswriter series. In the winter of 2000, with the result of the American presidential election still awaiting a verdict from the supreme court, Frank Bascombe is contemplating life with cancer. As with his other moments of intense reflection, this one too come on a holiday, as he visits his ex-wife. But the real pleasure provided by this book is the way in which the seemingly non-eventful journey yields a measure of the texture of the social and political undercurrents in America through, well, the lay of the land.

Everyman
Philip Roth

Another novel on mortality. All of Roth8217;s concerns are in play in this slim volume. His everyman has led a life punctuated by illness and surgery, each bout starting with a teenage hospitalisation bringing forebodings about death and mortality. Like all of Roth8217;s men, he seeks to stave off that inevitability by nurturing creativity and desire. But it is the telling of his post-war childhood that the book finds its center of gravity. It is, of course, a return to familiar terrain for his readers, in the making of a new American generation from the austere comforts of family and opportunity.

The Emperor8217;s Children
Claire Messud

It8217;s a 9/11 novel dressed up as a New York comedy of manners. Three smart thirtysomethings gather around the city8217;s grand old liberal. As does his country bumpkin of a nephew, initially in escapist awe but soon able to see through the sophistication they wear like the emperor8217;s new cloak. As Messud wittily maps the minds of her characters, the events of September 11, 2001 will somehow bring each one of them, now on the brink of fragmentation, in reconciliation with their long-held pretensions.

Brooklyn Follies
Paul Auster

In The Brooklyn Follies, Paul Auster once again lays out all the pieces of his fiction: a narrator recently estranged from spouse and offspring, oddball characters immersed in New York8217;s urban loneliness, chance encounters, erudite digressions into the writing of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the soft background noise of American politics. He lays them out, and then assembles them, in this extraordinarily tender novel, to map a place called happiness.

After This
Alice McDermott

Two wars tie together this novel about a Long Island Irish-Catholic couple who much battle their personal demons and carry on their personal narrative the shattered conscience of an America struggling in Vietnam.