Truth Is Best Approached Indirectly

1) The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday): Remember when somebody like Roth was a No. 1 bestseller? Here's the cat who can get us back to that. Lethem's coming-of-life story, fiction only by approach and embellishment, finds Dylan Ebdus growing up in a Brooklyn about to change. It finds Dylan meeting Mingus Rude, a calm, cool, and collected kid of ill destiny. It finds childhood when most of us have lost it for good. It finds Lethem setting out for a new course, one that ignores genre -- not plays with it, mind you, as he has done so well in the past, but ignores it (aside from the prop comic-book collections and the occasional delusional drunk leaping from rooftops with little more than a magic ring and a makeshift cape) -- instead embracing a soulful kind of storytelling, full of rhythm and style and layer. Something like Joni Mitchell was going for on and with Mingus, that "braided ... wall of sound." "Or," as we wrote in October, Lethem "has set out to write a story, deliberately and artfully, more configured than plotted, mournful but casual, an American story, and the American story is race, after all." We also wondered about its berth -- calling it the finest novel of the past five years -- but hedged a bit, settling on this: "a 50th-birthday gift to The Adventures of Augie March, that greatest of all fine American novels. Lethem has Bellow's style: his singing, trilling, soaring, dancing, skipping, breathless (albeit somber) command of the English language amplified with the uncanny ability to convey empathy and idea."

2) Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner): Our Jordan Smith in March: "LeBlanc, formerly the fiction editor at Seventeen magazine, spent 10 years living with the various characters. She has chosen telling details from a decade of life and imparted them with such honesty that their flaws are so much like our own that it becomes nearly impossible to pass judgment on them. LeBlanc starts by following the savagely sexy Jessica as she walks down the streets of her Bronx ghetto, gathering the stares of every man she passes. Her carefree generosity is infectious, but before the first chapter has ended, Jessica has already birthed three children out of wedlock, dropped out of the ninth grade, and taken up with an incredibly successful adolescent heroin dealer. The move is one that sets the stage for the rest of the book and the often-tragic choices found throughout -- and the implications of those choices are not lost on any of the people whose lives LeBlanc chronicles."

3) Timoleon Vieta Come Home by Dan Rhodes (Canongate): Upon his visit to Austin, the cryptic, funny, surly, sweet, retirement - threatening Rhodes was asked about his adoration of Daniel Johnston. "Listening to people like him made me strip away some of the layers of disguise in my writing and actually got me writing kind of sad stuff, really. I love the way that his music, although it's just so heartbreaking, is also incredibly uplifting, and funny in parts. So, yeah, I suppose that mixture of melancholy and humor is what I'm after myself, really." We agreed: "That mixture is potent in Timoleon Vieta Come Home, a novel concerning an alternately sympathetic and sickening character named Cockroft. He's a banished composer of little import -- mostly themes for such TV shows as Bibbly and the Bobblies and Turk Is a Four-Letter Word -- who lives in Umbria with his beauceron mutt, Timoleon Vieta. ... When the mysterious 'Bosnian' seeks shelter at Cockroft's villa after hearing that he essentially puts up young men in exchange for sexual favors and odd jobs, the lonely old drunk is eventually forced to choose between the two, as the surly stranger grows to hate the pet. This is where Rhodes' third book -- which becomes a kind of orbital series of folklike tales with various men, women, and children of destiny encountering a lost dog at their center -- begins to throb pleasantly with the storytelling simplicity that one of his idols, Chekov, predicated. By its end, the novel is a violent triumph."

4) The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): I, as a Catholic and a critic, am at a loss here, and not just because I'm only halfway through the book. In his debut, FSG editor Elie takes on intertwined critical biographies of Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton. "For Walker Percy, the burden of accomplishment -- namely, the expectation that he should write a 'Catholic novel' -- was the undoing of all he had accomplished with The Moviegoer," Elie writes in his sustained, incisive, culturally translating way. "He thought he had to learn how to shout in silence the way Flannery O'Connor had done. From his own experience, however, he should have known otherwise: The truth -- in his own work, at least -- is best approached indirectly, through cunning and guile."

5) P by Andrew Lewis Conn (Soft Skull): We wrote in July that Conn's story of a lovelorn pornographer "Joyces its way around the streets of New York City with a calculated, empathic abandon, stopping only to showcase the young writer's 21st - century - appropriate narrative versatility and his watchmaker's way with the English language."

6) The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf): Forget Lowell and Rexroth and Plath. Or, forget their big anthologies and big biopics, at least for now. Smith is a poet for our years, confused by the truth but trying, human and lustful, angry, ecstatic, running out of time. She's like Marianne Moore with less polish and more politics, not nearing the pure poetic force of that master quite yet, but hitting her marks all the same. "I'd like to smash a goblet in my fist," she writes in "Gospel: Jesús." And in "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y": "You are pure appetite. I am pure/Appetite."

7) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (Doubleday): While it's true that we might very well be collectively fucked when the Today show is literary fiction's public liaison, the fact is that its book club picks better books than yours. First, it was Stephen Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park, followed by Adam Haslett's You Are Not a Stranger Here, and then, in 2003, it was Caramelo (Sandra Cisneros), Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (ZZ Packer), The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger), National Book Award-winning Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, and this, a while in the life of an autistic kid on a mission. "Christopher has decided to write a book because his neighbor's poodle, Wellington, has been impaled with a garden fork, and because he's compelled to chronicle his quest to find the murderer as a school project," we wrote in June. "His greatest assets are his admiration for The Hound of the Baskervilles and the vacuum of his socio-emotional understandings. These assets in turn are siphoned by Haddon, the acclaimed British children's author and illustrator, who has struck fucking gold with his debut 'adult' novel (doubly struck, as it were, since Curious Incident is an inarguable artistic triumph, and one that has seen its rights sold to not only more countries than might actually be Earthly, but also Hey Day Films, Harry Potter's production company). Like Doyle, he has that enviable inverse-minded knack for crafting a slyly accessible puzzle."

8) Brownsville: Stories by Oscar Casares (Little, Brown/Back Bay Books): Our Roger Gathman on the stories of former Dobie Paisano fellow Casares in March: The "poetry of their slow burns tells us that Casares has been listening. His dialogues seem to hang just outside the realm of literature, which is where real writing happens. Casares recognizes that, at the core, the wisecrack expresses a deep, metaphysical melancholy: It's a pained, Augustinian response to the delusion that happiness can be pursued. A wisecrack is funny in exact proportion to the unfunniness of the world around the man making it. Casares' readers will be tempted to draw a parallel with Flannery O'Connor, whose stories are also populated by wisecrackers and their foils, the obsessives who are fascinated with the symbols that arise, like parodies of redemption, from the hopeless junk in their lives."

9) Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon): Just as studios began producing documentaries, Pantheon unveiled a series of graphic novels. Both models are relatively behind the times, but their efforts are appreciated all the same. This, the autobiographical retelling of a young girl's life in an overthrown Iran, is by far the best big-house graphic novel of the year, and certainly worthy of just about any small-press comparison or otherwise, considering that it has already been compared to Maus.

10) Born on a Train: 13 Stories by John McManus (Picador): We wondered in April whether Céline, to whom the Michener fellow has been compared by a reviewer who apparently wasn't messing around, would respond to the "young Tennessean's ability to inhabit stories like 'Eastbound,' ... which shows two elderly, life-beaten sisters stuck in a bum car on the highway and the hallucinations that leak from that crisis. The self-reflex of his work, found in the homoerotic tension of 'Fetch,' and yet also the simultaneous embrace of the unfamiliar, as in the dialectical experimentation of 'Thatcher Mountain.' ... What about the playwright's ear for dialogue (he is, after all, a friend of the Rude Mechanicals' Kirk Lynn)? The humor in his methodical examination of modern everyday disillusionment?" We also wrote that "the spirit of his Southern-powered work (Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, and Breece D'J Pancake come to mind)" is "acting natural. Speaking for itself. And people are beginning to hear it, like you sometimes hear a low, distant howl getting closer."