The best fiction of 2006

December 03, 2006|Gail Caldwell

Twilight of the Superheroes
By Deborah Eisenberg

The Lay of the Land
By Richard Ford

The Road
By Cormac McCarthy

After This
By Alice McDermott

The Echo Maker
By Richard Powers

The Accidental
By Ali Smith

With all due respect to Dickens, the old "best of times, worst of times" canopy no longer quite covers the territory. When the father of realism began "A Tale of Two Cities" with that melancholy insight, it still seemed feasible to capture the world, with all its complexity, in a story -- one that, we might add, was serialized in a weekly journal. Those were the days when novelists wrote installments on deadline and audiences yearned for the next week's chapter; if the novel as a form was considered risqu&#xE9; and even heretical, it hadn't yet been sentenced to the dustheap of history, along with last week's Pentium chip or BlackBerry.

But part of Dickens's genius was to foresee the predictability of change, and so he wrote on, in that exquisite introduction, that the year in question, 1775, was also the age of wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, hope and despair: "The period was so far like the present period," he wrote in 1859, "that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

So I will be no noisy authority: 2006 was a singularly weird and cockeyed and tragic year, and thus like every other. It was a year when the vast number of books published -- somewhere above 150,000 -- continued to rise while the newspaper book sections that covered them continued to shrink. In a parlor-game issue that irritated and energized readers for months, The New York Times Book Review tried to name the best fiction of the past 25 years; enough people voted for "Beloved" for Toni Morrison's novel to win the all-comers race, while John Irving voted for himself. His narcissism paled next to the pathological blindness of the marketing helpmates behind the O. J. Simpson fiasco, who had all but bought themselves a condo in hell until Rupert Murdoch had the sense to pull the plug on Simpson's "fictionalized" confession.