The best fiction of 2007

December 02, 2007|Gail Caldwell

The Welsh Girl
By Peter Ho Davies

Falling Man
By Don DeLillo

The Gathering
By Anne Enright

Tree of Smoke
By Denis Johnson

On Chesil Beach
By Ian McEwan

Cheating at Canasta
By William Trevor

If the map of human consciousness is largely delineated by its gaps - the wishes unfulfilled, the questions that drive us onward, the oceans that lie between the landmasses - then certainly literature, and our reliance on it as a natural resource, are partly about the books we've never read. Proust's madeleines appear on every buffet of genteel conversation, Hamlet's soliloquy or Beckett's tramp articulates our universal loneliness, and yet the thing itself - "Middlemarch," say, or "The Golden Bowl," or "Ulysses" - is often the signifier for the future. "I'll read 'Swann's Way' when I retire," one declares, dreamily and energetically, or, conversely, "It's too late to endure 'Moby-Dick.' " The particular voids matter less than their position in the unfinished blueprint of our lives. The unread books, I think, serve as a kind of promise - hopeful road markers for the territories not yet traveled.

French psychoanalyst and literature professor Pierre Bayard must have had a hunch this phenomenon would strike a nerve; his half-satirical "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read," published in October, was a runaway bestseller in France and is getting lots of ink here. No one has actually read it, of course - that would be cheating, or missing the joke - but Bayard's implicit point is the supremacy of literature itself. We need all our unread books, whether we're title dropping at holiday parties or making lists for the La-Z-Boy somewhere down the road. I consider my own list with a kind of sanctimony, unwarranted, on the grounds that I read for a living. The fact is that I quite enjoy pondering the books I may never get to. Like New York in the 1940s or camping under the stars, such Shangri-las are prettier when they're slightly out of reach.