The A.V. Club’s 15 favorite books of 2021

(New York Review Books)In the winter of 1960, before Jewish assimilation in America is a settled issue, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, father of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arrives at the fictional Corbin University in Upstate New York to interview for a professorship. Ruben Blum, the school’s first and only Jewish professor, has been tasked with sizing him up and showing him around. Netanyahu brings with him his wife and three terrible boys: the smoldering Jonathan; Iddo, of ambiguous age but still in diapers; and Benjamin Netanyahu himself. The Netanyahus are uncouth, lusty, loud, and violent. They break prized television consoles, devour gingerbread houses, seduce daughters, and flee naked into the night. And yet their foils, the upstanding Blums, with their gentile affectations, their quiet resentments and longings for straighter noses, come off no better. An uncommon combination of erudite and slapstick, this is Cohen’s best book yet. [Erin Somers]

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)Rachel Cusk’s strange, slim novel opens with a disturbing prelude: The devil, in the form of a grotesque dandy, follows the narrator up and down a train car while fondling a child. No one on the train makes any move to stop him. The episode is never addressed again, but sets the tone for a story in which evil exists alongside ordinary activities like art-making and cocktail hour and marriage and motherhood. M, a writer, maintains an artist’s residency near her home on a marsh. During what is presumably the early pandemic, she invites a painter she admires, L, to come stay. But the relationship does not pan out as expected. As the two spar, Cusk’s chilly precision yields to erotic ugliness yields to something surprisingly beautiful about the desire to mend relationships and experience life anew. [Erin Somers]

(trans. by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman; Farrar, Straus & Giroux) It’s funny, and maybe a little uncouth, to call a book a “depressing page-turner,” yet here we are. In The Copenhagen Trilogy, the late Tove Ditlevsen—beloved in her home country but, until this year, long out of print in the States—captures the tragedy of her life growing up in Denmark, from her cruel mother to a string of lackluster or enabling husbands, while moving swiftly from one thing to the next. In lyrical but never purple prose, the writer details her struggles as a child, poet, wife, mother. Even the names of each memoir, and the terrible leap from the second to the third, is heartbreaking: Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), Dependency (1971). Much attention has been paid to that harrowing final entry, Ditlevsen’s full submersion into addiction, but the melancholy is dense throughout. [Laura Adamczyk]

 (Algonquin)With Libertie, Kaitlyn Greenidge follows in the grand tradition of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison—marrying a richly detailed historical novel with an exploration of Black culture. Specifically, Greenidge challenges the notion of Black excellence and the protection it would seem to provide. Libertie is a highly engrossing read as it moves from the Reconstruction period to a downright Gothic setting in Haiti. Inspired by the life of Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black woman doctor in the state of New York, the story loses none of its power or urgency in changing locales or styles, occasionally dipping into an epistolary format. Though it’s not quite in that genre, there was hardly a better mystery novel this year: Greenidge’s protagonist may be named Libertie, but freedom proves difficult to define, let alone find. [Danette Chavez]

(trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd; Europa Editions)Mieko Kawakami’s second book published in the U.S. concerns a 14-year-old boy nicknamed “Eyes” by his classmates for his lazy eye. Eyes is humiliated regularly, and beaten inventively, by the popular kids at school. He begins a correspondence with another outcast, Kojima, a rich girl who has cultivated a slovenly appearance. Their ability to withstand cruelty is what sets her and Eyes apart, Kojima insists: “We see it and we let it happen. I don’t think that’s weakness at all. It’s more like strength.” When Eyes gets a chance to receive treatment for his condition, Kojima is furious, fearing he will no longer be bullied. He must decide whether to free himself by forsaking his only friend. The world asks of us that we turn away from nihilism, and that we do it by choice over and over, the book seems to say. Not everyone has the guts. [Erin Somers]

(Riverhead)It sometimes feels as though the events in Katie Kitamura’s novels are taking place in someone’s memory, as though the reader were seeing it all through tinted glass. It’s a mark of Kitamura’s immense talent for rendering isolation and reticence with such grace; even when we’re not sure what a character is thinking or feeling, there’s an understanding and an empathy at work. And in this novel especially, where language itself—and our inability to ever fully feel as though we have the proper words to communicate what we think—is so central, that gift for rhetorical minimalism stands out. Following an interpreter moving to take a job at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Intimacies traces her struggle for connection in a new city, the uncertainty of new romance, and the intensity of a high-profile trial. The writer does it all with a quiet, icy reserve, and always with what feels like exactly the right combination of words. [Alex McLevy]

(Scribner)A writer needn’t make themselves the subject of their work for you to get to know them. In the case of Rachel Kushner, you can learn all you need to know through who the writer chooses as her subjects: artists, activists, abolitionists, motorcycle fanatics. In brief, characters. The Hard Crowd may not be structured around an overarching theme, but in each essay Kushner enlivens already lively people. “She was indeed beautiful for most of her life, with a face whose astral luminosity reminds me of topaz, her favorite stone,” she writes of another animated prose stylist, Clarice Lispector. In the last entry of the collection, the self-mythologizing title work, Kushner draws a line separating writers from the eccentrics she finds so intriguing. Those kinds of people are the actors, and writers merely chronicle their performance, she says. Yet in this collection, Kushner makes writing wildly kinetic. [Laura Adamczyk]

(Knopf) You won’t find the term “toxic masculinity” anywhere in The War For Gloria (and honestly, it feels reductive to use it here), but in his second novel, Atticus Lish has indeed captured the many ways the lives of boys and men can curdle into something dangerous. The book centers around the teenaged Corey—an impetuous Boston youth who becomes obsessed with MMA—and his mother, Gloria, as she is diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease and her health deteriorates. As with Lish’s debut, the phenomenal Preparation For The Next Life, this novel is both dense and agile. It packs in a great deal about not just the extremes of masculinity but also class and the way the lives of the poor so often teeter on ruin. Lish set expectations very high with his first novel, and he more than delivers with his second. [Laura Adamczyk]

(Riverhead)One of the things I most enjoy about reading is forgetting a book’s broadest moves—major plot turns or themes—but remembering, years after I’ve read it, something pinpoint-specific: the smallest unit of odd dialogue or a single unexpected metaphor. The problem with Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel—centered around an extremely online woman who’s pulled away from “the portal” when a family tragedy strikes—is that she fires on all cylinders on every single page. A few lines chosen at random: Marlon Brando is a “wet knife in a t-shirt.” A dildo is “the shocking thing with veins.” The protagonist draws a line between herself and “people who hadn’t stopped being stupid yet.” These aren’t even the best ones. Which is to say, while No One Is Talking About This takes the online and the off- as its subjects, Lockwood’s brilliant, bawdy, sparkling prose is front and center. [Laura Adamczyk]

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)In this year of the nun (see: Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix and Paul Verhoeven’s sexploitation flick ), Claire Luchette’s madcap and melancholic debut is a stunner. Agatha Of Little Neon tells the story of a young, uncloistered nun ministering to the residents of a Mountain Dew-hued halfway house in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. In vignette chapters, Agatha and her sisters struggle to do good in a world—and religion—imbued with so much bad. They fight back (peacefully, obediently) against the irresponsible men that have put them there. They relax with games of thumb war and roller skating. Over time, Agatha doubts her vows and questions her sexual urges. She, like her sisters, helps and heals, fails and flounders. Together they teach the Word and absorb its lessons. “Not every one of God’s creatures deserves your mercy,” one sister declares. Amen. [Rien Fertel]

(trans. by Adam Morris; Farrar, Straus & Giroux)At first glance, Pola Oloixarac’s new novel feels slight, especially in comparison to the world-shaking events of her last book, . A gleeful takedown of self-styled “serious” writers, and the high-minded retreats they attend (immediately countermanded, of course, by the hedonism in which nearly all of them participate), it breezes by with the sly ease of a writer in their comfort zone. Mona, who drinks and drugs her way through a gathering to award a literary prize she’s up for, fills her days surrounded by conversations about language, the purpose of words, and the higher aspirations of literature. Until, suddenly, a left-field climax reveals what’s been bubbling under the lighthearted surface of the plot. It’s absurd and crushing simultaneously; but as the reader’s mind slowly reorients to an entirely new perspective on what’s been unfolding, the dark underside to Oloixarac’s razor wit is exposed, and the potency of her mousetrap of a novel takes hold. [Alex McLevy]

(Knopf)Relevance is not always a boon for a novel, and such was the case with Jim Shepard’s fantastic Phase Six. The book, completed before COVID-19 transformed our world, tells the story of the doctors and patients suffering through a massive and mysterious pandemic. The author rotates through the perspectives of key players: a young boy who’s the only survivor in the town where the first wave hit, a pair of CDC researchers, and a doctor in America. Shepard’s work often features characters blowing in the winds of history, and part of what makes his fiction so potent is how he balances a tight focus on their concerns alongside a wide view of the events unfolding around them. He deploys this skill to particularly unsettling effect in Phase Six. Nobody could be blamed for avoiding this book at all costs, but should staring back at the darkness instead of away from it appeal to you, Shepard’s stellar book is a great choice. [Bradley Babendir]

(Hogarth)Over the course of Christine Smallwood’s melancholy and charming debut novel, an English adjunct at a New York City university begins to realize some things about her career, such as it is: “She vaguely recalled a time when wanting to do the job she had trained for did not feel like too much to want. Now want itself was a thing of the past. She was in the epilogue of wants.” What should you do with yourself, The Life Of The Mind asks, once you’ve realized—not by sudden epiphany, but through a gradual, certain accumulation—that the life you thought you’d have is no longer viable? Another more literal loss, the protagonist’s miscarriage, serves as a crystal-clear but never heavy-handed metaphor throughout. It may all sound like dour material, but Smallwood’s mind is startlingly brilliant and full of life. [Laura Adamczyk]

(Doubleday)Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead adroitly moves to a different beat with Harlem Shuffle, a trenchant historical/crime novel hybrid. The story spans several years in the life of Ray Carney, a Harlem native doing his best to navigate the churn of the early 1960s: a neighborhood uprising and the growing civil rights movement, all set against a more primordial form of migration. Whitehead’s at his wryest when taking a closer look at Carney’s own desire for upward mobility; the author makes it easy to sympathize with the furniture store owner, while still scrutinizing his motives. Harlem Shuffle is deeply rooted in its historical setting, and makes for one hell of a hardboiled noir. But the story needs no real updating to serve as an astute commentary on today’s rise-and-grind culture. [Danette Chavez]