The Novels of 2023

The best books I read this year.

In McCarthy’s last novel, my favorite character John Sheddan tells the protagonist, “But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.” A sentiment that I hold to be true. We do get closer to each other through the sharing of the mystical psychospace that is created through the alchemy of literature. Books are one of the only ways we can legitimately travel through time, where we connect our intellect with that of the writer, transporting us to the instant pen was put to paper. Literature is one of the only modes of art and communication that can directly enter the inner space of our souls by using the symbolic power of written language to bypass the walls of the material senses. A task that neither film nor music can attain.

Because I hold the above to be true I like to share what I read in the hope that others will also read the same novels that I find impactful bringing us closer together, even if just in pleasant conversation about the work. So at the end of every year, I like to write and recommend five or so of the best works I’ve read in the past twelve months.

In 2023 I managed to read forty novels. A bit less than in past years but several of the forty were large works and a few were on the more difficult side requiring a slower more intentional read. I re-read Dostovesky’s Crime and Punishment along with Kevin Bermingham's The Sinner and the Saint which is a great bit of historical analysis of the great novel. I also re-read The Great Gatsby which I last read in High School and after this read, I was blown away by Fitzgerald’s writing. If you haven’t bothered with Gatsby since high school I recommend you pick it up, it’s a novella that can be read in one sitting and the first chapter alone makes the experience worth it. But, I don’t want to get into a deep analysis of the above two works because they are acknowledged and well-known masterpieces. I do intend to write a piece about Russian Literature in general and put together a survey list of the novels I think are necessary.

So, without further delay, here are the five novels read in 2023 that held the most intellectual and emotional impact for me and that I highly recommend to my readers. Remember Squire, books are made of books.

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. 2023 was a year where I got deep into McCarthy's work. My wife started reading Child of God, one of his early novels, and got me following along which turned into me reading most of his work this year. It was during this episode of reading that the unfortunate news of McCarthy's death came out making the reading of his work even more poignant and timely. Out of the body of work available from McCarthy Blood Meridian, in my opinion, is one of two masterpieces, his other being Suttree. Back in August, I wrote, See the child, he is pale and thin, my review of Blood Meridian. If you are interested follow the link and read that piece which covers a lot of my thoughts on this late 20th century American masterpiece. I will say that if you haven’t read Blood Meridian you just aren’t a serious reader of modern literature and cannot be taken seriously as a writer.

  

• Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. The other McCarthy novel I consider to have reached masterpiece status. Suttree and Blood Meridian are works that fall into distinct stylistic periods of McCarthys work, Suttree being the apex of his Tennessee-based Faulkarian style and Blood Meridian being the opening of his Southwestern era that took him to the end of his life and culminated in what I feel is a blend of the two vibes in The Passenger. Now, I will admit that Blood Meridian is the better of the two novels but if you asked me to pick I would go with this one. Suttree is a long novel about Cornelius Suttree, a man who walked out on his wealthy family so he could live in the slums of Knoxville. Our man Suttree lives on a delipidated houseboat and fishes most of the day so he can earn enough money to spend the night drinking with a collection of interesting degenerates, prostitutes, boxers, thieves, transvestites, witches, and other miscreants who live on the edge of the river that passes through Knoxville.

  Mr. Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein nigh draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.

  I was drunk, cried Suttree.

  The novel explores ideas like the rejection of modern life, and living on the edges with the outcasts that have nowhere or no desire to fit in. At once funny, with characters like Hargrave, the melonfucker, and also depressing with the death of the son he abandoned and the plight of the poor families trying to make ends meet in a difficult time and place. What stands out in this novel is the language, McCarthy writes some banger lines, and going back through my notes I think this is one of my heaviest highlighted books. Definitely on my list of 20th-century American Fiction.

  

• 2666 by Roberto Bolano. 2023 was a year when I read a lot of work by two authors. The first was McCarthy, an author with whom I agree with the consensus that he was a master of the written word but stylistically is not my favorite. While I enjoy his work, the lack of internality of his writing is not the style of fiction I want to work in myself. The second is the Chilean Roberto Bolano, who I discovered for myself this year and devoured the majority of his writing over the past few months. Bolano unlike McCarthy is a writer focused on the internal, his writing tending to be first person, even autofictional in style, breaking the border between the character and the writer. As a writer, I am stylistically in Bolanos camp.

  Just like McCarthy, Bolano writes about the North American Southwest, and just like McCarthy his work is topped by two powerful masterpieces, the apex being the difficult 2666. The novel is a maximalist masterpiece, a fragmentary novel in five parts, unconnected except by the horrid uncountable murders of women in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa (a fictional city based on Ciudad Juarez) and the strange life of a literary enigma, a reclusive Prussian writer named Beno Von Archimboldi. The main thread of the novel is never approached in a straight line. Instead, Bolano weaves individual narratives, disconnected lives, that swirl around the connecting element, and in this case that element is the black hole of countless female corpses discovered in Santa Teresa. I wrote a more in-depth review, The Corpses of Santa Teresa, that I hope you take the time to read and share.

  

• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano.

  Drink up, boys, drink up, and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

  Man, I love this novel. It starts with a group of young scenester poets in 1970s Mexico City who call themselves the Visceral Realists. They spend their time arguing politics in cafes, getting drunk, and sleeping with each other. Then the novel switches to an interesting interview format where we get monologs and stories from a huge set of characters spanning over two decades and many continents following the life, loves, failures, dissatisfaction, and disappointments of the Visceral Realists focused around the vortex of the movements main writers Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. The novel then brings us back to Mexico in the 70’s and ends with a chase through the Sonoran desert. Masterpiece and honestly I have a hard time describing it to someone not familiar with Bolano style, so you will just have to take my word for it and pick it up. Also, if you are wondering where to start with Bolano, this is it, read it before 2666.

  

• Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu. The best novel I read this year, and possibly one of the best novels I’ve read in my entire life. Solenoid hit me so hard that it inspired me to fly to my hometown of Bucharest for the first time in over thirty years. It’s a maximalist novel, sometimes autofiction, sometimes realist, others deep in the depths of dream logic. Kafkaesque and Borgesian, the journal of a failed writer turned middle school teacher in the second half of the 20th century Bucharest. A man who is struggling with existence, reality, love, and the purpose of humanity. A man who lives above a mysterious device, one of several “solenoids” buried around Bucharest, that allows him to float above his bed. This novel has so much, oppressive Communism, alien abduction, cults, industrial landscapes created by interdimensional beings, the corpses of giants buried under cities, oneiromancy, body horror, sanitoriums, robots, and many other wild and insane things that come together to make this masterpiece of a novel. Best of all, unlike a lot of maximalist novels this one has a masterful ending, one that takes everything that has happened before and makes some sense of it. Without ruining the end, I will say that it closes on a beautiful note about life, love, and the value of children.

  Irina,” I said, still looking out the window, “if someone told me that child was going to be Hitler, I would know in that moment that I am being deceived and tested. That I’m being tested by the one who once said, ‘If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from the top of the temple, and angels will bear thee up.’ I would be even more sure to choose the child, Irina. Because a child doesn’t have only one future, he has billions of creodes ahead of him. Any pebble he steps on, any blade of grass he looks at is the switch that can change the track his life is riding on. Every moment of his life is a fork in the road. No infant is destined to order the slaughter of the innocents. In another future, he might be the one who saves them.

  Solenoid changed the way I look at my own writing, my own purpose in the world, and helped me understand myself and where I come from at a time in my life when I was grasping at direction. But beyond that, this is a damn great novel, and the fact that it’s a new novel shows me that the form, that literature still has value and that there is still a lot to be said and written. If you read only one book out of the ones I recommend this year, please make it this one.

Well, that’s it, five books by three authors that hit me hard this year. I read a lot more, and most of it was great, but the above were the ones that impressed something on me, and I hope you pick some of them up, read them, and come back here to let me know what you think.