Best Books of 2013: Fiction Debuts!

Theres a certain pleasing fluidity to these annual lists, reflecting the fluidity of the publishing landscape. One year there’s an abundance of excellent nature books or books about Venice, and the next year the abundance has shifted to other subjects. A year-end list that held mechanically to all its previous iterations would be a morbid thing indeed – always being sensitive to what the industry is offering is an important part of appreciating that industry – hence the absence of some old familiar categories and the appearance of some new ones this time around. But thankfully, some categories cannot possibly have dry years, and since hope springs eternal in the narcissist’s heart, one of those categories is Debut Fiction! 2013, like all years, was positively BURIED in fiction debuts, and a very encouraging number of those were first-rate (and unlike last year, they don’t all have the same cover!) – easily enough to fill a list twice this size. So here are the year’s best beginnings to careers I hope will last a long time:

10. Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi (Penguin Press) – Fiction in 2013, debut and otherwise, was full to its eyebrows with two things: creaky artifice and arrogant ‘immigrant experience’ condescension on the part of Cantabridgian poseurs who could no more get a book contract in their various miserable cholera-ridden homelands than they could pull diamonds out of their ears but who still somehow find it acceptable to come to the developed West, deposit their education grants, and then open their MacBooks and poo all over their benefactors. Thank whatever gods may be that Taiye Selasi’s debut Ghana Must Go only indulges in the former, not the latter: yes, the book’s framework is that hoary old chestnut, the family-reunited-in-the-wake-of-a-patriarch/matriarch’s death trick, but this story of scattered family members coming together when their stiff and removed father in Ghana dies is entirely free of the spoiled spitting that usually afflicts diaspora fiction. Instead, the whole thing is earnest and energetic and winsome by turns.

9. The Carriage House by Louisa Hall (Simon & Schuster) – The parents-and-children hook is also the heart of Lousa Hall’s very memorable debut: when the head of the eccentric and aristocratic Adair family has a mild stroke, the delicate equilibrium of the clan’s Philadelphia suburb world is offset, and the family’s three grown daughters – all vividly realized by Hall – must suddenly cope with belatedly growing up. You can read my full review here.

8. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (Little, Brown) – It’s utterly astounding that an elfin-faced wee slip of a young woman like Hannah Kent could write a novel as cold and bleak and completely hopeless as this one, about a quiet, odd woman accused of murder in 19th century Iceland, but after just a handful of pages, trust me, you’ll forget that jarring little dichotomy. You can read my full review here.

7. The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth (Reagan Arthur Books) – Fiction debuts tend to be about as funny as a child’s bone marrow transplant operation (in fact, they tend to be about a child’s bone marrow transplant operation), and this is understandable for two reasons: first, debut authors tend to be coming off five or six years of working on their novel in stolen hours between slave-wage jobs and therefore have a slightly grim view of existence, and second, funny is so much harder than grim – even for practiced hands – that grim’s allure is all but irresistible. So extra kudos to Gabriel Roth in his debut, which tells the hilarious (yet somehow poignant) story of Eric Muller, a nerdy dot-com gazillionaire (strongly resembling exactly who you think) trying to understand women. The Unknowns is a first book, but it’s smart and polished, and funny, which says a lot about what Roth might become down the road.

6. The Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (Random House) – The funny, of course, wasn’t ever going to last for long in a list like this, and if there’s one word virtually guaranteed to suck the laughter out of a room, that word is “Chechnya” … which brings us to Anthony Marra’s stunning debut, which centers around a complicatedly related cast of characters connected to a dilapidated hospital in the wasteland of that war-ravaged country, where supplies are scarce, situations are hopeless, and valor – especially that of the main character, a doctor – is strained to brittle thinness. When authors create such hell-holes to put us in, the hoped-for bargain is that they will then counter the misery with beautiful prose, and that’s just what Marra does here in one perfectly-orchestrated scene after another. And a world that’s totally alien to most readers is brought vividly to life, which is certainly a nice additional consolation.

5. Double Feature by Owen King (Simon & Schuster) – If you’d have given me the choice last year, I’d have taken my chances in that Chechnyan doom-hospital rather than read a novel by the spawn of Stephen King, who’s been writing novels for half a century and has yet to produce a single goddam chapter that’s worth reading. But King’s son Owen’s debut raises the possibility that face-punching literary ineptitude might be a recessive gene; Double Feature, Owen King’s novel about the hapless son of a famous egomaniac father (…), is more heartfelt, more psychologically acute, and more expertly farcical than anything King Senior could write on his best day – in fact, saying that only insults Double Feature, which is better than what plenty of good novelists could write on their best day. And this book comes to its readers with none of the insulting lies that accompanied the debut of King’s other son, who claimed he submitted the book blind and that nobody in the industry knew “Joe Hill” was related to Stephen King. Double Feature comes with its unholy biological provenance stamped right on it – which may be the most daring thing Owen King could have done.

4. The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell (Harper Collins) – On the surface level, the plot of Lisa O’Donnell’s bitingly smart debut almost seems like a Stephen King premise: two young girls whose lousy parents die (perhaps of natural causes, but then again, perhaps not) bury the bodies in a desperate and fairly cold-hearted attempt to keep any of their busy-body neighbors (to say nothing of the child welfare authorities) from knowing they’re on their own, hoping they can string the whole world along until the older of the two becomes a legal adult. There’s a large amount of subversive, perfectly-controlled dark humor in these pages – yet another occurence of funny on this list, which is, when you think of it, a very hopeful sign for the future of fiction.

3. The Fields by Kevin Maher  - Another of the staples of debut fiction is the Bildungsroman-ready young character learning to grow up by confronting the world for the first time, and it’s so hackneyed a device that every year I go right to the brink of thinking it should be banned from fiction writing workshops altogether. But then some novel comes along and does it so successfully (like half the novels on this list) that I temporarily forget my complaints. One such novel is Kevin Maher’s debut, set in 1980s Dublin and featuring horny, questing young Jim Finnegan’s life-shaping encounters with a whole slew of Irish stereotypes, from the haughty girl with the Gaelic name to the predatory parish priest to the saintly old codger. It should all feel so unbearably derivative, but Maher’s raw talent saves it time and again, much to my delight.

2. On the Come Up by Hannah Weyer (Random House) – Our Bildungsroman formula continues in Hannah Weyer’s liltingly inventive debut, which stars young teenager AnneMarie Walker, who’s already negotiating more drama than most women twice her age experience, from a loutish boyfriend to a hellish housing project to social limitations she herself sees with merciless clarity. In an only mildly unlikely contrivance, the novel gives her a chance to experience life outside her crumbling Queens world, and Weyer patiently lets her narrative work out the complications that arise from AnneMarie suddenly learning exactly how unhappy she’s been all her life. Like so many of the debuts on this list, the hope in On the Come Up is exceptionally fragile; it takes exceptional skill to handle so fragile a thing, and Weyer shows that skill on virtually every page of this unforgettable book.

1. The Madonna on the Moon by Rolf Bauerdick (Random House) – And that same Bildungsroman theme takes us home in this, the best debut novel of the year, Rolf Bauerdick’s rambling, mordantly funny, slightly magical story (translated by David Dollenmayer) about a teenage boy named Pavel Botev who’s growing up in a tight-knit Gypsy community in Soviet-dominated 1950s Central Europe when he’s suddenly embroiled in a series of winningly farcical yet gripping mysteries, some of which only deepen as the novel’s timeline piles on the years and Pavel grows up surrounded by a large supporting cast of quirky characters. More successfully than any other debut on our list, Bauerdick not only fills his narrative with dry humor but also uses that humor surgically, to carve some wonderfully funny and savage lampoonings of the 21st Century. First novels this good almost always guarantee second novels that are Hindenburg-style disasters, or else they guarantee no more fiction of any kind, just decades spent slowly getting drunk every night while grading papers. I’m hoping Bauerdick avoids both those fates.