The best reads of 2016

Here are some of the best books of 2016, reviewed by local and national critics in the Express-News.

FICTION

The central conceit of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad,” which won the National Book Award for Fiction, is as simple as it is bold. The underground railroad is not, in Whitehead’s novel, the secret network of passageways and safe houses used by runaway slaves to reach the free North from their slaveholding states. Or rather it is that, but it is something else, too: You open a trap door in the safe house or find the entrance to a hidden cave, and you reach an actual railroad, with actual locomotives and boxcars and conductors, sometimes complete with benches on the platform. In a sense, “The Underground Railroad” is Whitehead’s own attempt at getting things right, not by telling us what we already know but by vindicating the powers of fiction to interpret the world. In its exploration of the foundational sins of America, it is a brave and necessary book.

Paulette Jiles was a poet before she became a novelist. And it certainly shows. Her latest novel, National Book Award nominee “News of the World,” has invited comparisons with both Charles Portis’s “True Grit” (because it involves a girl on a long journey with an older man) and John Ford’s film “The Searchers” (because it involves a man’s journey to “rescue” a white girl who has been kidnapped by Indians, and also involves a long journey). But it’s more like Jiles’s own “Enemy Women,” an exquisitely written Civil War epic about a woman’s long march to find her lover, or any fiction by Ron Rash, another poet who chooses each word with expert precision.

In Brit Bennett’s novel “The Mothers,” it’s the pain worn on the inside that devours. And her characters’ entire world, a black community in Southern California, is steeped in it. “The Mothers” is a debut novel for Bennett, 26. She’s young, but she can write. As her flawed, lovable characters make decisions they regret and deal with the consequences, Bennett unravels their tangled lives with a devastating elegance.

John C. Kerr has exhibited the breadth and depth of his historical interests in novels such as 2008’s “Cardigan Bay” (neutral Ireland in WWII), 2011’s “A Rose in No Man’s Land” (WWI’s Western front) and 2012’s “Fell the Angels” (a Victorian murder mystery). With “The Silent Shore of Memory,” the San Antonio writer turns his keen eye to the Civil War. He fleshes out the long and substantive life of James Barnhill, an East Texan who fought as a lieutentant in Gen. John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade. Writing with the dexterity that comes from fully knowing one’s subject matter, characters and setting, Kerr tells the intimate story of a heroic life set against an epic backdrop with power and precision. It’s as if he knows the family ghosts are reading over his shoulder.

We need the restorative space of books more than ever, especially the kind of deceptively profound and rollicking entertainment that Nathan Hill delivers with his debut novel, “The Nix,” a feat of levitation that wears its seriousness lightly and functions almost as smelling salts for the imagination. Hill’s 625-page joyride of a novel seeks both to anchor itself in a sensibility that is eminently contemporary, crackling with cool irony and flippant outrage, and to tunnel back into recent history with the preconception-shifting power that first-rate fiction has a unique power to summon.

Emma Cline’s urge to understand the dark impulses that drove Charles Manson’s acolytes gave rise to her debut novel “The Girls.” The story begins in Northern California in the summer of 1969, as a lonely 14-year-old girl, Evie, becomes mesmerized by group of carefree, feral looking girls she sees laughing in a park. She later learns that they are followers of a charismatic musician and prophet named Russell. The enduring fascination with Manson has spawned countless books, shows and movies, and “The Girls” stands apart from other treatments because Cline doesn’t try to glamorize Russell, but wants to explore violent acts committed by women.

MYSTERY

Blackmail, murder, deception, sexual shenanigans of every sort and an undercurrent of black humor pervade Philip Kerr’s 11th novel featuring the unsinkable German detective Bernie Gunther. Once a Nazi against his will who, in order to survive, worked for German intelligence as high up the ladder as Joseph Goebbels, the irrepressible Gunther returns in “The Other Side of Silence.” The essence of all Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels is the character of the hero himself — curiously self-deprecating and at the same time self-assured, cynical yet ultimately hopeful that his fellow man is essentially good. The effect on his psyche of the hideous events he suffered or witnessed during the Third Reich cannot be underscored enough. And yet he is one of the sanest, most magnetic detectives in fiction.

BIOGRAPHY

“Testimony” was five years in the making for Robbie Robertson of The Band, author of two of the rock era’s greatest songs: “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” This book is his declaration, his manifesto. As he said in a recent interview, “This is my testimony. There’s so much written about The Band, and Bob Dylan, and this time period, and a tremendous amount of it is inaccurate. Because the people writing about it weren’t there, and they don’t know what they’re talking about. So, I need to testify.”

Fans of the popular Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” or the cable television comedy “Jane the Virgin” know Diane Guerrero for her roles as Maritza and Lina, respectively. On TV, the actress appears much younger than her 30 years. But her memoir, “In the Country We Love,” reveals an older soul and a long, treacherous road to the Hollywood limelight. In fact, Colombian-born Guerrero spent much of her life in the shadows in the United States — and in hiding, as an undocumented immigrant. “In the Country We Love” is a necessary story for our times, a heartrending memoir that humanizes the story of America’s immigration policies and helps us all find a way to understand the challenging questions and ineffective strategies of current policies and practices.

“Born to Run” (the book) is like one of its author Bruce Springsteen’s shows — long, ecstatic, exhausting, filled with peaks and valleys. It’s part séance and part keg party, and his writing voice is much like his speaking voice; there’s a big, raspy laugh on at least every other page. There’s some raunch here. This book has not been utterly sanitized for anyone’s protection, and many of the best lines won’t be printed in this newspaper. Most important, “Born to Run” is, like Springsteen’s finest songs, closely observed from end to end. His story is intimate and personal, but he has an interest in other people and a gift for sizing them up.

In her introduction to “Black Dove,” Ana Castillo makes it clear that she doesn’t expect every reader to identify with her story. What she asks of the reader is “radical curiosity,” seeking the kind of knowledge that “sets you free,” that “makes you strong.” This powerful autobiography deserves no less. Recalling the complete lack of any Latino/a professionals in her life until her senior year in college — no teachers, no nurses, no artists — she tells us, “You see, I never saw me in history books. I didn’t find women who looked like me in the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnets I fell in love with at 16 in my secretarial school’s library.”

Patience was not a virtue in the 1960s. The decade was all about change: Wonderful, horrific, bewildering, logical — often all at the same time. Into that world and time strode Robert Kennedy. He was, as Larry Tye’s new biography, “Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon,” shows, a man on a mission, even if he wasn’t, perhaps, fully aware of where the mission would go. Tye’s well-researched and carefully sourced book details how Kennedy addressed the major issues of that rapidly evolving decade. He saw change coming and turned to meet it. Tragically, Robert Kennedy would not live to see the country he was working so hard to change.

ESSAYS

The murder last year of nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., epitomizes the subject of “The Fire This Time.” These African-American churchgoers, including an 87-year-old woman, were murdered by a white racist simply because they were black. Novelist Jesmyn Ward edited this collection of essays and a few poems, which describes the sorrow and unease of being black in America in the time of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and Sandra Bland, making it a natural companion to “Men We Reaped,” Ward’s memoir of five men close to her who died violent, untimely deaths. The new book’s title, of course, pays homage to James Baldwin’s 1963 classic “The Fire Next Time.”

HISTORY

Author Mary McAuliffe begins “When Paris Sizzled” by explaining that the U.S. Roaring Twenties coincided with Paris’ les Années folles, or “the Crazy Years.” After World War I, Paris especially was poised to live it up. But what emerges from McAuliffe’s book is how a substantial amount of the energy and money for les Années folles flowed from people who came to Paris that decade from other countries, especially the United States, among them novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, bookseller Sylvia Beach, author Gertrude Stein, songwriter Cole Porter, showgirl Josephine Baker, composers Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, dancer Isadora Duncan and photographer Man Ray. An absorbing, well-researched book.

In “Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939,” historian Voker Ullrich sets out to strip away the mythology that Hitler created around himself in “Mein Kampf,” and he also tries to look at this “mysterious, calamitous figure” not as a monster or madman, but as a human being with “undeniable talents and obviously deep-seated psychological complexes.” “In a sense,” he says in an introduction, “Hitler will be ‘normalized’ — although this will not make him seem more ‘normal.’ If anything, he will emerge as even more horrific.”

Thomas Francis Meagher certainly made huge mistakes in his short life, but as George Bernard Shaw noted, honor is not measured by taking the nearest fork in the road. And doing nothing was not in Meagher’s vocabulary. After reading Timothy Egan’s exhilarating biography — really a rollicking historical adventure story — you are bound to agree that Meagher is indeed “The Immortal Irishman,” a true-green American hero. Egan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who won the National Book Award for “The Worst Hard Time,” his book about the people of the Depression-era dust bowl, once again has made heroic what could easily be thought a tragic story.

SOCIAL ISSUES

Given Iran’s nuclear deal with the West and the lifting of economic sanctions, Laura Secor’s book about Iran since its 1979 Islamic Revolution could not be more timely. In “Children of Paradise,” Secor indelibly portrays the journalists, dissidents, reformers and student activists who have fought bravely for their ideals in a country where voicing one’s beliefs has often led to imprisonment, torture and death.

In his posthumously published “When Breath Becomes Air,” Paul Kalanithi gets straight to the sudden turning point in his life: the day a neurosurgery chief resident looked at a scan showing he had advanced cancer and little time left. What follows is a poignant account of the Stanford University instructor’s life, his quest to find meaning, his efforts to retain his humanity in the grind of becoming a doctor and, ultimately, his thoughts on dying. As he and his wife, Lucy, grapple with whether to become parents in their remaining time together, she asks him: “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” He replies: “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” The heartrending exchange captures Kalanithi’s full-throttled approach to living.

ART

“Juan O’Gorman: A Confluence of Civilizations,” a landmark book from Trinity University Press, tells the story of the extraordinary mural “Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas,” which spans the upper level of the facade of the Lila Cockrell Theater. It was an artistic cornerstone for San Antonio’s world’s fair, HemisFair ’68, as well as being the visual expression of the fair’s theme. Through its intricate, brightly colored mosaic representations of human, natural and technological images drawn from both Mesoamerican and Western cultures — from antiquity to the present day — it also symbolizes the blended sources of San Antonio’s rich history and contemporary social life.

YOUNG ADULT

In his 2015 young-adult debut “Randoms,” San Antonio author David Liss introduced readers to the remarkable sci-fi geek turned hero Zeke Reynolds. Zeke returned in “Rebels,” a 2016 adventure in a universe where science fiction meets reality. The twisting plot pressurizes as the his journey continues, and Liss’ characters, old and new, are vivid and compelling, driving the action and building the suspense. Quirky and fascinating, “Rebels” is a strong sequel to “Randoms.”

Seventeen-year-old Cam Smith seems to have it all: He goes to a prestigious prep school, has a great relationship with his girlfriend, Claire, and has been accepted to Princeton University. The only problem is he’s not actually Cam. He’s really Stephen “Skip” O’Rourke, who escaped his crime family at age 13 to live a more normal life. Of course, the family pulls him back in. The strongest point of “Thieving Weasels,” San Antonio author Billy Taylor’s debut young adult novel, is Skip’s first-person narrative voice. Skip is likable, blunt and sarcastic, adding an extra layer of savvy to the already dark-humored tone of the novel. Engaging, smart, wise and funny, “Thieving Weasels” is tough to put down.

With his novel “The Smoking Mirror,” South Texas author David Bowles is helping to fill what amounts to an ethnic gap in mythology-oriented adventure literature for middle-grade readers by exploring the Aztec underworld, Mictlan. He’s created a rollercoaster narrative that fascinates, educates and (almost inevitably) terrifies. The novel was a Pura Belpré Honor Book and a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters’ H-E-B prize for young adult literature. There is a point in “The Smoking Mirror” when Johnny Garza comments to his twin sister Carol, “It seems to me that history and mythology? Same thing.” It is the kind of thing only someone who has stood at that nexus and seen into both worlds can acknowledge so matter-of-factly.

CHILDREN’S PICTURE BOOKS

In Emily Winfield Martin’s “The Little Family’s Big Day,” a family of bears so little they can find shelter under a mushroom arrive in the woods, and readers will delight in following them on their simple and sweet adventure. The little family, who have a tiny adopted fox baby, find a little house, move in and set off to explore. They chase a breeze, feast on wild strawberries and explore a deep and wild river by crossing it on leaves. They meet butterfly fairies and friendly animals. The illustrations are utterly enchanting. It’s an oh-so soothing book for bedtime.

POETRY

Anyone who has enjoyed the Texas Gulf Coast mysteries written under the collective nom de plume of Miles Arceneaux has gotten a fair dose of James R. Dennis’ dry, wry humor and his penchant for mixing dazzling displays of erudition and vivid description with just plain talk. In his impressive debut collection of poetry, “Correspondence in D Minor,” Dennis uses those same gifts to speak strongly against the currents of chaos in our time, engaging in poetic correspondence with some great (and not so great) historical and fictional figures, including the primordial Adam of the Book of Genesis, Mahatma Ghandi, Galileo Galilei, Werner Heisenberg, Theodore Roosevelt, Ahab (the whaler), Cotton Mather (witch hunter), Fritz Haber (the “father of chemical warfare”), Leon Trotsky and Sophocles’ Haemer, the suicidal hero in the play “Antigone.”

sbennett@express-news.net
https://www.mysanantonio.com/entertainment/arts-culture/books/article/The-best-reads-of-2016-10806327.php
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