Ask me if I can recommend a good book. Yes, I can. I can recommend a couple of them, if you can take them. The best book I have read this year, if not the best of the decade, is Erasure by Percival Everett, the guy who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn’s adventures with Jim the runaway slave, told from Jim’s point of view. (I’m sure that James is a great book too, but I haven’t yet read it.)
Erasure is not an easy book to take. It may surely shock a lot of readers. Written by a black man, it viciously satirizes a certain class of black men—those who adopt and lionize the gangsta lifestyle and affectations, and especially black writers who win fame and fortune by grandizing the life to (mostly) white audiences. The sex, the violence, the crudity, the racism may be far too rough for gentle readers, but oh my god can Percival Everett tell a tale in a most entertaining way. It is telling that his latest book is a retelling of a Mark Twain book, because he may well be the new Twain.
If Erasure is my favorite book of the year, following close behind is an unassuming book by an unknown writer named Diane Chiddister, who not too long ago moved to my hometown of Olympia, Washington. Diane emailed me her resumé and asked if she could write for Oly Arts. I was impressed with her resumé and offered to give her a shot at freelancing. And she gave me a copy of her debut novel, One More Day, a novel about residents and workers in an assisted living home. This novel is cleverly constructed around a series of chapters, each of which focuses on a different character and each of which is a self-contained short story with different characters in different situations, each related by their connections to the same assisted living facility.
Whether through imagination or experience or some combination of both, Chiddister found her way into the minds and hearts of these people as no one else possibly can, and through her words, we the readers come to know them. Their lives are sweet, heartbreaking, and in many instances surprisingly. This is a major talent at work. I recommend getting copies of Erasure and One More Day.