Fall Books Offer Compelling Works of Emotional Depth

Over the last few years, I’ve lost my faith in fiction. Perhaps I should say my faith in contemporary fiction, the apparently endless run of inconsequential novels and short story collections that clutter up the bookstores like a particularly dull aesthetic plague. So much of what I see these days feels nonessential, written for other writers, or (even worse) for critics, with little apparent intention of connecting to the larger world.

“Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late like the modern ‘literary’ bestseller,” notes B.R. Myers in “A Reader’s Manifesto,” published this summer in the Atlantic Monthly, and, having suffered through too much “serious” writing that seems obscure, willfully ambiguous, I quite agree. From the look-at-me prose of Rick Moody to the elliptical sentences of John Edgar Wideman, I find myself frustrated with modern fiction, pessimistic about where we go from here. Or, as novelist Jonathan Franzen said recently in the New York Times Magazine, “Another 20 years of boring literary novels, and the whole thing’s dead.”

In light of that, I’m surprised and delighted that many of this fall’s most interesting titles are works of fiction--none more interesting than Franzen’s “The Corrections” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a 500-plus page novel that plumbs the interior of the American family with equal measures of precision and heart. Revolving around an elderly mother’s desire to have her three grown children return home for one last Christmas, “The Corrections” finds epic drama in the small, personal interactions of everyday life, reminding us that compelling fiction can take on any subject, as long as it has the necessary emotional depth.

When it comes to small, personal interactions, Jim Crace’s “The Devil’s Larder” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) features 64 loosely connected stories about food and its peculiar solaces, a kind of abecedary of the dining table, as it were. Crace won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his last novel, “Being Dead,” and if “The Devil’s Larder” is a slighter book, it still manages to resonate within the quieter corners of the mind.

Equally subtle is “Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper” (Permanent Press/Seven Stories) by Harriet Scott Chessman, a slender novel that uses several Mary Cassatt paintings as a starting point to evoke the relationship between the painter and her sister, not to mention the fluid connections between life and art.

Not all of this fall’s fiction relies on restrained, interior moments: William T. Vollmann’s “Argall” (Viking), the fourth novel in his projected seven-volume mythos of America, “Seven Dreams,” takes on the John Smith-Pocahontas story, reimagining it as a symbol of the clash between native and European cultures, a clash whose fallout we’re still sifting through today. For a different type of fallout, there’s “The Complete Works of Isaac Babel” (Norton), a monumental collection, edited by the Russian author’s daughter, that gathers all of Babel’s deft and brutal writing, including a wide array of previously unavailable material, from never-before-translated stories to plays and film scripts.

Also newly rediscovered is Mark Twain’s “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage,” a novella (the title pretty much sums up the story) originally commissioned in 1876 by the Atlantic Monthly, and unpublished in book form until now. Speaking of mysteries, Jerry Stahl’s “Plainclothes Naked” (Morrow) takes a perverse view of the detective genre, as it follows an ex-junkie private eye on the trail of (among other things) a photograph of George W. Bush that reveals an indelicately placed happy face tattoo. And T.C. Boyle’s sixth book of short fiction, “After the Plague” (Viking), encompasses such topics as air rage, abortion and viral apocalypse (“After the plague,” the title story begins, “--it was some sort of Ebola mutation passed from hand to hand and nose to nose like the common cold--life was different.”) to offer up another showcase of its author’s strange and idiosyncratic mind.

By focusing so much on this fall’s fiction, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no noteworthy nonfiction, although the nonfiction title I was most looking forward to, Joan Didion’s “Political Fictions” (Knopf), turns out to be one of the season’s most disappointing books. A collection of eight essays on contemporary politics, “Political Fictions” is diffuse and distant, curiously elusive--and, most surprisingly, doesn’t have any original points to make. The same might be said of “With Love and Squalor,” a multi-author anthology edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller, in which 14 contributors respond to the influence of J.D. Salinger. Despite strong work by several writers I admire--Aimee Bender, Karen Bender, Aleksander Hemon--the book can’t avoid a certain preciousness, which has been the problem with the cult of Salinger all along.

Vivian Gornick’s “The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) suggests a way around that pratfall, arguing for an expansive view of personal nonfiction, in which the individual story is connected to the larger world. For a lovely example of this idea in action, check out Louise Steinman’s “The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War” (Algonquin). Steinman, cultural programs director at the Central Library, blends the personal and the global in this story, which begins when she discovers a box containing her father’s letters home from World War II and an intricately inscribed Japanese flag.

A wide array of other titles seem destined for attention, if only one has time to read them all. Sebastian Junger’s “Fire” (Norton) collects reportage from global hot spots; Naomi Wolf’s “Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood” (Doubleday) explores the author’s experiences during pregnancy as a filter for the issues facing expecting women in America, from the hidden costs of prenatal care to postpartum disillusionment and the lack of support from business and society. In “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” (Knopf), former Los Angeles Times book editor Jack Miles picks up where his Pulitzer Prize-winning “God: A Biography” left off, writing about Jesus as a literary character and the New Testament as a work of art. Janet Malcolm brings a similar degree of analysis to “Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey” (Random House), using a trip to modern-day Russia to three-dimensionalize Chekhov, while in “Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail” (Metropolitan), Ruben Martinez takes a personal approach to border politics, following a Mexican family on its extended exodus from the small town of Cheran to the strawberry fields of Watsonville, and beyond.

On a lighter note, William Grimes’ “Straight Up or On the Rocks” (North Point), traces, in a newly expanded version that updates the original 1993 edition, the history of the cocktail, including nearly 40 pages of drink recipes; “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey” (Harcourt), edited by Karen Wilkin, gathers more than a quarter-century’s worth of interviews (illustrated, of course) with the late master of the macabre. “Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies” (BOA Editions), the sixth collection of verse by Long Beach’s Charles Harper Webb, is full of accessible yet subtle poems (one features a series of meditations on the poet’s name) that bend your mind in unexpected ways.

Of course, no book this fall is as unexpected, or as unexpectedly delightful, as “Life Turns Man Up and Down” (Pantheon), a sampler of African market literature selected by Kurt Thometz. Market literature, Thometz tells us, was an indigenous phenomenon--pamphlets, popular in Nigeria from the 1940s to the late 1960s, by which a largely oral culture made the transition to the printed word. Ranging from fiction to advice and inspirational tracts, and written in an exuberant pidgin English, the material can’t help but recharge our faith in writing, revealing “in demotic, uncooked, Mad English, composited by illiterate printers in broken type, newsprint bound in bush-bruised wraps and distributed from hand to mouth ... a potential literature’s growing pains on display.”