The Decade's Best Books

[Dave Monroe]

The Decade's Best Books
Join us as we leaf through the finest the publishing world had to offer
By Zach Baron
Tuesday, December 22nd 2009 at 3:40pm

[...]

Best Doorstops

Maybe the decade's biggest novel, in terms of its scope, Jonathan
Franzen's The Corrections (2001) was about family, which made you
think of Tolstoy—but it was also about money, the market, big pharma,
unbridled Russian death capitalism, the goofiness of academic American
postmodernism, gourmet cooking, therapy, and, maybe above all else,
passive aggression.

Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (2007) topped Corrections in terms of
word count, but, by comparison, had modest aims. Where Franzen wanted
to write the great social novel of the 21st century, Johnson merely
wanted to capture 10 years or so worth of Vietnam and spook culture
and human weakness. It's got the best ending and the best dialogue and
a bunch of the best sentences in any book written in this decade, for
whatever that's worth. Only books by Roberto Bolaño (2666, 2004),
Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice, 2009), William Vollmann (The Royal
Family, 2000; Rising Up and Rising Down, 2004; Europe Central, 2005),
Cormac McCarthy (The Road, 2006), and David Markson (This Is Not a
Novel, 2001) reached for anywhere near as much.

[...]

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-12-22/books/the-decade-s-best-books/

Inherent Vice, and not Against the Day?  Also ...

"... the unfinished novel The Pale King, which [David Foster] Wallace
once hoped would redeem his dissatisfaction with his own earlier
fiction, arrives from Little, Brown next year. If only two of the best
critics of the last century, John Updike (1932–2009; he also wrote a
novel or two) and John Leonard (1939–2008), were still around to make
sense of it for us."

Cf. ...

http://www.theonion.com/content/columnists/view/harvey