RSSZach Baron, “The Decade’s Best Books,” The Village Voice 22 December 2009
Here’s the relevant extract:
Best debut
It opened with a Tempest reference, borrowed acronyms from Pynchon and jokes from both Amises, dreamed up a riot of characters and loved them all equally, and hid a novel almost Victorian in its concern for families, religion, race, and class behind lightshow prose. Zadie Smith was 24 years old when White Teeth (2000) was published—”the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing ten-year-old,” she’d later admit—and On Beauty (2005), her third novel, was even better. But by then we were already taking her for granted. She’s this decade’s undisputed debut novelist, with apologies to Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai, 2000), Tom McCarthy (Remainder, 2007), Benjamin Kunkel (Indecision, 2005), Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End, 2007), et al.
Mark Medley, “The National Post’s Best Books of the Decade,” National Post 2 January 2010 [Canada]
Remainder is included in the National Post’s Top 10 books of the decade:
1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers (Simon & Schuster, 2000, U.S.)
Dave Eggers turned the most devastating of tragedies, the loss of both of his parents to cancer in the span of a month, into one of the most affecting literary debuts anywhere. The critically praised and commercially successful memoir helped launch Eggers’ career, and his later work on McSweeney’s and the 826 writing centres quickly made him one of the most important literary voices in the English language. Ron Nurwisah, National Post
2. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, U.S.)
Published on Sept. 11, 2001, The Corrections serves as a fin de siècle document for an America that changed at the very moment of its publication. It’s a time capsule, and a largely unflattering mirror. Robert Wiersema, author of Before I Wake
I actually hated the first 25 pages of The Corrections, like it was a guy I’d just met at a bar who was trying to impress me with how sharp-witted and complex he was when really he was an utter tool. But something made me keep reading, and after a few chapters it became one of those books that my brain gets obsessed with and my body resents me for — a book that makes me stop working, eating, sleeping and socializing because it’s so damn amazing. For the next month, all I wanted to talk about with anyone was The Corrections, and I still look upon people with a bit of disdain if they haven’t read it. Vanessa Farquharson, National Post
3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon (Random House, 2000, U.S.)
Two cousins — amateur escape artist Josef Kavalier and Sammy Klayman, the son of a vaudeville strongman — find fame and (mis)fortune after creating a popular comic book character called The Escapist in Michael Chabon’s epic love letter to the Golden Age of comics. It is, in my opinion, the best book of the decade. Mark Medley, National Post
4. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf, 2006, U.S.)
5. Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin, 2002, U.S.)
One of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and one of the most heartbreaking. How Foer is able so elegantly to marry the two is dumbfoundingly impossible. It pains me to put this here because the one time I met him he was a bit of a dick. But perhaps it’s a testament to the book’s quality that I’m unable to deny its place. Nathan Sellyn, author of Indigenous Beasts
6. Platform, by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Frank Wynne (Knopf, 2001, France)
Forget Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul. If you like your novels with a side of provocation and public outrage, Houellebecq’s your man. He offends just about everyone, including his mother, whom he affectionately refers to as “that old c—.” Stephen Myers, Penguin Canada
I have returned to this book many times, in the way I return to restaurants because I’ve had good meals there, or I like the staff, the décor, where eventually the relationship deepens, achieves the kind of overtone I look for in all things. Platform is not a perfect novel. As in most of Houellebecq’s poorly written fictions we meet a misanthrope who accepts the market as the arbiter of all human relations, be they economic, social or personal. If there is hope in this book it lies in the reader’s potential to recognize the relationship between the author’s crippled syntax and his narrator’s equally crippled subjectivity. Whether Houellebecq writes “badly” on purpose (or whether he behaves badly in person) is irrelevant. The book works in part because the form (the author’s prose) relates to the content (an alienated narrator). Michel Houellebecq is the only writer I know who writes about the world from the top down. Michael Turner, author of 8×10
7. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber and Faber, 2005, U.K.)
8. Remainder, by Tom McCarthy (Metronome Press, 2005, U.K.)
If only for a fleeting moment, Remainder, a dark and spare novel about personal authenticity and murderous re-enactment, seemed to offer a creative alternative to the cul-de-sac of overwrought and twee novels emanating from Brooklyn (and creative writing classes everywhere). Sadly, the bloated and banal seem to have made a decided comeback (if they ever went away), but even so, the unashamedly intellectual Remainder stands out, perfectly capturing the fears and anxieties of the decade. Dan Wagstaff, Raincoast Books
9. The Master, by Colm Tóibín (Picador, 2004, Ireland)
A suspenseful meditation on what it means to write: how an artist strains life and experience through the mysterious sieve of art to achieve something more than himself. Marina Endicott, author of Good to a Fault
10. No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July (Simon & Schuster, 2007, U.S.)