Best in Books

James Hynes' house party set to Sticky Fingers explains the Rolling Stones better than Keith Richards.

by Justin Bauer

THE YEAR IN PUBLISHING and the year in reading are two different things.

It's no trouble to map out the former, bookended on one side by Stieg Larsson's last novel, which claimed the best-selling hardcover fiction slot, and on the other by the Time magazine cover anointing Jonathan Franzen as his generation's Great American Novelist.

The year in reading, on the other hand, is a much more private affair, insulated from sales figures and publicity campaigns, dictated instead by what a writer does and how that works on an individual audience. It draws on a restricted economy of time and attention, where every choice represents a trade-off. Even as a critic, the hundred-odd novels I read this year meant picking up, with high expectations, David Mitchell's disappointing Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet instead of a half-dozen other books with lower expectations and maybe higher payoffs.

Here are 10 novels — and moments in them — that pay off impressively:

Even if Justin Cronin's The Passage (Ballantine, June 8) staggers because of its genre and length — that's close to 800 pages of zombie vampire apocalypse — the clean and lucid attention paid to details and incidentals, like the early scene where an inmate confides that he "had been a Christian man himself from time to time" to the born-again husband of a victim, displays a technique able to bear that weight.

The opening chapter — the opening lines, even — of Joe Hill's Horns (Morrow, Feb. 16) gives a lesson in how to pull off outlandish high-concept. Hill presents the unbelievable as entirely natural, and he reveals his details slowly: "His belief was not required; his disbelief was of no consequence. The horns were always there when he reached up to touch them."

James Hynes may have pulled off an almost-unfair surprise ending in Next (Little Brown, March 9), but his rendition of a college house party set to Sticky Fingers explains Rolling Stones songs much better than anything in Keith Richards' Life.

The first shift in voice that Nicole Krauss makes in Great House (Norton, Oct. 5) — made up of four novellas, each cut in half and laced together — is disorienting and complete, as she goes from a natural voice (American, female, urban) to a wholly new one just as convincingly.

The chapter that follows the first shocking discovery, in China Miéville's Kraken (Ballantine, June 29), begins with: "The police arrived at last, coming in a stampy gang." That perfect adjective gets followed in the next sentence by "benthic," and a few lines on, there's a rubbishy wind and a klaggy squirrel. If Miéville's plotting isn't as apposite as his diction, it's close.

The intentional lack of tension, the stretched-out moments of waiting and boredom in Emily St. John Mandel's The Singer's Gun (Unbridled, May 4), excellently upends its thriller plot, making a book nominally about a gun into something capacious and sun-baked.

The amount of pathos and surprise Paul Murray crams into the space between the death scene that opens Skippy Dies (Faber & Faber, Aug. 31) and its repetition is impressive, but doesn't nearly match the heartbreaking scene between Skippy's crush and his podgy roommate, both looking for answers following that death.

Julie Orringer's complete surrender to the sweep and the heightened emotions of old-fashioned historical romance made The Invisible Bridge (Knopf, May 4) a perfect example of why clichés and old fashions still work.

John Reimringer's thumbnail father-son tour of the bars of St. Paul, glimpsed through a car window, exemplifies the lived-in sense of place, rooted and unshowy, that his novel Vestments (Milkweed, Sept. 7) and Milkweed Press are both so very good at.

And, in a similar way, Dennis Tafoya's junkie's-eye view of Philadelphia in The Wolves of Fairmount Park (Minotaur, June 22) features the city as an immersive element of the story, seeping through and dyeing everything, making his novel inextricable from its hometown setting.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)