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Top 10 Fiction Books of 2009

来源：网络发布时间：2009-12-15

　　1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
　　The year's most powerful novel has a demanding premise: it's the story of Thomas Cromwell, a badass political fixer in 16th century England, a time and a place where modern realpolitik was slouching its way toward us to be born and where "man is wolf to man." The son of a blacksmith, Cromwell served under Henry VIII, who was busily seeking to sever himself from Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, in the hope of producing a male heir. He needed an omnicompetent and thoroughly hard-boiled man to help him do it, and that was Cromwell. Through Cromwell's eyes, Hilary Mantel strips away any scrap of romantic period glamour, laying bare the vain, cynical souls of some of English history's most familiar figures. The tragedy of Cromwell is that he's human enough to understand the cost of what he does, but he's too smart not to do it — yet still he hangs on to his vision of a more enlightened political future for England. Watching the King and Queen take the stand against each other in court, one doesn't know whom to believe. "Hush," Cromwell tells us. "Believe nobody."
　　2. The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter
　　Matt Prior lost his job as a financial journalist. His Web start-up tanked. His wife is flirting with an old flame on Facebook. His father is senile. He's going to lose his house. Matt's brilliant solution to these problems is to become a suburban pot dealer. To make matters worse, he sucks at it. Matt is a kind of suburban Everyman — hopelessly optimistic, endlessly disappointed, incompetent but indomitable — and this book is a small masterpiece, a Wodehouse-level comic performance. But it's also a deceptively amusing survey of the post-Fannie-and-Freddie American landscape, with a mother lode of bitter truths lying right below its perfect, manicured lawns.
　　3. Swimming by Nicola Keegan
　　What makes a champion athlete tick? Nicola Keegan's debut novel answers that question in medal-worthy fashion, shrugging off the sentimentality of the Olympic minibiopic with its muscular prose and its heroine's wryly comic voice. Philomena (Pip) Ash is a Kansas girl whose love of the water — "I kick; it moves me, and I feel joy" — eventually propels her to stardom. But for all her freakish talent, Pip is a girl we can relate to. She may be amphibious in the pool, but outside it — coping with everything from family tragedy to boy trouble to a Catholic school full of oppressive nuns — she's gloriously warm-blooded.
　　4. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
　　Almost invisible behind the juggernaut that is the Twilight phenomenon is another breakout young-adult series, one that's better written and in many ways more powerful: Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games books, the second of which, Catching Fire, came out this year. They're set in a future dystopia ruled by a totalitarian technocracy that once a year forces the population to stage a grotesque gladiatorial spectacle: 24 children are placed in an arena bristling with traps and weapons, where they fight to the death. Katniss, our heroine, is the reluctant champion (she's pure murder with a bow and arrow) who would rather be fighting for freedom.
　　5. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
　　Wells Tower writes remarkably raw, forceful stories about men feeling bad, doing bad things and making bad decisions. In the title story, which is almost certainly the strangest and best 30 pages you'll read this year, Tower tells the saga of a band of raiding Vikings, but he does so using contemporary language and contemporary dialogue. "Don't suppose you've got a coin hoard or anything buried out back," says a raider to a potential victim. "Jeezum crow, I wish I did have. Coin hoard, I'd really turn things around." You laugh hysterically right up to the part where you start crying.
　　6. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
　　No contemporary writer blends genres better than Geoff Dyer, and his latest novel — a vigorous mash-up of satire, romance, travelogue and existential treatise — is his best yet. The first half trails a hack British journalist around the Venice Biennale, where he interviews a reclusive artist's muse and falls in lust (possibly love) with a comely American. In the second half, a British journalist — the same guy? We can't be sure — travels to the holy city of Varanasi, India, where he falls in lust (possibly love) with the idea of detachment. Dyer excels at savage comedy — see his tableau of jaded art critics desperately swilling Bellinis — but he's even better on the profound pleasures and indignities of the flesh, which are the forces that unite his novel's two very
　　7. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
　　The son of a Pakistani civil servant and an American writer, Daniyal Mueenuddin grew up in Lahore and Wisconsin, trained as a lawyer in the U.S. and then returned to rural Pakistan to run his family's farm. He writes — in an unadorned, mesmerizing style — with both a deep understanding of Pakistani culture and an appreciation for what Western audiences know, or don't know, about life in a country that features far more prominently in the news than on the fiction shelf. The eight stories that make up his debut collection are marked by conflict and corruption — he's especially attuned to the subtle power struggles that can infect a household — but in this bleak environment, it's the little victories that keep his characters hopeful.
　　8. Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
　　It's been a long time since I read a debut writer with the pace, humor and hard-boiled, powder-burned worldview of an Elmore Leonard. Who knows where he got 'em, but Josh Bazell has 'em. His hero is Peter Brown, a former Mob hit man who has witness-protected himself into a medical residency at a New York hospital. Surprise, surprise, his old life comes around looking for him. The book takes us careering through a crime-thriller plot, but the story is salted with a lot of really fascinating insider medical know-how and peppered with all kinds of ballistics lore and martial artistry. This is a hit man who knows in anatomical detail exactly how he's damaging you ("the two bones of the forearm, the ulna and the radius, move independently of each other..."). I defy
　　9. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
　　Imagine a post-petroleum world where internal combustion and electricity are vanishingly rare and almost all energy comes from biology: muscles and, ultimately, food. Can't? Let Paolo Bacigalupi do it for you. In this future, the entire global economy is built on calories: growing them as crops, consuming them as food, expending them as energy. Everything from guns to cars to factories runs on springs, wound by hand by humans or monstrous genetically altered elephants. As digital technology faded, biotech mutated out of control, and as a result humanity is ravaged by genetically engineered plagues and the streets are infested with genetically modified supercats. Bacigalupi is a worthy successor to William Gibson: this is cyberpunk without computers. Our heroine is Emiko, the windup girl of the title. She is a "New Person," a heavily genetically modified girl brewed up from scratch by the Japanese as a toy. But her DNA is not so compromised that she doesn't still yearn to be human.
　　10. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
　　Enormous and grotesque, tasteless and bloated, Jonathan Littell's book baffled and repulsed readers and critics alike. And yet, there is a strange majesty to it and an awesome ambition. The Kindly Ones is a first-person account of WW II through the eyes of a demented SS officer. We watch him watch himself commit atrocity after atrocity, and we see with absolute clarity the damage that his actions do, not only to his victims but to himself: in committing the ultimate sin, genocide, he destroys his own soul. It's a beast of a book, turgid and far too long, but its power and vision are inescapable.

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