Be Mine, by Richard Ford (Ecco). The fifth, and reputedly the last, of Ford’s books about the character Frank Bascombe, this novel finds Frank now in his seventies and confronting his son Paul’s devastating illness. After Paul, who has A.L.S. (or “Al’s,” as he jokingly refers to it), participates in an experimental protocol at the Mayo Clinic, Frank picks him up in a rented R.V. and they set out for Mt. Rushmore. A melancholy but banter-filled road trip ensues, in which they survey a swath of Middle America—kitsch stops along the way include the World’s Only Corn Palace, where everything is made of corn—and meet various vividly drawn characters. The startling and poignant conclusion unites father and son through love and grief as they learn to “give life its full due.”
August Blue, by Deborah Levy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This meditative novel starts at a flea market in Athens, where a pianist named Elsa, who recently interrupted her career after a disastrous concert, catches sight of a woman who seems to be her double. She keeps seeing her as she travels around Europe, teaching young students and reuniting with musicians from her past. In Sardinia, she visits her gregarious, domineering teacher, who adopted her as a child. Now dying, he urges her to find her birth parents. As the novel quickens to a climactic encounter between Elsa and her doppelgänger, it becomes a rumination on identity, desire, and the passage from self-effacement to self-discovery.
The Best Books of 2023
Read our reviews of the year’s notable new fiction and nonfiction.
V Is for Victory, by Craig Nelson (Scribner). On becoming President, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt faced two daunting tasks: to pull the country out of the Depression and, in the face of Nazism’s rise, to overcome U.S. isolationism. Such was his success, this paean to F.D.R. contends, “that, if any one human being is responsible for winning World War II, it is FDR.” Nelson focusses on the ways in which New Deal economics and a nascent war effort went hand in hand, as with the bond-sales programs that financed the “arsenal of democracy” policy, and shows us Roosevelt wrangling generals and manufacturers alike. He sees America’s “industrial genius”—factories producing everyday items were enlisted to make armaments—as central to the defeat of fascism, arguing that American workers were war heroes, too.
Easily Slip Into Another World, by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards (Knopf). “I go back in my memory and I don’t see: I hear,” Threadgill, a Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz musician and composer, writes in this autobiography. As a child, he taught himself to play his mother’s piano, then learned the clarinet, the flute, and the saxophone (his main instrument). Threadgill is an engaging narrator, touching on racism in the Chicago of his youth, his military service in Vietnam—one band performance is interrupted by a Vietcong raid—and his compositional process. The book’s title refers to a state of mind in which he is able to resist the “mess” of conformity and produce an utterance of his own. “Your neurosis and your dream,” he writes, “they go hand in hand.”
