my favorite books of 2024

plus some reading thoughts

Hello friends—

Brief edit: I was on Henry Oliver’s podcast! Come hear us rank our favorite Jane Austen novels and why I’m not opening novels in media res anymore 😈

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I gave myself until the end of the year to complete the final revision of my novel. I had hoped to be further along in that revision than I am. The semester and my editorial responsibilities got more complicated than I was anticipating, and my attention span was atomized. It’s hard to revise a novel the way this novel needs revising in short jags. I lost whole weeks at a time because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get stuck into the project the way I needed to because I would have to attend to something else. That’s how it is. That’s how life goes. I admit that in my arrogant, more naïve years, I used to marvel at the fact that my favorite writers weren’t producing more novels and stories for me to read. But now I understand that when there is a quiet period in a writer’s catalog, it’s sometimes because they got a job or a family or became ill.

That’s not what this newsletter is about. I am writing this newsletter because I am procrastinating doing my morning revisions. Last night, I made a series of large changes to the opening, and I am anxious about revisiting them in the harsh light of morning. The windows were frozen when I woke, but by the time my coffee was ready, the sun had thawed the ice and permitted a view into the outside world. I say that to say that there is now light on the desk, on the pages I printed, and I feel an overpowering terror at the sight of my own words. That is nothing unusual. That happens all the time. IT’s part of my process, one of the word hitches in an otherwise smooth operation. I’ve come to accept it as such. But it does steal yet more time from me, my tendency toward dithering.

Anyway, I thought I might write this newsletter to talk a bit my favorite books of 2024. I made an Instagram post about it a few days ago, but in the interest of forestalling my horror at my own work, I want to take refuge in talking about things I enjoyed.

My favorite book of 2024 was All that Glitters by Orlando Whitfield. This is a memoir of a friendship between Whitfield and the disgraced art dealer wunderkind Inigo Philbrick. The story of Philbrick’s various schemes and frauds at the uppermost echelons of the secondary art market have been well documented in the media and the press. There was a highly set of legal proceedings during which Philbrick eventually pled guilty. That version of the story is familiar to us in this age of scams, and therefore, it is less interesting to me. There’s even a moment when Philbrick is promising to send a “wire” because promised funds have not materialized at the promised time and everyone is very anxious and running around because their tenuous operations rely upon his very tenuous operation. That’s a scenario right out of any number of financial and cultural industry scams that have lit up our televisions, cell phones, and celebrity profiles of late. To parse the “wire” is the equivalent of parsing the significance of the green light in The Great Gatsby. Who cares.

What I found refreshing about All that Glitters is that it is not interested in retribution or entirely interested in trying to figure out how Whitfield and the rest of the art world got scammed. The books feels exceedingly like someone trying to find the moment their friend went wrong. It’s full of generosity and kindness, but also hard-eyed truth. He turns the gaze as much upon himself as upon Inigo, but he saves his sharpest analysis and critique for the art world itself, and he lays bare its various accepted scams and frauds as business practice. The book is frank but tender, not so much an expose as a careful parsing of a period of life between two people. I found it very moving.

By far, the best part was the way Whitfield writes about art, not merely the art historical stuff, but the materiality of the art of itself. He seems to get up on the paintings and photographs. You feel almost as if you could touch each piece. Also, he makes for a very charming, affably bumbling tour guide through a slick and polished world. You get the feeling he’s always sweating under the collar, afraid he’s about to be discovered behind enemy lines.

I picked up the book because I am working on a novel about a contemporary painter and the contemporary art world, and I wanted to get a sense of how these people talk about art and think about art and their world. But I stayed mainly because Whitfield is such a fine writer and because I was very moved by his story. It’s just a masterclass of a book. I suppose I might feel differently if I were a gossipier person. If I were, I might have wanted more of that. But I’m not really, so I didn’t.

I also read Paul Fisher’s The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World. It is perhaps no great surprise to anyone that I love Sargent’s work. Over the summer, I took the train from Paris to London to see the exhibit of Sargent’s fashions. It’s the one point of personal biography I’ve given to the main character in my novel, a love of Sargent, so much so that it rather threatened to take over the whole book. Anyway, I’d been meaning to read The Grand Affair since it came out in 2022, and I finally got around to it this year.

The book focuses on the social milieu and context of Sargent’s life. In some aspects, it feels less like a straightforward biography of Sargent and more like a chronicle of a scene. In that way, it resembles the later novels of Edith Wharton and certain early novels of Henry James, unfolding as it does within the expatriate communities of wealthy or semi-wealthy Americans abroad and their artist friends. Fisher has a novelist’s keen sense of scene and setting. He captures not just the Sargents but the whole social system undergirding their material comfort. Fisher gives us not just the party, but explains how the party is brought off due to the labor of the workers and the restaurant delivery guys who ferry the goods across crooked streets. He also draws out the differences between the homefront and abroad, and he articulates that the Sargents have decamped from America because healthcare is more advanced and cheaper in Europe and also because of the death of one of their young children.

There is of course the litany of famous names who are famous only after the fact. The descriptions of parties and clothes and social rituals. The descriptions of the Sargent children at play and at study, half-wild little Europeans more than Americans. The whole world springs richly to life in Fisher’s hands, and I loved every page of it.

Ironically, I was a little less interested in the art stuff, to be honest. And the stuff about whether Sargent was gay or not, etc. I mean, he probably was, like, let’s be real here. But not in any way that’s useful or interesting to anyone alive today. Unfortunately, my toxic opinion is that if he were alive today, Sargent would be one of those tedious Instagram painters who post pictures of they’ve done of dicks in bright colors and ugly compositions and it’s good he had to be in the closet as it were. However, one strong aspect of Fisher’s work is that he reveals the world of fin-de-siècle sexuality to be more varied, more nuanced, more complex than we have been led to believe. He restores some of the living charge and living shadow to the notion of the sexuality of historical people, and I found that very refreshing.

I also read Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, and I thought for sure it would be on the Booker Longlist. I also thought for sure that it would win the Booker Prize. Not merely because it is a certain kind of book—big, state of the nation, sweeping social novel, bitingly funny—but because I think it is one of the finest books published this year. At the time I read Caledonian Road, I was reading a lot of novels published by people younger than me, and I was struck by a difference in…I don’t know what to call it. I want to say “quality” but that will make it sound like it’s a matter of good vs bad when what I mean by quality is something in the nature of the book, its characteristics. But, yes, there was a difference in quality between Caledonian Road and some of the other books I Read this year by writers my age and younger, which is that you feel that Andrew O’Hagan has read more books than he has watched YouTube videos.

Like, there’s just something in the way he wields language and forms thoughts. There is nothing cinematic about the book. It feels like a novel. It feels like a novel that grew out of other novels and books. I guess what I am saying—and it feels silly to be saying it—is that Caledonian Road feels like a novel made out of something other than the feelings and passing observations of the author. Like, you can tell he really thought about the book for a long time.

The novel is sprawling, to be sure. It dips into various perspectives and moves around the United Kingdom. It takes on art, cancel culture, politics, corruption, MeToo, sex scandals, the drug trade, immigration, Brexit, shifting sexual mores, masculinity, and a lot more. You get disgraced actors, bribes, pay offs, schemes, gun violence, religion—I mean, it’s all in there! And O’Hagan brings it off elegantly, smoothly. I simply could not put it down. It unfolded with all the pleasures of a novel. I mean, really, I cannot stress enough how novel-y it felt. And deeply smart about matters of art and its urgency in a shifting, politically charged world. And the nature of being politically vulnerable due to gender, immigration status, class—the precarity of teetering over the brink of homelessness! Like it’s juicy!

Another big book I read this year was the third entry in Knausgaard’s Morningstar cycle, The Third Realm. I reviewed that book for The Washington Post and got to talk a bit about why the novel cycle is Knausgaard’s true form. The Third Realm was not my favorite of the cycle so far (that would be The Wolves of Eternity), but it is a crackling entry. It basically takes the form of a police procedural—my pet theory is that Knausgaard is remixing various genres with a philosopho-theological base to create these wonderfully discursive, spiritually restless novels of ideas that have very pronounced genre elements—as a cop tries to unravel a gristly murder first witnessed in the first book in the series. He also replays certain events from the first novel through the eyes of side characters in that book, creating lots of wonderfully eerie echoes, which in a series dominated by doppelgangers and shadowy doubles is amazing!

I feel somehow that the whole series is orbiting the Faust myth—another set of doublings!—and that it will culminate in a dark bargain. But so far, I am just enjoying the ride. I loved this book, and many parts of it were genuinely scary to me. He’s cooking.

James by Percival Everett was my other pick to win the Booker Prize and also the National Book Award. Everyone in America has heard of this book by now. The sales numbers are…wild. And deservedly so. The novel retells certain of the events from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel Everett truly loves, from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved companion Jim.

There is a version of this novel that sucks, right? It’s all righteous fury and tedious didacticism, etc. But Percival Everett is not that kind of writer, and so James is a fucking romp. It moves. And as it moves, it displays Everett’s usual voraciousness for reference, allusion, philosophical nonsense, and the delight of surprise. James argues with various philosophers about the nature of slavery and also the nature of life. There is something funny, yes, in the idea of a slave arguing with Descartes or Locke. But Everett seems to be saying, “Yes, it’s funny, but why is it funny, what are the conditions that have brought about this absurd situation? Is the absurd thing that a slave has a mind? Or is the absurd thing to enslave someone with a mind?”

I am not…a Twain guy. I did not love Huck Finn the first or even second time I tried to read it. I told Everett this during his New York launch for the book. We talked a bit about why he loves Twain so much. He said that Twain was perhaps the greatest influence on his work. I can see that. It’s hard to miss that influence. The humor. The biting intelligence. The irony. The formal play. The willingness to melt and bend genre into new alloys. All of it is so wonderfully present in Everett’s work. Especially in James.

Some will find this book a commercial on-ramp to Everett’s stranger, wilder work. Some will see it as a cop-out perhaps. For me, I don’t know, I just had a great time. He’s a master at work, and this novel was a thunderclap over the horizon.

The other novel I really loved this year was Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. I read this book very late. I got an early galley, and I meant to read it over the summer in Paris, but then I got sidetracked reading a book that…robbed me of my will to live and made me feel like I had Lyme disease. I am not exaggerating, that book made me feel very ill and I had a doctor’s appointment and everything. But then I finished the piece I had to write about the book and got better, so I didn’t end up going to the doctor. Anyway, that book stole several months from me, and I didn’t end up getting to Garth’s book until just a little while ago.

I actually probably should read it while I was feeling ill from book-induced malaise. It might have been a wonderful companion through that time. The novel follows an unnamed narrator into a winding and mysterious underwold of illness, brought about by a sudden attack of pain. The pain is revealed to be caused by a life-threatening aneurysm. Surgery is a last resort, and so the narrator enters a holding pattern in the hospital, waiting for information that does not come because we are never promised answers in life. While he waits, he reflects on art and literature and music. He reflects on love and care and distance—the novel takes place during COVID and so the narrator’s partner is not allowed to visit him—and through the novel’s strange alchemy, these meditations merge with those about art and literature and music, so that you get the sense that for the narrator, all of life is art and all of art is life.

In the hospital bed at the end of the world, in that pale gray waiting, all the shit we tell ourselves about art and writing, all the commerce-tinged bullshit and vague conspiracy nonsense, all that drops away. I found it a very profound book. And also very funny. And moving.

I also read some galleys:

David Szalay’s Flesh is an incredible book, maybe his best since All That Man Is. You gotta read it.

Andrea Long Chu’s Authority is a book I can’t wait to argue about with other people. Some of her arguments made me wish that I had her number so I could call her and fight about books.

Also special shout-out to Thomas Morris’s Open Up, which I am helping to publish in April 2025. A brilliant collection of darkly surreal contemporary stories. Like Severance meets Pushing Daisies.

I guess I should also mention that…I reviewed a lot of books this year (for me). Some of those reviews themselves were subject to review in the public commons. I think that’s fine, good even. People should argue about books more. I think that is a wonderful thing. I was recently on a panel with Lauren Oyler about negative book reviews or take-downs, stuff like that. My general thought about negative reviews and backlash to negative reviews is that people should be able to hate in peace.

I think when we get to the place of spooling out social conspiracy about reviewer motives and all this other stuff is when we kind of jump the shark and enter a realm of gossip rather than criticism. But again, that’s fine. Idk, let people hate. They’re going to do it anyway. For myself, I know what my motivations are. I know what drives my criticism. The interpretations and projected interpretations of other people are, frankly, none of my business. You either believe in your own taste or you don’t. Which is why I believe a lot of arguing about the “merits” or “virtues” or “downside” to negative book reviews or “harsh criticism” is really arguing about social control. That’s not super interesting to me, personally, but I understand that some people find it fascinating and indeed have made a whole career out of it online, lol. And to those people, I say good luck and godspeed.

I guess I have to go back to revising my novel. See you guys later!

b