The 15 Best Books of 2019

Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry

Two Irishmen swapping Hiberno-existential cracks and dead-end platitudes, nothing going on, waiting for Godot you might say—except that in Night Boat to Tangier they’re not on a road, by a tree, at dusk. They’re in the ferry terminal of the port of Algeciras, waiting for a boat, waiting for a particular girl. Kevin Barry’s previous novel, Beatlebone—John Lennon goes AWOL, on psychic safari in the west of Ireland—was marvelous. This one, his third, is even better. The lens of his interest goes where it goes. He writes what he wants to write, or what wants to be written: short runic paragraphs, mad images, bursts of almost-poetry, profligate (but artful) swearing. “He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses—he was the gaunt accumulation of them.” And underneath it all, steadily branching out and down into the depths of experience, a real story, a drug-smuggling love story. Magnificent. — James Parker

The Topeka School, Ben Lerner

That Ben Lerner’s third novel, The Topeka School, was overlooked by the big literary awards this year is one of many reasons not to care about big literary awards. Like Lerner’s debut, Leaving the Atocha Station, Topeka’s main character and occasional narrator is Adam Gordon—a younger Adam this time, in high school in Kansas in the late ’90s, who’s preparing for a national championship in “extemp,” a form of debate. We also hear directly from Adam’s mother and father, both psychologists. All of their stories consider, in a sense, the way men simply won’t shut up: They talk and talk to dominate their surroundings, and if that doesn’t work, they yell, and if that doesn’t work either, they try violence. Adam notes at one point that “literature is supposed to overcome” violence by “replacing physicality with language”—emphasis on the supposed to. The Topeka School is a great novel that explains The Way We Live Now. Someone should send Lerner to cover a Trump rally. — Juliet Lapidos

Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli

Five years ago, when Valeria Luiselli began writing Lost Children Archive, a novel inspired by her work with child refugees from Latin America, she was tempted, she told an interviewer, to use it “as a loudspeaker for all of my political rage.” She had to stop and vent, in Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, before returning to fiction. The result is a road-trip novel as propulsive as it is protean. The car that carries her characters—referred to as Ma, Pa, the boy, and the girl—from the Bronx to Arizona is crammed with the parents’ recording gear and the children’s “backseat games and reenactments.” The book itself is a kind of omnibus too: Luiselli mixes genres and perspectives, the personal and the political, as she tracks a dissolving marriage and disappearing children. The family dynamics are fine-tuned (Luiselli renders child voices and minds with rare insight). The social and physical landscape is hauntingly vivid. No loudspeaker blares, and that feat, in a book like this and times like these, feels remarkable. I couldn’t stop reading. — Ann Hulbert