The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century List

 The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century List

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  This list dropped last week- I can't track down a printable list but you can find non paywalled versions on Goodreads.  The list was generated via a survey of 500+ authors and other literary types which means that there was no editorial portion of the process. There was no definition of "best" give to the voters though in the parlance of this blog it is clear that voters cared more for "classics" than "hits,"  many hits were absent- no Sally Rooney, no Karl Ove Knausgaard, no Harry Potter.  Very little genre work of any kind.  The interactive presentation on the Times website allows you to tick off each title to see how many you've read- I came out with a count of 50/100- which probably would have been higher but for the inclusion of non-fiction works- not 50/50 fiction/non-fiction, but I'd only read one of the non-fiction titles.   There were a surprising number of authors who landed two or more titles on the list- Jesmyn Ward had three I thin, Ferrante has two, and Denis Johnson had 2 or 3.

  Leaving aside the actual rank order from 1 to 100, there was plenty of similarity between the books picked by these folks and the books I've written about here.  I was shocked by how many books in translation made the list- including the number one book (Ferrante) and three of the top ten books.  I saw the similarity in this blog and that list in the number of works of translated fiction and in the presence of so many titles that eschew the ordinary lives of ordinary folks.  I've made a dogged attempt over the past five years to come to terms with the merits of domestic fiction but after seeing only a handful of such titles on this NYT list, I'm starting to think I'm correct in my opinion that domestic fiction isn't particularly interesting to anyone. 

Behold the Dreamers (2016) by Imbolo Mbue

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Behold the Dreamers (2016)

by Imbolo Mbue

Lehman Brothers Building, Wall Street, Manhattan

Manhattan: 33/33 

New York: 86/105

   Woop Woop that is all for Manhattan, baby.  I won't miss the rat infested apartments and swarthy immigrant families- of all races, genders and socioeconomic status.  The immigrant experience has been at the fore of the Manhattan sub-chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- I count 9 out of the 33 books located on the island of Manhattan.  Fitting then, we finish with a 10th book about the immigrant experience- and one of my favorites, Imbolo Mbue's debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, about an economic migrant from West Africa and his family, and his job as the chauffeur for a partner at Lehman Brothers, just before and during their collapse.

  It's not the first time Lehman Brothers has popped up this year.  I recently read The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry (2017)  by Ned and Constance Sublette and the Lehman Brothers were a whole chapter as the example, par excellence, of the links between 20th century high finance and the slave trade in the American South (Lehman Brothers got their start as slave-trading middle men.)  I was mildly surprised not to see this fact established by any of the characters, and I was left wondering if it was the author himself who didn't know, or if he did know, picked Lehman Brothers for that purpose, and then decided none of his characters would know about that fact, so decided to omit any further discussion.  Anyway, that would be the first thing I would point out in a book about the relationship between an African immigrant chauffeur and a Lehman partner in the early ought's.

  Beyond that incongruity I quite liked Behold the Dreamers both in terms the characters and the mechanics of the book which center around the experience of an African immigrant that time and place. I also liked his treatment of the immigration legal system which I found to be sophisticated and nuanced in a book written by a non-lawyer.  At the same time, the writing wasn't overly technical or erudite, his portrayal of his aspirational immigrant family, living in a quasi-legal state while they actively try to defraud the US Immigration System (which is just treated as a fait accompli.) was also well executed.

  I was just generally impressed by the technical acuity of the prose writing, if not by the characters themselves, who are all morally culpable for various reasons.