Best books...chosen by Anne Enright
Irish writer Anne Enright is the author of seven novels, including The Gathering,
which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. In her latest, Actress, an Irish novelist
prepares to write a biography of her mother, a former star of stage and screen.The Book List^ ARTS^23
Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987). The story
of an escaped slave and her murdered daughter,
this novel contains wrenching truths. Beloved
is not just a work of literary genius; it also
improves our understanding of what it means
to be human. Morrison brought us all that bit
further along.Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955). Nabokov’s
novel is a warning to all stylists that, sometimes,
a brilliantly written book can be not only mor-
ally void—as some of them want to be—but also
repugnant. I am not sure if this is a recommenda-
tion or a warning; it is all very brilliantly done.In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
(1987). This book goes everywhere that the
beauty of the language takes it. Set from the
1910s through the 1930s, it is a shifting, thrill-
ing, traveling tale of the immigrants who built
Canada. Ondaatje’s prose is a generous guide:
Every sentence opens the heart.The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979).
Carter wrote the first and best collection of fairytales in which the traditional fates of the female
characters are reversed. Beauty becomes a fabu-
lous beast; Little Red Riding Hood seduces the
wolf. Carter was a high stylist, and this collection
is lush, subversive, and truly liberating.Flaubert and Madame Bovary by Francis
Steegmuller (1939). It is hard to describe the life
of a writer—most of us spend our time sitting
alone in a room. It is exactly these silent difficul-
ties and triumphs that Steegmuller, a translator
and longtime Flaubert scholar, understood best,
and that understanding informs this double por-
trait of a book and its tormented creator.The Progress of Love by Alice Munro (1986).
Pick up any volume of stories by the Nobel
laureate and you will find quiet excellence, com-
passion, and precision. If you love life as well as
books, you must read them all—and then read
them again. This collection contains the iconic
story “Miles City, Montana,” about a family trip
that climaxes in a near-tragedy. It is one of the
best stories about motherhood ever written.Also of interest...in life on the job
Louise Erdrich
Even the best writers can
fail to see a great story hid-
ing in plain sight, said Laurie
Hertzel in the Minneapolis
Star Tribune. Before starting
her latest novel, National Book
Award winner Louise Erdrich
wondered, at 64, whether she
had already
written her
last. But in
2018, her
grandfather
was post-
humously
inducted
into a Native
American hall of honor, and
she reread his letters. Patrick
Gourneau had been chairman
of the Turtle Mountain Band of
Chippewa in the 1950s when
Congress was considering
“emancipating” Indians by
abolishing tribes and moving
them from their reservations.
Erdrich had a passion for
studying Native history, but
only when she reviewed her
grandfather’s letters did she
realize how much he’d done
to preserve tribal sovereignty.
“All of a sudden,” she says, “it
was, ‘Ah, I’d been working on
this book all along.’”
The title character in The
Night Watchman is based
on Gourneau, who worked
overnights while building an
anti-emancipation campaign
by day. But it’s a loose portrait.
“I tried as much as possible to
fictionalize him,” Erdrich says.
She felt less free to do the
same to Gourneau’s main foe,
U.S. Sen. Arthur Watkins of
Utah, said Elizabeth Winkler
in The Wall Street Journal.
Nearly every word Watkins
speaks in the novel is thus
taken from the Congressional
Record. And Erdrich also
took pains to understand his
thinking. Her grandfather had
set a good example: When
Gourneau testified against
Watkins’ bill in Washington,
he stopped by the senator’s
office to thank him for listen-
ing. “He tried very hard to
meet people on a human
level,” Erdrich says. “He was
extraordinary that way.”Author of the week
Hugh Chaloner, Paul Emmel
A step above a must-read, Lee
Durkee’s hilarious new book is “one of
the best novels in recent memory,” said
James McElroy in The Washington
Examiner. The Durkee-like narra-
tor is a failed novelist getting by as a
Mississippi taxi driver, and his “wildly compelling
voice” propels the action. His fares tend to be old,
sick, or meth-addicted, and he struggles to deter-
mine what a Buddhist like himself owes to strang-
ers. Funny as the book is, it’s also “a dead-serious
reminder that virtue is a lifelong struggle.”The Last Taxi Driver
by Lee Durkee (Tin House, $26)
“Sometimes the most outrageous
truths are the ones that double as lived
experience,” said Megan Garber in
The Atlantic. For software engineer
Susan Fowler, being propositioned by
her boss was just the first of many
horrifying incidents that defined her time at Uber.
Her new memoir provides “gut-wrenching” detail
about the work culture she exposed in a 2017
blog post that rocked Silicon Valley. It tells a life
story, too. Given how this pastor’s daughter was
raised, “the outcome begins to feel inevitable.”Whistleblower
by Susan Fowler (Viking, $28)The protagonist of this “wildly imagi-
native” debut novel yearns for a stable
job, said Parul Sehgal in The New
York Times. Instead, she’s forced to
accept a series of increasingly bizarre
temp positions: replacement mother,
assassin’s assistant, substitute pirate, human
barnacle. These surreal scenarios, all described
deadpan, “draw attention to the freakishness of
ordinary life.” The result reads like a new Alice in
Wonderland, presenting “an eerily precise portrait
of ourselves in a cracked mirror.”Temporary
by Hilary Leichter (Emily Books, $17)
This memoir’s author didn’t find
salvation working at a Cleveland
steel plant, said Laurie Hertzel in
the Minneapolis Star Tribune. But
her three years inside “changed her,
and for the better.” She’s prickly and
insecure at the start, a woman ready to overcome
difficult challenges by the end, and much of the
credit belongs to sharing in dangerous work with
worn-down co-workers. Though we hear a touch
too much about politics, “the glowing core of
this book is the steel plant.”Rust
by Eliese Colette Goldbach (Flatiron, $28)