MFA programs have rendered too many novels cookie-cutter types, with privileged, precocious kids flexing their muscles and trying to show how hip they are. Too many novels fall into this category. But the special kind of novel, the one that, to use Nabokov's words, sends a "tingle" up your spine, is a rare beast. Here are 5 such tasty beasts I've read in the last 7 years or so:
2007: The Little Girl and the Cigarette by Benoit Duteurtre: An office worker lets his own brilliant insights into the folly of modern civilization get the best of him as he spews a tirade against politically correct sanctimonious politicians, office hacks, and the masses who have embraced a self-serving Cult of the Child.
2004: Little Children by Tom Perrotta. This facile novel seems to vindicate all the prophecies of Nietzsche who warned of the spiritual vacuum that would afflict "The Last Man." A funny parody of privileged adults, the novel shows parents with the emotional maturity of little children languishing through their narcissism and dysfunctional marriages.
2002: The Horned Man by James Lasdun. The fastidious, repressed narrator, a professor, is overtaken by some dark Jungian Demon, his "horned man" as we witness someone having a slow, steady meltdown.
2001: The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes. Using gothic and satire, Hynes writes a page-turner about a lowly lecturer who gains magical, demonic powers to ascend in power at a university. Hynes uses this plot as a vehicle to skewer all the tomfoolery and imbecilities that run rampant in academia.
1998: The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills. A dry deadpan first-person narrator chronicles the conflict between bovine laborers and their diabolical bosses. The allegory begins in the very earthly world but becomes more and more surreal. There is no novel quite like it.
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