The Best Books of 2022: Debut Fiction
/Best Books of 2022: Debut Fiction
It’s usually a thrill to survey the field of debut fiction every year for the compiling of this list. There’s usually nothing more bracing than a first novel, so full of possibilities, so free of baggage. But like so many things in the 21st century, those “usually”s are more uprooted every year. Fiction particularly is a battlefield; it’s never been more compromised and threadbare, never more derivative and navel-gazing. And in a cultural moment of weaponized entitlement, no kind of fiction is more vulnerable to these currents than debut fiction. As I’ll mention again later in our list this year, the overwhelming majority of the worst fiction I read this year was debut fiction. But luckily, there were exceptions! Here are the best of them:
10 Things We Found When the Water Went Down by Tegan Nia Swanson (Catapult) – This remarkable debut is working on many levels, including as a murder mystery and a coming-of-age yarn, all of it set against a weird North Country backdrop that subtly warps and changes with the moods of the story. The sixteen-year-old girl at the heart of the story wants to solve the death of a loutish miner, uncover the mysteries of her mother’s life, and penetrate the enigma of a local stranger, and Swanson sets about it all with such a hearty storyteller mischief that, as hackneyed as it is to say, you often forget it’s a debut.
9 The Family Izquierdo by Ruben Delgollado (WW Norton) – Even among the top picks of debut fiction, some of the selections share some of the ills that beset the year, and although that’s certainly true in this debut from Ruben Delgollado, the author manages to rise above those ills in order to tell the story of the many characters in three generations of a Mexican American family dealing with a string of setbacks and tragedies – and also with a supernatural element that adds a decidedly double-edged flavor to the whole story.
8 Holding Her Breath by Eimear Ryan (Mariner) – Ryan’s story of former Olympic swimmer candidate Beth Crowe and her life – a personal crisis and then an attempt at a personal re-invention – is heartfelt throughout and appealingly multilayered. Readers follow Beth as she migrates from the world of competitive swimming to the world of literary parties and book debuts and poetasters who idolize Beth’s grandfather, a celebrated poet who died before she was born. The narrative is uneven, and of course the ending, such as it is, is botched, but there’s real feeling in this first outing.
7 My Name is Yip by Paddy Crew (Overlook) – This debut distinguishes itself with outside-the-box aspirations, a Western that takes all the precepts of the sub-genre and playfully inverts them. Set in 1815 Georgia, this is the story of Yip Tolroy, who’s a social outcast, and his fiercely protective mother, who comes close to stealing the novel on multiple occasions. The bildungsroman is a very common pattern in Western-themed novels, and in this lean, readable book, Paddy Crew manages to make it feel arrestingly new by injecting it with a torrent of melodrama that under other circumstances might look ridiculous.
6 Delphi by Clare Pollard (Simon & Schuster) – The famously enigmatic future-predicting oracle of Delphi is the ideological pivot-point of this excellent, intriguing debut from Clare Pollard, which tells the story of a classics professor who, spurred in part by the massive unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic, becomes obsessed the ancient world’s obsession with predicting the future in a doomed attempt to insulate itself from the shocks of the present. The Delphi oracle was of course just the tip of the iceberg; the ancient world was full prophecy techniques, and as our main character studies and tries all of them, Pollard very skillfully draws readers into the mania.
5 Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro (FSG) – The premise of this debut – forbidden gay love – is admittedly simple and predictable, but Taymour Soomro invests his story of Pakistani teenagers Fahad and Ali and their blooming attraction with a heartfelt authenticity that’s skillfully enhanced by the equally predictable portions starring an older-and-wiser Fahad. There’s definitely a market for these semi-exotic gay love stories, and although their ultimate impetus might be deeply off-kilter, the products are often very good even in their first outings, like this one.
4 The Fields by Erin Young (Flatiron Books) – Of course, not all entries on a debut fiction list are or should be art-infused lit’rary fiction – it’s considerably harder to succeed in crafting an actual fictional story as opposed to an almost imperceptibly altered version of your own Facebook timeline, so a well-done mystery/thriller is an unexpected delight, like this one by Erin Young that kicks off in the American Midwest when a dead body is found in an Iowa cornfield. The dead person was a childhood friend of the policewoman who’s assigned to the case, and Erin Young covers this admittedly familiar ground with a wonderfully refreshing energy.
3 A Little Hope by Ethan Joella (Scribner) – This debut is every bit as warm and unabashedly humanistic as The Family Izquierdo, a deceptively big and heartfelt story elegantly folded and re-folded into the delicate little framework of a seemingly idyllic family that’s rocked to its foundations by an unexpected cancer diagnosis. Their tight-knit and seemingly idyllic neighborhood is likewise rocked, and from these simple, straightforward elements, Ethan Joellla composes something memorably good.
2 Shmutz by Felicia Berliner (Atria Books) – Every so often, far less frequently in fact than should be true, a debut novel comes along that feels like a debut, rather than some aspiring author’s best attempt to imitate a mid-career novel of some established author, a debut novel that seems to relish in the strange originality of its own weird narrative impulses. This book by Felicia Berliner is just such a debut, the oddly exuberant story of a woman in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn who develops first a fascination with online pornography and then perhaps an eensey-weensy addiction to it. Given such ingredients, it’s hardly surprising that this book is funny (although that’s not a given, God knows, in the largely humorless 21st century literary world); the added delight is how emotionally touching it ends up being.
1 My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson (Flatiron Books) – This is Rasheed Newson’s first novel, but he’s nonetheless a veteran storyteller, having worked on the writing for a number of cable TV shows – and the skills he honed in those various writers’ rooms are very much on display in this, the best fiction debut of the year, the story of a young black man in the 1980s who leaves his comfortable Midwest family behind and moves to a feral New York City bubbling over with both gay subculture and a virus sweeping through that gay subculture. Young Trey enters the moment, becomes an activist, and begins to find out who he is, and Newson turns it all into an utterly absorbing drama that quickly made me hope for a dozen more novels from this very busy writer.