Worst Books of 2022: Fiction

Worst Books of 2022: Fiction

Every publishing year represents the crashing assault of the unnumbered hordes of King Crapola against the brave 300 at the Thermopylae of Good Work, but in 2022 an enormous section of that bulwark simply caved in. In 2022, readers largely lost an entire genre: this one, fiction, which all but disappeared into the navel-gazing narcissism of “auto-fiction.” And since that fad combines the laziness of most authors with their ironclad self-centeredness, it’s unlikely to go away in our lifetime. Ninety percent of the books released in the mainstream US market in 2022 labeled “novels” were in fact memoirs containing not a single particle of fiction, which presents added challenges for a year-end fiction list. Those challenges are increased by my reluctance to put debut novels in a year’s-worst list; since the “auto-fiction” fad most strongly appeals to the combination of ‘no experience’ and ‘no talent,’ it’s taken hold most strongly among debut writers. And all this is before factoring in all the usual sins of bad fiction. The result was a year absolutely choked with bad books. These were the worst of them:

10 Pure Color by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – The idea of this flimsy scarf of an attempt at a book, presumably, is a kind of new mythology spun by its author, a kind of Book of Genesis in which Eve meets Eve, but readers won’t need to worry about following the world-building, since Heti loses interest in it – and everything else she tries here – in about a dozen pages. 

9 Either/Or by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press) – It was probably too much to hope that any continuation of Batuman’s less-than-stellar The Idiot would be better than its wretched template, but even so, this windy, vapid sequel starring Batuman’s self-insertion character Selin in her continuing wacky adventures draped in flat prose takes the customary derivativeness of sequels and, TikTok-style, dumbs it down.

8 The Last White Man by Moshin Hamid (Riverhead Books) – Some of the entrants on the list this year have unbroken histories of writing gawd-awful books, and Hamid is one of the foremost of these repeat offenders, offering up, almost reluctantly, the kernel of a good premise and then demonstrating on page after uninspired page that he understands the potential of that kernel less than his most inexperienced reader. This ridiculous exercise in Twitter-racism, complete with its tacked-on epiphany, keeps his streak going.

7 The Last Chairlift by John Irving (Simon & Schuster) – If it’s annoying every year to find writers coming up with new ways to write bad books, it’s just that much more annoying to find some writers skipping even that minimal effort and coming up with old ways to write bad books, but that’s pretty much all that ersatz literary lion Irving does in this bloated, tedious, and most of all dated story of all the different ways a stupid man can have sex or think about having sex. Can we call an official end to the 1970s? Or do we have to wait for the actual obituaries of every single overrated wordsmith who made so much of the decade’s fiction so unbearable?

6 The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf) – It’s been nearly 20 years since Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning moronic post-apocalyptic novel The Road, and since the author is nearly 90, there was a flicker of hope that either McCarthy had quit writing or learned how to do it. Both those hopes were completely dashed this year, when McCarthy released not one but two sloppy, incoherent, misogynistic, lazy, almost unbelievably self-indulgent novels, starting with this one, which tells the story of Who The Hell Knows as he does Who The Hell Cares for Manly Reasons that are intimately connected with the fact that The World’s Not As Good As It Used To Be. 

5 Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf) – When the emperor has no clothes, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a fawning fashion show, but that’s exactly what The Passenger got; the first of Cormac McCarthy’s bloated, conjoined 2022 novels received a cascade of frothingly adulatory reviews (most of which had been written as early as 2008 and were published in 2022 once the character names were added – honestly, what’s the point of writing or reviewing if an author’s canonization is pre-ordained?), but there was still fanboy hysteria left over for its quasi-sequel Stella Maris, which has all the weird octogenarian preoccupations of its predecessor, plus some freshman-level quantum physics for the (surely sizable?) stoner contingent of McCarthy’s readership. Having two different books on a year’s-worst list is quite the accomplishment – maybe time to rest on those laurels?

4 Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead)  – In these forsaken latter days when a collection of photocopied Sephora receipts can be outright called “fiction” by a publisher and “groundbreaking” by critics, it might seem impossible for books to get on a year’s-worst list simply by being old-fashioned flawed, but it does still happen. This novel by Shamsie is a good example: the premise – following two friends as their life takes them from Karachi to London – is strong. But Shamsie only bothers to write to the strength of that premise for about half the book, after which, like so many authors on this list this year, she seems to lose interest in her own story. 

3 The Furrows by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth) – Likewise with this novel by Namwali Serpell: the premise – a young woman quite literally haunted by the disappearance of her brother when they were children – has lots of potential, but the potential itself seems somehow to disinterest the author; the book loses focus fairly early on, wanders around quite a bit, and of course (it being the 21st century and this being a work of contemporary lit’rary fiction, after all) completely falls apart like a bad soufflé at the end. 

2 Be Here To Love Me At the End of the World by Sara Fletcher (Melville House) – Since taking your current MSNBC obsessions, attaching them to the social media feeds of yourself and your friends, and publishing the results unchanged and unedited – in other words, “auto fiction” – has now all but entirely eradicated both the act and the concept of the genre of fiction, you’d think any book that didn’t do that would be a breath of fresh air. But no - it turns out that if you take your current MSNBC obsessions, attach the social media feeds of yourself and your friends, and then mix in some embarrassingly juvenile dystopian fantasies, you get something almost as bad as “auto-fiction” – you get, as Fletcher has written in this decidedly un-promising debut, Twitter fiction.

1 Fairy Tale by Stephen King (Scribner) – As purely comforting as it would be to put a new Stephen King novel at the #1 spot on the year’s-worst list in light of how bitterly disappointing 2022’s fiction crop was, the temptation would have to be resisted if Fairy Tale were any good. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for the Republic of Letters, it’s resoundingly not: it’s an almost-formless mess in which the National Book Award grandee mostly just shows up and natters. It’s the worst book in an entire year of “My name on the dust jacket is pretty much all the effort I plan to make.” True, even that is more effort than we get in “auto fiction,” but that’s small consolation.