The Worst Books of 2020: Fiction!

It’s only a couple of discrete steps from the kind of fuzzy navel-gazing required for admission to any of America’s 14,355,005 MFA programs to the kind of flinty, hard solipsism required for admission to any fascist group-think, and the practitioners of contemporary fiction are nothing if they’re not quick learners. The humid, smarmy sense of entitlement that prompted last year’s crop of bad fiction-writers to ask “Why should I try any harder?” hardened this year into the brittle sense of inertia that prompts them to ask “Here are my collected Facebook posts - how dare you ask for more?” 

10 The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein) (Europa)

Kudos to the dutiful Ann Goldstein for translating the awful, meandering tedium of this drippy bildungsroman so faithfully. Maybe if we crowdfunded a bit of a bonus, she could slip some interesting prose into Ferrante’s next masterpiece, so it gains something in the translation.

9 Drifts by Kate Zambreno (Riverhead)

Always a slightly depressing thing, to add to this particular list a novel that exhibits genuine intelligence and writing skill, but those things can’t save a book so dead-set on failing to entertain or even to be anything in particular, other than a meta-meditation on the process of not writing a book.

8 Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press)

Start with near-universal unearned acclaim for an earlier crappy book, add the complacent arrogance that can come from that, spend roughly 15 seconds thinking up the thinnest possible pretence of a premise - in this case “an old woman who thinks thoughts” - type almost random words for roughly a month, and presto, you get a book the AP will call, hilariously, “fashionably self-referential.” 

7 Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)

Debut novels are usually exempted from this list, and Brandon Taylor’s willingness to specify his preference for the skin color of his ideal readers (apparently not a professional death-sentence in 2020, although we can hope future years will come to their senses) didn’t put it here - the book’s pomposity and hysterical over-writing did that.

6 This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Graywolf)

This novel about a woman in Zimbabwe trying repeatedly to do … something or other and facing endless setbacks due to … something or other is so gruellingly boring and so murkily written that it should stand as an indictment to every writing group, sympathetic friend, and working editor who saw it prior to publication - unless none of them did, which would at least explain a bit.

5 A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green (Dutton)

The predecessor of this incredibly derivative cod-sci-fi novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, was a New York Times bestseller long before it ever appeared in bookstores, which naturally lowered the odds that this sequel would be any better. And it’s in fact even worse. Isn’t math fascinating?

4 Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown)

It’s bad enough to be asked to sit quietly through the sententious condescension of being told this memoir is in fact a work of fiction, but it’s a very measurable amount worse - a 2020 amount worse - for the end result to be so thin and inept that it would be a failure even if it were fiction. 

3 Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd) (Europa)

It’s almost impossible to believe that two different people were needed to translate this rotten author’s latest monosyllabic slab of dead-eyed zombie-fiction - maybe they took turns so that neither one would take to amphetamines. Certainly the book’s unlucky readers could use some.

2 Daddy by Emma Cline (Random House)

In this short story collection, Emma Cline uses - or rather, aggressively re-uses - the small handful of tinny rhetorical mannerisms that so woefully filled The Girls with its obvious convictions of its own maturity are scratched on top of truly 21st-century levels of pointless anomie. The result is like an ill-lit dentist appointment.

1 Cleanness by Garth Greenwell (FSG)

If you count his initial and somewhat promising novella Mitko, then Cleanness, the worst novel of 2020, is Garth Greenwell’s third attempt at telling the exact same (autobiographical, needless to say) story, and by a minor miracle of uppity complacency, he’s somehow managed to get a little worse each time. Here’s hoping next year’s version of What Belongs To You will show a little initiative.