Recent fiction recommendations

Pundits look at the popularity of subjects like adultery and serial killers and presume it tells us something about our society. I’ve been creating stories since I was 14, and selling them since I was 20, and I look at murder and adultery from a less lofty viewpoint — to me, they’re exploitable dramatic situations. Fiction requires drama, and drama requires a problem or a conflict.

In real life, conflicts rarely reach the level of intensity fiction requires. Genre writers create plots by imposing a genre device on their characters’ lives. In real dysfunctional families, the children hide out in their rooms, the father watches TV, and the mother escapes into Facebook, happy that she and her spouse don’t have to talk. The crime writer drops a couple of escaped convicts into their house and transforms latent conflicts into overt life-and-death issues.

Pick a disaster

In my own genre, science fiction, we can do the same thing with alien invasions, environmental disasters, and other types of large-scale calamities. On a more sophisticated level, we can write about people coping with future developments, such as advances in psychology and biochemistry that let them choose their personalities and design their offspring.

Serious literary writers have to work with a narrower range of disasters. Right now, adultery seems to be the calamity of choice. There was a time, when I was in my 20s, when it seemed like every serious contemporary novel ended with an illegal abortion. Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is a sterling example that’s still worth reading. Heroin addiction was popular around that time, too.

Sooner or later, every subject succumbs to a literary aging process. Serial killers have had a good run, but the homicidal madmen have become increasingly unbelievable as writers have dragged up variations on the theme. Anyone who has looked at the FBI profile on serial killers knows they are usually losers, not super-geniuses with an unusual hobby.

A few recommendations

When I browse the fiction offerings in bookstores, the first thing I look for is an unhackneyed idea that looks intriguing. Some of my favorites are quite famous. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, for example, caught my attention because it builds its plot around the ramifications of a hit-and-run accident — a common event in our society but a relatively rare happening in fiction.

Phil Klay’s short story collection Redeployment won the National Book Award, but I’m proud to say I read it before it received that honor. Klay’s complex, highly individualistic picture of contemporary war keeps surprising you with bits like the psych war officer who lures the enemy into the open by inventing creative insults.

Most of the discoveries I’ve made over the last few years haven’t been that celebrated. Laura Kasischke’s Life Before Her Eyes became an Uma Thurman movie, but I’ve never met anyone who’s heard of it. It starts with a school shooting and creates suspense with a question: Are we watching the life the protagonist could have lived or the life she did live? This is one case in which I can actually recommend the book and the movie. I can even report that I preferred the ending of the movie.

Everyday drama

I mostly read nonfiction these days, but I can pass on four other titles you might want to consider. Ian McEwan’s Children Act presents a believable, well-researched portrait of a mature professional woman dealing with a difficult legal issue. The subplot involves her husband’s stab at late-life adultery, but his approach is so gauche it’s almost charming. Tom Perrotta’s Abstinence Teacher pits a sex-education teacher who’s forced to teach an abstinence curriculum against a coach who’s a born-again Christian. Gabrielle Zevin’s Storied Life of A.J. Fikry captures low-key drama in the life of a bookstore owner. Vincent Lam’s Headmaster’s Wager chronicles the trials of a Chinese schoolmaster in war-torn Vietnam.

I’ve passed up more possibilities than I’ve read. Novelists and short story writers are still turning out interesting books about people who resemble the human beings we actually encounter in our daily lives. You don’t have to confine your reading to adultery and multiple homicide if you’re willing to do a little browsing.