An end-of-year bouquet like this one offers a chance to pick some flowers that I didn’t get to this year. So in addition to re-recommending some of the fiction I reviewed in the last twelve months (namely, Hilary Mantel’s “Bring up the Bodies,” Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?,” Edward St. Aubyn’s “At Last,” and Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time”), I want to mention two books of fiction that I wish I had written about.

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The first is “Four New Messages” (Graywolf Press), a collection of stories by Joshua Cohen. These were a revelation. I’d never read anything by Joshua Cohen, and I fear that I have no better excuse than laziness: his last book was an enormous, challenging, eight-hundred-page novel called “Witz” (Dalkey Archive). I was attracted by that novel’s title—Italo Svevo, one of my favorite novelists, was addicted to Witze, witty paradoxes and jokes, such as his response to Joyce’s apparently smug comment that he never used coarse language but only wrote it: “It would appear then that his works are not ones that could be read in his own presence.” But “enormous” and “challenging”—especially “enormous”—too often mean, alas, in a life with young children and teaching and writing, skimming the first few pages and replacing said book on the shelf with an embarrassed sigh… some day, some day.

I didn’t have to wait long, because Cohen, who can apparently write about anything, isn’t waiting to be read. He exists to write. (At the age of thirty-two, he’s already published more books, and surely more pages, than many writers in their fifties.) And he certainly can write! There are four stories in “Four New Messages,” and though I only really liked the first and last, those two are remarkable—intelligent, lyrical, prosaic, theoretical, pragmatic, funny, serious. His best prose does everything at once. He can move from a very clever, David Foster Wallacian phrase like “diagnosed with a boutique sarcoma” or “just her face and, regretfully, perhaps the top cleave of her breasts” or “same gist, different oblast” (the last story is partly set in Russia, and reads like a sad inversion of “Dead Souls”), to this perfect piece of realism, a lyrical and plangent evocation of Berlin, a kind of up-to-date Joseph Roth: “The leafy lindens and sluggish Spree, the breakfasts of sausages and cheeses and breads that stretch like communist boulevards in late afternoon, the stretch denim legs of the artist girls pedaling home from their studios on paint-spattered single speeds, the syrupy strong coffees the Kurdish diaspora made by midnight at my corner café and its resident narcoleptic who’d roll tomorrow’s cigarettes for me, ten smokes for two euros.”

I was excited to read this young writer, and uncalmly await more.

The second work of fiction that stood out was Zadie Smith’s “NW” (The Penguin Press). As everybody has commented, Smith has a restless, continuous relation with the novelistic tradition, and appears to be trying out different styles and forms in this new, Joycean / Woolfian / Dos Passos-ish work—first and third person, stream of consciousness, free, indirect style, dialogue written out like a screenplay, numbered vignettes, and so on. This seems to me pretty brave, because it risks alienating former readers who have just gotten comfy with her last work; and there is indeed something wonderful about encountering baffled responses to the book on Amazon, like this one: “I loved ‘On Beauty’ but could not get into this book… the writing style is so difficult it makes it not worth the effort.” The decentered and interrupted form feels right here, because this novel is trying to bring home a whale of a city, and to number the days of people who do not necessarily feel that they themselves possess an ordered internal calendar—who may feel, like Natalie, one of the protagonists, that they lack a continuous sense of self.

But, in fact, there is a marvellous, implied center to this novel’s style—or perhaps current would be a better word than center: underneath the formal experimentation runs a steady, clear, realistic genius. Smith is a great urban realist. There may be two paths to the novel, as Smith has suggested in a noted essay, or, more likely, there may be fifty-two paths (as her own fiction suggests), but there is also the single “blue river of truth,” as Henry James put it (“the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth”—it’s from “What Maisie Knew”), and Smith negotiates that grand channel as well as any contemporary novelist. This novel bursts with the imagined, lived, tragic-comic, polyphonic reality of London—its speech, accents, dusty pavements, whining buses, gloomy offices (“boxy cramped Victorian damp”), wet parks, scandalous disparities (this is as much a book about class as about race), grim housing estates (Smith’s eye may take many privileged readers as far as they have ever gone into such places). It is an even more intensely English novel than “White Teeth”—one character is described as having an accent “somewhere between the Queen and the speaking clock” (in the old days you were able find out the time by phoning a number, to hear a very proper, real but slightly unreal female voice, constantly updating herself)—and a better one, the best novel she has yet written. I read it fast (it seemed much shorter than its four hundred and sixteen pages), and with mounting excitement.

I also loved Karl Ove Knausgaard’s book “My Struggle” (Archipelago), which I reviewed at length in the magazine. I felt that the book didn’t get the attention it deserved. Was it a novel or a memoir, or something in between? Knausgaard has written five more volumes of whatever this book is, and these have made him famous and infamous in his native Norway (where it is reckoned that a fifth of the entire population has read him). So English-speaking readers are going to be able to make up their own minds, at their own speed, as these books appear over the next few years. Knausgaard tells the story, such as it is, of his childhood and adolescence, his marriage, his life as a father, husband, and son, and his desperate need to be a writer. The book is more like a dramatic essay than anything else, and the form allows Knausgaard room for digressions, reflections, asides. This is a book intensely hospitable to ideas, and it is thrilling to witness a properly grave and ironic mind, treating, in a theoretical and philosophical and yet fundamentally unshowy way (a massive difference between Knausgaard and certain show-offy American novelists, who always seem to be squeezing the juices of their obsessive fandom over their cultural subjects), all kinds of elements of life: having children, the working of memory, reading Adorno, playing guitar and drums in crappy rock bands, drinking too much, looking at Constable drawings, sex (good and bad), and death.

Above all, death. Knausgaard reflects, at one point, like Walter Benjamin before him, that modern life has successfully hidden death from sight. On one hand, it is everywhere, in the news and in images. But this, he says, is death as a concept, death without a body. On the other hand, actual death: “That which belongs to the body and is concrete, physical and material, this death is hidden with such great care that it borders on a frenzy. And it works, just listen to how people who have been involuntary witnesses to fatal accidents or murders tend to express themselves. They always say the same, it was absolutely unreal, even though what they mean is the opposite. It was so real. But we no longer believe in the reality. For us everything has been turned on its head, for us the real is unreal, the unreal real.” Then this paragraph of meditation ends, there is a break in the page, and Knausgaard announces, “I was almost thirty years old when I saw a dead body for the first time. It was the summer of 1998, a July afternoon, in a chapel at Kristiansand. My father had died.” And so begins the second half of “My Struggle,” which chronicles Knausgaard’s response to the death of his father, who died in squalor and isolation, after years of alcoholism.