The Pulitzer citation specifies that the winning novel “preferably” deal with “American life” — but preferable to what? Moreover, in an age of global interconnection, does such a thing as “American life” even exist?

That said, one work of fiction that I read this year manages to capture both the postmodern instability of the American idea and the belief that it still means something: Don DeLillo’s “Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories.” This may sound like a bogus lifetime-achievement award, but in its stripped-down way, “The Angel Esmeralda” is as good as anything DeLillo has done since “Underworld” in 1997. And it explains why the books in between have been so hit or miss: four decades into his career, one of our great novelists has been reinventing himself as a short-story writer. “The Body Artist,” “Cosmopolis” and “Point Omega” are not undercooked novels so much as trial-and-error experiments in concision. In a more perfect world, DeLillo would have included here the best parts of each. That bigger book would show DeLillo to have had a decade to rival Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth. As it is, “The Angel Esmeralda” reminds us of why we keep returning to these old masters. About the important stuff, they’re never wrong.

Garth Risk Hallberg, an editor of the literary Web site the Millions, is completing a novel.

Laila Lalami: “State of Wonder,” by Ann Patchett

By far the best novel I read this year — and the one I would have chosen for the Pulitzer Prize had I been given that privilege — is Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder.” The book begins with a missive announcing the death of Anders Eckman, a pharmaceutical researcher who traveled to the Amazon to learn more about the work of a certain Dr. Annick Swenson. Eckman’s colleague, Marina Singh, flies to Manaus to find out what happened to him and to bring back his body. But the only person with any clues about his disappearance is the fearsome and reclusive Swenson, who lives with the Lakashi tribe, the subjects of her research on fertility.

In “State of Wonder,” Patchett reinvents the archetypical journey into the unknown and, in the process, explores themes as ancient as love and loyalty and as modern as the ethics of anthropological fieldwork and medical research. She gives us a full experience of Marina Singh’s inner life: her search for the truth and the excruciating choices she faces, set against a rich portrait of the Amazon, where “every drop of rain hit the ground with such force it bounced back up again, giving the earth the appearance of something boiling.” While Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and V. S. Naipaul’s “Bend in the River” stun us with their violence, “State of Wonder” transports us into a mysterious world and engages us with its empathy.

Laila Lalami is a critic and a novelist and the author of, most recently, “Secret Son.”

Alexander Chee: “Silver Sparrow,” by Tayari Jones

When I think of the previous Pulitzers I loved, those books have always made me want to try more as a writer, to be more ambitious for my fiction. Many of last year’s fiction crop made me feel that way, but of what I read, only one was also a love letter to America and about America in a way that I hadn’t really seen before, and that was “Silver Sparrow,” by Tayari Jones.