![]() ![]() ![]() In an era where all consensus seems to have broken down, and a year marked with incredible turmoil in every area of American life, such certainties have their uses, but when it comes to art, they often make the resulting work feel claustrophobic. This would probably be true of any 200 novels taken from any single year, but in 2021 what this perspective often looked like was one of certainty-one of providing answers instead of asking questions, one of making sure the reader knew what the author’s position was and that that position was correct. The moral and political frameworks of the novels-their ideas of what society is and how people should relate to it-had a uniformity as well. The problems, and the perspective on those problems, remained remarkably consistent from book to book. Though most of the books were marked by either swooning lyricism or Didionesque aphoristic minimalism, this goes deeper than prose style. ![]()
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