Milkman
Anna Burns · 2018
Burns wrote an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city (unmistakably Belfast during The Troubles) in a style of such anxious, digressive, paranoid brilliance that it reads like the inside of a traumatized consciousness. The most formally risky Booker winner in decades. It earns every syllable.
The case against
Nobody has a name, paragraphs run for pages, and the narrator circles every event two or three times before letting it occur. The claustrophobia is the point; it is also the cost. Burns built a voice that mimics trauma so faithfully that reading it produces some, and the middle hundred pages repeat the lesson long after you have learned it.
Best of Last 10 Years · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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