The 2000s were a decade overshadowed by two world-historical events — September 11, 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008 — and the literature of the decade reflects both, in the way that serious fiction absorbs historical pressure. The best books from this period are not necessarily about those events directly; they often work through them obliquely, arriving at the decade's anxieties by another route. Looking back now, two decades on, the books that lasted are the ones that were doing something more durable than documenting the moment.
Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2004) is the most fully realized American novel of the decade. An aging Congregationalist minister in Iowa writes letters to his young son, knowing he will die before the boy is old enough to read them. Robinson's subject is spiritual attention — the texture of a serious religious life, what it actually looks like to believe something deeply and try to live by it — and her prose is the closest contemporary American fiction comes to that particular form of earned gravity. The novel is quiet, patient, and completely without sentimentality. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, Marilynne Robinson's second win after Housekeeping (which didn't win the Pulitzer but should have). The literary fiction shelf at byallo carries Gilead as one of its central picks.
Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) is the decade's most important work of nonfiction — a direct account of the year following the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne. Didion is a writer whose default mode is analytical control, and the book's subject is precisely what happens when that control fails: grief as a form of cognitive disorder, as a disruption of the normal machinery of perception and memory. The prose is as precise as anything she ever wrote, but in the service of describing imprecision — the irrationality of grief, the way the bereaved mind keeps running the same calculations hoping for a different result. It won the National Book Award in 2005.
David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster (2005) collects his most accomplished essays, including the title piece about the Maine Lobster Festival, a profile of John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, and "Authority and American Usage" — a thirty-thousand-word meditation on prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar that is really about authority, persuasion, and what it means to write for an imagined reader. Wallace is the best American essayist of his generation: his essays enact the arguments they make, performing the kind of recursive self-examination they describe. The essays and memoir shelf at byallo carries Consider the Lobster alongside the other essential essay collections.
W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001, translated 2001) is the decade's most formally unusual novel. The narrator meets a man named Jacques Austerlitz in Antwerp in the 1960s; over subsequent decades and meetings across Europe, Austerlitz slowly uncovers the history he had been suppressing — that he was brought to England from Czechoslovakia as a child on one of the Kindertransport trains, and that his parents died in the Holocaust. Sebald's method — long sentences that fold back on themselves, black-and-white photographs embedded in the text, a narrative voice of extreme temporal indirection — produces something that reads like memory itself: fragmentary, accumulated, never quite arriving at its destination. His four major works (all published in German in the 1990s and early 2000s) are among the most important fiction of the era.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) is his most structurally austere work: a father and son moving south through a post-apocalyptic America, carrying the fire. McCarthy strips the prose back to its barest grammatical elements and removes the punctuation he had used selectively in earlier work; the result is a text that feels as reduced as the world it describes. It is not his most ambitious novel — that remains Blood Meridian — but it is the most emotionally direct, and it won the Pulitzer in 2007 partly because of that directness. If you have not read McCarthy and want an entry point, The Road is the most available; Blood Meridian on the literary fiction shelf is where to go next.
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001) spent years on bestseller lists and won the National Book Award, and it has earned its reputation: a large, comic, frequently devastating novel about a Midwestern family coming apart under the pressure of the father's advancing Parkinson's disease. Franzen's command of social observation is exact — he is brilliant on class anxiety, on the texture of American consumer capitalism, on the specific self-deceptions families require to function. The novel is long and densely plotted, but it pulls.
For nonfiction, Michael Lewis's Moneyball (2003) and The Big Short (2010, just outside the decade) established a template for narrative nonfiction about systems: using a specific story to make a structural argument legible to non-specialist readers. Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower (2006), about the intelligence failures leading to September 11, is narrative nonfiction at its most demanding and necessary. Both books demonstrate that the decade's best nonfiction was working toward the same goal as its best fiction: using specific human stories to make abstract forces — financial, institutional, political — feel as they actually are experienced, one person at a time.