Seven titles that defined the Obama era

Andrew Ridker was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1991. His second novel, Hope, is now out from Viking.

[Q&A with Andrew Ridker].

His debut novel, The Altruists, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Paris Review staff pick, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, and the People Book of the Week. It won the Friends of American Writers Award and was longlisted for the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Prize.

Ridker is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Le Monde, Bookforum, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Ridker lives in Brooklyn, New York.

At Electric Lit he tagged seven novels that capture the cultural moment of Obama’s America, including:

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

In his 2017 essay, “Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama,” to which this list is indebted, Christian Lorentzen defined four kinds of books that “have been particularly germane to the Obama years”: autofiction, fables of meritocracy, historical novels, and trauma novels. The biggest trauma novel of them all, in every respect, was undoubtedly A Little Life. Hanya Yanagihara’s epic was full of extraordinarily high highs—her four main characters are all some combination of handsome, successful, rich, loving, and glamorous—and unbearably low lows. (A tote bag bearing the names of her protagonists was ubiquitous in Brooklyn for a time, a rare feat for any novel, much less one that features so much physical abuse, pedophilia, and self-harm.) Lorentzen attributes the trauma novel’s success to the relative tranquility of the Obama era, “when American writers had the luxury of looking inward, investigating the systems that formed them, reimagining the romantic days just past, and registering the echoes of personal traumas.” Interestingly, the trauma novel only became more popular after Obama left office. It makes a kind of sense. After 2016, who wasn’t traumatized?

Read about the other entries on the list.

A Little Life is among Fatin Abbas's top ten books about chosen families, Christie Watson's five top books to inspire compassion, and Jason Flemyng's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue