Worst Fiction of 2010

9. How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu – It’s a neat little irony that Mengestu’s thin, meager novel is mostly about the many and multi-layered lies African ex-pats tell almost compulsively, and this book is a very good example of how a work of fiction can also be a sustained lie. African ex-pat Jonas Wondemarium (that surname wouldn’t be significant, would it? geez) is the alleged center of this book’s many trite stories, but the real point here is the novel’s unspoken but deafening proclamation: “I, the author, am an African ex-pat! I am a cottage industry! No matter what garbage I serve up, you must call it ‘a searing examination of exile and community’ in the New York Times!’ If the author’s name were Daniel Miller, this novel would have been called an idiotic, farcical bit of laziness. But the book-world is enamored of the exotic and will venerate any old crap as long as it carried a rifle across the veldt when it was eight.

More from the always opinionated Steve Donoghue.

And I’ll have a few scorn-worthy books on Monday.

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