In a typical year, in this space, Washington Examiner readers would find a symposium from editors and contributors to this magazine, recommending some of the best books of the year or perhaps some old favorites to pick up for the occasion. This year, I am exercising a prerogative that a books section editor should only use a couple of times in a career to do something a little different: I am just going to tell you what book you need to get. It’s a short novel called Whole by Derek Updegraff, published by a tiny conservative press called Slant Books, and it is the most astonishingly good piece of new fiction writing I have encountered in years.

I picked it up at random two months ago, expecting very little from it. Eleven pages in, I started reading paragraphs out loud to my wife, almost alarmed that maybe my critical faculties had failed me. Uhh, is this as good as I think it is? I kept asking. Keep reading, she kept saying. Then I gave it to a visiting friend, who meant to read just a few chapters but stayed up and read it in one night.

Whole follows the not hugely eventful travels of a guy living in California’s Inland Empire as he lives his life, drives around, works his job making sandwiches, and desperately hopes things work out with the girl he’s dating, an adjunct at a local Christian college. He’s an underemployed slacker, in other words, which gives the book its Big Lebowski feel, with maybe a dash of Confederacy of Dunces. Only he’s not a bum, nor is he a grandiloquent narcissist. He’s a thoughtful guy, trying to be fundamentally decent and ordinary despite having every reason to dissolve in the bitterness and shyness some tough breaks in childhood seeded in him. Fatally, as the story begins, he accidentally strikes a homeless man with his car. What happens from there has no obvious shape or plot as such, only the feel of hearing about a few months of someone’s life as he tells the story of trying not to fray while he tries to pull himself together. Yet there is a careful, morally thoughtful thrust to everything that happens in the book’s 140 pages that pays off tremendously.

The thing about this book that makes it so good and so worth actually reading and sharing is it is warm and kind, suffused with bonhomie. Well, that’s one of the things. The other is the writing itself. It’s downright astonishingly, almost hilariously, good. Our narrator thinks out loud in a voice that so doesn’t sound like writing you’ll forget you’re reading, not being talked to by the winning yet troubled voice of a man with both a conscience and some anxious voices in his head — a guy who has to work hard to reason out which of his impulses represent his better angels.

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Trying this is a risk. In fact, on virtually every page of Whole, Updegraff takes some sort of formal, writerly risk that, if it didn’t work, it would have made the reader hate the entire book. Each chapter is separated by a mock short story by our narrator, each one gorgeous. However, each one also serves to explain him. At one point, we are treated to a self-contained, somehow successful comic short story about a mass death among spelunkers. This, again, is the sort of thing writers try to pull off in their novels but fail. It works, though. Boy, it works. Yet unlike so many other literary highwire acts that insist upon themselves, this book would be easy to comprehend for a child, and it doesn’t show off for one single word. The writer wrote it for you, not for him. 

I have no connection to this book, but I feel strongly that it needs attention. I called the publisher to ask for some background, and he told me it’s probably currently only got a readership of, well, me and him. If that’s it, the readers of the world are doing themselves a disservice, missing out on something here. I am telling you, this book is better than many classics. Better yet, for the purposes of Christmas gift-giving, it is short, funny, emotionally stirring, and would be as interesting to a man or woman, a 70- or a 20-year-old, liberal or conservative, a Christian or a nonbeliever. I’m buying three copies for people on my list and keeping my copy for myself in case a first edition is worth something one day.