The usual suspects — rampant narcissism, shore-to-shore MFA programs, the malignant validation-sweepstakes of social media — combined in 2021 to produce a great sludging wash of Gawd-awful fiction, all of produced with the signature 2021 twist: writing anything, whether it’s history, cross-stitch instructions, the tech manual for a Lenovo AMD-A6, or especially your own boring autobiography, and straight-up lying by calling it fiction. The two obvious reasons for this, cynical opportunism (fiction sells better than nonfiction) and overweening egotism (what, the authors ask, could be more interesting than I?), underscore a more subtle one: to pre-emptively critic-proof their garbage by blurring the lines that differentiate any one kind of writing from any other kind of writing. Unfortunately for these authors, crapola by any other name still stinks. These were the year’s worst offenders:

10 Second Place by Rachel Cusk (FSG) – It’s possible that Rachel Cusk’s slim-yet-bloated latest novel is about a thwarted woman who invites a pompous artist to live in her guest house. The labored prose, the incoherent metaphors, and the lack of individually-realized characters means we’ll never be 100% certain, but it’s possible.

9 Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (One World) – No matter where you stop in the noxious buffet this novel presents - Anti-science? Anti-woman? Anti-trans? - you’ll get the same end result: since the book starts with the presumption that its readers are evil bigots and operates on that presumption throughout its ridiculous plot, the key take-away is Anti-reader.

8 Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason (Harper) – In case so many of the rest of the books on this list haven’t given readers enough anti-science egomania, this idiotic, carpingly condescending story of a woman with a “mental illness” that mainly seems to turn her into a too-online Twitter-hole ought to make up the difference.

7 Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead Books) – As this sloppy, self-indulgent mess of a story collection makes clear, the governing justification so many 21st century writers use for creating grating, vapid characters is that it positions said authors perfectly to call anybody who objects to said grating, vapid characters a bigot. Heck, some 21st century writers look to be making a career of it. 

6 Animal by Lisa Taddeo (Avid Reader Press) – The vile cowardice behind this book’s narrative of its main character’s combination of vengeful man-hating and whining victim-bragging lies in the aforementioned attempted critic-proofing of the end result; if you hate the main character, you’re a sexist; if you like her, you’re a monster – and if you read this book, you’re a glutton for punishment.

5 Milk Fed by Melissa Broder (Scribner) – There are no characters in this wretched, torturous excuse for a novel, no plotting, no story-arcs of any kind, no relief from slipshod knee-jerk Twitter politics, and no sincerity on any level. But hey, at least there’s junky prose.

4 The Magician by Colm Tóbín (Scribner) – It’s an odd thing to include this normally-talented author on this list, but this overlong novel about Thomas Mann somehow manages to take Mann’s fascinating life and engrossing letters and transmute them into a merciless slog of flat, uninvolved prose and vast tracts of undigested exposition.

3 Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler (Catapult) – Even the very rare occasional scrap of Lauren Oyler’s pompously, flagrantly untalented ‘novel’ that isn’t explicitly, verifiably autobiographical (in other words, not even remotely fiction) still reads every bit as endlessly tedious as the author’s Facebook feed would read, if reader were masochistic enough to seek it out.

2 Leave Society by Tao Lin (Vintage) – The sheer unbelievability of Tao Lin still having a writing career even after 15 years of nothing but weak, rancid, navel-gazing gruel appearing under his name is a travesty only compounded by this grotesquely whinging embarrassment of a novel.

1 Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (FSG) – Take ostentatiously weak, empty prose, add huge chunks of the aforementioned rancid navel-gazing, stir in ineptly-sketched characters who have no individual voices, no motivations, and no character arcs, be careful to remove any hint of craft or plot, and presto! You have this, the worst novel of the year.