The best debut novels that subvert the mainstream Western novel

Written in 46 short vignettes, this is a coming-of-age story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Yet the novel is anything but one protagonist’s story, as it consistently juxtaposes Esperanza’s story with stories of secondary characters who make a brief appearance in the novel to seldom reappear and tie loose ends of the “sub-plots”: Marin, Louie, Alicia, Geraldo, Rafaela, Minerva, and others. Narrative continuity via a protagonist’s psychological journey that is a key trait of coming-of-age novels, or of mainstream Western or realist novels at large, is repeatedly disrupted here, making the reader wonder, who is the novel’s protagonist?: Esperanza, Mango Street, or its Brown community, or young Latina girls and women in a 20th century USA, alluded by “las Mujeres” to whom the book is dedicated.

At 160 pages, here is another coming-of-age novel whose 8 chapters offer a glimpse into a specific year of Annie John’s childhood and teenage years in Antigua before she migrates to England for higher education. Throughout the novel, we learn of Annie’s relationship with her parents, especially her mother’s overbearing influence, and Annie’s stepping into her independence with migration. As sub-plots, we encounter Annie’s relationship to other secondary characters—Gwen and the Red Girl who are her friends, Miss George and Miss Edward who are her teachers—yet they eventually fade away without enough of a resolution to the “sub-plots.” Through unexplained jumps in time that inaugurate each chapter, this fragmented novel set in the Caribbean breaks away from ideas of continuity and wholeness that define the realist novel and mirrors the book’s setting instead with an archipelagic narrative structure.

Another powerful debut on border-crossing, this novel begins with a frame-chapter or a prologue of sorts called “The Trip” that shows a group of Moroccans fleeing to Spain for a better life on a ramshackle boat. The following subsections, “Before” and “After,” zoom into the lives of the characters introduced in the opening chapter to highlight the socio-economic reasons leading them to risk their lives by crossing the Mediterranean Sea illegally, and their gritty fate once the boat fails them, as they’re stranded in Spain or deported to Morocco. Some critics have called the novel a collection of interconnected stories, although the book’s “prologue” is hardly a standalone story; it aligns the novel instead with an alternative structural aesthetic, one that recalls the frame narratives of oral storytelling traditions like The Thousand and One Nights, an obvious influence on the book. 

Yet another short, coming-of-age novel with a staccato rhythm, We the Animals is 125 pages long and made of 19 chapters spotlighting different moments in the lives of 3 brothers growing up in a dysfunctional family in Brooklyn, New York. The novel is a dark, lyrical portrayal of boyhood and toxic masculinity as it follows the 3 brothers from boyhood to adolescence through several jumps in time that resist a novel’s evocation of a “vivid and continuous dream,” to echo John Gardner’s famous words. Another subversive narrative choice here is the abrupt switch in narration from a first-person plural to a first-person singular narration toward the end of the book, as the story’s protagonist no longer refers to the inseparable 3 brothers, but to the youngest one who invites the reader to witness the violence his family inflicts on him when they find out he is gay.  

If character-driven fiction is a hallmark of the modern, Western, realist novel, here’s a community-driven novel recounted in the first-person plural narration for all of its 200 pages. As the title suggests, Brown Girls is a coming-of-age story of brown girls, children of immigrants, who grow up in Queens, New York, although the novel’s biggest innovation lies in the way it makes it impossible to nail down the protagonist. The book’s narrator-protagonist, the “we” who continues to talk in the book, refers to a consistently fluid, changing, and inclusive community of straight and queer brown girls from NYC who share a South or Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, Latinx, biracial or other kinds of mixed-race identity, a narrative feat I haven’t yet encountered in another novel.