Ah, 2006, where have you gone? Last year’s top novels made fiction look resurgent. There was Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” Deborah Eisenberg’s “Twilight of the Superheroes,” Dave Eggers’ “What Is The What?” and Ken Kalfus’ “A Disorder Peculiar To The Country” - all surprising works both for their inventive prose and for the writers than authored them. Throw in less surprising but no less competent “Everyman” by Philip Roth and “Black Swan Green” by David Mitchell and we’re talking about the best year of fiction in recent memory.

I’ll remember the year in fiction 2007 as just the opposite. Many of the novels I had the misfortune of reading seemed to be contract-fillers from the get-go.

Philip Roth’s “Exit Ghost,” the final Zuckerman novel, is much worse than many critics are willing to admit (after all, it’s PHILIP ROTH!). Who would think that Roth would write a novel about an aging incontinent Jewish man lusting after a younger woman? Oh wait, everyone? “Lost City Radio,” Daniel Alarcon’s follow-up novel to the brilliant story collection “War By Candlelight,” got glowing reviews for the story of a radio show host who comforts vanished families in a fictional war-torn South American country. Despite my anticipation, my reception of “Radio” was static-filled and garbled at best. Denis Johnson’s Vietnam epic, “Tree of Smoke,” took ten years to write and reads like the best novel of 1987. Unfortunately, in 2007, the novel just seems like literature’s version of Cindy Crawford, an aging model you’ve seen far too many times.

After awhile, I just lost interest in the literary authors the major publishing houses were busy pushing this year. McEwan is great, but does the world need another Ian McEwan novel (“On Chesil Beach”)? I’m writing this just as Atonement the movie hits theaters. Might as well make it official that McEwan jumped the shark for me after “Atonement” was published. Ha Jin published another novel (“The Free Life”), but I felt no compunction about missing that one since I find his prose chewy at best, English As A Second Language at worst.

Perhaps the best evidence of novelists en masse churning out pages to fill contracts is how few surprises there were in 2007. Who thought Cormac McCarthy would drop a post-apocalyptic masterpiece like “The Road” last year? Not me. So many big names went back to their predictable themes and settings that I never felt bad for missing any of the “astonishing” novels the publishing houses were telling me to buy. Khalid Hosseini went back to Afghanistan in “A Thousand Splendid Suns.” Richard Russo went back to an upstate New York small town in “The Bridge of Sighs.” Tom Perrotta returned to the suburban well again with “The Abstinence Teacher.” Then there’s Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” - did you know Chabon’s Jewish?! Wow, would have never guessed!

I still haven’t gotten to all the 2007 fiction I wanted to read, but I wonder whether I should just wait for the year in fiction 2009 when the aforementioned novelists will decide to take a chance and write a novel that pushes their personal envelopes rather than fulfilling the duty of keeping their books in print. I guess I can always read yet another novel from Haruki Murakami (“After Dark”); I can just be an enabler to the novelists of 2007 and go back to the tried, true and unmemorable.