We move on to 1992, when Johnny Carson retired, the Clinton era began, something called a “web browser” was first introduced, and the great Wallace Stegner died.

Best Fiction:

10 – Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates – I’d never been a big fan of Joyce Carol Oates’s writing, and when I read the advance descriptions of this book, a very lightly fictionalized version of the Chappaquiddick tragedy in which Senator Ted Kennedy left a young woman to die trapped underwater in his car, I thought the worst about authorial pandering and laziness. But the book turned out to be operating on a level far beyond my worries – it’s as sharp as an ice pick and, in a strange way, as beautiful as anything this author has written before or since.

9 – Clockers by Richard Price – Likewise with Price: a little of his usual business tends to go a long way with me. But this bleakly lyrical novel, one one level the parallel stories of a New Jersey crack dealer and a New Jersey cop, revels in that usual Price-business and still kept me captivated throughout. I’d entirely overlooked Price’s previous book, but this one alerted me to something like the full breadth of power he could summon when he was on his game.

8 – The Sheriff of Nottingham by Richard Kluger – This fantastic historical novel takes all the easy Howard Pyle cliches about the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and the virtuous Robin Hood and thoroughly inverts them, and it’s a completely assured performance from beginning to end. Not only are the psychological portraits amazingly believable (especially the one of King John), but the dirty, seedy, yet oddly bracing texture of day-to-day life in medieval times is conveyed with real skill.

7 – The End of the Novel by Michael Kruger – This strange, strange thin novel is as much about excision as inclusion; its nominal subject is an author (not unlike its author, naturally) who’s been laboring at his masterwork for years when he suddenly begins stripping things out of the manuscript instead of putting things in – begins, in other words, whittling it down to a book that will become The End of the Novel. The descriptions of the process are minimalist and beguiling – more than most of the books on this list, this is one I wish I’d kept.

6 – Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge – Vinge’s sprawling masterpiece of interplanetary idea-binging science fiction was another one of those books whose brilliance announced itself to me after mere minutes of reading. It’s impossible to synopsize the gigantic plots of this book, which is as much about the looming dangers of the Internet as it is about space battles with aliens, but although its proceedings would be a bit of a stretch for newcomers to the genre, sci-fi fans who haven’t read it are summarily urged to do so.

5 – Living After Midnight by Lee Abbott – The Cheever territory of societally-emasculated men moping their way through midlife crises usually bores the pee out of me (some book critics I know review virtually nothing else, and their stamina baffles me), but through the grace of his well-shaped prose, Abbott here managed to keep me eagerly reading, and the book has stayed in my memory ever since, even though my original copy has long since disappeared.

4 – Rumpole on Trial by John Mortimer – Although he very much wanted to give the impression that his beloved Rumpole of the Bailey stories were as natural and unchanging as PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster stories, the truth is that John Mortimer improved as a writer over time, and the stories in this collection amply demonstrate that fact, especially “Rumpole and the Miscarriage of Justice” and the wonderful title story.

3 – Meeting Evil by Thomas Berger – In the bookselling world, the contemporary fiction of Thomas Berger was always a tough sell (unlike his historical fictions, which customers somehow found less threatening, even though they’re actually far more subversive), and never more so than this novel about an ordinary man who meets evil on his front doorstep in the form of a stranger in need. The book unfolds with unblinking malevolence toward the reader’s comfortable expectations, and the conclusion is as sick and inevitable as a holiday car-crash.

2 – Nothing But Blue Skies by Thomas McGuane – This deceptively simple-looking novel about a Montana man who becomes weirdly, obsessively deranged when his wife leaves him is plotted in a shaggy-dog over-the-top way that makes no explicit sense, but such is the moral conviction (not to mention steely prose skill) that McGuane brings to it that I somehow never ended up doubting any of it.

1. Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth – This best novel of the year is an immensely powerful work of historical fiction that puts several different faces on the British slave trade while at the same time delivering a Mardi-style adventure and a tensely-orchestrated climax. I’m predictably partial to another of Unsworth’s novels, but I recognize this one as his masterpiece.

 

 

Best Nonfiction:

10 – Men and Whales by Richard Ellis – This tough and harrowing history of mankind’s calamitous interaction with the large cetaceans of the world doesn’t exactly make for easy reading, but Ellis crafts such smart prose that you keep reading any, from one slaughter and near-genocide to the next.

9 – Edgar A. Poe by Kenneth Silverman – I came to this book after reading and very much liking the author’s biography of Cotton Mather, a tortured soul and not the easiest person to chronicle. I was thus hoping that Silverman would bring the same sympathetic acumen to this far more famous tortured soul – and I was enormously rewarded: this is still by far my favorite biography of Poe and the one I always recommend first.

8 – The Rascal King by Jack Beatty – This richly-detailed biography of Boston’s epically corrupt and larger-than-life mayor James Michael Curley has that ‘instant classic’ feel all through its pages! Beatty, amazingly, isn’t flattened by the innumerable great stories surrounding Curley’s life and times – rather, he wades into them and brings them marvelously to life. It takes quite a book to go toe-to-toe with Curley’s own I’d Do It Again, and this is such a book.

7 – Whale by Moonlight by Diane Ackerman – Crocodiles, penguins, and whales fill this luminously eloquent book, with Ackerman writing a pitch-perfect mixture of appreciation and natural history. The chapter on bats alone is worth its weight in lesser such accounts.

6 – Byzantium: The Apogee by John Julius Norwich – This middle volume of Norwich’s three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire is not only the most heartfelt of the three but also has the best stories to tell. I’ve very much liked most of Norwich’s books, but this trilogy is by far my favorite, and this middle volume is my favorite of the three.

5 – The Passion of Emily Dickinson by Judith Farr – I ordinarily distrust biographies who take this particular approach to their subject, searching out their landmarks and significances by sifting and probing their emotional states, especially when it involves a neurological basket-case like Emily Dickinson, but in this engrossing volume, Farr makes the approach work wonders – you really do finish the book feeling you know its subject personally.

4 – The Reckoning by Charles Nicholl – This electrifying book, in which Nicholl exhaustively investigates the precise circumstances informing the death of Christopher Marlowe, proves with soaring success how exciting history can be in the hands of a writer who remembers to convey the thrilling intellectual spadework all the best historians do. Nicholl doggedly traces the lives of the four men in that room in Deptford, finding connections and resonances nobody had found before, and the result is astonishing.

3 – Intellectual Memoirs by Mary McCarthy – A newcomer to this fantastic book, seeing that it covers only a couple of years, might wonder how it could be worth reading at all, much less merit a place on this list! But McCarthy’s account in these pages of her early, hustling years in New York, writing freelance book reviews, working and maneuvering to get commissions and pay bills and make deadlines and shoe-horning prose into word-limits, is so intensely human and readable that it should certainly be required reading for all young would-be writers in the marketplace.

2 – Landscape with Reptile by Thomas Palmer – This amazingly lyrical natural history about the small population of rattlesnakes that lives in Massachusetts’ Blue Hills Reservation tackles the reader’s perhaps ingrained dislike of snakes head-on, with an opening description of what it feels like, step by step, to be first poisoned and then consumed by a rattler. But the book expands from their so gracefully to include the complexity and, yes, wonder of these animals that those readers might find themselves converted by the end.

1 – What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer – This raucous, blazingly enjoyable account of the 1988 American presidential race is hands-down the best nonfiction book of the year, a smart and irreverent analysis of not only the major candidates (the look at Bob Dole is especially acute) but the whole ugly, ungainly machinery of American politics.