The Donoghue Interregnum: 1997!

We’re now up to 1997, the year when Woolworth’s, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and the great Jacques Cousteau all died. But books were very much alive and well, as our list clearly shows:

Best Fiction:

10 – The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald – It took me a while to warm up to the quirky minimalism of this particular author, and it’s a process that’s never yet quite happened, but this book hit all the right notes with me, for some obvious reasons and some not-so-obvious ones – for instance, this author’s grasp of the subtleties of human malice caught me by surprise, especially considering the slim elegance with which that malice is conveyed in words.

9 – The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismaile Kadare – Another in the clear theme of this year’s fiction: a slim volume! When somebody reads as fast as I do, slim volumes of anything, but especially fiction, tend to get short shrift even in my own mind, and yet this year I found myself deeply impressed by one short book after another, most certainly including this novel by Kadare about the social, political, and even religious ruckus kicked up by the construction of a new bridge in the 14th-century Balkans. All of Kadare’s strengths are here, including sharp characterizations and a heart respect for his readers’ intelligence (and a carefully-controlled taste for the macabre, which manifests here in one small detail only). No novel I read this year reminded me so favorably of J. M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.

8 – The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy – This novel is another of a type we’ve seen in these lists before: a highly-charged novel of an Indian family grappling with personal betrayals and national upheavals. But unlike some earlier examples, Roy manages to pull off a similarly credible performance in one-third the page-count, and the descriptions and tensions here are no less amazingly well-done, especially considering the fact that this is a debut.

7 – The Ax by Donald Westlake – I was utterly delighted at the appearance of this acidic novel by one of my favorite mystery writers, not least because this is to a normal murder mystery what Tannhauser is to a “Dear Abby” column. This story – about a corporately-downsized paper company executive who takes a delightfully literal approach to eliminating the competition in his job market – has every Westlake hallmark strength: his ear for dialogue, his knack for plotting, and his playfully mordant outlook on life, but in this book those elements are controlled more precisely than in anything else I’ve read by this author.

6 – Ingenious Pain by Andrew Miller – At the center of his powerfully entertaining historical novel set in the 18^th century England of the Enligtenment, Miller puts an unforgettable character: James Dyer, a man born with a freakishly recuperative metabolism and the inability to feel pain (the book had immediate appeals to me, not surprisingly). We follow Dyer as he makes his way through the strata of English society, and Miller makes it an endlessly interesting odyssey.

5 – Andorra by Peter Cameron – I’m usually no fan of the kind of unreliable-narrator games that sometimes so attract Cameron (an author whose work I typically love), and yet this novel, which is entirely built upon and motored by exactly that kind of game-playing, thrilled me from start to finish. One one level, it’s the story of a smart, soft-spoken American who relocates his life to the land of Andorra and tries to forge a new identity with the curious locals. But on a deeper level, it’s the story of the stories we tell about our own pasts, and what they tell about us. I thought it was a masterful performance, and a recent re-reading did nothing to ding that assessment.

4 – The Book of Famous Iowans by Douglas Bauer – I was drawn toward this novel set in small-town Iowa for drearily predictable reasons, but Bauer’s story of a man looking back on the parental upheavals that changed the course of his life (and effectively ended his childhood) effortlessly rises above its intentionally ironic setting and delivers a very strong story about a very unusual family-in-crisis.

3 – Mistress of Spices by Chitra Divakaruni – I originally scorned this novel about an immortal “mistress of spices” as the very worst in New Age woo-woo fiction about alternate paths and opened senses. But the simple conviction with which Divakaruni spins her tale, especially when her mistress of spices feels very human love for the first time, entirely won me over.

2 – The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White – The “farewell” symphony of this book’s title – the iconic work by Haydn in which the musicians leave the stage one by one until only a solo player is left – gives ample warning as to the tone White sets in this introspective piece of autobiographical fiction about his mature years, being a writer and watching one old friend after another drop away. But this is also White’s quippiest volume, and somehow he meshes to the two registers so naturally that you’ll be tempted to cry and laugh sometimes on the same page. A truly impressive performance.

1 – Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon – There had to be a tome on our list, and this one is it! This is Pynchon’s twisted fantasia on the picaresque adventures of the eponymous British surveying team features fire-cracker dialogue, lovely dense prose, and fantastic set pieces featuring a talking dog, an eternally-rolling wheel of cheese, a chunk of lost time wandering around the countryside, and a virulently racist George Washington. Even the first time I finished it, I knew two things: that it was Pynchon’s best book, and that I would spend the rest of eternity arguing that point with college freshmen who were really, really impressed by the 200 pages they read of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Best Nonfiction:

10 – Pages Passed from Hand to Hand, edited by Mark Mitchell & David Leavitt – This sensitive, incredibly discerning anthology unearths and stitches together an entire literary DNA for American literature, revealing a long and deeply encoded history that needed careful teasing to bring it into the light. This is a book to savor and re-read, a book to feature prominently on college reading lists, a book to change minds.

9 – A Journey with Elsa Cloud by Leila Hadley – The two strands of this wonderful book – the complicated relationship between a mother and daughter who don’t see eye-to- eye and a glowingly gorgeous portrait of life in contemporary India – intertwine so expertly in Hadley’s handling that it’s impossible to see the seams. I ordinarily loathe the narcissism of “the world helped us work things out” travel books, but this one is of a very different order.

8 – Rage for Fame by Sylvia Jukes Morris – The overcharged and hyper-charismatic life of Clare Booth Luce is the subject Morris takes on in this first volume of her epic two-volume biography – it’s a story that had never been told in such detail (indeed, critical carpers mentioned the sheer amount of detail almost compulsively), and this volume chronicles the best part of the story, the “ascent” to notoriety and fortune and all the newspaper headlines. And yet, Morris shows throughout a sharp psychological insight into her subject, an insight that’s easy to lose in the welter of gowns and Broadway shows and rich husbands.

7 – Whittaker Chambers by Sam Tanenhaus – Even in a standout year of strong biographies, this muscular volume stands out, even if only for all the ground-breaking research Tanenhaus does into the incredibly complicated life of a spy who came in from the cold. But as with Rage for Fame, the real standout quality of this book is the biographer’s shrewd understanding of the cast of characters involved – even Alger Hiss, even, Gawd help us, Richard Nixon. Like some of the best biographies, this book doubles as a portrait of an entire era.

6 – American Visions by Robert Hughes – The author came to America to film and research and understand the nation’s art, reaching all the way back to prehistory and extending all the way forward to the most hair-brained permutations of modernism. The result was not only an intensely enjoyable TV documentary but this invigorating book, stuffed full of the author’s typically barbed, funny observations about iconic art and the artists who created it. In a field full of contenders, this is Hughes’s best book.

5 – The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Helen Vendler – Our greatest living critical teacher of poetry in this beautiful volume turns her attention to the most-studied sequence of poems in human history. As much as I love Vendler’s work, I honestly thought when I started this book that it would contain nothing I hadn’t read in many dozens of similar works. But in that wonderful way that brilliant authors have, she surprised me on every page – with at least one predictable result: I never re-read those dozens of similar works, and I re-read this book at least once a year.

4 – Hogarth by Jenny Uglow – This enormous book is about so much more than the 18th-century London artist of its title – as with Whitaker Chambers, so too here: the book contains an entire world. The grubby, grasping, menacing, and entirely alive England of Hogarth’s time is like an added character throughout the narrative, constantly challenging, uplifting, and undermining the various strivers and connivers who inhabit it – none more so than William Hogarth himself. The book is a thoroughly impressive performance from start to finish.

3 – God and The American Writer by Alfred Kazin – The great critical thinker Alfred Kazin here looks at the seminal titans of American literature, figures like Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and, for better or worse, Faulkner, and he draws out from each of them their themes of God and religion, sifting the evidence and grinding away in that brainy style of his, searching for the truth buried deep under his somewhat trite theme. That’s one of the many pleasures of reading this writer: he makes the predictable brand new.

2 – Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian – This book was slow to grow on me – it’s very much the kind of history-as-memoir hash I tend to dislike, and the fact that the history in question this time, the Armenian genocide, is so emotionally charged only raised my suspicions even more. But Balakian’s avowedly personal approach quickly disarms such worries – he works the mixed genre of his topic as skillfully and eloquently as Daniel Mendelsohn, for example, does in his superb 2006 book The Lost.

1 – Byron by Phyllis Grosskurth – It takes a literary figure of Lord Bryon’s stature to withstand so well a biography so withering as this one! Grosskurth comes to her story with knives sharpened and ears deafened to context or excuse-making, and the resulting book, although by no means the Byron biography you should read if you’re only going to read one, is utterly bracing, the kind of well-researched but angrily-biased argument-starter that is often more informative and more interesting than a more balanced approach would be. I myself love this kind of rabble-rousing biography of famous figures, and Grosskurth’s is one of my favorites.