The Donoghue Interregnum: 1990!

We begin in that halcyon year of 1990, the year of my return to Boston! Thatcher resigned, the Berlin Wall fell, priceless works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the great Jim Henson died. And in the world of books, this is how things broke down:

Best Fiction:

10 – The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk – This curiously twisty story about an Istanbul lawyer’s multi-layered search for his missing wife is taut and smart, the first Pamuk book I actually read and liked.

9 – The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi – Likewise this novel, about poor hormone-tormented young Karim Amir: it was my first positive Kureishi reading experience. You can read my full thoughts on it here.

8 – Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair – This gemlike novella about the crush developed by clueless old British novelist Giles De’Ath on pretty-boy American film heartthrob Ronnie Bostock was one of the highlights of my reading year, a perfect exploration of the extents an intellectual can go to if he finds himself caught in the emotions of lust.

7 – Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli – It won’t be often that I bring a YA novel into these lists, but this one certainly warrants it; it’s the self-conscious tall tale of an 11-year-old boy who steps easily from the reality of his small-town life into legend.

6 – Possession by A. S. Byatt – Byatt’s richly-textured novel about a pair of scholars researching a pair of Victorian poets was slow to grow on me, despite the steady way it moved on to bestseller status and despite the huge number of bookstore customers urgently recommending it to me. But I eventually came to love it, especially its subtle humor.

5 – Symposium by Muriel Spark – Black humor, Spark’s speciality, runs through this slim story of a doomed dinner party. I loved every page.

4 – Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordechai Richler – I was already a Richler fan of long standing before this great novel, so manically absurdist and shaggy-dog in its perfect construction, and I’ve energetically recommended it over the years even as I’ve watched Richler’s reputation steadily fade.

3 – Restoration by Rose Tremain – Naturally, I immediately took to this sumptuous historical novel about a seventeenth-century glove-maker’s son who becomes the ultimate social climber in the court of King Charles II. It’s smart and witty and sharply paced, in ways I don’t think Tremain equals again anywhere in her career.

2 – Delhi by Khushwant Singh – Singh’s endlessly bawdy and enormously affectionate pen-portrait of his beloved city of Delhi has delighted me more with every successive re-reading, and it pleased the hell out of me even back when I first read it, although it’s a tougher recommendation to make to even well-read readers than anything other work of fiction from this year.

1 – Entered from the Sun by George Garrett – I’ve praised this muscular, gorgeously elliptical novel “about” the slain playwright Christopher Marlowe many, many times, and I’m sure I’ll continue to praise it here on Stevereads. It’s Garrett’s best and strangest book.

Best Nonfiction:

10 – Lawrence of Arabia by Jeremy Wilson – This enormous authorized biography of T. E. Lawrence isn’t nearly as snarky as Richard Aldington’s nor as rhetorically gifted as John Mack’s A Prince of Our Disorder, but it has a stately grandeur they both lack.

9 – Looking for a Ship by John McPhee – As odd and idiosyncratic as anything McPhee ever wrote – and more beautiful than anything of his other than The Pine Barrens – this book tells the story of the author and his friend shipping out on a Merchant Marine down the Pacific coast of South America, and it’s positively suffused with sea-stories.

8 – The Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich – The life of an 18th-century midwife in the wilderness of Maine originally struck me as unlikely raw material for a great book, but Ulrich proves me wrong almost from her first page. I was happy to hand-sell this book to many, many customers.

7 – Notes of a Hanging Judge by Stanley Crouch – This utterly electrifying collection of essays and reviews mostly centers around key or controversial figures in the American Civil Rights movement, and Crouch’s voice is so thoughtful and powerful that there isn’t a dull or bombastic page in the book.

6 – Becoming a Poet by David Kaldstone – This posthumous study of the unexpectedly intricate connections between Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell ends up being mostly about Bishop and her poetry, and that’s just fine, since the author is brilliant on the subject.

5 – What I Saw at the Revolution by Peggy Noonan – Noonan’s memoir of being a speechwriter in the administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush is smart and funny and winningly partisan in ways that no similar memoir of this (or any other) year manages to be.

4 – The Holocaust by Leni Yahil – This one’s a technicality, since this incredibly detailed, incredibly moving account of the origins and implementation of Hitler’s Final Solution originally appeared in 1987. But the English translation appeared this year, and the book is such a landmark I thought I’d stretch a point and include it.

3 – The Westies by T J English – I didn’t expect to like this nitty-gritty account of the life and death of the “Westies” gang of 1960s Hell’s Kitchen, but English proved to be such an energetic storyteller that I was sucked right in (and the bucket-loads of gratuitous gore didn’t hurt, either).

2 – The King’s Cardinal by Peter Gwyn – Talk about storytelling! In this great book, Gwyn sets out to challenge the then-standard view of Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wolsey, as a typical bloated Church climber – and he’s so convincing I’ve re-read his book half a dozen times.

1 – Tribes with Flags by Charlie Glass – Glass’s account of his 1987 kidnapping outside of Beirut, the most famous detail from this fantastic book, is just a tiny part of it; most of the book is a vividly intelligent tour of the various backways and byways of the Levant, and it’s so powerfully observed that it sticks in my mind as the best nonfiction book of 1990.