The Donoghue Interregnum: 1991!

We continue with the year 1991, when Operation Desert Storm expelled Iraq from Kuwait, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, the Soviet Union dissolved at long last, and the great Gene Roddenberry died. This is how the books stacked up:

Best Fiction:

10 – Rumpole a la Carte by John Mortimer – Six classic stories to start off the year’s fiction bests! This sparkling connection contains some real gems, including “Rumpole and the Summer of Discontent,” the title story (in which our hero defends an arrogant celebrity chef), and the highlight of the collection, “Rumpole for the Prosecution.”

9 – The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky – The author returns to his favorite fictional alter ego, Danny Smiricky, who in this raucous novel hinging on the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of 1968 stands back and offers acidic commentary on the absurdities of life in Communist Czechoslovakia.

8 – Brotherly Love by Pete Dexter – These lists are of course too late to include Dexter’s masterpiece Paris Trout, but Brotherly Love, the story of two very different young cousins whose lives take very different paths, is a pretty damn good substitute from one of America’s best novelists.

7 – The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper by Paul West – This author’s novels are a bit of an acquired taste, but I’ve loved every one of them, and this one – a fictional realization of the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper – was no exception; it’s fantastic and very effectively unsettling.

6 – The Runaway Soul by Harold Brodkey – Brodkey’s enormous (and long-awaited) novel about one man’s life-journey through American suburbia is so extravagantly observed and gorgeously written that it was one of the few books on any of these lists that actually made me wish, while I was reading it, that I would then go on to review it somewhere.

5 – Lady’s Maid by Margaret Forster – A lush and deceptively intelligent novel about the love and life of Elizabeth Barrett and her husband Robert Browning, told from the point of view of Elizabeth’s lady’s maid, who also ends up having a quite poignant tale of her own.

4 – Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal – Another slight fudge of the rules here, since this little book first appeared in the 70s! But the first English-language translation I read was in 1991, and I instantly love – and felt challenged by – this story of a man who learns how to think by reading the haphazard written discards of other people.

3 – Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima – An amazing, tightly-controlled work about a Prague street-sweeper who is actually a defrocked and deeply frustrated writer – the story mixes his involuntary observations of the people all around him (to whom he’s invisible, of course) with his musings on his own life, all of it filtered through his lifelong obsession with Franz Kafka. I came to it with many oddly happy memories of Prague, and I dared the book to trivialize them or trade on them – but it never did.

2 – An Honorable Profession by John L’Heureux – I’m a big fan of this author, and I came to this book with high hopes that were completely fulfilled. It’s the story of a vain but good-hearted Boston schoolteacher whose life systematically falls apart after he befriends a bullied boy at his school and then the boy commits suicide. It’s all told with grace and nuance, which makes some of its moral conclusions all the more stark.

1 – The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers – This, the best novel of 1991, is not only also the best thing Powers has written so far but also the best novel of the entire decade. Like so many of Powers’s most powerful works, it’s tricky to synopsize, but the two main plots – the life of a genius molecular biologist and the lives of a young couple who, years later, investigate that biologist’s disappearance – are marvelously, delicately interwoven throughout the book. It flat-out amazed me when I first read it, and each subsequent re-reading has revealed new wonders.

Best Nonfiction:

10 – Divorce Among the Gulls by William Jordan – How roundly Jordan was criticized in the natural history community for this wonderful, richly anecdotal series of looks at animals in the wild! How angrily he was accused of anthropomorphizing! It’s only now, a quarter-century later, that science is just beginning to understand the truth underlying Jordan’s book: that animals are at least as similar as they are different.

9 – Anne Sexton by Diane Middlebrook – Middlebrook’s biography of the troubled poet is not only groundbreaking but also unstintingly powerful – helped in large part by the soaring skill of Middlebrook’s own prose, so sharp and insightful and knowingly sympathetic.

8 – Long Day’s Journey into War by Stanley Weintraub – One of my favorite popular historians is fantastic and typically aphoristic in this long, minutely-detailed look at the world in the immediate ramp-up to the entry of the United States into the Second World War. Personalities – always Weintraub’s strong suit – jump off these pages.

7 – Backlash by Susan Faludi – I found Faludi’s book genuinely, startlingly eye-opening when I first read it. Like most of its male readers, I suspect, I’d sort of turned my mind’s eye away from the whole subject of women’s rights after the late 1960s and early ’70s. This book – with its cold, superbly intelligent prose detailing the long, long way women in America still had to go for anything approaching real equality – was an amazing wake-up call.

6 – Dickens by Peter Ackroyd – Here’s another one of my favorite popular historians, this time taking on the larger-than-life biography of writer I’ve never much liked. He doesn’t succeed in changing my mind about Dickens (after this many years, this many biographies, and this many re-readings of his books, I’m not sure anything will), but oh, what a fantastic story he tells in the trying!

5 – King Edward VIII by Philip Ziegler – If I’ve never much liked Charles Dickens, I’ve always actively dis-liked the appalling subject of this big, totally masterful work by another of my favorite popular historians. This feckless, idiotic king – who abandoned the Throne of England in order to marry an equally-brainless harridan – in these pages receives a far, far better biography than he deserves.

4 – Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby by Stephen Carter – I’ve been thinking back to this powerful, careful book quite a bit in the course of 2015, the most racially-charged year in America since the Watts riots half a century ago, particularly since Carter so eloquently voices a lot of the same ambivalences that are still very much present in Between the World and Me, which won Ta-Nehisi Coates the National Book Award this year. Like Susan Faludi’s book and our next title, Carter’s book was an eye-opener.

3 – Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol – This devastating look at the state of primary school education in America is so unrelentingly on-target as an indictment of income inequality that it became a bestseller on the basis of collective guilt and outrage. I myself was the lucky recipient of a fairly conscientious education, so I read Kozol’s book just riveted – and I’m sure without even checking that all the problems he discussed back in ’92 still exist today.

2 – Stalin by Robert Conquest – This biography of one of the worst mass-murdering tyrants of all time packs a lot of learning into a comparatively small number of pages and keeps every single one of those pages pointedly interesting. Last year I read Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin, which was based on lots of new archival evidence and was, even in its first volume, three times the length of Conquest’s, and yet I remember Conquest’s book more vividly.

1 – Dreadnought by Robert Massie – This, the best nonfiction book of 1991, is an enormously readable (and just plain enormous) history of the steady and in many ways crazed tensions that filled Western Europe in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War – which sounds grim, and yet one of the strengths of Massie’s book is his consistent willingness to find the dark humor in the events he’s describing. I loved this book, and I used to recommend it far and wide – until the dawn of our current “post-literate” age doomed the very idea of recommending thousand-page books just in general.