The Donoghue Interregnum: 1998!

Through toil and patience, we’ve reached 1998, when the IRA once again laid down its arms, Islamic terrorism rises all over the world, President Bill Clinton is impeached for the 431^st Clinton scandal, and the great Martha Gellhorn died. Here’s the book-world outlook:

Fiction

10 – A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe – What insufferable book-critics (other insufferable book-critics) might refer to as the epi-phenomenon of Tom Wolfe fiction has fascinated me from its beginning. To my mind, far, far too many of those critics concentrated almost exclusively on the author’s much-earlier nonfiction work and sartorial choices, while ignoring a string of meaty, smartly-constructed novels. I thought this about A Bonfire of Vanities, and I thought it even more strongly about this book, which struck me as a genuine masterpiece of American fiction. Occasionally self-indulgent, yes, but what masterpiece isn’t?

9 – The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett – This novel of 19th-century Arctic exploration (and the people such explorations leave behind at home) struck me as far more powerful than anything else Barrett had written – the descriptions and the characters all breathe with a palpability that goes far beyond the large amount of research Barrett obviously did in preparation for the book. It’s the only novel of hers that I re-read.

8 – Daughter of Troy by Sarah Franklin – Talk about re-reading! As some of you will know, there’s scarcely a book in the world that I’ve read more times than Homer’s Iliad, and I’ve likewise read more Homer pastiche-fiction than anybody else on Earth (and even wrote some of it, a trilogy of unpublished novels called Troy War, Steve Donoghue’s Ulysses, and The Telemachiad). So naturally I jumped at this retelling of the Trojan War story from the viewpoint of Briseis, here a spirited young seer who’s invested by Franklin with a wonderfully sharp, sometimes bawdy personality. The book was a very supple read, not quite like any other Homeric pastiche fiction I’ve ever read.

7 – Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler – Barney Panofsky, the eruptive main character of Richler’s hilarious tale of dueling memoirs, is like a Philip Roth narrator if such a character were written with depth, intelligence, very effective humor, and actual literary skill. Predictably, Richler has no trouble at all inhabiting his carping, smart, hyper-sarcastic, funny doppelganger, and as a result this is one of this most immediately affectionate novels.

6 – The Archivist by Martha Cooley – The clash of personalities in this remarkable debut between a wounded, mandarin academic who sits like a hoarding dragon on a precious trove of rare TS Eliot letters and an eager young researcher who very much wants to see them is at the heart of this novel, but it very skillfully expands into a symphony of voices, including the professor’s long-dead wife. It’s a very hauntingly executed story, one that’s stuck with me.

5 – Freedomland by Richard Price – We started off this list with an author whose worth is sometimes obscured by his flashy style, and the same thing is very much the case for Price, who favors a kind of low-key rhetorical pyrotechnics virtually guaranteed to distract many readers and reviewers. This story, a child-kidnapping police procedural in Price’s favored gritty New Jersey locale, manages to chip out a hero from the grim background and tells an utterly gripping thriller with bracing literary merit.

4 – Leonardo’s Horse by R M Berry – Once again we have a perfectly-executed parallel narrative, one set in the present day and detailing the misadventures of a hapless man named Charlie Dent and the other giving us one of the best, most compelling fictional recreation of Leonardo da Vinci I’ve ever read, a recreation centering on the epic horse-statue Leonardo was commissioned to do for the city of Milan, a horse of such stunning size that the project inevitably came to nothing. This is a strange, frustrated dual-story, full of thwarted inspirations and lovely prose.

3 – Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton – This sweet, lovely novel has a lot in common with The Archivist, except without rancid old TS Eliot getting in the way: a headstrong, lively female grad student seeks out a much older male novelist, a steady, respected mid-list figure who isn’t at all sure he wants to be ‘rediscovered’ by such an enthusiastic literary explorer. The delicate, half-implied relationship between these two is a marvel of fine writing.

2 – Damascus Gate by Robert Stone – As a later age would say, there are many moving parts in this big atmospheric literary thriller: heroes, antiheroes, lunatics, innocents, all drawn into the psychic whorl that Jerusalem so easily seems to be for so many people, all mixed in with complicatedly interconnected plots involving disruptive politics and the end of the world. But Stone does a fiercely good job of not only uniting these elements but also deepening them – this ends up being a profoundly probing novel.

1 – An Arrow’s Flight by Mark Merlis – This fantastic novel is our second Homeric pastiche this year, but whereas Daughter of Troy takes a fairly reverential stance alongside its “source material,” this book is a wild and sardonic fantasia on the Trojan War, here a conventional modern-day conflict fought with aircraft carriers, in which the Greeks are badly in need of a new military star since the death of Achilles and turn in their desperation to the son of Achilles – who’s a handsome gay go-go boy in the city and wants nothing of the wars of his father’s generation. It was the best, saddest, most touching book I read this year.

Best Nonfiction

10 – My Life in Dog Years by Gary Paulsen – This book is very slim, less than 150 pages, and it’s very simply done (I’ve seen it assigned to very young grades), but in its sentiment and execution, its virtually flawless. In it, Paulsen briefly relates the stories and personalities of eight of the many dogs he’s known in his life, dogs who made him laugh, whose deaths tore him apart, and who saved his life both figuratively and literally. Short as it is, it’s a marvelous portrait of the many ways dogs make their humans better people.

9 – The Red Hourglass by Gordon Grice – Poison is the underlying subject of this creepy, irresistible book, the various biological poisons that living creatures wield, and how they work. The book’s title obviously refers to the black widow spider, but everybody who’s read this fantastic book will remember another spider far, far more vividly: Grice’s chapter on the brown recluse spider is the stuff of nightmares, particularly for me, since the brown recluse is one of the few creatures on Earth whose venom I haven’t personally experienced. I’ve been bitten by every kind of poisonous snake there is, zapped by countless scorpions, and had half a dozen annoying encounters with black widows, so Grice’s book spoke directly to me. I’ve recommended this book to many, many people, and I always tactfully leave out the fact that it’s hugely likely they go to bed at night within ten feet of a watching brown recluse spider. Why spoil the fun?

8 – The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang – In this book about the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians by the invading Japanese army in 1937, Chang proves again one of the most unsettling facts about the craft of history: great books can be written on even the most gruesome subjects. Chang spares her readers nothing, not a single instance of violence or depravity (the Japanese troops genuinely do seem crazed by blood-lust), and yet her book is riveting to read, the best work of history this year.

7 – World Poetry, edited by Katharine Washburn & John Major – There are many things to love about this big, roomy anthology, but the best of them is its unpredictability: turning the pages, you have no idea what you’ll encounter. Schools and traditions of poetry from all over the world are briefly, cogently introduced and then presented to the reader in often very quirky translations designed to spark curiosity. This is the kind of anthology that lends itself to late-night favorite-quote-swapping over wine – one of the best poetry anthologies I’ve ever read.

6 – Sight-Readings by Elizabeth Hardwick – This collection of a generous selection of Hardwick’s wonderfully conversational literary pieces ranges all over the place, from Margaret Fuller to John Updike with countless snarky digressions in between. Any such volume from this writer is a gem to be treasured, but until The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick should appear, I think this one might be my favorite. But then, I say that about all of them.

5 – Inside the Sky by William Langewiesche – For all his 30 years of reporting on a huge array of subjects, this author has always been the Shakespeare of the sky, never clearer than in this collection of airplane-related pieces, which includes some of the most intelligent and gripping writing about air disasters – what causes them, what survives them, how they work – ever written. The bulk of this author’s writing on such air disasters appeared after I’d begun to sour on the whole idea of plane travel, and this volume certainly helped that process along.

4 – Red-Tails in Love by Marie Winn – Such a winning little volume, documenting the very public mating and parenting of two hawks who built a nest high up on a Fifth Avenue apartment building. Winn works in generous helpings of natural history, and since the book deals with birds in New York City, there’s also a veritable visitor’s gallery of lunatic bird-watchers, several of whom might not remember their daughter’s name (hint: it’s Courtney) but are willing to shell out thousands of dollars to help two raptors who don’t even know they’re around. In several ways – all of them both appalling and riveting – it’s a quintessential New York story.

3 – Pack of Two by Caroline Knapp – Even more so than My Life in Dog Years, this powerful, moving book captures the glorious and bittersweet ways that humans love their dogs – in this case, how hyper-smart ex-drunk Knapp forms a life-renewing bond with a dog named Lucille. I’m naturally a big fan of the whole ‘dog enriches human life’ sub-genre (and even helped out in the writing of one or two that did fairly well in the marketplace), so I’ve read a mountain of examples – but this is one I keep going back to. I re-read it the night its author died, and it actually helped a bit, which was exactly what she intended.

2 – The Art of Scandal by Douglass Shand-Tucci – This biography of legendary Boston art patron Isabella Steward Gardner was an act of sheer nerve when it first appeared. After all, the 20^th century world of letters had produced few biographies more universally-loved than Louise Hall Tharp’s 1965 masterpiece Mrs. Jack, also about Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the idea of another such book hitting the bestseller lists seemed vaguely like an act of betrayal. But by the time I finished it even on a first reading, I was glad Shand-Tucci remained undaunted by thoughts of sacrilege: not only are his historical insights far more comprehensive than Tharp’s, but his prose is far more fitting to its subject, full of the rococo flourishes and witty digressions she loved so much in conversation. It’s a magnificent performance, not supplanting Mrs. Jack but not a bit less than it either.

1 – Africa by John Reader – The simple, monumental title of this gigantically thought-provoking book by Reader effectively conveys the almost unimaginable task it undertakes and somehow manages to perform: here in these pages is an entire vast continent, its peoples, its history, its customs, and most fascinating of all, its pre-history, all told in a prose of unfailing clarity and probity. This is one of those big, comprehensive works of nonfiction that teaches me something on virtually every page – the best nonfiction work of the year, and one of the top such books of the decade.