The Donoghue Interregnum: 2001

We’ve reached 2001, the year of the 9-11 attacks. Books – and everything else – in America were necessarily overshadowed, but there were of course nonetheless works of great worth:

Best Fiction:

10 The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction Colm Toibin ed (1999) – It’s this enormous, unendingly rewarding volume that gave me my first real suspicion that Toibin might have missed his real calling – as an editor (presuming he had much to do with the assembling of this Table of Contents – for all I know, he might have merely shown up at the end, lent his name and collected his paycheck, otherwise known as “pulling an Updike”). Be that as it may, this is an outstandingly stuffed and balanced anthology, one worth keeping and consulting for years.

9 The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy – Again we encounter the coldly-controlled madness that is Ellroy’s fiction, again with the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas as the center or gravity around which all events revolve, again featuring a trio of hard men, each dangerous in his own way, each coming to Dallas in order to chase down leads and nail down loose ends, and each playing with a violence that could consume him at any minute. To say this is tense reading would be an understatement – this is a series of mild heart attacks, in written form.

8 At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie McNeill – This big novel about the friendship of two Irish boys on the eve of the Easter Uprising of 1916 takes many gambles (not least inviting comparisons, through its title, with Flann O’Brien’s greatest novel), and they all pay off wonderfully. The language here is a flagrant quasi-homage to the overheated undergrowth of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and like all such homages, it works better than the original. And the story itself is heart-wrenching and a remarkable invention.

7 According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge – It’s always amazing to me how this author managed to cram 1000-page historical novels into the slim little things she regularly produced, and she never did it more effectively than in this book about Samuel Johnson and his extended circle of fellow literary luminaries, friends, and domestic hangers-on. The marvel’s of rhetorical compression here are feather-light in their execution, and yet you come away from the book feeling you know a man and an era.

6 My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk – The clockwork plots of this book (the author’s current best) is an intricate wonder, doubling and even tripling back on themselves without ever appearing to do so, and without ever disrupting the book’s surface preoccupation with one week in the life of a 16th century Ottoman Sultan. The ending isn’t really an ending, the beginning isn’t really a beginning, the characters aren’t really what they seem, and yet the experience of reading it all is ironically substantial. I don’t know how Pamuk did it.

5 Goats by Mark Judge Poirier – Talk about a novel I should hate: this debut, one prolonged hymn of praise to getting stoned, distills in 200 pages practically everything I used to hate about potheads from when I was an undergraduate, especially the arrogance that’s available only to lazy people. The young main character of this book not only gets high every day of his life (initiated into his addiction by a wise old pot-mentor) but, it’s clearly implied, is a superior human being because of it. And yet, far from being maddened by the novel, I was entranced by it – Poirier’s literary gifts more than make up for the addled world-view of his characters.

4 Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey – This strange, beautifully subdued coming-of-age story about a Scottish woman named Eva who’s been visited her entire life by two non-corporeal ‘companions’ only she can see (although we quickly learn they’re not figments of her imagination – they can very much affect the material world, not always to Eva’s liking). They guide and guard her through an early-20^th century life that’s otherwise fairly ordinary, and with amazing literary skill, Livesey combines the mundane and the supernatural and brings their story to a conclusion that’s at once comforting and unsettling. This is one of those creeping novels that sneaks past your guard and then sticks with you.

3 Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks – The year in question in this amazing historical novel by Brooks is in the 17^th century, in rural England, and the wonders are dark ones: the village is struck by plague. In response, the village’s vicar compels the townspeople to seal off the village from the outside world and let God’s will takes its course, and the slim, powerful novel that follows is harrowing to read and yet also, somehow, lovely.

2 The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh – This story of an Indian boy named Rajkumar whose life is upended in 1885, the year the British invade Burma and depose its royal family. Rajkumar catches a glimpse of royal servant named Dolly, and the thought of her haunts him throughout the ensuing years of his life as he rises to power and wealth in the teak industry. Ghosh takes this already-sprawling story and doubles and redoubles it in complexity and human breadth, until the novel feels like a vivid dream.

1 Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold – The best novel of the year was also a debut: an incredibly assured historical novel set in 1920s America and starring the young stage magician Charles Carter, known to his public as Carter the Great. Gold fills his book with the sights, sounds, and above all personalities of the Roaring Twenties, and through it all he threads a plot of fiendish complexity to a climax that’s downright exhilarating. A bravura performance.

Best Nonfiction

10 The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class by Jonathan Rose – Despite the broad implications of this great book’s title, it’s really about the books people read, and how they got them, and what they thought about them, and it’s an absolute feast for any other book-reader. Rose sifts through worker diaries, library records, and even the occasional printed book review in order to assess 200 years of British life from the inside out, and quite apart from their historical importance, the results end up being very, very affirming: books, as we always knew, can literally change lives.

9 Grant by Jean Edward Smith – Until I read this fantastic biography, I’d largely swallowed the standard line about the Grant presidency: an inept trudger in the center seat, surrounded by great crowds of corrupt swindlers buying and selling the government down the river. I already knew what I thought about Grant the so-called genius general, and although Smith didn’t do anything to move those military opinions, he entirely changed my perception of Grant’s political life, making me realize how much of that standard line was the result of party politics. I love it when a biography makes me see its subject in a new way, and I got that with this book.

8 Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll – This big book – Carroll’s most powerful and angry work – makes for some prolongedly difficult reading. It’s the long story of Christianity’s anti-Semitism, and Carroll spares his readers no gruesome detail or twisted psychology. I think the most riveting aspect of the book (much like William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, to name one example) is the palpable feeling of long-boiling outrage on Carroll’s part as he tells story after story of savage cruelty and cold contempt in age after age. He ends his book by calling for reformation, but even that feels like an act of outrage rather than optimism.

7 The Eternal Frontier by Tim Flannery – The ‘deep’ natural history of North America is Flannery’s subject here, and although his treatment of that subject is entirely historical, he does an eye-opening job of portraying that natural history as a flexible, living thing. He’s a superb science-popularizer, and his vivid descriptions of all the various eras of the place are unfailingly thought-provoking. And his call to re-introduce elephants to the American plains? I’d be all for it, if we first killed off all the humans living there.

6 Savage Beauty by Nancy Mitford – Anybody who’d read this author’s deeply empathetic biography of Zelda Fitzgerald would know what to expect from this look at the great poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Mitford wonderfully delivers: here is the poet, the celebrity, and the human being, all brought to immediate life on the page. I’d hoped, when the book first appeared, that it would spark a critical revival of Millay, but no – it’s possible the art she once dominated has stupidly outgrown her.

5 Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century by James Farrell – The character of former Speaker of the House and quintessential drunken Irish political backstage operator Thomas “Tip” O’Neill just naturally lends itself to Irish-stereotype caricatures, a great many of which O’Neill himself happily perpetuated in his own book, and it’s to Farrell’s great credit that he side-steps such blarney in order to deliver instead a shrewd study of how Congressional power operated in the long era before one of the US’s two political parties lost its collective mind and became an object of ridicule for anybody who’s ever read a book or had a thought. Farrell’s O’Neill is a deeply flawed individual, but even so, my guess is he would have liked this book more than the fawning encomiums he saw in his time.

4 Washington by Meg Greenfield – One of the clearest, sanest voices cutting through the babble of O’Neill’s Washington was that of Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield, and this posthumous memoir manages to preserve something of that voice, although not enough of it – the book of her long-time friend and ally in the Capital, Katharine Graham, is more than three times as long (and the book of their incredible partnership has yet to be written). The portrait she paints in these pages of the sordid drama of Washington has all the sharp angles she loved so much, and it also has the virtue of being true.

3 The Third Reich by Michael Burleigh – Gott knows, the world doesn’t lack for long histories of the Third Reich, and even I, whose love of reading about the WWII era is second to none, looked at this book in the publisher’s catalog with something approaching weariness. But although Burleigh’s subject matter is intensely familiar, and although his lines of historical inquiry have been trod into broad elephant-trails, he manages through sheer dint of literary ability to make this an indispensable volume for any WWII library.

2 Dead Certainties by Simon Schama – This little book consists of two halves – one telling the story of the death of General Wolfe in 1759 on the Plains of Abraham and the other telling the story of the murder of Boston grandee George Parkman in 1849. Despite some lit-rary fancy-dancing on Schama’s part, nothing connects these two deaths – this book is just two long American Scholar articles forced to live in the same small room like Hoosier undergrads. But I wasn’t ten pages in before I stopped caring about that, because all of Schama’s great literary gifts (which sometimes take protracted coffee breaks during his longer works, especially his universally-praised snoozer Citizens) are on fire in these pages. Despite the longer and far more ambitious books this author has written, this is the thing of his I always recommend to newcomers – the Parkman piece especially is just damn fine writing.

1 The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens – As with a few books on our list for this year, so too even more for this tiny hand-grenade from the late Christopher Hitchens: revelation is the goal and hugely successful effect. In this case, Hitchens takes the near-universal dislike every thinking person has felt for Henry Kissinger for five decades and relentlessly concentrates it all into a knife-point war crimes indictment of unanswerable brilliance. I had my issues with Hitchens, certainly (foremost among them being his alcohol-spawned grasping laziness – this thing, for instance, is a pamphlet when it should have been a book, and it joins a long list of other such rushed-up squibs), but here he’s in utterly inimitable top form.