Season's readings

Critic's choice: the year's best fiction

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, December 7, 1997

Page: G1

Section: Books

But there were plentiful riches to be found elsewhere on the range, from the elegant precision of Ward Just's Washington novel, ``Echo House,'' to the much adored ``The God of Small Things,'' Arundhati Roy's dark little drama of iniquity and caste set in contemporary India. Francisco Goldman delivered a spookily lovely story about stranded sailors on a ghost ship with ``The Ordinary Seaman.'' ``The Complete Stories'' of Bernard Malamud graced the year, as did the less seasoned likes of Charles Baxter's luminescent stories in ``Believers.'' Edna O'Brien gave us her usual blend of passion and shadow with the heart-heavy story of a pregnant girl in Ireland in ``Down by the River.'' And the inimitable P. D. James, British queen of murder-with-manners, provided a sweet frisson of danger in ``A Certain Justice.''

A few of the reigning lions showed up in 1997, with Saul Bellow contributing a spare but signature novella in ``The Actual'' and John Updike providing his own brand of mischief in the indulgent but rueful ``Toward the End of Time.'' Richard Ford took us to Paris and Montana in the three careful stories of ``Women with Men.'' Joyce Carol Oates took us, as usual, to the bleaker corners of upstate New York in ``Man Crazy,'' a novel so frenzied and psycho we were all lucky to get out alive.

Not so with Julie Hecht, this year's fabulous, made-in-New-York newcomer, who delivers a delightfully aberrant world in ``Do the Windows Open?''; her voice makes you want to stay there forever. (Two other contributions to the world of Zany Chic were Kirsten Bakis's fabulist ``Lives of the Monster Dogs'' and Linda Yablonsky's ``The Story of Junk.'') Blanche McCrary Boyd captured a neighboring branch of black hilarity in ``Terminal Velocity,'' which opens in a lesbian commune in Mendocino County. Diane Johnson wrote a semi-farcical romance, posing as Jamesian, in ``Le Divorce.'' John Dufresne weighed in again this year as sit-down comic with ``Love Warps the Mind a Little''; Richard Russo, who has a singular talent for masking sadness with humor, performed a masterful camouflage with his academic satire, ``Straight Man.'' Less fully realized but still fetching were Amy Hempel's stories, ``Tumble Home.'' Garrison Keillor managed his familar homespun bitters in ``Wobegon Boy.'' Canadian Barbara Gowdy, in ``Mister Sandman,'' combined the freakish and the comedic, with engaging but uneven results.

Every year is a good year for the short story, regardless of the trend-callers rediscovering it from time to time, and 1997 had its share of fine collections, including Tess Gallagher's spare, deeply realized ``At the Owl Woman Saloon''; Deborah Eisenberg's quirky and wise ``All Around Atlantis''; Francine Prose's ironic novellas in ``Guided Tours of Hell''; and Paul Theroux's ``Collected Stories.'' Amy Bloom wrote a collection of intricately linked stories camouflaged as a novel, ``Love Invents Us''; Julia Alvarez enjoyed a like-minded creative license in ``Yo!''

Cristina Garcia took us to Cuba in her sparkling story of two women separated when young, ``The Aguero Sisters.'' Arthur Golden took us to the silent prison of geisha culture in ``Memoirs of a Geisha''; Nora Okja Keller explored another degree of misery in ``Comfort Woman.'' Allan Gurganus squired us through an artfully arty New York on the verge of the AIDS crisis in ``Plays Well with Others''; in ``The Farewell Symphony,'' Edmund White returned to the same plague-ridden territory, albeit autobiographically, with the advantage of elegant prose. Jay Parini used biography to deliver fiction in his story starring Walter Benjamin, ``Benjamin's Crossing.'' And Thomas Mallon, a novelist in love with history, returned us to the postwar years in ``Dewey Defeats Truman.''

With its usual surplus of reserve, New England is proud of its writers, though we claim so many there's rarely enough praise to go 'round. Localish heroes abounded this year in the world of fiction, with novels from Douglas Bauer (``The Book of Famous Iowans''), Caroline Preston (``Jackie by Josie''), Elizabeth Graver (``Unravelling''), Alice Hoffman (``Here on Earth''), and Leslie Epstein (``Pandaemonium''). Suzanne Berne wrote a foreboding first novel in ``A Crime in the Neighborhood''; Dennis McFarland, looking to ``The Turn of the Screw'' for his model, delivered a brilliantly ghostly work set in London in ``A Face at the Window.''

We rather wish Denis Johnson hadn't unearthed the spirits of ``Already Dead,'' a novel of bad-news hipster California that's just as soon forgotten. A similar lifelessness prevails over Ann Beattie's ``My Life, Starring Dara Falcon,'' whereas Carol Shields's ``Larry's Party'' got lost in a maze garden of its own creation. Brad Morrow's ``Giovanni's Gift'' wanted to be a Faulknerian Western, and failed to be either. Other minor setbacks -- Alice Adams' ``Medicine Men,'' Rick Moody's ``Purple America'' -- disappointed in part because these are good writers who know how to do the job right.

There are losses, though, in every year, and the larger ones in 1997 were the deaths of those who touched and sometimes shaped the world of letters: V. S. Pritchett, James Laughlin, Amy Clampitt, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, James Dickey, and Michael Dorris. May their work outlast them; non omnis moriar.

Which is, of course, one of the glories of literature, not to mention duties: to take us higher, leave us not alone. Here, then, the fiction that emerged triumphant in 1997 -- scaling the peaks of the literary tundra, and making the wind at the top blow a little less raw for us all.

``The Mercy Seat'' by Rilla Askew (Viking, $23.95). Set in the badlands of the Oklahoma territory in the late 19th century, this first novel rings with exquisite echoes of Scripture and Faulkner. Its story is unrelenting; its protagonist is a young girl who has lost her mother, and is trying to walk her way out of the vast country of grief.

``Reading in the Dark'' by Seamus Deane (Knopf, $23). Oh, those marvelous Irish voices! Deane's spare novel about a boy's loss of innocence in Derry has the quiet authority of litany; casting its light on the political grief and turmoil of Northern Ireland, it is also an homage to the power of story itself.

``Underworld'' by Don DeLillo (Scribner, $27.50). What other contemporary writer would dare to envision the links between baseball, the Cold War, and modern art -- then write a dangerously farflung novel in which even these themes recede into a wash of dazzling color? DeLillo has captured much of modern America here, connecting a half-century of history, love, and trouble with undeniable brilliance. ``Underworld'' is the size of Wyoming, and just about as scarily beautiful.

``Fugitive Pieces'' by Anne Michaels (Knopf, $23). A first novel by the Canadian poet, ``Fugitive Pieces'' is in love with both the sound and meaning of words, and Michaels uses that passion to build a sometimes breathtaking story about a young boy fleeing the Holocaust. He is rescued by a Greek geologist who loves and then instructs him -- about poetry, science, how to find solace in the stars at night.

``The Puttermesser Papers'' by Cynthia Ozick (Knopf, $23). If we didn't have Cynthia Ozick, we wouldn't have thought to invent her -- she's far too original and unpredictable for such concoction. But that's precisely what happens to the protagonist of this fiercely intelligent, funny novel: Ruth Puttermesser wakes one morning to find that she's created a golem, who's soon enough baking souffles and getting Puttermesser elected mayor of New York. George Eliot gets a starring role, too.

``American Pastoral'' by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, $26). In a fiendish attempt at innocence, Roth has written a novel both tender and merciless about the fragility of the American dream. His evocation of a good man -- Swede Levov, the high-school football hero of Zuckerman's Newark -- shows that Learesque cruelties can (and do) happen to anybody. Roth's magnificent depiction of that fall from grace is his Camelot Unbound.

``Bear and His Daughter'' by Robert Stone (Houghton Mifflin, $24). The voice is part Gnostic querulousness and part hipster-saint, and nobody in America does it better, if at all. These seven stories are collected from the past 30 years; two of them are already classics of the genre, and they demonstrate Stone's unparalleled ability to go fearless in the face of tragedy -- believing in hope, but not necessarily banking on it.