Closing the Books on 1986

Was 1986 a good year for books?

I answer that no year could be altogether bad that included:

1--Books on the both poles, Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams” (Scribner’s) and Michael Parfit’s “South Light: A Journey to the Last Continent” (Macmillan).

2--Four notable works from beyond the grave: Ernest Hemingway’s “Garden of Eden” (Scribner’s); Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Freud Scenario” (University of Chicago Press); Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Enchanter” (Putnam’s), and John Lennon’s “Skywriting by Word of Mouth” (Harper & Row).

3--Three well-received works of fiction by West Coast black writers: Charles Johnson’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (Atheneum); Ishmael Reed’s “Reckless Eyeballing” (Marek/St. Martin’s), and Sherley Ann Williams’ “Dessa Rose” (Morrow).

4--A play that people are reading after they have seen it, or because they haven’t been able to get tickets to it: What else but Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” (Harper & Row)?

5--An overdue, full-dress book on Woody Allen: Robert Benayoun’s “The Films of Woody Allen” (Harmony).

6--Bestsellers by David and Julie Eisenhower in the same year: his “Eisenhower at War: 1943-1945” (Random House) and her “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story” (Simon & Schuster).

7--An, at last, explicitly theological novel from theologian manque John Updike: “Roger’s Version” (Knopf), set at the Harvard divinity school and perhaps to be taken as Updike’s gift to his alma mater on the 350th anniversary of its Puritan founding.

8--The end (can it be?) of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation and Earth” saga (Doubleday).

9--Four books on great journalistic institutions: Richard Kluger’s “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune” (Knopf); Loudon Wainwright’s “The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of Life” (Knopf); Curtis Prendergast’s (with Geoffrey Colvin, edited by Robert Lubar) “The World of Time Inc.” (Atheneum), and A. M. Sperber’s “Murrow: His Life and Times” (Freundlich), Murrow having by now surely qualified for institution status.

10--Two notable musical dictionaries: the “New Harvard Dictionary of Music” (Harvard University Press) and the “New Grove Dictionary of American Music” in four volumes (Macmillan).

11--The landmark “Encyclopedia of the Constitution” (Macmillan), edited by Leonard Levy, just in time for the 1987 bicentennial celebration.

12--A work of anthropology that inspired some months of a comic strip: E. Wade Davis’ “Serpent and Rainbow” (Simon & Schuster), which fathered the recent zombie cycle of “Doonesbury.”

A good year, then, or good enough, with its complement of definitive biographies, handsome art books, fetching children’s books, and estimable novels and poems.

I find New Year’s Eve the most melancholy of the year’s holidays, however, an acknowledgement of time passing and of little else. On this holiday, therefore, the books that come unbidden to mind are those that have dealt lately with nature--grave, unchanging nature, the immensity by which we measure our human brevity.

Or used to measure it: Soon, if we are to believe a book like William Ashworth’s “The Late Great Lakes” (Knopf), such measurement will be a memory, for nature is dying faster than we are. To stand on the shore of Lake Superior, a majestic living thing that has seen so many generations of men come and go, and to be told that one will live to see its death--this is an ominous and estranging experience. During the year, when such a book arrives, we hurry past. What can be done anyway? But at the dark end of the year, perhaps we can take another look.

Or consider another 1986 title, Les Kaufman and Ken Mallory’s “The Last Extinction” (MIT Press), which claimed on impressive evidence that within our lifetime, more species will die out than have died out in the entire previous history of the planet. Once, an old woman could return to the woods where she walked as a girl, find that the birds there still sang, and take comfort in the thought that after her death, they would be singing still. Now, and this is the novelty of our era, she may return and find that there are no longer birds in the woods at all, that she has outlived them.

The death of lakes, the death of the animals--there was also at least one book this past year that dealt with the death of the air. Andrew W. Mitchell’s “The Enchanted Canopy” (Macmillan), a captivating book about life in the treetops of the world’s rain forests, ended with a warning: These forests are the principal source of the oxygen that the entire planet breathes, and they are being felled.

There were works in 1986 that dealt with the undeniable political aspects of death on this scale. Two such were Donald Worster’s “Rivers of Empire” (Pantheon) and Marc P. Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water” (Viking). Also, in the year of the Chernobyl meltdown, it seemed noteworthy that so mainstream an organization as the League of Women Voters saw fit to issue a toxic waste handbook.

But the deeper implications of this change in the setting of the human mortality play were to be sought in certain works of fiction. Here, writing reached the spot where environmental and political concerns intersect with those “selfish” personal and familial concerns that political/environmental writers--so high-minded, so healthily extroverted--rarely take up.

Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Houghton Mifflin) imagined a time in the American future in which pollution had so disrupted human reproduction that a woman capable of bearing a child was a scarce resource and an undeformed fetus a rare prize. As Atwood imagined events unfolding, it was the decline of the physical environment that strengthened the hand of religious fundamentalists for a coup d’etat and the establishment of a hieratic, sexist, reproduction-obsessed state. This novel, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, had many merits, but not the least was its perhaps prophetic linkage of slow environmental change to sudden social change.

Fertility problems also played a part in Paul Theroux’s “The O-Zone” (Putnam’s), and so again did pollution. The zone of the title is the Ozarks, rendered uninhabitable by leaks from nuclear waste dumps. But where Atwood joined her environmental concerns to a fear of religious fanaticism, the much-traveled Theroux joined his to the anger of the Third World. For a 1986 nonfiction gloss on Atwood, you might have read “If I Should Die Before I Wake” (Thomas Nelson), Jerry Falwell’s book on abortion. For a nonfiction gloss on Theroux in 1986, the year of The Statue of Liberty, the book of choice would instead have been David M. Reimers’ “Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America” (Columbia University Press).

And then there is Caroyn See’s “Golden Days” (McGraw-Hill). We have been instructed by many books over the past few years to regard nuclear war as a danger utterly unlike any that has confronted the species before. But this is not quite true. The apparatus of nuclear war has in common with other technological apparatus the possibility of misfunction, and this possibility seems to me to be the premise of See’s novel about surviving the unsurvivable.

No doubt, a properly managed nuclear war could do away with us all--cleanly, as it were. But a botched nuclear war may be like a botched suicide attempt: It may leave us merely injured. Its effects may be like those of a series of very bad nuclear accidents. It may constitute, in short, a situation that not having managed to die from, we may have to live with.

The death of lakes, the death of air--See’s book is about, among other things, the death of Topanga Beach, fused into glass by nuclear heat. The novel ends with the narrator’s family at play on that glassy beach, saved, against the odds, by the failure of technology to live up to its promises and the failure of nature to perish quite as predicted.

Were this a television news program, I would close now on a note of happy triviality. My parting chuckle would put the lid back on Pandora’s box, benevolently excusing one and all from the need for painful thought about painful prospects. But books are tougher than that, and so I close, figuratively speaking, with the family that outlived Topanga Beach, wishing you, against no worse odds, good health and good fortune with the books of 1987.