FICTION

Editor’s Note: The following reviews represent the best books of 1997 in the judgment of our contributors. Their original reviews have been edited and condensed for reasons of space.

THOMAS McGONIGLE

DREAMS OF MY RUSSIAN SUMMERS. By Andrei Makine . Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan . Arcade: 256 pp., $23.95

Often in France, if you are a foreigner writing in French and have achieved a certain level of excellence, you become a French writer. In this century alone, Samuel Beckett, Julian Green, Nathalie Sarraute, Eugene Ionesco and E.M. Cioran, to name only a few, have become French writers even though their first language was not French. The same can be said of the Russian-born Andrei Makine, whose fourth book, “Dreams of My Russian Summers,” was written in French. Like Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory,” Makine’s novel reminds us how, through a precise use of language, it is possible to call back the past. By trusting in his ability to render truthfully the oddness of his story, the peculiar treasured details--ordinary pebbles individually wrapped in tissue paper--Makine allows himself and his readers to be possessed by the singular hallmark of greatness in literature (in a paraphrase of Osip Mandelstam): the desire to be astonished by his own words. “Dreams of My Russian Summers” is one of the great autobiographical novels of this century.

TED MOONEY

MASON & DIXON. By Thomas Pynchon . Henry Holt: 774 pp., $27.50

What is history, what is civilization, what are the limits of our ability to know? It is Thomas Pynchon’s great distinction in his four previous novels and now in the dizzying and encyclopedic “Mason & Dixon” to have repeatedly brought extra-literary rhetorics to bear on these, the most pressing questions literature can address. But it is the vision itself that one takes away from this remarkable book: a wilderness America, peopled as much by European hopes and longings as by the interlocking kingdoms of the indigenous; a virgin, undivided land. Until, one morning, two ordinary men appear, charged with cutting a perfectly straight line, eight yards wide, westward into its heart. . . . It is a moment of surpassing beauty and sadness, a glimpse of something whose sense we can never take for granted or be lastingly done with--even when, as here, it has occasioned a masterpiece.

THOMAS CURWEN

STRAIGHT MAN. By Richard Russo . Random House: 396 pp., $25

Richard Russo, who made his mark capturing the foibles and manners of working-class stiffs in his first three novels, “Mohawk,” “The Risk Pool” and “Nobody’s Fool,” has retained his deadpan edge. He’s a Raymond Carver without the grunge, a funny Richard Ford and, on the not-so venerable campus of WCPU, an American Kingsley Amis, and in “Straight Man,” with his leisurely pacing, deliberate dialogue and keen eye for details, he shows that realism and farce are not distant cousins, that absurdity can be successfully mined from the ordinary events of an ordinary life without diminishing its humor and truth.

CELIA McGEE

THE FLAMINGO RISING. By Larry Baker . Alfred A. Knopf: 310 pp., $24

When was the last time you thought of a drive-in movie screen as Moby Dick? No need to answer. This flying leap of the imagination is taken by Larry Baker in “The Flamingo Rising,” a first novel that dares to mix the Icarus, Oedipus and Earhart myths, risks a Romeo and Juliet update, plunders Dante, references the Bible, rewrites movie history and inside-outs the American past. Yet Baker’s book is far from pretentious; it’s one of the more endearingly adept debuts to come along in a while.

FREDERICK BUSCH

BELIEVERS. By Charles Baxter . Pantheon: 288 pp., $23

Charles Baxter, known for the wisdom in his fiction and the feelings evoked by his prose, may be thought of as an artist only of the spirit, responding, say, to the season, to a perceived mood, to the smell of the river or the light in the sky. But this collection of seven stories and a novella will remind us that he is an exemplary writer because he works in persuasive solidities, in what is actual, in what, when dropped into water, displaces it up and into the air. “Believers” is also a source of simply gorgeous prose: “My father sits in utter silence, and it is there that I go to see him.” But every page that Baxter writes is such a source, as is his every story a lesson in observation, feeling and wit. Of one of his characters, Baxter writes, “In the spiritual mildew of the Midwest all winter he lives stranded in an ink drawing.” But to see that trap of black and white, you need good light. Baxter shines on even his darkest characters like a summer’s pulsing Middle Western sun.

ANNA MUNDOW

THE WITCH OF EXMOOR. By Margaret Drabble . Harcourt Brace: 282 pp., $23

Comic irony--what V.S. Pritchett called the “most militant and graceful gift”--is rare in contemporary fiction, perhaps because it appeals to the head, not the heart, and because it is a difficult balancing act. To succeed, it must repel sentiment without sacrificing compassion. In “The Witch of Exmoor,” Margaret Drabble gets the balance just right and proves herself a master of the art.

GARY INDIANA

IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW. By Sandra Tsing Loh . Riverhead Books: 224 pp., $23.95

Sandra Tsing Loh’s “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now” is a kind of slapstick product of post-riots, multicultural Los Angeles in which the present already feels like the past because one has to live in the future to keep up. “If You Lived Here” depicts with horrific accuracy the yearning for money and nice things and a real life and how blinding that yearning can be when it encounters the slightest chance of being satisfied. No sooner do Bronwyn and Paul start to feel real in their glitzy high-rise than it’s all taken away: Paul gets fired, the car falls apart and the riots erase the value of their condo. Surrounded by slick, confident people who win every hand they’re dealt, Bronwyn and Paul can’t understand why they, uniquely, are doomed to a destiny in lower case; in the end, neither can we. It’s just the way things are in the big city. “If You Lived Here” is a deceptively droll portrait of Los Angeles as a giant mousetrap, baited with all the ridiculous junk that money can buy.

DAVID AMRAM

THE BEAR COMES HOME. By Rafi Zabor . W.W. Norton: 480 pp., $25

“The Bear Comes Home” achieves the seemingly impossible task of combining fictional and real characters, actual events, music theory, satire and fantasy with ease and panache. The book’s hero, a circus bear, becomes a great jazz innovator on the alto saxophone, paying his dues in a hilarious series of events that fill the pages of this wildly picaresque novel. We join the bear in musical adventures with actual living jazz masters, a trip to jail, disastrous trips on the road and a shattered romance (with a non-bear). The Shakespeare-quoting, sax-playing bear fulfills his search for musical greatness at the end of the book, finally achieving his nirvana. Poignant and touching moments combine with hilarious descriptions of the bear’s struggle in a story that anyone--whether familiar with jazz or not--will find compelling and entertaining.

ROBERT CULLEN

IN THE MEMORY OF THE FOREST. By Charles T. Powers . Scribner: 384 pp., $23

Charles Powers’ sense of place is astounding. His knowledge of Poland fills “In the Memory of the Forest” with details that bring the novel alive. He knows how Polish peasants butcher calves and share bottles of vodka. He knows the smell of the bus to Warsaw and the sound the leaves make as clandestine lovers slip away to a rendezvous in the forest. He knows the way the old party bosses kept people in line and where the bosses are today, “burrowed in like ticks on a sick dog.” He knows the banality of their corruption, and he knows the self-righteous veniality of some of the priests and politicos scrambling to take their places. He knows the places where the Jewish cemeteries used to be and what happened to the tombstones. He knows what the Russian trucks are carrying as they lumber through the Polish countryside late at night. And he knows the Polish soul.

JOANNA SCOTT

ASYLUM. By Patrick McGrath . Random House: 254 pp., $22

Patrick McGrath’s new novel, “Asylum,” is one of those rare pleasures, a book as absorbing as it is intelligent--a book so rewarding to read that I found myself spacing out chapters, restraining my curiosity to savor the elegant sentences. This is a thrilling book to read if only for its plot. Every page is full of portent, of mystery, of the suggestion of the disasters that are about to occur. But there is an even greater thrill: the thrill of insight. With great sympathy and wisdom, he explores those obscure regions of the psyche where love and evil mingle, where tragedy has its roots.

JONATHAN LEVI

TEXACO. By Patrick Chamoiseau . Translated From the French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov . Pantheon: 402 pp., $27

SCHOOL DAYS. By Patrick Chamoiseau . Translated From the French by Linda Coverdale . University of Nebraska Press: 156 pp., $35 cloth, $13 paper

When his novel “Texaco” won the French Prix Goncourt in 1992, Patrick Chamoiseau could not have foreseen that it would appear in English at a time when language and art were sitting in the front row of the long-running American play of “race.” Texaco, the language of “Texaco,” is absolutely, magically enchanting. As heroic as the tales of Marie-Sophie, her papa, Esternome, and mama, Idomenee, it is Chamoiseau’s chabin language that is the true heroine of “Texaco.” Marie-Sophie’s battles are nothing less than the wars between French and Creole, between the classic and the patois, the colonizer and the colonized. It is only through mastery of language that both “Texaco” and “School Days” cry, through the mastery of music and meaning that one can hope to survive through adversity and find true freedom.

MERLE RUBIN

COMFORT WOMAN. By Nora Okja Keller . Viking: 214 pp., $21.95

This powerful first novel by a young writer born in Korea and raised in Hawaii tells the intertwined stories of a Korean-born woman sold into the sexual slavery of the Japanese camps and of the woman’s American-born daughter, who discovers the secret of her mother’s harrowing past after her death. Strongly imagined, well-paced and written with an eloquently restrained lyricism that conveys the subtleties of feelings as well as the harshness of facts, “Comfort Woman” is a poignant and impressive debut.

BENJAMIN WEISSMAN

ALMOST NO MEMORY. By Lydia Davis . Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 194 pp., $21

Lydia Davis is one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction. Her language has such an inspiring air that it’s difficult to read without putting her book face down and writing yourself. She has one of the driest senses of humor on the planet, relying on subtle, awkward wording to carry each narrative. “Almost No Memory” reaches into a wide range of subjects. The consciousness that presides over each story is consistently flat, a flat monotone that ventures into delirium. She tells stories that are domestic, gently absurd, hyper-minimal. Her vocabulary has a utilitarian, carrots-and-potatoes quality, which is amusing coming from someone who has spent the last 15 years translating French philosophy and fiction. She takes great advantage of this simplicity, piling each word like a rock to form a wall of subtle strangeness. Lydia Davis’ stories are comic yet perversely controlled. It’s fiction on a short leash, tightly wound, with curious psychological underpinnings.

JEREMY LARNER

PANDAEMONIUM. By Leslie Epstein . St. Martin’s Press: 398 pp., $24.95

“If this had been a movie and not real life . . . “ the novel opens, on the sight of storm clouds over the Bavarian Alps. The obvious irony is that what is to follow is neither film nor life; it’s a novel about the ways in which movie reality and historical reality get mixed, causing public confusion and large-scale disaster. “Pandaemonium,” which involves the crossing paths of real-life stars, impresarios and mass murderers, is fictional, as made-up, say, as the tragedy of “Antigone,” which his director-character, a Wagnerian maestro-maniac, is driven to mount and remount in every medium. But Epstein’s technique, his retouched and over-dubbed surrealism, is, nonetheless, an instrument well chosen to capture a troubling area of real life: namely, the overlap of show business and politics, where sanity can be pushed to the limit by the fierce competition for stardom and power. The mood is sustained hysteria; the mode is sex, murder, image-mongering and what might be called control of the final cut. Let all who think image is everything, who celebrate film as sacrament and worship imaginary superheroes who can do no wrong, read this book and know their roads lead to Pandaemonium. As for us, we have one more book to bring us this day our daily bread--and a last laugh for Peter Lorre, stifled in the throat like a sob.

VALERIE MINER

ROUND ROCK. By Michelle Huneven . Alfred A. Knopf: 296 pp., $24

“Round Rock,” the first novel by Los Angeles writer Michelle Huneven, is a vivid examination of the satisfactions and perils of living in small communities. Brush fire rumors, ancient feuds, busybody intrusions, neighborly support, family secrets, race and class rifts: It’s all here in Rito, Calif., population 750. And here as well is Rito’s own model drunk farm, Round Rock Ranch for Recovering Alcoholics. Huneven is an audacious novelist, casting the narrative light evenly on various idiosyncratic characters while summoning the generationally and culturally distinct voices of a diverse population. She forfeits fashionable audience-protagonist cathexis for a more complex portrayal of multiple situations and relationships, thereby introducing readers to this tight, fractious community as if they were newcomers, free to form their own fresh allegiances. “Round Rock” is a textured drama of individual and cultural history, a promising debut from a writer of moral nerve, sharp wit and uncommon generosity.

MARTIN AMIS

THE ACTUAL. By Saul Bellow . Viking: 104 pp., $17.95

A complex tale, ranging emotional urgencies against material powers in present-day Chicago, “The Actual” is even more scrupulously written than its immediate predecessors. We notice the “dried urban gumbo of dark Lake Street”; we glimpse a silhouette “in the gray bosom of the limo TV”; an ancient billionairess is “like a satin-wrapped pupa.” But after 80 years of passionate cohabitation, the author’s relationship with language has evolved into something like sibling harmony. The desire for vatic speech is undimmed, yet no riffs, no party pieces, accompany it. . . . Bellow’s prose remains a source of constant pleasure because of its manifest immunity to all false consciousness. It plays very straight. When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page--stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author. Or, in this case, with something even more fundamentally his. Bellow’s first name is a typo: that a should be an o.

GLORIA EMERSON

EXILES. By Philip Caputo . Alfred A. Knopf: 384 pp., $25

Philip Caputo is a splendid, muscular storyteller who possesses the crucial power to make endearing ordinary men from diverse fragilities and stubbornness. The men who loom so large in the remarkable and often-harrowing three short novels in “Exiles” understand suffering. They are often shrewd and smart but never lucky. All of them move in alien terrain that promises defeat and, in two of the novels, odd and ghastly deaths. A former Marine in Vietnam who wrote the brilliant memoir “A Rumor of War,” Caputo understands the working-class men who are always America’s surplus and count for very little; such men were used up in the Vietnam War. Two of the novels have nothing to do with that lunatic conflict, but still, it hovers: The brutish father of one man was a veteran, and another character was shot in the leg and fled to Australia to start over. The great theme in these novels is powerlessness. Desperate men, each facing a different struggle, lack the same power to choose. Caputo reminds us how, although we tend to assume that such men always possess power and control, they do not, except on those occasions when they use a weapon to have their way.

GARY INDIANA

GUIDE. By Dennis Cooper . Grove Press: 176 pp., $22

Since his writing first appeared in chapbooks in the late ‘70s, Dennis Cooper has been a uniquely disturbing presence in American literature, a major voice shunted to cult status by mainstream squeamishness, flawlessly fluent in the lingua franca of youthful alienation and its coolest, least affected recording angel. Cooper’s work claims the bleakest regions of American affluence with the sureness of Faulkner staking out Yoknapatawpha County. Widely imitated by such writers as Brett Easton Ellis and A.M. Homes, Cooper lacks their dazzling commercial appeal and desperate wish to shock; he lives where they go vogueing. His novels are peopled by all manner of rock ‘n’ roll burnouts, drug casualties, juvenile porn stars, aspiring serial killers, artists and geeks, materially comfortable or willfully marginal malcontents living way beyond the edge. Shock Cooper does, but not because he tries to. Like the scorpion in the fable, it’s his nature. “Guide” is much broader farce than Cooper’s previous novels. I don’t want to take anything away from this book’s outrageousness by saying that it’s the most seductively frightening, best-written novel of contemporary urban life that anyone has attempted in a long time; it’s the funniest, too, and does for Clinton America what “The Tin Drum” did for postwar Germany.

JUDITH FREEMAN

THE HOTEL EDEN: Stories. By Ron Carlson . W.W. Norton: 224 pp., $23

Ron Carlson’s “The Hotel Eden” is a strange eclectic mixture of some of the funniest and saddest stories ever to cozy up together in one volume. Some stories are brilliant and deeply moving; others are wild and surreal. Taken together, they represent the idiosyncratic vision of an original writer who does what only good writers can do: make us see and feel what his characters see and feel and draw us into their world as if we had been born there. From the “torn edge of the known world,” to use one of Carlson’s many memorable phrases, come these stories of yearners and bumblers and gamblers, caught up in moments “gone strange.” The themes of sex and death are played out with contrapuntal intensity against a landscape of malls and sterile suburbs and in the process, America--its very essence--is brilliantly captured. “The Hotel Eden” affirms both the breadth and the depth of this writer’s vision as well as the utter singularity of his voice.

VALERIE MINER

THE CRYSTAL FRONTIER: A Novel in Nine Stories. By Carlos Fuentes . Translated from the Spanish by Alfred Mac Adam . Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 266 pp., $23

“The Crystal Frontier,” a novel in nine stories, explores the deceptively transparent border between Mexico and the United States. Carlos Fuentes’ 19th book is amphibian fiction--a form hovering between long and short prose--an acute political novel and a cosmopolitan, intergenerational saga. Throughout the novel, Fuentes plays with the tensions between durability and fragility, between exposure and protection, between visual transparency and physical barrier, as well as with other material and metaphorical properties of glass. Fuentes finds his crystal frontier in the infrared goggles of the U.S. Border Patrol, in the safety peepholes of urban apartment doors, in Manhattan’s high-altitude windows and in the almost-transparent body of a rich Chicago dowager. The border weather is always mercurial--baking heat, raging storms--but rarely does a rainbow get refracted on either side of the crystal frontier.

JOAN MELLEN

PERFIDIA. By Judith Rossner . Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 308 pp., $23.95

In Judith Rossner’s chilling new novel, “Perfidia,” Maddy, a bright high school senior bound for the Ivy League, murders her mother in an uncontrollable fit of rage. As in her best-selling “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” Rossner drew this story from the nightly news, in this case the account of a woman whose admission to college was rescinded after her matricide was discovered. With uncompromising accuracy, Rossner has penetrated Maddy’s secrets. “Perfidia,” a painfully disquieting book, transcends Maddy’s confusion to lay bare, without didacticism, the horrifying and deforming legacy of psychological abuse. It’s a tour de force.

PAULA FRIEDMAN

FLOWER NET. By Lisa See . HarperCollins: 320 pp., $24

The venerable tradition of the Chinese tea-serving ceremony might seem at odds with a culture that practices summary executions, but contradictions abound in Lisa See’s novel of political conspiracy and family betrayal. In “Flower Net,” See captures China after the Cultural Revolution in all its harshness, giving insight into the devastating effects of government oppression on its people, particularly on their family relationships. Far from one-sided, however, the novel portrays family betrayal and government corruption in America, suggesting that although their sources may be differently motivated, the results can turn out to be disturbingly symmetrical.

THOMAS CURWEN

ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, ALWAYS OUTGUNNED. By Walter Mosley . W.W. Norton: 208 pp., $23

Political yet temperate, angry yet subtle, “Always Outnumbered” is the work of a writer unafraid of pushing forward his own notions of responsibility and entitlement. Without sacrificing nuance or trying to settle the difficult and irreconcilable contradictions of life, “Always Outnumbered” is the picture of a black community struggling to take on the challenge of finding its own better life and--given the strength, moral questioning and willingness to break the rules--may, just, succeed.

KAI MARISTED

THE READER. By Bernhard Schlink . Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway . Pantheon: 218 pp., $21

In a quietly riveting voice, as if remembering aloud, the Reader tells of a boyhood interlude with a woman, of his sexual awakening and its aftermath--events the man has kept carefully hidden throughout his subsequent dry life. Simultaneously, with “The Reader,” German author Bernhard Schlink presents a formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel. From the first page, it ensnares both heart and mind.

MICHAEL FRANK

THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY. By Edmund White . Alfred A. Knopf: 414 pp., $25

Edmund White’s ambitious and elegiac new novel, “The Farewell Symphony,” is a literary hybrid, a vivid and variegated book. Part confession, part memoir, part social and sexual history of the last three decades of gay life in America, this intricate novel is not unlike a silver ball that hangs above a dance floor and rotates slowly on a fixed axis, reflecting the action below in a mosaic of differently angled mirrors. White’s narrator is the axis, at once removed from much of the action of the book, speaking to us from faraway, perspective-restoring Paris, and at the same time situated at its very center, inhabiting or perceiving nearly every scene. Mosaic is his unmistakable technique: In constructing this novel, White has abandoned the framework of linear plot in favor of piecing together sharply realized individual stories or installments in the narrator’s ongoing, unfolding life. And rotation, too, is essential to his approach: Once a story is affixed to its surface, the ball turns to accommodate another story and another and another still, which after 400 pages results in a surprising accumulation of power and feeling. At the end, the beautiful room, though in fact emptied of many of its AIDS-stricken dancers, is in another sense rich and peopled and full: of individual histories, of couplings and confidences and, above all, of lives conjured from the fog of the past, irradiated with the light of language and preserved with almost reliquary devotion.

DAVID McCUMBER

SUSPICION. By Robert McCrum . W.W. Norton: 292 pp., $23

Adultery, duplicity and homicide seem as intrinsically British as tea and crumpets. But rarely have these themes been treated as elegantly, which is to say in such a beautifully British way, as they are by Robert McCrum in “Suspicion.” McCrum, a distinguished London editor, establishes himself here as a master of psychological suspense. He plays the themes beautifully: The introduction of foreign elements into public and private lives, the vulnerability of love and the release of long-held emotion are all threaded through a clever and chillingly believable plot. Indeed, the formidable P.D. James would appreciate this civilized nightmare of fraternal bond gone bad. And thriller aficionados will be pleasantly surprised to discover that she could not have rendered it better herself.

HELLER McALPIN

ARKANSAS: Three Novellas. By David Leavitt . Houghton Mifflin: 198 pp., $22.95

When David Leavitt published his first short story in the New Yorker in 1982 while still a Yale undergraduate, he could be characterized as a “bridge homosexual” in much the same way that Harry Belafonte once referred to himself as a “bridge Negro”: Leavitt presented homosexuality in a way that was palatable even to straight readers. Now, with “Arkansas,” Leavitt drops the circumspection and writes like someone who has nothing to lose. The book gets its title from a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, one of Leavitt’s heroes: “I should like to flee like a wounded hart into Arkansas.” This is classic Leavitt--writing with subtlety, maturity and compassion about the complexity and fragility of human relationships.

SHASHI THAROOR

THE MISTRESS OF SPICES. By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni . Anchor Books: 338 pp., $22.95

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s style is catching. The author of a well-received collection of short stories, “Arranged Marriage,” Divakaruni has written an unusual, clever and often exquisite first novel that stirs magical realism into the new conventions of culinary fiction and the still-simmering caldron of Indian immigrant life in America. The result is rather as if Isabel Allende met Laura Esquivel in the pages of India Currents--and it works.

HELLER McALPIN

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. By Arthur Golden . Alfred A. Knopf: 392 pp., $25

“Memoirs of a Geisha” is a bravura performance, a first novel that provides a vivid view into a largely lost and secret world. Arthur Golden tells a mesmerizing story of a poor fisherman’s daughter named Chiyo, who in the 1930s is sold into slavery at age 9. Voice is central to literature, and Golden, who has degrees in Japanese art and history from Harvard and Columbia, has managed to disguise, alter and project his with the skill of a talented ventriloquist and impersonator.

PAM HOUSTON

CLOUD CHAMBER. By Michael Dorris . Scribner: 316 pp., $24

Michael Dorris’ novel, “Cloud Chamber,” confirms everything I suspected after reading “A Yellow Raft in Blue Water”: that he is one of the true masters of voice, of character and of storytelling in contemporary American literature. As comfortable in the voice of a consumptive teenage girl as he is in the voice of a black waiter in a German officers’ club, as at home with the Irish landscape as he is with rural Kentucky and Montana’s Great Plains, Dorris weaves five generations, at least that many ethnicities and three times that many locales into a cohesive and satisfying narrative--made all the more satisfying by its vastness and scope. In “Cloud Chamber,” Dorris tells the American story of hard people leading difficult lives with as much courage, insight and allowance for complexity as anyone writing today.