The Best Books of 2001

This year, the Los Angeles Times considered more than 1,200 books. As we revisited those reviews, we concluded that our contributors reserved their highest praise for 82 novels and short story collections, 23 children’s books, 25 mysteries and thrillers, 10 poetry titles, 13 books on the West and 85 works of nonfiction. Their original reviews have been edited and condensed. In addition, we have selected some of the year’s best art books to illustrate the issue.

*

AFTER THE PLAGUE

And Other Stories

By T.C. Boyle

Viking: 304 pp., $25.95

*

“After the plague--it was some sort of Ebola mutation passed from hand to hand and nose to nose like the common cold--life was different. More relaxed and expansive, more natural.” Although he wrote the sentence long before, the optimistic opening of the title story to T.C. Boyle’s disturbing new collection reads as sharp, if different, after Sept. 11. Terrible things happen in these stories. Boyfriends sabotage their lovers, brothers their brothers, fathers their sons. And it gets worse. We watch with dread as Boyle’s characters follow lost dogs and errant libidos, invite thieves and murderers into their homes, veer off their programmed courses and maneuver their jets to their own destruction. The lemming is not an aberrant character in the world according to Boyle. It is the norm. Boyle--and we have no finer virtuoso of the American language than Boyle--has made the decision that language should no longer be played like a hip kit of Yamaha drums and Zildjian cymbals but, as he quotes Flaubert, like “a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” In an age of war where the foe is indistinct and difficult to identify, Boyle has become the poet and the prophet of our time.

Jonathan Levi

*

ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN

A Novel

By Remy Rougeau

Houghton Mifflin: 224 pp., $23

*

“If you wish to become a monk, you must prepare yourself for a life that is not always peaceful,” warns the novice master in Remy Rougeau’s pensive first novel, “All We Know of Heaven.” In this warning lies delicious foreshadowing of the deep yet quiet tale that follows. The main character, Paul, arrives at St. Norbert’s Abbey in rural Canada to start his journey as a monk in the Cistercian order, a lifestyle in which the men pass much of their time in silence, communicate primarily with hand signals and join in formal prayer eight times a day. In between, they tend crops, milk cows, make cheese, prepare meals and care for the sick among them. Paul has come to the monastery hoping to make sense of his life, to find some definitive answer on spirituality, and to seize hold of peace. Somewhere in that process, he hopes to make himself perfect. Written by a first-time author who is himself a cloistered monk, “All We Know of Heaven” resonates with the timbre of paradoxical truth. Rougeau’s novel succeeds brilliantly by illuminating the slow pace of monastic life and the little variances that spark growth, confrontation and the quiet locus of spiritual enlightenment. It’s as if Rougeau has taken the loud cacophony of urban life and turned down the volume to a hush until the narrator and reader can hear the small, still voice of God.

Bernadette Murphy

*

AMERICAN SON

A Novel

By Brian Ascalon Roley

W.W. Norton: 218 pp., $13 paper

*

At first glance, this story of two half-Filipino brothers growing up in south Santa Monica looks like a neon-lit allegory: The older brother, Tomas, who dresses like a Mexican gangster and tools around in a provocatively painted Oldsmobile, sells fancy dogs to Brentwood types. Sometimes the dogs come from the hood--chained-up pit bulls, hopeless cases of dubious breeding and limited prospects--but, more preferably, they are American bulldogs, bred by Tomas himself on his prized bitch, Buster. Gabe, Tomas’ younger, timid and easily manipulated brother, narrates this story and looks upon his brother’s petty criminality with a mixture of fear, bewilderment and acquiescence. It’s the immigrant experience spelled out in Alpo: Los Angeles is a dog-eat-dog kind of town; immigrant enclaves are teeming kennels, and only a few choice specimens will be plucked out of this inhumane environment to flourish elsewhere.

Mark Rozzo

*

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

A Novel

By Moon Unit Zappa

Scribner: 284 pp., $14.95 paper

*

America Throne, born 1969, daughter of the famous, controversial painter Boris Throne, hippie royalty, star of this novel is not, prima facie, all that different from Moon Unit Zappa, daughter of the late Frank Zappa, famous anarchist musician, also hippie royalty. Boris, America recounts, died in hot pursuit of yet another woman, leaving America with her saintly mother (surrounded by a host of healers) and her brother, Spoonie. Mortified by the $2,000 check she accepts each month from her mother, America cannot figure out what she wants to be when she grows up: “[T]ry to find your own identity in the shadow of a certifiable ‘self-made’ genius.” This is a novel that could only be set in L.A. The breezy banter; the real or imagined feud between the city’s bureaucrats and the city’s artists; the fine, raw (sometimes flaunted) edges between rich and poor; the plain speaking about love and orgasms; but most of all, the possibility for recovery, which many people have been known to travel across the country for.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

ANTARCTICA

Stories

By Claire Keegan

Atlantic Monthly Press:

224 pp., $23

*

Every spring, the city of Galway hosts the Cuirt International Festival of Literature, Ireland’s premier literary event. It draws the cognoscenti and the country’s leading writers and critics. Finding myself there last year but uncertain which events to attend, I let others lead and followed a gaggle of Ireland’s well-known and established writers, who were going to listen to a young woman who had just published her first book of stories. The buzz was that she was the real thing. I heard Claire Keegan and was thunderstruck. When it comes to dialogue, Keegan has oblique genius. She has an unerring sense of odd pathos. Reading these stories is like coming upon work by Ann Beattie or Raymond Carver at the start of their careers.

Jerry Griswold

*

AUSTERLITZ

A Novel

By W.G. Sebald

Translated from the German

by Anthea Bell

Random House: 352 pp., $25.95

*

In the creation of a distinctive, instantly recognizable voice is a sure sign of literary mastery, then W.G. Sebald clearly merits much of the acclaim with which his work has been greeted. Beginning in 1996 with the English-language appearance of “The Emigrants,” the first of his books to be translated from German, and quickly followed by “The Rings of Saturn,” “Vertigo” and now “Austerlitz,” Sebald has produced a body of writing that stands at an intriguingly oblique angle to most serious fiction currently being published. Sebald has been lavishly praised by critics throughout the English-and German-speaking worlds, and he has won a series of major literary awards, including The Times’ 1998 book prize for fiction. It is Sebald’s elegiac tone--the fastidious vocabulary, melancholy prose rhythms and seductive emotional reticence--that envelops one from the first sentence and helps create the paradoxical synthesis of an isolated, unbridgeable inwardness, combined with an uncanny intimacy between narrator and reader that is the hallmark of his writing. History is a nightmare into which Sebald’s characters and his books as a whole are trying to awaken. The people he takes seriously have been emotionally deadened, almost to the point of paralysis, by all that has been denied or simply forgotten by those determined never to look backward, and he has learned that a real nightmare is preferable to the inner desiccation of such oblivion. “Austerlitz” is the story of one such bitter attempt to wake up into history’s nightmare, and it is Sebald’s most direct confrontation so far with the aftereffects of the genocide.

Michael Andre Bernstein

*

AZAREL

A Novel

By Karoly Pap

Translated from the Hungarian

by Paul Olchvary

Steerforth Press: 220 pp., $14 paper

*

If cultures resemble people--they’re born, they grow, they thrive or fail to thrive, and eventually they die--there can be intense visionary episodes in their lives that resemble fevers. Early 20th century Eastern European Jewish culture must have had such a fever to produce literary works like I.B. Singer’s “Satan in Goray,” I.J. Singer’s “Yoshe Kalb” and Chaim Grade’s magisterial “The Yeshiva” as well as the better-known exotic blooms of Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. Now we can add Hungary’s Karoly Pap to this luminous list. His novel, “Azarel,” which appeared in 1937, has recently been published for the first time in English. Like the Singer brothers’ and Grade’s books, Pap’s novel is set against a rabbinical background at a time when religious verities are starting to crumble beneath the onslaught of modernity. Whether that culture would have survived is moot because it was murdered during the Holocaust, as was Pap, whom literary historians believe died in Bergen-Belsen in 1944.

Melvin Jules Bukiet

*

BABE IN PARADISE

Fiction

By Marisa Silver

W.W. Norton: 234 pp., $23.95

*

Marisa Silver’s debut collection of short stories, “Babe in Paradise,” is peopled by housebreakers, eavesdroppers, carjackers, baby sellers, pornographers, bad parents and others who consider the social contract optional. And that’s just the humans. Nature adds other transgressors: birds that nest inside houses, rats that hide inside walls, fires that devour homes. In other words, boundary problems abound. The paradise of the title is Los Angeles--a Los Angeles that is haunted by the unattainable physical beauty and happy endings of Hollywood yet is populated by ordinary strugglers: a public school teacher, a man who rents out equipment, Hollywood wannabes. Their homes are ill-constructed, flimsy: shabby apartments; a “pitiable warren of rooms”; an advertised “hillside aerie” turns out to be a pale pink shoebox with walls cracked at the seams. The stories are ambitiously and successfully well-structured. Silver’s vision cumulatively amounts to a dark, desperate, down-and-out world, a Los Angeles of her own making, where the elusive instances of human connection and hope are all too rare, and therefore all the more luminous.

Michelle Huneven

*

BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS

A Novel

By Dai Sijie

Translated from the French

by Ina Rilke

Alfred A. Knopf: 202 pp., $18

*

Dai Sijie’s debut novella is an unexpected miracle--a delicate and often hilarious tale set amid the ham-fisted brutalities of the Cultural Revolution. It’s about two best friends--”city ouths” from bourgeois families--who, in the early 1970s, are sent off to the mountains to be “re-educated” by the local peasants. Sijie’s nameless teenage narrator--along with his best friend, Luo--find themselves in a China they’re ill-equipped to deal with, where something as innocent as a violin is taken for a potentially dangerous artifact from another planet. (The narrator is made to perform a piece for the villagers that--for purposes of personal safety--Luo audaciously renames “Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao.”) In this rainy outback, the boys somehow stumble upon a hidden suitcase full of banned books--a treasure trove of forbidden fruit by the likes of Flaubert, Zola, Gogol, Melville and, of course, Balzac (known in Chinese as “Ba-er-zar-ke”). The books ignite the boys’ sense of romance and awareness of the world at large, and Luo sets about using their elaborate plot lines to woo the beautiful, enigmatic Little Seamstress--a “lovely mountain girl in need of culture.” We read Sijie’s exquisite sentences (which improbably bridge the gap between China and France) with close to the same wonderment that the boys experience leafing through such potent contraband as “Pere Goriot” and “Madame Bovary”--of new worlds opening up, of realms of possibility regained.

Mark Rozzo

*

THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER

A Novel

By Amy Tan

Putnam: 354 pp., $25.95

*

Amy Tan’s “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” dramatically chronicles the tortured, devoted relationship between LuLing Young and her daughter Ruth. Spanning the 20th century, the book raises intriguing issues about the nature of literacy, the complications of immigration and the unpredictable lessons of aging. Tan’s style is lively, witty, suspenseful and rich in historical detail. “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” revisits fraught territory explored in “The Joy Luck Club”: family secrets, unasked questions, the suffocation of feudal marriage and the Japanese invasion of China. In the new novel, Tan again identifies the American-born daughter as cultural mediator for her parent. She shows how, for those of us with immigrant mothers, the lines between obedience and betrayal, gratitude and guilt get inextricably tangled. “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” is a strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters, haunting images, historical complexity, significant contemporary themes and suspenseful mystery.

Valerie Miner

*

THE BOSTONS

Stories

By Carolyn Cooke

Mariner/Houghton Mifflin:

224 pp., $12 paper

*

Weird, slightly cracked, yet chiseled and often luminous, Carolyn Cooke’s debut collection of short fiction grabs you right away, gathers force and leaves little holes in your heart. These are spare, linked stories of ruin, broken families and angled loneliness. The characters are boozy and often in real pain. Many center on odd relationships, of in-laws and former loves, of chilly husbands and wives and children estranged from parents. They ring with gunshots, failed suicides and cracked bones. She writes with brutal sympathy for old people. Some of her stories are about the young. Like a latter-day Grace Paley, she addresses--of all amazing unspoken American things--class issues. Most of all, she has a strong woman’s eye and touch; her characters cook and feel twangs of desire; they despise and yet are drawn to relatives; they laugh in the teeth of hardship and tragedy. Her best writing nails a pinched, painful world, one where good intentions, while clearly evident, hardly suffice, and where love exists, but a long time ago.

Bret Israel

*

CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL

A Novel

By Glen David Gold

Hyperion: 484 pp., $24.95

*

“I didn’t invent sugar or flour, but I bake a mean apple pie.” So says magician Charles Carter, vouching for the originality of his act. The same could be said of Glen David Gold, the author of this wildly entertaining interpretation of the real-life Carter’s extraordinary career. There are shades here of E.L. Doctorow, Stephen Millhauser and Caleb Carr in the way Gold creates a foreboding, dreamlike aura of Americana. But like his subject, Gold builds upon the craft of his predecessors to give us something wonderfully his own. Gold creates an exuberant feeling of expectation and mystery, cramming this novel, like a thrilling three-act magic show (the unavoidable metaphor here), with misdirections, vanishings and potentially deadly secrets.

Mark Rozzo

*

THE CLOUD SKETCHER

A Novel

By Richard Rayner

HarperCollins: 436 pp., $25

*

A man’s passion for architecture is at the heart of Richard Rayner’s “The Cloud Sketcher,” a sprawling, action-packed epic set in the early 20th century, which ranges from Civil War-era Finland to Jazz Age New York. It’s an engrossing book, full of elegant surfaces, and a significant departure from Rayner’s fine memoir, “The Blue Suit,” and his novels “Los Angeles Without a Map” and “The Murder Book.” Rayner has a strong sense for the textures of time and place--the pale, melancholic light of the Finnish landscape and the heated, highly sexual energy of New York during the 1920s--and the novel’s greatest strength is its intensely filmic descriptions of the rhythms of pounding steel girders together high in the sky or the pleasurable claustrophobia of a reckless, drunken night in a Harlem club.

Meghan O’Rourke

*

THE COMPLETE WORKS

OF ISAAC BABEL

By Isaac Babel

Edited by Nathalie Babel

Translated from the Russian

by Peter Constantine

W.W. Norton: 1,072 pp., $39.95

*

Isaac Babel’s personal life was unpredictable, disorganized and rash; his art was otherwise. He wrested his sentences out of a purifying immediacy. Like Pushkin, he said, he was in pursuit of “precision and brevity.” Babel’s art served as a way station to the devouring. He was devoured because he would not, could not, accommodate to falsehood; because he saw and he saw, with an eye as merciless as a Klieg light; and because, like Kafka, he surrendered his stories to voices and passions tremulous with the unforeseen. If we wish to complete, and transmit, the literary configuration of the 20th century--the image that will enduringly stain history’s retina--now is the time (it is past time) to set Babel beside Kafka. Between them, they leave no nerve unshaken.

Cynthia Ozick

*

THE CORRECTIONS

A Novel

By Jonathan Franzen

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

568 pp., $26

*

Even more than a work of art, “The Corrections” is a significant cultural document. Jonathan Franzen wants to capture, in Trollope’s phrase, “the way we live now” and to write an old-fashioned novel, solidly built on character and psychological insight. “The Corrections” is everything certain readers have been wanting for years: an attempt at a realistic portrayal of ordinary people and everyday life. Franzen isn’t afraid to try to inhabit the most diverse kinds of people, from heiresses to nurses to gangsters to Norwegian tourists. And he has to be one of the funniest novelists at work now. His portrait of the social comedy aboard a luxury cruise liner--his mischievous reply to David Foster Wallace’s essay about taking a luxury cruise--stands alone as a comic gem. There is something humbling about the way this writer strains his psychological acumen to the breaking point.

Lee Siegel

*

CROOKED RIVER BURNING

A Novel

By Mark Winegardner

Harcourt: 576 pp., $27

*

Superman was invented in Cleveland. The world’s first rock concert was staged in the Cleveland Arena, a hockey venue, by deejay Alan Freed in 1951. After race riots in 1966, Carl Stokes became “the first African American to be elected mayor in a major city where white people were the majority. And also the last.” These are just a few of the things we learn in Mark Winegardner’s sprawling, high-spirited novel about the Ohio metropolis that was America’s sixth largest city in 1948, when the book begins, and had fallen to 12th largest by 1969, when it ends. In those two decades, Winegardner (“The Veracruz Blues”) juxtaposes a fictional love story--that of Anne O’Connor, rich daughter of a Democratic Party boss, and David Zielinsky, middle-class son of a small-time labor racketeer--with Cleveland’s social and political history. “Crooked River Burning” brings Cleveland’s past to life on an intimate and a sweeping scale. Winegardner describes weddings, funerals, dances, rallies, ballgames, graduations, parties, elections, moments of domestic warmth and public violence with equal facility. But his main achievement is a narrative voice--not Doctorow’s, not Tom Wolfe’s (though Wolfe would surely applaud the documentary heft of this novel), but one that’s distinctly his own. It’s a fast voice, a funny one, almost a stand-up comic’s patter, loaded with sarcastic interjections, parenthetical asides, even footnotes, so that Winegardner can be inside his tale, in Anne’s or David’s mind, in the ‘50s or ‘60s, yet speak directly to us at the turn of the millennium. It’s a voice that begins, “Here’s the deal,” and follows through so well on its promise of leveling with us that the 576 pages that ensue don’t seem too many at all.

Michael Harris

*

DAYS OF AWE

A Novel

By Achy Obejas

Ballantine: 384 pp., $24.95

*

Two years after the revolution, Cubans began leaving the island on anything that would float--less terrified of Castro’s Communism, novelist Achy Obejas intimates in “Days of Awe,” than they were of the persistent rumors that an invasion and a terrible war would follow. As Obejas’ narrator, Alejandra explains it, Cubans feared that their country would be besieged by “another one of those bloody skirmishes the U.S. periodically undertook in Latin America.” With much sadness, but little hesitation, Alejandra’s parents shipped out in April of 1961 with their 2-year-old daughter in tow, stopping first in Miami, but finally settling in Chicago, where Lake Michigan provides the family with a bit of watery solace that reminds them of their homeland. As Alejandra grows up, she begins to grasp her parents’ passionate attachment to their home country, learning as well about their all-but-dormant Jewish roots. Obejas masterfully links identity with place, language and the erotic life, without ever descending into sentimentality. Her descriptions render her characters’ emotional lives with a precision that precludes exotic stereotyping. But the novel yields further delights, as Obejas allows Alejandra to meditate on the cultural and philosophical differences reflected in language. We learn, for example, that in Spanish, it is simply not possible to speak of love for an object with the same word used to speak of human love. This focus on language accounts for one of the novel’s most enchanting riches, revealing a capacity to neatly articulate in Spanish the concepts that English and other languages have no words for.

Paula Friedman

*

THE DEATH OF SWEET MISTER

A Novel

By Daniel Woodrell

Marian Wood / G.P. Putnam’s Sons:

196 pp., $23.95

*

“You wake up in this here world, my sweet li’l mister, you got to wake up tough. You go out the front door tough of a mornin’ and you stay tough til lights out--have you learned that?” This is the maternal advice Glenda Atkins offers her 13-year-old son, Shug, early on in “The Death of Sweet Mister,” Daniel Woodrell’s fiery, poetic, hair-raising novel. Fat, dreamy and lost, Shug lives with his mom in a small house on the edge of an Ozark Mountains cemetery, or “bone orchard,” as he calls it. He spends his days tending the graves and carefully witnessing, practically cringing, at his mother’s wanton ways. The story is nervy and yet feels true. It is spare but at the same time comes at a sly slant. It seems to participate in certain tropes and truisms of deep Southern storytelling and yet one turns the pages with a sickening foreboding. Shug and Glenda’s downward spiral picks up steam when the necessary stranger comes into their lives, riding a sleek green Thunderbird. For a mother and son living on the side of a Southern cemetery, deliverance doesn’t really figure in the equation. After all, as Shug says, “every window we had opened onto a vista of tombstones.... I believe dusks and dawns spent staring out that window shaded me ever more towards no-good and lonely.”

Bret Israel

*

THE DEATH OF VISHNU

A Novel

By Manil Suri

W.W. Norton: 300 pp., $24.95

*

“Not wanting to arouse Vishnu in case he hadn’t died yet, Mrs. Asrani tiptoed down to the third step above the landing on which he lived, teakettle in hand.” Thus begins Manil Suri’s splendid first novel, “The Death of Vishnu,” a remarkable literary debut by a 41-year-old tenured professor of mathematics. This opening sentence perfectly captures the qualities of the novel it launches, a finely observed comedy of manners that evolves into searing tragedy, rendered in a tone of wry detachment that paradoxically illuminates its characters’ essential humanity. “The Death of Vishnu” is written with limpid grace, in a simple, straightforward, irresistible flow. There are few flashy phrases, no authorial showiness. The arrival of Suri marks yet another development in the rise to prominence of Indian literature in English. Read Suri not because he’s Indian, not necessarily because you are interested in India but because he has written an exceptionally good novel, and there will be a lot more where it came from.

Shashi Tharoor

*

THE DISTANT LAND OF MY FATHER

A Novel of Shanghai

By Bo Caldwell

Chronicle Books: 374 pp., $23.95

*

This is a marvelous story, straightforward without being prosaic, full of momentum yet complex and unpredictable. Bo Caldwell’s novelized memoir of her father and of their lives in Shanghai in the 1930s and ‘40s, portrays an idyllic childhood, vividly remembered, a time of verandahs and parties and white linen suits, that is abruptly shattered when the Japanese invade Shanghai. There are bloody bodies and kidnappings and burning buildings, but more painful is the steady erosion of the child’s faith in her father. “The Distant Land of My Father” is a study of the glittering visions that wear us down; to ashes or diamonds.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

DOGHOUSE ROSES

Stories

By Steve Earle

Houghton Mifflin: 208 pp., $23

*

Not many singer-songwriters make the leap from writing lyrics to fiction. Rosanne Cash tried it in 1996 with “Bodies of Water,” a collection of semi-autobiographical stories that succeeded on the merits of her ability to write so close to the bone, and it is Steve Earle’s willingness to do the same that makes “Doghouse Roses” such an entertaining read, mining territory--aching love, trapped lives--familiar to those who know him and his music. These are stories filled with the melancholy that comes from living with your heart exposed, in which the reality of loss is balanced only by the exultation of having lived. It is a message that Earle brings to his music, and as he stands with the wreckage of his life strewn around him, you come to realize that he’s not out trying to prove something or make up for lost time or even redeem himself. He probably doesn’t even believe in redemption. He’s simply trying to keep the demons at bay, and “Doghouse Roses” is just enough to keep them outside the door. For now.

Thomas Curwen

*

ECLIPSE

A Novel

By John Banville

Alfred A. Knopf: 212 pp., $23

*

Nothing in the theater is more terrifying in the eyes of the audience than when an actor forgets his lines. Nothing. Not a missed lighting cue nor a popped bodice. Even the onstage death of one of the singers at the Metropolitan Opera during a performance of “The Makropoulos Affair” a few years ago was merely horrible. At the start of Irish writer John Banville’s latest novel, “Eclipse,” hero Alexander Cleave, famous thespian, feels this particular terror and thrill. “My mind was whirling and flailing like the broken belt of a runaway engine. I had not forgotten my lines--in fact, I could see them clearly before me, as if written on a prompt card--only I could not speak them.” Cleave’s personal account of every actor’s nightmare leads quickly into ghost story. Beneath the costume is visible a man who slowly rends his costumes until he is as naked as Lear on the heath and as insightful as Oedipus in Colonus. The result is an unveiling that is terrifying, and no figment of an overheated playwright or an actor in crisis, no party trick like a mere eclipse of the sun. The true nightmares, Cleave discovers--solitude, loneliness and loss of loved ones--come to us offstage and in full light of day.

Jonathan Levi

*

EMBERS

A Novel

By Sandor Marai

Translated from the German version

of the Hungarian original

by Carol Brown Janeway

Alfred A. Knopf: 218 pp., $21

*

On a summer day in 1940 in a Hungarian castle, Henrik, a 75-year-old general, is waiting for Konrad, his closest friend from childhood. They haven’t seen each other in 41 years--not since a hunt they had been on in July 1899. Eventually, Konrad arrives. Dinner is served. The general talks and asks a few questions. The visitor departs. The reader of “Embers” will have been very quietly nailed to the spot by this short, mesmerizing novel depicting the nature and limits of friendship. Sandor Marai was a writer whose entire oeuvre of more than 45 books and thousands of newspaper articles had been nearly wiped from the face of the Earth. Well-known to experts of Hungarian literature, Marai was prominent in Hungary’s literary circles in the 1930s and early 1940s, but persecution by the Communists forced him to leave in 1948. In 1989, Marai committed suicide in San Diego. Thanks to this first English translation of “Embers,” our ever-shrinking world of culture seems a little bigger. Readers should take comfort in knowing that this novel has survived an initial forgetting and, surely, the statues in the famous metaphorical garden of T.S. Eliot’s literary tradition will have to be rearranged to make room for this powerful work.

Thomas McGonigle

*

EVERYTHING YOU NEED

A Novel

By A.L. Kennedy

Alfred A. Knopf: 560 pp., $25.95

*

From its very dawn, with novels such as James Hogg’s “Confessions of a Justified Sinner,” serious Scottish fiction has always concerned itself with questions of morality and its relationship to everyday life. For A.L. Kennedy, that debate takes place in a paradoxical interior landscape that is simultaneously beyond reality and firmly rooted in the territory beneath the superficial skin of events. “Everything You Need” stakes its claim as another distinctive monument in the landscape of contemporary Scottish writing. Truthful, surprising and visceral, it provokes the sort of response that reminds us what fiction is for.

Val McDermid

*

THE FAR FIELD

A Novel of Ceylon

By Edie Meidav

Houghton Mifflin: 584 pp., $25

*

Edie Meidav’s “The Far Field” opens with an untitled poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: “You who never arrived/in my arms, Beloved, who were lost/from the start,” it begins. “You, Beloved, who are all/the gardens I have ever gazed at,/longing....” It is an exquisite expression of restive desire that sets the tone for this complex and imaginative story, a story at whose center lies a similar longing, a longing too deep ever to be satisfied. When an American, Henry Fyre Gould, abandons wife, child, career and faith to travel from New York to the turbulent Ceylon of the 1930s, a country chafing to overthrow British rule, he hopes to create a model Buddhist society in a remote village and redeem his failed and unhappy life. In language that approaches myth, Meidav portrays the complex ways in which ego and greed and the love of power come together to destroy the utopia Henry had dreamed of. Nothing is as the naive Henry--or even the reader--imagined it to be. The redemption he finally manages to wrest from his life forms a surprising but satisfying end to an ambitious and distinguished first novel.

Chitra Divakaruni

*

THE FEAST OF THE GOAT

A Novel

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Translated from the Spanish

by Edith Grossman

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

404 pp., $25

*

Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has conducted his career as artist and intellectual in a climate--late 20th century Latin America--where art and ideas make material differences and often have a price in blood and death. A failure as a politician--he ran unsuccessfully for president of Peru in 1990--he is one of our greatest and most influential novelists. In the world of fiction his continued exploration of the often-perilous intersection of politics and life has enriched 20th century literature. Vargas Llosa’s “The Feast of the Goat” is about the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic, where the most frightening possibilities of personal dictatorship were made undeniably real. What we are brought to see at the end of this novel is the ultimate horror of the Trujillo regime: Not so much that he raped people’s daughters but that his power was so total and pervasive that he could get people to cooperate, voluntarily, in the raping of their daughters. His artfulness in turning all Dominicans into accomplices in their own ruin explains why Trujillo seems in some way invulnerable to death and why the terrible wounds he opened in the lives of his people take more than one generation to heal. In “The Feast of the Goat,” Vargas Llosa paints a portrait that is darkly comic, poignant, admirable and horrifying all at once.

Madison Smartt Bell

*

FIXER CHAO

A Novel

By Han Ong

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

386 pp., $24

*

Han Ong’s bitter and brilliant first novel traces the dubious rise of William Narciso Paulinha, a Port Authority rent boy who becomes Master Chao, celebrated feng shui advisor to New York’s rich and gullible. It’s not a stretch to think of “Fixer Chao” as a slightly rabid update of Melville’s “The Confidence Man”: This furious--and occasionally infuriating--book is relentless in its exposure of the frauds that fuel the American Dream, irate and inchoate as it takes on race and origin and sexual orientation, self-consciously microcosmic in its exploration of class and, to the last, baffling, ambiguous and nearly euphoric in its anger.

Mark Rozzo

*

FROM THE DUST RETURNED

A Novel

By Ray Bradbury

William Morrow: 208 pp., $23

*

The gestalt patchwork quilt that is “From the Dust Returned” may not be “Les Miserables,” but it is superlatively what it is: a touchstone, codex and sampler of the pure Bradbury voice. Now here’s the warning, the gardyloo you must not ignore, the alert not to feed the gremlins after midnight. Bradbury’s voice is as idiosyncratic, as mannered, as specifically that of a rara avis, as Hemingway’s or Proust’s or Vonnegut’s. If you dip a toe, and the aroma of rose petals and jasmine rises to trouble you, hit the road. Go find some faux-noir imitator of Jim Thompson or James M. Cain or John O’Hara. Don’t shred the air with complaints of “precious” or “arty.” There are already enough auctorial demagogues loose in the land. Thank the shades of Twain and Melville and the living presence of Pynchon--all of whom cherish Bradbury, wherever they may be--that this Poet Laureate of the Chimerical and Phantasmagoric is still with us, still writing, still freshening our ration of dream dust.

Harlan Ellison

*

GABRIEL’S GIFT

A Novel

By Hanif Kureishi

Scribner: 223 pp., $23

*

Hanif Kureishi’s fans love his plays and stories and novels about family, about the relationships between fathers and sons and husbands and wives. His sweet spot, the thing that brings out his finest writing, seems to be the father-son relationship. This is where Kureishi’s honesty and humor and social conscience and sense of the generations of history blend and fly out. He is good at telling the story of daily life (coffee, sleep, staircases and laundry) against a variety of backdrops: still life with racism, still life with poverty, still life with religious fanaticism. Still life in London, if such a thing is possible. Gabriel is 15. He loves his sneakered, guitar-playing father, who moves out on the novel’s opening morning. The boy draws pictures of objects that become real as he draws them. This is one of his gifts. Another is extraordinary insight into adults: “He had noticed ... that there were different styles of madness for men and women, fathers and mothers. The women became obsessive, excessively nervous, afraid and self-hating, fluttering and blinking with damaged inner electricity. The men blunted themselves with alcohol and cursed, blamed and hit out.” Yet another gift comes from legendary rock star Lester Jones (a kind of Mick Jagger figure), who once performed with Gabriel’s father. When father and son visit Jones, he draws a picture for Gabriel that turns out to be incredibly valuable. But Gabriel’s real gift is optimism. He believes in his father and in his own future, in his own talent and ability to work hard. In Gabriel, Kureishi has created the kind of character who turns life into art.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

GABRIEL’S STORY

A Novel

By David Anthony Durham

Doubleday: 296 pp., $23.95

*

David Anthony Durham is a writer of Caribbean ancestry who lives in the United States and Scotland. His first novel--a western that’s as lyrical as it is thrilling--gathers up these various outposts of personal geography and unites them amid the large-scale diorama of the American West. It’s about a surly kid named Gabriel who is brought from Baltimore to a Kansas homestead by his ex-slave mother. The Civil War is a not-so-distant memory, and so we’re immediately set down in a cultural and topographical tabula rasa: the earliest days of free blacks and their westerly progress into a barren landscape. “Gabriel’s Story” is the kind of book you wolf down like stew dished up at a campfire. But it’s also a carefully wrought meditation on the big stuff: race, family, crime and the cruelties reaped from living on the outskirts of society.

Mark Rozzo

*

THE GARDEN OF SECRETS

A Novel

By Juan Goytisolo

Translated from the Spanish

by Peter Bush

Serpent’s Tail: 154 pp., $24

*

Living in Marrakech’s medina, Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo has published at least 15 works of fiction in English, and “The Garden of Secrets,” like most of his preceding works, is in part an attack on the author’s native Spain and, in particular, on Franco and the fascists. Indeed, like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and other great writers who lived in exile and often loathed their homelands, Goytisolo has spent most of his life attacking the values present and past of his country. “The Garden of Secrets” tells the fictional life of a Spanish poet named Eusebio--a homosexual friend of the great authors Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Cernuda--who is arrested by Franco’s forces and imprisoned in the military psychiatric center in Melilla at the beginning of the 1936 rebellion. Like Orson Welles’ exploration of the life of Charles Foster Kane in “Citizen Kane,” Goytisolo’s is a Rashomon-like tale, with 28 tellers, one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet. Sitting in their garden, which one of the figures describes as “make-believe,” the Readers’ Circle meets for three weeks, each member telling his or her version of stories about the mysterious poet. In “The Garden of Secrets,” Goytisolo has given us a beautifully written metaphor for what it means to seek out the truth in a world often dominated by lies. As novelist Carlos Fuentes has described the book, “The Garden of Secrets” is “one of the finest novels in Spain of the last 10 years.” And though I prefer Goytisolo’s trilogy of novels, “Marks of Identity,” “Count Julian” and “Juan the Landless,” “The Garden of Secrets” certainly reminds us again that this author, now 70 years old, is one of the most brilliant of living writers.

Douglas Messerli

*

THE GLASS PALACE

A Novel

By Amitav Ghosh

Random House: 476 pp., $25.95

*

Ambitious, multigenerational, “The Glass Palace” is a saga akin to a 19th century Russian novel. Opening with the British invasion of Burma in 1885, its early chapters focus on Rajkumar, a penniless boy who, through sheer intelligence and pluck, becomes a rich merchant in Burma and marries Dolly, a lady-in-waiting from the exiled Burmese royal court. There is something irresistible about the novel’s ambition and how thoroughly it dissects the impact of the British colonial enterprise. “The Glass Palace,” like its far-ranging subject, is capacious; it reflects the author’s curiosity and hunger for understanding. Amitav Ghosh shows how, for all its oppression, British colonialism helped to create a cosmopolitan culture in which Indians and others re-created themselves in foreign lands. Ghosh has taken great care to depict these mingled identities, where questions of allegiance are not so clear-cut. There is the figure of Saya John, for instance, a Europeanized, Christian Malayan, who speaks Hindustani and builds up a successful rubber plantation, which his son and American wife come to run. Character, for Ghosh, is built up through the careful accrual of culture and history, and it is against this complex panorama that his creations are most vibrant. The result is a rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland--a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire.

Marina Budhos

*

GRAND AMBITION

A Novel

By Lisa Michaels

W.W. Norton: 276 pp., $22.95

*

When Glen and Bessie Hyde departed from Green River, Utah, on Oct. 20, 1928, en route to the Colorado River and their final destination, Needles, Calif., they hoped to make history. Either they’d set a speed record for running the rapids, or Bessie would become the first woman to make this journey. But something went wrong. By Dec. 9, they were overdue, and a few weeks later their 16-foot scow was discovered floating in an eddy just past Diamond Creek, the couple nowhere to be found. In “Grand Ambition,” Lisa Michaels answers the mystery of their disappearance in her own surprising and magnificent way. Ignore the rumors about the Hydes that have surfaced in recent years--that Glen, for instance, forced Bessie on the trip and that she, feeling trapped, killed him--Michaels tells a decidedly less sensational but far more satisfying story about two people falling in love, about ambition and acquiescence played out in the most epic, solitary and sublime of settings. Balzac called marriage “the most audacious of enterprises,” and “Grand Ambition” is the most audacious of love stories for attempting to take us to a place most of us inhabit but can’t describe and for suggesting what it takes for two people to live with one another without sacrificing their ideals or limiting their dreams.

Thomas Curwen

*

GUILTY OF DANCING

THE CHA CHA CHA

A Novel

By Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Translated from the Spanish by the author

Welcome Rain Publishers:

112 pp., $22.95

*

Three stories that share the same space at the same time are, Guillermo Cabrera Infante explains, “an impossibility in physics but not in fiction.” They comprise a triptych, set in a Cuban restaurant at the end of the 1950s. The city? Of course, Havana. The first moves to the music of a Santeria ritual, the second to the bolero and the third to the cha-cha-cha. In each, the man and the woman eat in a restaurant. It is raining outside. The man wonders whether he will marry the woman. The Santeria theme in the first draws the two characters together against its deep, dark background. In the second, the bolero makes the rhythm of their dialogue sharper and crueler: It is all about contrast, male female, light dark. The third, the cha-cha-cha, is more about the “we.” The man in the stories carries the book of his life, which he periodically asks the woman to open in order to explain her behavior. The world outside the lovers is different in each, though it is the same city, like a dream dreamed in different houses or a play performed with different sets. The first two are heavy with nostalgia; the third is set in a more modern, more politically confused Cuba. Together, they have the feel of an exercise undertaken by a master.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

HALF A LIFE

A Novel

By V.S. Naipaul

Alfred A. Knopf: 216 pp., $24

*

“Half a Life,” a masterpiece of implicitness, is explicitly concerned with drawing out the metaphysical-private while keeping it embedded in society and history. This small, sparely written tale embodies a fragile idea of freedom, a vision of human life disentangling itself from the encumbrances of time and place. It is the artistic version of Naipaul’s obsession, in his nonfiction, with the living fact of poverty rather than its inanimate antecedents. In this novel, the intuited, secret relations between people are even more the agents of personal change than history is. The novel gently swells to such a chord of mystery and tentativeness that it is as if Naipaul wants to say that there can be no resolution of identity, but that the perception of the riddle of identity, as it unfolds through intimate relations in the present moment, discernible to the open mind, is a potent freedom. Life’s meaning lies in the way its meaning never ends. To recognize that identity is an enigma is a cause of derangement but also a mark of sanity. To make that sentiment breathe in the mouth of a living character, and then rise from the page with silent laughter, is a beautiful completion: the mark of a genius and a cause of unending delight.

Lee Siegel

*

HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP,

LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE

Stories

By Alice Munro

Alfred A. Knopf: 320 pp., $24

*

Canadian writer Alice Munro’s masterful 10th collection of stories, “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” proves again that she is a writer to cherish. Munro, who turned 70 this year, has throughout her career focused on a particular region--rural southwestern Ontario--as well as on the cities of Vancouver and Toronto. Her world is not very different from any small town or village with farmland, lakes and rivers, shady streets and big brick houses, insular rules and rituals. Over the years since her first collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was published in 1968, the sheer spaciousness of Munro’s storytelling, her gift for surprising us with the truth about ourselves, has transcended national boundaries and the limits of regionalism. Which is why we have come to embrace her as a major author writing in English on the strength of her short fiction. In the nine stories in her new collection, Munro works a rich new vein of retrospection, following the meandering stream of memory as it flows to and fro, revealing long-buried nuggets and unexpected gaps, reversals and corrections. Munro has avoided literary fads and followed her circuitous path, capturing the nuances of ordinary lives with naturalistic grace. Her observations are as acute as the photographic mages of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Her stories will be as enduring.

Jane Ciabattari

*

THE HOTHOUSE

A Novel

By Wolfgang Koeppen

Translated from the German

by Michael Hoff

W.W. Norton: 224 pp., $23.95

*

Impotence has never looked so good. It has rarely waxed so lyrical, nor built sentences of such tumbling, feverish intensity. Only now translated from the German, Wolfgang Koeppen’s 1953 novel, “The Hothouse,” is a prose poem about failure. Withering in its insights into post-World War II Germany, incantatory in its rhythms, it shows us the idealistic parliament member Keetenheuve, and it shows us how he perishes. It shows us good intentions that “turn awry and lose the name of action.” It brings us face to face with a modern-day Hamlet. Koeppen’s novel is a chastening anatomy of politics--not only German, but global. It is a portrait of the weakness of good intentions, the impotence of intelligence. When Hamlet went down, at least he took some bad guys down with him. When his 20th century descendant goes, he takes no one.

Cristina Nehring

*

I, ROGER WILLIAMS

A Fragment of Autobiography

by Mary Lee Settle

W.W. Norton: 320 pp., $24.95

*

“I, Roger Williams” is a beautiful work of art. Daring in conception, elegantly deft in execution, this novel about early life in the American colonies makes vividly present the doughty character of the English Puritan who rose above his time and place to create, with his work-worn hands, the king post of American liberty. Settle evokes the time of her tale with language that beautifully echoes the English of those days. Remembering his banishment, Williams says, in Settle’s re-creation, that the reflection of the moon “lit the snow like some day in night--I could hear animals beyond the trees, and knew that I was watched, but only by the wild and not the civilized that would have destroyed me, oh not by tearing at my throat like the wild animals, but by law and dignity and the awful certainty of righteousness.” The reader comes away from this novel realizing that Roger Williams deserves to be in the forefront of American historical consciousness. And the portrait that Settle has so artfully and attractively painted in “I, Roger Williams” may just put him there.

Anthony Day

*

ISLAND

The Complete Stories

By Alistair MacLeod

W.W. Norton: 434 pp., $25.95

*

“The land was ours,” wrote the poet Robert Frost, “before we were the land’s,” but his vision, steeped in a moment of nationalism, brooked neither the pain of possession nor the ambivalence of belonging. One thousand miles north of Frost’s granite and birch-covered landscapes, the terrains of Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod are more barren and wind-swept. Tenure, forged in duty and obligation, is less to be desired than endured. “Island,” 16 short stories following the publication last year of MacLeod’s much-acclaimed novel “No Great Mischief,” is a remarkable collection. Like the great writer W.G. Sebald, MacLeod wanders across the landscape he claims as his own and lets the wandering reveal its meaning, content to know that the deeper you pour yourself into a region, the more you transcend the particulars and give the stories a universal sheen, an intimate gloss. MacLeod’s Americans--refugees from Ireland’s poverty and Scotland’s clearances--are haunted by what’s been lost, by what can never be. He sings his stories, and in the cadences of his sentences, in the slow unraveling of the narrative, his quiet deliberation, he steps between generations, setting down their history, their silent progressions, before they are lost. Read his words out loud. Read them twice over. Understand that nothing happens within these pages that isn’t the product of time.

Thomas Curwen

*

JOHN HENRY DAYS

A Novel

By Colson Whitehead

Doubleday: 448 pp. $24.95

*

The folklore of America is full of tall tales, fictional people in real places, poems and songs that send a shiver or a thrill, mixtures of fact and fantasy, all born of a restless movement ever westward. One of these folk tales, the legend of John Henry, is the linchpin of Colson Whitehead’s epic second novel, “John Henry Days.” “John Henry Days” transforms the simple ballad that begat an American legend into a rich feast of history, fiction and fable, as complex and satisfying as a Bach toccata and fugue. Whitehead’s novel winds and turns in time, from 1871 to 1996, switching decades or centuries in the flick of a page. Its language is elegant, colloquial, archaic, protean, shifting in tone with each of the stories it tells. This powerfully composed novel is likely to have a long and praiseworthy life, not unlike the legend from which it springs.

D.J. Carlile

*

THE LAST REPORT ON THE MIRACLES

AT LITTLE NO HORSE

A Novel

By Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins: 362 pp., $26

*

In stories dense with desire, enmity, love-longing and grief--her trademarks through nearly 20 years--Louise Erdrich has often parted the curtains of everyday life to intimate the lure of another world. But what had been an occasional dalliance with the spiritual is in “The Last Report” a deeper meditation. Part novel, part fictional biography, part hagiography, it is a story that bridges the distance between the spiritual and secular world in an attempt to explain, if at all possible, the capriciousness of life. Messy, ribald, deeply tragic, preposterous and heartfelt, “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse” is a love story, and what shine most brilliantly through its pages are Erdrich’s intelligence and compassion. Let the world shake, buckle, storm and burn. Let the people suffer, as they will. It is our connections to the past and the future, through families and connections to kin, that grant us our saintliness and our transcendent power.

Thomas Curwen

*

LICK CREEK

A Novel

By Brad Kessler

Scribner: 300 pp., $24

*

“She found her hollow once on a map of West Virginia. Lick Creek was the thinnest scribble of blue, a crack in a porcelain cup.” At the start of Brad Kessler’s thrilling “Lick Creek”--a claustrophobic mining community of the 1920s--seems more like the cup than the crack. Kessler sets up a culture-clash romance--and its cataclysmic consequences--expertly, making “Lick Creek” the kind of guilt-free melodrama that Hollywood can only dream about. In the end, the main characters slip away, sharing a wild fugitive freedom that, like this odd, exquisite and affecting book, ends all too abruptly.

Mark Rozzo

*

LITTLE AMERICA

A Novel

By Henry Bromell

Alfred A. Knopf: 404 pp., $24

*

“Little America,” a remarkably well written and highly original novel that could be called a thriller at the classiest level, is the story of a 52-year-old history professor who wants and needs to find out what his father did for the CIA. Henry Bromell knows the Arab world and writes about it with accurate beauty. The novel is so gracefully embellished with insights, fine language and intelligence that it becomes exceptional.

Gloria Emerson

*

LOOK AT ME

A Novel

By Jennifer Egan

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday:

406 pp., $24.95

*

Jennifer Egan is moving in exactly the direction you want a writer to go: richer, deeper prose, deeper characters, better detail and more imagination. “Look at Me” is a complicated novel, sometimes too complicated, but the questions it raises are worth following a lifetime of labyrinths toward the answers. How can we live so that what is inside of us is more important than what is on the outside? How does falling in love relate proportionally to the rest of a person’s life: family, career, interests, friends. Who can you trust?

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

THE LOOKING GLASS

A Novel

By Michele Roberts

Henry Holt: 304 pp., $23

*

This hypnotically sensuous new novel by prize-winning English-French author Michele Roberts, is possessed of assured, image-rich language. There are many early passage hints at many of the pleasures to come: certainly the reverent eye for workaday objects, the Matisse-/Monet-like brush-loads of color and the writer’s deft establishment of a time (early last century, before the age of the automobile) through precise telling details rather than ham-fisted declaration. All of which adds up to a palpable immediacy, an intimacy not usually associated with historical fiction. The structure of “The Looking Glass” is shifting, fluid. In succeeding sections, various women reveal their lives. For a reader to close a book with the sense of “Yes, so this is why, and this is the only way it could have been!” is one of fiction’s deepest rewards. It is almost consolation for having to say adieu to Normandy and “the sea endlessly writing its life into ours,” in the last summer of innocence, 1914.

Kai Maristed

LOVERBOY

A Novel

By Victoria Redel

Graywolf Press: 208 pp. $21.95

*

“Who is the mother that does not want to keep her child from the ruin of the normal?” It’s the same question Victoria Redel asked in many of the stories in her collection “Where the Road Bottoms Out,” and she asks it again in “Loverboy.” Redel is one of the most talented scary writers to come out of musty old Manhattan in the last few decades. She’s a writer with her fists clenched so tightly that her palms must bleed, and when she opens her fists, suddenly, in front of the reader, powerful, hurtful truths come flying out.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

THE MARBLE QUILT

Stories

By David Leavitt

Houghton Mifflin: 224 pp., $25

*

“No wonder he grew up ugly, ill, ill-tempered!” a young man, reading classics and longing for his cousin in the same train car in David Leavitt’s “Crossing St. Gotthard” thinks of himself, “[h]e belonged to a different age. And now he wanted to cry out, so that all of Switzerland could hear him: I belong to a different age!” It is a cry that rings out in each of these stories, as characters strain against their culture, their times, their definitions of love and the sometimes suffocating constraints of their relationships. In the title story, an older man is killed. The murderer uses pieces of marble the man has stolen from archeological sites. There is a bit of a warning here, like in Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice.” Something to do with honesty and pure love.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

MARTYR’S CROSSING

A Novel

By Amy Wilentz

Simon & Schuster: 312 pp., $24

*

The first scene of “Martyr’s Crossing” is so precise, so startling, so unforgettable, that it well serves its riddle-like role in the rest of the novel: How could such a thing have happened? This is the question all of Amy Wilentz’s characters and her readers must ask themselves. On the cold rainy night of several terrorist attacks, a young Palestinian woman tries to carry her 21/2-year-old son, who is having an asthma attack, past a checkpoint into Jerusalem to see the doctor. She is stopped at the checkpoint by a young lieutenant who is ordered, against his judgment, not to let her pass. An ambulance arrives to take an Israeli soldier with a scratch on his face to the hospital, but the authorities will not let the child go. The boy dies. It must be said again--the boy dies. No sooner is he dead than he becomes a martyr and the focus of rioting, graffiti and a public campaign to “find the soldier” who would not let them pass. The boy’s grandfather, a cardiologist, comes from America to help his daughter find a path through the political harangues that cloud her grieving. These characters are all pawns of history and politics, but Wilentz makes them live, insisting on the potential of humans to be good at every critical juncture. This is how fiction sheds light on history. It is not necessarily balanced, but it makes, in the end, history, writ large, seem tragically superficial.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

MASTER OF THE CROSSROADS

A Novel

By Madison Smartt Bell

Pantheon: 732 pp., $30

*

Madison Smartt Bell’s superb novel about the Haitian Revolution weaves between the personal and public lives of its main characters with a consistency that disguises and betrays its grounding in historical sources. This narrative approach will be familiar to readers of Bell’s previous book. A finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, “All Souls’ Rising” covered the opening years of the Haitian Revolution, beginning in August 1791 with a voodoo-inspired slave revolt in the northern plains of the colony. “Master of the Crossroads,” the second book in a planned trilogy, picks up the narrative in the latter half of 1793, just as Toussaint L’Ouverture is beginning to acquire the grass-roots military support that will make him the undisputed leader of the black revolution. Bell has taught historians a thing or two about what it means to have an intimate relationship with the past. Throwing caution to the wind, he has taken up a little-known but hugely important subject with passion and conviction. “Master of the Crossroads” is a labor of love, and the spell of Bell’s romance with Haiti is manifest throughout.

Malick Ghachem

*

THE MIRACLE LIFE OF EDGAR MINT

A Novel

By Brady Udall

W.W. Norton: 424 pp., $24.95

*

“The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint” is an adept and marvelous mix of humor and pathos. Brady Udall’s prose strikes a perfect balance, sometimes minimalist, sometimes lush. The novel revolves around an odd central character who, if written by a writer of less talent, would have strained credulity but with Udall as a muse is achingly human. Edgar Mint is nobody’s Everyman, but he is the hope and the pain of a child looking for, and eventually finding, a home.

Zachary Karabell

*

MONSTRUARY

A Novel

By Julian Rios

Translated from the Spanish

by Edith Grossman

Alfred A. Knopf: 230 pp., $25

*

Julian Rios is one of the most original writers living in Europe today. “Monstruary” is an opportune place to begin reading Rios. “Monstruary” opens in Berlin as the story’s narrator, Emil Alia, sits at the bedside of painter Victor Mons, who threw himself out of a hotel window after a frenzied evening of destroying his own work. His long years of painting have been an attempt to depict the horrors of the 20th century. Rios comes from the literary tradition that produced “Finnegan’s Wake” and the novels of Arno Schmidt, Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino (and you might add Georges Perec and Raymond Roussel for good measure). Impatient with the limits of the conventional novel, Rios shuns elaborate scene-setting and long conversations between characters. Instead, he toys with his own knowledge of art (he has written about the painters Kitaj, Saura and others) and language to create Mons and the people that he has transformed into bestial erotic images for his series of paintings titled “Monstruary” (“monster” as well as his own name). “Monstruary” is a book constructed of many roads, all of which must be taken in order to grapple with the mystery of artistic creation at the center of this story. Through Alia’s eyes, Rios has conjured up a novel as a tour through the infernal memory of contemporary Europe.

Thomas McGonigle

*

MY NAME IS RED

A Novel

By Orhan Pamuk

Translated from the Turkish

by Erdag Goknar

Alfred A. Knopf: 422 pp., $25.95

*

Love and crime in an exotic city have always proved a compelling combination to Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, whether in his 1990 contemporary novel “The White Castle” or his historical “The Black Book.” Yet it is neither passion nor homicide that makes Pamuk’s latest, “My Name Is Red,” the rich and essential book that it is. While Pamuk’s descriptions of the ravishing and ravenous Shekure quicken the heart, and his circuitous clues to the identity of the murderer quicken the mind, Pamuk is neither Jacqueline Susann nor Umberto Eco. It is Pamuk’s rendering of the intense life of artists negotiating the devilishly sharp edge of Islam 1,000 years after its birth that elevates “My Name Is Red” to the rank of modern classic.

Jonathan Levi

*

NIAGARA FALLS ALL OVER AGAIN

A Novel

By Elizabeth McCracken

Dial Press: 308 pp., $23.95

*

Mose Sharp, the tone-perfect narrator of Elizabeth McCracken’s beautifully written second novel, is a Jewish boy from west Des Moines who is expected to inherit the family clothing store. Instead, breaking his father’s heart, he runs away at 18 and becomes a vaudeville performer during the Depression, when vaudeville is dying. This is a realistic novel, as well as one in which every bit of stage patter, every foreshadowing and echo, every time-shift is faultlessly handled. The reality is that most of the fun happens in the first half of life. Then parents die, children drown in swimming pools, spouses die of cancer, careers peter out, old age sets in. It’s proof of McCracken’s magic that the impression we take away from “Niagara Falls All Over Again” isn’t of sadness--though there’s plenty of that--so much as exuberance and wit.

Michael Harris

*

ON THE WATER

A Novel

By H. M. van den Brink

Translated from the Dutch

By Paul Vincent

Grove Press: 134 pp., $21

*

Like Thomas Eakins’ paintings of 19th century scullers on the Schuylkill, H.M. van den Brink’s debut meticulously depicts