Best of the Decade

FICTION

Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (1981). In his third incarnation as the titular hero of an Updike novel, Harold C. ("Rabbit") Angstrom makes good money selling Japanese cars (Toyotas) to Americans. Still, something has gone wrong in Rabbit's native land, and Updike's valedictory to the late 1970s creates an unforgettable comedy of diminishing expectations.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa (1982). Juxtaposing a romance between the narrator, Mario, 18, and his nonblood relative Julia, 32, with the saga of a writer of soap-opera scripts, this novel, set in Peru during the 1950s, displays Vargas Llosa -- now a candidate for the presidency of that troubled country -- in a wry, confessional, accessible mood that may never appear again.

The Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982). An assembly of 47 fictions -- teeming with demons, dybbuks and exuberant men and women -- that remains the best introduction to the Nobel laureate and world-class writer who transformed Old World folktales into modern art.

- Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories by Saul Bellow (1984). Another American Nobel laureate presents his patented array of characters -- big thinkers and big shots -- with typical energy and verve. The author here makes limitations of length a positive virtue; the pressure of high-toned ideas passing through the minds of flawed, often comic figures gives the impression of short stories that are bursting at the seams.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (1984). The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia forces the surgeon Tomas, his wife Tereza and his mistress Sabina into involuntary exile. Kundera, who was himself driven from Prague by that upheaval, examines his characters' reactions to the new winds of freedom. Hailed as an apotheosis of East European dissent when it first appeared, the novel now begins to look prophetic.

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler (1985). The 1980s finally gave Tyler the broad readership her talents deserve. Her tenth novel is a poignant portrait of a travel writer who caters to people who hate to travel. Behind this whimsical premise lies a tragedy (the death of a child) that is never played for easy irony or pathos.

Zuckerman Bound by Philip Roth (1985). Roth's trilogy of novels about the American Jewish writer Nathan Zuckerman seems even more impressive whole than it did in its serial installments. Zuckerman is not Roth, exactly, but neither is he entirely unlike his creator, trapped by work and celebrity. The interplay between these fictional and real beings is unfailingly rich, comic and engaging.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987). This vivid portrait of fear and loathing in New York City, circa now, is hilarious, unsparing and eerily premonitory, especially about Wall Street jitters and deteriorating race relations. The author is carrying on the panoramic tradition of Dickens and Thackeray but with updated social material. A better decade might have spawned a more comforting novel.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1988). It might seem hard to wring interest or suspense out of a love story that has been stalled for more than 50 years by the inconvenience of the woman's happy marriage to someone else. Garcia Marquez does so with no visible effort. The magic realism of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), is muted here. The later novel's surfaces seem real; the inner lives are fantastic.

Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow (1989). A boy growing up in the Bronx during the Depression is effectively adopted by Dutch Schultz, a notorious gangster. The hero's vision of criminal life, at once glamorous and corrupting, amounts to a privileged education. This story of a young man's coming of age already seems a part of the American grain.

NONFICTION

Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel (1980). The "and" in the title is crucial. For biographer Steel illuminates not only the life of his subject, perhaps this century's most illustrious American journalist, but the events he reported and witnessed, on and off the record, from World War I through the agonies of Viet Nam.

Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson (1982). This would be a rarity in any era, a literary memoir free of rancor and score settling. The author recalls her first husband, John Berryman, and his friends, among them Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, men who left behind some splendid poems and some sad histories of alcoholism, despair and suicide. But here they are young and joyful amid the possibilities of words, ignorant of the sadnesses that await them all.

Modern Times by Paul Johnson (1983). The former editor of Britain's New Statesman has the crust and style to pinpoint evil in an age of moral relativism, and he is not talking about Gordon Gekko's affirmative views on a greedy decade. The villains are the tyrants of both the left and the right who have perpetrated outrages in the name of the modern secular state.

Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn by Evan S. Connell (1984). The author, one of America's most underappreciated novelists (Mrs. Bridge, 1959; Mr. Bridge, 1969), uses his imaginative skills to re-create the historical George Armstrong Custer and his foolhardy last stand. An unconventional retelling of the familiar legend that broke new ground in the organization and narration of the history of the Old West.

Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas (1985). Focusing on three families from different backgrounds -- one black, one Irish Catholic, one liberal Wasp -- Lukas achieved a thorough and balanced social history of Boston's school- desegregation ordeal that won him his second Pulitzer Prize and became a landmark study of the impact of public policy on private citizens.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1987). A modern variation on the theme of stealing fire from the gods, this saga about the beginning of the nuclear age, from inspiration to detonation, is one of the great stories of the 20th or any other century, and Rhodes has told it better than anyone before.

A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan (1988). A passionate and painstaking reconstruction of the strange career of John Paul Vann, a U.S. proconsul in Viet Nam, that casts new light on the ambiguous nature of that tragic war.

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; Alone: 1932-1940 by William Manchester (1988). Although not as long or crammed as Martin Gilbert's official eight-volume life of Winnie, Volume II of Manchester's opus takes the irrepressible Brit through the gathering storm to the first thunderclaps of World War II and demonstrates that the author is one of today's best writers of narrative prose.

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch (1988). What lifted this biography to new heights was Branch's researches into the origins of the Southern black churches and their influence in inspiring and organizing Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights revolution. Volume II is in the works.

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama (1989). An immensely readable work of distinguished scholarship that guillotined many of the romantic myths about the beginnings of French democracy, notably that the ancien regime was hopelessly reactionary and the masses supported free trade and religious toleration.