Best of Books

Fiction

The Burden of Proof by Scott Turow. The blockbuster novel of the year is also one of the better, more intelligent reads. As he did in Presumed Innocent (1987), the author-lawyer hurls the human impulse to make trouble straight at the bloodless statutes designed to keep the peace. The impact is shattering, and the echoes remain long after the explosion is over.

Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro. This collection of 10 shimmering stories should put to rest, at least for a while, the old canard that nothing interesting ever happens in Canada. The author, who lives near Lake Huron, writes about the lives, times and loves of her countrymen and -women with grace, precision and memorable generosity.

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The last months and days of Simon Bolivar, the brilliant and thwarted liberator of South America, are imaginatively reconstructed by the acknowledged master of magic realism. As the general flees from his progressive illness and ungrateful people, he trails, in his turbulent wake, a hyperactive tale of grandeur and disillusionment.

My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer. For nearly 25 years, those who have wanted to burrow beneath the headlines from South Africa have consulted the fiction of Nadine Gordimer. Her 10th novel, which deals with a "colored" schoolteacher caught up in his country's racial strife, offers another inside view of people who are trapped and defined by the fatal abstractions of black and white.

Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman. This fiction revolves around a fact: the May 1985 fire bombing (ordered by a black mayor) of a Philadelphia house occupied by a black organization called Move. But that is only the starting point for a prolonged, dramatic monologue on racism in the U.S. and the possibility that the birth of the nation was accompanied by a genetic disorder.

Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt. Two contemporary British scholars, one male, one female, try to collect evidence about a presumed love affair between two Victorian poets, one male, one female. Antonia Byatt, who until recently has been known chiefly as Margaret Drabble's older sister, comes into her own as a novelist (and romancer) of dazzling inventiveness.

The Quincunx by Charles Palliser. Roughly half a million words long, this extravagant narrative is a faithful re-creation of the 19th century British novel -- lots of them, including Bleak House, Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. Miraculously, this bald-faced imitation works wonders. The author makes the distant world of Victorian fiction, with its careful plotting and moral punctiliousness, as gripping as tomorrow's whodunit.

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. Rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated; Harold C. ("Rabbit") Angstrom is in awful shape at the end of this novel, the victim of piggy habits and a massive coronary, but Updike has left himself free to have a second opinion. If Rabbit really is finished, in this fourth book, then so too is a luminous, encyclopedic saga of postwar America.

Symposium by Muriel Spark. Ten guests assemble for a fashionable London dinner party, with no idea of just how murderously interesting the affair will turn out to be. The author here approaches the sinister elegance of her The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). She introduces fundamental issues -- salvation and sin, inspiration and insanity, free will and destiny -- through the medium of light but lethal comedy.

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. Devotees waited 17 years for the author to outdo his apocalyptic Gravity's Rainbow (1973). What they got instead was a kinder, gentler Pynchon. This saga of wilting '60s flower children, circa 1984, on the lam from federal narcs, displays much of the author's old virtuosity: stunning erudition and terminal paranoia coupled with the hard-edged loopiness of cartoons. That is not surprising; the happy ending is.

Nonfiction

C.S. Lewis: A Biography by A.N. Wilson. Comic novels, essays and biographies waft from Wilson with Mozartean ease. Each book seems better than the last, or at least different in some incomparable way. Such is the case with his approach to Lewis, the British writer and celebrator of Christian thought who delighted both adults (The Screwtape Letters) and children (The Chronicles of Narnia). Fans should be warned that Wilson's portrait of the saintly don contains some fleshy demons.

A Hole in the World by Richard Rhodes. Child abuse was not discovered by if- it-bleeds-it-leads TV-news editors. Suffering innocents can also be found in literature, extending from Medea to Oliver Twist. Set in the Midwest during the '30s and '40s, this memoir of how Rhodes and his brother survived mistreatment by a hateful stepmother should become a minor classic.

In All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley by Sally Bedell Smith. Paley, the founder of CBS and a Manhattan socialite, died not a moment too soon to avoid seeing himself debunked in this best-selling biography. "Paley," says the author, "was as spoiled as a man could be." By the end of her razor- edged narrative, Smith has cut her subject down to where he would have trouble filling a 12-in. screen.

Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic by Bette Bao Lord. When Lord went to fetch her father's ashes from a Red Chinese prison, she was told that his ears had been torn off. It was all she had to hear to know that the official report of suicide was a lie. The author, wife of the former ambassador to China Winston Lord, confronts 40 years of cultural distortion in the People's Republic.

Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro. The second installment of what promises to be the longest and liveliest American political biography of modern times finds Lyndon Johnson transforming what were certainly not his finest hours into tarnished triumphs. To wit: avoiding World War II combat for as long as possible and then parlaying a few minutes under fire into a Silver Star; and stealing the 1948 Texas senatorial election with 87 questionable votes -- enough to earn him the nickname Landslide Lyndon.

The Politics of Rich and Poor by Kevin Phillips. Twenty years ago, the Nostradamus of Washington correctly predicted the emerging Republican majority. Now Phillips foresees a populist backlash to the greedfest of the Reagan '80s. A provocative analysis based on social science and a cyclical view of history.

The Polk Conspiracy by Kati Marton. One of the mysteries of the early years of the cold war has been, Who killed George Polk? He was a CBS correspondent in 1948 who, shortly after threatening to expose corrupt officials of the Greek Royalist government, was found floating in Salonika bay with a bullet in his head. The Royalists blamed the communists. Not so, according to Marton. Her investigations reveal a right-wing conspiracy and a Washington cover-up aided by columnist Walter Lippmann.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power by Daniel Yergin. If you ever had any doubt about what makes today's political pole greasy, read this documentary history of the petroleum industry. Yergin leaves no promising source undrilled in this story of how the U.S. has gone from being the world's leading exporter of oil products to a nation of worried petroholics.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years by Brian Boyd. The late, great novelist once defined biography as "psycho-plagiarism," the unauthorized use of another's mental states. It is nearly impossible to think how an outsider could enter Nabokov's baroque imagination, let alone leave with its mysteries intact. Boyd's brilliant biography is a sort of literary cyclotron, accelerating streams of His Nabs' life and work until they collide in ways that leave traces of his genius.

What I Saw at the Revolution by Peggy Noonan. Presidents are accustomed to having words put in their mouths. Ronald Reagan was spoon-fed by speechwriter Noonan, who also flavored George Bush's minced syntax with "a thousand points of light." As a woman with a lower-middle-class background and a degree from a third-rate college, she was largely ignored by bosses she calls "Harvardheads." Their mistake. Noonan's witty memoir of her time at conservatism's red-hot center proves that the way to spell revenge is b-e-s-t s-e-l-l-e-r.