The Best Of 1998 Books

FICTION

1 A MAN IN FULL Tom Wolfe's long-awaited successor to The Bonfire of the Vanities lives up to all the hype, and then some. It is big (742 pages), crammed with the author's keen and boisterous prose and encyclopedic in its scope. Wolfe believes that novels can still show us the way we live now. His version of a cross section of today's Atlanta proves that his novels certainly can.

2 PARADISE Toni Morrison's first novel since she won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature tells a haunting tale. After the Civil War, nine ex-slaves move their families to the Western territories to found a new community and new lives. Nearly a century later, some of their descendants jointly commit a violent crime. Why? What happened to the dream of paradise? Morrison's soaring, incantatory prose provides the rich, unforgettable answers.

3 CHARMING BILLY The title character, Billy Lynch, has just been buried when this shrewd, elegiac novel opens. Alice McDermott shows Billy's family and friends in a Bronx bar, hoisting a few drinks to the memory of the deceased, a hopeless alcoholic. The author does not underscore this irony; she lets her characters talk, to each other and themselves, and turns in a clear-eyed portrait of Irish-American life.

4 I MARRIED A COMMUNIST Iron Rinn, ne Ira Ringold, is a prominent radio actor during the late '40s and early '50s whose career collapses when his estranged wife writes a book titled, quite accurately, I Married a Communist. Philip Roth filters the story of Rinn's downfall through the memories of two men who loved and admired him. The mania of the Red-baiting days is recorded with perfect pitch. Roth's look at the past is harrowing and mesmerizing.

5 CLOUDSPLITTER Was John Brown, the antislavery revolutionary who led the famous 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, W. Va., a visionary or a madman? Russell Banks frames this question in fictional form, a furious, sprawling drama narrated by Brown's real-life son Owen. The result is a historical novel that is not simply a period piece or a pedantic tract but an imaginative leap.

NONFICTION

1 KING OF THE WORLD: THE RISE OF MUHAMMAD ALI A book about a boxer would seem to lack, well, social significance. Not true here. David Remnick takes off from the 1964 bout in which a brash Cassius Clay dethroned the menacing heavyweight champ Sonny Liston. That fight changed Clay into Muhammad Ali and created a new sort of black athlete. Remnick's account of the aftershocks packs a punch too.

2 PILLAR OF FIRE: AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS 1963-65 Taylor Branch's second installment of his trilogy on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. covers only three years, but they were complex and fateful times. Lyndon Johnson ascended to the White House and rammed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a triumph for King. But his doctrine of nonviolence was being challenged by Malcolm X, and a war in Southeast Asia escalated. Branch's book is an eerie chronicle of deaths foretold.

3 LINDBERGH His 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic made him, at 25, the most famous person on the planet. A. Scott Berg records what happened to the aviator before, during and after his transcendent triumph. The later life proves especially poignant, not only because of his child's murder. Lindbergh came to dislike commercial aviation and was accused of pro-Nazi sympathies. A hero who flew so high became a troubled human back on the ground.

4 TITAN: THE LIFE OF JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, SR. The man who made his surname synonymous with limitless riches was reviled and caricatured during his life, and posterity has not been too much kinder. Biographer Ron Chernow's account portrays both the thin-lipped skinflint and the philanthropist who gave away hundreds of millions of dollars to worthy enterprises. Monopolies seem to be back in vogue. Wherever he is now, the old man must be smiling.

5 SLAVES IN THE FAMILY Sullivan's Island, just across the bay from Charleston, S.C., was once a major docking point for incoming shiploads of African slaves. Journalist Edward Ball grew up on the island; his family in the area stretches back to 1698 and includes generations of slave-owners. Ball's research into this personal past is not a guilt trip but a journey of discovery.

AND THE WORST The Starr report. O.K., news junkies lapped it up, and TV talking heads droned on about it, but the Starr report was a pretty pallid piece of work. Wimpish hero, insecure heroine, pizza, thong underwear, a cigar. What in the world has happened to romances?