TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010190/01019012.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.6 KB | 157 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 92

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.