RICHARD EDER’S 10 BEST BOOKS

Herewith, nine works of fiction and one of nonfiction:

THE HOURS; By Michael Cunningham; (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 230 pp., $22)

A contemporary gay writer simultaneously affirms and dissolves the category with a novel that is simply a particular door into a universal fiction. A set of contemporary characters re-voices the patterns of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (one of them is Woolf herself). It is not a pastiche but a transplanting: an exquisitely written, kaleidoscopic work that anchors a floating postmodern world on pre-modern caissons of love, grief and transcendent longing.

DAMASCUS GATE; By Robert Stone; (Houghton Mifflin: 512 pp., $26)

A modern novel of Jerusalem; and in the labyrinthine currents of that city, umbilical of history’s obsessions and the future’s forebodings, Robert Stone finds a scale for his own labyrinthine forebodings. It is a metaphysical, historic and political thriller. When the metaphysics spring a leak, the history and politics sear it closed. I think it is Stone’s best book.

BLINDNESS; By Jose Saramago; Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero; (Harcourt Brace: 294 pp., $22)

The darkest of the Portuguese writer’s great parables, but two words need qualifying. Jose Saramago’s “dark” is invariably lightened, first by a private universal smile, then by hope (not the endurance of hope, but the hope of endurance). As for “parable”: In this tale of a nation gone blind, it means much more than signifying. It means coming round to sweep, tell a joke or wait outside so a couple can finish making love. Saramago’s Nobel Prize does not make him a better writer but it improves the prize.

THE FOREIGN STUDENT; By Susan Choi; (HarperFlamingo: 336 pp., $23)

Her first novel brings a Korean student to a university in Tennessee and pairs him up with a young Southerner. He is scarred by wartime atrocity; she by a more private and internal outrage; together they achieve an intricate match out of a painful and comic mismatch. It is all ups and downs, connections missed, mistaken and made, and the result is a vivid and graceful look at two kinds of foreigner in America: the one from far away, the one from just down the way.

CHARMING BILLY; By Alice McDermott; (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 280 pp., $21)

Author of “That Night” and winner of this year’s National Book Award, Alice McDermott is a pantheist in our pantheon. In her ostensibly domestic settings, indwelling spirits make every gesture, teacup, errand and meal sentient or perilous. Billy the charmer is dead; out of his wake come the stories that fight the warfare of any family legend--here, a characteristically Irish American family legend--and construct a teeming three-generational world. Its tenderness is steel, its comedy devoid of indulgence and its sadness too vital to do more than lament and pass along.

THE RINGS OF SATURN; By W. G. Sebald; Translated from the German by Michael Hulse; (New Directions: 278 pp., $23.95)

This German writer living in England has created a haunting genre, a series of fictional meditations like a lantern shining up through our liquid depths. Together, a walk through the once prosperous towns and abandoned follies of East Anglia, and the narrator’s rich literary and historical musings, weave a cloth of tragic memory. In his previous “Emigrants,” it was the memory of survivors of the Holocaust; here it is as if the dark canopy had spread over all we knew and know of our civilization.

DEATH IN SUMMER; By William Trevor; (Viking: 214 pp., $23.95)

What seems to be heading for horror ends in an equivalent shock: the shock of saintliness. “Death,” the most perfect of William Trevor’s novels and certainly the most surprising, brings two members of the English gentry together with two figures from London’s slums. The result is tragedy and redemption. Trevor’s writing, Apollonian and incandescent, seems only to get better as he rounds his 71st year.

THE EVOLUTION OF JANE; By Cathleen Schine; (Houghton Mifflin: 210 pp., $24)

A young woman flees a divorce with a trip to the Galapagos. There, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the picaresque history of her own family, an obsession over a lost friendship and a boatload of possibly odd and certainly lively fellow-tourists combine to produce a relative rarity in our fiction: a novel of ideas girded up with authentic if raffish emotion.

PARADISE; By Toni Morrison; (Alfred A. Knopf: 324 pp., $25)

This novel about a tight Oklahoma community settled by descendants of slaves splits just off center. The most of it, portraying the harsh, industrious patriarchy of the settler families, is Morrison at her finest. Its interlocking stories battle out the old dilemma of black history: whether to keep separate and proud or undergo the painful process of joining the larger national community. The book’s lesser part, the parallel story of a nearby settlement of women of mixed races, is a case of magical correctness: Its lessons lead it instead of developing from it. Still, two-thirds of first-rate Morrison is worth many two or three other first-rates.

THE UNKNOWN MATISSE: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908; By Hilary Spurling; (Alfred A. Knopf: 480 pp., $40)

It is long--only the first half of a projected life--and prodigiously researched. But Spurling’s book is the opposite of the massive bound collections of file cards that are biography’s current fashion. Her facts are tesseracts in a mosaic. I do not know another book which, while lavishly setting its subject in his time and among his fellows, illuminates so searchingly the human and artistic struggles of a painter’s life, as well as providing such expressive side-portraits--notably of the playfulness and grit concealed in those ostensibly severe paintings of Amelie, his wife.