The Best Fiction of 1998

Editor’s Note: This year, The Times reviewed more than 700 books. Here, in the judgment of our contributors, are the best fiction, poetry and children’s books of 1998. Culled from the original reviews, their notices have been edited and condensed for reasons of space.

Next week: The best nonfiction of 1998, including memoirs, biography, politics, history, economics and science.

A SONG OF STONE; By Iain Banks; Simon and Schuster: 280 pp., $23

Iain Banks writes with rich tactile detail and dark suspense, borne upon an undercurrent of revulsion. The revulsion issues from the corrupt voice of Abel, his narrator. It grips us insistently and too close; it breathes a perfumed rottenness in our face; it employs unabashed confession as an ultimate smoke screen. Banks uses this smoke to trace out his novel’s theme: the perduring evil that underlies all history and histories. “A Song of Stone” is powerfully written and fiercely provocative. Banks, a Jeremiah of our Western civilization, refuses to spare the past, the present or the future. For this novel, incarnation is no miracle but a curse. The vision is bleak and narrow, but it is impressive.

-- RICHARD EDER

T.C. BOYLE STORIES: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle; By T. Coraghessan Boyle; Viking: 694 pp., $35

The author of “Riven Rock,” “The Road to Wellville,” “The Tortilla Curtain” and five other novels, T.C. Boyle finds the intense, rapid-moving spotlight of the short story especially suited to his brigand’s play with language. Ironist and adventurer among the potholes and pratfalls of the American language--how we utter, mangle and stretch it--Boyle doesn’t quite deserve the title of philosopher king or teeth-clenching prophet. Not every yarn-spinner needs to be the philosopher king of an epoch. But when the spinner of yarns is as adept at composing his tapestry as Boyle, he is a source of philosophy in others and, yes, he can call himself Maestro.

-- HERBERT GOLD

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE; By Barbara Kingsolver; HarperCollins: 544 pp., $27.50

The rape of undeveloped countries, the exploitation of primitive peoples, the destruction of ancient traditions--these are themes usually attacked with the zeal of the newly converted. Barbara Kingsolver has written on social justice before, but she is no less fervent for it. In this powerful new epic, she addresses these issues through the more minute concerns of an American family caught in the social and political upheavals of the Belgian Congo in the 1960s. Leaving the familiar Southwestern terrain of novels like “The Bean Trees” and “Pigs in Heaven,” Kingsolver paints the modern history of Africa with a broad brush while ensuring that individual lives pop out like hardened bumps on the palimpsest. Whether one is converted by the testimonials given in “The Poisonwood Bible” or indeed enticed by Kingsolver’s thoughtful evocation of a turbulent paradise, the degree of her achievement is unarguable. She has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.

-- PHYLLIS RICHARDSON

THE TATTOOED SOLDIER By Hector Tobar; Delphinium Books: 308 pp., $23

This fine novel is about fate and consequences. Using flashbacks, the author creates a steadily escalating confrontation between two Guatemalans who meet in Los Angeles at a dramatic moment of life or death. The hero is Antonio Antonio, once a student in Guatemala City and now homeless and unemployed in Los Angeles. The antagonist is retired Sgt. Guillermo Longaria, a soldier who killed Antonio’s wife and child in a death-squad operation in Guatemala and now spends his days in an apartment on Bonnie Brae Street, studying mind control and playing chess. Hector Tobar, a Los Angeles Times reporter who came from Guatemala as a small child, has a fine storyteller’s instinct. As the author moves his characters toward the climax with the skill of a chess master, he also includes deeper commentaries on urban pathologies. “The Tattooed Soldier” is especially remarkable for the invisible world Tobar has so skillfully illuminated. Who realizes that there are 5,000 dispossessed Kanjobal-speaking Mayans in Pico-Union and South-Central who live, in Tobar’s description, in a canyon of brick tenements where not a single shaft of their corn can grow?

-- TOM HAYDEN

MY HEART LAID BARE; By Joyce Carol Oates; Dutton: 544 pp., $24.95

In “My Heart Laid Bare,” Joyce Carol Oates pulls from her well-stocked shelf of influences elements of the gothic novel, the sweeping historical romance and even the social satire of Herman Melville’s “The Confidence Man” to create a family of characters for whom the idea of “beginning afresh” is more than just a wistful notion. Novels of a size and scope this ambitious can easily collapse under their own weight, unless constructed by a skilled architect of tone and narrative. Fortunately, the author’s instinct is sure and solid, audaciously original but rooted in an idiom linking it with the towering influences of past generations. The ghost of Melville saturates “My Heart Laid Bare,” from its elaborately discursive sentences to its suspicion-laced curiosity about 19th century American reform movements.

-- JEFF TURRENTINE

KAATERSKILL FALLS; By Allegra Goodman; The Dial Press: 326 pp., $23.95

“Kaaterskill Falls” is a richly textured portrait of a small community in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. When the novel opens in 1976, Rav Kirshner, a frail and ailing but still controlling 78, has yet to choose a successor. He is a man of great learning, neither a Hasid nor a mystic but “a rationalist, interested in law, not myth.” He has two sons between whom he must choose: Jeremy, a Queens College professor who is brilliant and undeniably more interesting but defiantly unmarried and worldly, and Isaiah, equally indoctrinated but not as intelligent as Jeremy. With his bitterly efficient wife, Rachel, Isaiah attends his father’s every need loyally and ploddingly. Not since Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen” have readers been treated to such an intimate look at a closed Orthodox community. Allegra Goodman’s portrait of the Rav is a marvel of research and imagination, a fascinating, multifaceted profile of power and rigidity based on utter devotion to Jewish law and prayer.

-- HELLER MCALPIN

THE MUSEUM GUARD; By Howard Norman; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 310 pp., $23

*

Howard Norman, author of “The Bird Artist” and now of “The Museum Guard,” endows his characters with rooted human quiddities and a fable-like float of purpose and fate. It is as if carpenters and angels were measuring them at the same time. Norman’s writing is not magical realism but a quietly and sometimes awkwardly eccentric realism given wings. “The Museum Guard” is a cousin to its predecessor. Its theme is similarly the power of art to break through to those veins of life that we keep bound up for fear of lethal hemorrhage. In “Bird Artist” the breakthrough is ultimately festive. Here, despite the insouciant and often wacky surfaces (marched to the gallows, a Norman character would likely pause to scratch a mosquito bite on his ankle and one on his guard’s as well), it is tragic and frightening.

-- RICHARD EDER

RESERVATION ROAD; By John Burnham Schwartz; Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $24

“Reservation Road” is the story of a grief we’d rather not contemplate: the death of a child. And though stories like this don’t always make for the most appealing reads precisely because this is a possibility every parent must secret away to make it through a day, what John Burnham Schwartz has given us is a dark and irresistible miracle: a heartbreaking thriller. “Reservation Road” is a story that matters to the heart and mind and soul, driving us to see more deeply into the dark recesses of our own hearts to examine possibilities we would rather leave alone: loss, resignation and a heart broken into so many pieces we may lose ourselves and those we have left. Yet Schwartz’s generous heart and clear eye make certain there is room for redemption, despite the depth of grief he limns so beautifully.

-- BRET LOTT

CHARITY: Stories; By Mark Richard; Nan A. Talese / Doubleday: 146 pp., $19.95

Mark Richard has a gift for making us share the guilt with his characters and for his characters. There’s no returning to the safety of your world after reading his books, either his first novel, “Fishboy,” or this one. Children and simple people get hurt in these stories. The writing provides image grist for a reader’s fears and only the gentlest nudges toward moral conclusions.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

THE WOODY; By Peter Lefcourt; Simon and Schuster: 316 pp., $23

Looking for that perfect gift to celebrate politics in America? Search no further. With only a handful of shopping days remaining, Peter Lefcourt’s “The Woody” makes the perfect ballot stuffer. This neon farce lights up the political spectrum to the left and the right of the primary colors. Political correctness, or the lack thereof, has little to do with Lefcourt’s mission. “The Woody” is smart, sexy and just plain funny and, unlike the bulk of satires, it only gets funnier as American politics get weirder.

-- JONATHAN LEVI

THE HINGE OF THE WORLD; By Richard N. Goodwin; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 210 pp., $25

Richard N. Goodwin’s “The Hinge of the World” is a rare accomplishment, a book of ideas that manages to be animated, suspenseful and firmly grounded in the individual psychological identities of its principal characters. The ideas under discussion here--about scientific method and the threat it posed to Catholicism during the first decades of the 17th century--feel as fresh and as startling as when they were first formulated. They receive an elegant and downright thrilling articulation by Goodwin, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and went on to write widely about America in the 1960s. Written as a drama, “The Hinge of the World” displays many characteristics of a philosophical dialogue, a genre much in favor in ancient Greece and during the Renaissance. Yet Goodwin is careful throughout to give his speakers flesh and blood and foibles, and it is not impossible to imagine his work being presented on the stage. The principal speakers are the Tuscan scientist Galileo Galilei and Maffeo Cardinal Barberini, who is the Vatican’s ambassador to France when we meet him and is Pope Urban VIII by the end of the story. “The Hinge of the World” is history alive with tension, passion and paradox.

-- MICHAEL FRANK

THE KNIFE THROWER; By Steven Millhauser; Crown: 256 pp., $22

It doesn’t really matter that Steven Millhauser won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for “Martin Dressler,” an excellent book but not quite as excellent as his astonishing first novel, “Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954.” Like many great writers, Millhauser is obsessed. He has one story; he tells it again and again, and practice only makes it more perfect. Charles Sarabee, the genius behind a fantastical Coney Island-like playground, Paradise Park, in Millhauser’s latest collection of stories, “The Knife Thrower,” is an early sketch of Martin Dressler himself. Paradise Park, with its several levels of extraordinary underground amusement parks filled with beaches and live sea gulls, forests and spherical Ferris wheels, is the amusement park twin of Martin Dressler’s Grant Cosmo hotel. What matters is that by grouping the dozen stories of “The Knife Thrower” together, Millhauser gives the reader a solid dose of Dr. Millhauser’s Fantastical Tonic, producing laughter, wonder, heady confusion and, best of all, a vision of an America we never knew.

-- JONATHAN LEVI

THE FALL OF A SPARROW; By Robert Hellenga; Scribner: 464 pp., $25

Pace Oprah Winfrey, our country’s most (and perhaps only) powerful book critic, the best thing you can say about a novel is not that it made you laugh or cry, helped you endure life’s travails, gave you hope or empowered you. These days, emotions come fast and furious, cheap and easy and, if the advertisers are right, we no longer need literature--just a Visa card--to activate them. In such a culture, the highest possible praise for a novel may be that it forced you to engage it, to argue, to confront it as you would a challenging but sometimes misguided lover. Robert Hellenga’s “The Fall of a Sparrow” is such a novel. A novel of ideas, “The Fall of a Sparrow” resonates deeply.

-- SUSIE LINFIELD

THE ESSENTIAL TALES OF CHEKHOV; By Anton Chekhov; Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett: The Ecco Press: 340 pp., $27.50

Chekhov seems to me a writer for adults, his work becoming useful and also beautiful by attracting attention to mature feelings, to complicated human responses and small issues of moral choice within large, overarching dilemmas, any part of which, were we to encounter them in our complex, headlong life with others, might evade even sophisticated notice. Chekhov’s wish is to complicate and compromise our view of characters we might mistakenly suppose we could understand with only a glance. He almost always approaches us with a great deal of focused seriousness which he means to make irreducible and accessible and, by this concentration, to insist that we take life to heart. Chekhov’s stories are never difficult but often demanding; always dense but never turgid; sometimes dour but rarely hopeless. Just read these wonderful stories for pleasure, first, and do not read them fast. The more you linger, the more you reread, the more you’ll experience and feel addressed by this great genius who, surprisingly, in spite of distance and time, shared a world we know and saw as his great privilege the chance to redeem it with language.

-- RICHARD FORD

THE LIFE OF INSECTS; By Victor Pelevin; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 180 pp., $22

With beetles making up one of every four species on Earth, it will come as no surprise, at least not to entomologists and fanciers of the more exotic stories of Kafka and Gogol, that the Russian Victor Pelevin has populated the universe of his second novel, “The Life of Insects,” with a menagerie of beetles, ants, moths, cockroaches and flies. One scene, a quiet bit of philosophy passed on by a father to his son as they walk to the beach, is as moving as any slice of Turgenev. And the pathos of its payoff, when the young dung beetle finally reaches the strand, is pure Chekhov. What is truly stunning is the whole-cloth originality of Pelevin’s vision. His characters break in and out of their human cocoons with an ease that would be the envy of any morph-master. The author defies the reader to gum the simple taxonomic labels of political, existential or absurd onto his novel. Instead, he asks us to look with the split vision of the scarab beetle, using feel as much as logic. “The Life of Insects” is a virtuoso performance, at times as deep-hearted as a Tchaikovsky pas de deux, at others as light-fingered as “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

-- JONATHAN LEVI

NOSFERATU; By Jim Shepard; Alfred A. Knopf: 216 pp., $22

Can there be any doubt that novelists are possessed by their subjects? We know Jim Shepard, author of “Battling Against Castro,” “Kiss of the Wolf,” “Lights Out in the Reptile House” and others, to be a mild-mannered, precise writer. Indeed “Nosferatu” has many of these stylistic attributes, but all too close to the surface burns the hypnotic, viral spirit of the vampire. This novel is out of control, completely infected by that spirit. The plot glides and shudders. It is the life, as Shepard imagines it, of F.W. Murnau, the German director. Since Shepard has been bitten in the course of writing “Nosferatu,” he and Murnau are inseparable. The result is brilliantly cinematic--a figure looming in the corner of each scene, with an even larger shadow behind him on the wall. It will take days to shake this one off.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

THE FISHERMAN’S SON; By Michael Koepf; Broadway Books: 288 pp., $24

“The Fisherman’s Son” is a gritty novel with a hard-hitting intensity that comes from Michael Koepf’s 19 years as a working fisherman. The pages reek of fish guts, hardship and rough companionship. There is a passionate authenticity in his words. Koepf knows the people he writes about and has lived among, so his reach into the California fishery of the 1940s and the present is comprehensive. Moments crackle with affection and humor. Brilliantly written and mesmerizingly evocative, Koepf’s extraordinary novel is a tribute to tough men and their long-suffering, and sometimes not-so-long-suffering, families.

-- BRIAN FAGAN

THE TALE OF THE 1002ND NIGHT; By Joseph Roth; Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann: St. Martin’s: 266 pp., $23.95

Joseph Roth’s last published work, “The Tale of the 1002nd Night,” has just been issued in English for the first time by St. Martin’s, while most of his other fiction was republished during the 1980s by Overlook Press in a massive undertaking of cultural and historical fidelity. Together they bring to light one of the most important and unjustly lesser-known writers of the century. Roth is the exemplar of the rootless, cosmopolitan wanderer with as keen a recognition of his own condition as his more febrile peers, Franz Kafka and Bruno Schultz. The latter’s poetic incandescence, the former’s hysterical martyrology and Roth’s own worldly analytical despair represent three points of a triangle that defines the diasporic imagination. Yet what’s finally most remarkable about Roth as a writer is his prescience. Though he ostensibly looked backward from the 1930s to the 1910s and earlier, he also anticipated the 1940s and beyond. His books possess an eerie clairvoyant feel; they are shattering in their simplicity, exalting in their moral philosophical weight.

-- MELVIN JULES BUKIET

LOVE AND TERROR; By Alan Jolis; Atlantic Monthly Press: 338 pp., $24

“History is a qualitative filter, and events recorded for posterity are a pitiful fraction of the ones that actually take place,” writes Alan Jolis in an explanatory epilogue to this elegant historical novel. “When the filter of history sifts out significant events along with more trivial ones,” he adds, “it is up to the novelist to go scraping the bottom of the sieve.” From the imagined remnants of one of the colossal events in human history, the French Revolution, Jolis has constructed a suspense story that is indeed a tale of love and passion. The necessity for compassion permeates “Love and Terror”: The novelist’s picturesque details enhance this knowing sketch of the confused and ardent human heart.

-- ANTHONY DAY

BEACH BOY; By Ardashir Vakil; Scribner: 240 pp., $22

Recipient of the Betty Trask Award honoring British writers under 35 and finalist for the Whitbread Prize for first fiction in Britain, “Beach Boy” gives readers an opportunity to enjoy one of India’s newest and most engaging literary talents. Whether he is describing the urban landscape of Bombay or its suburbs, Ardashir Vakil demonstrates richly hued powers of observation and has a knack for sweeping up detail, large and small. From the spectacular imagery of Hindi cinema to the exquisitely prepared and presented traditional foods, Vakil mirrors a sensuality almost spiritual in intensity, thus sharpening the irony reflected in the surname he gives his protagonist.

-- PAULA FRIEDMAN

THE HISTORY OF OUR WORLD BEYOND THE WAVE; By R. E. Klein; Harcourt Brace: 224 pp., $22

On the first day of summer, Paul Sant, a Southern California English professor, heads to the beach, rents a surf mat and witnesses the end of the world. After a series of scrapes with amphibious humanoids called “gugs,” whirlpools and terrifying medieval visions, Paul alights on a shore where other post-apocalyptic island hoppers have begun to create a new human community. Yet even as it forms, the town of Grant (named after Ulysses S.) is threatened by the very forces that made civilization so overrated in the first place. R. E. Klein’s spirit of adventure is contagious in this first-rate post-deluge tall tale.

-- MARK ROZZO

CAUCASIA; By Danzy Senna; Riverhead Books: 354 pp., $24.95

Danzy Senna, the 28-year-old author of “Caucasia,” has written a book that is not always perfectly crafted, but it is about many things, and important ones too. If you have tired of first novels in which the listless youth of America have listless sex, listen to listless music and listlessly consume junk food, “Caucasia” should interest you. It is a curiosity of recent American fiction that so few novels address race in ways that are moving, complex, realistic or lucid--or, for that matter, address it at all. “Caucasia” is an exception. It is not a feel-good book about the brotherhood of man; it explores both the centrality, and the lunacy, of racial identity in America. And it does so through the eyes of Birdie Lee, a character as peculiar, particular, believable and compelling as any you are likely to encounter.

-- SUSIE LINFIELD

LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD; By Jen Banbury; Little, Brown: 296 pp., $21.95

Jen Banbury, a former AT&T; spokesmodel, drives this Generation-X noir thriller like a danger-happy teenager on a joy ride. Her heroine is the smart-alecky yet winsome Jill, a slacker whose chief responsibilities are keeping the pantry stocked with Cap’n Crunch and ringing up paperbacks at a used bookstore. When a suspicious-looking dwarf comes in to unload a handsome first edition of Jack London’s “The Cruise of the Snark,” all hell breaks loose, and Jill is forced to take control of herself and the impossible situation that has sprung up around her. But even as Jill finds herself in a life-threatening cross-fire among unsavory parties vying for the ultra-rare six-figure volume, she refuses to become a boring adult. During one abduction, she’s asked what kind of films she likes. “Kidnapping flicks” is the answer. Jill’s taste in sarcasm and malt liquor keep her, and the book, going; Jack London would have admired her survival instincts, and he’d recognize Banbury’s L.A. as an untamable wilderness.

-- MARK ROZZO

ARMADILLO; By William Boyd; Alfred A. Knopf: 338 pp., $24

William Boyd has a frisky style, plots that are intricate balsa wood models of a story, characters who never have just one identity. “Armadillo” is a house of cards. You know it will come down under the sheer weight of British irony. But Boyd’s characters have soul as well--humor, fear, secrets and self-deprecation. One of the great joys of “Armadillo” is the vernacular. When Lorimer is invited to a dinner party, Ivan inspects the invitation. “ ‘Black tie?’ he said. ‘That’s a bit naff isn’t it?’ He sniffed. . . . ‘Sounds very dodgy to me.’ ” Words like “jackanapes” and rain that looks “spittley” and employees who get “sacked” are a bonus. It is the very triteness of these characters’ revelations, the skimpiness of their armor against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that will keep you chortling (a twitty, nasal sound) all the way to the end.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

THE COCKFIGHTER; By Frank Manley; Coffee House Press: 206 pp., $19.95

Frank Manley, who directs the creative writing program at Emory University, is better known as a poet, but this quiet, sure-footed novel is an auspicious and mature prose debut. It’s about a 12-year-old boy named Sonny Cantrell, whose demanding father, Jake, the proprietor of the Snake Nation Cock Farm, presents him with a cock of his own. The prized gray has earned nearly $4,000 so far and a hard-won reputation as “the meanest son of a bitch chicken” around. Jake, however, teaches Sonny never to call a cock a chicken and never to give one a name. Nevertheless, Sonny names the gray “Lion,” in honor of the cock’s steadfastness, which, along with Sonny’s efforts to win his father’s respect, is mortally challenged when Sonny must pit Lion in a high-stakes cockfight. The fight, with its abundant suspense, gore and brutality, is unflinchingly rendered, as is Sonny’s shocking effort to leave childhood behind.

-- MARK ROZZO

BIRDS OF AMERICA: Stories; By Lorrie Moore; Alfred A. Knopf: 288 pp., $23

Lorrie Moore, author of “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,” has something that many writers of her generation don’t have: She is truly odd. Her characters--an-out-of-work actress on the lam from Hollywood, a mother and daughter on vacation in Ireland, a young boy with cystic fibrosis, a woman whose parents were killed in a car accident, a woman whose cat has died, an unlikely gay couple, a woman who accidentally killed a baby--find affection in unlikely places. Many have children tugging at their hearts. You end up liking people you didn’t think you’d like, which always, in life and fiction, lifts the spirits. Moore’s stories don’t leave us in the solitary confinement that oddity can create, the way Diane Arbus did in her photographs, or Flannery O’Connor in her stories. They are the dance halls and constellations in which eccentricity becomes uniqueness.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS; By Magnus Mills; Arcade: 214 pp., $22.95

“Bang Bang Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is the soundtrack to this brilliant, deadpan novel by Magnus Mills, ex-bus driver in London, ex-operator of “dangerous machinery” in Scotland and ex-fence builder. The novel never strays from its working-class roots; the author never betrays his characters, two Scottish fence builders (Tam and Richie) and their British foreman. “The main concern of farmers,” thinks the narrator-foreman in an effort to understand his employers, “was that their fences should be tight. Without this the restraint of beasts was impossible.” In a devious, subtle way high-tensile fencing and beast restraint become metaphors for working-class life in Scotland. They get their revenge for class oppression, all right, bizarre and final, but it’s a vicious cycle they’re caught in, and though Magnus is too good to preach, the desperation of the working class haunts these pages.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

SHADOWS ON THE HUDSON; By Isaac Bashevis Singer; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 550 pp., $28

Clocking in at 550 pages, “Shadows on the Hudson” is the fattest Isaac Bashevis Singer novel to appear since “The Manor” and “The Estate” about 30 years ago. It is, on the one hand, an unruly and chaotic roller coaster wallow of a book, discursive, repetitive and not exactly refined. Unashamedly melodramatic, with an emphasis on lust, sexuality and the cruder passions, it illustrates tendencies that the more genteel of Singer’s Yiddish-language critics often objected to.

Yet for all its rawness--maybe even because of its rawness--”Shadows on the Hudson” is also one of Singer’s most revealing novels. Under its rough surface, the author was playing with powerful material, dealing, albeit in lurid colors, with many of his key preoccupations and concerns. An ambivalence toward organized religion, a concern for the place of Jews in the modern era, the centrality of both sex and spirituality to the human condition--all get an airing here. This may be a Yiddish bodice ripper, but it is a distinctly philosophical one; “Melrose Place” joined to “A Guide for the Perplexed.”

-- KENNETH TURAN

FLIGHTS OF ANGELS: Stories; By Ellen Gilchrist; Little, Brown: 336 pp., $24

Whether her subject is charmingly playful, like the eccentric Los Angeles medical clinic that gives aid and comfort to hypochondriacs in “Phyladda, or the Mind/Body Problem,” or seriously scary, like “The Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor” that threatens a small community with nuclear contaminants, Ellen Gilchrist brings to each story an engaging sense of compassion and a saving sense of humor.

-- MERLE RUBIN

INGRATITUDE; By Ying Chen; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 154 pp., $20

Yan-Zi plans her own suicide, the only escape she can imagine from her mother. This venomous little novel has much of the feel of Camus’ “L’Etranger”: a character stuck at an emotional impasse, an author who hammers at the block of marble concealing his character. It takes a kind of willpower to portray what the poet William Blake called our “mind-forged manacles,” and Ying Chen doesn’t waver.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

JACK MAGGS; By Peter Carey; Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $24

A former convict, deported to Australia and prospering there, returns illegally to England in the 1830s to present himself to the young recipient of his mysterious benefactions. It must be Magwitch, of course, Pip’s patron in Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.” It must be, that is, except that it is Maggs, protagonist of Peter Carey’s new novel. The author, who wrote “Oscar and Lucinda” and “The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” is always stimulating and almost always enthralling. He holds a perplexity long enough to goad the brain but not so long as to blur it.

-- RICHARD EDER

BALDWIN: Early Novels and Stories; By James Baldwin; Edited by Toni Morrison: The Library of America; Volume I: 970 pp., $35; Volume II: 870 pp., $35

Now in its 16th year, the Library of America series has produced 98 volumes of what constitutes the canon of American letters. James Baldwin is the fifth black writer to be accorded such status, the others having been W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Frederick Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston. Among 20th century black writers, none was more influential and important than Wright, Ralph Ellison and Baldwin. Baldwin was unique, however, as one of the few American writers, white or black, who was also a celebrity, a status conferred by his being on the cover of Time magazine in 1963. He was a public intellectual before we had the phrase and, through the sheer power of his language, did almost as much as Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement to make the nation pay attention to its racial agony--at least for a brief moment. The publication of these two volumes makes it clear that Baldwin’s place in American letters is now secure. The uniqueness of his voice and the rightness of his vision come through clearly in his novels, stories and essays. It is a voice and vision that is needed now more than it was 30 years ago.

-- JULIUS LESTER

MASTER GEORGIE; By Beryl Bainbridge; Carroll & Graf: 190 pp., $21

Authors fascinated by chance and destiny are bound by a certain style that determines their arrangement of details, their grip on the story. If that grip is too tight, they lose authenticity. If it is too loose, they lose authority. I imagine Beryl Bainbridge with a certain fixed and vacant stare while she writes because of the concentration an author must maintain in order to travel through history, not unlike the gaze of a bird of prey, sweeping over the landscape and diving, swiftly and mercilessly, scattering dust and leaves and other animals. The chapters in “Master Georgie” begin with a great deal of momentum and screech to a halt--a revelation, an image, an impasse, a memory--a construction which shows the eagle-eyed Bainbridge flying and diving, watching and pouncing.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

THE FILE ON H; By Ismail Kadare; Arcade: 192 pp., $21.95

Ismail Kadare begins “The File on H.” as Balkan farce, as satiric and absurd as something by the early Evelyn Waugh or Lawrence Durrell. The farce is sustained, with touches of comic nightmare, almost to the end. Yet this remarkable Albanian novelist has simply used a lighter-than-air conveyance to shift some of the somber political and literary themes he develops more gravely in “The Palace of Dreams,” “The Three-Arched Bridge” and “The Pyramid.” By anyone else, the climax would be willfully melodramatic. Perhaps through his buoyant mastery of darkness, Kadare makes it somber and disturbing. Ross (one of the main characters), watching his friend, gets the last lines, and they purge melodrama into something more ancient: “The word death crossed his mind twice over, but strangely it now seemed devoid of any significance. It was only a shell that encased something else.”

-- RICHARD EDER

THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT: Stories; By Aimee Bender; Doubleday: 184 pp., $21.95

Aimee Bender has perfect pitch. Her stories are fierce and true. In “Call My Name,” a girl who thinks she can have anything auditions men on the bus to find a lover, follows one home, makes him cut her dress off and then lies on his couch while he, totally uninterested, watches TV. Funny, not funny, right? In “Marzipan,” the wife of the man with the hole in his stomach gives birth to her mother. “Mother? . . . What are you doing here? Mommy?” Possible only in the circus of metaphor, correct? In “Quiet Please,” a librarian whose father has just died propositions every man who approaches her desk. The first one admits to having a fantasy about a librarian--”he’s on her like Wall Street rain.” Ludicrous! Fantastic!

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

ALMOST HEAVEN; By Marianne Wiggins; Crown: 214 pp., $23

In “Almost Heaven,” her fifth novel--ferocious, often frightening, licentious and slightly weird--Marianne Wiggins creates a wrecked foreign correspondent fresh out of Bosnia after witnessing the carnage and a beautiful woman, Melanie, old enough to be his mother, who suffers from “hysterical amnesia.” (Isn’t there a new name for this condition?) She saw her husband and four young sons killed inside their car during a tornado. Now she does not remember they even existed. Holden, the correspondent, takes her out of the psychiatric institution where they fell in love to deliver her to her brother, Noah, the only person she talks about. The brother, Holden’s friend and his old professional mentor, cannot leave South Dakota, where he lives, to visit Melanie because of a situation there with a woman. All we are told is that Noah disappeared to be with her. “Rode some wild high thunder till the chaos tossed him under,” Wiggins writes. There is a lot of that thunder in “Almost Heaven,” for Wiggins is not one of those lacy, literary writers who favors lovely language. She is powerful and original, wanting her readers to go into shock right away.

-- GLORIA EMERSON

THE VOICE IMITATOR; By Thomas Bernhard; Translated from the German by Kenneth J. Northcott: University of Chicago Press: 116 pp., $17.95

Thomas Bernhard is one of the indispensable writers of the 20th century. Reading a book by Bernhard is a painful and frightening experience. He provides an overwhelming sense of intellectual and emotional exhilaration unmatched by any contemporary American author. “The Voice Imitator” (first published in Germany in 1978), is composed of 101 stories, some no more than three sentences long and others, at the very most, a page in length. The stories owe much in form and voice to the typical short newspaper story of incident. As delineated on the cover, the book contains 18 suicides, six painful deaths, one memory lapse, four disappearances, 20 surprises, three character attacks, five early deaths, 26 murders, 13 instances of lunacy, four cover-ups and two cases of libel. A short story is a piece of prose in which something happens and is elaborated upon. It has often been said that the problem with short stories is that they are never short enough. Well, Bernhard has removed all of the elaboration to allow these tender morsels of despair and disgust to shine.

-- THOMAS MCGONIGLE

EAST INTO UPPER EAST; By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Counterpoint: 272 pp., $24

We are ushered into the stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala the way a gracious hostess pulls you into her home, takes off your coat, tells you something about a guest; in short, makes you comfortable. It’s a good thing, too; her stories are all set in precarious contexts (perhaps why she is often compared to Anton Chekhov), families on the brink of destruction, cultures trying to annihilate one another, the fingers of colonialism scraping against the blackboards of continents. Running through them are examples of the way love dignifies those who are true to it, the elder brother who still believes in his little brother’s sweetness, the daughter who stands by her mother through various humiliations, the repaired marriage that inspires a man and a woman to be true to their spirits. In many ways, these individuals carry the whole weight of their cultures: Indian, British or American.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

THE MAGICIAN’S WIFE; By Brian Moore; William Abrahams/Dutton: 232 pp., $23.95

“The Magician’s Wife” is accomplished and adroit, a fable sustained by Brian Moore with a practiced and confident balance. In nothing is he more the true novelist--a vanishing breed--than in his respect for plot and for narrative swiftness. One of the pleasures for the reader derives from the pleasure Moore clearly takes in his narrative dexterity. It is a novel played in a different and lighter key than other recent Moore novels.

The novels of Brian Moore are unexpected, idiosyncratic, each filled with its own energy, colors, scents. The writer whom in some ways he resembles is Graham Greene, who called him “my favorite living novelist. Each book of his is unpredictable, dangerous and amusing. He treats the novel as a tamer treats a wild beast.” (Greene too was unpredictable, but there was nevertheless a recognizable Greene-land, a familiar territory of voices, moods, scenes.) Each of Moore’s novels launches itself afresh upon an exercise in fable-making, confident in the powers of fable to sustain the writer on his tightrope and to entertain, perhaps to dazzle, the reader. It is difficult, as Anita Brookner has written, to think of another writer these days who is “taking risks of such unfashionable magnitude.”

One need not be a novelist, like Greene or Brookner, to recognize those risks; they are present in the feel and sound of Moore’s novels, their swift sleights of hand. Moore is a magician.

-- THOMAS FLANAGAN

I SWEEP THE SUN OFF ROOFTOPS; By Hanan al-Shaykh; Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham: Anchor Books: 267 pp., $12 paper

Under Western eyes, Middle Eastern women, from Scheherazade in “A Thousand and One Nights” to the Frenchified demi-mondaines of Beirut, have borne a mysterious, Orientalist fascination. Hanan al-Shaykh, the author of the 17 remarkable stories that make up “I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops,” plays that fascination with the grace and surprise of a virtuoso. Born in Lebanon, resident of London, al-Shaykh writes like a true foreigner, at home in no country, writing with a pen that is neither East nor West but entirely her own. She writes with a knowledge veiled by imagination that is at once touristically educational and sexually arousing, exploring the permutations and combinations of Arab womanhood in a way that reminds the West that the mathematics of our numerals and the beauty of the Alhambra flow from the same Arab source.

-- JONATHAN LEVI

CLOUDSPLITTER; By Russell Banks; HarperFlamingo: 758 pp., $27.50

As a novelist distinguished for his sympathetic portraits of the isolated and the disaffected (“Rule of the Bone,” “Continental Drift”) and communities bewildered by profound and fateful emotions (“The Sweet Hereafter”), Russell Banks could be expected to bring scrupulous powers of observation and an abiding human sympathy to his story of an abolitionist family at war with a political culture that tolerates slaveholding. In this he does not disappoint. “Cloudsplitter” is a vibrant, out-sized, mesmerizing portrait of the mercurial John Brown that reveals his charm as well as his piety, his compassion as well as his demonic wrath, his intellect as well as his willfulness. To watch Banks’ John Brown stride across the Waterloo battlefield to discern the lessons of Napoleon’s defeat, to stand with him as he reorganizes a faltering encampment in a whirlwind display of skilled craftsmanship and masterful direction, to listen to Brown read aloud the biblical account of Gideon’s army as a series of tactical suggestions from the Lord himself is to immerse oneself in literary representation of the highest order.

Like John Brown himself, this demanding and provocative novel is a protean, eloquent, fatalistic amalgam in which triumph and failure are hopelessly and forever entangled.

-- HENRY MAYER

KALIMANTAAN; By C.S. Godshalk; A Marian Wood Book/Henry Holt: 472 pp., $25

In the 1840s, James Brooke left the service of Britain’s East India Company to go it alone. Landing in Sarawak on the north coast of Borneo, he helped the forces of the sultan of Brunei put down a rebellion of the native Dyaks; in return, the sultan granted him suzerainty. For the next 100 years, the Brooke family, the so-called White Rajahs of Sarawak, ruled under the auspices and with the occasional assistance of the British crown. The Japanese drove them out; after Japan was defeated, the Brooke heir ceded the territory to Britain, which later incorporated it into the new nation of Malaysia. C.S. Godshalk has spent 10 years traveling, researching, imagining and--to judge by her incantatory writing--dreaming of the life and times of the first White Rajah. The result is “Kalimantaan,” a spectacular book and at times a superb one. Godshalk is fascinated by, and makes fascinating, the thunderous incongruity of colonial incursion: the whites’ illusion of civilization and control, the utterly alien world they sought to master, the atrocious violence they incur and inflict and the disintegration they undergo. In Godshalk’s heart of darkness, it is not just the Kurtzes who are undone but the Marlowes as well. Godshalk has written a brilliant historical chronicle, adorned with inventive incident and a poetic sensibility and suggesting a somber and illuminating message. -- RICHARD EDER

RIVEN ROCK; By T.C. Boyle; Viking: 466 pp., $24.95

Picture, if you will, a man of power, a man who loves women. A man who can’t keep his hands off women. A man who loves women so much that he threatens not only his reputation but the safety of the very society whose pinnacle he inhabits. Now roll your mind back a century, to the fin of another siecle, and change the name below your picture to Stanley: Stanley Robert McCormick to be exact, the youngest son of the inventor of the reaper (and International Harvester) and the hero of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s latest epic novel, “Riven Rock.” Boyle writes with the muscle of a collegiate fullback ripping the OED in two just for fun. He has always shown an affection for the surrealist scalpel of Dr. Frankenstein, grafting the sublime onto the ridiculous. But 20 years on, Boyle has refined his riffs, matured into more of an Eric Clapton than an Eddie Van Halen: more philosophy, less feedback.

-- JONATHAN LEVI

AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST; By Iain Pears; Riverhead Books: 694 pp, $27

An excellent tale of murder, “An Instance of the Fingerpost” is also a careful reconstruction of cultural history. Iain Pears accomplishes something quite extraordinary in it. He elevates the murder mystery to the category of high art. His novel will inevitably invite comparisons with Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” but Eco’s equally long book is really an intellectual’s revenge on moralists, in which a medieval monk, who considers humor sinful, refuses to copy Aristotle’s treatise on comedy and is willing to kill to destroy the philosophical justification of comedy. Pears’ story is more gritty; he writes closer to the genuine tradition of detective fiction and uses the historical setting not because it is quaint but because that age, except for technology, is so much like our own: Like us, the 17th century English are torn between science and religion, idealism and cynicism. In presenting the contradictions of the age, Pears proves that the past does have a future.

-- ALFRED MAC ADAM

THIS SIDE OF BRIGHTNESS; By Colum McCann; Metropolitan Books: 289 pp., $23

The explosive launch to Colum McCann’s novel, like that of a space probe, takes the reader to some far and uncanny places. It is hard to encapsulate “This Side of Brightness” or to convey its author’s accomplishment in combining so many different elements to such effect. It is partly a story of the men who dug and blasted New York’s tunnels and of the high-steel workers who turned horizontal astonishment upon its vertical end, balancing hundreds of teetery feet above the streets to subdue the swinging girders and bolt them together into skyscrapers. Told with gripping realism and subtle detail, the facts--history researched--glow like jewels. “Brightness” is also a moving, beautifully written account of three generations of the racially mixed family of Nathan Walker, a black man from the Okefenokee Swamp who rises to the perilous tunnel position of “front hog” and, having survived the East River blast, goes on to work underground for the next 30 years.

-- RICHARD EDER

THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON; By Jane Smiley; Alfred A. Knopf: 452 pp., $26

Jane Smiley’s ninth book of fiction is a memoir focusing on the action-packed, life-altering 21st year of a feisty heroine from Quincy, Ill., who marries a Yankee abolitionist and accompanies him to Kansas Territory. There, a fight that presages the Civil War is waging between Free Staters and Missourians over whether the new state will abide slavery. Smiley’s novel is a rousing, grippingly paced historical saga, but it manages at the same time--in classic Smiley fashion--to also be a touching portrait of marital love, an account of personal growth from ideological ambivalence to strong convictions and a searching inquiry into complex moral issues. The intricate emotional analysis for which Smiley has become justly celebrated, tracing characters’ feelings as they fluctuate and evolve with the precision of fine needlework, is much in evidence in “Lidie Newton.” She is as adept at capturing the subtle nuances of relationships as she is at chronicling complex political activity. This is a gripping story about love, fortitude and convictions that are worth fighting for regardless of the outcome.

-- HELLER MCALPIN

SPENDING; By Mary Gordon; Scribner: 302 pp., $24

Mary Gordon calls her fifth novel, “Spending,” “a utopian divertimento.” I call it a lark, with more orgasms per page than anything I’ve read since “Portnoy’s Complaint” or “A Sport and a Pastime”--but from the female point of view. In a nutshell, it’s about sex and money and art, and it’s filled with plenty of all three, but it’s the sex that takes you by surprise. It’s a departure for Gordon, who isn’t exactly known for being light, never mind lusty. It’s as if she’s expressing her sense of liberation after working through complex emotions about her mysterious, disappointingly all-too-human father in her 1996 memoir, “The Shadow Man.” It’s also as if she’s out to prove that she’s got a sense of humor. “Spending” is at once a witty ode to unmarried midlife love, an avant-garde feminist artist’s roundabout justification for being shacked up with a rich Jewish commodities trader and a meditation on the values we place on art, sex and money.

-- HELLER MCALPIN

A CROWDED HEART; By Nicholas Papandreou; Picador: 192 pp., $21

Greece is irresistible. And when it dons the mantle of fiction, as in the case of “The Crowded Heart,” a fictionalized memoir, Greece sets up such a clattering and longing, such a thumping in the heart that it is hard for the story to fall flat. Nicholas Papandreou, young son of the big man, son of Greece, knows this better than any of us. His very first paragraph attests to the seduction: “To describe Greece I would share with you a tomato on the sandy beaches of Skopellos, open a sea-urchin with my penknife and serve you the scarlet eggs inside while the salt stretches the skin on our backs. We would bodysurf on white waves in the day and soak up the moonlight at night.”

This is the story of Papandreou’s childhood, which included sea urchins and moonlight and public speaking from age 8 for his father, the popular socialist prime minister. It included watching his father being carried from their home by the secret police, watching his mother wait for his father to return from jail, living in exile in Canada and, last but not least, enduring the rage and ambition of the man we all read about in the newspaper. The son holds his own against that father, which actually makes the book hold its own under the weight of history and the fickleness of memory.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

THE GLANCE OF THE COUNTESS HAHN-HAHN (DOWN THE DANUBE); By Peter Esterhazy; Translated from the Hungarian by Richard Aczel: Northwestern University Press: 256 pp., $22.50

As a boy growing up in the little village of Patchogue on Long Island, I was introduced to the world by collecting stamps--Tanganyika, Ghana, Fiji, Ascension Island, Tibet--and now as an adult the world comes to me by way of translations. Certain countries, certain civilizations exist only because of translations. Sadly now in America only three publishing companies can be said to reliably, season after season, produce significant translations: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the University of Nebraska Press and, most extravagantly, Northwestern University Press, which almost single-handedly are keeping alive the idea that the many countries in Eastern Europe are replete with marvelous writers worthy of our attention here in the West. One such writer is the altogether extraordinary Peter Esterhazy, the Italo Calvino of Hungarian literature.

“The Glance of the Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube)” is one of the finest explorations of going on a journey and of the idea of what it means to go anywhere. The Danube is traced from its origins in Germany all the way to the final dispersal into the Black Sea.

I suppose some readers might ask the question: Why bother with these translated novels, don’t we have enough writers in this country? The answer: We have many fine writers in America, but we do not have even a single one of the stature and exemplary ambition of Peter Esterhazy.

-- THOMAS MCGONIGLE

CITIES OF THE PLAIN; By Cormac McCarthy; Alfred A. Knopf: 296 pp., $24

John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, the young wranglers whose tale is told in Cormac McCarthy’s “Cities of the Plain,” belong in the same vast pantheon of cowboy heroes in which we find Shane, Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” and the Marlboro Man. McCarthy has reinvented and reinvigorated the old cowboy saga in the series of novels that he calls the Border Trilogy, and the third volume brings the chronicle of these two iconic cowpokes to a grand climax.

John Grady and Billy remind me of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, another pair of restless young men in search of adventure on the American landscape, sometimes bumping up against the hard realities of life and always finding redemption in each other’s fidelity and friendship. Despite the challenges and eccentricities of McCarthy’s literary enterprise, I was won over by his cowboy heroes in much the same way that I took Huck and Tom to heart. And that is why I felt such a sharp stab of regret when the saga of Billy and John Grady finally comes to an end in “Cities of the Plain”--the sense of loss at the moment of parting is something that only a master storyteller can evoke.

-- JONATHAN KIRSCH

A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR; By John Irving; Random House: 542 pp., $26.95

“A Widow for One Year” reestablishes John Irving as a premier storyteller, master of the tragicomic and among the first rank of contemporary novelists. This time around, every major character is either a writer, book editor or, at the very least, a prodigious reader. But “A Widow for One Year” is no tedious postmodern tract of writing about writing. Holding at bay his penchant for the outlandish, banishing most of his familiar imagery of circuses, bears, wrestling and the gruesome mutilations that 20 years ago made “The World According to Garp” both a strikingly imaginative work and something of a special case, Irving now offers a deeply affecting, entirely believable family saga. Coincidence, the reflex of earlier Irving novels, has risen to metaphor. The pleasures of this rich and beautiful book are manifold. To be human is to savor them.

-- JOAN MELLEN

THE ANTELOPE WIFE; By Louise Erdrich; HarperFlamingo: 240 pp., $24

In a novel of many unanswered questions, Louise Erdrich pictures love not as a delicate wisp, an airy confection at all but as something more primal, an uncontrollable compulsion that pushes the world to a terrible brink but never quite over. Richly cadenced, deeply textured, Erdrich’s writing has the luster and sheen of poetry, each sentence circling deeper into emotion, motivation and rationale, until love touches not eternity but death, transforming “The Antelope Wife” into a story of longing and of longing assuaged, as sustaining as her earlier “Love Medicine,” serious, sometimes flawed but altogether passionate.

-- THOMAS CURWEN

THE CASTLE; By Franz Kafka; Translated from the German by Mark Harman: Schocken Books: 328 pp., $25

A new translation of Franz Kafka is always an event. No author of the 20th century has had such an extensive and profound influence. He changed literary thought, laid bare the interior of the soul that had lain in darkness for generations and, surprisingly, he showed that modern man’s longings for the metaphysical had not faded, even in a period when it appeared that religious faith had died out.

The new translation, with respect to its vocabulary and tempo, brings Kafka closer to the source. The transparent factuality, the precision and the musicality of the sentences all come through well. To read Kafka is always a surprising encounter. It shocks literary conventions and takes you with a jolt to the depths of the soul. Kafka’s writing is daring in its expression but not experimental. It is like the prose of the Bible: factual, to the point, without ornament and without too many adjectives. Kafka relates seriously to people’s pain and nightmares, with respect and without any sentimentality but also without cynicism. The new translation by Mark Harman restores Kafka to Kafka.

-- AHARON APPELFELD

FREEDOMLAND; By Richard Price; Broadway Books: 546 pp., $25

Richard Price is America’s Dickens, Dempsy and Gannon his “Two Cities” and race his Industrial Revolution, mill and mill wheel tied around the neck of the nation. We’ve always known the moral: The criminal justice system, the media system, the literary system, are ill-equipped to solve the infinite injustices spawned by the racial divide in American society. Try as we might to talk about sports, the market, the weather, the carjacking at the center of this novel grabs our attention. And it’s the subject of race that has jacked America. It may take a tougher man than Spike Lee to capture the horror of “Freedomland” on film, someone, say, like D.W. Griffith.

-- JONATHAN LEVI

THE PILOT’S WIFE; By Anita Shreve; Little, Brown: 284 pp., $23.95

Infidelity in fiction these days has to compete with the daily news. The idea that you can trust someone who conducts a secret life parallel to the one you share with him or her wobbled its way as a story line through humor, fantasy and horror since the novel was little more than a gleam in a good liar’s eye. But unlike a journalist, a novelist can steer your lascivious brain through the vicissitudes of infidelity.

Anita Shreve has written an oddly gripping popular novel (meaning it is not experimental; it has a conventional plot and pace) about the wife of an airplane pilot who discovers, after he is killed in a crash in Northern Ireland, that her husband had another life for several years. Kathryn is dense, which is what allows the plot to exist at all; she must put together a puzzle whose pieces have floated through her married life for a long time. After the plane goes down, in her efforts to aid the investigation, she discovers the truth. The truth doesn’t make more of a difference in fiction than it does in the news, but Shreve has done a terrific job with an otherwise dull subject: the aching innards of a betrayed spouse.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

NOW IT’S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE; By Dale Peck; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 458 pp., $25

“Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye” returns to Dale Peck’s earlier fiction with an emotional vengeance, dramatic breadth and observant fervency that brings his every gift to fruition. Conceivably the third installment of a trilogy, it stands, too, as a saga on its own. “Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye” starts out as a storm almost as scattered and blinding. It chills. That it falls ultimately into a pattern beautiful, affecting and rational strongly proves Peck’s mastery as a writer.

-- CELIA MCGEE

DOM CASMURRO; By Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis; Translated from the Portuguese by John Gledson: Oxford University Press: 230 pp., $25

THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRAS CUBAS; By Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis; Translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa: Oxford University Press: 220 pp., $25

To say that Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was the greatest 19th century Latin American novelist is to invite fair, if impertinent, questions: What was the competition? Who cares? We see his genius in two new, fresh translations of “The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas” and “Dom Casmurro.” These satiric novels stand like beacons in the literary landscape of 19th century Latin America, a landscape inhabited by derivative novelists and great poets like the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario or the Cuban Jose Marti. Machado’s writing hasn’t aged, and today’s readers will find his voice both familiar and strangely new (he was born in 1839 and died in 1908).

As for the translations, Gregory Rabassa is the godfather of the Boom in the United States. His translations have utterly changed our understanding of what a translator’s obligations are in the re-creation of a text from another language. His “Bras Cubas” should see us through the next century. The translation of “Dom Casmurro” by John Gledson (a distinguished Machado scholar) is well-timed. The old American translation is only sporadically available and the British version perpetrated by R.L. Scott-Buccleuch is an abomination that actually deletes chapters. Oxford University Press is to be congratulated for sponsoring translations worthy of the original.

-- ALFRED MAC ADAM

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY; By Samantha Gillison; Grove Press: 240 pp., $23

This astonishing first novel is subtle and exotic. Peter Campbell, a biologist, takes his wife, June, and their 6-year-old daughter, Taylor, to Papua New Guinea to gather data for his Harvard dissertation. They are not sure of the wisdom of taking Taylor, but their marriage is in trouble, and Peter needs to succeed at something, fast. Out in the field, everything is exaggerated: Peter’s aloofness, June’s controlling and her desperation to be loved by him and, most interestingly, Taylor’s wild, native nature, which emerges as the shy girl scrambles to climb out of the rift between the mother and father. The shy girl disappears each day into the native village, learns the language (her parents do not) and founders in the morass between her mother and father. Various diseases attack each family member, and by the last third of the book, the impossibility of this family’s survival is so absolute that the reader very much wants someone to die. It is the only way out of the inevitable jealousy and shrewishness and paranoia that come from a marriage in which one person loves so much more than the other.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

GOODNIGHT, NEBRASKA; By Tom McNeal; Random House: 318 pp., $23

In “Goodnight, Nebraska,” his first novel, Tom McNeal takes a panoramic approach to storytelling, and his multiple narratives initially constitute a vivid, tender and thoughtful portrait of a “tiny black map dot” of a Great Plains farm town. Goodnight, Neb., has a population of 1,680, a total of seven paved streets and is home to the Friendly Festival, hosted during the first week of July. In Goodnight, Neb., news and gossip travel at lightning speed, lives are overlapped and interconnected and people regularly struggle with feelings of unexpressed longing and sorrow.

McNeal’s characters resonate most truthfully when they are most heedful of their membership in a club of people “who walk around and eat meals and answer telephones and go to work and who keep tucked away inside them the sad secret stories that got them into the club.” These sad secret stories bring out McNeal’s most assured writing. They are his finest and most lasting gifts to the reader.

-- MICHAEL FRANK

THE GIANT, O’BRIEN; By Hilary Mantel; Henry Holt: 192 pp., $22

Spinning facts into gold, the coin of fiction, is the peculiar joy of certain novelists. Dull patches of history catch the eye of these alchemists, encouraging them to heat their secret crucibles until history glows with the fire of literature. Often the residue is dross. But in the case of “The Giant, O’Brien,” Hilary Mantel has turned out the real thing.

The most fascinating of O’Brien’s tales are mutations of other authors--the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, to name two--stories we recognize as stories in the same way we recognize the giant as a man whose limbs and joints have grown into freakish horrors. Snow White is housed and fed by the seven dwarfs, but the social contract of the Giant’s version insists that every service has its price.

Charity exists only to give the maiden a choice of bed and dwarf. Rescuing princes are few, and the rabble is many. Beyond the forest lies a village that has little patience for perversion. “When night fell, they saw the light of torches dance between the trees.” The shocked populace has become a lynch mob, beating the dwarfs to death and chasing Snow White “into the forest, screaming, barefoot and without her cloak, until she was lost among the trees, and the night’s blackness ate her up.” It is one thing to spin fiction from history and another to spin truth from fiction. These grotesqueries are Mantel’s grandest creations.

-- JONATHAN LEVI

SECRETS; By Nuruddin Farah; Arcade: 398 pp., $23.95

Good fiction can give a reader tremendous insight into another culture. Nuruddin Farah, who is Somali, lives in Nigeria. This is not the first time that he has written to bring his culture home to us, but “Secrets” has a particular depth to it because it was written after his first visit to Somalia in 20 years. The plot is rich and the language is superb, exotic and consciousness-expanding, even phrases as simple as: “We were much of a muchness, she and I.” It’s enough to make you homesick for a country that is not your own.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

THE WILLOW TREE; By Hubert Selby Jr.; Marion Boyars: 288 pp., $25.95

It is a testimony to the power of image and language that Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn” from 1964 is still one of the most discomfiting books in the English language. In his latest novel, “The Willow Tree,” his first in 20 years, Selby moves from Brooklyn to the Bronx. Selby’s talent is to describe physical brutality in the cool voice of an urban clinician. There is no setup, no false building of suspense. When Selby decides to attack, it is with the shock of a practiced mugger and with the speed and economy of a poet.

-- JONATHAN LEVI

LOOKING FOR MO; By Dan Duane; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 230 pp., $22

The two axes on which a true California writer plots his or her curve are distance and risk. “Looking for Mo” is an outdoor book, a book of distances, risks and revelations. Some people can’t stop talking; some people can’t stop eating. Dan Duane is a rabid noticer; he can’t stop noticing everything. In these chapters, Duane reveals himself as a California writer, strung up between distance and risk. By distance, I mean distance to the nearest familiar object, and by risk, I mean willingness to play with that distance, to try to change or even control it. The object can be a woman in a cafe, like Fiona, or it can be a mountain, like El Capitan. Both must be approached carefully, with utmost consideration and respect.

-- SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

THE PRIEST FAINTED; By Catherine Temma Davidson; Henry Holt / John Macrae: 262 pp., $23

Catherine Davidson’s pungent, flexible prose serves her well, not only in her witty retellings of ancient myths, but also in her crisp accounts of her heroine’s exploits as well as in her more lyrical evocations of emotion and atmosphere. Ponderi