The Donoghue Interregnum: 1999!

We’ve now reached 1999, when the number of humans living on Earth passed six billion, America was shocked to its core by the Columbine shootings, Vladimir Putin came to power, and the indispensable Alan Clark died. But the world of books was alive and well, and here’s how it rated:

Best Fiction:

10 The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead – Even after all this time, I’m still flat-out amazed by the assurance and fierce intelligence of this debut. It’s a novel set in a weirdly normal alternate world in which a courageous black woman, the first inspector in the history of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, must fight for her reputation and ultimately her life when an elevator she’d declared safe crashes to tragedy (the setting might be alternate-world, but the book’s elevator science is very much from our world – you’ll be extra-conscious of these things forever after you read this book). Whitehead takes a quotidian detail of city life – the omnipresent elevator – and spins from it an utterly fascinating tale of race and corruption and fantasy.

9 Hannibal by Thomas Harris – This long-delayed novel from Harris takes a bit player in Red Dragon and a co-star in The Silence of the Lambs and puts him front and center: even more so than its own sequel, Hannibal Rising, this is the story of Hannibal Lecter, his experience of the world. Harris constructs a big and satisfyingly complex story around him – one of his few surviving victims has orchestrated a illicit hunt for his capture, and intrepid FBI agent Clarice Starling is racing to prevent that while also seeking to capture him herself – but it’s the rich evocation of Lecter that carries this book (including carrying it over its two flaws, an overlong leftover-plot from the book Harris meant to write instead of this one, and an utterly blasphemous ending).

8 The Tesseract by Alex Garland – The plot of Alex Garland’s debut novel The Beach is as simple and straightforward as the expulsion from Eden. By contrast, this slim book is a complicated gear-work of three interconnecting plots and sub-plots, all set in an extra-dark Manila, all involving multiple characters and liberal amounts of action and gore. But just as in the case of The Beach, Garland’s deeply-realized characters actually end up being the most memorable part of the story – and like the previous took, The Tesseract amply repays re-reading.

7 Losing Nelson by Barry Unsworth – As impressed as I’d been by both Sacred Hunger and Morality Play, I was still unprepared for the sheer genius of this novel about a London man who’s devoted his entire life to the worship and study of Admiral Horatio Nelson. Charles Cleasby believes he mystically shares a soul with his hero, and as he works on his massive biography of the man, the very fabric of his identity shifts with each unsettling discovery. The intelligence of this novel – its pathos and sheer, frenzied sadness – simply amazed me and still do.

6 Freddy Neptune by Les Murray – The main character of Murray’s novel in verse, Freddy Boettcher, while serving on a German warship during World War I, sees so much action and horror and depravation that he’s both numbed and strengthened by the experience – literally: he loses the ability to feel pain, and he gains super-strength. There follow more adventures, but the really memorable thing about this fun, frightening book is that there’s so much more to it than a mere series of adventures – and the off-kilter conclusion has grown on me over the years.

5 The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch – This amazing historical novel is another example of a book rising above the sum of its parts. In Busch’s story, facially-maimed Civil War sniper William Bartholomew, now a money-chaser in postwar New York, hatches a plan along with his Creole-prostitute lover to save a group of slave children being held captive in Florida. The plot also involves a very memorably-imagined Herman Melville, now past the years of his fame and working as a lonely customs inspector, and the whole thing could have stopped at consisting only of those elements – certainly Busch writes them all well enough. But he also invests his narrative with so many deeper resonances of pain and self-representation that for long stretches you’re simply caught up in the claustrophobic beauty of his writing.

4 East Into Upper East by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala – The sternly peculiar craft of this wonderful author is on full display in this collection of short stories about the complex ordinary lives of people living in the “East” – the steamy, teeming city of New Delhi – and the “Upper East” – Manhattan’s Upper East Side. When recommending books to customers and friends, I’ve always been hard-pressed to pinpoint what I love so much about his author, and this collection, which I consider one of her best books, certainly doesn’t make that any easier: there’s the elegance of her prose, and there’s the unblinking sharpness of her insight into the pettiness and hope of her characters, and something more, a kind of wise human sympathy that always reminds me of Narayan.

3 Jem (and Sam) by Ferdinand Mount – I was, of course, never going to be able to resist a historical novel about Samuel Pepys, any more than Mount – at the time editor of the mighty TLS and a descendant of the book’s main character, Jeremiah Mount – could resist writing one. “Jem” Mount is a name from the diaries of Samuel Pepys and here reconfigured as Pepys’s friend and rival in all the sweaty endeavors of Restoration London, and Ferdinand Mount captures that world so exuberantly that by the time you finish the book, you’ll want to check yourself for pox. You’ll also have laughed a great deal.

2 The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison – There’s an enormous amount of great, well-chosen stuff in this big volume … I was impressed from the start with the job Katrina Kenison does sorting it all and choosing gem after gem in order to produce what really is one of the best American short story anthologies ever assembled. And as usual, I remain grateful that John Updike’s main suggestion for the editorial process – that the book include roughly ten of his own short stories – was politely declined.

1 Click, Clack, Moo – Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin, pictures by Betsy Lewin – In the world of fiction, on rare occasions, a classic will be obvious from the very moment of its appearance. And so it was with this utterly wonderful children’s book written by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Betsy Lewin, the clearly-told story of a group of cows who discover an old typewriter and begin making very reasonable workplace demands of their tyrannical overlord, Farmer Brown – with results that might make even a hardened Trotskyite smile.

Best Nonfiction:

10 Embracing Defeat by John Dower – This bleak, occasionally overpowering book documents as never before in English the sordid realities of the six-year military occupation of Japan in the wake of the Second World War. Dower takes John Hersey’s lead and fills his account with human stories that better illustrate all the levels of that occupation than five times their weight in statistics could do. I was deeply impressed by the book when I first read it, and now I consider it an essential part of any WWII library.

9 A Flame of Pure Fire by Roger Kahn – The savage, irrepressible boxer Jack Dempsey is the beating heart of this fantastic book – his life, his loves, his triumphs and defeats, and, in Kahn’s energetic, skillful telling, his entire era. Kahn is wonderful at capturing the highs and lows of the Roaring 20s, which isn’t as easy as you might think, and he’s superb at conveying the second-by-second drama of the boxing ring, which most definitely isn’t as easy as you might think. He’s impressed by his voracious subject but now cowed: this is a warts-and-all portrait, one of the best sports bios I’ve ever read.

8 Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden – As noted, some books simply announce themselves as classics upon arrival, and this was certainly the case for Bowden’s riveting, brutal account of a disastrous US military mission to Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. Bowden draws on lots of first-hand accounts and crafts the kind of bitter account that doesn’t let you go while you’re reading and stays with you long after you’re finished. Needless to say, I was hugely relieved when Ridley Scott managed to make such a brilliant movie out of the book.

7 Hot Seat by Frank Rich – New York Times drama critic Frank Rich was quickly and predictably dubbed “the Butcher of Broadway” once it became clear to the cognoscenti that he wasn’t simply going to regurgitate their press releases in his reviews. As this very generous and spellbinding anthology of his theater writings proves, Rich was by no means a close-minded or tough-to-please audience member – he simply has standards, and a ready pen. This volume is the indispensable biography of Manhattan theater in the 1980s.

6 Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt – This huge, jam-packed book takes a straightforward, almost annalistic approach to telling the biographical story of poetry, but such a description does it no real service and gives no real hint of the treasures of wit and insight that fill its pages. Being a big fan of Samuel Johnson, I looked at this book askance in the publisher’s catalog, but the sheer breadth of learning on display here need defer to no author, living or dead. If you want a one-volume guided tour of poetry (and why on Earth would you?), this is the one you should own.

5 No Other Book by Randall Jarrell – It’s to Brad Leithauser that we all owe a debt of gratitude for this near-perfect anthology of the critical essays of the great Randall Jarrell. Here we get most of the best such essays Jarrell ever wrote, and here we get to savor again his amazing compassion, readerly insight, and most of all his rhetorically flawless Augustan sense of humor. Over the decades of reading and re-reading these pieces, Jarrell has succeeded in opening my mind not only to certain poets but to certain poetic concepts and allowances, which is something neither Philip Sidney nor Sam Daniel was ever able to do. Until a much bigger, annotated thousand-page collection comes along, this is a book to treasure.

4 Swampwalker’s Journal by David Carroll – I’ve loved every volume of Carroll’s gentle, quietly observant natural history memoirs of going out walking and seeing what he can find in the world of nature, but I think this one is my favorite, as he traces the path of a year in his beloved swamps and sedgy ponds, peeks into the lives of their inhabitants, and records it all in beautifully evocative low-key prose, accompanied by his own wonderful illustrations.

3 In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick – This rip-roaringly good story about the whaleship Essex, its fateful encounter with a rampaging sperm whale, and the long and harrowing story of the survivors has been told before, of course, not only by Thomas Heffernan back in 1981 but also by Owen Chase, the first mate of the Essex, back in 1821. But loyal as I am in my own way to both those books, I have to admit: Philbrick’s is better – every bit as rousing as Chase’s account but more comprehensive and historically informed, and every bit as comprehensive and historically informed as Heffernan but more rousing. Back at the bookstore, this book just kept selling and selling, and it’s due to get an eye-popping big-screen Hollywood treatment that will certainly put fresh copies into more hand, which is good news all around.

2 A Clearing in the Distance by Witold Rybczynski – I likewise had a soft spot of prior loyalty to Laura Wood Roper’s earlier biography of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, F.L.O when I encountered this new biography by a writer whose nonfiction I’d always found a bit facile. Olmsted’s life is a great subject for a biographer: it’s full of passion, adventure, highly articulate literary remains, and it leaves behind it some of the best-loved physical spaces in America, including the Fens of Boston and New York City’s Central Park. And Rybczynski wonderfully rises to the occasion, presenting here an energetic and appealingly sensitive story I read with great enjoyment.

1 A Traitor’s Kiss (Sheridan) by Fintan O’Toole – The nonfiction high point of the year, however, was this sparkling, incredibly nuanced biography of 18^th century playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose works I’d of course read (the very end of the 20^th century was just about the last time when an ‘of course’ like that one wouldn’t look like science fiction – the 21^st century’s tsunami of tstupidity was just cresting and would strike during the 2000 US presidential election season), but I’d never really considered him as the subject for a full-length biography, let alone one as completely invigorating as this. A tremendous performance.