The Donoghue Interregnum: 2003!

The year is now 2003, when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in a fit of pique, Broadway went dark, the Old Man of the Mountain finally crumbled, President George W. Bush declared the Iraq War a victory, and the great Katharine Hepburn died. And the book-world carried on regardless, hitting these high notes:

Best Fiction:

10 Some Hope by Edward St. Aubyn – I knew very little about this author when I first encountered this novel about his great, self-indulgent character Patrick Melrose, abused and foul-minded child of British privilege and uneven doppelganger to St. Aubyn himself. But the book’s surreal confidence and almost anachronistically graceful writing drew me in, and I was greatly rewarded – especially with the single best recreation on paper of what it’s like to be high as a proverbial kite on strong drugs (with all due apologies to Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight). Needless to add, this book kept me coming back to Patrick Melrose novels – including long after I should have stopped.

9 Great Neck by Jay Cantor – I was deeply impressed by this panoramic novel that stretches from the living memory of the Holocaust to the social upheavals of the 1960s, and to this day I’m a little mystified as to why it’s been forgotten. Cantor here tells the story of a tight-knit group of friends striving to make sense of the burgeoning 20^th century, and he threads through their very mundane experiences the carefully-evoked world of comic book superheroes, and it’s all expertly done, right up to an unforgettable climactic scene.

8 I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company by Brian Hall – This won’t be the only occasion on this year’s list for me to point it out, but still: despite my repeated urging, I’m still not in charge of creating the titles of every new work of fiction, or I assure you all, this great historical novel about the Lewis and Clark Expedition wouldn’t have an entire stanza by Sir Philip Sidney as its title. But if you can somehow get past it, a taut and wonderful story awaits you within.

7 Gilligan’s Wake by Tom Carson – For cheekiness’s sake, I’m willing to overlook what is in fact yet another rotten book-title; hell, for this book, I’d be willing to overlook an outright cliché as a title. Carson’s maniac idea here – to take the characters from the TV show “Gilligan’s Wake” and imagine gigantically complicated life-stories for each – is so magnetic and his execution of that idea so fantastically effective (my favorite creation here is his Mr. Thurston Howell III) that it all works perfectly when none of it should work at all.

6 The Point of Return by Siddharta Deb – I believe I mentioned outright cliches as book titles? But even so, we’ll once again strain ourselves to look past it – to this wonderfully moving debut novel set in 1970s India. Deb tells the story of a young man named Babu and his unaccountable, distant father Dr. Dam, who share a house in a village in northern India but neither know nor understand each other. Deb tells his complicated story in fractured pieces floating all along the timeline of his two characters, and instead of being unbearably precious and show-offy, the innovation actually serves to make a very moving finale even more so.

5 Any Human Heart by William Boyd – Much like both Great Neck and The Point of Return, this wonderfully textured novel by Boyd tells the story of an era while it’s telling the story of its characters. In this case, the character is the unforgettable Logan Mountstuart, a slightly corkscrewy Everyman whose life takes on a wittily-handled profusion of shapes during the 20^th century, including spy, entrepreneur, writer, rich man, and poor man. Boyd – a writer I don’t often find readable, much less compelling – creates a finely-detailed character in Mountstuart, but he spends just as much time creating a finely-detailed fictional look at the various crises of the British 20^th century, from the costly victory of WWII to the colonial frittering it hastened, and more. The combination of personal and panoramic in these pages is superbly handled.

4 Still Holding by Bruce Wagner – I mentioned crappy book-titles already, and I’ve long since registered my watery contempt for the titles Wagner chose for his Hollywood novels (the so-called Cellular Trilogy, hence the particular cliches involved and why they might have seemed like good ideas at the time), but if we once again hold our noses and step through the threshold, what we find is Wagner writing at the top of his game about the insanity, vanity, pomp, and hypocrisy of post-9-11 Hollywood. Title or no title, the sparkling and deviously smart Wagner prose is still here in abundance.

3 The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri – This slim, deceptively simple novel about cultural assimilation and the intense inner politics of identity stars a young man named Gogol Ganguli, first-generation son of immigrants from India, and the book tells his wandering, self-consciously literate odyssey to find peace in a homeland that never quite feels like home. Lahiri is an almost spookily observant writer who’s pleased me more with each book she’s written, and the pattern of my loving her novels began right here.

2 All the Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones – It’s not often a cop-thriller novel will find its way into the Interregnum, mainly because cop-thriller novels tend to trade any hope of literary excellence for great hopes of popular enjoyment – they’re bad, in other words, no matter how enjoyable they may be. But Jones’s book is that rare exception: on one level, the story of a Texas Deputy Sheriff chasing a mysterious killer known as the Tin Man. But thanks to the intelligence and gripping visual intensity of Jones’s prose, this book has another level, as a richly-rewarding psychological study. I can’t recommend the book strongly enough to crime fiction fans, but I often recommend it – without subsequent objection – to people who hate crime fiction.

1 The Songs of the Kings by Barry Unsworth – As we’ve already had occasion to note, I have a bit of a soft spot for fiction set in the Homeric world, a soft enough spot to have written quite a bit of it myself. So naturally I was overjoyed to learn that Barry Unsworth had likewise caught the bug and would be writing a Troy War novel. And I wasn’t disappointed: The Songs of the Kings is fantastic. It’s violent and epic, and Unsworth sharpens both those qualities by filling the book with contemporary-sounding dialogue, with no hint of the formal locutions so familiar from the many English-language translations Homer’s had over the centuries. The result is an Iliad-story that feels both very personal and genuinely moving – much like the original, come to think of it.

Best Nonfiction:

10 For Bea by Kristin Von Kreisler – Redundant perhaps for me of all people to say it, but still: there’s something special about beagles. Almost every beagle owner can attest to the moment they knew it: it’s the moment – never immediate and by no means certain ever to happen – when a new beagle decides you’ve passed whatever internal test they were conducting and are now worthy of both affection and loyalty. That moment can’t be hurried, and it can’t be bribed, and it can’t be predicted, and the when Kristen von Kreisler has that moment in a beautiful scene in this book, every beagle owner will tear up a little at how well it’s described. Von Kreisler found Bea, the beagle in question, terrified and malnourished on the roadside and took her in, and for the next fifteen years they were close friends who learned about each other and from each other. I’ve featured a few of these ‘dog enriches human life’ books in this Interregnum, but this one holds a special place in my hear, for obvious reasons.

9 Hawthorne by Brenda Wineapple – Nathaniel Hawthorne presents both an attractive and a daunting prospect for would-be biographers, attractive because his life is so well-documented, and daunting because in so many ways, his life seems to shed virtually no light on the very reason we study his life in the first place: the great literary works that flowed from his pen seem every bit as unaccountable no matter how much you know about the man himself. Wineapple, much to her credit, understands this even as she’s attempting to subvert it by amassing typically comprehensive picture of Hawthorne’s life and times. There’ve been many, many such life and times books on this author, but for my money, this one has an almost cold kind of depth its subject would appreciated very much.

8 Robert E. Lee by Roy Blount – Once again, we return to the old Penguin Lives series, and this time for a pairing unlikely to please me: not only a humorist writing a serious biography, but anybody at all writing yet another serious biography of the arch-traitor Robert E. Lee. Such biographies universally bug me because they don’t end with their subject hanging by the neck from the tallest tree at Appomattox Court House, so it’s all the more amazing, the job Blount does here telling his story with such gusto and insight. I was never even vaguely tempted to change my mind about Lee, but I sure as Hell changed my mind about Blount.

7 The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan – The fifth-century BC war between Athens and Sparta is one of those conflicts that’s always ripe for retelling, but it’s big and daunting and there’s always new research to take into account (and for all his faults, Thucydides is a bit of a tough act to follow). In other words, there’s a grave potential when reading a new history of the Peloponnesian War to hit icebergs of boredom calved off glaciers of caution, but that doesn’t happen in Kagan’s fantastic account: he keeps the story’s several parallel theaters active and interesting, and he manages to write about the whole conflict with tremendous freshness.

6 The Double Life of Doctor Lopez by Dominic Green – The long, complicated story leading up to the execution in 1584 of Queen Elizabeth’s personal physician, the Portuguese Jew Roderigo Lopez is the heart of Green’s vivid and immensely enjoyable book, the best work of Elizabethan history the young century had seen so far. Green traces the man’s involvement in secret dealings with the Spanish and deals very shrewdly with the strong currents of anti-Semitism running through England at the time, and his account of Lopez’s arrest and execution is gripping. There is and never was any evidence that Lopez committed any crime, let alone any capital offense, and Green’s book is still the best thing ever written about him.

5 All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer – The countless evils of the CIA make for countless books, and this is one of the best. It deals with the 1953 coup the CIA instigated and aided in Iran in order to overthrow the then-prime minister and install the Shah, and it’s Kinzer’s drama-thesis that the brutal oppressions of the Shah’s reign led directly to the rise of radical Islamic theocracy in the form of the 1979 revolution. In reality, this is almost complete hogwash; the ousted prime minister in question was a monster, and the Shah, for all his autocratic tendencies, most certainly was not (as for whether life in Tehran was better in 1975 or 1985, well, ask an Iranian woman) – and the 1979 revolution was religious, not social. But within the framework of the story he sets out to tell, Kinzer is a mighty entertaining writer, and All the Shah’s Men is a mighty entertaining book.

4 Jarhead by Anthony Swofford – This terrific book is a grunt’s-eye-view of the 1990 Gulf War, full of grit and violence and hugely energetic writing from a man who was there. I read it dismissively at first, but over time it’s stuck with me and grown in my estimation (a process not even dented by the laughably awful movie adapted from the book), to the point where I now rank it among the best such accounts of the modern war-experience I’ve ever read.

3 The Big House by George Howe Colt – That particular alternate reality known to only a very lucky few – the Cape Cod summer house – is given a marvelous, unforgettable celebration in this book, in which Colt and his family return for one list visit to the summer house where Colt’s own rambling old summer house before it’s sold to strangers. And the book sold so well – and was so well-written – that thousands of people who’ve never had a Cape summer house suddenly knew something of what it was like. Colt captures every aspect of such places perfectly, from the sometimes-sullen moodiness of the house to the bright kaleidoscope of the Cape in summer. A pure treat.

2 They Marched into Sunlight by David Maraniss – This author is one hell of a gifted storyteller, and that fact is never more dramatically demonstrated than in this extremely readable and deeply impressive look at three sides of the Vietnam War in 1967: the men in the field, the students protesting back home, and the politicians in Washington. Maraniss writes a very rich, very strong line of prose, and despite the moral murkiness of his subject matter, his book is filled with believably-drawn good guys and bad guys (the worst of the latter being a younger but still timelessly evil Dick Cheney, skulking around back in the States and so obviously plotting future war crimes that his every appearance is practically accompanied by the Star Wars “Imperial March” theme). In many ways this is a painful book to read, but it’s a necessary one.

1 W B Yeats the Arch Poet by R F Foster – Concluding his magisterial two-volume biography of the great Irish poet, Foster here gives readers the best, most detailed, most passionately readable account imaginable of “Yeats – The Certified Loon Years,” when the poet let his hair grow shaggy white and took to making sonorous gnomic pronouncements in the hedgerows. Oxford University Press did an excellent job of making these two volumes look lovely and monumental, fit to match Foster’s prose throughout.