The Year's Best Books

City Life, by Donald Barthelme. Wizardly fantasies, written with Kafka's purity of language and some of Beckett's grim humor.

Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow. A highly intelligent example of a rare form, the philosophical novel.

Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion. Madame Bovary in Hollywood--written in masterly, spare, sinuous prose.

Local Anaesthetic, by Guenter Grass. A darkly humorous allegory that tunnels through the moral and metaphysical confusions of the contemporary West.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A teeming chronicle of one family that may or may not represent all of South America.

. . . In the Highlands Since Time Immemorial, by Joanna Ostrow. The story of a Belfast boy in the remote Scottish highlands makes an exotic, lyrical first novel.

Dance the Eagle to Sleep, by Marge Piercy. The disaffections of the young swarm against the social-science backdrop of a violent youth revolution.

Max Jamison, by Wilfrid Sheed. A scalpel-sharp dissection of a critic criticizing himself.

Bech: A Book, by John Updike. A "famous Jewish novelist" on a cultural-exchange mission behind the Iron Curtain occasions a spoof of the government-intellectual complex.

Losing Battles, by Eudora Welty. This story of the reunion of a vast clan in the Mississippi hill country is like a home movie shot by an enraptured genius.

NONFICTION

Exiles, by Michael J. Arlen. A son's portrait of his famous parents that is almost unbearably eloquent about deep, ambivalent feelings.

Ball Four, by Jim Bouton. Inside Baseball, where Bowie Kuhn fears to tread --lively, bawdy, irreverent.

My Lai 4, by Seymour Hersh. An account of the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by the Pulitzer prizewinning journalist who broke the story.

The Loss of El Dorado, by V.S. Naipaul. A literary re-creation of the his tory of Trinidad, which evokes the terror, avarice and cynicism accompanying the development of the New World.

Crisis in the Classroom, by Charles Silberman. A massive, thoughtful inquiry into U.S. schools concludes that education is almost always sacrificed to order and discipline.

Inside the Third Reich, by Albert Speer. An unusually intimate view of the workings of Nazi Germany by one of Hitler's closest aides.

Nuremberg and Vietnam, by Telford Taylor. A former U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials examines the question of moral responsibility for war atrocities in Southeast Asia.

Words for a Deaf Daughter, by Paul West. A talented novelist describes the difficulties and revelations of bringing up a brain-damaged child.

Nixon Agonistes, by Garry Wills. A book about "the idea of Nixon" turns out to be a stringent accounting of Horatio Alger ideals and supply-and-demand marketplace ethics.

Radical Chic and Mou-Mouing the Flak-Catchers, by Tom Wolfe. Two related pieces of social satire about the confrontation between Black Power and white guilt.

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