The Best Books of 1994

FICTION

1. In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien (Houghton Mifflin). A boyish politician, spooked by an election defeat and by undead memories of Vietnam, retreats to a Minnesota lake to sort things out. He and his wife, who has spooks of her own, slip separately through the trapdoors of the mind into the subterranean world where morality, evil and reality itself are shifting phantoms. O'Brien, who served in Vietnam and in 1979 won the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato, once more displays his enormous talent.

2. The Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike (Knopf). Again, elder writesman Updike proves his durability by turning out yet another splendid collection of elegant short stories about -- no, no, stay with him -- Wasp geezers who golf. Now and then, unblocked metaphors rise up shrieking: one duffer is resigned "to a golfing mediocrity that would poke its way down the sloping dogleg of decrepitude to the level green of death." Fore? Sure, but Lord, how that senior citizen can write!

3. The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Here's a marvelously operatic novel, roiling with outrageous men and women and with jealousy, revenge, gunfire, deadly sea swells and lust in a lighthouse, all set in the tiny Newfoundland community of Witless Bay (one store, one restaurant, a sawmill and a drydock) just after the turn of the century. The author writes well against this florid grain, producing extravagant melodrama in language that is strict, laconic and evocative.

4. The Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow (Random House). This Poe-esque tale of murky doings in 1871 Manhattan offers the surreptitious exhumation of a corpse / while, sure enough, fog swirls in the phosphorescent light of early dawn. What it can't supply, for all the author's huffing and puffing, is social significance. But with a ghostly white stagecoach whose passengers are supposedly deceased rich men, significance (which closes on Saturday night anyway) shouldn't be an issue.

5. Open Secrets by Alice Munro (Knopf). Once more the Canadian writer supplies rich, daring and satisfying short stories, all rooted in rural Ontario, most of them about women balanced uneasily between a conventional past and a present that tips them in new and strange directions. The constants in Munro's stories are remorseless time, blind fate and the author's wry sense of the bizarre hidden in the ordinary.

...And The Worst

The Fermata by Nicholson Baker (Random House). The author, whose specialty is upwardly pretentious soft porn, is puffed as a writer of something like satire, with something like a point of view. Baloney, as proved by this latest aid to heavy breathing: the smarmy tale of a fellow who learns how to stop the universe momentarily and uses the trick to undress women, then masturbate.

NONFICTION

1. Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity by Neal Gabler (Knopf). Walter Winchell would have sent Rush Limbaugh out for coffee. Doubters among the uninstructed young are invited to read biographer Gabler's superb, richly detailed portrait of the grade-school dropout and vainglorious, third-rate ex-hoofer who, more than any other gossipist, invented the modern celebrity industry. His syndicated "colyums" and brassy, red-baiting broadcasts to "Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea" shaped U.S. lowbrow culture for the 1930s and '40s. When he died unlamented in 1972, Winchell was a lonely and bilious has-been, still clinging to the shabby remnants of his column.

2. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown). The author, a music critic, follows the self-created rock hero as he is borne to platinum paradise on a great celebrity updraft -- this despite Miss Marmann, his eighth-grade music teacher, who told him he couldn't sing worth a lick and gave him a C. Guralnick writes evocatively and sympathetically of Presley's first wild fame -- That's All Right, Mama, his first recording, made him a millionaire -- and tracks the star through the shattering death of his mother Gladys and his entry into the Army. A second volume is set to cover Elvis' long downward trajectory.

3. South Wind Changing by Ngoc Quang Huynh (Graywolf Press). A Vietnamese refugee to the U.S. who was a young student in Saigon when the war ended tells movingly of surviving a Marxist re-education camp and escaping Vietnam by boat. His adventures in the U.S. include earning a bachelor's degree at Bennington College and learning the rhythms of English well enough to write this haunting, oddly pastoral memoir. Even today, concerned that he may never see his parents in Vietnam, he writes, "I sat on the hill, surrounded by trees in their spring blossom, looking over the pond at Bennington College, listening ((to a lecture)) on Tolstoy's great novel War and Peace. I felt like one of the characters."

4. Family by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author, first visible as a New Yorker humorist, then as an observer in Great Plains, an elegiac portrait of the American heartland, turns reflective and inward in this long, moody rummage in time's attic. He began to gather material about his near and distant family after the death of his parents, searching, he says, for the meaning of life, for "a meaning that would defeat death." The journey -- perhaps more correctly his obsession -- began in 1987. Collecting family papers, dating as far back as 1855, he filed them in two boxes: the dad museum and the mom museum. The result of this painstaking and painful process adds up to a remarkable demonstration of Frazier's ability to write with rare, pure love and to make his feelings meaningful to casual passersby -- his readers.

5. My Own Country by Abraham Verghese (Simon & Schuster). When the physician- author arrived in the Appalachian town of Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1985, aids was an alien, virtually unknown, something that happened only to gays in New York City. But now the virus was beginning to kill in this isolated, staunchly religious community (72 churches), and Verghese, an expert on infectious diseases, had to deal with it. At the same time he had to fight the ignorance and prejudice of townspeople (transcriptionists would run away so as not to have to type up his examinations of homosexual patients). Verghese's descriptions of his patients and of his own frustration as a healer who could not heal are brilliant and extremely moving. An Indian Christian who was born in Ethiopia, Verghese brings strength and humility to his agonizing story. Fatigue and burnout are detectable here too, but his compassion and sorrow are an openhearted gift to his country, and to ours.

...And The Worst

Health Security Act

The Clinton Administration's health-care bill was a boffo concept, much needed by a nation whose health-care system is itself a systemless invalid. What could have been a stirring theme disappeared under 1,500 pages of turgid details. Wait for the mini-series.