FICTION

1 AMERICAN TABLOID by James Ellroy (Knopf). This big, brazenly entertaining novel begins in 1958 and ends seconds before the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In between, James Ellroy--a crime-noir cult writer making his mainstream debut--propels two rogue FBI agents and a former Los Angeles County deputy sheriff through a fictionalized, nightmarish tour of five tumultuous years in U.S. history. Life is seldom horrifying and hilarious at the same moment. On nearly all its 576 pages, American Tabloid manages to be both.

2 SABBATH'S THEATER by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin) explores the beginnings of geezerhood (Roth's resolutely obnoxious hero, Mickey Sabbath, is a randy 64) with some of the same comic sexual energy that set readers goggling in Portnoy's Complaint. Sabbath is an ex-puppeteer whose present occupation is perfecting his scabrous personality. As he searches his disorderly past for meaning, largely without success, he is an equal-opportunity boor, richly offensive to women, men, Jews and Gentiles. Yet the result is a brilliantly written character, rampaging through a novel about facing death in a lonely old age.

3 GALATEA 2.2 by Richard Powers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The Galatea in this reworking of the myth is not a statue but an enormously complicated network of computer circuitry that, on a bet, is being taught to think. The Pygmalions--there are a couple of them--are an acerbic cyber-scientist and a lovelorn novelist named (hmm?) Richard Powers. A scheme that might seem mechanical and too clever works out instead to be humane and thoughtful and, when the computer is troubled by 3 a.m. brooding ("What race am I? What races hate me?"), surprisingly moving.

4 LADDER OF YEARS by Anne Tyler (Knopf). Here's an almost perfect summer-weight, drip-dry, easy-care novel. Delia Grinstead is terminally comfortable, or nearly so, in her life as a 40-year-old wife and mother. The trouble is she has become all but invisible, even to herself. So, one day, on the faintest of whims, she wanders away from the family beach house and lights out for the territories. Such fantasies have grabbed all of us now and then, and Tyler writes her runaway's adventures not just as stylish comedy but as intriguing possibility.

5 OUR GAME by John le Carre (Knopf). Despite much prophesying to that effect, the end of the cold war did not mean the end of the moral and political murk in which spying and spy thrillers flourish. Le Carre continues to be the master of this shadowy genre, and he is near the top of his form in his latest novel. His hero is a middle-age intelligence operative put to pasture by bosses who decide (wrongly, as it turns out) that his skills and mind-set are obsolete. A bittersweet love affair winds through a landscape of modern menace, whose vectors, by now quite familiar, are ethnic and religious mania.

NONFICTION

1 DARK SUN: THE MAKING OF THE HYDROGEN BOMB by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster) looks clearly and steadily at what is, thus far, the most perilous venture in human history. The view is not in the least reassuring. The best that can be said is that in a struggle between our scientists on one side and our civilian and military politicians on the other--and, of course, between two such unstable aggregations on either side of the Iron Curtain--we blundered to a fortunate standoff. There were relatively sane and reasonable people in the several camps. But no reader of Rhodes' careful book can doubt that the ideologues--notably the belligerent Strategic Air Command head Curtis LeMay and the truly monstrous "father of the H-bomb," physicist Edward Teller--came close to making the earth uninhabitable for anything but cockroaches.

2 LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY by Simon Schama (Knopf). Once upon a time, when early man roamed the African savannas, landscape was where we lived. As Columbia University historian Schama relates in his long, richly detailed and fascinating study, our ways of thinking about ourselves and our world, and about national character and destiny, are deeply influenced by landscape. His book bears its scholarship gracefully, as when he traces the actuality of rivers--the flooding and enriching Nile as the center of our thoughts of riverness--to the symbolic rivers embodied in Bernini's designs for the splashing, tumbling fountains of Rome. Europe's towering Alps were known to harbor dragons, the author notes, and the deep forests to the north kept alive the mythical roots that became the bloody Germanic lore of Nazism. The book is a refreshing scenic turnoff from society's hell-bent journey toward clear-cutting our forests and drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness.

3 A CIVIL ACTION by Jonathan Harr (Random House). This true story of a gutsy lawyer who takes on a couple of corporate polluters on behalf of the penniless families of leukemia victims and extracts $8 million from one of the firms should be an inspiring proof that the system works. It's not, and the system doesn't. That's the glum message of reporter Harr's well-researched account. Jan Schlichtmann, the flamboyant Boston attorney who took the case against W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods despite warnings that his law firm was too small to handle the enormous trial costs, ended up broke and unable to get his repossessed Porsche out of hock. This although he was virtuous and partly victorious (Beatrice was let off, despite later epa reports supporting the plaintiffs). The eight families of the Woburn, Massachusetts, leukemia victims got only $455,000 each, not much to cover the costs of lifelong illness. The important result was yet another warning to would-be Robin Hoods: Don't even think of fighting corporate America.

4 THE NIGHTINGALE'S SONG by Robert Timberg (Simon & Schuster) offers five quite different answers to the troubling question, "What is a hero?" His subjects are five decorated Vietnam vets, all Annapolis grads: John McCain, the Republican Senator from Arizona who was once a Navy pilot and then for 5 1/2 years a pow; James Webb, a battlefield hero who became Secretary of the Navy and then wrote a superb Vietnam novel, Fields of Fire; and three men who smeared themselves with Iran-contra, Oliver North, Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter. The author does not decry heroes or the military, but a subtext is the importance of looking closely at the reputations we buy. North is merely the gaudiest example--cool and brave under fire but in civilian life a hot dog who, Timberg suggests, is perhaps unhinged in some surreal way that involves a mix of self-dramatization and stupidity.

5 THE LIARS' CLUB by Mary Karr (Viking). Poet Karr's memoir of her God-awful childhood in an East Texas oil town is marvelously entertaining, much in the manner of a train wreck recalled with guitar accompaniment. "My spankings were a kind of family sporting event," she writes. "Unless Mother managed to get me down in a corner, she would have to hold one of my wrists to keep me within flyswatter distance while she flailed in my direction. At best, she made contact about 10% of the time." Character takes firm hold in this wondering account of fistfights and flood, car crashes and shootings. It's not all funny, but it's a drop-dead reply to the question, "Ma, what was it like when you were a little girl?"

...AND THE WORST

MISS AMERICA by Howard Stern (Regan Books). The new best seller from America's top radio smut spieler and foremost exponent of penis envy is an ordeal even for those who liked Stern's first one: it is to Private Parts what Demi Moore's Scarlet Letter is to Nathaniel Hawthorne's. Stern puts his wittiest mots (e.g., "stupid smelly moron") in large type; he's found a way to shout in print. One photo, of the author with O.J. Simpson, reads getting away with murder!, which Howard has been doing on radio for years. Here, for crimes against humanity, the English language and his own repute as a low-level wit, the verdict is Guilty!