THE BEST BOOKS OF 2004
Fiction
Los Angeles Times
12/5/2004
Birds Without Wings
A Novel
Louis de Bernières
Alfred A. Knopf: 560 pp., $25.95
Louis de Bernières is an angry man, and the
destructive manifestations of nationalism, above all
in pointless warfare, make him seethe with fury and
contempt. Only those with the strongest of stomachs
will be able to read his horrifyingly brilliant
account of trench warfare during the Gallipoli
campaign without flinching: All five senses are
exploited to the fullest. He agonizes over what he
calls the conspiracy to forget the Armenian genocide.
He shows, in detail and for his individual characters,
just what mass uprooting and exile mean in human
terms. “Birds Without Wings” is a quite astonishing,
and compulsively readable, tour de force.
— Peter Green
Conspirators
A Novel
Michael André Bernstein
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 506 pp., $25
Pick up any of the Viennese journals, one of the
characters says in Michael André Bernstein’s
“Conspirators,” “and you will see right away that in
our politics, in our dreams … and certainly in our
fashionable plays and novellas, all we talk about is
murder.” This strange, hypnotic first novel takes us
into the murky, perplexed heart of Mitteleuropa on the
eve of World War I. It is a world well known from the
writings of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Bruno Schulz,
Joseph Roth and Thomas Mann — a world of literary
cafes, decadent art, military parades, psychoanalysis,
secret police, poverty and catastrophic premonitions.
Bernstein’s beautifully written, intricate and
entrancing novel seems to prove that to show true love
of the past, or true love of life, a writer must
resist the urge to treat the past as prologue.
— Jaroslaw Anders
Cruisers
A Novel
Craig Nova
Shaye Areheart Books: 306 pp., $24
Let it quickly be said that “Cruisers,” though rich in
symbols and glittering with images, is a tense and
fast-paced chronicle, told in prose as nimble and
shiny as a pellet of mercury. Russell Boyd is, after
all, a policeman, and “Cruisers” is, among other
things, an oblique police-procedural novel, in which
trooper Boyd from time to time seeks clues to a
roadside killing “like a blind man … who kept going
around a room with no door.” In the effective way the
author mixes vivid prose, existential riddles and
violent incident, Nova bears comparison to such
contemporaries as Robert Stone, Pete Dexter, Thomas
Berger and Jim Harrison.
— Tom Nolan
The Daydreaming Boy
A Novel
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Riverhead Books: 214 pp., $23.95
“The man who has no mother’s form to form him is a sad
man, unanchored man, vile and demoniac,” confides Vahe
Tcheubjian, narrator of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s
beautiful and disturbing second novel, which details
in stark terms the psychic aftermath of the Armenian
genocide. Having written compellingly about the
1915-18 massacre of more than a million Armenians in
Turkey (“Three Apples Fell From Heaven”), Marcom turns
her attention to the recurring distress of that event
in the life of one man. “The Daydreaming Boy” is a
dazzling and disquieting account of what happens when
our dreamscapes stop working as a defense against the
past and the awful reality of what we do to one
another reasserts itself.
— Bernadette Murphy
The Egyptologist
A Novel
Arthur Phillips
Random House: 386 pp., $24.95
Arthur Phillips’ second novel, “The Egyptologist,”
reads like a love child of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask
of Amontillado” and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,”
with Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury from “The Importance of
Being Earnest” as godparent. Phillips proved himself a
writer to watch with his first novel, “Prague” (2002),
his cynical, caustic, frolicsome and moving view of a
new lost generation seeking to make its mark in
Communist-pocked Central Europe. “The Egyptologist”
shifts to sandier turf, a murder mystery in the
Egyptian desert told by some of the most amusingly
unreliable narrators you’ll find in literature. “The
Egyptologist” is about taking that most creative and
desperate of urges, the desire to secure one’s legacy
and immortality, to the most outlandish extremes
imaginable. It offers a king’s bounty of lively,
sparkling conceptions and misconceptions.
— Heller McAlpin
Graceland
A Novel
Chris Abani
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 324 pp., $24
“Graceland” opens in 1983, in the teeming city of
Lagos, Nigeria, where 16-year-old Elvis Oke, who hopes
to become a dancer, is trying to earn money performing
in the street, doing impersonations of the more famous
American Elvis. As evoked in this novel by Nigerian
writer and poet Chris Abani, Lagos is a city of
startling contrasts. “Graceland” amply demonstrates
that Abani has the energy, ambition and compassion to
create a novel that delineates and illuminates a
complicated, dynamic, deeply fractured society.
— Merle Rubin
The Green Lantern
A Romance of Stalinist Russia
Jerome Charyn
Thunder’s Mouth Press: 358 pp., $22
Jerome Charyn’s dream life must be exceptionally rich.
Author of nearly 40 books — from knowledgeable police
novels to picaresque tales of the Bronx, nymphomaniacs
and Pinocchio; nonfiction books documenting his
fascination with the movies, Broadway and pingpong;
memoirs of his immigrant Jewish family; and
distinguished short fiction and essays — he now
rewards his readers with “The Green Lantern,”
subtitled “A Romance of Stalinist Russia.” In this
novel, the ’60s tradition of black humor evolves into
what could be named Red humor. Of course, this is not
new in the Russian experience; Gogol, Bulgakov and an
exile like Nabokov created despairing absurdities that
apply to the world, not just Russia. Like them, Charyn
also knows that “the old love game went on and on and
on,” a simple statement in a book of rococo and
burlesque that can pierce the heart of a reader. One
of the ways to live with the memory of tragic times is
to laugh if you can. Charyn can.
— Herbert Gold
A Hole in the Universe
A Novel
Mary McGarry Morris
Viking: 376 pp., $24.95
There are few contemporary American writers whose work
can absorb readers so fully and with such immediacy
that the line between character and reader begins to
seem dangerously thin. Among these few is the
brilliant Mary McGarry Morris, who has written several
exceptionally fine books, all of them so dense with
dread and complexity that you are hard-pressed not to
keep reading until her battered characters’ troubles
have been resolved. “A Hole in the Universe” is the
superbly drawn story of Gordon Loomis, a man just
released from prison after serving a 25-year sentence
for the murder of a young pregnant woman. “A Hole in
the Universe” is not exactly a mystery, but it has the
tautness and suspense of one — the sense, threaded
through its pages, that something is genuinely at
stake: Gordon’s redemption and acceptance by society,
perhaps, and by proxy an assurance to readers that
clemency wins out over chaos in the end.
— Francie Lin
Honored Guest
Stories
Joy Williams
Alfred A. Knopf: 214 pp., $23
“It sounds as though you had a very fortunate
childhood until you didn’t,” says Francine to her
gardener, Dennis, who seems to have an obsessive crush
on her. He’s been telling Francine about his childhood
nanny, Darla, of whom Francine reminds him, and her
response in many ways sums up Joy Williams’
penetrating and thoughtful collection of stories,
“Honored Guest.” In these tales, Williams, an
incomparable novelist and short-story and essay
writer, gives us characters who have good lives until
they don’t — people who revel in fortunate experiences
until fortune gets tired of them. In wonderful, stark
relief, Williams gives us a glimpse into the
pliability of the human heart, its marvelous ability
to withstand adversity and accommodate whatever comes
next.
Bernadette Murphy
The Inner Circle
A Novel
T.C. Boyle
Viking: 418 pp., $25.95
The 10th novel by T.C. Boyle, “The Inner Circle,” is
the story of John Milk, a fictional cohort in the
otherwise nominally real team of researchers employed
by Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. The two volumes that
issued from their work, “Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,”
transformed the way people everywhere thought about
sex; in America, at least, this was not a universally
welcomed change. “The Inner Circle” covers a great
deal of literal and psychic geography, and its
supporting cast is large. The story paints an
effective picture of America’s clammy, stultifying,
erotically punitive atmosphere in the early and
mid-1940s. It has impressive momentum and formal
reach, and a fair amount to impart about wrong turns,
anger, dependency and disillusion.
— Gary Indiana
It’s All True
A Novel of Hollywood
David Freeman
Simon & Schuster: 274 pp., $23
David Freeman’s “It’s All True” is a wry, observant
and forgiving Hollywood novel. I’m not certain that it
is, in the full sense of the word, a novel at all. It
is more like a collection of loosely interrelated
short stories about an intelligent, literate man
trying to survive in a town where intelligence and
literacy are not as highly valued as, say, the lettuce
assorte salad the studio exec orders just before
hearing Henry’s pitch for a movie in which aliens
intervene, to good effect, in the life of a Midwestern
counterfeiter.
What we have here is neither Nathanael West nor Jackie
Collins. It lacks the bleak hysteria of the former and
the latter’s breathless desire to put a glaze of
glamour on trashy, preposterous behavior. “It’s All
True” is more radical than that. It is a book about
normal people engaged in an admittedly abnormal, even
exotic, business yet trapped in their ordinariness,
their variously expressed needs to make their livings
in a place that rewards them only grudgingly with just
enough success to keep them in its game. In this
epitaph for a small winner there is wit, poignancy and
seductive grace.
— Richard Schickel
Last Lullaby
A Novel
Denise Hamilton
Scribner: 358 pp., $25
Eve Diamond is a romantic whose job as a Los Angeles
Times reporter requires her to be a cynic. This
conflict gives ex-Times reporter Denise Hamilton’s
third Diamond mystery novel, “Last Lullaby,” much of
its interest and unpredictability. One of Hamilton’s
strengths is her grasp of the Southland’s shifting
ethnic landscape. “Last Lullaby” leads us through
seedy Chinatown hotels, a trendy Asian fusion
restaurant, a backyard barbecue for her lover Silvio
Aguilar’s abuelita (grandmother) and a cyber-cafe that
might as well be an opium den, so oblivious are its
denizens to the outside world. Hamilton’s narrative
prose can recall potboilers past, but it can also
display so much freshness and sass (“I climbed up
spongy wooden stairs that creaked under my weight as
the termites held hands and moaned.”) that comparisons
with Raymond Chandler aren’t too far out of line.
— Michael Harris
The Lemon Table
Stories
Julian Barnes
Alfred A. Knopf: 244 pp., $22.95
Julian Barnes takes up the theme of aging
unflinchingly in “The Lemon Table,” his second
collection of stories. Erotic yearning, missed
opportunities, regret and other somber chords
predominate in this collection, although nearly always
with wry wit.
Barnes’ novels rely upon pyrotechnics, lexicographer’s
puns and postmodernist devices; these new stories are
filled with emotional resonance and hard-won wisdom.
“The Lemon Table” is a virtuoso performance of
remarkable clarity and insight.
— Jane Ciabattari
Little Black Book of Stories
A.S. Byatt
Alfred A. Knopf: 244 pp., $21
Although A.S. Byatt is best known for the Booker
Award-winning 1990 scholarly romance “Possession” and
four overstuffed Frederica Potter novels of ideas set
in the 1950s and 1960s (“The Virgin in the Garden,”
“Still Life,” “Babel Tower” and “A Whistling Woman”),
she also has written her own fabulist’s tales over the
years.
In “Little Black Book of Stories,” Byatt continues her
reinvention of the fairy tale, focusing on the darker
mysteries of madness, violence, grief and
transformation and using the uncanny power of language
to reach deep into the imagination, thrilling and
terrifying in equal measure. These bewitching stories
are immensely readable, fiercely intelligent and
studded with astonishing, refracting images.
“Little Black Book of Stories” is a virtuoso
performance by a master storyteller; Byatt spins pure
gold from the darkest elements in our nature.
— Jane Ciabattari
Little Scarlet
A Novel
Walter Mosley
Little, Brown: 310 pp., $24.95
In his continuing portrait of black and white life in
Los Angeles, Walter Mosley has dipped his pen into the
nightmare of the Watts riots and come up with his most
searing and unforgettable account of America to date.
Indignation, ferocity, excoriation scorch the pages of
“Little Scarlet” like a fiery sermon, powerful for its
nuance, poignant for its humanity and all the more
compassionate for coming from the heart and mind of
Easy Rawlins. “Little Scarlet” is a novel about who we
really are and who we all can become. Argue it.
Question it. You cannot read this story without
recognizing the poison we feed one another. Mosley
makes it clear that the real nightmare of the Watts
riots had less to do with that hot summer evening in
1965 than with everything that preceded it.
— Thomas Curwen
The Master
A Novel
Colm Tóibín
Scribner: 342 pp., $25
The biographer is bound by fact, but the historical
novelist need only be plausible. His characters may
bear the names of those who once actually lived, but
he enjoys a liberty that the biographer does not. Even
the most amply documented of lives contained moments
in which important words went unsaid, scenes
determined by a level, all-knowing stare or the way
one pair of eyes avoided another. That’s the kind of
unspoken communication in which the fiction of Henry
James delights, and no biographer can possibly treat
James’ inner experience with the kind of freedom he
brought to his characters. That is precisely what the
Irish writer Colm Tóibín has achieved in his deeply
engrossing novel “The Master,” which follows James
through what have been called the most treacherous
years of his life. It begins in 1895, when his bid for
popular success as a playwright had failed, and ends
in 1899, with his purchase of a house in the English
coastal town of Rye.
Tóibín gives us an infinitely patient intelligence and
an entirely convincing portrait of a writer at work:
the glimmer of an idea with which a new story first
comes, the way a tale is produced by the lamination of
moments widely separated in time and space. He shows
us that fiction never provides a transcript of
experience but instead offers a variation upon it, a
sense of how things might have gone if only they had
been different.
— Michael Gorra
Natasha and Other Stories
David Bezmozgis
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 150 pp., $18
“Natasha and Other Stories” chronicles, in seven tales
spread over 23 years, the fate of the Berman family,
Latvian Jews who fled the Soviet Union in 1980 for
Toronto. Mark Berman, the only child of Roman and
Bella, narrates the stories, and through him we learn,
as if for the first time, what it means to remake a
life in a new country and language. Like Philip Roth,
and Isaac Babel before him, David Bezmozgis is
fascinated with the varieties of ethical
responsibilities demanded by Jewish family and
culture, and the limitless ways of transgressing them.
Bezmozgis makes his characters, and the state of
marginality itself, uniquely his. This hysterical,
merciless yet open-hearted excavation of a Jewish
family in the process of assimilating gives his
literary predecessors a run for their money.
— Daniel Schifrin
Nothing Lost
A Novel
John Gregory Dunne
Alfred A. Knopf: 338 pp., $24.95
John Gregory Dunne, who died last December, was the
most modern of American novelists — that is, he was as
much a reporter as a fabulist. This gave his fiction
the weight and gravity of truth. His great subjects
were American institutions and enterprises: the
courts, prisons, the media, the Catholic Church and
Hollywood. “Nothing Lost,” his final novel, is a
sprawling story of murder, corruption and mistakes.
This book is often gripping and cuts deep. In time, I
think — with “Playland” and its predecessor, “The Red
White and Blue,” in which Jack Broderick is introduced
— “Nothing Lost” will come to be seen as part three of
Dunne’s American trilogy. America was his great
subject, and he pursued it, depicting it, trying to
contain it, allowing himself to be dazzled (though
ever surprised) by its malicious heart. He reveled in
chicanery and human folly; it gave him his voice. John
Gregory Dunne was our great connoisseur of venality.
— David Freeman
The Persistence of
Memory
A Novel
Tony Eprile
W.W. Norton: 300 pp., $24.95
Charged with a shining imagination, “The Persistence
of Memory” is reflective of everything it meets up
with, at once capacious and finely honed. Think
Laurence Sterne meets Proust meets the antic,
dissembling spirit of Stanley Elkin. It’s part
bricolage, part lyric paean to the passage of
childhood, part bitter yet nonmoralistic indictment of
a country — South Africa — steeped in horror and
exploitation yet also a country like any other, with
suburbs where wealthy housewives trade recipes for
lamb curry with their black housekeepers. This is an
unforgettable book.
— Daphne Merkin
The Plot Against America
A Novel
Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin: 392 pp., $26
“The Plot Against America” may join Sinclair Lewis’
1935 “It Can’t Happen Here” and Philip K. Dick’s “The
Man in the High Castle,” a 1962 novel set in an
America defeated in World War II (the big holiday is
Capitulation Day) and partitioned between Japan and
Germany. Describing the rise to power of Charles
Lindbergh, it may be plumbed in years to come as a
cautionary tale about the fragility of the democratic
spirit in America or as a metaphorical rendering of
the United States and its president today.
“The Plot Against America” is written with the sense
that at any moment the lives of a small boy, his
family and his country can spin out of control, that
every assumption underlying the orderly progress of
ordinary life may be contradicted, countermanded and
reversed. It leaves you breathless, right up to the
point when the cavalry comes riding over the hill and
the great train of American history is switched back
onto the right track, and we emerge from the book as
if nothing had happened at all. Effortlessly, it
seems, Philip Roth has led us to suspend disbelief;
then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief
and finally removes it. The result is that the present
seems already in the past. Anything can happen; it is
happening now.
— Greil Marcus
Pushkin and the Queen of Spades
A Novel
Alice Randall
Houghton Mifflin: 282 pp., $24
The novels of Alice Randall are deliberate
reinterpretations of classics refracted through a
Negro-centric lens. Her first novel, “The Wind Done
Gone,” was a strident rebuttal to “Gone With the Wind”
told from the point of view of Tara’s former slaves,
who, in contrast to Margaret Mitchell’s simple-minded
“darkies,” outwit their weak white masters at every
turn. “The Wind Done Gone” is a little ditty compared
with “Pushkin and the Queen of Spades,” Randall’s
operatic, far more audacious and accomplished second
novel. In the guise of a mother’s rant against her
son’s choice of bride, her new novel is an impassioned
aria on the ferocity and consummate importance of
parental love. It is also a complex manifesto on why
and how race and roots matter, especially “in the face
of love.” This is a stunningly gutsy, literate and
original novel.
— Heller McAlpin
Soldiers of Salamis
A Novel
Javier Cercas
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Bloomsbury USA: 224 pp., $23.95
It is difficult to give “Soldiers of Salamis” the
serious attention it deserves without making the novel
sound ponderous and unappealing. This is a shame. The
book is funny and gripping and a tear-jerker in the
best sense of the word. I laughed and cried while
reading it, even though I didn’t quite fall in love.
The key to the novel’s charm is that it works on so
many levels. On one level it is the story of a man
without direction who finds meaning in his life; at
the same time it is the history of a curious incident
in the Spanish Civil War; it is also a meditation
about what makes someone a hero, or a decent human
being; finally, it is a story about how and why we
remember the past. It has sold more than 500,000
copies in Spanish and been made into an equally
well-received movie. The novel’s success in France,
Germany and England suggests that it strikes a chord
in any country or individual with ghosts to face.
— Rebecca Pawel
The Stone That the Builder Refused
A Novel
Madison Smartt Bell
Pantheon: 750 pp., $29.95
In any bin marked “historical novels,” one is likely
to find two diametrically different kinds of reading.
The first bulging pile consists of collages of
good-to-middling research and stagy period drama. A
second, much smaller stack glows with unquenchable
life. These are the true time machines, books that
completely transport, that seem not so much to have
sprung from a writer’s imagination as to have taken
possession. It’s here one would find, say, Robert
Graves’ “I, Claudius,” Gore Vidal’s “Burr” or Yukio
Mishima’s “Spring Snow.” Now the stack is a little
taller with the addition of the final volume of
Madison Smartt Bell’s sweeping trilogy of the life of
Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of
the only slave colony to throw off its own shackles.
The great beauty of this work is its language, the
authoritative formal lilt of English and French, the
weaving in of Creole as spoken then. Just as
characters in “The Stone” are possessed by the lwa —
spirits who guide souls — so too has Bell opened to
the spirits of his characters, imagined and real.
— Kai Maristed
Sweet Land Stories
E.L. Doctorow
Random House: 150 pp., $22.95
In this age of skepticism, when a writer uses the word
“sweet” in a title, our irony detector shifts to high
alert. We know not to expect saccharine
sentimentality. A wistful aura of disappointment
pervades Doris Lessing’s “The Sweetest Dream,” Russell
Banks’ “The Sweet Hereafter,” Reginald Gibbons’
“Sweetbitter” and Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of
Youth.” What is sweet in the land of the free and the
home of the brave for the misfits in E.L. Doctorow’s
new book, “Sweet Land Stories,” is mainly the freedom
to nurture their personal delusions. In the tradition
of the best American fiction, “Sweet Land Stories”
prods the beached whale of the American dream in order
to examine its underbelly. Less complex and tangled
than his recent novels, these are deceptively simple
but subtle morality tales that showcase Doctorow’s
deftness as a storyteller.
— Heller McAlpin
True North
A Novel
Jim Harrison
Grove Press: 390 pp., $24
Jim Harrison may well have started out to write a book
about greed, sex and religion, but what he has given
us is a story about love and forgiveness and the
trials they entail. For all the hype about this
writer’s machismo, Harrison consistently commands our
attention for his humanity and tenderness. That he can
create such tension in the process — a tension not
released until the last page — and in the end forge
such violence shows his skill as a storyteller and
makes “True North” a great achievement. When the book
was still a work in progress, Harrison described the
plot as a “tight little knot” combining greed, sex and
religion. The task of untying that knot has fallen to
the novel’s narrator, scion of a family of timber
barons.
Is the past ever really past? In “True North” this
question is played for all it’s worth. Here lies the
great paradox of American life: In a country created
on the premise of escape and reinvention, there is no
real freedom, and the dreams of one generation are
often a curse for the next. Such is the peril of being
an American: The more we understand the past, the more
we are haunted by what can never be. Our lives are
gripped by forces we only dimly understand. The real
effort, Harrison implies, is to act in spite of those
forces, correct for deviance and find our own true
north.
— Thomas Curwen
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