TIME EUROPE
December 18, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 25
The Best of Books
Historians may look back on this year as the thin edge of the e-publishing wedge, the moment when books made of paper and ink began sliding into digital obsolescence. But those not yet ready for the brave new reading world can mark 2000 by the extraordinary output of new fiction from big-name veteran authors, all producing energetic work at age 60 or older: Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Edna O'Brien, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, John Updike. The year also brought posthumous books by Joseph Heller and Mario Puzo. The millennium has so far been generous to readers. In with the new! In with the old!
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Fiction
1. The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood's novel is part family saga, part social history, part suspense tale and altogether captivating. As its elderly narrator, Iris Chase, looks back on her life — and some mysterious deaths — she evokes not only a tangled past but a luminous fictional realm.
2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon's serious but never somber tribute to the golden age of American comic books leaps 600 pages in a single bound. The title characters create an imaginary pulp icon while they live through a vivid era of real-life melodramas from the 1930s to the '50s.
3. Ravelstein
Much ink was spilled wondering how much Saul Bellow's novel told of the real life of his deceased friend Allan Bloom. Such a waste of energy. What matters is that the author, 85, produces another brainy, complex and cantankerous hero to add to his gallery of memorable fictional beings.
4. Beowulf
The Anglo-Saxon epic, the bane of English majors, looks brand-new and thrilling in a verse translation by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. The tale may still strike readers as bloodthirsty, but Heaney's language evokes Beowulf's tragic stature, his helplessness to avoid — and his bravery while facing — the dictates of his fate.
5. White Teeth
Zadie Smith's miraculous first novel takes place in a tumultuously multicultural London where unlikely friendships and even more unlikely romances rule. Much of the action is comic, but even at their most foolish, Smith's characters are both fascinating and admirable.
Non-Fiction
1. Nothing Like It in the World
Veteran historian Stephen Ambrose writes at full throttle about the construction of the U.S. transcontinental railroad during the 1860s. This magnificent tale of high finance, low finagling and workers hacking through 3,200 km is magnificently told.
2. Robert Kennedy
Evan Thomas calls his superb biography "the story of an unpromising boy who died as he was becoming a great man." Bobby's well-documented life and legend are re-examined here with moral clarity, psychological subtlety and a bracing dramatic pace.
3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers tricks out his riveting memoir with an ironic title and plenty of literary gamesmanship, but the story he tells is indeed heartbreaking: the death of his parents and his subsequent guard-ianship of his younger brother. His book shows how laughter is sometimes the only medicine.
4. Experience
Taking a breather from fiction, Martin Amis writes movingly about life with his famous father Kingsley, who died in 1995. The book hums with the same antic prose and looping comic riffs that characterize Martin's novels, along with a surprising admixture of tenderness.
5. In the Heart of the Sea
In 1820 the Nantucket ship Essex was rammed and sunk in the South Seas by an angry whale. This event, which inspired Moby Dick, is thrillingly retold by Nathaniel Philbrick.
This edition's table of contents
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