Best of '90: Books

Fiction

The Burden of Proof by Scott Turow. The blockbuster novel of the year is also one of the better, more intelligent reads. As he did in Presumed Innocent (1987), the author-lawyer hurls the human impulse to make trouble straight at the bloodless statutes designed to keep the peace. The impact is shattering, and the echoes remain long after the explosion is over.

Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro. This collection of 10 shimmering stories should put to rest, at least for a while, the old canard that nothing interesting ever happens in Canada. The author, who lives near Lake Huron, writes about the lives, times and loves of her countrymen and -women with grace, precision and memorable generosity.

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The last months and days of Simon Bolivar, the brilliant and thwarted liberator of South America, are imaginatively reconstructed by the acknowledged master of magic realism. As the general flees from his progressive illness and ungrateful people, he trails, in his turbulent wake, a hyperactive tale of grandeur and disillusionment.

My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer. For nearly 25 years, those who have wanted to burrow beneath the headlines from South Africa have consulted the fiction of Nadine Gordimer. Her 10th novel, which deals with a "colored" schoolteacher caught up in his country's racial strife, offers another inside view of people who are trapped and defined by the fatal abstractions of black and white.

Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman. This fiction revolves around a fact: the May 1985 fire bombing (ordered by a black mayor) of a Philadelphia house occupied by a black organization called Move. But that is only the starting point for a prolonged, dramatic monologue on racism in the U.S. and the possibility that the birth of the nation was accompanied by a genetic disorder.

Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt. Two contemporary British scholars, one male, one female, try to collect evidence about a presumed love affair between two Victorian poets, one male, one female. Antonia Byatt, who until recently has been known chiefly as Margaret Drabble's older sister, comes into her own as a novelist (and romancer) of dazzling inventiveness.

The Quincunx by Charles Palliser. Roughly half a million words long, this extravagant narrative is a faithful re-creation of the 19th century British novel -- lots of them, including Bleak House, Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. Miraculously, this bald-faced imitation works wonders. The author makes the distant world of Victorian fiction, with its careful plotting and moral punctiliousness, as gripping as tomorrow's whodunit.

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. Rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated; Harold C. ("Rabbit") Angstrom is in awful shape at the end of this novel, the victim of piggy habits and a massive coronary, but Updike has left himself free to have a second opinion. If Rabbit really is finished, in this fourth book, then so too is a luminous, encyclopedic saga of postwar America.