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 Contents | December 2001 In This Issue (Contributors) More on books from The Atlantic Monthly. From the archives: "A Quiet Genius" (December 2001) Alice Munro is the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years. Mona Simpson Reviews Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. "France's Downfall" (September 2001) The most comprehensive account of the most sordid period in French history. Eugen Weber reviews France: The Dark Years 1940-1944. "The Country and the City" (September 2001) With her inclusion in The Library of America, the neglected novelist Dawn Powell has finally achieved literary canonization. Our critic assesses the contrasting worlds of Powell's fiction. Philip Hensher on the novels of Dawn Powell. "Bozzy's Task" (September 2001) A dazzling portrait of James Boswell as a literary artist. Miranda Seymour reviews Boswell's Presumptuous Task by Adam Sisman. "A Harrowing Mirror of Loneliness" (July/August 2001) Richard Yates was the supreme chronicler of American solitude. Stephen Amidon reviews The Collected Stories of Richard Yates. "An Omnivorous Curiosity" (June 2001) Anthony Powell, the author of A Dance to the Music of Time, also wrote one of the great literary memoirs of the twentieth century. Christopher Hitchens reviews To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell. "Ordinary People" (May 2001) In her latest novel, as in all her work, Anne Tyler explores un-hip, gentle lives of fortitude and decency. Katharine Whittemore reviews Back When We Were Grownups. From Atlantic Unbound: Interviews: "Mainstream and Meaningful" (October 3, 2001) Jonathan Franzen, the author of The Corrections, discovers that, when it comes to fiction, "serious" doesn't have to mean "marginal" or "boring." Fallows@Large: "The Work of Words" (February 21, 2001) An e-mail exchange with Christopher Hitchens, author of Unacknowledged Legislation and would-be prosecutor of Henry Kissinger. Interviews: "Out of Hiding" (February 1, 2001) A conversation with the author of The Hiding Place, a dark debut novel that casts new light on a province and a people. |
Books & Critics
Books
(Some of) the best books of 2001 Suggestions for getting and giving by Benjamin Schwarz ..... 
ore books for review are sent to our offices in a week than the magazine has space to cover in a year, which means that we're constantly culling. Here are some principles that guide our choices. We are, of course, looking for the great books that deserve our readers' attention. Some might be otherwise neglected—the mesmerizing debut novel that the literati aren't talking about, the dazzling memoir out of print for decades, the obscure work of sociology so bold in its approach that it redefines the way its subject is understood. But we also want to help our readers decide which highly publicized books are worth their time and money. Moreover, we hope to keep readers abreast of significant scholarly debates, even if a book defining one of those debates is clumsily written and, we believe, completely wrong (reading brisk book reviews can be a painless way to understand the arguments in "important" books you'd rather not read). We also want to assess for our readers popular books that have few if any literary or intellectual pretensions, because we believe that such books can illuminate meaningful aspects of the nation's social and cultural life. And we want to tell our readers about sharp, clever books, utterly lacking in gravitas, that we know will delight them on the beach or the bus. (Further, "The Editors' Choice" each month is the one book in that issue that we think is most likely to appeal to our readers.) The following is a list of books, most but not all reviewed in our pages, that we believe are among the best published in 2001. Although we stand by our choices, we've undoubtedly overlooked some extraordinary titles. We offer this selection to help our readers in their holiday book buying. FICTION
The Hiding Placeby Trezza Azzopardi Atlantic Monthly Press, 288 pages, $24.00 In sentences that lilt and caper Azzopardi renders her story of a loss-filled childhood in the gritty Cardiff docklands at once horrifying and lovely. This first novel may well be the best of the year. The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble Harcourt, 369 pages, $25.00 Burrowing under the present and layering her story with metaphor, Drabble explores the persistence of the past. Remarkably, although this clear-eyed novel probes a daughter's despair over her mother's severe depression, its perfectly sustained tone expresses humor without poking fun, and regret without sentimentality. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 568 pages, $26.00 If this novel were half as good as the hype would have it, it would be an extraordinary work. It is both. Overstuffed and at times silly, it is also a funny and deeply affecting portrait of an American family. Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey Henry Holt, 232 pages, $23.00 With precision and discipline Livesey builds a perfectly structured novel about an intense and sometimes inconvenient friendship between the living and the dead. The Island: The Complete Stories by Alistair MacLeod Norton, 320 pages, $25.95 MacLeod's "complete" stories number only sixteen, which is understandable though unfortunate, since nearly every one of them is flawless. In stark and cadenced sentences he depicts the hard people and fierce beauty of Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island and pieces together sad, often violent stories (no writer has better captured the love and brutality with which people treat animals) that are at once wrenching and idyllic, harsh and tender. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro Knopf, 320 pages, $24.00 This collection amply demonstrates that there is no greater living writer than Alice Munro. See the review. Novels 1930-1942 by Dawn Powell The Library of America, 1068 pages, $35.00 Novels 1944-1962 by Dawn Powell The Library of America, 969 pages, $35.00 With the publication of these volumes Powell, who could write novels both of cynical wit and of romantic longing and regret, has finally won literary canonization. Empire Falls by Richard Russo Knopf, 483 pages, $25.95 In this comic novel set in a down-at-heel Maine mill town, Russo is as adept at subtle social delineation as he is at creating his passive, melancholic, yet compelling protagonist. Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler Knopf, 273 pages, $25.00 A moving exploration of the life of a fifty-three-year-old woman who suddenly discovers that "she had turned into the wrong person," Tyler's novel of forbearance is a gentle masterpiece. The Collected Stories of Richard Yates Henry Holt, 494 pages, $28.00 In these tales of loneliness and self-delusion Yates treats his characters with enormous compassion while unsparingly dissecting their weaknesses. His are among the most superb stories of mid-twentieth-century America. NONFICTION
London: The Biographyby Peter Ackroyd Doubleday, 864 pages, $45.00 With panache Ackroyd hopscotches through the centuries in an exuberant, eccentric, complex, and occasionally exasperating portrait of a great, if sometimes sinister, city and its people. The War Against Cliché by Martin Amis Talk/Miramax Books, 512 pages, $35.00 Most of the essays in this huge and admittedly uneven collection relentlessly, eloquently, and with enormous intelligence support Amis's contention that style "is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception." The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 by William J. Bouwsma Yale, 352 pages, $29.95 Bouwsma argues elegantly that the liberation accompanying the Renaissance engendered an intellectual reaction characterized by pessimism, doubt, and anxiety. By placing the intellectual history of the Renaissance in the context of a continuing struggle between freedom and order, Bouwsma fundamentally challenges a progressive interpretation of Western history. Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—The Early Years by Gary Giddins Little, Brown, 728 pages, $30.00 Giddins's lively and perceptive combination of history, biography, and musicology illuminates nothing less than American popular culture in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Alexander Hamilton, Writings The Library of America, 1200 pages, $40.00 For better or worse, Hamilton's vision of America triumphed, and it is simply impossible to understand this country without apprehending his mind. Readers can now do so with this comprehensive, intelligently selected, and accessible collection of the works of the most brilliant and far-seeing of all the Founding Fathers. Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere by Christopher Hitchens Verso, 320 pages, $25.00 A collection of subtle (a word usually, if unfairly, missing from descriptions of its author), generous, and deeply learned essays on an amazing range of literary figures, written with brio and precision. France: The Dark Years by Julian Jackson Oxford, 630 pages, $35.00 In the most complete and careful history to date of occupied France, Jackson unflinchingly explores the complexities and moral ambiguities of his subject. The Danger Tree by David Macfarlane Walker, 320 pages, $13.95 This gripping and elegiac memoir of a Newfoundland family, centering on its experiences in the Great War, makes felt the weight of the past on the present and of great movements in history on the lives of individuals. To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell Chicago, 472 pages, $27.50 Powell's complete memoirs have long been out of print, and this abridgement, published in the United States for the first time, is a window onto his masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time. Among portraits of twentieth-century British literary life this is perhaps the wittiest and most keenly observed—and certainly the finest-written. Boswell's Presumptuous Task by Adam Sisman Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 400 pages, $25.00 A sparkling portrait of a literary artist, and a penetrating assessment of the greatest biography in English. The First World War, Volume I: To Arms by Hew Strachan Oxford, 1180 pages, $45.00 "Definitive" is a much overused word, but this work merits the term. The first of a three-volume history that explores nearly every aspect of the war, from finance to ideology to diplomacy to armaments, it combines depth with staggering breadth, acute analysis with magisterial narrative.
Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; December 2001; (Some of) the best books of 2001; Volume 288, No. 5; 149-150. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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