FICTION
1. In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien (Houghton Mifflin). A boyish politician, spooked by an election defeat and by undead memories of Vietnam, retreats to a Minnesota lake to sort things out. He and his wife, who has spooks of her own, slip separately through the trapdoors of the mind into the subterranean world where morality, evil and reality itself are shifting phantoms. O'Brien, who served in Vietnam and in 1979 won the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato, once more displays his enormous talent.
2. The Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike (Knopf). Again, elder writesman Updike proves his durability by turning out yet another splendid collection of elegant short stories about -- no, no, stay with him -- Wasp geezers who golf. Now and then, unblocked metaphors rise up shrieking: one duffer is resigned "to a golfing mediocrity that would poke its way down the sloping dogleg of decrepitude to the level green of death." Fore? Sure, but Lord, how that senior citizen can write!
3. The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Here's a marvelously operatic novel, roiling with outrageous men and women and with jealousy, revenge, gunfire, deadly sea swells and lust in a lighthouse, all set in the tiny Newfoundland community of Witless Bay (one store, one restaurant, a sawmill and a drydock) just after the turn of the century. The author writes well against this florid grain, producing extravagant melodrama in language that is strict, laconic and evocative.
4. The Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow (Random House). This Poe-esque tale of murky doings in 1871 Manhattan offers the surreptitious exhumation of a corpse / while, sure enough, fog swirls in the phosphorescent light of early dawn. What it can't supply, for all the author's huffing and puffing, is social significance. But with a ghostly white stagecoach whose passengers are supposedly deceased rich men, significance (which closes on Saturday night anyway) shouldn't be an issue.
5. Open Secrets by Alice Munro (Knopf). Once more the Canadian writer supplies rich, daring and satisfying short stories, all rooted in rural Ontario, most of them about women balanced uneasily between a conventional past and a present that tips them in new and strange directions. The constants in Munro's stories are remorseless time, blind fate and the author's wry sense of the bizarre hidden in the ordinary.
...And The Worst
The Fermata by Nicholson Baker (Random House). The author, whose specialty is upwardly pretentious soft porn, is puffed as a writer of something like satire, with something like a point of view. Baloney, as proved by this latest aid to heavy breathing: the smarmy tale of a fellow who learns how to stop the universe momentarily and uses the trick to undress women, then masturbate.
NONFICTION