FICTION
1 AMERICAN TABLOID by James Ellroy (Knopf). This big, brazenly entertaining novel begins in 1958 and ends seconds before the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In between, James Ellroy--a crime-noir cult writer making his mainstream debut--propels two rogue FBI agents and a former Los Angeles County deputy sheriff through a fictionalized, nightmarish tour of five tumultuous years in U.S. history. Life is seldom horrifying and hilarious at the same moment. On nearly all its 576 pages, American Tabloid manages to be both.
2 SABBATH'S THEATER by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin) explores the beginnings of geezerhood (Roth's resolutely obnoxious hero, Mickey Sabbath, is a randy 64) with some of the same comic sexual energy that set readers goggling in Portnoy's Complaint. Sabbath is an ex-puppeteer whose present occupation is perfecting his scabrous personality. As he searches his disorderly past for meaning, largely without success, he is an equal-opportunity boor, richly offensive to women, men, Jews and Gentiles. Yet the result is a brilliantly written character, rampaging through a novel about facing death in a lonely old age.
3 GALATEA 2.2 by Richard Powers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The Galatea in this reworking of the myth is not a statue but an enormously complicated network of computer circuitry that, on a bet, is being taught to think. The Pygmalions--there are a couple of them--are an acerbic cyber-scientist and a lovelorn novelist named (hmm?) Richard Powers. A scheme that might seem mechanical and too clever works out instead to be humane and thoughtful and, when the computer is troubled by 3 a.m. brooding ("What race am I? What races hate me?"), surprisingly moving.
4 LADDER OF YEARS by Anne Tyler (Knopf). Here's an almost perfect summer-weight, drip-dry, easy-care novel. Delia Grinstead is terminally comfortable, or nearly so, in her life as a 40-year-old wife and mother. The trouble is she has become all but invisible, even to herself. So, one day, on the faintest of whims, she wanders away from the family beach house and lights out for the territories. Such fantasies have grabbed all of us now and then, and Tyler writes her runaway's adventures not just as stylish comedy but as intriguing possibility.
5 OUR GAME by John le Carre (Knopf). Despite much prophesying to that effect, the end of the cold war did not mean the end of the moral and political murk in which spying and spy thrillers flourish. Le Carre continues to be the master of this shadowy genre, and he is near the top of his form in his latest novel. His hero is a middle-age intelligence operative put to pasture by bosses who decide (wrongly, as it turns out) that his skills and mind-set are obsolete. A bittersweet love affair winds through a landscape of modern menace, whose vectors, by now quite familiar, are ethnic and religious mania.
NONFICTION