The Best & Worst Books

The Best

The Journals of John Cheever
John Cheever
Here, against all odds, is misery extracted from comfortable circumstances, and lyricism and lucidity extracted from misery. These alchemical transactions are what art is all about, but God help the alchemist (and those who have to live with him). The public Cheever —a witty, charming man fond of parties and full of jokes, whose clipped New England accent and elliptical conversation suggested patrician nonchalance — is nowhere to be found here. Instead, we get a suburban man under some mysterious sentence of inner exile, a yearning, thwarted man whose fear of landing in a desolate hotel room prevents him from leaving his family, but who still suffers from a loneliness most of us would require a Gobi or Sahara Desert to experience.

2. Den of Thieves
James B. Stewart
The Best and the Brightest rewritten for the 1980s. Seeing the mighty crawl is one of the many pleasures of watching Stewart, The Wall Street Journal's front-page editor, chronicle the rise and fall of the junk-bond and leveraged-buyout empires. More disquieting is his pungent analysis of how and why much of the financial community was so easily taken for a disastrous joyride.

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale — ''And Here My Troubles Began''
Art Spiegelman
It sounds like a sick joke: a cartoon history of the Holocaust in which the Jews are mice, the Nazis cats, the Poles pigs. And it would indeed be grotesque if Spiegelman hadn't drawn the life of his father, Vladek — a survivor of Auschwitz — with such defiant grace. It's an astonishing portrait of survival through wit and luck.

4. The Kitchen God's Wife
Amy Tan
Tan's stunningly successful first novel, The Joy Luck Club, captivated hundreds of thousands of readers who found in it disconcerting, touching, and funny echoes of themselves and their own mothers or daughters. Tan's second novel begins on the same note as The Joy Luck Club but quickly turns into a richer, darker work that lives up to Tan's proclaimed promise and then some.

5. Inmortality
Milan Kundera
Kundera's newest fiction is a brilliant series of cultural dissections, satirical meditations, tangents, and excursions in which a novel is carefully concealed, sometimes turning up where you least expect it, but too well camouflaged to be shot and stuffed by Hollywood.

6. A Soldier of the Great War
Mark Helprin
Helprin's novel — an Alp among contemporary fiction foothills and molehills — may have its Dostoyevskian defects, but it also has its intense, memorable triumphs in the passages on war, nature, and love. And not least important, the book reminds us that one freedom the 20th century has taken from us is the freedom to ignore politics.

7. Patrimony
Philip Roth
An unsparing, moving account of the last year of life of Roth's father, Herman, who, at the age of 86, woke up one morning with the right half of his face paralyzed. Roth has set himself the task of recovering his father's essential dignity from the paralysis' indignities, and he succeeds because the rude virtue he attributes to Herman Roth is also the virtue of the book: a ''pitilessly realistic determination.''

8. There Are No Children Here
Alex Kotlowitz
A heartbreaking study of how life in the ''promised land'' of the North has turned out for poor black families who migrated from the South. Kotlowitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, recounts just two years in the life of a family in the Henry Horner Homes — one of Chicago's roughest housing projects — and makes the reader feel the effect of the ghetto by showing how it shapes the lives of two young boys.

9. A Life of Picasso, Vol I: 1881-1906
John Richardson
This is the first book in a projected four-volume series that promises to become the most enthralling and unwieldy artist biography ever written. Richardson's greatest accomplishment in this brilliantly illustrated work is to paint the young Picasso into a geographical and cultural landscape. Whatever Picasso's ultimate place in art history — whether he ends up as a beginning or an end — he emerges in Richardson's superb biography as the most engaging artist-rogue since Benvenuto Cellini.

10. A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley
A fine, bitter, suspenseful novel that could as easily be called A Lear of the Plains. Smiley has succeeded in transplanting something of Lear's mythic power to the bleak American prairie.