PLUS: The year in books By Dwight Garner Hands were wrung, insults were flung and the future of publishing was fretted over in what turned out to be a grand year for books, after all T A B L E+T A L K Wishing you could get your $25 and 6 hours back? Join the Table Talk discussion on the worst or most overrated new books of 1997. R E V I E W S For Shame: The Loss of Common Decency in American Culture An inquiry into "the loss of common decency in American culture," from an author known for his critique of advertising (12/24/97) R E C E N T L Y Were the '60s a fraud? By Gary Kamiya (12/22/97) Save these books! By Dwight Garner (12/04/97) The art of life By Jay Parini (11/19/97) The Gospel according to Paul By Mark Hertsgaard (11/12/97) The Salon interview: Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Books feature archive As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir The Mansion on the Hill The Alamo Hand to Mouth Dewey Defeats Truman Resentment Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities The Royals Underworld The Confession of O. J. Simpson: A Work of Fiction Hapworth 16, 1924 The Kiss Tetherballs of Bougainville Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life The Day After Roswell The Other Woman: My Life With O. J. Simpson My Brother Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age All Over but the Shoutin'		- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY DWIGHT GARNER | It has to be said: 1997 was a good year to be a constant reader. Even if you consciously avoided the big books that made the most cultural noise (Don DeLillo's "Underworld," Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon," etc.), there were literally dozens of smaller and more idiosyncratic titles that were well worth searching out. We'll pay tribute to the best of them next month in our second-annual Salon Book Awards, and you can let us know which books you liked best in our Reader's Choice poll. Before we start handing out laurels, however, we'd like to stop for a moment to talk about the books that, in our estimation, weren't quite as successful. George Orwell surely got it right about book criticism when he said that most reviewers tend to be overly generous. "It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising most of them," he wrote. "Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are." In the spirit of Orwell's observation, we've asked a handful of our editors and regular critics to tell us about the books that most frustrated them this year -- the ones they most wanted to (and sometimes did) fling across the room. We asked them to split their answers into two categories: Worst Book of the Year and Most Overrated. Without further ado, here are their responses: Sarah Vowell WORST: I'll warn against the most evil book of 1997 -- Spaulding Gray's fuck-morality-let's-ski memoir "It's a Slippery Slope" -- and advise you to avoid the dumbest book of 1997 (the never-ending drip of Anne Rice's "Violin"), but there's one endearingly awful tome that I actually recommend: Chet Baker's "As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir" (St. Martin's). From its first banal sentence ("Fort Lewis, Washington, seemed especially gray and cold during the winter of 1946-47, at least to me") to its last (including the phrase "we were so stoned and so sleepy"), it never comes close to the blue velvet of Baker's singing voice or the sheer breathiness of his trumpet playing. But if you care about that voice or that trumpet, if you can't get through certain Saturday afternoons without listening to Baker do "It's Always You," you might find a little redemption in this curiously bland laundry list of gigs and drugs and drugs again. Despite the cool sadness of his songs, fans will be glad to learn the genius junkie seemed to find contentment. He writes, "I enjoyed heroin very much." MOST OVERRATED: Here's what we know: There isn't one way to do things. Because this is America, if you are a performer, an artist, a musician -- an anything really -- you can choose your path. If you're good, and you feel like sharing what you do with a lot of people and making some money doing it, you're allowed. If you feel like not compromising and playing in your garage without pay, go ahead. If you choose the happy medium of making and distributing records yourself, that's fine, too. None of this has anything to do with quality and everything to do with the free country/free market crap shoot. I say all of this in response to Fred Goodman's "The Mansion on the Hill" (Times Books), probably the most reviewed, talked-about pop music history of the year. Its shocking revelations: Music is -- gasp -- a business, Bruce Springsteen sometimes listens to his manager, Bob Dylan cares about making money and David Geffen is super-duper ambitious. Yeah, and ...? - - - > Salon's review of "As Though I Had Wings" - - - > Salon's review of "The Mansion on the Hill" Dwight Garner WORST: Pound for pound and sentence for sentence, the least felicitous book I read in its entirety this year was, no question about it, Michael Lind's epic poem, "The Alamo" (Houghton Mifflin). But because the galloping absurdity of Lind's epic is also chronicled by another writer in this round-up, I'd like to mention my runner-up: Paul Auster's memoir "Hand to Mouth" (Holt). I admire Auster's best work, and that work includes a remarkable memoir about his father called "The Invention of Solitude." But "Hand to Mouth," an account of Auster's days as a struggling writer, seems to me the most narcissistic and self-congratulatory prose I've read recently from a major writer. When you add to this that "Hand to Mouth" is padded out with sorry examples of Auster's juvenilia -- a card game, a play, a pseudonymous mystery novel -- you've got a book that makes you want to put a hand to your eyes. MOST OVERRATED: Thomas Mallon is one of the most gifted critics and nonfiction writers alive, and the abundant praise for his 1994 novel "Henry and Clara" ("Amazing ... one of the most interesting American novelists at work," John Updike wrote in the New Yorker) made me eager to pick up his new novel, "Dewey Defeats Truman" (Pantheon). The book is set during the 1948 presidential election in Thomas E. Dewey's Michigan hometown, but the book isn't really about politics. Instead it's a squeaky-clean and surprisingly facile love story -- the tale of a young woman forced to choose between two suitors, a union organizer and a wealthy young lawyer. "Dewey Defeats Truman" lacks grit and real feeling; it's cloying in a way that Mallon's nonfiction never is. This novel has made several "Best of the Year" lists (including Publisher's Weekly's), which is why I feel compelled to add a dissenting opinion. - - - > Salon's review of "Hand to Mouth" - - - > Salon's review of "Dewey Defeats Truman" Charles Taylor WORST: There's a strain of consciously transgressive fiction that works so hard to shock that rejecting it can make you feel less prudish than accepting it would. Admitting that you're shaken up by a pretentious stinker like Gary Indiana's "Resentment" (Doubleday) means admitting that you're willing to be a con man's mark. When you read a scene where one guy buggers another with a Snickers bar and then eats it, you've got two choices: You can be disturbed, or you can shrug and figure sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don't. "Resentment," Indiana's take on the Menendez trial, combines Joan Didion's mandarin portentousness, the snide superiority and big apocalyptic finish of that alleged master Nathaniel West and the guess-who roman à clef approach of Harold Robbins and Mario Puzo. Indiana sets out to make his book chic and depraved, the perfect accouterment for a trip to Canyon Ranch. He ambles from one tired theme to the next -- L.A. as the mecca of the rootless, disaffected and psychotic; the unimaginably perverse private lives of public figures; the lack of distinction between journalism and scandal mongering; the nexus between criminals and celebrities -- and even he can't hide his been-there-done-that boredom over it all. "Resentment" is the worst book I finished reading this year and the most perfectly named, its title being exactly what I felt for the time I wasted on it. MOST OVERRATED: And the year's most overrated book? Anything praised by Michiko Kakutani. Charles Taylor regularly reviews movies for Salon. N E X T+P A G E+| Paula Barbieri's heaving breasts and florid prose