PLUS: The worst books of 1997 By Dwight Garner Our critics pick the worst, and the most overrrated, titles of 1997 T A B L E+T A L K Discuss 1997's best books and its worst books in Table Talk. 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		T H E_Y E A R_I N books 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. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY DWIGHT GARNER James Dickey died this year. So did Allen Ginsberg, who got off the best line about "Deliverance," Dickey's lone bestseller ("What James Dickey doesn't realize," Ginsberg mused, "is that being fucked in the ass isn't the worst thing that can happen to you in American life"). Isaiah Berlin died. So did Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Michael Dorris, J. Anthony Lukas, James Michener, V.S. Pritchett and Murray Kempton. Call me morbid, but it seems appropriate to commence this piece with a list of 1997's illustrious dead -- a roll call of literary souls worth mourning. (In death, even Michener took on Texas-sized stature when the extent of his philanthropy was revealed.) Why? Because if on one level 1997 was the best year in recent memory to be an alert, yea-saying reader -- for an abundance of reasons I'll be getting to -- it was also a year in which there were some seismic, queasy-making shifts in the lit world. Some of the old niceties began slipping away (some of them deservedly), a postwar generation of writers started to stumble, and a cold and crackling new economic order swept in under the doorjamb. Civility, for sure, suffered a few head wounds in 1997. At a panel discussion at the New York Public Library in October, Barnes & Noble CEO Leonard Riggio gave novelist Cynthia Ozick a start when he outed her sales figures, revealing that his continent-girdling chain had sold but a few hundred copies of her Holocaust masterpiece "The Shawl." In response, Ozick politely murmured something about how she'd like to sell more books -- but so would Stephen King. The evening's topic: "Book Publishing: Dead or Alive?" People left wondering. Revenge had a bullish year. New novels from such celebrated old goats as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were accompanied by frisky tell-all memoirs dictated by aggrieved former lovers. (Behind every great male novelist, it sometimes seemed, there was an extremely pissed-off woman.) Retaliation came into its own as a genre, and these novelists suffered some very '90s-style indignities. The high-low point in Adele Mailer's "The Last Party" -- which is arguably better-written, and surely less pretentious, than Mailer's own "The Gospel According to the Son" -- may be when young Norman catches Adele in bed with another man (she was avenging his own cheating ways), strides into the room and stubs out a lit cigarette into the man's naked buttocks. The low-low point is, of course, when Mailer stabs her. In "Handsome Is," a memoir from Bellow's former literary agent, Harriet Wasserman, we hear not only about the great writer's abiding narcissism, but Wasserman also mentions that she would rather lick out a Times Square toilet bowl than say hello to Bellow's new agent, Andrew Wylie. And in Claire Bloom's "Leaving a Doll's House" (a late 1996 title), we learn about her 18 years with Philip Roth -- including news that, during their divorce proceedings, Roth charged her $150 an hour for having helped her go over her scripts. Not all of the year's aggrieved memoirists charged at writers: Mia Farrow dumped on Woody Allen in her mopey, elegiac "What Falls Away"; Kelly Flinn dumped on the Air Force in "Proud to Be"; and Paula Barbieri unwittingly dumped on herself in "The Other Woman: My Years with O.J." Those Mailer, Bellow and Roth novels were kept company by new books from John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. Readers could be forgiven, in a retro-hellish year, for walking into bookstores and thinking it was 1973 all over again. (Even J.D. Salinger poked his squirrely nostrils out from his hole for a moment, sniffed the wind and apparently decided not to release his story "Hapworth 16, 1924" as a novel. Next year he'll get -- what else? -- depicted in another tell-all memoir, from his former teen lover, Joyce Maynard.) New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has long ridden herd over this flock, caning the beasties who got too randy. Few were surprised when she bestowed her blessings on Roth's relatively soft-focus "American Pastoral" while pounding Updike's sharply lecherous "Toward the End of Time." At times, however, a few of these aging writers seemed to be caning themselves. I read most of these books, and if you forced me into Entertainment Weekly's bullpen I would grade them thusly: Mailer: D; Bellow: B-; Roth: B; Updike: A-; Vonnegut: B-. (The Pynchon I couldn't get through, although unlike Slate's estimable critic, Walter Kirn, that fact did prevent me from reviewing it.) Those tell-all memoirs aside, the book world in 1997 did occasionally feel like a tug-of-war between the sexes. Oprah Winfrey solidified her clout, sending a number of titles (Mary McGarry Morris' "Songs in Ordinary Time," Earnest Gaines' "A Lesson Before Dying," two novels by Kaye Gibbons) soaring onto bestseller lists and onto the counter of your local Starbucks. So pervasive was Oprah's influence that the New York Times published a long, fretful piece about the potential "feminization" of literature. Because so many of Oprah's viewers (and so many fiction buyers) are women, the Times reasoned, publishers might start to skew their lists toward books that are by and about women. Sounds plausible -- until you take into account one of the year's other significant publishing trends, the rise of manly-men-against-the-elements narratives. Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" and Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm" both lingered on bestseller lists for months, and they seemed to provide a cultural antidote to wispy, so-introspective-it-hurts memoirs like Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss" (alternate title: "Hop on Pop"), a book about her long-running adult affair with her father. Harrison's book was published in February, and the reaction to it was loopily fascinating. "The Kiss" prompted dozens of furrowed-brow panels on "The Rise of Memoir," a brutal review by James Wolcott in the New Republic (Wolcott accused Harrison of, among other things, being a lousy mother by not waiting to publish her tome) and prompted Harvard child psychotherapist Robert Coles -- in what must be a first -- to withdraw his jacket blurb for the book. N E X T+P A G E+| Is the memoir trend dead?