Alias Grace By Margaret Atwood Nan A. Talese/Doubleday Cold Mountain By Charles Frazier Atlantic Monthly Press Because They Wanted To By Mary Gaitskill Simon & Schuster Mason & Dixon By Thomas Pynchon Henry Holt The Reader By Bernhard Schlink Pantheon - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - How Proust Can Change Your Life By Alain de Botton Pantheon The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman Farrar Straus & Giroux Into Thin Air By Jon Krakauer Villard Echoes of a Native Land By Serge Schmemann Knopf Close to the Machine By Ellen Ullman City Lights Books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Reader's choice awards Your best books of 1997 - - - - - - - - - - - Sneak Peeks Salon's daily book review Win a free Salon mousepad. Sign up for our newsletter. Join the Books discussion in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - - SALON home page

The Salon Book Awards PAGE 2 OF 3 | F I C T I O N | - - - - - - - - - - - - ALIAS GRACE By Margaret Atwood Nan A. Talese/Doubleday Long fascinated by Grace Marks, a 16-year-old Torontonian maid convicted of conspiring to murder her employer in 1843 and confined to a madhouse until a group of social reformers obtained her release, Margaret Atwood makes this notorious life the occasion for a novel about servants and masters, men and women, crime and punishment. A proto-psychologist seeks out the imprisoned Grace hoping to excavate her secrets and establish, once and for all, her guilt or innocence, but Atwood herself is just as interested in the texture of daily life in the 19th century; this is a book about blood and laundry. Her tremendous intelligence -- never contaminated by an iota of sentimentality or cant -- and poet's eye (she describes a Victorian interior in which "all possible surfaces are upholstered; the colours are those of the inside of the body") make "Alias Grace" an acerbic delight, but as always it's Atwood's capacity to imagine herself into the minds of characters like the hapless Dr. Simon Jordan that make this book a marvel. "Alias Grace": EXCERPT__|__ ORDER A COPY__|__SNEAK PEEKS REVIEW - - - - - - - - - - - - COLD MOUNTAIN By Charles Frazier Grove/Atlantic In Charles Frazier's majestic first novel, Inman, a wounded Confederate Army deserter (based on an ancestor of Frazier's), makes his way, on foot, to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Back at Cold Mountain, his prewar sweetheart, Ada, a city-bred woman, learns how to run her farm. Inman and Ada each face trials that can only be surmounted step by step, Inman traveling across a treacherous and violent landscape, and Ada learning, in a world where paper money has lost its value, how to make the necessities of everyday life -- butter, cloth, medicine -- from scratch. The old "lifeways" Frazier captures had their own slow rhythm, the rhythm of a cow grazed and milked, of butter churned and salted, of a journey made one footstep at a time. In the course of "Cold Mountain," Inman and Ada salvage their lifeway little by little, but, as Frazier laments, for us that possibility is now long lost. Only very rarely, as in a miraculous book like "Cold Mountain," can we rediscover a sense of life lived in intimacy with the earth. "Cold Mountain": EXCERPT__|__ORDER A COPY__|__SNEAK PEEKS REVIEW - - - - - - - - - - - - BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO By Mary Gaitskill Simon & Schuster, 254 pages. Mary Gaitskill's short fiction, like all of her work, is devastating in its honesty and emotional accuracy. "Because They Wanted To" is her most fully realized work to date; 13 keenly-observed stories about disillusionment and revenge, lust and love, often about characters living on society's margins. Gaitskill's sentences sing because they carry no extra baggage: "Valerie had been celibate for two years when she met Michael," begins a story called "The Blanket," "and sex with Michael was like a solid left hook; she reeled and cartoon stars burst about her head." Other stories probe such topics as a father's public betrayal by his daughter; a writer seeking retribution from a lover who spurned him; and a blanked-out young girl who abandons the children she is hired to baby-sit. Gaitskill refuses to sentimentalize anything in her fiction, most notably her characters. She is as suspicious of middle-class life as any other kind: A pharmacist and his wife remind one character of "two colored building blocks made to illustrate solidity, squareness, and rectangularity for children, the kind of blocks that, when picked up, turn out to be practically weightless and not solid at all." Gaitskill's stories, on the other hand, are more solid (and certainly less square) than you'd ever dream possible. "Because They Wanted To": EXCERPT__|__ORDER A COPY__|__SNEAK PEEKS REVIEW - - - - - - - - - - - - MASON & DIXON By Thomas Pynchon Holt The year is 1761 and two men, a mournful astronomer and a jolly surveyor, meet in London to commence a long, adventurous, quarrelsome and ultimately deeply affectionate partnership. They sail to South Africa to chart the Transit of Venus and observe humanity's shameful propensity to divide itself by race. Then it's on to America, where the friends are hired to slice the colonies neatly, but fatefully, in half with the latitudinal line ("between their Slave-Keepers and their Wage-Payers") that still bears their name. Along the way, they meet scheming Jesuits, cabalists, the Founding Fathers, a homesick electric eel, a fugitive French chef, a vengeful mechanical duck and a fanatical feng shui master, among others. Yes, this is a hefty book, but it's also Pynchon's finest, for in it the brilliant, eccentric novelist of the mind enjoys a late, sweet blossoming of the heart. "Mason & Dixon": EXCERPT__|__ORDER A COPY__|__SALON REVIEW - - - - - - - - - - - - THE READER By Bernhard Schlink Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway Pantheon Bernhard Schlink's slim novel "The Reader" has become an international sensation since it was first published in Germany in 1995 (it has now been translated into 14 languages), and it's not difficult to see why. Told in spare, lucid, mesmerizing prose, Schlink's tale -- about a 15-year-old boy's erotic awakening at the hands of a much older woman -- is as gripping as the best, darkest kind of fairy tale. As "The Reader" unfolds, and the older woman's wartime background becomes clear, what began as a novel about a clandestine affair becomes a searching tale about morality, love and mercy in Germany before and after World War II. "Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?" the young boy asks. It's the question of his generation, and this book explores the potential answers with grace and courage. "The Reader": EXCERPT__|__ORDER A COPY - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T+P A G E+| Fiction Awards | Nonfiction Awards - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -