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 Introduction Salon's favorite books of the year - - - - - - - - - - - Sneak Peeks Salon's daily book review sponsored by Borders Books and Music Win a free Salon mousepad. Sign up for our newsletter. Join the Books discussion in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - - P.D. James The Salon Interview (02/26/98) - - - - - - - - - - - SALON home page - - - - - - - - - - -

____| E X C E R P T | ___because they wanted to BY MARY GAITSKILL FICTION SIMON AND SHUSTER 254 PAGES ______=====> "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" He lay in his reclining chair, barely awake enough to feel the dream moving just under his thoughts. It felt like one of those pure, beautiful dreams in which he was young again, and filled with the realization that the friends who had died, or gone away, or decided that they didn't like him anymore, had really been there all along, loving him. A piece of dream flickered, and he made out the lips and cheekbones of a tender woman, smiling as she leaned toward him. The phone rang, and the sound rippled through his pliant wakefulness, into the pending dream. But his wife had turned the answering machine up too loud again, and it attacked him with a garbled, furred roar that turned into the voice of his friend Norm. Resentful at being waked and grateful that for once somebody had called him, he got up to answer. He picked up the phone, and the answering machine screeched at him through the receiver. He cursed as he fooled with it, hating his stiff fingers. Irritably, he exchanged greetings with his friend, and then Norm, his voice oddly weighted, said, "I saw the issue of Self with Kitty in it." He waited for an explanation. None came, so he said, "What? Issue of Self? What's Self?" "Good grief, Stew, I thought for sure you'd of seen it. Now I feel funny." The dream pulsed forward and receded again. "Funny about what?" "My daughter's got a subscription to this magazine, Self. And they printed an article that Kitty wrote about fathers and daughters talking to each other, and she, well, she wrote about you. Laurel showed it to me." "My God." "It's ridiculous that I'm the one to tell you. I just thought --" "It was bad?" "No, she didn't say anything bad. I just didn't understand the whole idea of it. And I wondered what you thought." He got off the phone and walked into the living room, now fully awake. His daughter, Kitty, was living in South Carolina, working in a used-record store and making animal statuettes, which she sold on commission. She had never written anything that he knew of, yet she'd apparently published an article in a national magazine about him. He lifted his arms and put them on the windowsill; The air from the open window cooled his underarms. Outside, the Starlings' tiny dog marched officiously up and down the pavement, looking for someone to bark at. Maybe she had written an article about how wonderful he was, and she was too shy to show him right away. This was doubtful. Kitty was quiet, but she wasn't shy. She was untactful and she could be aggressive. Uncertainty only made her doubly aggressive. He turned the edge of one nostril over with his thumb and nervously stroked his nose hairs with one finger. He knew it was a nasty habit, but it soothed him. When Kitty was a little girl he would do it to make her laugh. "Well," he'd say, "do you think it's time we played with the hairs in our nose?" And she would giggle, holding her hands against her face, eyes sparkling over her knuckles. SALON | Jan. 19, 1998 BACK TO THE SALON BOOK AWARDS INTRODUCTION