THE BEST BOOKS OF 1996

By CONTRIBUTORS GINIA BELLAFANTE, RICHARD CORLISS, CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY, PAUL GRAY, BELINDA LUSCOMBE, JOSHUA QUITTNER, RICHARD SCHICKEL, MICHAEL WALSH, STEVE WULF, RICHARD ZOGLIN

FICTION AND POETRY

1 THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH (Pantheon). Salman Rushdie's first novel since The Satanic Verses exuberantly details the protagonist's absurd fall from the grace of a wealthy Indian childhood into the hands of a madman who plans to kill him once the story ends--an interesting motif for this particular author. But the hero survives, and Rushdie's bountiful comic narrative triumphs.

2 Infinite Jest (Little, Brown). The year's longest good novel, at 1,079 pages, is by turns enthralling and exasperating, with the emphasis on the former. David Foster Wallace brilliantly extrapolates cultural and commercial trends into a nightmarishly funny near future, where years are named after products. One of the many subplots involves a movie, Infinite Jest, that can literally make its viewers die laughing. Readers, beware.

3 The Tailor of Panama (Knopf). John le Carre offers a typically stylish and subtle turn on the espionage game. Nothing is actually going on in Panama that demands being spied upon, but that doesn't stop a couple of itchy agents in British intelligence. In Panama City they blackmail a well-connected tailor who obediently weaves a dire plot against British interests out of whole cloth. As with any good fiction, imagined events lead to real repercussions.

4 Ants on the Melon (Random House). Virginia Hamilton Adair's first book of poetry is one of the year's imaginative peaks. The 87 poems by this 83-year-old poet are short--the longest runs to 52 lines--and as richly terse as haiku. But the many themes addressed in this collection--life and love and loss--are clear and capacious, a distillation of life into a perfect ordering of words.

5 The Odyssey (Viking). In thrilling fashion, Robert Fagles' verse translation retells an epic tale 2,700 years old that some would argue is the mother of all novels. In recounting Odysseus' long journey home from the Trojan War, Fagles finds a contemporary English style that beckons to the ear as well as the eye. Rewardingly for an age so often rendered in rap and heavy metal, he makes Homer sing to us.

NONFICTION

1 ANGELA'S ASHES (Scribner). When it comes to sad tales of childhood hardships, "nothing can compare with the Irish version." So writes Frank McCourt, a retired New York City public school teacher, and then proceeds to prove his point. His memoir of growing up poor in the dank slums of Limerick radiates misery, humor and the cheerful humanity that got him through.

2 Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf). In the year's most talked about book, Harvard historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argues that the Holocaust should be blamed not just on the Nazi faithful but also on ordinary Germans. His evidence of widespread cruelty toward Jews by rank-and-file German soldiers seems irrefutable; his explanation for it has produced brisk debate on the source of human inhumanity.

3 Red China Blues (Anchor Books). Jan Wong, the privileged daughter of Chinese-Canadian parents in Montreal, became a true-believing Maoist and decided in 1972 to return to the land of her ancestors. The journey was bumpy and led to disillusionment--and also to this lively and shrewd reminiscence. Wong still loves China, but she can laugh at it and her youthful enthusiasms.

4 A Life of Picasso: 1907-1917 (Random House). In the second volume of his biography, John Richardson applies his skills as storyteller and art historian to a prodigious decade in Picasso's life. At the beginning a still struggling Spanish artist in Paris, he was by the end truly Picasso, a co-founder of Cubism and perhaps modern art's paradigmatic figure. Richardson presents a behind-the-scenes look at an apotheosis.

5 My Dark Places (Knopf). James Ellroy's mother was murdered in 1958, when her only child was 10. The crime was never solved, and the son affected to be glad he was no longer under her strict spell. But now that he has grown famous as a writer of crime fiction--by no coincidence--he has decided to re-open the case and his own wounds. Ellroy's search for his mother's killer transcends the personal; it is a gripping meditation on the men who kill and the women who die at their hands.