THE BEST BOOKS OF 1997

FICTION

1 MASON & DIXON (Henry Holt) Thomas Pynchon's vast novel retraces the progress of the men who drew the line between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. For all its Pynchonesque tomfooleries--a talking dog, a four-ton cheese--the tale is somber, elegiac. Mason and Dixon come to realize that their triumph means an end to the wilderness, the imposition of order on "the realm of the Sacred."

2 Underworld (Scribner) Despite its title, Don DeLillo's 11th and most ambitious novel is not about organized crime. DeLillo takes on nothing less ambitious than the buried life of the cold war, the specter of nuclear annihilation as experienced by a large group of vividly rendered characters. The story begins with Bobby Thomson's famous home run in 1951 and moves back and forth over the following four decades, showing how we all got here from there.

3 Cold Mountain (Atlantic Monthly Press) Imagine Odysseus walking through the blue mountains of North Carolina in the ghostly half-light at the end of the Civil War. Charles Frazier's miraculous (and best-selling) first novel is as spare as timeless myth, one man's yearning homeward. Yet its deeply local details, its twiggy smell of roots and solitary eccentrics, evoke the spirit of Thoreau--and the Taoist hermits who once haunted the Cold Mountains of old China.

4 American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin) The title is ironic--a Philip Roth specialty. There is precious little rural peace and harmony in this scorching novel about a prosperous New Jersey couple whose good life is destroyed when their daughter becomes a '60s terrorist. In Roth's earlier novels, parents tended toward the comic and repressive. Not here. The author renders the Job-like suffering of a father and mother over a lost child with characteristic emotional force and verbal energy.

5 The God of Small Things (Random House) Arundhati Roy's bold debut achieves an intensity that will feel familiar to fans of D.H. Lawrence. The author sometimes seems too clever for her novel's good, but her material triumphs. Three small children, a blue Plymouth and the lushness of southern India merge into a gripping story of passion thwarted by prejudice.

NONFICTION

1 INTO THIN AIR (Villard) In May 1996 Jon Krakauer reached the 29,028-ft. summit of Mount Everest. His assignment for Outside magazine would, it seemed, end in triumph. But the day did not. A storm arose that killed 11 other climbers. Krakauer's book dramatically reports this calamity and examines the proliferating, expensive tours that offer novices the top of the world. Some of them live to tell their tales.

2 A People's Tragedy (Viking) In this tale of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution, Cambridge historian Orlando Figes deals vividly with starvation, disease, tribal hatreds, sociopathic bloodlust, religious mania, governmental terrorism and most other sources of human misery. Plus, Figes argues, stupidity ruled the times, quite literally in the stiff presence of Czar Nicholas II. A smarter leader might have led to a better 20th century.

3 Legends of the American Desert (Knopf) Alex Shoumatoff, a New Yorker contributor, spent 25 years researching and writing this book about the U.S. Southwest. The result is a sometimes bewildering but continually fascinating profusion of stories and themes. Shoumatoff writes knowingly and affectionately about indigenous Indians and those who came later. The scenery is spectacular, and there is nothing dry or dusty in this desert.

4 Whittaker Chambers (Random House) Historian Sam Tanenhaus rights an old imbalance in this scrupulous biography. For more than 40 years, most discussions of the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers affair focused on Hiss: innocent, as he claimed, or guilty, as Chambers charged? But of the two, Chambers was by far the more interesting person and tormented soul. Tanenhaus' perceptive illumination of Chambers' life also lights up a dark, troubled period of American history.

5 Citizen Soldiers (Simon & Schuster) Stephen Ambrose, author of Undaunted Courage, last year's best seller about Lewis and Clark, thought there were still some untold stories to tell about World War II in Europe, and he was right. His mixture of narrative and oral histories brings to unforgettable life the G.I.s who slogged through it.