If authors are fishermen, there are many points in the river to catch a story: when it happens, when it's remembered, when it's told and when it's finished. The first and last require the most restraint, the least artifice and the most faith in the reader and in the power of the story--in other words, grace. The middle two require the most imagination and the most manipulation in terms of plot. Penelope Fitzgerald, who died earlier this year at 83, catches most of her stories when they happen, and she must travel back in time, to 1663 or 1875 for example, to do so. Because her subject is almost always justice, she must keep a firm hand on the pen to tell her stories simply, without moralizing. Her characters are trod upon every which way. They are often children or working-class people treated thoughtlessly and cruelly by upper-class people. As Vermeer does, Fitzgerald invests her characters with a great deal of quiet dignity and inner light, the source of which is unspoken. In many of these stories, getting and keeping a job is the theme. In some, jobs are a means of escape from circumstances of birth; in others, characters transcend meaningless jobs with secret inner lives. In many, there are ghosts, a reminder that ghost stories have less to do with horror than they do with justice. "There is nothing really lasting, nothing that will endure, except the sincere expression of the actual conditions of life," a character derisively quotes a better man than himself. "Conditions in the potato patch, in the hayfield, at the washtub, in the open street!" This is what Fitzgerald captures in her writing, and why she will endure.
The Best Fiction Of 2000
The Best Books of 2000
THE MINERAL PALACE
By Heidi Julavits
Putnam: 400 pp., $23.95
Heidi Julavits' first novel is set in the Dust Bowl, and its perfectly distilled Depression-era mood recalls such iconic, clear-eyed American visions as the photographs of Walker Evans and Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde." The famous criminal duo even make a cameo here, briefly crossing paths with young Bena Jonssen, her husband, Ted, and their baby, Little Ted, as they drive from the staid comfort of Minnesota to Pueblo, Colo., where Ted, like a middle-class Tom Joad, has been forced by circumstance to continue his medical practice. In Bena, Julavits has created a period-piece heroine with timeless obsessions and a troubling town full of "cowards in the guise of impossible creatures."
THE MISSING WORLD
By Margot Livesey
Alfred A. Knopf: 352 pp., $23
Truth is the oxygen of love. This ancient but easily forgotten verity is at the heart of Margot Livesey's clever, lively, sometimes hilarious new novel "The Missing World," which follows a group of up-to-date Londoners through their romantic mishaps and existential quandaries. The book is also a meditation on the moral economy of memory--on the price, that is, of denying what one has done and who one is. Livesey's book reminds us that in love, as in history, those without memory are condemned to a lifetime of weary, farcical repetitions. At one point one of the characters, who is "hopeless" at love and work and money, insists: "We repeat what we remember. Only forgetfulness sets us free." Like so much that she believes, this proves untrue. The last line of this book makes the unshakable strength of this absolutely clear; it is a shocker that made us sit up with a jolt.
MORE THAN YOU KNOW
By Beth Gutcheon
William Morrow: 270 pp., $24
Maine must be farther (psychologically) from Los Angeles than any other state in the union, the crucible for New England's ghosts and hardscrabble fears, almost as dark as witchy Pennsylvania. "More Than You Know" is the story of a haunting. It is set on an island in Maine and told by an elderly woman, Hannah Gray, who remembers a summer there when she met and lost the love of her life, Conary Crocker. Summers in Maine pose for normalcy, with beach roses and periwinkles and sea glass and porch swings. But that summer, Hannah and Conary were haunted by the ghost of a young woman who, legend had it, had murdered her winter-cruel father. Now, you may think that movies have cornered the market on terror and that few literary fiction writers do justice to Edgar Allan Poe, but Beth Gutcheon writes one scary haunting, complete with disbelieving wicked stepmother and light generating eye-sockets in the rearview mirror.
MR. PHILLIPS
By John Lanchester
A Marion Wood Book / G.P. Putnam:
304 pp., $23.95
