A look at the National Book Critics Circle nominees - Fiction

Kennedy's latest novel about Albany (his seventh) opens as World War II closes. The dashing young mayor is returning from battle, and with the Nazis vanquished, his new enemy is a Republican governor determined to clear out the city's network of political cronies, gangsters, prostitutes, and bookies - in other words, the Democratic Party. Three crafty crooks and boyhood friends run the party: Patsy, the leader, Elisha, the moneyman, and Roscoe, the brains. After 25 years of patriotic crime, Roscoe is ready to leave it all to a new generation of con artists. But when Elisha's suicide and a storm of ensuing scandals threaten the party, the crisis appeals to Roscoe's "rage for duty": In one of his best moments, he punches out a critical journalist, sets his own bail, pays it with city funds, and then schedules his own arraignment. But his greatest challenges are internal. When he should be shuffling off to retirement on years of protection money, he finds himself instead tying up potentially deadly loose ends. Fans still reeling from Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Ironweed" (1984) will find this novel a different, but no less brilliant book. "Roscoe" barrels along with wild vitality - a winking, confident novel, full of snappy irony but capable of dropping into dark horror or sweet sympathy. (291 pp.) (Full review Jan. 10, 2002) By Ron Charles

In this comic, moving, ultimately unsettling novel, Booker Award-winner McEwan captures the brutality of love and war and guilt. The story opens on a sweltering day at the ugly Gothic estate of the Tallis family. McEwan rotates through the perspectives of several residents and guests during a ludicrous and ultimately disastrous weekend, turning subtly through a kind of mock tribute to Jane Austen, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. Briony Tallis, 13, fancies herself a writer. At the start of the novel, she is composing romantic verse to convince her brother to marry the right sort of girl. But when she interrupts her cousin's rape in the garden, Briony's story of who was to blame - despite the dark, her cousin's lack of confirmation, and a sprinkling of contradictory details - calcifies into rock-hard certainty that smashes several lives. McEwan's knowledge of the inner workings of his characters is so piercing that you can't help feeling sorry for them; only God should have such intimate knowledge. As the novel moves through three more sections, Briony clears the fog of adolescence and confronts the destructive power of her fiction, even while she pursues its redemptive possibilities. Each of us, McEwan suggests, is composing a life. (351 pp.) (Full review March 14, 2002) By Ron Charles

In the title story of this elegant collection, the narrator, Eve Prescott-Clark, describes her World War II job in a US Army office in Britain with an understated, self-assured flipness. Her breezy account of the banalities of office life and women bored with their lovers or absent husbands makes Eve's eventual developments with "the Major" all the more searing. In Templeton's world of cosmoplitan women, aloof men, and upper-crust society, dark passions lurk dangerously close to the surface. Her prose, like her characters' polished veneers, often hides perverse desires. Indeed, the tension between love and desire, and the inexplicable nature of the latter, is a frequent theme. "Marriage is the tomb of love," declares one story, but Templeton's narrators are often consumed by the need to be desired - and even abused - by cold, authoritative men. It's tempting to view the collection as memoir, since the narrators (often named Edith) share Templeton's singular experiences: a childhood in a Prague castle, a wartime job in a US Army office in Britain, and a marriage to an eminent cardiologist who tended the king of Nepal. Templeton writes in a crisp, detached prose, and each story is a tightly crafted gem. Though written over the past half century, they rarely seem dated. (312 pp.) By Amanda Paulson

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