National Book Critics Circle finalists / Fiction

Mitchell is one of Britain's most sophisticated young novelists, and this sprawling, psychedelic new novel is his most ambitious book yet. There are six narratives on display here, ranging from a Melvillean era sea-faring voyage to an apocalyptic tale from the far distant future. Using a kind of negative capability that even John Keats would marvel at, "Cloud Atlas" creates a montage of their collective concern - the horrific tendency for the powerful to abuse the weak - without ever reaching for simplistic connections. The novel draws its title from one of its many narrators, Robert Frobisher, a composer who drafts "The Cloud Atlas Sextet," a score made for six instruments. Mitchell is playing a literary version of that score here, blowing life into not just six different stories but six different genres as well. If you're a fantasy reader or a thriller buff, a fan of epistolary novels or a collector of journals, "Cloud Atlas" maintains a high level of authenticity throughout. In this sense, reading the novel is not unlike encountering a narrative buffet - you want to try each. Once the book hits the future, it reverses backward to the 1850s. Its beginning is its end, so to speak, a subtle warning to its readers: Societies born from violence often find a way to end that way, too. By John Freeman

Robinson's narrator is a 77-year-old pastor in Gilead, Iowa, who's been told he has only a few months to live. That might sound depressing or boring, but these pages flow with the intensity of a prayer, both anguished and assured. The whole novel is a letter written by Rev. Ames to his 7-year-old son. Knowing he's "about to put on imperishability," Ames writes, "I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way." "Gilead" wanders in that casual way that fellow masters of reflection like Henry David Thoreau or Annie Dillard manage without seeming vagrant. Ames recalls a store of wild anecdotes about his grandfather, a Union chaplain in the Civil War who saw visions of God frequently. The old one-eyed man was so militant that he signaled the start of church by firing his pistol. He rode with the abolition terrorist John Brown and followed the Gospel so literally that he became a kleptomaniac in service to the poor. But the most profound moments arise from stories of spiritual intimacy with the narrator's own father, who was a very different kind of preacher. There are passages here of such hard-won wisdom and spiritual insight that they make your own life seem richer. (Full review Nov. 30)

With a seamless blend of autobiography, history, and speculation, Roth imagines that Charles Lindbergh ran against Franklin Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1940. Drawing on Lindbergh's writings and speeches, Roth creates a campaign for the aviation hero centered on his determination to keep America out of Europe's war. While Roosevelt enunciates complex policies in his famous upper-class cadence, Lindbergh buzzes around the country in The Spirit of St. Louis declaring, "Your choice is simple. It's between Lindbergh and war." To preserve the nation, we must resist the propaganda of "the Jewish race," Lindbergh warns, "and their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." Yes, Lindbergh comes off very badly in these pages, but Roth's real target isn't an anti-Semitic aviation hero who died 30 years ago. It's an electorate he sees as dazzled by attractive faces, moved by simple slogans, and cowed by ominous warnings about threats to its security. Told from the point of view of an adult looking back on himself as a boy, the result is a cautionary story in the tradition of "The Handmaid's Tale." It's a stunning work of political extrapolation about a triumvirate of hate, ignorance, and paranoia that shreds decency and overruns liberty. (Full review Sept. 28)

Page: 1 | 2