MEMOIR

Editor’s Note: The following reviews represent the best books of 1997 in the judgment of our contributors. Their original reviews have been edited and condensed for reasons of space.

SUSIE LINFIELD

THE KISS. By Kathryn Harrison . Random House: 214 pp., $20

Every now and then a book comes along that disturbs, disrupts and polarizes the public in new ways. Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was such a book, as were Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” William Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s “The Bell Curve.” (This used to happen with films, too--”Bonnie and Clyde,” “Last Tango in Paris,” “Shoah”--but that, alas, seems to be a thing of the past.) In such cases, it is not just the work itself but the author too--and, in particular, his motives, integrity and moral vision--that are scrutinized and interrogated. The debates over such books can turn highly unpleasant, yet they are, generally speaking, a good thing, for they force readers and critics to confront their most cherished ideas and even, sometimes, develop new ones. Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss,” a memoir of her incestuous relationship with her father, is the latest, and perhaps the best, example of such a polarizing work. This is the story of a young girl with a fifth column lodged firmly in her heart and of the terrible places it leads her. Precisely for that reason, I suspect, it will be read by women of all ages--and their mothers and their daughters of all ages, too--long after “Oprah” is off the air and long after Harrison’s sputtering critics have hushed up. Like all good literature, “The Kiss” illuminates something that we knew already, while also teaching us things we had not even suspected.

GLORIA EMERSON

ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN’. By Rick Bragg . Pantheon: 326 pp., $25

The idea of a journalist born in 1959 writing his memoirs, with no great wars or historic events to report, is surprising. But what Rick Bragg gives us in “All Over but the Shoutin’ ” is his own story, a record of a life that has been harrowing, cruel and yet triumphant, written so beautifully he makes the book a marvel. His portrait of the rural, violent Appalachian South, where people were kept crouching as they worked themselves to death, is stunning and sickening. Scarred, Bragg has almost willed himself to become an astonishing writer who, as a New York Times reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. He is still not a peaceful man, but he no longer needs to wear “that chip on [his] shoulder like a crown.”

OSHA GRAY DAVIDSON

RED DIRT: Growing Up Okie. By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz . Verso: 228 pp., $25

America--urban America, that is--has never quite made up its mind about its rural areas. Are they stifling backwaters, incubators of ignorance, violence and really bad haircuts? Or are they fountainheads of our national identity, populated by the noble descendants of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, full of “the old virtues” of hard work, fair play and decency? Is rurality something to escape from or aspire to? To put the question a different way: Which more accurately captures the essence of rural America: “Deliverance” or “The Grapes of Wrath”? The truth, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals in her richly textured autobiography, “Red Dirt,” is that rural America contains the squeal-like-a-pig horrors of James Dickey’s Chattanooga River, the quiet heroism of Steinbeck’s Tom Joad and much more besides. There is complexity in them thar’ hills. And why not? We’re talking about a huge expanse of land that ranges across our continent. More to the point, each rural community is itself a mixed bag, containing the many soaring ideals and hateful passions which, taken together, make America American. There are many qualities to praise in “Red Dirt”: its masterful evocation of a time and place, its telling details of both the pain and beauty of rural life, its straightforward yet elegant prose. But Dunbar-Ortiz’s most important achievement--in a book filled with them--is to put class back on the rural map where it belongs. Without stooping to mere polemics, Dunbar-Ortiz’s story is steeped in class awareness. And that’s important, for without the compass-rose of class, rural America will remain forever terra incognita: quaint, mythic and meaningless.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

THE BLACK DOG OF FATE: A Memoir. An American Son Discovers His Armenian Past. By Peter Balakian . BasicBooks: 288 pp., $24

In “The Black Dog of Fate,” Peter Balakian has written a sort of Armenian “Roots.” Growing up in the New Jersey of the 1960s, he offers a picture (Philip Roth without the self-abuse) of a suburbia with a secret. Keen on becoming an all-American, he was aware that his aunts and grandmothers were somehow different. They would use strange oaths and knew mysterious recipes. They had a non-American memory. His poetic interests, and the happy coincidence of an aunt who worked as a literary editor, led him to explore the rich tradition of Armenian writing and, later, to mount an investigation into the fate of his ancestors.

WINSTON GROOM

WATCHING OUR CROPS COME IN. By Clifton Taulbert . Viking: 158 pp., $15.95

Clifton Taulbert, author of the previously applauded “When We Were Colored” and “The Last Train North,” continues in this short book his autobiographical reminiscences of growing up black and poor in a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta on the cusp of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. “Watching Our Crops Come In” is an eloquent and moving account of how a man comes to appreciate and understand his life and times and, aside from its obvious appeal to a general audience, ought to be required reading for young people, regardless of race or ethnic origin.