EDITORS' CHOICE

THIS year's roster of best books contains five works of fiction and four of nonfiction, compared with last year's five of each. Choosing was easy. Nominating was not. Throughout the year there is some competition among editors to put books on the list for consideration. Yet from 1997 through last year, the numbers nominated declined by two each year. This year the process nasdaqed, ending in only 16 nominations, down from 20 last year.

There are four novels on the 2001 list, a collection of stories, two memoirs, an intellectual history and a biography. Of the fiction writers two are American, one Canadian, one Australian and one German. All the nonfiction is by Americans, although one of the writers did not start out that way. Two of the writers, one in each category, have appeared on these lists in the past, and only one, a novelist, is under 35.

The volume of history is in part a collection of biographies, and the biography is in part a broadside against received history. As for the memoirs, which both focus on childhood, it is hard to imagine two accomplished writers having grown up in more contrasting conditions.

Characterization of the fiction is best done in the accounts given below. But since we like to signal firsts in any year, there is one odd circumstance to notice. One of the novels, as everyone knows, gained a certain notoriety when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club and the author allowed he was not entirely pleased by this honor, even though her nod would virtually guarantee its reaching the top of the best-seller list. It so happens that our reviewer of the book conjured up almost this very scenario in his review -- more than a month before the brouhaha erupted. There is no precedent for this. Editors here like to feel we have an effect in the literary world, but it had never occurred to any of us that a reviewer might slip a script of the future into a passing clause.

The best books were chosen from among those reviewed by us since the 2000 Holiday Books issue, and the summaries below draw on those reviews. Best books are not included among the Notable Books of the Year, which begin on Page 63.

AUSTERLITZ

By W. G. Sebald.

Random House.

Memory is moral treachery in the works of W. G. Sebald, and in none is it more threatening than in this one. His protagonist, Dafydd Elias, grew up in Wales and is past 50 before he finds he is really Jacques Austerlitz, whose Jewish parents sent him from Central Europe to Britain at 4 to escape the Holocaust, in which they perished. That would suggest he is like leading characters in several other Sebald novels, for whom missing the Holocaust left holes in their lives. But this man's name signals that Sebald is on a much more far-reaching quest this time. Napoleon's brilliant victory over Russia and Austria at the Czech town of Austerlitz in 1805 was taken by poets at the time and many historians later as a sign that a European political and social order dating from Charlemagne was gone, and that the pursuit of transcontinental imperial power had taken a new form. In this novel Austerlitz, the character, is an architectural historian whose meditations on the past dwell on monstrous buildings and fortifications, some of them instrumental in the fate of his parents, as if the natural end of empire was Terezin or Auschwitz. As so often in Sebald's fiction, direct connections are never highlighted in the vast loops and sudden knottings of his rhetoric, but the reader cannot escape the inference that in the long sweep of history the Nazis were not alone, but that an inquirer searching for meaning is.

BORROWED FINERY

A Memoir.

By Paula Fox.

Henry Holt & Company.

Paula Fox's children's books have been staples for 35 years, and her adult fiction has had a rousing revival recently. But nothing she has done has prepared her readers for this fragmentary memoir. It may send many back to her other books, for it turns out she has been fictionalizing her real life all along, beginning with the remark of a character in one novel: ''I was born and thrown away.'' It was her mother who decreed she had to go, not long after she was born, and she was passed along among relatives and friends haphazardly all over the country and in Cuba almost until she was an adult. Occasionally the feckless parents would remember she was theirs and intrude on her childhood disastrously. Her father sometimes tried to be kind, but recollections of these few moments are among the most painful parts of this book -- so little so seldom. As for the mother, there is no pretense that Fox, now 78, has ever penetrated that dark natural force. Indeed, it is her inability to come to an understanding that makes ''Borrowed Finery'' so haunting. It is organized among the many locales of her youth and has a choppy, imagistic quality that reflects the reality of that time. Throughout there are glimpses of what saved her spirit and made her a writer: the sharp, funny observations of people's conduct and character by a girl of quick intelligence who had to learn too early the saving value of guarded independence.

THE CORRECTIONS

By Jonathan Franzen.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The important thing to know about Jonathan Franzen's novel is that you can ignore all the literary fireworks and thoroughly enjoy its people -- a retired railroad man whose mind is going, his addled wife and their ill-assorted children, all in midlife, whose sometimes bizarre behavior does not erase their inheritance of humanity from their parents. After they have found their ways through a fiendish puzzle of subplots -- which take us with impressive authority through the worlds of finance, medicine, haute cuisine, Eastern European politics, cruises, drugs and much more -- all of them turn out to be likable. Franzen conceals nothing about the weaknesses of these people, but neither does he satirize them. This generosity carries us along even when the author is sending a stream of coded postmodernist messages to a long list of other writers he admires, or doesn't. And Enid, the mother of the brood in the novel, is so vividly realized she could eventually have a life of her own in the conversations of people who have never read the book; she is a great character. Beyond that, Franzen is a writer with old-fashioned virtues: he loves witty wordplay; his command of detail in an enormous range of interests is unassailable; he has a painter's eye for depth and contrast; and he creates characters whose emotions reach us even when they are hidden from the people feeling them.

HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE

Stories.

By Alice Munro.

Alfred A. Knopf.

As Alice Munro gets older, the challenges faced by her characters get darker -- in this collection cancer, Alzheimer's disease, suicide to escape debilitation, among others -- but a reader never comes away thinking life itself has gone from bad to worse. Munro seems to have taken as a mission finding the value of life in any circumstances. The search and the struggle all occur in her language. No sentence in any of the stories in this collection stands up and demands attention, although virtually every one of them has a tough wit that is matched by few writers in any era. The vocabulary is always subdued and precise; the words create a world one feels, hears and sees as natural, and big questions about morals and meanings rise in the reader's mind, not on the page. The acuteness of Munro's observation often makes her stories seem bleak at first glance; the richness that becomes clear as they proceed comes from the balance of an inner consciousness so subtly poetic it usually escapes our notice. This quality has never been more effective than in an autobiographical story here about a young woman's discovery of her vocation to be a writer, an epiphany that ends characteristically with a declaration so quiet it makes one want to applaud: ''This was how I wanted my life to be.'' And there it is, on every page.

JOHN ADAMS

By David McCullough.

Simon & Schuster.

Behold! A gentler, more quiet John Adams. The story of his devotion to his wife, Abigail, and hers to him, is the affecting centerpiece of David McCullough's biography, which uses the large correspondence between the two through several decades with sensitivity and skill. Sustaining that lifelong love affair was not easy; Adams took on political duties that kept him away from home and embroiled in public controversies for much of his life, and McCullough's praise of him for his stoic sense of duty is appropriate. McCullough's other purpose is to set a new balance in the public's assessment of Adams and his contemporary Jefferson. His argument that Adams was the main force behind the declaration of independence by the Continental Congress is one Jefferson himself made, and Adams certainly used diplomacy with remarkable foresight during the Revolutionary War and during his years as president to secure the foundation of this country. Whether this makes Jefferson a lesser figure remains debatable. McCullough's best gift is his ability to bring such icons to life, and to make us feel the texture of life in the past. That is one reason this book is likely to be argued over by readers for years, for there will always be some who will feel that the historian's subduing of Adams's noisy feistiness in this account -- his rashness, stubbornness and sometimes bizarre opinions -- makes him a little less himself.

JOHN HENRY DAYS

By Colson Whitehead.

Doubleday.

The ambition of Colson Whitehead's second novel is to define the interior crisis of manhood in terms of the entire pop-mad consumer society, and it succeeds so well that if there are a few omissions they are not easy to find. The sumptuous writing has the structure and quality of music, and it is that eloquence that keeps a reader moving, despite a few passages that run out of control. The John Henry of the title is the black railroad worker of the ballads, who won a tunnel-drilling contest against a steam-powered drill even though the effort killed him. Against the backdrop of this 130-year-old myth Whitehead gives us his protagonist, J. Sutter, and a gang of his friends and competitors -- young, educated, glib operatives in the publicity and celebrity machine of a modern world that values a man for what he buys and wears and doesn't give a damn about performance. Whitehead relishes slashing through the mindlessness of the age in a voice so intelligent and an idiom so imaginative that it can lift a reader right out of his chair. But he is not remorseless. He likes these people and respects their longings. They have no moral compass, but he has, so we can laugh at them but still grieve for the loss of so much possibility. You may feel you can never get to the end of this novel, not because it often meanders but because it goes on speaking after the last sentence and you want to head back in to argue with it, question it and listen to it.

THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB

By Louis Menand.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The club was a short-lived affair begun in Cambridge, Mass., in 1872, but the ideas espoused by three members and one of their disciples became foundations of American thought in the 20th century. The four men Louis Menand concentrates on are Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. He argues that Darwin's ''Origin of Species,'' published in 1859, and the Civil War swept away the notion that a divine being governs the universe, along with the basic cultural assumptions on which American society, North and South, were based. The new outlook that replaced them was pragmatism, a concept first formed by Peirce in 1872 and turned into an articulated system of thought by James in 1898. Menand characterizes it as a way of thinking, and believing, in a world that is shot through with contingency. Accounting for modern thought cannot be done in terms of four men, of course, and Menand's cast of characters soon multiplies into scores, some of whom he allows have little connection with his four heroes. The ground he has to cover is vast: legal theory with Holmes, psychology and religion with James, educational development with Dewey, mathematics and philosophy with Peirce. But the large personalities of his principal players let him explain ideas in a series of connected stories that help the reader digest the learning. This approach also gives his thesis a kind of theatrical excitement that no severe intellectual history could engender.

TRUE HISTORY OF

THE KELLY GANG

By Peter Carey.

Alfred A. Knopf.

Peter Carey, widely recognized as one of the most engaging historical novelists alive, surpasses himself in this novel about the Australian version of Jesse James. Here the author becomes historical impersonator: the chapters are 13 packets of narrative written by Ned Kelly to his baby daughter at a time when he knew his violent life was coming to its end, to give her his version of himself and his family and friends, who were seen by 19th-century Australians as thugs and killers. The voice, untutored, ungrammatical and often comically colloquial, becomes intoxicating, poetic and sinuous enough to reflect the highly idiosyncratic conversations of others without ever losing its own character. That alone would make this novel perhaps the most compelling reading on this list. But there is a kind of defiant bravery in Carey's attitude toward Ned. Kelly is a disarmingly candid young man driven to lawlessness by the corruption of the ruling establishment. In his own view he is almost always innocent, and his actions reveal what one can only call a native nobility; next to him Robin Hood looks frivolous. It is as if Carey were daring the reader to desert him as a romantic and a sentimentalist. He wins. The domestic scenes and the appalling education in crime of the boy Ned and his siblings are searing explorations of poverty, fear and ignorance; the one romance in Ned's life is wholly convincing; and the breathless chase at the end, as the vengeful constabulary closes in, is as heart-stopping a story as you can find.

UNCLE TUNGSTEN

Memories of a

Chemical Boyhood.

By Oliver Sacks.

Alfred A. Knopf.

As charming as his prose always is, Oliver Sacks cannot write for long without finding a subject outside himself. In his previous books he has been able to turn his findings in neurology into engagements of high literary quality. But a memoir presents him with a challenge of a different order. He has solved it in this account of his early years not only by recreating a very large extended family of highly individual and eccentric adults who fascinated, repelled and inspired him in Britain in the 1930's and 40's, but by focusing on his youthful infatuation with chemistry (thus the title; one of his uncles was a leading manufacturer of light bulb filaments and an inspiration to Oliver). Both parents were physicians, his mother a doctor who insisted on teaching him her trade by having him dissect stillborn fetuses despite his squeamish protests. A formidable but vastly amusing aunt made him see the underlying mathematical structure of every natural activity. Another uncle taught him spectroscopy. Such people bring the book to life. But it is most alive when it turns to chemistry and its history. Readers can absorb more information here than they could ever get in a classroom about the composition of matter, including some spectacularly explosive forms, and about the beauty of something as austere as the periodic table of elements -- in highly entertaining stories about the discoverers of the science. By the end we also come to understand who Sacks is and how he got that way; he simply emerges from this enchanting company, without pleading or apology.