"Drop City"
By T.C. Boyle
Viking
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Hardly anyone can write about the communal experiments of the '60s and '70s without getting either too starry-eyed or too cynical. Boyle's scaldingly hilarious and remarkably considered tale of an unruly pack of California hippies who decamp for Alaska in search of total freedom manages to hit the sweet spot between the two clichés. Up north, the commune mixes with another breed of American idealist -- those who subscribe to the self-sufficient ethos of the rural West -- and the chemistry is volatile, to say the least. Still, Boyle gives each very different side its due, while never letting either one off the hook. The proceedings are boisterous, the debacles are comic and the author's take on our national dream of self-reinvention is, finally, generous and sympathetic.

"The Fortress of Solitude"
By Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday
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Dylan Ebdus comes of age in a funky fugue, one of the few white kids in the 1970s Brooklyn neighborhood where his bohemian parents have decided to put down roots. To the smooth and sinewy beat of the era's soul soundtrack, he tries to reconcile race in the big picture (where people like him come out on top) with the granular reality of his scary experiences on the street. The black friend who tosses him a lifeline, Mingus Rude, has his own troubles, and even a (possibly) magic ring passed to the boys by a homeless man can't entirely overcome the gap between them, especially when punk rock, college and crack come along. "Fortress" is a bruised paean to the hometown of Jonathan Lethem (a friend of and occasional contributor to Salon) and a meditation on American boyhood, but it's also a cautionary tale about the folly of trying to escape your past and the melancholy necessity of coming home again.

"I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark"
By Brian Hall
Viking
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Hall tells the epic story of the Lewis and Clark expedition from a variety of perspectives, but it's Lewis and Sacagawea who steal the show. This is a historical novel that's unflinchingly honest but doesn't serve a political agenda. It describes the arc of a grand and thrilling journey, but views the progress through the halting, thwarted, damaged psyches of those who make it, one complicated step at a time. Sacagawea is a stifled philosopher, scarred by losses greater than any of her companions can imagine -- if they ever bothered to try. Lewis is valiant, depressed, infatuated with the wilderness and his co-captain and tormented by the impossible demands placed on him by his president and, especially, himself. Hall's portraits of these travelers are never less than utterly convincing and his sense of the strangely fruitful intersection of great deeds and human failings is unforgettable.

"Old School"
By Tobias Wolff
Alfred A. Knopf
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Most fiction about writers feels thin and self-regarding, but Wolff's passionate account of a youth coming into his own as a literary artist defies the rule. At the beloved boarding school his narrator attends, literature holds a lofty spot. Each term a famous author comes to speak to the students and meet with the winner of a writing contest. In succession, the narrator encounters the examples of Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway, and his transit through the stages of abject hero-worship, callow self-confidence and a true understanding of the demands of his chosen craft is both funny and touching. This is the kind of novel that glides effortlessly into your heart, sets up housekeeping and winds up telling you far more about life and yourself than a book that's so easy to read has any right to.

"Property"
By Valerie Martin
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
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Chill and pointed as an icicle, Martin's slim novel is a riveting depiction of intelligent but thoughtless evil. Told from the point of view of an unhappy female slaveowner in the antebellum South, it is a book of few and exquisitely chosen words, each one of which resounds with a terrible meaning. Manon Gaudet loathes her boorish plantation owner husband, not least because he dotes on the halfwit son of his slave, Sarah, a boy who looks altogether too much like the master of the house. When rebellion and violence change the power dynamics at the big house and Sarah escapes, Manon has the opportunity to open her eyes and recognize the similarities between their plights. Like all too many, she chooses not to. Martin's courage in letting her anti-heroine remain unenlightened is what makes "Property" so daring, so riveting and so impressively tough.

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