Janet Maslin’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By JANET MASLIN

November 23, 2010
Janet Maslin’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By JANET MASLIN


THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by Tom Rachman. This debut novel by a former journalist is a splendid original, the hilarious yet wrenching half-century story of a newspaper’s rise and fall. But this book is bigger than the life cycle of any one profession. Mr. Rachman structures his story so wittily and unpredictably that figuring out where it’s headed is half the fun. (Dial Press, $25)

SAVAGES by Don Winslow. Mr. Winslow wrote 12 previous crime novels before “Savages,” the one that jolts him into a different league. Boisterously stylish, outrageously brazen, this is a ferocious, wisecracking, high-wire act about a Southern California drug deal gone wrong. A snow-white opening page with a two-word obscenity establishes Mr. Winslow’s indelible, no-prisoners narrative style. (Simon & Schuster, $25)

JUST KIDS by Patti Smith. The most enchantingly evocative memoir of funky-but-chic New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s that any alumnus has yet committed to print. Ms. Smith’s time with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe in “a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone” — the Chelsea Hotel — is summoned with both nostalgic innocence and sharp perspicacity, as are the period’s showy luminaries. As she writes exactingly of Andy Warhol, “I hated the soup and felt little for the can.” (Ecco, $27)

FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French. Ms. French’s third novel is an Irish mystery story and a richly enveloping family story too. She draws a piercingly astute portrait of the Mackeys, a Dublin clan riven by old secrets, grievances and sibling squabbles. The unsolved disappearance of a neighborhood girl, Rosie Daly, once broke the heart of Frank Mackey, her abandoned sweetheart. But it sets off sparks now that Frank is a middle-aged undercover detective — and there’s a suddenly a chance that Rosie may be found. (Viking, $25.95)

A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY: A NEW LIFE OF E. M. FORSTER by Wendy Moffat. This new look at what Ms. Moffat calls Forster’s “strange broken-backed career” casts fascinating light on why, after publishing classic works including “A Room With a View” and “Howards End,” this towering novelist kept the last two-thirds of his life under wraps. His biographer traces a long, heretofore mostly hidden life and makes it clear why the homosexual Forster, in his last years, looked back so angrily at the world that had forced him to hide his true nature. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $32.50)

FIFTH AVENUE, 5. A.M.: AUDREY HEPBURN, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, AND THE DAWN OF THE MODERN WOMAN by Sam Wasson. A bonbon of a book about the making of the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” filled with all the delightful anecdotes and none of the dull ones. Its knowledgeable author looks fondly and incisively at the arsenal of tricks that turned Truman Capote’s risqué heroine into the bewitching Audrey Hepburn of Blake Edwards’s frothy classic. A book as well tailored as the little black dress the movie made famous. (Harper Studio, $19.99)

61 HOURS by Lee Child. The craftiest and most highly evolved thriller in Mr. Child’s smashing Jack Reacher series, even if 2010 also brought the too-smashing, more head-busting follow-up, “Worth Dying For.” In the interests of pure gamesmanship, not to mention knuckle-whitening suspense, Mr. Child threw aside his own conventions and did everything differently this time. Thigh-high snowdrifts, precise logistics and a mania for detail made this the robust, he-man version of a closed-town Agatha Christie story. (Delacorte, $28)

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA’S GREAT MIGRATION by Isabel Wilkerson. In a book that is, quite amazingly, her first, Ms. Wilkerson pulls off an all-but-impossible feat: she documents the migration of black Americans across their own country on a grand, panoramic scale but also a very intimate one. This work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who leave their hometowns to emigrate to big cities during the days of Jim Crow. For anyone who has never imagined what it was like for a black man to drive from Louisiana to California without being free to pull off the road and sleep, Ms. Wilkerson puts many such stories on the page. (Random House, $30)

THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE: CLINTON VS. STARR by Ken Gormley. Another work of living history that’s full of real voices, including the remarkable ones of former President Bill Clinton and the former special prosecutor Ken Starr. With an exhaustive list of interviewees who attest to Mr. Gormley’s impartiality, including some who could not speak freely while under fire, this law professor coaxes forth the dizzyingly convoluted legal mess that plagued the Clinton presidency and led to impeachment hearings. He has pieced together a book that’s no cinch to read but is certain to age well thanks to its comprehensiveness. The title leaves no doubt as to how much bipartisan damage Mr. Gormley thinks was done, and the price he thinks we all paid. (Crown, $35)

MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND by Helen Simonson. Funny, barbed, winsome storytelling from a first-time novelist shaping an odd-couple romance. When the rigidly correct British widower of the title meets the dignified, elegant, conveniently widowed Mrs. Ali, he scandalizes his provincial neighbors and sets off a slew of screwball consequences. A bit formulaic and pat, perhaps, but noncopycat mainstream fiction was in oddly short supply this year. With a nod to the genteel flair of Alexander McCall Smith, Ms. Simonson delivers an old-school charmer. (Random House, $25)