According to news sources in the U.K., the film’s production has been delayed because Irish crew members have discovered the wonders of Panama’s brothels. The crew is reportedly staying up until all hours, enraptured with sampling local examples of the world’s oldest profession. When it comes time for work the next day, the spent men have lost their stamina and proceed at a snail’s pace.

The delays were first discovered when Brosnan flew to Central America to begin filming, and observed that work had barely begun on construction of the sets. One would think that director John Boorman would have anticipated such difficulties, having previously worked under trying conditions on earlier films such as “Deliverance.” But the languid progress of a hooker-chasing production crew is apparently even too much for him.

“I sent a construction gang from Ireland to Panama to build certain things, and when I got there nothing had happened,” Boorman is reported to have told the Daily Star. “It turned out they were spending a lot of time in these brothels and were too exhausted to work.”

Miss Moneypenny would be upset.

A little one, that would be nice. A big one would be not. [He laughs. Note: Follett's laugh is a simple, straightforward, "Ha
ha ha."]

You’re pretty safe in New York. Apparently there are no earthquake fault
lines here.

Somebody told me that there’s a fault line that runs right through the
middle of Manhattan. I don’t believe it is true. We don’t have the edge of
a tectonic plate here, do we?

Did you spend a lot of time out west researching “Hammer of Eden”?

Not a lot of time. I spent probably in total three or four weeks.

Do you do a lot of research? Do you have a staff to assist you?

No. No. I use Dan Starr, a professional researcher here in New York who
does all the legwork, all that stuff which would take me days and weeks of
calling, waiting for people to call back. Dan does all that. Finds books.
Makes reading lists. Finds maps. I say to him, “I need a seismologist.” So
he’ll find one who is good at explaining their work, and is willing to read
the manuscript and catch errors.

I also wanted to spend some time with the FBI, so Dan called the San
Francisco FBI and got ahold of the agent in charge of media, and set up an
appointment. I have to do the actual interviewing myself — you can’t have
somebody else do that because you don’t know in advance all the questions
you’ll want.

Did people in San Francisco get nervous when you started talking to them
about man-made earthquakes?

Yes. I went to see Gov. Pete Wilson. I told him what my story was and said,
“Just try to imagine for a minute, if there was a terrorist threat of an
earthquake and something happened that made you believe they could really
do it, how would you deal with it?”

He gave the answer I anticipated. He said, “No mater what the threat, you
couldn’t give in because if you did, then next week there would be another
threat.”

How real is the idea of an earthquake bomb?

I hope it isn’t real. Some of the seismologists told me, “There’s no way
this could happen.” But others gave sad little shrugs and said, “It’s hard
to say. Who knows? Maybe. It’s within the realm of possibly.”

Is every book the same pattern — research, outline, write it?

Generally. That has been the pattern for several books. “Pillars of the
Earth” was different because it was so long. It took much longer to
write it. Over three years. Otherwise for a long time now I’ve been on
these two-year cycles — a year of preparation and a year of writing.

Do you have a lot of writer friends in London?

Probably my best friend among writers is Hanif Kureishi. He writes
novels about the experience of being Asian in London. [In London, "Asian"
means Indian and Pakistani rather than Japanese and Chinese.] A novel of
his was filmed and was quite successful, “My Beautiful Laundrette.”
He’s probably my closest friend among
writers. I know the thriller writers. I see Frederick Forsyth, Jack
Higgins. I see Jeffrey Archer. Who else? Ruth Rendell. I see some of the
feminists. Fay Weldon. In America, Erica Jong. She is probably my oldest
friend. I’ve known her for 20 years now. Known her through several
husbands.

You care about Bob Dylan?

Yeah. Very much.

Have you heard his new album? There’s an 18-minute song on it where Dylan
mentions to a Boston waitress that he’s read Erica Jong.

Oh really? I don’t know if she knows about it. The last album that I got of his was “Good as I’ve Been to You,”
which was really raw, but terrific folk songs. Just before I came to
America I was playing “Highway 61.” That album must be 30 years
old.

Where were you when Dylan went electric in the ’60s?

I was in university. From 1967 to ’70. I used to play guitar, and I used to
play Bob Dylan songs. I’d play “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And all those
numbers. “Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” “The Times They Are
a-Changing.” I can still play all those songs.

And I’ve really been enjoying “Highway 61.” Those surreal lyrics.
“You can hear the penny whistles/You can hear them blow/If you lean
your head out far enough/From Desolation Row.” That’s terrific. God knows
what it means. But it’s just wonderful. They stay in your head, those words.

Is this the first time you’ve gone public as a Dylan freak?

No one has ever asked me.

When were you a crime reporter?

I was a newspaper reporter when I quit college in 1970 until late ’74. I
was never specifically a crime reporter, but I was often sent to court
because my shorthand was so good. I bet you don’t do shorthand.

No.

But I did do shorthand, which was necessary for court work because if you
report something wrong in court you lose your immunity from prosecution.
I guess I also spent some time at Scotland Yard — so yeah, I did a lot of
crime work.

You must get interviewed a lot. Anyone ever use shorthand?

Yes. Some people do. Definitely.

Did you do interviews when you were a reporter?

On my first newspaper job I had the pop music column. So I interviewed
Stevie Wonder. He was probably the best in terms of most famous and most
interesting. I interviewed Led Zeppelin.

Did they tear up the room with Samurai swords?

No, no. They were quite calm. They looked as if later that night they might
raise a little hell.

I meant to ask you this after you mentioned Erica Jong. I’ve always been
under the illusion that I really understand women, even though my wife
tells me, “You don’t understand women at all.”

Ha ha ha.

But you have this reputation of really understanding women.

I don’t really think that way. When I’m writing a woman character, I don’t
think, “What would a woman do?” I just think, “What would this character do
in this situation?” I’ve never made a big distinction between the way that
women react and the way that men react. It’s often more interesting
artistically to have a female character in a situation of physical danger.
Two men in a fight is fairly tame, but put a woman in that situation and
you haven’t got all that history of male confrontation to get in your way.
You can do anything you want.

I don’t think there’s any great mystery about writing female characters, so
long as you talk to them — I mean if you lived in a monastery and never met
any women maybe it would be difficult, but somebody who’s led a normal
life, and fallen in love, and been married, had sisters and daughters,
mother and aunts — what’s the mystery? You know women as well as you know
men.

But it is said you have this great insight into female characters.

It is true that an awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly.
So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.

Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books, the women
characters often rather decorative. Like the James Bond books, which are
really my literary influence. Now the women in those stories are very
peripheral. They’re in the story to either create a problem for James Bond
or be the romantic interest. Whereas in my books the women often solve the
problem. Even if the woman is not the hero, she’s a strong character. She
does change the plot. She’ll often rescue the male character from some
situation. When I started writing, this was mildly unusual. Now it’s
commonplace.

For the past year I’ve had this crazy impulse to read a James Bond novel.
They aren’t as silly as the movies, are they?

They’ve never had the humor that the movies had. Sean Connery really
slightly subverted James Bond when he played the part because he had this
slightly ironic self-mocking air all the way through. But in the books
themselves there’s no self-mockery about James Bond. He’s quite serious
about his drinks and clothing and cigarettes and food and all that sort of
thing. There is nothing wry or amused about James Bond.

There are a lot of nonfiction books in this room. You yourself wrote one nonfiction book, about Iran.

“On Wings of Eagles.” It was about two employees of Ross Perot who
were arrested during the revolution in Tehran, and they escaped. Perot sent
in a rescue team. And they all got out.

The book was really a collaborate effort of all the people who’d been in
the story. I interviewed all of them. And spent a long time with Perot
himself. And showed my draft to all the principals in the story to correct.

Were you surprised when Perot ran for president?

I wasn’t that surprised. People were always saying to him in those days,
“You should run for office.” That was in ’82. He used to say, “If you could
run for king I might.”

What made you choose to do this book?

I was looking for something different to do. I had written three novels in quick succession. Then one of Perot’s
people called my agent and explained that Perot had decided that sooner or
later someone was going to do a book about the rescue. If they didn’t
cooperate it would be an inaccurate book. So they wanted a good book
written that would be accurate, and they would pick someone to collaborate
and take charge of it. I was selected as the writer.

So since I was looking for something different, this sounded great. I
took it. The drama was already there. Here were these data processors from
Texas, and they were in this ancient and rather primitive kingdom, Iran.
The culture clash is terrific drama. Then there’s the drama of the
businessman who finds himself in the middle of a revolution. Then there was
the ultimate drama of the boss who says, “I sent these people in there.
They’re my responsibility. I’m going to get them out, no matter what it
takes.” That was a great story.

Who had “final cut”?

In the end that wasn’t an issue. At first I was worried that it would be an
issue between me and Perot before I got to know him. So we made a deal
whereby it would cost him $1 million, but he would have the right to
kill the project.

You’d get the million either way?

Yes. That would be my compensation for not publishing the book. So that
was the deal we made. We never came close to quarreling because my worry
had been that he would want to promote himself egotistically. That wasn’t a
problem. His worry would be that I would take against the character of
Col. Simons. He was afraid that I, as a cynical Brit, would deflate this
character. None of that turned up to be an issue. Col. Simons was a
gung-ho hero. And I actually managed to get a little underneath his skin.

There was no danger of fatwa on you, was there?

I don’t think I would have done the book if the project came after
Salman Rushdie’s fatwa. I think I would have been too scared. But at the
time I wasn’t scared of the Ayatollah. I wasn’t afraid of anybody. I
probably should have been.

Do you know Salman Rushdie?

Yeah. I think he’s a terrific writer. And he’s been through a terrible
experience. He’s a very strong character. And that’s really helped. He has
the most enormous self-confidence. He’s got quite a big ego actually. Too
big for some people. Some people don’t like Salman; I like him. That ego
and that self-confidence have really helped him through this.

When he was really in hiding, I used to see him at the home of a mutual
friend. In those days Salman would be having dinner with you, and three
bodyguards would be having take-away (food) in the next room. But then he started to come to regular parties and show up at book parties and so on.

How different is publishing in London from New York?

Not that much different. The British watch the
American bestseller list and vice versa. A lot of companies are owned by
international conglomerates.

Martin Amis aside, do we Yanks seem more money-obsessed?

No. All publishers all over the world are having to pay attention to the
bottom line. I want publishers to be strong, not subsidized by other
businesses.

But you’re a member of the small percentage of writers who make money. No
one will lose money publishing a Ken Follett novel.

I wouldn’t say it was a small percentage. Most writers make money.
Occasionally, at the beginning of a writer’s career, when the
publisher is trying to establish the writer, they will spend more than
they’re making to try to bring this writer to the public’s attention. But
by and large publishers expect every book to make a profit.

Did the Jackal [the nom de guerre of famously aggressive New York literary agent Andrew Wylie] try to sign you?

Ha ha ha. No.

Would you have been tempted?

No. I mean, Al Zuckerman, who has been my U.S. agent for 25 years, is a
very good editor. And that’s his great value to me. He’s almost a
collaborator.

Is there any book that you’ve written that just never came together.

I abandoned a book after working on it for a year. I was writing a story
called “Country Risk,” which was about a KGB plot to take over a bank
and then subsequently cause a financial crisis. Not a bad story idea. I
must have been working on this through 1983. At the end of that year I had
an outline that all my publishers liked. My agent liked it. At first I
thought it was great, but then I stepped back. I thought about how people
talk about “Eye of the Needle.” They were so on the edge of their seat
reading this book. They couldn’t bear to put it down because they were
afraid of what was going to happen next. I realized that nobody was ever
going to feel that way about this story about bankers. And so I dropped it.

It was heartbreaking because it was a year’s work, but it was the right
decision. Then the book I wrote was “Lie Down With Lions.”

Did that one come easy?

Yes. That was very much an adventure story. Outdoor adventure story. Two
people escaping across the Himalayas. And the KGB team chasing them.

I don’t know anything about your personal life. Do you have more than one wife?

Yes. Funny way to put the question. I’m now married for the second time. I
have two children and three stepchildren.

Who were you married to when you abandoned your manuscript?

Oh, I see. “Country Risk.” I was married to my first wife.

I’m married. I can’t imagine coming in and telling my wife, “I’m going to
drop this book.”

Well, that. My publishers were a bit dismayed, because I was going back to
square one, which meant I wouldn’t be delivering the book as soon as they
hoped. But no one argued with me about it. I’m trying to remember
conversations with my then wife about it. And I can’t remember what she
said about it.

It was risky writing about Russia in the ’80s anyway. The scene kept
changing. I have no desire to read John le Carré books from that decade.

I’ve always found John le Carré after his first few books, which were
great, hard to read.

You ever put yourself in peril in the last 20 years doing research?

No. When I did “Lie Down With Lions,” I didn’t go to Afghanistan. I
used people who had been. I talked to TV reporters.

What if you had had the opportunity?

I would have said, “No.” And it could have been arranged. The war was on
and people were going there as reporters. But I didn’t go because it was
dangerous.

But you have a wife and kids, it wasn’t really an option. I would like to
think that I would have gone to Spain with Hemingway in the ’30s. Or
Nicaragua in the ’80s.

There’s a very short period in your life when those options are open to
you. You have to be 19 or 20 and single.

Do you ever regret that you never visited a battlefield?

No. I don’t think I would have found any battle or wartime situation
congenial. I’ve always been fond of creature comforts. Hot baths. I never
liked danger.

Call me morbid, but it seems appropriate to commence this piece with a list of 1997′s illustrious dead — a roll call of literary souls worth mourning. (In death, even Michener took on Texas-sized stature when the extent of his philanthropy was revealed.) Why? Because if on one level 1997 was the best year in recent memory to be an alert, yea-saying reader — for an abundance of reasons I’ll be getting to — it was also a year in which there were some seismic, queasy-making shifts in the lit world. Some of the old niceties began slipping away (some of them deservedly), a postwar generation of writers started to stumble, and a cold and crackling new economic order swept in under the doorjamb.

Civility, for sure, suffered a few head wounds in 1997. At a panel discussion at the New York Public Library in October, Barnes & Noble CEO Leonard Riggio gave novelist Cynthia Ozick a start when he outed her sales figures, revealing that his continent-girdling chain had sold but a few hundred copies of her Holocaust masterpiece “The Shawl.” In response, Ozick politely murmured something about how she’d like to sell more books — but so would Stephen King. The evening’s topic: “Book Publishing: Dead or Alive?” People left wondering.

Revenge had a bullish year. New novels from such celebrated old goats as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were accompanied by frisky tell-all memoirs dictated by aggrieved former lovers. (Behind every great male novelist, it sometimes seemed, there was an extremely pissed-off woman.) Retaliation came into its own as a genre, and these novelists suffered some very ’90s-style indignities. The high-low point in Adele Mailer’s “The Last Party” — which is arguably better-written, and surely less pretentious, than Mailer’s own “The Gospel According to the Son” — may be when young Norman catches Adele in bed with another man (she was avenging his own cheating ways), strides into the room and stubs out a lit cigarette into the man’s naked buttocks. The low-low point is, of course, when Mailer stabs her. In “Handsome Is,” a memoir from Bellow’s former literary agent, Harriet Wasserman, we hear not only about the great writer’s abiding narcissism, but Wasserman also mentions that she would rather lick out a Times Square toilet bowl than say hello to Bellow’s new agent, Andrew Wylie. And in Claire Bloom’s “Leaving a Doll’s House” (a late 1996 title), we learn about her 18 years with Philip Roth — including news that, during their divorce proceedings, Roth charged her $150 an hour for having helped her go over her scripts.

Not all of the year’s aggrieved memoirists charged at writers: Mia Farrow dumped on Woody Allen in her mopey, elegiac “What Falls Away”; Kelly Flinn dumped on the Air Force in “Proud to Be”; and Paula Barbieri unwittingly dumped on herself in “The Other Woman: My Years with O.J.”

Those Mailer, Bellow and Roth novels were kept company by new books from John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. Readers could be forgiven, in a retro-hellish year, for walking into bookstores and thinking it was 1973 all over again. (Even J.D. Salinger poked his squirrely nostrils out from his hole for a moment, sniffed the wind and apparently decided not to release his story “Hapworth 16, 1924″ as a novel. Next year he’ll get — what else? — depicted in another tell-all memoir, from his former teen lover, Joyce Maynard.) New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has long ridden herd over this flock, caning the beasties who got too randy. Few were surprised when she bestowed her blessings on Roth’s relatively soft-focus “American Pastoral” while pounding Updike’s sharply lecherous “Toward the End of Time.” At times, however, a few of these aging writers seemed to be caning themselves. I read most of these books, and if you forced me into Entertainment Weekly’s bullpen I would grade them thusly: Mailer: D; Bellow: B-; Roth: B; Updike: A-; Vonnegut: B-. (The Pynchon I couldn’t get through, although unlike Slate’s estimable critic, Walter Kirn, that fact did prevent me from reviewing it.)

Those tell-all memoirs aside, the book world in 1997 did occasionally feel like a tug-of-war between the sexes. Oprah Winfrey solidified her clout, sending a number of titles (Mary McGarry Morris’ “Songs in Ordinary Time,” Earnest Gaines’ “A Lesson Before Dying,” two novels by Kaye Gibbons) soaring onto bestseller lists and onto the counter of your local Starbucks. So pervasive was Oprah’s influence that the New York Times published a long, fretful piece about the potential “feminization” of literature. Because so many of Oprah’s viewers (and so many fiction buyers) are women, the Times reasoned, publishers might start to skew their lists toward books that are by and about women.

Sounds plausible — until you take into account one of the year’s other significant publishing trends, the rise of manly-men-against-the-elements narratives. Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” and Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm” both lingered on bestseller lists for months, and they seemed to provide a cultural antidote to wispy, so-introspective-it-hurts memoirs like Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss” (alternate title: “Hop on Pop”), a book about her long-running adult affair with her father. Harrison’s book was published in February, and the reaction to it was loopily fascinating. “The Kiss” prompted dozens of furrowed-brow panels on “The Rise of Memoir,” a brutal review by James Wolcott in the New Republic (Wolcott accused Harrison of, among other things, being a lousy mother by not waiting to publish her tome) and prompted Harvard child psychotherapist Robert Coles — in what must be a first — to withdraw his jacket blurb for the book.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

The memoir glut showed no signs of slowing down (among the year’s best were J.M. Coetzee’s “Scenes From a Provincial Life,” James Salter’s “Burning the Days,” Thomas Lynch’s “The Undertaking” and Jean-Dominique Bauby’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”), but memoir as a cultural obsession and weekly Charlie Rose topic seems over, played out, kaput.

Other writers popped up in new and often surprising formats. Tom Wolfe released a discarded chunk of his new novel, “Chocolate City,” which is due next year, on audiotape only. Titled “Ambush at Fort Bragg” and read by actor and fellow Yalie Edward Norton, it was a brisk and dazzling slice of media criticism and surely the best fiction that came out of my (rental) car stereo this year. Updike popped up on Amazon.com, delivering the first and last sentences of a collaborative murder mystery, co-written with Amazon customers. Updike’s Kakutani-friendly opener: “Miss Tasso Polk at ten-ten alighted from the elevator onto the olive tiles of the nineteenth floor only lightly nagged by a sense of something wrong.” Amazon had a hit on its hands.

Stephen King’s silkiest move this year happened off the page. King fled Viking, his longtime publisher, and set out after someone willing to pay him a Jim Carrey-esque $17 million advance for each of his next three books. He wound up at Simon & Schuster with a deal that many in the publishing world will be watching closely — it guarantees him a $2 million advance per book and an unprecedented 50 percent share of the profits. Perhaps he’d been perusing Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Comeback.”

The King deal, with its repercussions, is merely one more reason for publishers to fret. Book sales have been off by as much as 5 percent for each of the last several years, and some began to panic this year. In June, shortly after posting a $7 million loss for the quarter, HarperCollins shocked many observers (and certainly some of its writers) when it tried to staunch the flow of red ink by abruptly canceling more than 100 titles.

Spookier still was the news that many publishers have begun to turn to book chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders (which is among Salon’s sponsors) for advice about what books to publish and how. The New York Times noted that Grove Press abandoned plans to publish a memoir titled “Love Potion No. 9″ by songwriter Jerry Leiber after Barnes & Noble responded coolly to it and ordered a mere 1,200 copies. Similarly, when Random House was unhappy with the dust jacket for Mario Puzo’s “The Last Don,” it turned to a Barnes & Noble buyer for advice. (The cover changed from black to crimson, and was stamped with more eye-grabbing typography.)

The splashiest behind-the-scenes news this fall was Harold Evans’ departure from Random House after seven years as the publishing house’s scene-making president and publisher. Did Harry jump or was he pushed? Most seemed to agree it was a mixture of both. At the time of Evans’ exit, Random House was in a slump — out of the 30 titles on the New York Times bestseller list that week, only three were RH titles: John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” Arundhati Roy’s surprise-bestseller “The God of Small Things” and a book by Monty Roberts called “The Man Who Listens to Horses.” Worse for Evans was the fact that, as the Los Angeles Times pointed out, each of those titles was acquired by editor in chief Ann Godoff, Evans’ replacement.

Evans’ departure may mean the end of the Big Dick management style, at least at Random House. Evans liked Big Books by Big Names, and he threw for them the kind of parties that regularly landed him (along with his wife, New Yorker editor Tina Brown) in Page Six and other gossip columns. Among his successes were Colin Powell’s “My American Journey” and Anonymous/Joe Klein’s “Primary Colors.” Among his notable miscues were the $5 million he paid to Marlon Brando for an autobiography that tanked and $2.5 million to ex-Clinton advisor and foot-fetishizer Dick Morris. (Cynthia Ozick can take solace in the fact that Evans once admitted, famously, that the 29 Random House books that made the New York Times “notable books” of 1993 list collectively lost $600,000.)

Evans grooved on (self-spun) controversy, and 1997 had its fair share of it. Esquire’s literary editor, Will Blythe, quit in protest after then-editor Ed Kosner killed a David Leavitt short story because advertisers objected to its homosexual content. Romance novelist Janet Dailey admitted that three of her books included passages plagiarized from competitor Nora Roberts, the romance industry’s hottest writer (no wonder you thought all that stuff sounded the same). And Salman Rushdie and John le Carri pounded the crud out of each other in the letters section of London’s Guardian newspaper. (Rushdie to le Carri: “illiterate, pompous ass.” Le Carri to Rushdie: “self-canonizing, arrogant colonialist.”)

The Rushdie-le Carri feud started when le Carri published a Guardian piece in which he defended himself against allegations that his most recent novel, “The Tailor of Panama,” was anti-Semitic. The essay enraged Rushdie, who dashed off a letter saying he’d be more sympathetic to le Carri if “he had not been so ready to join an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer.” According to Rushdie, when he became the subject of an Iranian fatwa, or death order, in 1989, le Carri “eagerly, and rather pompously, joined forces with my assailants. It would be gracious if he were to admit that he understands the nature of the Thought Police a little better now.”

The letters went ping-ponging back and forth for a week or so, giving U.K. newspaper editors a respite from the post-Diana doldrums. Le Carri responded: “Rushdie’s way with the truth is as self-serving as ever. I never joined his assailants. Nor did I take the easy path of proclaiming Rushdie to be a shining innocent. My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says that great religions may be insulted with impunity.” Rushdie got off what sounded like the last word: “Every time he opens his mouth, he digs himself into a deeper hole.”

This year, like every year, there were books by well-regarded writers that didn’t seem up to their usual standards, either critically or commercially. Among them in 1997: E. Annie Proulx’s “Accordion Crimes,” Paul Auster’s “Hand to Mouth,” Allan Gurganus’ “Plays Well With Others” and Carol Shield’s “Larry’s Party.” But they seemed like aberrations.

In general, 1997 offered myriad reasons to believe. Fine first novels by Charles Frazier (“Cold Mountain”) and Arundhati Roy (“The God of Small Things”) won the National Book Award and Booker Prize, respectively. Among the other writers who made impressive debuts were Arthur Golden (“Memoirs of a Geisha”), Alex Garland (“The Beach”), Kirsten Bakis (“The Lives of the Monster Dogs”) and Steve Lattimore (“Circumnavigations”).

A slew of old favorites returned with work that ranked with their best. Those books included Robert Stone’s “Bear and His Daughter,” Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” Diane Johnson’s “Le Divorce,” Edna O’Brien’s “Down By the River,” John Banville’s “The Untouchable,” Muriel Spark’s “Reality and Dreams” and Richard Russo’s “Straight Man.” And happily, small presses seemed stronger than ever: If you missed Ellen Ullman’s “Close to the Machine” (City Lights), Eileen Whitfield’s “Pickford,” David Haynes’ “All-American Dream Dolls” (Milkweed) or Barbara Gowdy’s “Mister Sandman” (Steerforth), to name just three, it’s not too late to pick them up for Christmas.