A Son of the Circus.

The French have a phrase, L'esprit d'escalier, the wit of the staircase, which defines that frustrated feeling we have when we find the brilliant, parrying riposte only after the argument is long over and we're glumly going to bed. I often feel that way in hotel elevators when, after a fiction reading or bookstore signing, I have once again blanked on the question, "Are there any recent books you'd recommend?" Hours later I have a huge list in my head, but up there in front of those eager readers I fall back on a few eminently worthwhile but well-known titles that most people there had probably beaten me to. And now I can make up for that. This is my booklist of the staircase.

Susan Bergman's Anonymity (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $20, 198 pp.) is a harrowingly honest and heartbreaking memoir, full of healthy anger and healing love, about a Christian evangelical family dealing with the loss of their husband and father to AIDS and with the shock that he was secretly homosexual - he'd claimed his illness was many other things. Wise, passionate, beautifully written, it's the finest portrayal of fear and hiddenness in families that I have ever read.

The principal theme of Donald Hall's Life Work (Beacon Press, $15, 124 pp.) is precisely that of the monks of the Middle Ages, Laborare et orare, to work and to pray. Twenty years ago, the prize-winning poet gave up a full professorship at the University of Michigan to go back to his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire and commit himself as wholly to his prose and poetry writing as his forebears did to their fields. Life Work is Hall's sage and inspiring paean to "absorbedness" and to the consolation his healthy obsession offers him when cancer forces him to come to terms with his own mortality.

Reynolds Price also faced the affliction of cancer when, in 1984, an eel-like tumor was found braided onto his spinal cord. Surgery failed to get rid of the growth, radiation only hastened the gradual paralysis of his legs, whence followed chronic and excruciating pain, malaise, depression, and the too-ordinary difficulties of the handicapped. Without a hint of self-pity or false claims on beatitude, Price affectingly writes, in A Whole New Life (Atheneum, $20, 214 pp.), of his illness and of his healing through self-hypnosis, prolific writing, the heroic help of his family an friends, and faith in the "now appalling, now astonishing grace of God."

Healings of the spirit also occur in Harriet Doerr's charming second novel, Consider This, Senora (Harcourt Brace, $21.95, 241 pp.). Like her first novel, Stones for Ibarra, for which she won an American Book Award, Consider This, Senora focuses on the changes wrought by the land and people of Mexico on exiles from America, in this case a California artist getting over her divorce, an old widow awaiting death in the country of her birth, a frustrated woman seeking a new life, a feckless investor fleeing tax evasion charges in Arizona. With affection and humor, Doerr sketches the beauty of a Mexican hilltown where the homely and the magical delightfully coexist.

The fantastic is often near at hand in a John Irving novel, and that's especially true of his latest, A Son of the Circus (Random House, $ 25, 633 pp.). The son of the title is Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, an orthopedic surgeon in Toronto who is visiting his hometown of Bombay to work with crippled children and dwarfs when he gets caught up in a murder investigation and the first meeting of separated twins, one a zealous Jesuit from California, the other an actor in hackneyed mystery films that have offended all of India. But the novel is so huge, so ingenious and prodigal in its plotting, so full of rambunctious, quirky life, that it seems to be about everything.

Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing (Alfred A. Knopf, $23, 426 pp.) is a haunting, enthralling, lyrical tale of a stoical teenaged boy tracking a she-wolf in the rangelands of New Mexico just before World War 11. When he finds the wolf is pregnant, he takes her back to Old Mexico to free her, but she's caught and used for dogfighting and he finally has to kill her. When Billy Parham gets back home, he finds his parents murdered, the horses stolen, and he takes his little brother with him on another strange journey into Mexico to get back what is theirs. All the Pretty Horses, winner of the National Book Award, was the first volume of The Border Trilogy and The Crossing is the second. When the trilogy is finished it just may be the great American novel; it's truly a work of genius.

The heroism of daily life is wonderfully limned in Joanne Meschery's smart, perceptive, achingly tender novel, Home and Away (Simon and Schuster, $21,284 pp.). The protagonist is Hedy Gallagher Castle, an officer at a border station below the Sierra's eastern wall. Operation Desert Storm is underway and her father, a former minister and recent stroke victim, is in the house with her and heading further into bewilderment, while her famous an often childish husband, for five years the fastest man on skis, is, in his forties, trying a comeback in Europe. Meanwhile there are girls' basketball games, gossip that the coach is a lesbian, and skirmishes about sex education in the high school. Hedy's teen-aged daughter gets her first lessons in loss and love through a friend who undergoes an abortion, even as her mother falls into an affair with a part-time soldier shipped off to Iraq. At one point it occurs to Hedy "why people are always leaving to strike new ground, set new records. Why they strive to be first in the world. The reason, I believe, is that daily life extracts too much - takes it all...the home front - here - will break your heart every time."

The home front is a war zone, too, in Jim Shepard's Kiss of the Wolf (Harcourt Brace, $21.95, 308 pp.), a deft, funny, disquieting thriller about the unforeseen eruption of violence in an Italian Catholic family in Connecticut. Joanie Mucherino, whose husband has abandoned her and their eleven-year-old son, Todd, is hurrying home with the boy from his Confirmation party when her Buick slams into and kills a man walking on the highway. She hides the evidence of the hit-and-run as well as she can, but in so doing orchestrates ever greater anguish for her son as she is forced to face her own capacity for wrongdoing and to find in her old flame, Bruno Minea, a friendly confidant whose own motives for helping Joanie may well be sinister. Kiss of the Wolf is a tight, tense, chilling novel about how human frailty and deception can offer a home to terror.

Eight great books, and the list is still far too short. Although people rightly bemoan what is happening to publishing, the fact is that American writing is as healthy and fascinating as it's ever been. I haven't mentioned half the fiction, histories, biographies, and books of poetry and theology I have profited from this past year. But I'll probably be thinking of them as I again trudge up the staircase.