Critics' choices for Christmas.

I cannot stand Philip Roth; he not only rips your insides out but makes you laugh in mid-vivisection. Every time I hear he has another book coming out, I know I'm in for a whole new world of hurt, even as I'm logging on to Amazon to pre-order. I could do without all the hype, too. Is his latest, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin, $26, 400 pp.), which imagines a world in which Nazi sympathizer Charles A. Lindbergh was elected president in 1940, really worthy of all the worshipful reviews?

Unfortunately, yes. You cannot not read this scary book. As you've heard, it's about how easily democracy can be undone by a complacent faith in our own goodness and in a president who tells us what we want to hear in really short sentences. (Here is Lindy's whole campaign speech: "My intention in running for the presidency is to preserve American democracy by preventing America from taking part in another world war. Your choice is simple. It's not between Charles A. Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It's between Lindbergh and war.")

In Lindbergh's America, the government's "Just Folks" program (described by the new Office of American Absorption as "a volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life") ships young Jews off to Kentucky tobacco farms--with the blessing of Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, a man perfectly willing to "kosher Lindbergh for the goyim" in return for frequent invitations to take tea with the First Lady.

By the time the stubbornly, heroically decent father of the character named Philip Roth sets off for Kentucky to rescue a former Newark neighbor who has been orphaned in anti-Semitic rioting, you, too, may be semihysterical, picturing tanks circling the White House as Dick Cheney explains why, for reasons of national security, the election results have been voided pending further notice ... Thank goodness, the author makes clear in a postscript, that this fictional work has nothing whatsoever to do with our current situation. That part you can skip.

Iris Origo's War in Val D'Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944 (David R. Godine, $14.95, 256 pp.) describes life on a remote Tuscan farm as a kind of surreal parade. There are children's birthday parties in the garden as warplanes buzz overhead, weeping German soldiers who want only to be sung to, and long-awaited Allied troops who, when they finally arrive, help themselves to the local women.

Origo was an Anglo-American woman raised outside Florence and married to a prominent Italian landowner. She describes her daily struggles--hiding deserters and feeding combatants from all sides--through a thoroughly practical rather than partisan lens. While you may wonder how anyone in her situation could have remained so completely apolitical, her almost preternatural remove is the power of this book, which reminds us how little sense war ever makes in real time:

  September 28, 1943: Meanwhile the Germans went to the door of that
  very house and while the Englishmen were still lingering upstairs
  asked the old farmer's wife in the yard whether she had seen any
  Americani. "Americani? No, certainly not!" she replied, in so
  convincingly blank a tone that the Germans, without bothering to
  search the house, went away again. When Antonio asked her about it
  afterwards, he saw that she did not even realize that her lie had been
  dangerous. "They might have put me in prison? Nonsense--what would
  they do with an old woman like me? Anyway, they asked for Americani,
  and we've only got Inglesi here!" So all the prisoners have got away.
  In every farm there is a deep regret at their going. Everywhere they
  have become a part of the family. They played with the children,
  helped the housewife with the chores, shared their rations--and bon
  citti (good boys) is the general affectionate verdict. On their side,
  too, there was an equal liking. Perhaps when they get home, to
  Yorkshire farms and Midland towns, they at least will speak well of
  the Italians.

This memoir, originally published in 1947, is hard to find, though it can be purchased online at www.godine.com. I received it as a gift, and even then might not have read it but for the fact that I had spent some time in the Origo family's palazzo in Rome when a friend was living there. Of the half-dozen books I read on holiday this summer, this was the one that has stayed with me.

Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole (Scribner, $13, 288 pp.) was not particularly well received when it was published two years ago. And I get how the moral dilemma of a hyperliterate underachiever who takes a job as an undercover scout for hog farms in the Texas panhandle may not be everyone's cup of coffee.

But when I picked up the book, on a whim recently, to read on a trip to the high plains, I found that Proulx's descriptive powers had in no way been wasted on its inelegant hero, Bob Dollar, or on a landscape so often described as merely flat:

   The great prairie dog cities of the short-grass plains which once
   covered hundreds of square miles were gone, but some old-fashioned
   red-tails continued to hunt as their ancestors, in flat-shouldered
   soar, turning methodically in the air above the prairie, yellow eyes
   watching for the shiver of grass. Many more had taken up modern ways
   and sat atop convenient poles and posts waiting for vehicles to clip
   rabbits and prairie dogs .... The ancestors of the place hovered over
   the bits and pieces of their finished lives. [Bob] didn't notice the
   prairie dog that raced out of the roadside weeds into his path and
   the tires bumped slightly as he hit it. A female red-tail lifted into
   the air. It was the break she had been waiting for.

Proulx is never sentimental, yet takes such a kindly attitude toward all of her odd, wind-burned characters--and the land itself is one--that you can't but feel some kinship with every last miscreant among them. In that sense, too, it's a perfect read for the season.

A contributing editor at Newsweek, Melinda Henneberger covers politics, and writes a weekly column on faith and social issues for Newsweek.com.