BY REYNOLDS PRICE

"  A   F l a g   f o r   S u n r i s e  "   b y   R o b e r t   S t o n e

Michael Chabon: The Swimmer by John Cheever Jeffrey Eugenides: Portrait of a Lady by Henry James Mary Gaitskill: The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo Dwight Garner: On the Road by Jack Kerouac Denis Johnson: Fat City by Leonard Gardner Cynthia Joyce: Mating by Norman Rush Gary Kamiya: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Mignon Khargie: Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee John Le Carré: Right Ho, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse Laura Miller: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Joyce Millman: Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris Joyce Carol Oates: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Andrew Ross: The Castle by Franz Kafka Scott Rosenberg: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien Ian Shoales: The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney Joan Smith: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Amy Tan: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Mary Elizabeth Williams: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Cintra Wilson: Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving

if I were required to select one novel, from the entire history of world fiction, to escape nuclear holocaust, I'd choose Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina." I've been reading it since I was 15 with only increasing admiration for its breadth and profundity. But Tolstoy will rank high on most such lists. So will Dostoevsky, Dickens, Flaubert, Proust and Mann. It may be more interesting to consider what novel I'd choose if permitted to save one example from, say, the second half of the 20th century. Again, I'd be torn between several favorites: James Salter's "A Sport and a Pastime," Scott Spencer's "Endless Love," John Updike's "Rabbit; Run," Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (not to speak of my own 10 novels). But a particular recent novel has developed an impressively respectable gravity in my recollection since I first read it, new, in 1981. It's the work of a living American, one who has slowly but with steadily strengthening power published five novels, unsurpassed so far as I know by his current peers. As in all Stone's novels, the story itself, the rhythm with which it's unreeled, the severity of the prose and the final resonance of all components are bleak, if not terrible. In brief, "A Flag for Sunrise" is set in the near-present in a Central American country poised for revolution and ruled by oppressors who are simultaneously credible as human beings and as supreme monsters. An aging Yankee priest, a young Yankee nun, a Yankee anthropologist, a reptilian local official, a vicious Hispanic U.S. Coast Guard deserter and a rich moil of smaller characters are folded together with the typical slow genius of Fate's cookery until they form a catastrophe that looks both insanely accidental and eerily providential. If one's penultimate response is horror, the final response is likely to be invigoration -- one of the Earth's endless tragedies has been watched and recorded by a sensibility of superb toughness, subtlety and an even-handed tenderness. Read it if you haven't; if you have, try the first five pages and see if you can resist the whole awful journey one more time. Reynolds Price writings include the novel "Kate Vaiden." His most recent novel, "The Promise of Rest," will be published in paperback in November, 1996. His "Collected Poems" will be published in May, 1997.