The Moviegoer

There is something overheated and unattractive about The Moviegoer. The novel is rich in ideas, contradictions, poetical prose and sly humor. And yet.

Acquainted with the Night

Heinrich Boll's novel of postwar Cologne depicts a ruined city and its half-ruined people struggling to emerge from the rubble and dust. There was a Blitz here, too, as non-Germans may forget. Fred and Kate, whose marriage has been deformed by the destruction of the city, narrate alternating chapters. They are both ordinary and exemplary, as good literature requires. With Boll, too, there is a Catholic element that leavens the text.

The White Tiger

After reading putrid novels by Ian McEwan and J.M. Coetzee, both of whom have been honored with the Booker Prize, it should not have been a surprise that this novel, the 2008 prize winner, is a disaster. It is less challenging and less subtle than many comic books. Stylistically, it is inert. There is plenty to learn about modern India in its pages, but it is hardly literature. Or is the Booker Prize for children's books?

The Incomparable Atuk

After three overheated and over-serious "young man's novels," Mordecai Richler found his voice in 1959 with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Atuk, published in 1963, is an attack on human folly of the type that Richler would soon come to perfect in both novels and essays. "I'm world famous," one character says, "all over Canada." That one-liner sums up Richler's wit and his purpose perfectly.

Presence

The six stories in this collection by Arthur Miller are direct and engaging. Themes of loss and longing are treated with transparent sensitivity and flashes of humor. A New York Times reviewer gets it exactly right in saying that the stories "depend little on the pared nuance and carefully staged epiphanies" of much contemporary literature.

One More Story

A few of the stories in this collection by Ingo Schulze are slight or drizzle to an end, but others show the polish and concluding snap that the best short stories require. Schulze's insights into human connections are commonplace, but his settings -- rural Estonia, a Germany in transition, Egypt -- often provide the needed spark.

Therese Raquin

This early work by Zola was called a "sewer," and, truth be told, some of the scenes are gruesome even by today's standards, particularly the chapter set in a morgue. The novel, a story of adultery that could appear on any given Friday on an episode of NBC's Dateline, heralded the birth of naturalism. If early practitioners could be crude, they should also be thanked for clearing the air and setting the stage for the realist, unblinking novels of Anderson and Dreiser and their ilk, who in turn cleared the way for the modernists. As Orwell said, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Now All We Need Is a Title

Titles catch the eye and remain in the imagination, but their origins and meanings can be lost. This collection by Andre Bernard offers brief explanations of several dozen famous book titles. One anecdote will give an idea: Somerset Maugham noted that people complimented his titles but often didn't know what they meant. In the case of The Moon and Sixpence, he said, "It means reaching for the moon and missing the sixpence at one's feet."

Green Thursday

Julia Peterkin's connected set of stories tells of the travails of rural blacks at the beginning of the 20th century buffeted by every kind of misfortune: natural, man-made, and spiritual. A rooster plucks out the eye of a child in a crib; an old woman burns down a neighboring house to preserve her own; pangs of an unmentionable love stir in an adolescent girl. Peterkin's use of black dialect -- "ebry," "gwine," etc. -- is a legitimate technique, but taken to extremes it brings a choppiness to the text that dialogue pitched slightly more toward standard English would avoid. Still, Peterkin was the one who lived on a plantation, and listened to the stories, and her sensitivity shines through.

Lanzarote

Michel Houellebecq's short novel contains themes developed further in Platform (tourism, sex) and The Possibility of an Island (cloning, sex). Easily read in one sitting, Lanzarote will give the uninitiated appetite for more Houellebecq. Its descriptive passages could even inspire a trip to the island itself.