A Year in Provence

Peter Mayle avoids a pitfall I imagine many of these kinds of books fall into: the author coming off as a horse's ass. His year in France is told with modesty and flair.

The Assault

The Assault, by the Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch, is an affecting rumination on the persistence of history and the fog of confusion that envelops it.

The Magic Christian

Terry Southern's satire retains some of its bite more than a half-century later, but in other respects it (like the film Network) is a sobering reminder that seemingly farfetched idiocies do come true.

Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Thomas Mallon's success with Watergate, his novel reimagining that subject, gave hope that this book would provide a similar jolt in tackling the Reagan administration during 1986. But as entertaining as some of the gossipy conversations are (Nancy and her astrologer, Nancy and Merv Griffin, Christopher Hitchens and Pamela Harriman), the vaporousness of the president at the center of the story makes the novel ultimately disappointing. If Reagan's official biographer couldn't figure him out, there should be no points deducted for Mallon's ambiguity. But a reader will demand more from a real-life subject of a novel, an intensification, and with Reagan there is only fog.

Our Gang

This Philip Roth satire of Nixon, published in 1971, hits its target with unerring aim and vicious humor. The final chapter, with the assassinated "Trick E. Dixon" in Hell running for office against Satan, brings the whole enterprise to a suitably grave conclusion. Throughout, the parodies of Eric Severeid (Erect Severehead),  Billy Graham (Billy Cupcake), and others are dead-on. A mental search for writers who could execute such a brilliant satire today (against Donald Trump, say, or Hillary Clinton) comes up empty.

Butterfield 8

The sexual frankness of Butterfield 8 must account for a large measure of its success on publication. Even today its treatment of the main female character has the power to shock. As a document of "the way we live now" and thwarted dreams, it takes its place with classics of the period like Manhattan Transfer and The Beautiful and the Damned.

Van Morrison - On Hyndford Street (Live from Cyprus Avenue, Belfast)

Appointment in Samarra

A Greek tragedy, projected onto a snowdrift in anthracite coal country, fueled by booze.

Hope of Heaven

This short John O'Hara novel highlights, along with his skill at dialogue and characterization, the impossibility of his writing a bad sentence. The story, set in Hollywood of the 1930s, is a modest thing, but O'Hara makes it seem bigger.

Brandenburg

This spy thriller by Henry Porter only truly becomes the "gripping page-turner" advertised on the cover blurb around page 300 (of 550). Before then, and in parts afterward, it is mainly an account of people moving from here to there, getting in and out of cars, and entering and leaving hotels. Things happen, but where characterizations and political and philosophical digressions would be most welcome, they are mostly absent.