Lost Horizon

James Hilton's 1933 novel was made into a Frank Capra film a few years later, and its cinematic qualities are easy to spot: a plane crash, the survivors' trek through the mountains, and their arrival at a mysterious and serene Shangri-La (the name originates here). There is also a rather artificially binary dispute between the doomed outside world and this Eden populated by contemplative lamas. Stay or go?

Survivor

As entertaining as Chuck Palahniuk's flamboyant nihilism and wordplay can be, he is a bit of a one-trick pony. It's a nice trick, though. Still, Survivor's portrayal of the emptiness of celebrity comes off as quaint a mere decade and a half after publication.

Another Great Day at Sea

A full entry will need to wait till May, when this latest Geoff Dyer nonfiction work is published, but safe to say that anywhere Dyer goes (here, to the carrier USS George H.W. Bush), readers will enjoy following.

Irish Journal

On finishing Heinrich Boll's observations of mid-1950s Ireland, a reader might well wonder how much of that place remains. Boll himself added an appendix remarking on the centuries-deep changes that had occurred only a decade hence. But the rain must still be there, and the green and dirty Liffey, and Yeats's grave, and good tea. Boll finds and describes the folkloric and picturesque in a way that dissipates all mists.

Detective Story

A new member of the Corps (secret police) in an unnamed banana republic: "I actually thought we were serving the law here." His boss: "Those in power, sonny boy." The officer: "Up till now I thought the two were the same." Boss: "Fair enough, only you shouldn't lose sight of the order." Officer: "What order is that?" Boss: "Those in power first, then the law."

This novel by Hungarian Imre Kertesz from the 1970s should never have found parallels in the United States. But the naive were taught the hard way that exceptionalism is a myth and evil knows no borders.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Geoff Dyer has admitted to having trouble cooking up plots, which explains why the device of a journey shoulders a lot of the narrative load in his books, even the nonfiction ones. This novel shines a light on the contrasts between a decadent West and a bewildering East. Humor and pathos compete on the surface, but by the end a kind of rough and ready philosophy emerges.

Snuff

Sex is a dirty business — in two senses of the word — in Chuck Palahniuk's novelistic take on pornography. The premise is a 601-person sex act, but what actually occupies centerstage is Palahniuk's wordplay (porno title punning) and wit. The whole thing is about as erotic as a ham sandwich, which may be the point, and a whole lot funnier.

Metropolitan Life

This old bird is still peddling her bons mots to college students and appearing on television and in movies, most recently as a prune-faced judge in The Wolf of Wall Street. But she has written virtually nothing since this book and a follow-up made her a celebrity for a few years on either side of 1980. Reading the raves this collection received prompts some head-scratching. I guess the lesson is that wit, with very few exceptions, expires well before the author does.

Ironweed

There are spirits abroad in William Kennedy's Ironweed: They speak to Francis Phelan, reminding him of his past and that he has nothing to lean on but his guilt. Ironweed is a novel whose heartbreak includes the germ of an affirmative flame.

Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

Characters who aren't there dominate the William Kennedy novel Billy Phelan's Greatest Game: the missing father, the kidnapped son, the senile father, the lost infant. It is to the author's credit that these people take on a depth and life that is lacking in the out-front protagonists of many contemporary novels. The characters who are there, like Billy Phelan and the newspaperman Martin Daugherty, are positively gaudy. This is only partly due to Kennedy's skill with aphoristic dialogue. If that was all there was, this would be a pleasant entertainment in the Graham Greene mold. The deep political history provided (reminiscent of Faulkner in The Hamlet) and the excavation of family trauma (also Faulkner) bring this novel to a higher level. The addition of humor seems almost too much to ask, but it's there too.