The Grand Banks Cafe

This Maigret story, like others in the series by Georges Simenon, excels in its understanding of human impulses, desires, and fears. The mystery here is solved, cleverly enough, but the heart of the story is the excavation of the characters' flaws. Through it all Maigret sips on his beer and puffs on his pipe, seeing everything and judging nothing.

Gut

Giulia Enders's Gut explains the digestive system and ranks its importance on a par with the circulatory and nervous systems. If the gut continues to be "underrated," as the subtitle maintains, it won't be her fault.

Sweet Tooth

Tedious, arid, and unconvincing are the words that come to mind as the reader trudges through the nearly 400 pages of Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth. Writing about an attractive woman in her early 20s in the first person must have been done on a dare; even at a remove, McEwan couldn't vivify such a person in prose to save his life. And his sex scenes are as awful as ever. No steak; not even any sizzle.

Haunch Paunch and Jowl

Samuel Orntiz's novel captures the pageant of immigrant life in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the years straddling the turn of the 20th century. The Jewish experience is presented in vivid detail by the ambitious and clever narrator, Meyer Hirsch. Starting off as a boy in a street gang, Hirsch ascends the ladder of power through all means open to him, legitimate and otherwise, to eventually become the caricatured bigwig of the title. A stream of consciousness device is used sparingly and effectively as Ornitz's characters confront the issues of poverty, politics, religion and love.

About a half-century later Mordecai Richler would mine this same vein, but in Montreal, in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Haunch Paunch and Jowl is a worthy ancestor.

Go Set a Watchman

This novel by Harper Lee succeeds on many levels, which makes the largely negative reaction it has received puzzling. It may be that by taking the "tin god" of Atticus Finch, as one character refers to him, down to earth, the book has committed a crime equivalent of telling a five-year-old that there is no Santa Claus. Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, who had "barnacled" her morality to her father's, gets a rude awakening on a trip home from New York when she learns that he attends white racists' meetings and thinks blacks are too primitive for self-government. This Finch, paradoxically, is consistent with the one in Mockingbird because that story was set in the 1930s, a time when blacks posed no threat to white power and he could magnanimously defend an obviously innocent man without fear of wider consequences. This story takes place in the 1950s after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which poses a very real threat to the kind of society that Finch wants to protect. Beyond the racial elements, there is a good deal of gentle humor, especially in Jean Louise's flashbacks to her childhood and adolescence. 

The Big Money

The concluding volume of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. is a heartbreaking, panoramic portrait of America in the 1920s. The striving characters are blunted at nearly every turn, and even their successes contain the seeds of future failure. The high point is the Camera Eye chapter on the Sacco and Vanzetti case with its declaration that "all right we are two nations." A great novel never loses relevance; The Big Money meets that standard.

Finders Keepers

Although this second installment in a planned trilogy by Stephen King is an improvement over the first, the parade of cliches and tin-eared dialogue marks it as a true sibling to Mr. Mercedes. On page 268, the reader finds: "A week from now, all this will be over, he tells himself. The thought brings him some comfort," and thinks: "One-hundred and sixty-three pages from now, all this will be over. The thought brings him some comfort."

Thais

Thais is best known today as an opera by Massenet. Its source is Anatole France's 1890 novel about a monk whose consuming desire to reform a courtesan leads him into a pit of degradation. The tale is set in Egypt during the reign of Constantine, a time when Christianity had yet to establish its dominance. Thus, the skeptic France has one character asking: How are we supposed to believe in Christ when even the peasants no longer believe in the old gods?

Woodcutters

Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters finds the author in a familiar spot: sniping from the sidelines, this time at an artistic dinner (his italics). In the course of the evening the narrator considers friendship, the arts, suicide, and the wisdom of the aged. His spite and revulsion ultimately devolve to another familiar spot: a kind of love.

Hope: Entertainer of the Century

Hope by Richard Zoglin is as close as anyone is likely to come to a definitive biography of Bob Hope. If it falls short, perhaps it's the subject's fault: When you get past the manic energy and self-promotion, spiced up by greed and adventurous sex, there really isn't much inside the man. Did Hope create the monologue? I will take Zoglin's word for it, but Carson will go down as its master practitioner. Yet Hope was a success in all media: vaudeville, Broadway, radio, television, movies, even books. There was a comic book about him that ran for 18 years. His joke writers deserve much of the credit (or blame) for his success, but he could ad lib, dance and sing. The numbers his TV specials pulled will never be surpassed: The medium is forevermore too fragmented. He worked like a Trojan, and quit too late. Zoglin's portrait is hardly affectionate, but is more credible for that.