Life at the Top

When we left Joe Lampton, at the end of John Braine's novel Room at the Top, he had clawed his way to the high life by marrying the boss's daughter. Ten years later, in Life at the Top, he has two children, is still working for the odious father-in-law, is still dissatisfied, and continues to have trouble keeping his zipper up. There is a soap opera quality to parts of this novel; Graham Greene would have called it an "entertainment" (and done it better). But it must be admitted that Braine's prose is congenial and his scenes at their best have a vivid, cinematic quality.

Portraits from Life

The pleasures of this book of literary profiles: Ford Madox Ford's fine writing, his talent for anecdote, and his clear-eyed literary assessments. As a bonus, the reader is directed to books he might have overlooked, such as W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions, and ones he should revisit, such as The Red Badge of Courage.

But Beautiful

By the time the reader gets to the chapter on Art Pepper and finds him face down in his own vomit, he will have had quite enough of Geoff Dyer's half-invented biographical sketches of jazz musicians. Which works out well, since Pepper is the last in the series and is followed by a much more useful general essay about jazz's history and meaning. Dyer is fixated on the drugs and drinking and suffering of artists like Bud Powell and Chet Baker because he believes that from this pain comes the beauty of the music. But he soon begins to sound like a sad voyeur.

Clean Young Englishman

The honesty, if that is what it is, of John Gale's account of his upbringing, travels as a reporter, and episodes of madness permits little of the self serving that pollutes too many memoirs. "'Damn me if I haven't wound up in the nuthouse,' I thought," he writes near the end about his confinement at age 34, in 1959. A manic depressive, he was released after undergoing electroshock treatment. The horrors he witnessed reporting the Algerian war could not have left him unscathed, a result all the more poignant given the apparent clear sailing of his life up till then.

Inez

This late, short novel by Carlos Fuentes is too gauzy for my taste; a little Ibero-American magical realism goes a long way. The two plot strands feature a Faust conductor and his diva and a prehistory couple at the time of an ascending patriarchy. I suspect the strands complement and reinforce each other, but frankly I couldn't be bothered to put it all together.

Mr. Peanut

Adam Ross's debut novel succeeds on several counts. It is eventful; things happen, surprises even, unlike in much of contemporary fiction, especially work from MFAs or the Iowa school. It is written in a graceful style, pleasing to the ear, that doesn't call undue attention to itself. Finally, it is put together like a puzzle box. The line between love and death is thrown into sharp relief.