Blue Nights

In Joan Didion's world, there are nothing but exemplary people and status markers. Natasha Richardson  didn't just cook; she "did a perfect buerre blanc." When Didion's daughter wed, the cake came from Payard. The whole work is dusted with brand names. Everything is pitched upward, is unassailable. The clueless intellectual is a stock figure, but he exists. I think of Edmund Wilson not being able to figure out a checkbook and getting taken for all his money late in life. In Didion's case, a loose baby tooth might require a trip to the emergency room. Drilling into everything with a colossal intellect, she comes up with dust.

Dropped Names

The quality of this memoir by Frank Langella is derived from the quality of his interlocutors. It rises above Hollywood tittle-tattle because many of the actors and others presented have intellectual heft, a wicked sense of humor, or an obnoxious personality — and sometimes all three. It seems inevitable when reading anything remotely honest about show business to conclude that actors are sad, sad people.

The Centaur in the Garden

If only all magical realism were as effective as this novel by Moacyr Scliar, a tale of the centaur son of Jews chased from Russia to Brazil in the 1930s. What makes it work is an emphasis on realism with a light touch of the magical. The reader will not doubt the existence of the centaur. Even if the thoughtful treatment of themes of alienation, love, and faith was absent, that fact alone should earn the novel high praise.

And Even Now

This 1921 volume of essays by Max Beerbohm is pure pleasure. In it, among other things, he: investigates why a statue of King Umberto in Italy is cloaked; imagines the fate of an anonymous clergyman who dared to speak to Dr. Johnson and was cut to the quick; burns a novel by a woman who annoyed him; watches a boy build a house in the sand and then delight in its destruction; imagines a missing, vast portrait of Goethe and speculates on why it was never finished; and much else. What Beerbohm can do so well is to bring his erudition and felicitous writing style to bear on any number of subjects, and then spin out the piece with his creative imagination. There are a few misses here, primarily those essays in which he sets himself up as the schoolmaster, but much more often the arrows find their targets.

When That Rough God Goes Riding

Greil Marcus, who writes in a labyrinthine, showoff style, is at his best in this book (subtitled Listening to Van Morrison) when he excavates songs from the 1968 album Astral Weeks. He unpacks the lyrics, digs into the emotions, and charts the musicians' interplay. Too often, though, the work is gauzy and tentative. It is also marred by unaccountable errors, including misidentifying a song title (Linden Arden is given as "Linden Arlen") and a person (Haji Akbar, who appears on an album cover, is called Pee Wee Ellis). Marcus's dismissal of 17 years of Morrison's output, from 1980 to 1997, is also wrong, but he at least makes an interesting case.

Bluebeard

This short Max Frisch novel, his last, is titled after a 17th century French fable about a nobleman who murders his wives. In Frisch's tale, a physician in his mid-50s is acquitted of killing his sixth wife. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that "not guilty" is not the same as "innocent." The story is told mostly in dialogue among the doctor, prosecutor, and witnesses. It reads in a flash, accompanied by visions of the stage play it could easily become.

Panama

This 1978 novel by Thomas McGuane revels a little too much in its outrageousness. By the end of the first chapter, a character has snorted cocaine off the sidewalk, masturbated in a grocery store toilet, and nailed his hand to a door. Yet there is some crackling and funny writing here, like the line describing a character who "looks like a circus performer who's been shot out of the cannon one too many times." McGuane also delivers a colorful portrait of a raucous Key West. Critics savaged McGuane for this one, which he considered his best. For me, it falls into the category of interesting books that will never be re-read.

Billiards at Half Past Nine

This novel marks another landmark in Heinrich Boll's mapping of the German soul. It is notable that the words "Nazi" and "Hitler" almost never appear in these books, which nonetheless excavate the times and thoughts of a nation with an archaeologist's care. What constantly impresses is how Boll can paint good and evil in such subtle colorings that are at the same time brilliantly vivid.