Everything You Know

Zoe Heller reminds me of Mordecai Richer. Her novels are sharp and funny, and her sentences flow smooth as a mountain stream, with always the right words in perfect rhythm. Her characters, enormously flawed, teeter on the edge of caricature but never quite fall in. Her novels' poignancy is wrapped inside humor, which makes it all the more affecting.

The Man Within My Head

Pico Iyer's writing style is not felicitous. He often approaches his subject crabwise, backing into his points and putting too many words between subject and verb. And this book, which makes connections between the author and Graham Greene, the "man within his head," has the added defect of being repetitive. All that aside, this is an interesting study, more of Greene than of Iyer, that gives an appetite to read, or re-read, the novels of the conflicted voluptuary.

They Eat Puppies, Don't They?

For a country as big as the United States, there seems to be a shortage of satirical political fiction. I can't think of anyone in the field other than Christopher Buckley. This novel is a quick read and mildly entertaining, certainly nothing approaching Waugh or even Mordecai Richler in terms of style or humor. Its mustiness will put some readers in mind of 1930s Hollywood screwball comedies.

The Lawgiver

The doubts Back to Blood prompted about an old writer's ability to connect with contemporary life have been overturned, at least for today, by this epistolary novel by Herman Wouk, age 97. Consisting of faxes, e-mails, Skype transcripts, notes, and text messages, The Lawgiver revolves around an Australian billionaire's attempt to produce an epic film of the life of Moses. Wouk places himself in the cast of characters, struggling in Palm Springs to write his own long-desired novel on the subject. The workings of Hollywood, religion, and love are mashed together in a funny, vibrant stew.

Drop

I heard about Mat Johnson through the Dos Passos Prize, which he won and which is named for one of my favorite writers. This novel, Drop, would have found favor, I think, with that earlier author, whose Manhattan Transfer was described by a contemporary as an "explosion in a sewer." In Drop there is an almost literal explosion in a toilet. The sights and sounds of rough Philadelphia, its crazy and desperate people, come alive in Johnson's deft similes and piquant descriptions that sometimes veer into verse. The narrator, young but not so young, finds his talent in advertising and strikes out for London. His adventures and misadventures result in the first truly surprising ending I've read in a novel in recent memory.

Back to Blood

I've always enjoyed Tom Wolfe's writing and, with the exception of a short piece here and there, I've read all of it. His new novel, alas, demonstrates that he has lost it. Back to Blood is a series of researched, fictionalized anecdotes carried out by plywood characters. No matter how mightily Wolfe labors to breathe life into these people, they do not live. If this book were cleared of Wolfe's tics and presented as an anonymous work, I doubt anyone would publish it. There are many embarrassing moments showing that this 81-year-old man, no matter how many guided tours he takes, cannot capture contemporary experience. A character "iPhones" someone else, a usage I've never heard once. In one scene, a doctor supposedly carries out a "takedown" of a 60 Minutes reporter. But the interview shows nothing of the kind. The "Grand Inquisitor" is reduced to a mumbling mess, but the doctor has done next to nothing to demolish him. The scene falls utterly flat.

Throughout, there is a mixture of sawdust stuffing ("It was lunchtime, and students were coming out of the building and heading here and going there") and cluelessness ("Nestor happened to look at the big glass case he was beside -- and what the hell was that? Those shelves didn't just have pastries and cookies, they had wrapped up foods..."). The second quote is from a scene in which a 25-year-old policeman is supposed to be flabbergasted by his first trip to a Starbucks.

In Hooking Up, published in 2000, Wolfe was already lost. The "trends" he cited there were either over, peripheral, or nonexistent. Since then he's only fallen further behind. Back to Blood is a sad denouement to a worthy career. Or, as the saying goes, there's no fool like an old fool.