Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations

This biography, begun in the late 1980s and abandoned after Frank Sinatra found out about it, was finally published in 2013. The reader doesn't get much from Ava Gardner's Sinatra years, but there is plenty (perhaps too much) on her first marriage, to Mickey Rooney. The account of Gardner's rural upbringing is excellently done. Her stories of old Hollywood, even half-true, reveal both her power as a sex object and her lifelong insecurity. She called herself a simple farm girl, but the transcript reveals a Bertrand Russell compared to dull-witted actors in the spotlight today.

Curtain

The last time I read this final case of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot was in 1976. The end of Poirot affected the adolescent reader strongly, and it is possible tears were shed. The puzzle's solution, long since forgotten, satisfies. I count it fortunate to have discovered Christie's books as a young reader. They expand the vocabulary (I looked up words like "postern" and "interstice"), teach Shakespeare and foreign phrases (French), take the reader to exotic places, and provide a sense of accomplishment on finishing that can lead (did lead, in this case) to a lifelong love of books.

The Circle

The Circle is not a great novel, but it is a necessary one. The explosion of technology and the erosion of privacy have been met with barely a peep of skepticism. Dave Eggers takes up a sledgehammer, not a scalpel, in dissecting how today's shibboleths can lead to tomorrow's horrors. In the 1950s, Bill Buckley said his magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." Eggers, at least, is yelling today.

Doomed

In the second part of Chuck Palahniuk's religious fantasy, young Madison Spencer of Damned returns to Earth as a mischief maker and possible prophet. In her world, Darwin is a myth and the Bible is real. A practical joke played on her parents has turned people on to Boorism as a ticket to Heaven, and bad behavior is the norm. Madison's adventures are entertaining enough, but the real nourishment comes from Palahniuk's humor, social criticism, and aphorisms about theology, philosophy, and love. There is: "Why do the impulsive notions of a would-be do-gooder always translate into the ideals of the next civilization?" Or: "The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited." And: "What two people don't say to each other forges a stronger bond than honesty."

Bookart #6

The design is eye-catching, and the hole in the cover (through which the red part shows through) is a first in my experience (outside of children's books).

Bookart #5

Given that this is Chuck Palahniuk, it's probably best to not wonder what the white dripping stuff is. The creepy multicolored eyes are a nice touch.

Rickles' Book

Don Rickles' autobiography leaves a taste of sweetness, not bile. He is probably too old-school to settle scores publicly (if indeed he has any to settle). While some of the anecdotes trail off into awkward cul-de-sacs, there are enough bits and pieces and photographs to carry a reader through.

Here's Johnny!

Ed McMahon's book, not surprisingly, is less an appraisal of Johnny Carson than an appreciation done in superlatives and half-remembered anecdotes. Amid the fluff there are nuggets pointing to what made Carson special. His rapid wit and insistence that the show not be overly planned were two halves that made a bigger whole. Late night today lacks anyone who excels at both parts of this equation. Jimmy Fallon has a reasonably quick wit but his show is overplanned; Jimmy Kimmel is lacking on both fronts; Craig Ferguson's show is unplanned (obnoxiously so) but his wit is not sharp, just weird; Conan O'Brien can't pull his eyes off that blue card telling him what to talk about; Letterman hasn't been funny for 25 years; and I'm not sure Leno ever was.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

The Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic taps into the folkloric figure of Baba Yaga in two stories that demonstrate the marginalization of women, particulary the old. The third section is a primer on mythic witches and their fables, including an analysis of the stories the reader has just finished. The stories themselves lack propulsion, but their themes are worth pursuing in our youth-obsessed culture.

Damned

I read Chuck Palahniuk's Diary before starting this blog and couldn't tell you a thing about it, except that I remember an appealing trenchancy. Damned is likely to stick in the memory longer, being an account of 13-year-old Madison Spencer's trip to Hell. The story begins as a Breakfast Club, with Madison in "detention" with a jock, cheerleader, geek, and punk. She is the daughter of a Hollywood power couple who jet off to Bhutan or Burundi every few weeks to adopt another sibling. Palahniuk is mordant and funny throughout: The English Patient plays endlessly in Hell, and Madison believes she's there because of a "marijuana overdose." The girl possesses both great wisdom and the limitations of a 13-year-old, a combination that can be jarring at times, but most readers will want to roll with it. Just think Joan of Arc.

One for the Books

Joe Queenan's One for the Books contains few, if any, bad sentences, a wealth of judgments (some questionable, like his decision to not read Manhattan Transfer), humor, and something worthwhile on virtually every one of its 244 pages. Opening at random to page 82, you find this about the novels of Anita Brookner: "They are a bit like Chieftains records: Unless you're a hard-core fan, you probably don't need more than one of them in your collection."

Johnny Carson

Henry Bushkin's portrait of Johnny Carson during the 18 years that he was the TV star's lawyer reveals a darker side audiences never saw. Carson's mother, Ruth, comes in for much of the blame for her son being unable to return love, care for his sons properly, or maintain a marriage. She was a cold, selfish woman by many accounts. Bushkin's fly-on-the-wall biography is both frank and affectionate.

The Plague

At once a work of philosophy, theology, and psychology, The Plague is above all an examination of the human heart. People become their true selves in extreme situations that peel back the accretions of convention and delusion. Camus is ultimately an optimist on the subject of human nature, making this work a provoking, affirming flame.

The Racketeer

The expansion of the federal criminal code and the overreach of federal authority are background themes in this John Grisham page-turner. Reliably entertaining.

Get Ready for Battle

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's portrait of an Indian family, circa 1960, is elegant and wise with a dash of humor. The characters in Jhabvala's book are characters, somehow bigger than life but firmly circumscribed by reality. She also makes use, sparingly and therefore effectively, of overlapping dialogue when people talk around and past one another, giving these scenes a dramatic and comic intensity. And she simply writes beautifully, as here: "The shops were all lit up with electric bulbs and the barrows with flares of naphtha light, and there was music blaring out of various radios, sweet-sad music played at top volume, and horse-drawn carriages came trotting through with a merry jingle of bells from the harness of underfed but bravely plumed horses."

The Fall

One cannot escape guilt; one can only dilute one's own guilt by judging the whole world guilty. Whether this program as a practical matter will produce serenity or insanity isn't clear. (The narrator's scale tilts toward the latter.) But if serenity is just another word for obliviousness, and insanity is another word for for intensity, which is preferable?

Camus lays out a catalog of modern ills as backdrop to his tale, including this that resonates today: "We no longer say as in simple times: 'This is the way I think. What are your objections?' We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communique: 'This is the truth,' we say. 'You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right.' "

Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir

Ezra Pound supplies anecdotes, letters from the front, an explanation of Vorticism, and 30 illustrations in this memoir of sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. It is actually less about Gaudier than about Pound making the case for vibrancy in art as against superficial "prettiness." Pound can throw a poisonous dart, as when he calls the Tate Gallery a "sink of abomination" that has, by refusing a Vorticist's work, "rushed further into the sloughs of stupidity."

Ladies and Gentlemen

Adam Ross's outstanding novel Mr. Peanut led me to this collection of short stories. The work can stand with Cheever in tone and characterizations; there's not a single dishonest or tactical sentence; and the reader gets the added bonus of some surprise endings (the best kind: those that in hindsight aren't surprising at all).

Bookart #4

A sharp 1926 design from Boni & Liveright.

A Virtuous Girl

When Maxwell Bodenheim's publisher was hauled into court on an obscenity charge for the novel Replenishing Jessica, the book — all 272 pages of it — was read out to the jury. The result was almost instant acquittal. Many of the jurors had trouble keeping their eyes open during the recitation of the "evidence." I think I know how they must have felt during that 1925 trial, having just taken a seeming eternity to finish this 1930 effort of 260 pages. The theme is hammered from the opening page: a 17-year-old girl in 1900 who is vital and alive and yearns to live genuinely and fully, against a stultifying and prudish cast of adults who are dead, dead, dead inside. The prose is heavily ornamented with adjectives, as befits Bodenheim's poetical past, and often overheated. But it is a fire that gives off little light.

The ending, however, is effective, and Bodenheim offers a critique of mass media that still stands today when he has the girl (listening to records) think: "If you could sit down in a chair all the time and have everything brought to you — sights, music, words — you'd never have any adventures yourself ... just eat up the bold or laughy things other people were saying ... just be an open bag — everything pouring in, nothing coming out ... couldn't keep yourself from getting fat and dull and crazy ... " Sounds like a kid with an XBox.

Motherland

William Nicholson's novel may start by treating love as it is generally treated in books and movies — as an impulse or a stroke of lightning — but as the sprawling tale proceeds love takes on aspects more complicated and fraught. The story contains a brilliant set-piece on the failed British landing in Dieppe in 1942 and plenty of historical color from India and Jamaica. The characters struggle through traumas, thwarted desires, and loss, and do not shrink from addressing moral and religious dilemmas directly. This, as in Nicholson's earlier Sussex novels, is a breath of fresh air in a world of literary fiction that can be obtuse and petulantly ironic.

Savage Messiah

H.S. Ede's biography of artist Henri Gaudier is told mostly in the form of letters from Gaudier to his beloved companion, Sophie Brzeska. The letters make clear the difference between a true artist, who works tirelessly at his craft, and a false one like Brzeska whose literary efforts were ingrown and ultimately unfinished. It is a testament to Gaudier's character that, even in the throes of poverty, he would offer his sculptures to admirers for free. Gaudier was killed in World War I at the age of 23.

My Father's Fortune

It is a strange book that a reader finds detestable at page 70 and endearing at the finish, but that is Michael Frayn's memoir. The negative reaction is caused by Frayn's habit at the outset of describing perfectly ordinary people (and events) as if they were superhuman (or supernatural). One relative is "exotic" because she is a typist. But when the Second World War rolls around, the book offers a detailed and sensitive picture of life under threat of instant death. And after Frayn's mother's death at the close of the war, the family portrait is splashed with brighter colors.

The Last Friend

In a repressive society, friendship can be more lifeline than trifle. That is the case in this Tahar Ben Jelloun novel set in Morocco starting in the 1950s. When school chums Ali and Mamed are thrown into a military re-education camp for some harmless dissident activity, a 30-year friendship is born. The story is told from both sides and from a third party. Jelloun manages to illuminate the specific (political and social life in Morocco) and the universal (the foundations of friendship, or love).

The Wilt Alternative

Henry Wilt, the anti-hero of Tom Sharpe's Wilt, is back with quadruplet daughters, a bigger house, and the same vexing wife, Eva. The wild plot includes genital mutilation and a terrorist siege. But there are also a few detours into more serious matters. As Sharpe puts it near the end of this comic novel, referring to Wilt but really to everyone, "No one ever understood him: no one ever would. He was a creature of infinite incomprehensibility and the world was filled with idiots, himself included."

Bomb Power

Gary Wills's 2010 examination of the imperial U.S. presidency and ballooning national security state could not be more timely. He traces the growth of secrecy and the state of constant war-in-peacetime to the atom bomb, which was developed in secret and exploded on presidential command. The need to secure bases, and nations, from which to launch these new weapons, combined with the Soviet threat, led to the growth of a military and espionage apparatus largely outside the control of Congress and therefore in violation of the Constitution. Only a slumbrous, ignorant public could have acquiesced for so long to the idea that "the president knows best."

Evil Eye

This book of Joyce Carol Oates stories, subtitled "Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong," reveals a dark and frightening side of human relations. One tale, "The Execution," is a flat-out cribbing of a true story featured on television crime shows about a college student who takes an axe to his parents, with an ending twist. The eerie and stark stories show that love, even deformed, wants to triumph.

Leaving Tangier

An exile can leave his country, but he can never escape himself. Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story of a brother and sister who seek a better life in Spain, just eight miles across the sea from Tangier, but who are thwarted (or debased) at nearly every turn. Leaving Tangier is, like Manhattan Transfer, an argument for the idea that novels are as good a way to learn about the world as histories.

Black Water

Joyce Carol Oates puts her clean, idiosyncratic prose (many of the sentences are fragments and the punctuation isn't standard, but readability and rhythm don't suffer) to work retelling the incident when Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge and a young woman died. In some ways this short novel is a horror story, as it describes the black water rising and the woman furiously trying to escape the submerged car. Where it expands into the woman's memories and hopes, it becomes pitilessly sad.

My Reading Life

I've not read Pat Conroy's fiction — his basketball memoir My Losing Season was enjoyable — and after this accounting of his prose style and literary heroes, I probably won't be rushing off to read the doorstop-sized Beach Music or others of his novels. But give Conroy this: He knows his books can be too lush, too filled with advectives and adverbs, too overheated, and he simply doesn't care. A child weaned on Gone with the Wind and Thomas Wolfe was never going to be the next Hemingway. Conroy tosses around metaphors like they are gold doubloons, when at best they are those coin-shaped chocolates wrapped in golden tinfoil.

Have a Nice Day

Dubravka Ugresic, Croatia's greatest living writer, wrote this collection of newspaper articles, subtitled "From the Balkan War to the American Dream," in America after leaving her inflamed homeland in the early 1990s. Asked why she did not stay to record the wars of ex-Yugoslavia, she answered simply: "I'm afraid of blood." The essays dissect life in New York and Connecticut in the clear-eyed method of the outsider: with no illusions, many generalizations, and all the while aiming for connections to the deserted homeland. Some of the pieces have a microscopic, Dos Passos quality of observation. Others are lyrical. There is even humor. Through it all, Ugresic manages to achieve the rare effect of unintentional moral superiority.

Broken Glass

Part of the enjoyment in reading Alain Mabanckou's novel Broken Glass comes in finding the dozens of literary references that seed the text. Titles like The Feast of the Goat and The Autumn of the Patriarch pop up as part of the narrative; expressions like "strait gate" suggest other books (Gide in this case); and the narrator himself, Broken Glass, is a kind of Hemingway-Faulkner, drinking and writing with equal fervor. There are no periods in the text; it is separated only by commas and type breaks. Other writers who have managed this trick successfully (Thomas Bernhard, Friedrich Durrenmatt) have a new member of their club. The tale, set in Congo-Brazzaville, includes all kinds of damaged and striving characters in all kinds of desperate situations. A pungent, not a pretty, book.

Turtle Diary

Russell Hoban's novel consists of alternating first-person chapters about two loners, a middle-aged male bookshop clerk and a middle-aged female writer, who are connected by their desire to set zoo turtles free into the sea. Sensitive, sharp, and not without humor, it is both a fine study of character and of life's meanings. The turtles simply are, which is a lesson the humans come in time to learn.

Wilt

For many readers, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is the archetypical man of angst. I prefer Henry Wilt, the Tom Sharpe creation who debuts in this novel. Wilt teaches at the "Tech" (Lord of the Flies to plumbers), has a dimwitted and nagging wife, and gets mixed up with an inflatable sex doll (Judy) with outrageous and hilarious results. The sharp elbows on display in Sharpe's first novel in 1971 are still there in Wilt, published in 1976, but the author has now come fully into his own and buffs the prose to a high sheen.

Riotous Assembly

The four-barrel elephant gun that makes an appearance early in this Tom Sharpe novel devastates everyone (and every tree and shrub and hillock) in its path. That is a good metaphor for what Sharpe is about in savagely satirizing South African apartheid society. But the modern reader should not laugh too loudly or tut-tut too sternly: Innocent people condemned to death, unwarranted surveillance in the name of fighting terrorists, and official cover-ups are not unknown in the more "enlightened" quarters of the globe today.

Verdi's Shakespeare

Garry Wills examines Verdi's three operas based on Shakespeare: Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff. The best stuff is where he explains the workings of the theater in Shakespeare's day and the painstaking efforts of Verdi to match singer to character. When it falters, the book becomes merely an annotated plot summary of the works.

Henry and Clara

Thomas Mallon's skill at spinning fact into fiction in his latest novel, Watergate, led me back to this 1994 work. In it, he uses two characters on the periphery of history to paint a portrait of an era, a war, and a family. The characters of the title were in the Lincolns' box at Ford's Theater on the night of the assassination. Henry and Clara is a big, old-fashioned novel written in Mallon's winning style.

Some Do Not ...

Ford Madox Ford creates, in Christopher Tietjens, a pillar of rectitude in a crumbling world. Although set during war, a war which in fact damages Tietjens badly, the battlefield makes no appearance. Instead it is in the homes and clubs of Edwardian England where the breakdown is shown to occur. Tietjens is the last good man; his mistress is perhaps the last good woman. What chance can they have?

Porterhouse Blue

Memory plays tricks. I remember this Tom Sharpe novel as being full of belly laughs, but a second reading 20 years later reveals it to be more wit than pratfall. It is no less satisfying for that. The character of Skullion, head porter at Cambridge's fictional Porterhouse College, deserves to go down as a mythic figure in literature as defender of tradition against a new master. His name itself — evoking skull, skullery, hellion, even scorpion — is cause for a smile whenever he appears. No one is protected from Sharpe's poisonous pen, and the Buster Keaton-like calamity, when it comes, provides the laughs of memory.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

The authorities tapping phones, journalists making things up, reputations destroyed — the storyline of Heinrich Boll's slim novel from 1974 will resonate with readers four decades later. As in Group Portrait with Lady, but here on a smaller scale, Boll assembles facts from documentary sources, all fictional, into a beautifully forged dagger aimed at the heart of German (or any) society. What makes the critique all the more damning is the matter-of-fact presentation of the "facts" and the author's sardonic remove.

The Dark Room

In an effective, understated way, action becomes meaning in Rachel Seiffert's three-piece novel of ordinary Germans dealing with war. In the first two parts, especially, there is little explication. The characters — a German, born in 1921, with a physical defect who becomes a photographer; and an adolescent on the run in 1945 with her siblings — simply go from here to there and do this and that, witnesses to a Germany either heading into war or in ruins afterwards. The third section, set in the late 1990s, more traditionally addresses issues of guilt and responsibility, with the characters making plain in words the trauma caused in a family when the past is unearthed.

Puckoon

Spike Milligan's humor is dry and sly. This short novel about the Irish border being drawn through the town of Puckoon contains at least a smile, if not a chuckle, on every page, although many readers will tire of the absurdist pyrotechnics long before reaching the end.

Strange Interlude

This 1928 Eugene O'Neill play is running in London through August, cut from its original five hours to about three and a half. I saw an apt description of the published work on a website: high-brow soap opera. But in London one of the characters is being played, apparently successfully, mostly for laughs. With this in mind, the reader can stretch the work beyond its limits on the page. The play also benefits from O'Neill's technique of having characters speak thoughts that are heard only by the audience. Nina is the center of the play, a professor's daughter who loses her beloved in World War I. The ghost of this character, Gordon, haunts her throughout the play, following her into an ill-advised marriage, an abortion, an affair, and other travails. The title is referred to directly twice: The first time it represents the actual living present, which is the strange interlude between the memories of the past and the hopes for the future that make up real life. Not all of the characters are thwarted, but Nina ends up in a placid, otherworldly existence stripped of all conflict. Is that life? It can be.

Gone Girl

Good writers are able to paint vivid descriptions in a few quick strokes. Bad writers pile on the adjectives and neologisms and end up with an unbelievable mess. It doesn't take many pages of Gone Girl to learn that Gillian Flynn falls into the second category. She overdescribes and overwrites nearly every scene. At more than 400 pages, this pulp entertainment works as a page turner, just, but would have greatly benefited from a 100-page pruning.

Gantenbein

I remain a fan of Max Frisch, but this novel was a chore, even soporific at times. It is a series of variations on two imagined lives. One character, Gantenbein, pretends to be blind so he can observe how people really behave. These are the most fruitful scenes, often delivering a jolt of insight. At other times, the novel lives up to its English title in a previous edition, A Wilderness of Mirrors, and becomes a numbing labyrinth.

The Tom Sharpe Project

Summer is a good time for Tom Sharpe, so I've decided to make a project of reading (in some cases re-reading) all 16 of his novels in chronological order before season's end. Is there anyone writing today like him? O'Rourke and Buckley are thin beer, comparatively. Maybe Michael Frayn? I've not read him but have his latest, Skios, on my list. The world is in dire need of a new Tom Sharpe.

Tom Sharpe

The British novelist Tom Sharpe has died, aged 85. I remember sitting on a plane somewhere waiting to take off, my nose buried in one of Sharpe's books, perhaps Blott on the Landscape. I came to a passage that made me laugh, and then continued reading and laughed harder, and then went back to the start of the passage and laughed so hard that tears were popping from my eyes. I hurt my side. Literally. Since this was pre-9/11, I wasn't carried off the plane for interrogation. Tom Sharpe was, as the obituaries said, like a cross between Wodehouse and Waugh, multiplied by LSD. I think I came across his books poking around a used bookshop in London about 25 years ago. The sad occasion of his death provides a happy excuse for re-reading his work.

Five Chiefs

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens recounts his experiences with Chiefs Vinson, Warren, Burger, Rehnquist and Roberts. While generally good-natured, the memoir has an element of score-settling, especially with Rehnquist on the subject of sovereign immunity. The inside baseball doesn't always appeal (an explanation of the color-coding of briefs folders, for example), but peeks into the workings of the court are useful. And who knew that each justice is provided with a spittoon?

India Calling

Born in America to Indian parents, Anand Giridharadas returns to India to assess that nation's social and economic remaking. The conflicts between traditional and Western ways of living are brought into relief in an anecdotal approach. It turns out that the old ways that so many young Indians are rushing away from are also a source of security and comfort when Western individualism falls short.

Watergate

Thomas Mallon might just as well have called this novel "The Women of Watergate." Into the foreground come Pat Nixon, Rose Woods, Alice Longworth, Dorothy Hunt, and others who have since assumed minor roles in the public's memory, including on the male side Mississippian "bagman" Fred LaRue. The line between fact and fiction quickly becomes irrelevant as Mallon touches up characters with color and supplies their every utterance with the quality of a quip.

Bookart #3

Beneath the dust jacket, on white boards, is the bugging device (and wires) suggested by this sharp design.

The Sense of an Ending

Literature, capital L, is supposed to intensify normal life. Julian Barnes knows this; his narrator in The Sense of an Ending says as much early on. And yet this short novel has the mountain-out-of-a-molehill feel of On Chesil Beach: fine writing, astute observations, some flashes of power, but small in the way that England is small.

Heat and Dust

Parallel lines never meet, but in this perceptive novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvla the parallel lives of two women in India a half-century apart do touch. The 1923 strand follows a British official's wife who takes up with a minor Indian prince. Despite the declarations of all the old India hands, including her husband, that they know the country best, it is the newcomer who feels at once at home, even during the insufferable heat. The post-independence thread has a more optimistic and modern outcome. Throughout, the author's crystalline, gorgeous prose propels the reader forward. Her characterizations may not go deep enough for some, but discerning readers will appreciate the Greene-like sophistication and remove.

I Only Roast the Ones I Love

Jeff Ross's memoir-cum-instruction manual is a cut above the usual celebrity fare. His putdowns invariably strike home, producing what Arthur Koestler called the human body's only "luxury" reflex: laughter. Although I would argue that, for a sane life, laughter is more necessity than luxury.

The Man Who Outshone the Sun King

Nicolas Foucquet is not a name that will ring many bells, but anyone who has seen his magnificent home of Vaux-le-Vicomte near Melun, about 50 miles from Paris, will not soon forget it. The financier responsible for this edifice eventually ran afoul of King Louis XIV and ended up spending the last two decades of his life banished in an Alpine fortress. With a deft and clear style, Charles Drazin has chronicled the rise and fall of Foucquet against the background of war, insurrection and intrigue in 17th century France.

Endgame

In Endgame, author Frank Brady provides an admirably detailed biography of world chess champion Bobby Fischer. The reader who is familiar with the game, however, will be left wanting more about the nature of Fischer's dominance over the board. I suspect the chess content was watered down in the interests of appealing to a wider audience.

Narcopolis

There must be something about being a drug fiend that makes the fiend think he is fascinating. But as this novel by Jeet Thayil shows, it ain't necessarily so.

491

This novel by Swedish author Lars Gorling might be described as a cross between Lord of the Flies and A Clockwork Orange. Told in the first person by an adolescent offender who is sent to an experimental group home, the narrative is full of offensive behavior (including a dog having sex with a woman) that created a sensation when it was published in the 1960s. A film of the book was widely banned. If the point is alienation and generational disconnect, that message comes through loud and clear.

Bookart #2

Sometimes a cover is enough to close the deal. This intriguing Grove Press dustjacket from 1966 did the trick.

My Paper Chase

Harold Evans, a prominent British newspaper editor, would have done well to prune this 580-page memoir. There's much here to enjoy, especially for journalists interested in inside accounts of major events like the Irish Troubles. But in other areas, like his early life, this renowned editor needed an editor.

Zebra and Other Stories

The turning points of childhood often have a purity that, with adults, is missing. For adults, in literature at least, major events tend to be bitter traumas; there is little room left to learn. These stories by Chaim Potok, which feature children, are elegant accounts of adversity and growth.

Being Dead

Ten years ago I read, and hated, Jim Crace's novel Genesis, so it was with reluctance that I picked up his Being Dead from a 3-for-$12 shelf at the antiquarian book fair. I already had two books and, with nothing more that I wanted, it would have to do. A lucky stroke, as it turns out, because Being Dead is a thoughtful, intense, sharply written novel. Two middle-aged zoologists are murdered at the seashore; their bodies begin to decay; their daughter searches for them; the police find them. That's it in a nutshell, but within those borders Crace explores the biology, theology, and poetry of death. For the daughter, the deaths are sad but also liberating. Death is universal and inescapable, so it is regrettable that modern society has turned it into an unmentionable. Crace remedies that.

Chronicles: Volume One

The world has Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson to thank for Bob Dylan, to judge from the singer's frank and entertaining autobiography. The account slips back and forth in time effectively, starting out in New York in 1961, scrolling back to Minnesota, flashing forward to miserable years in Woodstock and a middle section devoted entirely to the recording of a single album in the 1980s, and wrapping up with a return to the early 1960s with the singer on the cusp of fame. Dylan never lets the reader get too close. He's all business when it comes to music, soaking up influences and techniques like a sponge. His personal life is treated at a remove. To hear him tell it, all he wanted to do was take care of his family; the "voice of a generation" stuff never made sense to him. His favorite politician was Barry Goldwater because he reminded him of Tom Mix. An odd man with a plan.

Tula Station

The ingredients of Latin American literature — multiple narrators, time shifts, impossible love — are here in spades. For good measure, the Mexican novelist David Toscana adds the "found manuscript" device. The result feels too much like a pastiche to leave a lasting impression, although there are effective and sly touches throughout Tula Station.

Fatherland

Robert Harris appears to be a can't-miss writer. His Pompeii, The Fear Index, and Cicero novels are entertaining and historically intelligent. This is his first novel, an alternate-history speculation in which the Nazis were not defeated in World War II. Suspenseful and seemingly effortlessly written, Fatherland follows a Berlin police detective investigating the death of a retired high-ranking Nazi. It's 1964 and President Kennedy is in the White House: Joseph Kennedy, John's father. Germany is preparing to celebrate Hitler's 75th birthday. Harris carries it all off with elan.

Pym

Mat Johnson's novel, a mixture of fantasy, social commentary, and literary detective work, begins promisingly but begins to wheeze about halfway through. It was a chore to finish. Fantasy must be believable to be effective literature, and too often Pym comes off as half-baked. Fiction is not true, but neither can it be false.

The Move

This Georges Simenon novel, from late in his career (1967), has a smutty feel to it. It hides what it believes to be dirty behind what amounts to a wall with a peep hole. It is the story of a man in his 30s who moves with his wife and teenage son out of Paris to a new housing development. In his bedroom, while his wife is sleeping, he hears through the wall the sexual exploits of a couple in the next apartment. This topples him off his perch of middle class respectability, into a downward spiral that eventually brings him to question the very value of societal norms. Halfway through this brisk, 148-page novel, I read a People magazine piece from 1980 in which Simenon claimed to have slept with 10,000 women. That made this novel a little easier to understand, though no pleasanter.

Serenade

James M. Cain (1892-1977) is best known for his novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, which were made into films. Serenade, also made into a film, is a lesser-known book published in 1937 that taps into Cain's interest in music and singing. The plot is about as wild as could be imagined: washed-up opera singer lands in Mexico, meets a prostitute, agrees to go to Acalpulco to help her manage a brothel, gets stuck in an empty church during a thunderstorm, miraculously recovers his voice, smuggles the prostitute to Los Angeles on a freighter captained by an opera-loving Irishman, becomes a movie star, and ... that's just the half of it. There's not much violence, but the hard-boiled label still fits because of Cain's frank, for the time, approach to sex. There is a world-weary directness throughout that is very appealing, and as a stylist Cain hits the bull's-eye.

A Farewell to Arms

I doubt there is single simile in this novel. I can't remember one. For me, a judicious use of similes is one of the best ways a novelist can bring events and personalities into sharp, three-dimensional focus. Hemingway's genius here is to achieve that clarity and depth using the bluntest of tools. But the surface realism is an illusion: A Farewell to Arms is more like a dreamscape. The only time you are conscious of reading a novel is during the (few) instances when characters make philosophical statements. These are like road markers on the trip through the dream.

The Redbreast

This Norwegian crime novel by Jo Nesbo arrived in the mail from a former colleague who shares a fondness for translated fiction. The hero, an Oslo police detective named Harry Hole, is full of the angst and life failures that plague his breed. The novel reaches back into Norway's collaborationist history in World War II and threads it into the present. All the pieces lock into place by page 500 with a satisfying thunk.

Steppenwolf

Words to live by? Hermann Hesse's novel could certainly be called that. Straddling the theoretical and the practical, it is a search for and a journey into the nature of existence. Conceptually we are all a multiplicity of entities, but with both feet on the ground the book argues the importance of dancing and laughter.

Killing Floor

To see what all the Jack Reacher fuss was about, I picked up Killing Floor, the first installment in the series. The text, 407 pages in paperback, contains probably 300 pages of what I would call sawdust: Reacher eating eggs, Reacher buying supplies, Reacher driving somewhere, Reacher eating more eggs. When you actually get to an action scene, it is more likely than not a disappointment, carried off in a deadpan manner. The clipped non-sentences take some getting used to; but after about 100 pages the reader has stopped trying to find merit in the prose and is simply flipping through to get to the next action sequence. There is some suspense here, but there's too much other stuff or, more accurately, stuffing.

Measuring the World

This novel by Daniel Kehlmann can take its place beside historical fictions like The Way to Paradise and The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa. Although lighter in tone than those works, Measuring the World is, like them, packed with ideas and sharply drawn characters. Kehlmann even skillfully carries off the technique that Vargas Llosa has perfected of interweaving plot strands in the same paragraph. The reader will believe he is consulting a colorful historical account of the two scientists involved, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, rather than a novel.