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.