No Man's Land

The German novelist Martin Walser's No Man's Land was first published in English in 1989, the year the division of Germany collapsed. Its central character, Wolf Zieger, lives in the West and spies for the East. It's a testament to Walser's skill with characterization and his handling of the themes of identity that book retains its relevance even after the direct cause of the story's conflict has been removed. Walser puts a reader in mind of Max Frisch; he was also called by the New Republic the "closest thing the West Germans have to John Updike."

Hide & Seek

Ian Rankin's second effort in the Rebus detective series is a marked improvement over the first, despite an excess of sawdust stuffing.

The Good Cripple

This novel by the Gautemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa is, like his Severina, short and astringent. Taking as its subject a kidnapping, it touches on themes of friendship, revenge, and filial love. 

Love in Amsterdam

Piet Van der Valk is not a typical fictional detective, to judge by this first installment in the series by Nicolas Freeling. Set in Amsterdam, the story relies more on characterization than plot and has a satisfying sophistication. Van der Valk himself barely appears in the middle section of the novel, which fills in the life stories of the principals. What writer of detective fiction today could be so assured as to leave his main character out of the frame for 80 pages?

Knots & Crosses

The first novel in the John Rebus police series by Ian Rankin shows the hero to be a run-of-the-mill, if not positively dense, detective. But good pacing and Edinburgh color are enough to warrant giving book two a try.

Mozart: A Life

Paul Johnson seems determined to make of Mozart a moral exemplar: His attraction to dozens of women? It never descended to adultery. Freemasonry? He was still a faithful Catholic. Begging letters? They weren't what they seemed. A domineering Leopold? He was actually a loving father. In this way and others, Johnson's short biography is 180 degrees from the longer Beethoven biography referenced below. On the positive side, unlike John Suchet's vast silences on the subject of music, Johnson crams every page with facts about compositions and Mozart's working life, supplemented by extracts from his letters (and those of his father), with a small amount of personal information.

The Search

Geoff Dyer's second novel begins as a detective story and veers into Surrealism.

Harvest

Jim Crace's final novel generates gothic dread with its pre-industrial setting and strange vocabulary. Two plumes of smoke begin the tale: one signaling the arrival of newcomers to the outskirts of a farming village, the other the burning of the master's dovecote. At the center of the story is Walter Thirsk, a widower and relative outsider himself, although a "milk cousin" of the lord of the manor (they nursed at the same breast). The arrival of the three outsiders, plus a mapmaker and the master's cousin by marriage, portend trouble. Crace's prose seems to become more modern as the story unfolds, a subtlety that I may be imagining. In any case, the fable-like tale brings to mind the best of Par Lagerkvist.

Food: A Love Story

Most celebrity books have large type and wide margins, but Jim Gaffigan has produced an actual book of more than 300 pages (with a few photographs). Large sections of it seem lazy and dashed-off, but it helps to imagine it being read in the author's voice. 

Tanner's Twelve Swingers

Evan Tanner's intrigues continue, with the striking factor here that a Yugoslav defector whom Tanner must rescue has written a book that advocates splitting the country as a way to prevent war. Twenty-five years after the publication of Tanner's Twelve Swingers, the dissolution of Yugoslavia was instead the cause of wars.

Severina

A blurb on the back of this novel praising Rodrigo Rey Rosa's "surprising sobriety and economy of words" closed the deal. The Guatemalan author situates a love story in the context of a love of books: The woman of the title is a book thief; the man is the owner of a bookshop. The story, a quick 86 pages, is carried off with precision, polish, and an agreeable dash of ambiguousness.

The Canceled Czech

Lawrence Block's second book in the Evan Tanner series finds the agent behind the Iron Curtain looking to spring an aging Nazi from prison. The improbabilities multiply, but all in good fun.

The Two-Penny Bar

Maigret solves this one with some old-fashioned book work. And Pernod. 

The Blue Flower

A recommendation from William Nicholson, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald is a novel of sly wit. It is both a portrait of a time of intellectual ferment, with Goethe wandering in the margins, and a strange love story. Nicholson found it completely believable, the litmus test for any novel, but I see the author's winks and nods too often to be convinced. She writes, in any case, with a gorgeous style that reads like a combination of Evelyn Waugh and Anatole France.

Rich and Mad

Reading YA fiction past age 50 is a little silly, but this one is by William Nicholson, whose novels (and movies, like Shadowlands) I have enjoyed. There's no real suspense here about how things will end up between the main characters, but the journey is well done and includes a grocery list of adolescent challenges. Nicholson especially deserves credit for giving The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm a key role in the story. Young people could hardly do better than to consult that book on a subject that has unfortunately been deformed by culture and media into something trivial and, often, ugly.

The Open Door

The nature and importance of theater is explained lucidly and convincingly by Peter Brook. If all theater companies had to read and re-read this book, we'd have a theater that intensifies real life, works its will through surprise, and never bores.

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

"The point is to live." I will confess to getting stuck in some of the abstract thickets of Camus's essay, but the clarity and power of his central message, summarized in that sentence, ultimately shines through. Philosophers of old like Seneca taught their students how to live; Camus does likewise, echoing Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on." The other essays in this collection reveal Camus's affection for Algeria and his big-hearted view of the writer's role.

The Cold Song

Sprawling and at times unconvincing, this Linn Ullmann novel nonetheless delivers a nuanced portrait of a family in crisis. This is pure guesswork, but it seems that her publisher has indulged Ullmann lately; her last two novels are loose and overwritten. The first three are more powerful, as if they benefited from a stronger editorial hand.

The Colour of Memory

Geoff Dyer paints a vivid, impressionistic picture of gray, damp Brixton in The Colour of Memory, and gives his young characters a philosophical bent that comes through as genuine in the dialogue. With all that going for it, who needs a plot?

The Deportees and Other Stories

There is an element of improvisation in these Roddy Doyle stories, written as they were on a deadline in serial form. The magnet is reversed as Ireland, source of so much exile literature, becomes the attractor. "Fecking eejit" are the two words that come to mind whenever I hear Doyle's name, but a couple of these stories plumb beyond this welcome good humor to a deeper place.

The Children Act

Ian McEwan's new novel revolves around a 59-year-old family court judge in London, Fiona Maye, and a 17-year-old Jehovah's Witness whose family objects to a life-saving blood transfusion. It is a short, strong effort, although McEwan can't seem to make his characters wear their erudition lightly; it always thuds. As well, the prose style can get prissy, but perhaps that's just the impression created by the smirking author photograph.

Beethoven: The Man Revealed

Without his music, the man Ludwig van Beethoven would be unknown to history. I understand John Suchet's purpose in this non-specialist biography, but the scarcity of information about how and why Beethoven's music was revolutionary is frustrating. In particular, the break between the early symphonies, redolent of Haydn and Mozart, and the massive No. 3 needs a better explanation. One area where Suchet succeeds is in demonstrating how the personal situation of the composer, frequently dire, was no obstacle to his producing the most glorious music.

Indignation

The randomness of the universe and the high cost of maintaining principles: two themes that drive this Philip Roth novel to its inevitable (given his late output) dire conclusion.

Lionel Asbo: State of England

Years ago I read a book on English soccer hooligans, Among the Thugs, which, as horrifying as it was, described a subculture. With Lionel Asbo: State of England, Martin Amis tells us (in the subtitle, for starters) that those pathologies have gone mainstream. He paints a culture of gutter poor and gutter rich melded into one fetid stew, stirred along by the gutter (and "quality") press. The satire can be heavy-handed, but no one who has enjoyed, say, Tom Sharpe's South Africa novels will recoil. Amis also lets in a pinpoint of light to combat the darkness.

The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep

Lawrence Block's first novel in his Evan Tanner series, published in 1966, has the insomniac thief scampering back and forth across Europe, fleeing police and searching for a cache of gold. Along the way he sets off a revolution in Macedonia. A page-flipper with a dash of camp.

Nemesis

This Philip Roth novel is earnest, direct, and even a bit old-fashioned. I can imagine this same plot and themes being handled by Dreiser (more expansively) or Anderson (more floridly). The subject is a polio outbreak in Newark in the summer of 1944, so there are also faint echoes of Camus's The Plague. In all, a satisfying and bleak work.

The Humbling

This Philip Roth wet dream is agreeably short, 140 pages, and written with an admirable clarity. A subtitle might be, "There's No Fool Like an Old Fool."

Brief Encounters

The celebrity anecdotes in this Dick Cavett collection of essays are winning, as expected. Unexpected are the vivid and sometimes poignant recollections from a Nebraska adolescence, among them: a William Jennings Bryan statue at the state Capitol vandalized, a bittersweet Christmas story, and driving in freezing rain. I started this book thinking it was too bad there's no one like Cavett on TV today, but there might be when Stephen Colbert takes over the Late Show. Coincidentally in one of these columns written before CBS made that hire, Cavett makes the case for Colbert.

A Delicate Balance

Reading Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance leaves an impression that there is less here than meets the eye. The amateur intellectual matriarch, the drunken sister (comic relief), the petulant, hopeless daughter, the puttering husband, and two strange friends don't up add up to much more than the sum of their parts. Existential dread and a sordid secret can't put enough meat on these bones.

A Crime in Holland

Sending Maigret to Holland gives Simenon a chance to draw contrasts between the Dutch and French in matters of morals, behavior, and food and drink. Love and hate, however, cross all borders. After solving the crime, Maigret's remark is priceless: "And that's all ... What time is the next train for France?"

Night at the Crossroads

As if to prove that Maigret is not always sedentary, this novel has him throwing several punches, jumping into a well, and firing his gun. But these fireworks do not change what is underneath: a detective who has seen it all and who has, as his creator says, a credo of "understand and judge not."  

The Yellow Dog

It was Francois Mitterrand who said that one of the most important attributes of a leader is indifference. By which he meant, I believe, an aloofness to the white noise that will always surround a president. Jules Maigret must agree. He is described in this mystery as a "monument of placidity," and when leaders in a Breton town demand he do something about a series of attacks, his response is to hang up the phone or walk away. Indifferent to the extraneous things, yes, but not to the main game.

The Company of Women

A frank, unsentimental novel centered on sex is rare enough; Kushwant Singh's has the added benefit of providing a window onto Indian life and customs.

Old Masters

The torrents of negation that wash through this Thomas Bernhard novel are initially refreshing, yet run the risk of ultimately turning the book into a dead thing. What saves Old Masters from that fate are the flashes of affirmation, some even tender, that sparkle through the showers of bile. In a paradoxical way, this technique reveals Bernhard not as a curmudgeon but an arch sentimentalist.

The Wapshot Chronicle

John Cheever told the Paris Review about a writer who argued that Cheever could have been another Faulkner if only he had stayed in St. Botolphs, the setting of this novel. Reading The Wapshot Chronicle it is hard to disagree. There is a vibrancy and poignancy throughout, peppered with the picaresque. Leander Wapshot's memoir passages, written in a clipped style and revealing great depths, are especially effective.

Nosferatu

Jim Shepard's novel about the German filmmaker F.W. Murnau breaks his life into four parts -- youth, war, and two films (Nosferatu and Tabu) -- to reveal his character. It is that of an outsider, but perhaps more interesting than the director himself are Shepard's imagined but researched accounts of the technical challenges that faced Murnau in achieving his artistic objectives. At one point he is shown getting his hands dirty dressing a miniature set with floss doubling as grass. Cameras on wires crash and are rebuilt. Technology is invented on the spot, and work is the source of art.

The Beautiful and Damned

I'm not sure I would have noticed an aspect of The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald's second novel and the predecessor to Gatsby, or recognized it as clearly, had it not been pointed out in James West's introduction to the authorized text. It is this: The Beautiful and Damned is that rare novel in which a mature style is absent at the start but reveals itself by the final page. The novel's first hundred pages are earnest and overheated, almost mannered. But by the time Anthony and Gloria are married and reveling in their attitude of not giving a damn about anything, the author of Gatsby is clearly visible. In a subtler way, this evolution of style is also apparent in Streets of Night, the John Dos Passos novel of 1923 that precedes Manhattan Transfer.

Walkabout

James Vance Marshall's fable of a girl and her brother marooned by a plane crash in the Australian Outback throws into sharp relief the adaptability and resilience of children, at least in the pre-video game age. The siblings are mostly helpless and hopeless until they meet an Aboriginal boy on his walkabout, the test of survival that all young males must complete or die trying. The Westerners learn to communicate with him, and survive, in a landscape that is both forbidding and wondrous. Marshall tells his story simply, with a minimum of philosophical and religious gloss. He leaves that for the reader to supply.

Uganda Be Kidding Me

First funny, then tiresome.

Mr. Mercedes

Stephen King is a terrible writer, and the proof can be found on the rear flap of this book, which declares that he "is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers." Years ago I attempted to read Salem's Lot but quit after a few chapters; this time I slogged through the thickets of rotten sentences and sawdust stuffing and inane dialogue and pointless brand name mentions to the very end, page 436. Mr. Mercedes comes with a promise that is more like a threat: It's the first book of a trilogy.

At Last

The horrors of Patrick Melrose's childhood, except for a couple explicit incidents recounted in the earlier novels, could only be inferred from the wreck that his life became. With At Last, Edward St. Aubyn reveals the full scale of David Melrose's cruelty and perversity, and a Patrick some readers may have dismissed as a navel-gazer emerges as a damaged soul refusing to give up. (As a youth he carried around a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus.) As if to answer critical readers, Patrick himself takes a shot at the critics of navel-gazers, saying they are the ones who, despite all the advice to "get over" traumas, never get over anything because they simply forget. The concluding novel in the series is centered around the funeral of Patrick's mother, Eleanor. "The glory of his mother's death was that she could no longer get in the way of his own maternal instincts with her presumptive maternal presence and stop him from embracing the inconsolable wreck that she had given birth to."

Mother's Milk

Volume four of the Melrose series finds a whining and adulterous Patrick "obsessed with stopping the flow of poison from one generation to the next." His mother is being swindled out of her French summer home by a meditation guru; his wife is solely devoted to mothering their two boys, Robert and Thomas; and he himself seems to suffer from a locked-in syndrome in which every thought, desire, or deed is the entryway to a mental labyrinth that causes only torment. Waugh's people displayed an admirable stoicism and equanimity in the face of crisis. Patrick Melrose derides the New Age charlatan who has taken his family home, but he has more in common with the navel-gazers than he thinks.

Lost for Words

There is more suavity than slapstick in this Edward St. Aubyn satire on the literature prize racket. There is exactly one laugh-out-loud line in 261 pages, but plenty more sharp observations wrapped in idiotic behavior. As always, the prose style is impeccable.

Some Hope

There is Some Hope in this third book of the Melrose series: Patrick is off drugs, so is his friend Johnny Hall, and old George Watford's sincerity acts as a disinfectant to all the upper-crust rot. "One really has to try to make a contribution," Watford says. For Patrick, the trick is to "stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent." A party set-piece featuring a withering and nasty Princess Margaret provides the laughs.

The Carter of 'La Providence'

In this 1931 mystery, re-translated in 2014 for the Penguin series, Inspector Maigret himself becomes confused by the comings and goings of barges and boats through locks and canals, so the reader can be excused for thinking that La Providence is a bit muddled. It provides a peek into the people who transport cargo along the rivers of France, and a warning about dangers of the high life.

Bad News

Book 2 of Edward St. Aubyn's Melrose series begins with Patrick, 22, flying to New York to "collect my father's corpse." Like father, the son leads a vile life, but in a different way (he's a drug addict). Book 3 is Some Home. Whether "some" means "a measure of" or whether it is meant ironically is the question.

A Tale of Two Cities

What to call a person who gets to age 50 without having read any Dickens? A slacker, or worse. Reading this one is like drinking heavy cream after a diet of skim milk. Although plagued by a fair amount of throat-clearing, Tale also offers a richness of description and characterization and, in the case of Jerry Cruncher, a dash of humor, that make it irresistible. Knowing the plot in advance puts the watchmaker craftmanship on better display.

Detroit: An American Autopsy

Charlie LeDuff has a terrible story to tell about a city's collapse, and when he tells it straight it's compelling. Unfortunately, he too often slips into dime-store gumshoe mode and writes like a bad Raymond Chandler.

Never Mind

It is impossible to read Edward St. Aubyn and not think of Evelyn Waugh, but at the beginning of this project to re-read four of the five Patrick Melrose novels in preparation for the finale, the differences become more apparent. The snobbishness and cruelty of Waugh's characters was often light-hearted; St. Aubyn's people are more apt to be empty sadists. It's hard to blame the author for this; he is merely capturing his coarser world. As a stylist, St. Aubyn has a way with similes and metaphors such that the reader doesn't even mind when they're gratuitous ("The curtains billowed feebly and collapsed again, like defeated lungs"). The five-year-old Patrick Melrose of this novel is already damaged goods, with a wrecked mother and monstrous father. Waugh had God to provide an affirmative flame; what will St. Aubyn do?

The Price

Arthur Miller sets off a nice slow burn in this two-act play about estranged brothers who meet to dispose of their parents' furniture. Lightness arrives in the person of the 89-year-old furniture dealer. There is a whiff of O'Neill here with the family secrets, and a similarly satisfying conclusion.

True West

I am not sure people read plays much any more, but reading Sam Shepard's True West in about 45 minutes was a vastly more rewarding experience than sitting through an ineptly directed production later that day. This play is, on reading, full of laughs; nearly all of them were drained from the po-faced performance I saw. O'Neill's Strange Interlude, on its face a solemn piece, was played for laughs in a recent London production, to much acclaim. Theater, especially the local pseudo-professional kind, needs a much more Rabelasian attitude.

Unanswered Cries

This true crime book shows that even a seemingly ordinary murder can be an intense and page-turning drama if the author does meticulous, scrupulous research and keeps any overt "style" out of the way as the story unfolds. The details are what bring the themes to life.

Skios

Michael Frayn's farce, in the manner of Tom Sharpe, delivers comedy while poking half-seriously into issues like identity, causality, and academic nonsense.

The Great Pursuit

It is a coincidence that this Tom Sharpe novel about the literature racket reached my attention at about the time that Edward St. Aubyn published his new book satirizing the Booker Prize. Sharpe is outlandish as usual, peppering the text with lunatics and the lovelorn and adding large-scale set-piece disasters to drive the plot. The silliness of the human animal is a theme Sharpe returns to, fruitfully, again and again. And what makes the books work is that there is less sneering than sympathy. St. Aubyn could do a lot worse handing this theme than following Sharpe's lead. We'll see.

Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon

This is another Joe Queenan sneer-fest, in which he plunges his snout into what he might call "Suck Soup," or the worst of American culture. Although he seems to want to be a Mencken, Queenan more closely resembles the SNL character Drunk Uncle.

Summer House with Swimming Pool

Herman Koch, author of the provocative The Dinner, is back with a novel about a doctor, an actor, and their families on summer vacation. Some of the themes in that earlier work recur here, primarily the idea that you don't have to scratch a man too deeply to find the savage beneath. Hints are dropped like anvils, as when the doctor refers to "human filth." Whatever else one can say about Koch, there is no denying that he writes novels that demand to be consumed in two or three gulps.

Summer Reading

Three new novels look good for summer reading:

• Lost for Words, by Edward St. Aubyn. His books can overflow with similes, but St. Aubyn is always sharp, funny, and dead-eyed. This one parodies British literary society and the Booker Prize.
• Summer House with Swimming Pool, by Herman Koch. This is the Dutch writer who made such a splash with The Dinner. According to the Amazon summary, it's another sinister tale by an unreliable narrator. It will be essential to read no more about this book before cracking it open; friends who ignored this advice of mine with The Dinner regretted it.
• Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, by David Shafer. The author of Mr. Peanut recommends this first novel, about Big Data, and that's enough for me.

Train to Pakistan

Khushwant Singh's novel examines the communal violence in India in 1947 through the lens of a Punjab village of Muslims and Sikhs who had lived peaceably together for generations. The arrival of a "ghost train" full of corpses, and the instigation of a Muslim exodus, make it impossible for the villagers to remain isolated from the larger, terrible events around them. The novel's characters each reflect a facet of the conflict without becoming stock figures, and the ending is both shattering and deeply moving.

The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

The third in the series of new Simenon translations is a subtle and philosophical mystery about the dark places where "big ideas" can lead. These Maigret stories, though situated in 1930s' France, are both timeless and placeless: They achieve universality. And through them runs the figure of the detective chief inspector: "There was something implacable and inhuman about him that suggested a pachyderm plodding inexorably towards its goal."

Exile and the Kingdom

What Camus does so well in these stories is to show man at the limits of his existence. The moral, cultural, and artistic challenges presented are distilled to their purest form, without any extraneous matter. Much current fiction seems small when compared with these polished gems. "The Renegade," in which a Westerner captured by a demonic tribe comes to believe that "good is an idle dream," only to reject that thinking too late, is as harrowing as Heart of Darkness. "The Artist at Work" is a deft exploration of the nature of creativity and the leeches who attach to creators. In all of the stories a crystalline and direct prose style shines through.

Ending Up

Who are the novelists today who write about old people? With my limited knowledge of current fiction, I can't think of anyone. Kingsley Amis's 1974 novel, Ending Up, features a menagerie of five elderly characters living in one house, each with physical or moral shortfalls but all trying to muddle through (to the end) together. The tale is leavened with wry humor and Waugh-like wit: "Bernard said little; he was trying to reconcile his dislike of Trevor for having a lot of hair on his face with his dislike of Keith for having none, and found the task difficult until it dawned on him that of course Trevor was flaunting the fact that he was young while Keith was trying to pretend he was no different from anyone else."

The Late Monsieur Gallet

The second in the series of reissues of Georges Simenon's Maigret novels finds the detective traveling outside Paris to investigate a strange death in a hotel: A man has had half his face shot away and also been stabbed in the heart. In this rotten world, Maigret arrives not as an avenging angel but more of a resigned observer. The case will get solved, as usual, but the result is not cause for relief, much less celebration.

Europe in Sepia

Dubravka Ugresic, whose Starbucks name became "Jenny" after an abortive attempt at communicating her real one, is still adrift 20 years after leaving her native Croatia and being denounced there as a traitor. There is a chip on her shoulder, which makes for some strong essays on subjects like women's role in literature, the Internet, nostalgia for ex-Yugoslavia, and the consumer culture of publishing. The points are well taken, but I found myself wishing she would name names in many of the instances when generic attacks were offered instead.

Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler

It's clear what Joe Queenan doesn't like, although rarely why. In this collection of essays he spews negative adjectives all over the place, but after a while reading that a movie has all the earmarks of "high suck" gets old. Still, his breakdowns of dentistry, cannibalism and ear abuse in movies are entertaining enough, and his takedowns of Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen hit the bull's eye.

This Blinding Absence of Light

Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel is based on interviews with a survivor of Morocco's secret dungeon prison at Tazmamart. The prisoner's strategies for survival lean heavily on religion and a rejection of memory and hope. Although the novel highlights brute cruelty without reference to political philosophy, it finds echoes in Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

Blott on the Landscape

At the center of this Tom Sharpe novel, amid the pages of satire and absurdity, beats a moral heart. It belongs to Blott, "who would die rather than give up the right to be needed."

Indecent Exposure

The Buster Keaton-like calamities (exploding ostriches, e.g.) take center stage in this Tom Sharpe satire on the South African police, but at least a couple times he tips his hand. On p. 32, for example: "His professional task was to root out enemies of the state and it followed that enemies of the state were there to be rooted out." And p. 242-3: " 'Nothing like the threat of terrorism to keep the electorate on our side,' said the Minister of Justice." An optimistic reader might think that the practices so savagely ridiculed in a 1973 novel about South Africa would be extinct, but that reader would be wrong.

The Stranger

Today, Meursault would have been acquitted with a "stand your ground" defense (the Arab flashed a knife). He also bears a resemblance to our "whatever" type, but with this difference: His final revelation, far from being a negation, is an affirmation that "everybody (is) privileged."

Boomsday

Christopher Buckley should be called the cotton candy novelist: The books taste good, if a bit cloying, but are utterly forgotten 10 minutes after consumption.

Highcastle

Stanislaw Lem's reminiscence of his childhood in Lvov, Poland, in the 1920s and 30s is refreshingly devoid of retrospective reinterpretation. The child's life is explained from a child's eyes. Lem, like many children, was a tinkerer, but more unusually he was also a young bureaucrat, drawing up documents and passports and certificates with his own seals and using a clock part to make perforations. The imagination becomes constricted with age, but some can slip the noose.

Heroes Like Us

By the end of this novel by the East German Thomas Brussig, the pfennig, as he would say, drops. "How could our society have endured for decades if all its members had been as discontented as they claim?" This sentence, in common with what seems to be half the sentences in the novel, takes the interrogatory form and is answered only indirectly. The comic story of a daydreaming young Stasi agent, preoccupied with sex, ends with the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Behind the satire lurk some uncomfortable truths.

The Selling of the President 1968

Forty-five years after its publication, this account by Joe McGinnis of the TV advertising campaign to get Richard Nixon elected president is both quaint and startling. Quaint, because today all candidates use the image-building techniques detailed in these pages. Roger Ailes was proven entirely correct when he said that this was the way campaigns would be run "forevermore." But the book is also startling because of the candor from Nixon's team and the access they gave McGinnis. It is hard to imagine any of this material today escaping from the closed conference rooms of public relations or advertising firms. And what was true in 1968 seems even more true today: If the voters have become hypnotized by this kind of substance-free politics, it is because they want to be.

Cakes and Ale

Somerset Maugham has never disappointed me, not once. He is one of those writers whose books do not need page numbers because readers never have cause to look for them. As the paragraphs and chapters flow smoothly by, the character studies are always astute, the settings keenly observed. This tale of the early years of a grand old writer, seen from various angles, offers both Maugham's usual satisfactions and several surprises.

Not to Disturb

Muriel Spark's example of writing short novels is one that should be followed more today, even when the result, as here, is middling. Short, sharp and sprinkled with puns beats long, lugubrious and laden with imagery every time.

As I Remember Them

Nostalgia is a trap, but it's hard to get away from the idea that in some far-off "Golden Age" there were performers, not just celebrities. This reminiscence by Eddie Cantor contains chapters on well-known vaudeville and movie personalities like W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, and Jimmy Durante, plus capsules of a few performers like Bert Williams and Bea Lillie who won't be known to most readers today. The jokes are corny but produce a laugh, and the anecdotes, while mostly light-hearted, can turn poignant, as when Cantor tells how Rogers was so affected by a complaint from a clergyman about the morality of a play he was in that he dropped out and accepted an invitation from Wiley Post to fly around the world.

The Visit

You don't have to scratch too deeply below the surface of noble sentiments (justice, democracy) before the grubbier human instincts (greed, revenge) appear, Friedrich Durrenmatt suggests in this play.Yet the frequently funny drama also hints that material desires may be as lofty as any other human aim. Splitting the difference happens all the time in real life, but Durrenmatt seems to be saying it's not that easy.

Steaming to Bamboola

Christopher Buckley's account of a voyage aboard a tramp freighter in 1979 is sharply observed, funny, and full of sea lore.

The Safety Net

Heinrich Boll's 1979 novel is a time-release prophesy. What affected a prominent business family of the day in West Germany — surveillance, security, disappearing privacy — now affects everyone. One character warns that "this constant surveillance was causing mental distress leading to psychic damage." Another imagines drone warfare with flocks of mechanical birds carrying explosives. Other themes that resonate 35 years later include the rich who rail against socialism while ignoring that concentrated wealth dismantles the middle class, and the consolidation and trivialization of media. In the blink of an eye, Boll can take in the whole wide world.

Mad as Hell

The book can't compare with the movie, in this case, but Dave Itzkoff's Mad as Hell manages to throw illuminating light on the making of Network and the life of its angry screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky. Directed by the brisk and businesslike Sidney Lumet, Network comes off in this telling as a largely trouble-free shoot, with the exception of some nonsense from Faye Dunaway. The real drama came earlier as Chayefsky negotiated for control over the project. Itzkoff is especially good when he delves into the life of Peter Finch, who was an extreme long shot for Howard Beale when casting began but who performed the role unforgettably.

Pietr the Latvian

Penguin is publishing new translations of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret books, of which this is the first. The inspector leaps off the page, fully formed and in three dimensions. I suspect the pleasure of the succeeding stories will be derived less from the detecting and plotting, which are first rate in any event, than from the portraiture of this instantly likable policeman.

Lost Horizon

James Hilton's 1933 novel was made into a Frank Capra film a few years later, and its cinematic qualities are easy to spot: a plane crash, the survivors' trek through the mountains, and their arrival at a mysterious and serene Shangri-La (the name originates here). There is also a rather artificially binary dispute between the doomed outside world and this Eden populated by contemplative lamas. Stay or go?

Survivor

As entertaining as Chuck Palahniuk's flamboyant nihilism and wordplay can be, he is a bit of a one-trick pony. It's a nice trick, though. Still, Survivor's portrayal of the emptiness of celebrity comes off as quaint a mere decade and a half after publication.

Another Great Day at Sea

A full entry will need to wait till May, when this latest Geoff Dyer nonfiction work is published, but safe to say that anywhere Dyer goes (here, to the carrier USS George H.W. Bush), readers will enjoy following.

Irish Journal

On finishing Heinrich Boll's observations of mid-1950s Ireland, a reader might well wonder how much of that place remains. Boll himself added an appendix remarking on the centuries-deep changes that had occurred only a decade hence. But the rain must still be there, and the green and dirty Liffey, and Yeats's grave, and good tea. Boll finds and describes the folkloric and picturesque in a way that dissipates all mists.

Detective Story

A new member of the Corps (secret police) in an unnamed banana republic: "I actually thought we were serving the law here." His boss: "Those in power, sonny boy." The officer: "Up till now I thought the two were the same." Boss: "Fair enough, only you shouldn't lose sight of the order." Officer: "What order is that?" Boss: "Those in power first, then the law."

This novel by Hungarian Imre Kertesz from the 1970s should never have found parallels in the United States. But the naive were taught the hard way that exceptionalism is a myth and evil knows no borders.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Geoff Dyer has admitted to having trouble cooking up plots, which explains why the device of a journey shoulders a lot of the narrative load in his books, even the nonfiction ones. This novel shines a light on the contrasts between a decadent West and a bewildering East. Humor and pathos compete on the surface, but by the end a kind of rough and ready philosophy emerges.

Snuff

Sex is a dirty business — in two senses of the word — in Chuck Palahniuk's novelistic take on pornography. The premise is a 601-person sex act, but what actually occupies centerstage is Palahniuk's wordplay (porno title punning) and wit. The whole thing is about as erotic as a ham sandwich, which may be the point, and a whole lot funnier.

Metropolitan Life

This old bird is still peddling her bons mots to college students and appearing on television and in movies, most recently as a prune-faced judge in The Wolf of Wall Street. But she has written virtually nothing since this book and a follow-up made her a celebrity for a few years on either side of 1980. Reading the raves this collection received prompts some head-scratching. I guess the lesson is that wit, with very few exceptions, expires well before the author does.

Ironweed

There are spirits abroad in William Kennedy's Ironweed: They speak to Francis Phelan, reminding him of his past and that he has nothing to lean on but his guilt. Ironweed is a novel whose heartbreak includes the germ of an affirmative flame.

Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

Characters who aren't there dominate the William Kennedy novel Billy Phelan's Greatest Game: the missing father, the kidnapped son, the senile father, the lost infant. It is to the author's credit that these people take on a depth and life that is lacking in the out-front protagonists of many contemporary novels. The characters who are there, like Billy Phelan and the newspaperman Martin Daugherty, are positively gaudy. This is only partly due to Kennedy's skill with aphoristic dialogue. If that was all there was, this would be a pleasant entertainment in the Graham Greene mold. The deep political history provided (reminiscent of Faulkner in The Hamlet) and the excavation of family trauma (also Faulkner) bring this novel to a higher level. The addition of humor seems almost too much to ask, but it's there too.

Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk's first novel amounts to a call to destroy as a necessary first step in creating a new man, maybe even a New Man. Take a sledgehammer to the Elgin marbles, wipe yourself  with the Mona Lisa, his character intones, or remove your shoes and shirt and do battle at Fight Club. Palahniuk's achievement is to perfectly match his subject with a ragged, visceral style.

Choke

Chuck Palahniuk brings an electric jolt and playful humor to the themes of addiction, identity, and memory. It is an indication of how effective Choke is as a novel that I cringed to think what a po-faced member of the Iowa writing crowd would have made of this material.

Enjoying India: The Essential Handbook

This guide by J.D. Viharini focuses on the practical, cultural, and religious issues a Western traveler will face in India. The eyes-wide-open frankness may daunt a prospective visitor, but I suspect he will be grateful once the trip commences.

Social Studies

Any book with a blurb that proclaims it "laugh-out-loud" funny is bound to disappoint, and Social Studies has the added disadvantage of being written, as another blurb declares, by the "funniest woman in America." This collection of essays by Fran Leibowitz, who is a kind of a cross between H.L. Mencken, Erma Bombeck, and Woody Allen, has not aged well. There is a clever piece about comedy as a commodity, but much of the rest will have the reader wondering what all the fuss was about 30-odd years ago.