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.