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."