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.