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.