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.