Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

This Anne Tyler novel reads like young adult fiction, or at least what I imagine that genre to be. An excessive use of adjectives (to "create a picture" that never emerges) is just one of its problems. Characters are freighted with so many thoughts and qualities that, rather than emerging into reality, they practically disappear. That's quite a trick, to achieve the exact opposite of what the writer's aim should be.

Time's Arrow

This Martin Amis novel might be described as a philosophical chew toy. A toy because the narrative of a man's life runs backward in time, starting on Page 1 with his death, giving a playful and at times humorous quality; and philosophical because that choice by the author would seem to be a supreme statement of fatalism. And yet, the story of a physician who served the Nazis' murder machine, when run backwards, has him saving Jews. He herds them them onto trains for home rather than to death camps; he withdraws injections of crippling poisons and restores them to health. There is nothing extraordinary about this man, but the reversal of time serves to shine a disturbing light on the problem of evil.

Sweet and Sour

This collection of newspaper columns from 1953-54 by John O'Hara is a mixed bag. Some of the material has not aged well, but O'Hara's reflections on the rich, publishers, Hemingway and Steinbeck, and his work in newspapers still merit attention. His suspicion of metaphors and his reliance on characterization and observation rather than plot in his novels are traits missing in too many writers.

Celia's Secret: An Investigation

This is a brief, entertaining account by the author of the play Copenhagen and one of its actors about a set of documents that surfaced during the run of the play that threw a strange new light on the subjects of the drama. Michael Frayn and David Burke alternate chapters as they unroll the mystery, which provides laughs as well as some uncomfortable insights into credulousness.

At the Book Fair

• A Singular Country by J.P. Donleavy, just in time for St. Patrick's Day.
• Sweet and Sour, a collection of newspaper columns by John O'Hara.
• This Way Miss by George Jessel, purely an impulse buy.
• Celia's Secret: An Investigation by Michael Frayn, bought strictly on the author's reputation.
• Complete Plays, 1920-1931, by Eugene O'Neill, a Library of America edition. It's a shame these plays (like The First Man and The Hairy Ape) aren't produced more often; I think they hold up as well as the later stuff. Strange Interlude is an enormous undertaking, but it was done to great acclaim in London about a year ago.

Wolf Hall

Why should it take three months to read a novel? Even at 600 pages and with a peculiar prose style, Wolf Hall should not have taken that long, but I was constantly finding a reason to put it aside. The rise of Thomas Cromwell is a story not much told, and the subplot of Thomas More's downfall is a useful counterpoint to the Robert Bolt treatment, but even so, it's an uncongenial book.

A Dry White Season

The apartheid system that forms the backdrop of this 1979 novel by Andre Brink has been extinguished, but the moral and ethical questions confronting the central character, a mild-mannered schoolteacher, remain relevant. In this way A Dry White Season is as useful, and timeless, as Darkness at Noon a quarter-century after the demise of Soviet Communism.