The Big Laugh

On the back of my 1963 Bantam paperback of John O'Hara's The Big Laugh, a blurb calls him "America's most powerful novelist." Hemingway and Faulkner were dead, Dos Passos had moved on to other forms, and the generation of Mailer, Updike and others hadn't yet moved up to take their place. That leaves O'Hara, who was dismissed by many critics but whose books always sold well. The Big Laugh is a Hollywood novel with the O'Hara earmarks: long passages of pitch-perfect dialogue, a preoccupation with status and its markers, and crumbling relationships. O'Hara is nothing if not powerful, but who could hold that title today, in a landscape full of pipsqueaks like Jonathan Franzen?

Toujours Provence

This one is every bit as enjoyable as Peter Mayle's first run at the subject, A Year in Provence, with chapters on truffles, pastis, and Pavarotti.

The Empty Chair

Most of the pleasure in The Empty Chair, a volume of two novellas by Bruce Wagner centered on gurus and the search for enlightenment, comes from the author's electric prose. 

Arts and Sciences

Thomas Mallon's first novel captures the mood and culture of the early 1970s and presents a passable love story in an academic setting.

A Year in Provence

Peter Mayle avoids a pitfall I imagine many of these kinds of books fall into: the author coming off as a horse's ass. His year in France is told with modesty and flair.

The Assault

The Assault, by the Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch, is an affecting rumination on the persistence of history and the fog of confusion that envelops it.

The Magic Christian

Terry Southern's satire retains some of its bite more than a half-century later, but in other respects it (like the film Network) is a sobering reminder that seemingly farfetched idiocies do come true.

Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Thomas Mallon's success with Watergate, his novel reimagining that subject, gave hope that this book would provide a similar jolt in tackling the Reagan administration during 1986. But as entertaining as some of the gossipy conversations are (Nancy and her astrologer, Nancy and Merv Griffin, Christopher Hitchens and Pamela Harriman), the vaporousness of the president at the center of the story makes the novel ultimately disappointing. If Reagan's official biographer couldn't figure him out, there should be no points deducted for Mallon's ambiguity. But a reader will demand more from a real-life subject of a novel, an intensification, and with Reagan there is only fog.

Our Gang

This Philip Roth satire of Nixon, published in 1971, hits its target with unerring aim and vicious humor. The final chapter, with the assassinated "Trick E. Dixon" in Hell running for office against Satan, brings the whole enterprise to a suitably grave conclusion. Throughout, the parodies of Eric Severeid (Erect Severehead),  Billy Graham (Billy Cupcake), and others are dead-on. A mental search for writers who could execute such a brilliant satire today (against Donald Trump, say, or Hillary Clinton) comes up empty.