The Accident

In this final book of Elie Wiesel's trilogy, a damaged character (in all senses) comes to accept life and banish the ghosts of the dead. If that takes lies and a manufactured love, so be it.

Based on a True Story

A few years ago, Norm Macdonald's book club on Twitter lifted the veil and revealed his penetrating interpretations of world literature. His memoir, sly and clever and funny as it is, rings down that veil, which is doubtless the better commercial decision but still a bit disappointing.

Dawn

The second book in Elie Wiesel's trilogy, Dawn, explores how brutality breeds brutality. 

Lancelot

In this engaging, funny, and occasionally horrifying novel, Walker Percy offers both a critique of the modern world and a prescription for a new one. So skilled and persuasive is the prose that the reader barely notices the audacity of the enterprise.

Sanctuary

Faulkner called this novel a "cheap idea," and a reader today is still capable of being shocked by the scenes of voyeurism and the presence of the infamous corncob. But in accessing the deepest, darkest parts of the human soul, the writer has produced a worthy and lasting novel.

Home to Harlem

Claude McKay's novel of post-World War I Harlem is striking to a later reader because of its use of dialect and its characters' emphasis on the importance of skin tones. The book might be called a Manhattan Transfer of black people, as it creates a vivid portrait of a community with all its hopes and flaws.

Across the River and Into the Trees

Hemingway's last big novel, published in 1950, tells of a middle-aged American colonel's love for a young Venetian countess. The food and wine and hunting are there, as well as the mannered dialogue. A cold book about a doomed love.

The Torrents of Spring

I came across a 1930 issue of The American Mercury in which Sherwood Anderson wrote an affectionate piece about Hemingway and Faulkner, which shows his big-hearted nature given that both of those authors had mercilessly satirized him in print. Torrents, Hemingway's effort, is very funny for anyone who has read Anderson and a curiosity for those who haven't. I like the idea of an online reviewer who wrote that this book is not just pure cruelty; it is Hemingway's farewell to a way of writing as he struck out for new territories.

The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway grants one quick peek beneath the surface near the end of this novel when he has Lady Brett Ashley say, "You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. ... It's sort of what we have instead of God." Otherwise it's bars, restaurants, taxis, hotels, bulls, and some snappy and occasionally very funny dialogue.

The Garrick Year

Margaret Drabble's second novel displays her subtle and perceptive understanding of human behavior, in this case that of a couple with two young children who spend a summer in the countryside where the husband is a stage actor. 

Dear Mr. M

Herman Koch's Dear Mr. M is a tricky, subversive novel that offers a little bit of everything: a mystery, an exploration of the role of the novel and novelist, a young adult novella, and more of the corrosive misanthropy that made The Dinner and Summer House with Swimming Pool so popular. The second of his books in English was a bit of a repeat of the first, but Dear Mr. M successfully strikes out for new territory.

Tribe

Sebastian Junger has written a vitally important book because it explains something that is right in front of our faces but which we do not see: the destruction wrought by the atomization of society. As he details, it is a trait reinforced by genetics over thousands of millennia that humans survive in crises by taking care of one another. Absent crises, in this modern, largely comfortable world, the impulse toward community is short-circuited. The result: depression, PTSD, suicide, opioid abuse, political demagoguery, mass shootings, hopelessness, isolation. 

Days of Wrath

This Andre Malraux novel from 1936 contains elements and themes that would appear four years later in Arthur Koestler's landmark Darkness at Noon. With Malraux, the prisoner is a communist in a Nazi jail; with Koestler, the prisoner is an old communist imprisoned by new communists. Malraux's work is impressionistic and poetic in parts as it plumbs the imagination and memory of Kassner, who is picked up after a routine but heroic act that saves the lives of several of his comrades. The account of his time in prison has parallels with Koestler's work, such as the tapping between cells that becomes a lifeline of communication. Kassner's airplane flight to safety through a storm in mountainous terrain is done in a dreamlike and hypnotic style. Full of philosophy and abstractions, Days of Wrath returns movingly in the end to the importance of the human touch.

Touchstones

Mario Vargas Llosa's wide-ranging interests and lucid thinking are on display in this book of essays published in English in 2011. The literary pieces are signposts to books that the reader can, with assurance, profitably pursue, given the author's impeccable taste. Perhaps most striking in 2016 are two essays on the Peruvian dictatorship, whose main players and attributes have found a sickening echo to the north.

Black Like Me

In 1959, John Howard Griffin tinted his skin and became "black" for several weeks in the South. His account of that experience is as vital and instructive today as it must have been nearly 60 years ago. Perhaps most disturbing was his contact with white men who gave him rides only to pressure him with lewd and offensive questions about the supposed sexual behaviors of black people. The angry glares from white people and daily humiliations are there, too, as well as the simple kindnesses he received from blacks.

The Old Man and the Sea

At one point Santiago realizes there is no room to think; he must simply endure. In this way, this great Hemingway novel makes a companion piece to The Myth of Sisyphus: It is the doing, the daring to do, that reveals the best in mankind. In Santiago's case, he went out "too far." For Sisyphus, the stone was too heavy. But Santiago did not fail, except in failing to preserve his catch. He caught the huge marlin, alone, fought off sharks, went sleepless, and sailed himself back to port. There, he found the love of the boy and the respect of his community. 

Coriolanus

A conflict of power, privilege, and pride, Coriolanus resonates more readily today, perhaps, than others of the tragedies. At first glance a scathing indictment of mobocracy, it is that, but it becomes an examination of family dynamics and the costs of arrogance. In the end, Coriolanus is too extraordinary, in ways good and bad, to be allowed to exist in the world.

The Millstone

The pleasures of this Margaret Drabble novel are manifold. It has wit, depth, humor, and a poignancy that is never forced or facile. It can be summarized in a very few words: A woman has a baby. But where Drabble goes with that basic fact reveals her to be a sensitive and thoughtful interpreter of human experience.

Nutshell

The plot of Ian McEwan's new novel isn't much: It is essentially a mash-up of Hamlet and a Dateline episode. But the beautiful sentences follow one after another for 200 pages, and the digressions on the state of the world are always on point, and that's enough. The novelty of a fetus as narrator mostly works, although there are some noticeable contortions.

The Quiet American

No one can remain aloof; everyone eventually becomes engaged. The cynical nonbeliever, Fowler, and the true believer, Pyle, provide the two poles of behavior around which the world revolves. Graham Greene presents the conflict with the lightest finger on the scale, throwing suspense and even humor into the mix. Easily Greene's finest novel in my experience.

Really the Blues

The autobiography of Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow, co-authored by Bernard Wolfe, is a valuable historical document in the history of jazz, but it is also a work that touches on sociology, race relations, language, drug abuse — a partial but detailed portrait of America between the wars. Mezzrow's jazz snobbishness is not appealing, but a reader can surely recognize today that the further jazz moved away from Louis Armstrong, the more of a niche form it became. Mezzrow's ideal was music as a statement of defiance and vitality by black Americans. Would he have thought that rap was the natural descendant of the New Orleans music he so loved? 

Criminal Conversation

Nicolas Freeling gets points for original structure by making this Van der Valk novel a two-parter: Part One being a detective's investigation, if somewhat atypical; and Part Two being a memoir of sorts addressed to the detective. As with others in the series, it is the exploration of human nature, rather than "clues" as such, that recommends Criminal Conversation.

Valparaiso

The first half of this novel by Nicolas Freeling, author of the Van der Valk detective series, is a study of character and place (a sailor and the Porquerolles). The second half is a caper that unravels a la Kubrik's The Killing. Together, lubricated with Freeling's world-weary style, they fit nicely.

Eisenhower 1956

This account by David Nichols of Eisenhower's handling of the Suez crisis in 1956 too often reads like a timeline on steroids, with lists of attendees at innumerable meetings. But the effort to get through that underbrush is worth it for Nichols's detailed telling of how the president handled health crises (heart attack, abdominal surgery), a re-election campaign, the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Eisenhower emerges as a principled but pragmatic leader. The least interventionist president of modern times, he went to the United Nations to try to secure a cease-fire in the Suez war, and when that effort was thwarted in the Security Council by a veto of the aggressor nations (and World War II allies), Ike went to the General Assembly instead. It is almost quaint to read about a president who puts peace above all, but as Nichols points out there was a nuclear anvil hanging over the nation's head, and Ike thought the only way to win World War III was to avoid it. It is saddening to read an account of such an admirable leader in the midst of such a disheartening presidential campaign 60 years later. 

The Flemish House

This Maigret story lacks the kind of revelatory excavation of human nature that others in the series provide. The detective is out of his element, among foreigners, which makes him, and eventually the reader, irritable.

Dispatches

Michael Herr's Vietnam book is best when the writer isn't infatuated with his own writing style, particularly the gripping section on Khe Sanh and in his accounts of other correspondents like Sean Flynn, son of the film actor.

Dewey Defeats Truman

This is another old-fashioned and satisfying historical novel by Thomas Mallon, set in 1948 in Owosso, Michigan, during the presidential campaign between Thomas Dewey and Harry Truman. Mallon's skill is to make himself invisible as a writer, using an agreeable prose style that puts characterizations and plot to the fore. His modesty and craftsmanship are qualities too often missing in contemporary American literature.

Amherst

This William Nicholson novel, based around an affair between Emily Dickinson's brother and the woman who would become the poet's champion, alternates between that narrative and an account of a young Englishwoman visiting Amherst to research a potential screenplay on the affair. Like many novels by fine English writers (Graham Greene's The End of the Affair comes to mind) and countless bad films, Amherst displays an almost infantile conception of romantic love. There is a quote, deep in the novel, that tentatively moves toward a more mature understanding ("We think there's someone out there who can make us happy, someone who'll make us complete, but that's not how it works."), but the person quoted follows the thought to a nihilistic conclusion. Nicholson is better that the overheated romance novel dialogue that he's put into this book.

A Woman in Jerusalem

A.B. Yehoshua has been called "Israel's Faulkner," but his beautiful writing leads me to think of him as "Israel's Vargas Llosa." This story could certainly have been written by the Peruvian Nobelist. It is built as if by a master cabinetmaker and includes the feature that no one is named (except by occupation or relation) other than the woman at the heart of the story, a foreigner living in Jerusalem who was killed in a terrorist attack and whose body lay unclaimed until a weekly scandal sheet takes to task her employer for ignoring her. The journey into eastern Europe by the personnel manager of the company to return the body to its home soil becomes, first, an adventure, and then something deeper.

The Voice Imitator

Thomas Bernhard's book of 104 stories in 104 pages is filled with his usual mix of gloom, suicide, and alienation. Some of the stories hold a reader's attention long after he has put the book down; others are more ephemeral; all highlight Bernhard's distinctive voice and acid wit.

Mr. Mani

Mr. Mani is a multi-generational saga by A.B. Yehoshua, centered around Jerusalem and told in an unusual way: as conversations between two people, with one partner's words missing, and running in reverse chronological order. The reverse chronology suits the material beautifully, resulting in a feeling of almost archaeological discovery as deeper layers are revealed. The silent partner in the conversation is a device that works less well because it often calls attention to itself when the speaker repeats a question. Still, this is a rich and satisfying family chronicle.

Night

It probably shouldn't have taken Elie Wiesel's death to get me to read his work, but there you are. Night is notable for its clear-eyed, merciless clarity.

Notes on the Death of Culture

The typical problem with declinist polemics is fogeyism combined with a failure to establish that the "golden age" — from which current society has supposedly fallen so far — actually existed. There is a bit of this in Mario Vargas Llosa's collection of essays, but for the most part he makes a strong case that the culture of entertainment has been destructive both to the individual and to democratic institutions.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Evelyn Waugh's novel is based on his own experience of drug-induced hallucinations. While it is very funny, there is an undercurrent of unease in the verbal attacks by imagined enemies on Pinfold's character. Because after all, these attacks are coming from Pinfold's own subconscious.

Murder in Greenwich

Mark Fuhrman lays out in meticulous detail the events surrounding the 1975 murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut. Written in the late 1990s, before the trial and conviction of Michael Skakel, a Kennedy cousin, for the murder, Furhman presents an ironclad case for Skakel's guilt and a damning indictment of the Greenwich police for incompetence.

End of Watch

Eighty percent of the sentences in this Stephen King novel, the concluding volume of a trilogy, are bad: mostly laden with cliches or hackneyed metaphors. The dialogue is cutesy to the point of being inhuman. And as in the other books in this series, King drains suspense away by having characters puzzling over incidents that the reader already understands. King was a lousy writer when I gave up on Salem's Lot decades ago after about 50 pages, and he's a lousy writer still.

Something Happened

A novel of unblinking honesty by Joseph Heller, Something Happened is, in turn, funny, sad, and chilling.

The Girl on the Train

This is a constricted, tedious, and grossly overwritten "thriller."

The Saint-Fiacre Affair

This Maigret mystery is most notable for its details on the boyhood of the great detective.

The Shadow Puppet

The Maigret mystery here is less impressive than the keen insights Simenon packs into it. Greed, revenge, resentment, and madness all make effective appearances.

The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin

This is a subtle, psychological, and satisfying Maigret mystery but with some twists that, on final analysis, seem a bit contrived.

One Fat Englishman

Kingsley Amis's comic novel from 1963 reads like a coarse Waugh, with enough of a whiff of racism and anti-Semitism to make it occasionally unpleasant. It does manage to entertain and skewer American culture, just not nearly as elegantly as, say, The Loved One does.

King of the Rainy Country

In a nice piece of meta commentary deep within this detective novel, the Dutch police investigator Van der Valk compares himself and his plodding ways to the Marlowes and Bonds of fiction, who would never be putt-putting around like he is in a rented Renault on the trail of a potential murderer. There's not much action in this psychological story, but Van der Valk is an appealing enough character to carry the day. 

Love in the Ruins

Idiosyncratic and beautifully written, this Walker Percy novel from 1971 imagines a near future in which vine tendrils herald the decline of civilization, people have lost the ability to repair what is broken, and one man hopes that love can conquer all. It is a disorienting tale full of weird characters with a beating heart at the center.

Consumed

This David Cronenberg novel is a mishmash of technology worship, weirdness, and unconvincing human behavior.

Tanner's Virgin

As an example of its type, this Lawrence Block spy adventure featuring the recurring character Evan Tanner is good enough. It delivers a page-flipping plot and exotic locales.

Extinction

Thomas Bernhard's Extinction is, like his other novels, a cry of denunciation and renunciation. The plot can be summarized as follows: An Austrian living in Rome receives news of the death of his parents and brother in an automobile accident and returns for the funeral. Within that bare frame, Bernhard paints a dark and complex portrait of a family, stopping along the way to assess German literature, the destructive influence of photography, and other subjects. The ending stuns, but such is Bernhard's skill that on a moment's reflection it is revealed to be perfect.

The Storyteller

This novel by Mario Vargas Llosa is an exploration of the myths and legends man creates to make sense of the world and his place in it. The chapters alternate between ones narrated by a Peruvian in Florence who spots a friend from years before in a photograph of Machiguenga tribespeople, and accounts of the tribe's mythic tales. As he has done effectively in many of his novels, Vargas Llosa eventually brings the two strands together. Here, however, the mythic chapters never really ignite the reader's imagination.

Naked on Roller Skates

Despite Maxwell Bodenheim's sometimes flamboyant prose, this novel about a worldly-wise adventurer and his young female apprentice hits the mark in unpacking the demimonde. This would have been hot stuff on publication, in 1930, the kind of book that gets dogeared at all the "dirty parts." It can still shock, but more than that offers a believable and thoughtful survey of "the way we live now." 

Oblomov

In Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov created a character of unsurpassable dignity, purity, and decency. The fact that he is, on the surface, lazy and indecisive makes this literary achievement all the more unusual. In a lesson that should not be lost during a filthy political season, Oblomov is able to live an honorable life only by withdrawing from the crooked and low ways of the world around him. He, like a Bartelby, chooses not to get up from the sofa and in so doing becomes a hero.

The Train Was On Time

Heinrich Boll's first novel, published in 1949, is suffused with the deep concern for humanity and the truthfulness of emotion that would return in books throughout his life. A German soldier, Andreas, is on a train and, he is certain, on his way to death in Poland in 1943. By the time the journey is over, he has explained his life, his regrets, and his fears. A particularly poignant section has him recounting those he has wronged and praying for forgiveness. Boll is never sanctimonious, yet he is always able to find the heart of human tragedy and, even in darkness, find meaning.

The Arabs in History

A fair amount of this history by the renowned specialist Bernard Lewis is as dry as the desert from which the Arab people emerged. However, a patient reader who hacks through the thickets of names and dates will be rewarded with a fundamental understanding of the Arab economy, social organization, religion, and downfall.

Aurora 7

Thomas Mallon's novel covers the day, May 24, 1962, when the Aurora 7 space capsule carrying Scott Carpenter orbited the Earth three times. The book's structure has echoes of Manhattan Transfer, with lives big and small intersecting, but it's primarily about an awkward 11-year-old boy from the New York City suburbs trying to fit into the world. Mallon's prose in this early novel is elegant and smooth without calling attention to itself.

Pygmy

Chuck Palahniuk's decision to write this novel about a foreign agent's mission to destroy America as a pidgin English diary may be the most interesting thing about it. The mannered prose never really clicks, so it is always calling attention to itself, but it works to strip the subjects down to their essentials: American power, tyranny, religion, love. Palahniuk's callbacks, repetition, and humor are effective, too.

The Killing of the Unicorn

As a tribute to the murdered Playboy playmate and actress Dorothy Stratten, this account by film director Peter Bogdanovich is loving and seemingly sincere. As a takedown of the Hugh Hefner lifestyle and an argument for his partial culpability in Stratten's death, it is less convincing.

The Genius

Theodore Dreiser's enormous novel (736 pages of small print) boils down to an examination of the artistic temperament and the sex drive. The hero, Eugene Witla, has a weakness for women aged 18 that causes him no end of trouble. He leaves behind a career as a successful painter for supposedly bigger and better things, only to be brought low by another in a series of these women, despite having a decent and loving wife. This 1915 novel scandalized some elements of polite society, and the New York Times review said it left little to the imagination. A modern reader will find that, instead, it leaves almost everything to the imagination. There is nary a bare ankle in sight. Dreiser's style has never been considered his strong point, and his prose is hardly euphonious here, but he manages to sustain interest in a character who is in many respects a silly cad, and that's no small feat.

A Hero of Our Time

The Russian poet Lermontov's only novel, published in 1840, is a character study of a cynical, cruel and yet heroic military officer, Pechorin by name, who is a reflection of the author. It is startlingly modern in its treatment of human motivations and desires, making American novels of eight decades hence that tackle the same themes seem childlike in comparison.

A Clue to the Exit

A cold, posturing and largely tedious novel by Edward St. Aubyn about consciousness and death.

Orson Welles's Last Movie

Josh Karp's account of the making of The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles's last (and still unreleased) film, is at its best when describing Welles's personality, recounting his stories, and detailing his shooting and editing techniques and interactions with actors. The supporting cast is fascinating and includes John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich and, curiously, Rich Little. The money chase and the endless financial conflicts that are a key reason the film has not seen the light of day are less interesting and presented in a plodding style.

Mr. Hire's Engagement

The cruelty of the title of this Georges Simenon roman dur only becomes apparent near the end, but the dark motives and human failings that the author plumbs in all his books are present throughout. Simenon's unblinking gaze on life is not for the squeamish.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Horace McCoy's Depression-era novel makes a marathon dance contest the stage for several types: the dreamer, the lost, the con man, the lech. Once the contest is set in motion, it is largely McCoy's skill with dialogue that carries it across the miserable finish line.

Hunting Tigers Under Glass

This '60s collection of essays and reports by the Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler will remind many readers of the shortage today of nonfiction that is engaged, funny, worldly, and doesn't show off. Richler is one of those writers, and Geoff Dyer might be another, who could write on just about any subject and make it readable.

Maggie Cassidy

Kerouac's tale of adolescent love is bad poetry turned into worse prose.

Between the World and Me

An angry, necessary book that rightly takes to task the "Dreamers" who deal in gauzy nouns in favor of an ethic of verbs, specifically "struggle."