Smile

Roddy Doyle's novel will rise or fall in the reader's estimation in large part on his or her assessment of the final few pages. Victor Forde, mid-50s, is looking back on an adult life that started with some promise but has landed him in a pub, alone, looking for new friends. In walks Fitzgerald, apparently a schoolmate from the 1970s. Forde doesn't remember him, but Fitzgerald seems to know quite a lot about Forde. After a school trauma is revealed, the stage is set for the surprise ending. It is genuinely disorienting, but the publisher's note in my edition assures readers that there is no "trick," that everything in the novel adds up. I suspect a second reading would confirm that.

Moon Tiger

As she lay dying, historian Claudia Hampton writes her own life history in this Penelope Lively novel. One great love (and loss) is at the center, from her time in Egypt during World War II as a young reporter. The account is wide-ranging, both wistful and hard-nosed, and envelops the reader.

Delano

John Gregory Dunne's account of the grape pickers' strike in Delano, California, led by Cesar Chavez, balances perfectly the roles of disinterested observer and decent human being. Dunne can see what is in front of him, which is rare (cf. Orwell), but he has no illusions about the purity of any particular side. The historical background provided (large-scale theft of land by the railroads and others) is valuable in setting the context out of which this struggle arose.

Heather, the Totality

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner's attempt at a novel reads like a cross between Sherwood Anderson and Don DeLillo. A flat, affectless prose is used in service of a story about a well-to-do New York family and a down-and-out construction worker. That the paths of these two factions will cross is inevitable, but the climax is a bit of a damp squib. This is a very short novel, really more a long short story with four characters, easily and pleasantly read and then forgotten.

18 Stories

Heinrich Boll's stories put on display in a concentrated form his incisive understanding of the varieties of human behavior. The idea that flowers could become a necessity in demolished, postwar Cologne figures in one; how a crooked scale cheated peasants for decades features in another. The trick to these is to be wise in the ways of the world but still capable of wonder. In that, Boll excels.

The Middle Ground

To learn what London was like in the late 1970s, a reader could do a lot worse than consult this Margaret Drabble novel. It is kaleidoscopic and drills deeply into the personal and societal challenges of the era. Kate Armstrong, approaching 40, is the central character, and rarely has a person's muddling to get along been invested with such thoughtful perception. As often with Drabble, the plot is not the point; the point is life.

The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

To have found Penelope Lively's 2016 book of stories in a recycling bin is another one of those fortunate reading discoveries that come from poking around, like how stumbling on Margaret Drabble's The Millstone in a dusty bookstore in Maine opened me to her incisive mind and winning prose. In these stories, Lively, who is 84, demonstrates a penetrating understanding of human nature and a flair for the dramatic. Such is the intensity of some of them that they provoke a powerful physical response.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

This book, edited by Bandy X. Lee, M.D., is subtitled, "27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President." It evaluates the behavior of the president and its current and potential consequences. Potentially, it is not farfetched to imagine that a person as impulsive, erratic, and pathological as the president could lead the world into a nuclear holocaust. As for the here and now, the book explains how the president's behavior has a damaging effect on the mental health of the population as a whole. 

War and Turpentine

Stefan Hertmans's novel is a tender account of a 20th century life touched by ghastly inhumanity and, ultimately, unceasing grief. The writer's grandfather is the subject, and the tale is told through scraps of memories and, most directly, a diary. An exemplary soldier in Belgium in the Great War, Urbain Martien endures and describes the horrors of that conflict in the novel's central section. The bookending sections tell of his childhood and postwar life, which were colored by his own father's work as a church painter restoring the images of saints. The result is a family saga that is compellingly told, with layers peeled off and secrets effectively withheld until the very end.  

The Edible Woman

Deep in this highly readable and entertaining first novel by Margaret Atwood is a statement that I take to be its thesis: A person doesn't live by principles; a person lives by adjustments. That is true of the protagonist, Marian, a young woman in Toronto on a path toward a "normal" life of marriage and children. Atwood subverts what could have been a dreary domestic novel with a text that is just slightly off-kilter and studded with oddities. The old social and sexual patterns are very much in evidence in this 1969 book, but they are straining to break the leash.

A Sketch of My Life

Written after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929, this short biographical sketch by Thomas Mann reveals both the person and the intellectual. Most rewarding are the sections on his youthful school days and the publication and reception of his 1901 novel, Buddenbrooks. His philosophical thoughts are somewhat dense and, I suspect, not made less so by the translator.

Footsucker

Geoff Nicholson's novel reads briskly and contains enough academic information on its subject, fetishism, that the reader is left with something beyond the improbable plot twists. It is a dispassionate, typically British, I suppose, look at a subject that could easily have handled emotively or erotically, and all the better for it.

Decline and Fall

Evelyn Waugh's first novel (and second book, after a biography of Rossetti) finds the hapless Paul Pennyfeather thrown this way and that by forces beyond his control. As such, he stands in for us all, but his story is specifically situated among the upper classes of England, which Waugh uses to great comic effect. Thus, a serious and very funny book.  

Silence

This historical novel by Shusako Endo examines the meaning of faith, the problem of doubt, and the message of Christianity. A quibble centers around the concept contained in the title: The priest who resists apostatizing and who sees Japanese tortured and killed because of his resistance is bewildered by and eventually angry at the "silence" of God in the face of these travails. But isn't this a primitive position for a trained Jesuit, even considering the action takes place in the 17th century? What would the much-desired absence of this "silence" look like? A miracle from the heavens, say a bolt of lightning killing Inoue, a Japanese magistrate? It seems a false choice when silence is framed in this way, with no real answer possible. But elsewhere, the theological dilemmas and the weaknesses (and heroism) of humans are presented in a deeply affecting way.  

Almost Blue

This detective story set in Bologna provides some suspense and local color. It doesn't leave a strong appetite, however, for more by the author, Carlo Lucarelli. 

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

The so-called artistic temperament reaches its apotheosis with the great Benvenuto Cellini. Headstrong, dedicated, and supremely gifted, this Florentine will take guff from no man — be he king, pope, duke, artistic rival, or street tough. His adventures make wannabe tough guy artists like Hemingway look like prim schoolmarms. The highlights of this timeless account include Cellini's imprisonment and escape in Rome for murder and the casting of his great bronze, Perseus. Along the way he gets into many arguments, draws his dagger, impregnates a model, suffers heartbreak and sickness, and endures.

The Lime Works

The point, as Thomas Bernhard says about halfway through this novel, is to simply sit down and write what you have to say. The inhabitants of the lime works, a older man, Konrad, with a gift for natural sciences, and his incapacitated wife, are a case study in routine, obsession, and missed opportunities. Konrad's magnum opus, The Sense of Hearing, ultimately exists only in his mind. What a shame that is, Bernhard says, inviting the reader to look at himself through Konrad's experience.

Loitering with Intent

Muriel Spark is irresistibly witty, sly, and funny in this novel about biography and writing.

The Unseen

This stark novel by the Norwegian writer Roy Jacobsen is centered on a family's life as the only occupants of an island. The style is compact and direct, but without the elegance of, say, similarly minded works by Par Lagerkvist. At its best, The Unseen can put one in mind of As I Lay Dying with its exploration of flawed and struggling characters.

Kruso

This new German novel is dense, allusive, and seemingly endless. Also ponderous, dour, solemn, and humorless.

Bardo or Not Bardo

As an explanatory text on the Bardo, Antoine Volodine's seven connected stories are useful and interesting. As literature, Bardo or Not Bardo can be diffuse, obscurantist, and tedious.

Improvise from Inside Out

Mick Napier's ideas on improvisation are mostly free of the rule-based and cult-like approaches found in Truth in Comedy. The word "truth" in the title should have been a tipoff. Napier, in contrast, emphasizes just doing something, anything, committing to it, and sustaining and building the energy of the scene. This is an altogether more fun, yet paradoxically challenging, notion.

Dictator

Dictator concludes Robert Harris's compelling series of three novels centered around the life and career of Cicero. As orator, philosopher and politician, Cicero has much to teach readers 2,000 years later, but such wisdom is wasted on those who cannot or will not hear.

Doctorow: Collected Stories

In this final book by E.L. Doctorow, containing 15 stories, there is a not a single word out of place. Every sentence is finely wrought. It also shows the author's mastery of various styles and unfailingly gives that short story "click" on the final page that is like a catharsis.

Truth in Comedy

This manual on improvisation reads, at times, like a cult manifesto: There are certain things you must do, and others you must never do. But the information and instruction are presented convincingly. One tenet that seems counterintuitive at first but right on second thought is that agreement is funny. Another is that telling "jokes" is the surest way to doom a scene.

The God Boy

Ian Cross's 1957 novel might be compared to The Catcher in the Rye, but it is more sincere and affecting than that earlier work. Cross evokes place (New Zealand) and adolescence beautifully with small details, and succeeds, improbably, by having as his narrator a 13-year-old recounting three days in the life of his 11-year-old self. Religious mania, family dysfunction, sibling love, small-town life — it's all wrapped up in one package of nearly flawless prose.

The Theme Is Freedom

This 1950s collection of travel and political pieces by John Dos Passos allowed him to look back on his youthful enthusiasms with a more seasoned eye. The challenge with a book whose author has moved across the political spectrum is, basically, to be honest. Dos Passos thought Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent in 1927; it would ill-serve his credibility as a member of the right to throw overboard his meticulous and heartfelt defense of them then, and he doesn't. Whether sympathetic to the early Communists, the IWW or, later, more free market thinking, the thread that links all of these ideas is found in the book's title, but more specifically in a defense of the individual against giant organizations.

On Tyranny

A small, timely volume by Timothy Snyder which reminds readers that we are no wiser than the Romans, or Italians in 1922, or Germans in 1933, or Czechs in 1946, and that the descent of free societies into totalitarianism is quite normal.

A Man Called Ove

The popularity of the film of this novel is easy to understand: The story is appealing in a Frank Capra kind of way. But the novel offers few surprises and shallow sentimentality.

The Hemingway/Dos Passos Wars

This two-act play by Ben Pleasants, published in 1997, dramatizes the rupture of a friendship over the death of Dos Passos's Spanish friend, Jose Robles, at the hands of the Left. Dos Passos sought truth; Hemingway, results.

One Man's Initiation — 1917

John Dos Passos's first novel, published in 1920, recounts the horrors and absurdities of the Great War as witnessed by an ambulance driver. The author saw the things he fictionalized, setting the template for a career that would produce the great American novel, U.S.A. A brief review from the Bookman in 1922 of the American edition of One Man's Initiation says it well: "The literary workmanship is remarkably skillful as war is forced to parade in nakedness — robbed of its chauvanistic, romance-embroidered clothing."

The Ambulance Drivers

This account by James McGrath Morris of the friendship between Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, and its acrimonious end in Spain in 1937, explores the literary, political, and personal elements of the relationship in a swift-moving chronological narrative. Dos Passos was more wronged against, and the better human being, but Hemingway scores in his admonition to his friend against polemic literature. Looking back on Hemingway's early work and comparing it to Dos Passos's, it's not hard to see why the latter was on top with the critics in this rivalry, even if he occasionally had to borrow money from his far more financially successful friend to make ends meet.

Maigret

Jules Maigret is called out of retirement when his nephew, a rookie police officer, is blamed for a murder. The inspector sees right through everyone, as usual, and devises a clever way (both technical and psychological) to achieve the desired result.

The Misty Harbour

This Maigret mystery does not have the same probing into human behavior as some of the others. Or rather, it does, but all of that material is dashed off at the end when the mystery is solved. A second-tier Simenon, but not without its pleasures, including having the inspector himself come in for a bit of physical peril.

The Studio

John Gregory Dunne's The Studio was published during the death throes of the old studio system (when Hedda Hopper's successor still mattered, for example) and benefits from the author's keen observations and ear for dialogue. How a script gets pitched, how agents negotiate, how publicity is devised, the nuts and bolts of moviemaking — it's all here in a tight package written in a style that manages to be both deadpan and engaging.

The Defense

Compassion and pity aren't enough. That is the lesson Luzhin's wife learns in Nabokov's The Defense. Her mother was correct: She would never love him, and love was likely the only thing that could save him. Luzhin's own problems are less interesting than his wife's. He is captured in a maddening web in which chess and existence are confused, yes, but as a character he never comes into full flower.

Glory

Vladimir Nabokov's Glory is, in part, a cautionary tale about the dangers of imagination. The completely ordinary main character becomes aware that aspects of his imaginary life have come true, which leads him on a trip down a decisive path. It's all done for the love of a woman who could (barely) care less, which adds poignancy. Reading Nabokov delivers pure pleasure for his style. (But keep a dictionary handy.)

Thanks for Coming to Hattiesburg

Todd Barry is an excellent comedian, but his account of shows in "secondary" cities is disappointing. The focus on himself and his mundane habits doesn't deliver much in the way of laughs, or even entertainment.

The Transcriptionist

This first novel falls into the paradoxical category of "overheated and half-baked." It is ingrown, strains at shows of erudition, and, in at least one instance, is plagiaristic. (An anecdote about a "voice imitator" is presented as the author's when it is in fact an idea by Thomas Bernhard.)

The End of Eddy

Edouard Louis's autobiographical novel takes the reader where he or she has likely never been before. Tourists have seen Paris, or the chateaux of the Loire Valley, or maybe Nice; newspapers and opinion columns have explored the insular Muslim communities outside the city centers; but what of the poor native French villager? This is the person who is most likely to vote for Marine Le Pen, to be disdainful of both Arabs and the French middle class.

Louis's novel focuses on a boy growing up in a northern village, in a tumbledown house, with an alcoholic, unemployed father and no apparent way out. The fact that the boy is gay only multiplies his challenges. The story is grounded, at times brutal and always unflinching, in the best tradition of, say, Balzac.

The House of Wittgenstein

Alexander Waugh's history of the famous Vienna family in the first half of the 20th century focuses on Paul, the pianist, and Ludwig, the philosopher, with other members getting (sometimes juicy) supporting roles. In addition to the personal rivalries and disputes, Waugh provides a look at life in Austria, the trauma of two world wars, the nature of identity (the Wittgensteins were classified by the Nazis as Jews even though they had been in practice Christians for a century), and classical music. Other than when it gets bogged down during an account of a financial dispute, the story rolls along swiftly with rich detail.

The Dark Flood Rises

With Margaret Drabble, the term "discursive" loses all of its negative connotations. This novel about aging and death provides a wealth of insights and detours.

Darke

Rick Gekoski has tried to create a classic misanthrope in James Darke, but the character's heart just isn't in it. He's too soft, too human to fit the bill, and paradoxically the extent of his failure is the extent to which this novel succeeds.

The Pure Gold Baby

Margaret Drabble's 2013 novel is an episodic narrative, told by friends, of the life of a woman and her mentally disabled daughter. It is to Drabble's credit that while not much extraordinary happens, her perceptive touch and agreeable prose make The Pure Gold Baby worthwhile.  

Winter is Coming

Garry Kasparov makes a strong case not just against Vladimir Putin, which is easy enough, but against the Western accommodations that have allowed this Russian tyrant to expand his reach, first to Georgia, then Ukraine, and finally, although outside the scope of this book, to the U.S. presidential election. Kasparov's call for a tough response and a morality-based foreign policy is unlikely to be heeded in the next four years, at least, and so the problem of Putinism will likely only get worse.

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

Georges Simenon's novel, an effort to move beyond Maigret toward more "serious" work, nonetheless contains themes found in his crime novels. The story, in fact, has all the hallmarks of a Maigret story and features Lucas, Maigret's deputy, in a cameo as chief detective. The story, of a man chucking everything and running away from a respectable life, has been told before, but Simenon makes it particularly chilling and believable. 

The Plot Against America

It is unwise to draw too many parallels, especially given that this Philip Roth novel is speculative historical fiction, but The Plot Against America achieves a sobering relevance in the United States of 2017. The prose, firstly, is impeccable; the plot, believable; and the warning, a source of sickening dread. There is nothing that ensures that democracies will endure. Indeed they can't in the face of an ignorant or bigoted citizenry, not for long anyway.

The Whistler

It takes John Grisham 100 pages to get this leaden tale off the ground, after which the reader has only to endure another 250 pages of his awful prose.

Les Enfants Terribles

The strangeness of Jean Cocteau's novel derives from its honesty and perceptiveness about human behavior. That strangeness, therefore, becomes a commentary on the pettiness and parochialism of other novels, against which this one shines.