Uncivil Liberties

A volume of 40-year-old humor columns from the Nation is not a book that anyone would give high odds of being relevant and engaging, but Calvin Trillin's reflections on Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, parsimonious publishers and lesser subjects hit home with a decent batting average.

Messages from My Father

I would imagine that a writer has a hard time believing that whatever he chooses to investigate to write about may not be worth the effort. A real writer knows that he has something to say about almost anything. In this case, Calvin Trillin has taken his perfectly decent and hardworking father and written about him like he was extraordinary; it is a son's privilege to do such a thing, but is it a writer's? When Trillin points out that his father used the phrase "she's no spring chicken" there is a sense that we are meant to believe this was original to Abe Trillin, or at least that it is a striking idiom; of course it is fairly commonplace. There is nothing in the least wrong with having a commonplace father; I think the world would be a better place with more of them. But we don't necessarily need to read books about them.

Remembering Denny

Calvin Trillin's Remembering Denny reminded me, when I got to the last page, of Antonioni's The Passenger. Both have a similar quote along the lines of, "You didn't know him at all." Trillin traces the life of a Yale classmate in the 1950s who was a "golden boy" – winning smile, swimming star in high school, Rhodes Scholar, author on foreign relations – but who took his life in middle age. How much can we really know about people? Despite some digging and his clear-eyed intellect, Trillin approaches but does not fully explicate the personality and disappointments of Roger Hansen, known at Yale as Denny. On a side note, it is always a pleasure as a reader to be in the hands of a skilled writer, and Trillin's prose is sharp and crystalline.

Elegy for April

What is this? Humor in a Quirke story? How did that get in there? No matter, it's welcome, even if it is just a recurring punch line about Quirke's erratic driving after buying a fancy sports car. The underlying tale is grim as ever, but there seems to be a lot of padding as the plot develops.

Road to Volgograd

English novelist Alan Sillitoe's account of his trip to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1963, even discounting the benefits of hindsight, seems a little too credulous. He is fine when describing the vastness of Siberia, the giant hydroelectric and other building projects, the food and his theater experiences. The walking on eggshells about freedom of expression and Stalin, however, is telling.

A Small Town in Germany

John Le Carré's fifth novel, published in 1968, has resonances with today's politics in its depiction of a populist movement led by a demagogue threatening the established order in Germany. For the most part the book is a manhunt led by a rude and sometimes blundering but usually effective operative sent from London to track down a contract worker missing from the British Embassy in Bonn. For its skill in peeling an onion with countless layers before getting to the heart of the matter, A Small Town in Germany consistently entertains. Less effective is the rushed moralizing in the book's closing pages.