Skyline

Gene Fowler's memoir of his life as a newspaperman in 1920s New York includes a Zelig-like assortment of brushes with the rich and famous. Fowler was a Westerner, new to the city, when he signed on with William R. Hearst's newspaper, which gave him access to people like Damon Runyon, Jack Dempsey, John Barrymore, and assorted journalistic stars of the era. It was a wild decade, and Fowler doesn't stint on anecdote, the most outrageous being an editor's plan to use "monkey glands" to restore an old man to vitality and trumpet the results on the front page.

Look at Me

Anita Brookner's novel is a masterpiece of interiority.

I Exaggerate

I wasn't aware that the comedian Kevin Nealon was a caricaturist; I ordered the book from the library thinking it was a standard memoir. Instead there are pictures of dozens of celebrities with short articles on each. Some Nealon knows, which makes the text more interesting; others he doesn't, and here the book flounders a bit with Wikipedia-type bios. Nealon's drawings are good, with a few of them excellently capturing a face but others struggling to find the mark. There are surprisingly few laughs here for a book by a comedian.

Stella Maris

If you are a novelist who hangs around with physicists and mathematicians long enough, it's bound to work its way into your books. I still don't understand much of what Alicia Western (and her brother, Bobby, in the previous novel) are talking about when they declaim on these subjects, but the other 80 percent is penetrating and insightful. I especially like in Stella Maris that Alicia gets an interlocutor who stands in for a better-than-average intelligent reader. The novel consists entirely of a dialogue between Alicia and the shrink. It ends with me wishing he had mentioned The Myth of Sisyphus as an argument to keep on living.

The Lemon

This novel by the collective author S.E. Boyd is easily the worst book I read in 2022. I have lost count of the number of novels blurbed to be "hilarious," "a laugh on every page," or "gut-busting" that turn out to be witless and humorless. The issue is almost always that the characters have not been developed sufficiently to make any humor attached to them believable. Instead, there are absurd generic gags that don't match the characterizations (which, as I said, are thin at best anyway). The plot is beyond stupid, and as I read this I wondered what was going on: Why was this published? Then in the acknowledgments the authors gave the game away by thanking someone for securing the television rights. This was a purely commercial venture from the start, surely the worst possible way to write a novel (Faulkner and Sanctuary excepted, if you believe him).

Deeply, Madly

It is a shame that actor Alan Rickman never wrote a memoir; these diaries are a poor substitute, and I have sympathy with the view that they should never have been published in this form. It took me to about page 200 (of 450) before I settled into a rhythm that allowed me to finish this book in an enjoyable way. I can understand others giving up before then. There is simply too much routine personal information and too much complaining about mostly small matters (a $50 charge to enter the Delta lounge, a late train, etc.). His assessments of plays, movies and actors are welcome but all too brief.

The Passenger

Cormac McCarthy's novel is obtuse but also unexectedly funny. There are passages that will put some readers in mind of A Confederacy of Dunces, with its picaresque style and New Orleans location. Dabblers in quantum mechanics may enjoy a section that will leave most other readers baffled. A discussion of the Kennedy assassination will have the most ardent defender of the Warren Report scratching her head. Through it all is a thread of a brother's love for a sister, his sister's apparent madness, and the dark forces that run the world and run over the little people in it.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

This Ken Kalfus novel about Sept. 11, 2001, and its effects on a couple going through a divorce has a patchwork feel. One scene near the end about a suicide bomb is completely out of sync tonally with the rest of the book. Blurbs promising a "savagely funny" and "hilarious" work lied (again). There is no doubt some good stuff here, but the divorce proceedings become tedious and the fanciful ending feels like cheating.

Sea of Tranquility

Whatever Emily St. John Mandel writes, I will read. This novel, which stands alone but also references characters from previous works, has the same flowing style that first attracted me, along with a propulsive plot and satisfying twists. What Mandel understands more than many authors is that the novel is a form that is capable of so much more than it is usually asked to accommodate. She fills the form, not with unbelievable silliness like, say, Chuck Palahmiuk often does, but with real human behavior in a setting that is science fiction but glows with truth.

Camera Man

Dana Stevens's biography of Buster Keaton appears to hit all the high (and low) points of his life while also taking welcome side trips into the cultural and political context of his time. This essayistic approach allows the book to take in the technology of movies, the burgeoning child welfare movement, Alcholics Anonymous, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other trends and figures that touched on Keaton's life.

Night Train

For whatever reason – perhaps because Martin Amis thought he could use a genre mold and pour his own type of book into it – Night Train doesn't come off. From the opening sentence, "I am a police," with its odd construction, it's clear that Amis is more interested in subversion than anything.

The Possession

In just 62 pages, Annie Ernaux explores the subject of jealousy and obsession with a clarity and depth that most writers couldn't achieve in 300 pages. Everything rings true, mined from her experience of an ended affair and written in a vibrant cinematic style.

A Third Face

Sam Fuller's experiences would fill the lives of ten ordinary people. His autobiography covers his work in the newspaper business (copyboy, crime reporter, traveling chronicler of the Depression, cartoonist), his time in the Army in World War II (North Africa, Sicily, Omaha Beach, Battle of the Bulge, Falkenau), his novels and screenplays (The Dark Page was published while he was at war), his first job as a director (I Shot Jesse James), his productive relationship with Darryl Zanuck, his eventual alienation from the American movie business, his late films and acting cameos, and, finally, a message on the last page that would bring a tear to even a crusty old cuss like Fuller himself.

A Frozen Woman

Annie Ernaux's novelization of her adolescence and young adulthood succeeds because of its specificity and honesty. The writer is not a feminist, but a "womanist" who excavates the fears and desires of her sex with such ruthlessness that the effect is like being washed in the cool (not cold) water of revelation.  

The Smell of Hay

Perhaps because this one was the last of Giorgio Bassani's Ferrara works, read all in a row, but The Smell of Hay sank without a bubble and has been quickly forgotten.

The Heron

Giorgio Bassani's short novel is a day in the life of a man adrift and unsure of his place in society and the meaning of his existence. Seemingly well-off, he is afraid of the employees whose work enriches him. His marriage is defective, and the only true affection he gets from a woman is from his mother. The centerpiece of the story is a pointless hunting trip in which the man shoots nothing as an underling massacres scores of ducks and other birds and, sickeningly, a heron. What is the point? "You only had to observe life's events from a certain distance to conclude that all they amounted to was what they were; in other words nothing, or almost nothing."

The importance of money and status overrides all, in this telling. "Money, cash, dough: in the vicinity of those who had it, everything but everything – Fascism, Nazism, Communism, religion, family quarrels or affections, agricultural disputes, bank loans and so forth – everything else suddenly became of no concern or importance."

The ending comes not as a surprise but as a culmination of all the factors that Bassani has so meticulously assembled up to that grim point.

Small Things Like These

What do we owe to others? Not just in words, but in deeds. This is the question at the center of Claire Keegan's brief but powerful novel. The story, set in the mid-1980s, centers on Bill Furlong, a coal and firewood merchant in Ireland with a wife and five daughters who is hardworking and a good provider. When he is confronted with a deeply disturbing event, he is forced to consider his Catholic faith and what it is worth if suffering can be so simply ignored. Keegan's crystalline prose and deep sincerity bring forth a beautiful novel.

Behind the Door

Giorgio Bassani's novel returns to his theme of separateness, specifically that of a Jewish boy in prewar Ferrara. The act of kindness that the nameless narrator pays to an awkward and poorer classmate is repaid with the classmate's insults as the narrator listens behind a half-open doorway. The symbol of the door, although entirely on the nose, is nonetheless affecting.

Lessons

My harsh judgment on this Ian McEwan novel softened somewhat in the last 100 pages. In draft, my first sentence was: "This big fat novel is a big fat dud." Like other novels by this author it is a work of vanishingly small ambitions, despite its scope and length (150,000 words, I'd guess). This sentence refers to the main character of the book, a typical middling Englishman of McEwan's generation: "How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision." Novels, as Mario Vargas Llosa has written, should give the reader an intensified version of reality; it is barely worth the effort to read a book that simply reflects our day-to-day life.

Early on, the character's wife deserts him and becomes an acclaimed novelist, and it is those novels the reader wishes he were reading, not this one. Eventually, though, the poignancy and haze of melancholy lulled me into a kind of pleasant funk as I followed this unexceptional man into his twilight years, and for that McEwan deserves some praise.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

On this, my second reading of Giorgio Bassani's novel about Ferrara in the years before World War II, I wonder if an alternative title might be The Sleepwalkers. The Jewish characters seem immobilized by passivity in the face of threats that escalated in 1938 with the imposition of the Racial Laws. Life goes on, characters fall in love and play tennis, and Il Duce is nothing more than a faint background buzz.

Act of Oblivion

It is not possible for Robert Harris to write a bad novel, but this one falls into the second tier of his oeuvre. Set largely in New England during the second half of the 17th century, Act of Oblivion focuses on a manhunt for two Englishmen who took part in the execution of King Charles I. There is a lot of hiding and waiting, scrounging for food, then more hiding and waiting, together with a gloss of inquiry into the merits of the Cavaliers versus the Roundheads. Harris's Cicero trilogy was able to combine dramatic sweep with philosophical depth; this one has little of either.

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles

This novel by Giorgio Bassani held strong echoes for me of Death in Venice. The critical action takes place on a resort beach and involves an older, respected doctor making a fool of himself for a young man. The way Bassani presents the poison of gossip as it spreads is masterful, and a sequence near the end involving a stray dog is heartbreaking – maybe too heartbreaking and a tad manipulative, in fact.

Within the Walls

Giorgio Bassani's story collection set in Ferrara in the years before and shortly after World War II delivers a nuanced and elegant view of the city's residents and their overlapping loyalties. The Jewish community is the focus, and readers may be surprised to learn that some Jews eagerly joined the Fascists in the 1930s. Nothing is simple in Bassani's world: There are outsiders of all stripes, separated by class, scandal, religion, or politics. The complexity of human impulses, however, does not obscure Bassani's tremendous humanity, which shines through in all these stories.

A Ghost at Noon

This novel by Alberto Moravia, the basis of the film Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard, reads like a breeze despite its heavy underpinnings. At its core it is the story of a man trying to find out why his wife has stopped loving him. The man's artistic ambitions in playwrighting may be beyond his grasp, so he settles for writing film scripts for a crass Italian producer in order to give his wife the home he thinks she desires. Issues of class, Freud, and filmmaking (the movie at issue is a planned version of The Odyssey) make for a rich stew.

Day of the Oprichnik

Vladimir Sorokin has created a horrifying and all-too-plausible Russia of the near future in which an all-powerful king uses a cadre of enforcers, the oprichnina, combined with technology to rule and crush dissent. The combination of Middle Ages religiousity, killing squads, and surveillance is a potent one for keeping the population in check. The day of the oprichnik may not have arrived, but this 2006 novel, translated into English in 2011 and set in 2024, appears to have judged the timing about right.

We Had to Remove This Post

Hanna Bervoets's short and ultimately half-baked novel is ostensibly about the trauma created in people whose work as content moderators exposes them to the worst of humanity. But that theme, rich in possibilities for drama and philosophizing, gets shunted aside for a romantic crisis and an abrupt ending.

Inspector Cadaver

A middling Maigret with a somewhat obvious core mystery. 

A Woman's Battles and Transformations

Édouard Louis's account of his mother's 20 years in a terrible marriage is short, bitter and ultimately sweet. It takes on value beyond its length, just 100 pages, by the universality of its themes: the plight of the underclass, alcoholism and domestic violence. Louis's mother, whom he was once ashamed to be seen with in public, made a break for it and landed, at least partway, on her feet.

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama

Bob Odenkirk's memoir reveals him to be supremely arrogant and – by his own admission – mostly clueless about acting. I stopped counting the number of times he mentioned how he and some of his "comedy nerd" friends were smarter, sharper, hipper – in all ways superior to mainstream comedy of the time. I can't remember him describing a single sketch bombing, but if I missed one, it must have been because he thought the audience was stupid. The memoir becomes less repugnant in the final third, which deals with Breaking Bad and some of the movies Odenkirk acted in or directed. 

Thrust

This novel by Lidia Yuknavitch is a mess. There are plenty of themes – the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of workers, the meaning of childhood, the role of women – plus time travel and a talking worm and turtle. But despite some effective passages, the whole does not hang together. There is a didactic tone in parts that evokes someone who just learned something and can't stop talking about it. In other sections, alternatively, it is dreamy and diffuse, reminiscent of a teenager smoking his first joint and being fascinated by the worlds contained in his fingertip. A firmer editorial hand was desperately needed.

Bad City

Paul Pringle of the L.A. Times has written an account that has all the elements of potboiling cinema, except it is real. What is most unsettling is not that the head of the USC medical school was smoking methamphetamine with young people and supplying them with drugs, but that Pringle's superiors at the newspaper blocked publication of the story for more than a year. When corruption reaches into the leadership of newspapers to this extent, democracy is not sustainable. Thankfully, the doggedness of Pringle and his colleagues at the Times led to a housecleaning at the top.

Shakedown

Gerald Petievich, author of To Live and Die in L.A., again brings his experiences in Army intelligence and the Secret Service to bear in a crime thriller, this one set in Las Vegas. It is compulsively readable and entertaining, with some astute characterizations, particularly the deadweight clock-watcher in a crime task force who has put in his 20 years and is just taking up space.

They Want to Kill Americans

Malcolm Nance's examination of far right groups and their appeal has the feel of a data dump but nonetheless is a useful introduction to the factions attempting to overthrow the government. The danger is real, Nance warns, and there is no hopeful ending in sight.

All That Is

James Salter's final novel is a big-hearted and wistful tale of a man's life starting with his service in the Navy in World War II and running through a career in publishing in New York, a marriage, and several relationships. Ultimately the character, Bowman, looks down at a his legs, which "seemed to belong to an older man." That is one theme: that life, snap, is over quickly. But here as with the rest of the novel, themes are struck in minor key; there is no sledgehammer. Salter writes with a reticence and an elegance that propels the characters through the decades almost magically. The world goes by, but we almost never are subjected to it: Vietnam makes a passing appearance, Picasso and Francis Bacon show up, but the world of the characters is mostly stripped clean, leaving a lean and compulsively readable novel. A lesser writer would have labored and elaborated with greater might to lesser effect.

Elizabeth Finch

This short novel by Julian Barnes highlights what is best about the author: his impeccable prose style. It is a style that is neither fussy, nor showoffy, nor needlessly obscurantist, but rather flowing and calm (like a river with some shallows and a few depths). The title refers to an instructor the narrator, Neil, encountered in an adult education class on culture and civilization and who left an indelible mark on him. As in his novel about Shostakovich, I find Barnes does better with obscure and specific storylines – here it is Julian the Apostate at center – than he does with "love stories," which tend to fall into that English trap of being hopelessly trite. 

Who Killed My Father

Note the lack of a question mark in the title of this slim volume by the French writer Edouard Louis about his father. It is a scathing indictment of successive governments of France, starting with Chirac and running through Macron, for their treatment of the underclass. Louis's father, injured and disabled in his factory job, was made to travel dozens of miles to sweep streets to qualify for his pittance of disability. Louis here adds depth to the tough story of his upbringing that appeared in fictionalized form in The End of Eddy. The father, like many others in his position, blamed immigrants for his problems but now believes France needs a revolution. Louis deftly blends tenderness for his father with an unflinching look at his family's dysfunctions. His new book, about his mother, I expect will be as good.

The Last Days of Roger Federer

I am a fan of Geoff Dyer's novels, but his nonfiction has become a series of self-indulgent trips up the author's own ass. I am tired of reading about Dyer's tennis injuries, about taking drugs, about Burning Man. There is a footnote in this volume on his anxiety upon seeing a roll of toilet paper with only a few sheets left, for God's sake. Making connections is a sign of intelligence, and learning about them can make for enjoyable reading, but when the connections are obscure, tenuous and ingrown, the book needs to be thrown against a wall. There is a small amount of value here, directing a reader to other books and bits about Nietzsche and Beethoven, but much more that is unrewarding and tedious.

Down the Rabbit Hole

This work, a mere 70 pages, has been showered with praise but left me utterly cold. The first, and main, problem is the narration by a clever child. To me, such narrators are always just short of unendurable, Holden Caulfield being the prime example. To this unpleasant child, who has a penchant for denigrating "faggots," add a wisp of a plot that lacks any hook, and you're left with a dirty, grubby little thing and a reason to forget the name Juan Pablo Villalobos.

The Glass Hotel

Emily St. John Mandel proves again to be an engaging novelist with a fluid, transparent style. In trying to categorize her, I find the term "old-fashioned" comes to mind – as a compliment, not an epithet. This, like her previous Station Eleven, is well-plotted and not especially concerned with "big ideas," although there are enough smaller ideas to keep the pot bubbling. The use of supernatural elements never feels artificial, which is hard to pull off, and cameo appearances by characters from the previous novel are satisfying. Again, Mandel constructs a tight, propulsive, and believable plot (despite its fantastic elements). Old-fashioned, then, in the sense that the popular novels published by, say, Alfred A. Knopf in the 1920s were somewhat challenging but mostly just fun to read. 

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel reveals herself in this post-apocalyptic novel to be a writer with a pleasing prose style and the ability to construct intricate and interesting plotlines that contain surprises and address weighty issues of civilization's fragility. There is the sense that Mandel is writing to be read, not writing for her own sake, or to show off.

An Island

This short novel by the South African author Karen Jennings came to my attention by being longlisted for the Booker Prize. Of all the titles and plot summaries included on the list, An Island seemed the most promising to me, and it did not disappoint. As a study of the effects of isolation and violence, it is astute; as an unfolding narrative switching back and forth in time, it is skillfully done.

The Book of Joan

Judging by a name I had never heard before, I assumed the author of this novel, Lidia Yuknavich, was from Eastern Europe and that the book had been translated. Turns out she is an American living in Oregon. At its simplest, The Book of Joan is a dystopian novel in which a ruined planet is abandoned by the wealthy who live in an orbiting station. Joan, a human savior figure, has tremendous and unexplained "superpowers" that derive from her connection to the soil. The author's prose, when it rings with clarity, is excellent. The messages, thinly veiled, warn of where the planet is heading both environmentally and politically. There is quite a bit more in the plot, but I'm not sure it was worth following down every rabbit hole. There is also a fair amount of gore, which was in fact refreshing.

Q&A

Edwin Torres followed up Carlito's Way with this crime novel, like the earlier book also made into an entertaining film. Torres has a great ear for dialogue and a talent for pacing. The time jumps to flesh out the characters' back stories are seamless and effective.

Mecca

This novel by Susan Straight offers insights into the Californian communities that live mostly in the shadows, at least from the point of view of the Anglo world. These are not immigrants in the common usage of the term, but people whose roots to the state date back in some cases hundreds of years. And yet they are still treated as aliens, outsiders, and dangerous. The book appears to have been fused together from several stories, and the welding joints are not smooth. Straight also has an annoying habit of spewing perfectly quotidian details, firehose style, as if they were pearls of wisdom. In a few moving passages the characters transcend archetype, but much of the novel fails to launch.  

Allow Me to Retort

Elie Mystal's book, subtitled "A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution," contains the requisite anger needed for our times while also breaking down the errors of the Supreme Court and what can be done to reverse them. It is bracing to read how the very Constitution conservatives pretend to revere is utterly discarded when it comes to due process rights or, for example, the Ninth Amendment. His case for eliminating the Electoral College is airtight, as is his opposition to forced birth laws. It becomes clear on finishing this helpful work that the opponents of fascism are going to have to take a much more radical approach to defending democracy, or else all is doomed.

The Ink Truck

William Kennedy's first novel, set in a nameless Albany but not part of that cycle of books, suffers from the overheated prose often connected with first-timers. It is a little too proud of its quirkiness and cleverness. The hero, Bailey, a newspaper Guild member carrying on a doomed strike, is a character that is by turns fascinating (at least in his misadventures and dreams) and tiresome. Still, there is plenty to like  amid the fireworks and much that presages the greater books to come.

The Twilight World

Werner Herzog's fascination with the jungle is on display in this slight novel about a Japanese soldier who remained on a Philippine island for 30 years after the end of World War II. 

Roger Corman: How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime

Roger Corman is an artist, a businessman, and a teacher. His autobiography lays out his economic approach to movies (get the distributor to pay off the negative costs upfront so the company stays debt-free and the next project can be launched), as well as the technical details of shooting (plan, plan, plan, then fast, fast, fast). Also, recycle sets and bits of film from previous films to economize. As an artist, Corman puts the emphasis on keeping the eyeball interested by the use of movement and depth. In other words, interesting camera angles, not using the same view repeatedly (which "tires" the eye), and filling the foreground, middle distance and background with interesting things to look at. Directors like Coppola, Demme, Ron Howard and others cut their teeth with Corman, who was by all accounts a willing and generous teacher. One of the benefits of reading this excellent life story was being directed to a Corman-directed race drama, The Intruder, starring William Shatner in what is arguably his finest role. The story is bold, beautifully filmed and acted, and carries a strong message on the human mass mind.

Watergate: A New History

Fifty years after the Watergate break-in, Garrett Graff's detailed retelling of the fall of Richard Nixon helpfully expands the narrative to include all manner of violations of law and ethics to make the point that the burglary was a piece of a much larger, multifaceted scandal. All of the Watergate detail is there, but so are explanations of the ITT scandal, milk price-fixing, tax evasion, Agnew, campaign dirty tricks, and meddling in Johnson's Vietnam peace talks. Nixon's idea – if the president does it, that means it's legal – has now metastasized throughout America, and the treatment for this "cancer" (John Dean's word) does not appear to exist.

The Great Passion

This historical novel by James Runcie covers the period in Leipzig leading up to J.S. Bach's composition of the St. Matthew Passion in 1727. Runcie uses a 13-year-old boy, writing retrospectively from 1750, as narrator. The local color is vaguely interesting, but the Bach character never lifts off the page into the reader's imagination: He is too prone to droning sermonettes and repetitive instructions to singers and musicians.

Red Pill

This 2020 novel is my introduction to Hari Kunzru, and it gives appetite to read his earlier five novels. The story is a mixture of the personal and the political, with plenty of ideas thrown around, but the main attraction is the author's prose style, which is a toned-down and highly engaging variant of, say, Bernhard or Houellebecq.

Very Old Bones

This installment of William Kennedy's Albany cycle has a more self-consciously literary style, as befits being narrated by an aspiring writer. That leads to some curious flights of fancy. And while the excavation of family secrets is as appealling here as in the other novels, some of the incidents appear rabbit-out-of-a-hat style instead of, more satisfyingly, organically. Overall, this is an excellent depiction of what happens when you have a writer in the family.

Three Years in Mississippi

James Meredith had two goals when he attempted to register at the University of Mississippi in 1962: to get an education and to break down the system of white supramacy in his home state and perhaps the nation. An education was secured, but the second goal remains elusive 60 years later. Meredith's memoir shows him to be iron-willed, brave and strategic. His relationship with the civil rights establishment, including the NAACP, was not particularly warm, although his admiration for Medgar Evers was immense. Constance Motley's work as Meredith's lawyer was tenacious. Above all, the feeling that lingers after finishing Three Years in Mississippi is hope – the civil rights bills that Meredith thought were essential in giving Blacks their due were passed a few years later – mixed with sadness that the poison of white supremacy that Meredith sought to purge from America is perhaps as strong as ever.

The Pigeon

The Pigeon by German writer Patrick Süskind is a short novel (115 pages) that punches above its weight. In the style of Thomas Bernhard (but with paragraph and typographical breaks), it tells the story of a middle aged man set in his routines whose life is upended by the appearance of a pigeon in the corridor outside his apartment door. This one seemingly small but odd event sends him into a spiral that makes him question everything he's ever known. Süskind effectively shows that the veneer of civilization, and the mental layer that protects an individual's sanity, is very thin.

The Netanyahus

I had marked this novel in February to be read, never got around to it, and picked it up after it won the Pulitzer Prize last week. It is the kind of book that can be admired but never really loved, and its subject matter is awfully slight. "Cold porridge" passing as "hot stuff," to repurpose a Saul Bellow blurb, comes to mind. Still, although authors who wear their erudition loudly have never impressed me, Joshua Cohen may be the exception that proves the rule.

A Time to be Born

Dawn Powell's 1942 novel is in many ways the typical high-low story: high society, low stakes. After reading Native Son from only two years earlier, it seems almost obscene that someone would write a story that spoofs Clare Boothe Luce and the nonexistent problems of New York society types. But, to Powell's credit, the style is crisp, the scenes are well-observed, and there is a good amount of perceptive social commentary. Powell gets up on her high horse for an opening section and once again deep in the novel, but for the most part she constructs a narrative that is compelling and gathers pace as it rolls to a conclusion.

A High Wind in Jamaica

Reading this 1929 novel by Richard Hughes reminded me again of the vast differences between American English and British English, and of the hoary saying that the two countries are separated by a common language. There is much to enjoy here – an adventure story, an examination of how children think, some attractive set-pieces – but the overall effect is of a slog through the typical hyper-reserved and oh-so-clever English mind.

The Graduate

Writing a novel that is 85 percent dialogue must have been a challenge, but Charles Webb was mostly up to it. Where The Graduate succeeds is in presenting a very cool, distanced critique of suburban middle class values, or more accurately the lack of values parading as such. This is old hat by now, and when done today it comes off as sneering and pompous, but there was still something worth saying on the subject in 1963 when the novel was published. The dialogue can annoy at times, as when the characters repeat each other and ask questions without question marks, but this I suspect is all part of the plan of presenting a very specific world of alienation and meaninglessness. One advantage of the reliance on dialogue is that the reader never has to endure digressions about motivations and feelings – the characters simply act. The reader can fill in the rest.

Spies of the Balkans

Alan Furst's reputation for smart spy novels set during World War II led me to this book, which concerns the looming German threat to Greece in 1940. Furst wears his research lightly and has an appealing prose style. Although this story, centered on a police official in Salonika, is a bit scattershot, I will be dipping into to others in the series.

Double Indemnity

James M. Cain's short novel moves along at a breakneck pace, pun intended, with snappy patter and knowing glances into the dark underside of human behavior. Every bit a good as the film.

The Man Who Lived Underground

Richard Wright's novel was first published 60 years after his death, although it appeared in short story form in the 1940s. It mixes a type of magical realism with trenchant social commentary, opening with a brutal section in which a black man is tortured by police into signing a confession to a crime he didn't commit. The man escapes underground, lives in the sewers of the unnamed city and pokes holes into basement walls to observe a variety of scenes and people. Ultimately, he finds wisdom underground, the wisdom of one who sees the hopelessness of daily striving, the false allure of religion, and the injustice and dishonesty of what was then a world at war. Such a man cannot be allowed to exist, obviously, much as the Counselor in Mario Vargas Llosa's War of the End of the World could not be allowed to exist. The world kills its prophets, even the genuine ones. A sad but bracing tale told beautifully by a great writer.

God's Little Acre

What is most striking about this Erskine Caldwell novel are its shifts in tone. From a comic beginning in which a stubborn Georgia farmer ruins his fields to dig for gold, the story moves to South Carolina, where a kind of In Dubious Battle scenario plays out at a textile mill. (Mill workers are colorfully disparaged as "lint-heads" by some.) Then comes a Cain and Abel flourish, complete with deep philosophizing by the farmer, Ty Ty Walden. This is not even mentioning the lust that is threaded through the narrative, or the albino, or the black sharecroppers who seem to know everything. I have rarely encountered a more compelling and at the same time dizzying work.

Tobacco Road

Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is by turns comic, tragic and sickening – a paean of sorts to small farmers and their love of the land and an indictment of the forces crushing them. Published in 1932, the same year as Light in August, this novel is a stylistic 180 degrees away from William Faulkner's tale. The sentences are simple, with large blocks of dialogue in which characters repeat themselves as if they have to drum their thoughts into their own heads to make them real. Jeeter Lester, the patriarch of the family, has seen most of his children married off or die; there remains a wife, a daughter, a dim son, and a grandmother who wanders around unnoticed until she is run over by a car. Jeeter talks incessantly about the need to get seed, guano, and a mule to plant his cotton crop, but his credit has run out and the family is quietly starving, relying on snuff to stave off hunger. There is no nobility here, except perhaps in the immolation of the coda.

Acres and Pains

It is possible to appreciate the wit of S.J. Perelman contained in this volume on country living, and still maintain that the contents have aged badly. Eighty years ago wordplay of this type, most prominently displayed in film scripts Perelman did for the Marx brothers, could produce gales of laughter. Today, I find myself watching Marx brothers movies only for Harpo, whose humor transcends time because it is wordless; the Groucho patter, and this book, mostly leave me cold.

Native Son

Strong stuff when it was published and strong stuff 80 years later, Native Son by Richard Wright is a devastating and at times sickening indictment of racist America. The way the main character, Bigger Thomas, responds to being thwarted by society is, as one of the characters says in his defense toward the end of the novel, an act of creation as well as murder. I have rarely been in the grip of a more powerful story and storyteller.

Six Amendments

Subtitled "How and Why We Should Change the Constitution," this short work by John Paul Stevens presents clearly and persuasively how six amendments could create "a more perfect union," which is what the Constitution is supposed to be about, after all. The areas include gun laws, the death penalty and gerrymandering, which most people are familiar with, but also the pernicious doctrine of sovereign immunity and the dangerous anti-commandeering doctrine, which will be news to many readers. Stevens showed in Five Chiefs how he brings clarity and rationality to his subject matter, and that is certainly true here.

Black Money

Ross Macdonald was in his prime in the 1960s, creating complex but believable stories with his seemingly effortless touch at dialogue and simile. Black Money is no exception and has the added advantage of containing a brief statement of Lew Archer's credo: I like people, and I try to help them. Archer is the best fictional detective I've ever encountered, with Maigret a close second.

Gringos

Highly atmospheric and picaresque, Charles Portis's entertaining final novel, Gringos, suffers only perhaps from a large cast of characters that becomes unwieldy in spots.

True Grit

Charles Portis's 1968 novel had escaped my attention till now, perhaps because I thought John Wayne's performance was just more Duke, nothing special. To go back to the source material and find a perfect, sharp, funny, touching novel was therefore a surprise and a pleasure. The character of Mattie Ross deserves a place next to Huckleberry Finn in American literature.

Dream Story

This is a polished gem of a story by Arthur Schnitzler, the basis for the film Eyes Wide Shut, that investigates marital relations and the temptations that imperil them. Dreams and reality are blurred to such an extent that by the end of the story the reader is left wondering whether the dreams recounted by the wife were actually dreams within the main dream of the husband. Look too far into the mind, Dream Story would seem to be saying, and you risk everything.

Bad Lawyer

I picked this one up on a bit of a misapprehension, seeing it mentioned in a New York Times column by a writer I enjoy. I thought it would be a deeply researched examination of the flaws of our legal system and the farcical behavior by its practitioners, but what I got was a millennial memoir with a few instructive anecdotes and the balance taken up with fairly routine personal matters presented as interesting. I'm not sure why a certain age cohort believes that its every move sparkles with originality, but someone needs to tell them that previous generations also got drunk, got high, and had sex, and that there is nothing less interesting than reading about people who are constantly getting drunk or high.

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat

Brian Cox's memoir ticks all the right boxes: a thorough but not overlong account of his childhood, the story of how he came to love acting, and a mostly chronological tour d'horizon of his career. The anecdotes are winning and the judgments are unfiltered and sharp.

Peril

This account by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa about the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election and its hideous aftermath was surprisingly packed with detailed accounts of policy and not just gossip, thus far outstripping Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury of 2018 in relevance. It is clear that no one in Trump's camp, possibly excluding a couple of lunatics, ever believed any of the false claims about a stolen election. It is also clear that no one in this camp had even the smallest amount of human decency required to publicly state this truth. The main problem is that the liars who are playing politics convince 70 million dupes to believe their lies. That population then becomes the predicate for hanging on to the lies and imperiling self-rule itself.

Face: One Square Foot of Skin

Using reported anecdotes to produce fictionalized vignettes is an effective way to get at Justine Bateman's subject: women's faces, how they are viewed as they age, and why some women feel compelled to "fix" them. The book is an urgent voice that needs to be heard by both men and women in a culture where "old" is literally yesterday. 

The Underground Man

Ross Macdonald's wicked flair with titles, first apparent to me in The Ivory Grin, returns here. Again we have Lew Archer plunged into a case with a large cast in which secrets from the past open doors onto the present. A little violence here and there, snappy patter sprinkled throughout, and a thoroughly satisfying conclusion make The Underground Man a winner.

Even the Dead

The seventh Quirke novel by Benjamin Black (John Banville) is similar to previous installments in being long on atmosphere and short on plot. I keep wondering how much would be left of these books if you took out all the cigarette smoking, drinking, and uneaten meals – not much, certainly. Quirke "falls in love" in this one in yet another lazy and childish novelistic depiction. Still, there's some good action in the last 50 pages and a satisfying conclusion.

Tapping the Source

Kem Nunn's 1984 novel, his first, is classified as surf noir, a category I had not encountered. It is a tad too expansive stylistically for my taste, but it presents a vivid picture of the Huntington Beach demimonde as the main character arrives to search for his missing sister. Surfing and more destructive behaviors lead to a solution of sorts.

Absent Without Leave

This volume by Heinrich Böll contains two long stories first published in the early 1960s. The title story is highly literary and somewhat tough sledding, about a German's experiences leading up to and after the war. Böll plays with forms here, offering snatches of headlines (like Dos Passos) and family portrait thumbnails to deepen the narrative. The second story, "Enter and Exit," is more conventional and describes a recruit's experiences leading up to the first day of World War II and his train ride home after the war's end. It is significant that in both these stories, like in much of Böll's writing, the war itself is never or only obliquely described. In this way he stays powerfully concentrated on his theme – the effects of tyranny and war on the individual. 

Breakfast with Seneca

Subtitled "A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living," this examination of the highlights of Seneca's practical philosophy by David Fideler is both valuable in itself and as a prod to go deeper into the source material. For me, Seneca's wisdom has always had the effect of a warm healing light, or a refreshing immersion in cool, clear water. When I stray into negative behaviors (anger, for example), he offers a path back to a more focused, worthy life. Fideler reminds readers that this life is accessible to all.

Sleeping Beauty

Ross Macdonald's penultimate Lew Archer novel begins with an oil spill off the California coast that sets off a complex mystery stretching back decades. There is a bit less of the snappy patter in Sleeping Beauty compared to earlier novels, and it is with some wistfulness that I am reading this series knowing that the last novel, The Blue Hammer, was touched by Macdonald's oncoming dementia. But in reading Macdonald and Simenon, "mere" genre novelists, it's clear that they know far more than most "serious" writers about human motivations and flaws.

Holy Orders

Easily the weakest of the Quirke series, Holy Orders contains a mystery that isn't much of a mystery at all, the usual obsession with describing alcohol, cigarettes, trees and rain, and a style of narrative that has characters repeatedly asking each other questions to which there are no answers. I am beginning to wonder if this installment is some kind of meta joke.

The Armies of the Night

There is no Norman Mailer around today that I know of. Matt Taibbi has a bit of Mailer's dash, but nowhere near the authority supporting his prose. (And I haven't read him in years.) Mailer wrote about the peace march on the Pentagon in 1967 as if he were writing a novel, put himself in the third person, infused the text with enormous humor and self-deprecation (and self-aggrandizement), and spun tiny observations into encompassing philosophies. This is an achievement that far surpasses anything written about the current situation, where we see books like Peril by Bob Woodward that are nothing more than the emptying of a reporter's notebook.

Here, we have metaphor:

"For years he had been writing about the nature of totalitarianism, its need to render populations apathetic, its instrument – the destruction of mood. ... (M)ood was a scent which rose from the acts and calms of nature, and totalitarianism was a deodorant to nature. Yes, and by the logic of this metaphor, the Pentagon looked like the five-sided tip on the spout of a spray can to be used under the arm, yes, the Pentagon was spraying the deodorant of its presence all over the fields of Virginia."

We have timeless aphorism:

"Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia."

We have insights into mass psychology:

"The guards were here to work out the long slow stages of a grim tableau – the recapitulation of that poverty-ridden rural childhood which had left them with the usual constipated mixture of stinginess and greed, blocked compassion and frustrated desires for power."

We have lost a lot in this century. Perhaps what is missed more than anything is a Mailer to observe and warn.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Scrolling through the online auction catalogue for Ruth Bader Ginsburg's personal library I found a lot of five Nabokovs that surprisingly included his lesser-known chess novel, The Defense. The discovery created a spark of connection that was no less real for being imagined. In another lot, touchingly, there was a volume titled The Widow's Handbook. If a public figure is measured by her library, Ginsburg's death was a great loss indeed.

From the auction catalog: "At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write," Ginsburg wrote in a 2016 op-ed. "Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea."

(Update: The lot went for around $7,000.)

Vengeance

Author Benjamin Black (John Banville) has become a bit of a bore with this installment of the Quirke series. The repeated emphasis on drinking, smoking, and descriptions of nature wears the reader down. The mystery itself is interesting enough, though not particularly complex. Also, at 300 pages, the book is flabby and could have done with a sharp-eyed edit of, say, 50 pages.

The Chill

Ross Macdonald strikes again with a convoluted plot that works itself out to perfection in the final pages. Throughout The Chill, the sardonic and dogged Lew Archer spins witty dialogue seemingly effortlessly. What sets Archer apart from his predecessors Marlowe and the Continental Op is compassion compounded with toughness, with a dash of concern for the social issues of the day.

The Instant Enemy

To say that the plot of this Ross Macdonald novel gets tangled is an understatement. As in other Lew Archer stories, and as in the Quirke novels that I am also reading this month, dark family secrets play a large role in the resolution of the case. Macdonald's facility with dialogue, and the skill of his detective in untangling those knots, makes The Instant Enemy an unalloyed pleasure.

A Death in Summer

Book Four in the Quirke mystery series by Benjamin Black (John Banville) is the best so far. It has a clear line, the usual sharp dialogue and similes, and a main character who is thankfully not up his own arse.

The Boys

Ron and Clint Howard have packed all the ingredients necessary for a good memoir into The Boys: frankness, selectivity, self-deprecation, and a large quantity of interesting anecdotes. The book takes the Howards from their parents' fledgling acting careers in the 1940s and 50s through Ron's first major directing feature, Grand Theft Auto, in 1977. The stories about Andy Griffith and Gentle Ben are here, as expected, but there are also some unexpected insights into acting technique and a show business work ethic from the father, Rance Howard, and a touching account of the sometimes tragic but determined life of the mother, Jean. Clint had a drug problem that he kicked; Ron was basically as squeaky-clean as his image. An impressive family story about "sophisticated hicks," as they called themselves.

The Invention of Sound

Chuck Palahniuk's novel offers some satisfactions for the first two-thirds of the text: a father's hunt for a missing child, a sound engineer's gruesome method of capturing screams, the ways of Hollywood. But The Invention of Sound spirals into a fever dream that is confusing and frustrating. Sometime the strain of a writer trying to be bombastic and interesting really shows.

Consider This

Chuck Palahniuk's book of writing lessons is hard-nosed and practical. Use strong verbs, kill off a secondary character, vary the points of view – these and other strategies are mixed in with anecdotes from his travels to promote his books. This is an excellent resource for any writer, although it could produce more Palahniuk clones than original stylists. Maybe not a bad thing. 

A Crown of Feathers

At the end of one of these perceptive and affecting stories, a character says, "Man does not live according to reason." That might be the theme of the collection. These people – Jewish immigrants from Poland, the deeply religious and irreligious, the schemers and dreamers – have their lives disrupted by situations and people that are wholly irrational. The characterizations are spiky and piquant, and most of the stories end with either that satisfying "snap" or falling notes of pathos. Isaac Bashevis Singer throws into the bargain a wealth of information for a Gentile like me about Jewish sects and practices. A great book to end 2021 on.