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.