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.