The Loser

Thomas Bernhard's triangular character study includes an unnamed narrator, a fictionalized Glenn Gould, and the loser of the title. The three are pianists, but only Gould succeeds in becoming a piano artist. The loser kills himself, and the narrator writes endlessly about Gould. Stylistically, the novel thrums with repetitions, bald sincerity, and blazing judgments. On Page 1, the narrator steps toward an Austrian inn; by Page 100 he is barely inside, the intervening 10 seconds having been stuffed with surreal characterizations. The final 99 percent of the book consists of a single paragraph, or perhaps more accurately, no paragraphs. The reader may tire of Bernhard's rashness in expressing his loves and (many more) hates, but the author does not permit attention to flag.

What the Gospels Meant

Garry Wills's choice of tense is instructive: He is not explaining what the Gospels might mean to us today; he is excavating the writers' purposes. He translates the original Greek himself, clearing away centuries of holy smoke clouding the original intent. Even the Lord's Prayer looks fresh as taken apart by Wills, who writes with scholarship, clarity, and brevity.

Room at the Top

The theme of a young man on the make had already been done better by Thackeray and Dreiser when this novel by John Braine was published in 1957, but Braine succeeds as an agreeable stylist with a sharp eye for the details of human behavior. The dated rendering of some of the dialogue into overblown, faux adult flirting can be excused given the novel's timelessness in other aspects, such as demonstrating the eternal and related pulls of greed and love.

Then We Came to the End

It shouldn't take 200 pages to warm up to a novel; it should take two or three. Joshua Ferris's decision to write most of this book in the first person plural is damned by the fact that the only effective section, starting around page 200, uses the third person singular. The rest is stuffing.

Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light

To submit to a tyranny or to challenge it head-on are the binary choices. The Czech writer Ivan Klima's novel follows a character who takes a third, less comfortable way: accommodation combined with revulsion. The book falls within the tradition of Darkness at Noon and contains that predecessor's psychological insight and cold realism.

Losing Mum and Pup

It may be inaccurate to call Christopher Buckley's account of the death of his parents "breezy," but only just. Easily read in a sitting or two and full of name-dropping anecdotes, it is both blunt and affectionate.

Balzac

Balzac resonates so strongly down the years. From his introduction to Droll Stories:

Bear in mind also, ye wild critics, you scrapers-up of words, harpies who mangle the intentions and inventions of everyone, that as children only do we laugh, and as we travel onward laughter sinks down and dies out, like the light of the oil-lit lamp. This signifies, that to laugh you must be innocent, and pure of a heart, lacking which qualities you purse your lips, drop your jaws, and knit your brow, after the manner of men hiding vices and impurities.

Madeleine

Andre Gide must be held at least partially responsible for our age's magnification of ordinary life into overheated prose. Although he wrote books about Montaigne and the Congo, much of his work is extravagantly self-obsessed. A line can be drawn between Gide and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. In this volume, he recounts his marriage to his cousin, a decent enough woman who mostly withstood his pederasty and tawdriness in stoical silence. An exception was when she told Gide, "I loathe indescretion," to which he self-importantly replied that he hated falsehood more. She also quoted at him a line from the poet Paul Claudel: "Better hypocrisy than cynicism." As is so often the case in relationships like these, Madeleine, the simpler person, was the better one.

An Answer from the Silence

English-language readers are now able, 74 years after its publication in Stuttgart, to read this early novel by the Swiss writer Max Frisch. Withheld by the author from his collected works in the 1970s, An Answer from the Silence has tell-tale signs of youth like sincerity and iconoclasm. In this respect it could be classified as a lesser Hunger. But there is more here, such as subtle and lyrical imagery of the mountains, where the young man of the story goes in a search for meaning.

The Possibility of an Island

Michel Houellebecq throws futurism, sociology, sexuality, psychology, politics, culture, and philosophy up against the wall and just about all of it sticks.