The Humbling

This Philip Roth wet dream is agreeably short, 140 pages, and written with an admirable clarity. A subtitle might be, "There's No Fool Like an Old Fool."

Brief Encounters

The celebrity anecdotes in this Dick Cavett collection of essays are winning, as expected. Unexpected are the vivid and sometimes poignant recollections from a Nebraska adolescence, among them: a William Jennings Bryan statue at the state Capitol vandalized, a bittersweet Christmas story, and driving in freezing rain. I started this book thinking it was too bad there's no one like Cavett on TV today, but there might be when Stephen Colbert takes over the Late Show. Coincidentally in one of these columns written before CBS made that hire, Cavett makes the case for Colbert.

A Delicate Balance

Reading Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance leaves an impression that there is less here than meets the eye. The amateur intellectual matriarch, the drunken sister (comic relief), the petulant, hopeless daughter, the puttering husband, and two strange friends don't up add up to much more than the sum of their parts. Existential dread and a sordid secret can't put enough meat on these bones.

A Crime in Holland

Sending Maigret to Holland gives Simenon a chance to draw contrasts between the Dutch and French in matters of morals, behavior, and food and drink. Love and hate, however, cross all borders. After solving the crime, Maigret's remark is priceless: "And that's all ... What time is the next train for France?"

Night at the Crossroads

As if to prove that Maigret is not always sedentary, this novel has him throwing several punches, jumping into a well, and firing his gun. But these fireworks do not change what is underneath: a detective who has seen it all and who has, as his creator says, a credo of "understand and judge not."  

The Yellow Dog

It was Francois Mitterrand who said that one of the most important attributes of a leader is indifference. By which he meant, I believe, an aloofness to the white noise that will always surround a president. Jules Maigret must agree. He is described in this mystery as a "monument of placidity," and when leaders in a Breton town demand he do something about a series of attacks, his response is to hang up the phone or walk away. Indifferent to the extraneous things, yes, but not to the main game.

The Company of Women

A frank, unsentimental novel centered on sex is rare enough; Kushwant Singh's has the added benefit of providing a window onto Indian life and customs.

Old Masters

The torrents of negation that wash through this Thomas Bernhard novel are initially refreshing, yet run the risk of ultimately turning the book into a dead thing. What saves Old Masters from that fate are the flashes of affirmation, some even tender, that sparkle through the showers of bile. In a paradoxical way, this technique reveals Bernhard not as a curmudgeon but an arch sentimentalist.

The Wapshot Chronicle

John Cheever told the Paris Review about a writer who argued that Cheever could have been another Faulkner if only he had stayed in St. Botolphs, the setting of this novel. Reading The Wapshot Chronicle it is hard to disagree. There is a vibrancy and poignancy throughout, peppered with the picaresque. Leander Wapshot's memoir passages, written in a clipped style and revealing great depths, are especially effective.

Nosferatu

Jim Shepard's novel about the German filmmaker F.W. Murnau breaks his life into four parts -- youth, war, and two films (Nosferatu and Tabu) -- to reveal his character. It is that of an outsider, but perhaps more interesting than the director himself are Shepard's imagined but researched accounts of the technical challenges that faced Murnau in achieving his artistic objectives. At one point he is shown getting his hands dirty dressing a miniature set with floss doubling as grass. Cameras on wires crash and are rebuilt. Technology is invented on the spot, and work is the source of art.