Dewey Defeats Truman

This is another old-fashioned and satisfying historical novel by Thomas Mallon, set in 1948 in Owosso, Michigan, during the presidential campaign between Thomas Dewey and Harry Truman. Mallon's skill is to make himself invisible as a writer, using an agreeable prose style that puts characterizations and plot to the fore. His modesty and craftsmanship are qualities too often missing in contemporary American literature.

Amherst

This William Nicholson novel, based around an affair between Emily Dickinson's brother and the woman who would become the poet's champion, alternates between that narrative and an account of a young Englishwoman visiting Amherst to research a potential screenplay on the affair. Like many novels by fine English writers (Graham Greene's The End of the Affair comes to mind) and countless bad films, Amherst displays an almost infantile conception of romantic love. There is a quote, deep in the novel, that tentatively moves toward a more mature understanding ("We think there's someone out there who can make us happy, someone who'll make us complete, but that's not how it works."), but the person quoted follows the thought to a nihilistic conclusion. Nicholson is better that the overheated romance novel dialogue that he's put into this book.

A Woman in Jerusalem

A.B. Yehoshua has been called "Israel's Faulkner," but his beautiful writing leads me to think of him as "Israel's Vargas Llosa." This story could certainly have been written by the Peruvian Nobelist. It is built as if by a master cabinetmaker and includes the feature that no one is named (except by occupation or relation) other than the woman at the heart of the story, a foreigner living in Jerusalem who was killed in a terrorist attack and whose body lay unclaimed until a weekly scandal sheet takes to task her employer for ignoring her. The journey into eastern Europe by the personnel manager of the company to return the body to its home soil becomes, first, an adventure, and then something deeper.

The Voice Imitator

Thomas Bernhard's book of 104 stories in 104 pages is filled with his usual mix of gloom, suicide, and alienation. Some of the stories hold a reader's attention long after he has put the book down; others are more ephemeral; all highlight Bernhard's distinctive voice and acid wit.

Mr. Mani

Mr. Mani is a multi-generational saga by A.B. Yehoshua, centered around Jerusalem and told in an unusual way: as conversations between two people, with one partner's words missing, and running in reverse chronological order. The reverse chronology suits the material beautifully, resulting in a feeling of almost archaeological discovery as deeper layers are revealed. The silent partner in the conversation is a device that works less well because it often calls attention to itself when the speaker repeats a question. Still, this is a rich and satisfying family chronicle.

Night

It probably shouldn't have taken Elie Wiesel's death to get me to read his work, but there you are. Night is notable for its clear-eyed, merciless clarity.

Notes on the Death of Culture

The typical problem with declinist polemics is fogeyism combined with a failure to establish that the "golden age" — from which current society has supposedly fallen so far — actually existed. There is a bit of this in Mario Vargas Llosa's collection of essays, but for the most part he makes a strong case that the culture of entertainment has been destructive both to the individual and to democratic institutions.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Evelyn Waugh's novel is based on his own experience of drug-induced hallucinations. While it is very funny, there is an undercurrent of unease in the verbal attacks by imagined enemies on Pinfold's character. Because after all, these attacks are coming from Pinfold's own subconscious.

Murder in Greenwich

Mark Fuhrman lays out in meticulous detail the events surrounding the 1975 murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut. Written in the late 1990s, before the trial and conviction of Michael Skakel, a Kennedy cousin, for the murder, Furhman presents an ironclad case for Skakel's guilt and a damning indictment of the Greenwich police for incompetence.

End of Watch

Eighty percent of the sentences in this Stephen King novel, the concluding volume of a trilogy, are bad: mostly laden with cliches or hackneyed metaphors. The dialogue is cutesy to the point of being inhuman. And as in the other books in this series, King drains suspense away by having characters puzzling over incidents that the reader already understands. King was a lousy writer when I gave up on Salem's Lot decades ago after about 50 pages, and he's a lousy writer still.