Nightmare Alley

William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, published in 1946, succeeds on multiple fronts. It is a harrowing rendering of a con man's rise and fall; a seedy portrait of carny life; and a psychological biography of a damaged man. Throw in tarot cards and degrading behavior and you have a rich novel, written in a sharp style, that will linger in the memory.

Red Harvest

The title of Dashiell Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest, refers to the blood spilled throughout its pages. The writer drew from his experiences as a Pinkerton detective in his stories, which broke new ground in frankness and violence. A reader from the vantage point of nearly a century since Red Harvest's publication would do well to consider a few extenuating circumstances before judging it too harshly. Since it was originally written as a serial, the chapters have a self-contained aspect that impedes the flow of the novel. Also, the startling originality of Hammett's effort has faded with the years and the explosion of copycats in the genre. The best way to read Red Harvest is probably to imagine yourself in 1929 and encountering it for what it is: a new form of expression. On those terms, it is an undoubted masterpiece.

The Maltese Falcon

It is impossible to read Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon without imagining the actors from John Huston's 1941 film, and for that Huston deserves high praise. He had found the 1931 pre-Code version a disappointment and scripted a movie that followed the book pretty much right down the line. Hammett's snappy dialogue was a template for those who followed, both his equal (Chandler, Macdonald) and hacks. In the novel especially, the black bird is the perfect vehicle through which ethics and desires are revealed. A morality play with no moral, the book is a dark pleasure.

The Ringmaster

The Ringmaster by Darryl Ponicsan (author of The Last Detail) works less as a novel and more as fictionalized reportage. In that capacity, it provides an interesting look into the workings of a medium-sized circus circa 1975. After a while, the travel and staffing problems become repetitive, but the reader will put down the novel as an insider into a grimy subculture.

Beloved

Toni Morrison's Beloved is a difficult book to evaluate. The magical aspects didn't work for me, which undermined the entire project, and the text was stylistically erratic. By the latter I mean that there were large chunks of the book that flowed beautifully and meaningfully, only to be stopped by dense "writerly" passages that seemed to be nothing so much as showing off. It is doubtless a novel that would benefit from multiple readings; maybe I'll give it another go sometime.

The Last Detail

This 1970 novel by ex-sailor Darryl Ponicsan follows the classic picaresque road trip formula, but with some added satisfactions. The story is simple: Two Navy lifers must escort a seaman from Norfolk to Portsmouth Naval Prison. The young man has been convicted of stealing $40 from a charity collection box and sentenced to eight years and a "DD" – dishonorable discharge. The excessive punishment weighs on the two Shore Patrol men, "Bad-Ass" and "Mule," to the extent that they decide to show the convict a good time before he's locked up. Military injustice, racism, the perils of thinking that "doing your job" is enough to excuse anything – these themes and others are effectively explored in this entertaining, bawdy novel.

Babbitt

George Babbitt is a type: conventional, complacent, and a bit crooked. He is also an individual who comes to life in the pages of Sinclair Lewis's famous novel. It is interesting to compare what Lewis achieved in Babbitt with Dreiser's accomplishment in An American Tragedy or, more aptly perhaps, Jennie Gerhardt. Neither writer will ever be praised as a prose stylist, but I give the edge, slightly, to Lewis for his ability to dig into the subtleties of human desire where Dreiser takes a more blunt approach. Babbitt wants to break out of his confining yet comfortable shell, but when he does all the material goods he so adores (and his wife) are put at risk. So he inches back into the fold, mostly. Lewis gives Babbitt's son, Ted, a chance at the end of the novel to break out for new territory, bringing a beam of light into an otherwise dark story. 

The Loved One

Reviewed here 11 years ago, I returned to this Evelyn Waugh novel in preparation for a discussion of the 1965 film version directed by Tony Richardson. The last name of character Aimee Thanatogenos, I now realize, appropriately means "born of death" and her first name translates as "the loved one." What is striking in the text is not the satirizing of America but the way Waugh dispenses with dramatic set-pieces. For example, when Thanatogenos learns, to her horror, that her presumed future husband works at a pet cemetery, the reader is given nothing more than the fact that she attended the funeral of a parrot and saw him there. Everything else has been subtracted. This also happens with the suicide by hanging of Sir Francis Hinsley, which most other authors would have licked their chops at writing. Instead Waugh refers to it, almost in passing, as funeral preparations are described. The Loved One is a real masterpiece of wit and concision.  

Cavett

We get the culture we deserve, and today we don't deserve a Dick Cavett, apparently. The splitting of mass media into thousands of tiny slices has made commonality of experience much rarer. Shows that draw 1 million viewers today are hits; in the '70s the top-rated shows drew 30 million viewers a week. I can't even picture a "public intellectual" today of the kind that Cavett regularly interviewed. Does one exist? Cavett takes the form of a Q&A biography, packed with entertaining show-biz anecdotes. The Nebraskan who landed in New York via Yale was a hustler who knocked on doors – literally – and wandered into offices looking for work. As an actor, writer, stand-up comedian, and eventually host of his own show, Cavett relied on his quick wit, a quality evident throughout this 1974 volume.

The Conformist

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, released in 1970, is a film I have returned to repeatedly over the years with much admiration. The source material, a novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia, sat unread on my bookshelf for years – until now. It is a cool, clinical look at a man who knows himself to be different (as a child he exhibited cruelty to animals and shot a man who tried to molest him) and makes the decision, but more importantly takes actions, to conform. This leads to a monstrous betrayal, but it's all in a day's work for Marcello Clerici – a fascist when fascists are in charge, then suddenly an anti-fascist when Mussolini is removed. Though he does not preach about the dangers of a mass mindset, Moravia excavates the rotten, empty individual soul that makes all such movements possible.