God's Little Acre

What is most striking about this Erskine Caldwell novel are its shifts in tone. From a comic beginning in which a stubborn Georgia farmer ruins his fields to dig for gold, the story moves to South Carolina, where a kind of In Dubious Battle scenario plays out at a textile mill. (Mill workers are colorfully disparaged as "lint-heads" by some.) Then comes a Cain and Abel flourish, complete with deep philosophizing by the farmer, Ty Ty Walden. This is not even mentioning the lust that is threaded through the narrative, or the albino, or the black sharecroppers who seem to know everything. I have rarely encountered a more compelling and at the same time dizzying work.

Tobacco Road

Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is by turns comic, tragic and sickening – a paean of sorts to small farmers and their love of the land and an indictment of the forces crushing them. Published in 1932, the same year as Light in August, this novel is a stylistic 180 degrees away from William Faulkner's tale. The sentences are simple, with large blocks of dialogue in which characters repeat themselves as if they have to drum their thoughts into their own heads to make them real. Jeeter Lester, the patriarch of the family, has seen most of his children married off or die; there remains a wife, a daughter, a dim son, and a grandmother who wanders around unnoticed until she is run over by a car. Jeeter talks incessantly about the need to get seed, guano, and a mule to plant his cotton crop, but his credit has run out and the family is quietly starving, relying on snuff to stave off hunger. There is no nobility here, except perhaps in the immolation of the coda.

Acres and Pains

It is possible to appreciate the wit of S.J. Perelman contained in this volume on country living, and still maintain that the contents have aged badly. Eighty years ago wordplay of this type, most prominently displayed in film scripts Perelman did for the Marx brothers, could produce gales of laughter. Today, I find myself watching Marx brothers movies only for Harpo, whose humor transcends time because it is wordless; the Groucho patter, and this book, mostly leave me cold.

Native Son

Strong stuff when it was published and strong stuff 80 years later, Native Son by Richard Wright is a devastating and at times sickening indictment of racist America. The way the main character, Bigger Thomas, responds to being thwarted by society is, as one of the characters says in his defense toward the end of the novel, an act of creation as well as murder. I have rarely been in the grip of a more powerful story and storyteller.

Six Amendments

Subtitled "How and Why We Should Change the Constitution," this short work by John Paul Stevens presents clearly and persuasively how six amendments could create "a more perfect union," which is what the Constitution is supposed to be about, after all. The areas include gun laws, the death penalty and gerrymandering, which most people are familiar with, but also the pernicious doctrine of sovereign immunity and the dangerous anti-commandeering doctrine, which will be news to many readers. Stevens showed in Five Chiefs how he brings clarity and rationality to his subject matter, and that is certainly true here.

Black Money

Ross Macdonald was in his prime in the 1960s, creating complex but believable stories with his seemingly effortless touch at dialogue and simile. Black Money is no exception and has the added advantage of containing a brief statement of Lew Archer's credo: I like people, and I try to help them. Archer is the best fictional detective I've ever encountered, with Maigret a close second.

Gringos

Highly atmospheric and picaresque, Charles Portis's entertaining final novel, Gringos, suffers only perhaps from a large cast of characters that becomes unwieldy in spots.

True Grit

Charles Portis's 1968 novel had escaped my attention till now, perhaps because I thought John Wayne's performance was just more Duke, nothing special. To go back to the source material and find a perfect, sharp, funny, touching novel was therefore a surprise and a pleasure. The character of Mattie Ross deserves a place next to Huckleberry Finn in American literature.

Dream Story

This is a polished gem of a story by Arthur Schnitzler, the basis for the film Eyes Wide Shut, that investigates marital relations and the temptations that imperil them. Dreams and reality are blurred to such an extent that by the end of the story the reader is left wondering whether the dreams recounted by the wife were actually dreams within the main dream of the husband. Look too far into the mind, Dream Story would seem to be saying, and you risk everything.

Bad Lawyer

I picked this one up on a bit of a misapprehension, seeing it mentioned in a New York Times column by a writer I enjoy. I thought it would be a deeply researched examination of the flaws of our legal system and the farcical behavior by its practitioners, but what I got was a millennial memoir with a few instructive anecdotes and the balance taken up with fairly routine personal matters presented as interesting. I'm not sure why a certain age cohort believes that its every move sparkles with originality, but someone needs to tell them that previous generations also got drunk, got high, and had sex, and that there is nothing less interesting than reading about people who are constantly getting drunk or high.