Stella Maris

If you are a novelist who hangs around with physicists and mathematicians long enough, it's bound to work its way into your books. I still don't understand much of what Alicia Western (and her brother, Bobby, in the previous novel) are talking about when they declaim on these subjects, but the other 80 percent is penetrating and insightful. I especially like in Stella Maris that Alicia gets an interlocutor who stands in for a better-than-average intelligent reader. The novel consists entirely of a dialogue between Alicia and the shrink. It ends with me wishing he had mentioned The Myth of Sisyphus as an argument to keep on living.

The Lemon

This novel by the collective author S.E. Boyd is easily the worst book I read in 2022. I have lost count of the number of novels blurbed to be "hilarious," "a laugh on every page," or "gut-busting" that turn out to be witless and humorless. The issue is almost always that the characters have not been developed sufficiently to make any humor attached to them believable. Instead, there are absurd generic gags that don't match the characterizations (which, as I said, are thin at best anyway). The plot is beyond stupid, and as I read this I wondered what was going on: Why was this published? Then in the acknowledgments the authors gave the game away by thanking someone for securing the television rights. This was a purely commercial venture from the start, surely the worst possible way to write a novel (Faulkner and Sanctuary excepted, if you believe him).

Deeply, Madly

It is a shame that actor Alan Rickman never wrote a memoir; these diaries are a poor substitute, and I have sympathy with the view that they should never have been published in this form. It took me to about page 200 (of 450) before I settled into a rhythm that allowed me to finish this book in an enjoyable way. I can understand others giving up before then. There is simply too much routine personal information and too much complaining about mostly small matters (a $50 charge to enter the Delta lounge, a late train, etc.). His assessments of plays, movies and actors are welcome but all too brief.

The Passenger

Cormac McCarthy's novel is obtuse but also unexectedly funny. There are passages that will put some readers in mind of A Confederacy of Dunces, with its picaresque style and New Orleans location. Dabblers in quantum mechanics may enjoy a section that will leave most other readers baffled. A discussion of the Kennedy assassination will have the most ardent defender of the Warren Report scratching her head. Through it all is a thread of a brother's love for a sister, his sister's apparent madness, and the dark forces that run the world and run over the little people in it.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

This Ken Kalfus novel about Sept. 11, 2001, and its effects on a couple going through a divorce has a patchwork feel. One scene near the end about a suicide bomb is completely out of sync tonally with the rest of the book. Blurbs promising a "savagely funny" and "hilarious" work lied (again). There is no doubt some good stuff here, but the divorce proceedings become tedious and the fanciful ending feels like cheating.

Sea of Tranquility

Whatever Emily St. John Mandel writes, I will read. This novel, which stands alone but also references characters from previous works, has the same flowing style that first attracted me, along with a propulsive plot and satisfying twists. What Mandel understands more than many authors is that the novel is a form that is capable of so much more than it is usually asked to accommodate. She fills the form, not with unbelievable silliness like, say, Chuck Palahmiuk often does, but with real human behavior in a setting that is science fiction but glows with truth.

Camera Man

Dana Stevens's biography of Buster Keaton appears to hit all the high (and low) points of his life while also taking welcome side trips into the cultural and political context of his time. This essayistic approach allows the book to take in the technology of movies, the burgeoning child welfare movement, Alcholics Anonymous, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other trends and figures that touched on Keaton's life.

Night Train

For whatever reason – perhaps because Martin Amis thought he could use a genre mold and pour his own type of book into it – Night Train doesn't come off. From the opening sentence, "I am a police," with its odd construction, it's clear that Amis is more interested in subversion than anything.

The Possession

In just 62 pages, Annie Ernaux explores the subject of jealousy and obsession with a clarity and depth that most writers couldn't achieve in 300 pages. Everything rings true, mined from her experience of an ended affair and written in a vibrant cinematic style.

A Third Face

Sam Fuller's experiences would fill the lives of ten ordinary people. His autobiography covers his work in the newspaper business (copyboy, crime reporter, traveling chronicler of the Depression, cartoonist), his time in the Army in World War II (North Africa, Sicily, Omaha Beach, Battle of the Bulge, Falkenau), his novels and screenplays (The Dark Page was published while he was at war), his first job as a director (I Shot Jesse James), his productive relationship with Darryl Zanuck, his eventual alienation from the American movie business, his late films and acting cameos, and, finally, a message on the last page that would bring a tear to even a crusty old cuss like Fuller himself.