The Art of Fielding

This is a novel with the weight and IQ of a doorstop. A blurb from the execrable Jonathan Franzen should have been the tipoff. Nothing here is believable; no character emerges into three dimensions. To give the author credit, some of the dialogue begins to veer toward the credible along about page 250. But the Spider-Man comics of my youth in the mid-1970s were more complex and better written — by far.

Roadside Picnic

It is unlikely I would have picked up this Russian novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky had it not been the basis for the 1979 film Stalker. In the event, I am glad I did. As the useful foreword explains, this is not the science fiction of generals and geniuses, but of real people, principally the "stalker" Red Schuhart. That an alien civilization would visit Earth and then leave, possibly bored, is the type of contact story not often told. The humans are left to blunder through the items left behind, like animals encountering the remains of a roadside picnic. They reach blindly for understanding, with no tools but a puny intelligence and a living soul.

Candy

Banned smut with artistic pretensions will always attract a crowd, and the "scandalous" Candy, co-authored by Terry Southern, attracted a crowd of some 3 million readers after a Paris edition was reissued in the United States. Many of them, I suspect, eagerly fingered the pages looking for the dirty parts, which include anatomical terminology and some clumsy sex scenes. Southern's novel Blue Movie and his work in film make you wonder how he could have produced this satirical dreck.

Man Made

Joel Stein's book, subtitled A Stupid Quest for Masculinity, is deadpan, self-deprecating, and very funny. It also provides unexpected moments of insight as he endures military training, goes on calls with firefighters, and, perhaps most hilariously, hunts turkeys, among other pursuits. Stein's humor thankfully lacks snark, and his reporting puts the reader in mind of The Pump House Gang and other earlier classics.

The Happy Hypocrite

Max Beerbohm's 63-page story, first published in 1896, is described on the dust jacket as "a golden butterfly, done by Whistler." It is a skillfully constructed miniature about a vile, boozing English lord who woos a pure maiden by putting on a saintly mask. The ending has the rare quality of being both surprising and seeming in hindsight to have been inevitable. The fine prose puts one in mind, on the American side, of James Branch Cabell.

The Master of Go

There are passages in this novel by Yasunari Kawabata of poignant insight as a game of Go between the "invincible Master" and his young challenger unfolds amid the ebbing of an old, aristocratic Japan. The reportage upon which the novel is based, however, can take over the narrative. The hotel arrangements, match delays, health issues, and other practical matters are given in great detail. For a game as symbol, I prefer the approach of Nabokov in The Defense.

Blue Nights

In Joan Didion's world, there are nothing but exemplary people and status markers. Natasha Richardson  didn't just cook; she "did a perfect buerre blanc." When Didion's daughter wed, the cake came from Payard. The whole work is dusted with brand names. Everything is pitched upward, is unassailable. The clueless intellectual is a stock figure, but he exists. I think of Edmund Wilson not being able to figure out a checkbook and getting taken for all his money late in life. In Didion's case, a loose baby tooth might require a trip to the emergency room. Drilling into everything with a colossal intellect, she comes up with dust.

Dropped Names

The quality of this memoir by Frank Langella is derived from the quality of his interlocutors. It rises above Hollywood tittle-tattle because many of the actors and others presented have intellectual heft, a wicked sense of humor, or an obnoxious personality — and sometimes all three. It seems inevitable when reading anything remotely honest about show business to conclude that actors are sad, sad people.

The Centaur in the Garden

If only all magical realism were as effective as this novel by Moacyr Scliar, a tale of the centaur son of Jews chased from Russia to Brazil in the 1930s. What makes it work is an emphasis on realism with a light touch of the magical. The reader will not doubt the existence of the centaur. Even if the thoughtful treatment of themes of alienation, love, and faith was absent, that fact alone should earn the novel high praise.

And Even Now

This 1921 volume of essays by Max Beerbohm is pure pleasure. In it, among other things, he: investigates why a statue of King Umberto in Italy is cloaked; imagines the fate of an anonymous clergyman who dared to speak to Dr. Johnson and was cut to the quick; burns a novel by a woman who annoyed him; watches a boy build a house in the sand and then delight in its destruction; imagines a missing, vast portrait of Goethe and speculates on why it was never finished; and much else. What Beerbohm can do so well is to bring his erudition and felicitous writing style to bear on any number of subjects, and then spin out the piece with his creative imagination. There are a few misses here, primarily those essays in which he sets himself up as the schoolmaster, but much more often the arrows find their targets.