Chronicles: Volume One

The world has Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson to thank for Bob Dylan, to judge from the singer's frank and entertaining autobiography. The account slips back and forth in time effectively, starting out in New York in 1961, scrolling back to Minnesota, flashing forward to miserable years in Woodstock and a middle section devoted entirely to the recording of a single album in the 1980s, and wrapping up with a return to the early 1960s with the singer on the cusp of fame. Dylan never lets the reader get too close. He's all business when it comes to music, soaking up influences and techniques like a sponge. His personal life is treated at a remove. To hear him tell it, all he wanted to do was take care of his family; the "voice of a generation" stuff never made sense to him. His favorite politician was Barry Goldwater because he reminded him of Tom Mix. An odd man with a plan.

Tula Station

The ingredients of Latin American literature — multiple narrators, time shifts, impossible love — are here in spades. For good measure, the Mexican novelist David Toscana adds the "found manuscript" device. The result feels too much like a pastiche to leave a lasting impression, although there are effective and sly touches throughout Tula Station.

Fatherland

Robert Harris appears to be a can't-miss writer. His Pompeii, The Fear Index, and Cicero novels are entertaining and historically intelligent. This is his first novel, an alternate-history speculation in which the Nazis were not defeated in World War II. Suspenseful and seemingly effortlessly written, Fatherland follows a Berlin police detective investigating the death of a retired high-ranking Nazi. It's 1964 and President Kennedy is in the White House: Joseph Kennedy, John's father. Germany is preparing to celebrate Hitler's 75th birthday. Harris carries it all off with elan.

Pym

Mat Johnson's novel, a mixture of fantasy, social commentary, and literary detective work, begins promisingly but begins to wheeze about halfway through. It was a chore to finish. Fantasy must be believable to be effective literature, and too often Pym comes off as half-baked. Fiction is not true, but neither can it be false.

The Move

This Georges Simenon novel, from late in his career (1967), has a smutty feel to it. It hides what it believes to be dirty behind what amounts to a wall with a peep hole. It is the story of a man in his 30s who moves with his wife and teenage son out of Paris to a new housing development. In his bedroom, while his wife is sleeping, he hears through the wall the sexual exploits of a couple in the next apartment. This topples him off his perch of middle class respectability, into a downward spiral that eventually brings him to question the very value of societal norms. Halfway through this brisk, 148-page novel, I read a People magazine piece from 1980 in which Simenon claimed to have slept with 10,000 women. That made this novel a little easier to understand, though no pleasanter.

Serenade

James M. Cain (1892-1977) is best known for his novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, which were made into films. Serenade, also made into a film, is a lesser-known book published in 1937 that taps into Cain's interest in music and singing. The plot is about as wild as could be imagined: washed-up opera singer lands in Mexico, meets a prostitute, agrees to go to Acalpulco to help her manage a brothel, gets stuck in an empty church during a thunderstorm, miraculously recovers his voice, smuggles the prostitute to Los Angeles on a freighter captained by an opera-loving Irishman, becomes a movie star, and ... that's just the half of it. There's not much violence, but the hard-boiled label still fits because of Cain's frank, for the time, approach to sex. There is a world-weary directness throughout that is very appealing, and as a stylist Cain hits the bull's-eye.

A Farewell to Arms

I doubt there is single simile in this novel. I can't remember one. For me, a judicious use of similes is one of the best ways a novelist can bring events and personalities into sharp, three-dimensional focus. Hemingway's genius here is to achieve that clarity and depth using the bluntest of tools. But the surface realism is an illusion: A Farewell to Arms is more like a dreamscape. The only time you are conscious of reading a novel is during the (few) instances when characters make philosophical statements. These are like road markers on the trip through the dream.

The Redbreast

This Norwegian crime novel by Jo Nesbo arrived in the mail from a former colleague who shares a fondness for translated fiction. The hero, an Oslo police detective named Harry Hole, is full of the angst and life failures that plague his breed. The novel reaches back into Norway's collaborationist history in World War II and threads it into the present. All the pieces lock into place by page 500 with a satisfying thunk.

Steppenwolf

Words to live by? Hermann Hesse's novel could certainly be called that. Straddling the theoretical and the practical, it is a search for and a journey into the nature of existence. Conceptually we are all a multiplicity of entities, but with both feet on the ground the book argues the importance of dancing and laughter.

Killing Floor

To see what all the Jack Reacher fuss was about, I picked up Killing Floor, the first installment in the series. The text, 407 pages in paperback, contains probably 300 pages of what I would call sawdust: Reacher eating eggs, Reacher buying supplies, Reacher driving somewhere, Reacher eating more eggs. When you actually get to an action scene, it is more likely than not a disappointment, carried off in a deadpan manner. The clipped non-sentences take some getting used to; but after about 100 pages the reader has stopped trying to find merit in the prose and is simply flipping through to get to the next action sequence. There is some suspense here, but there's too much other stuff or, more accurately, stuffing.