Some Do Not ...

Ford Madox Ford creates, in Christopher Tietjens, a pillar of rectitude in a crumbling world. Although set during war, a war which in fact damages Tietjens badly, the battlefield makes no appearance. Instead it is in the homes and clubs of Edwardian England where the breakdown is shown to occur. Tietjens is the last good man; his mistress is perhaps the last good woman. What chance can they have?

Porterhouse Blue

Memory plays tricks. I remember this Tom Sharpe novel as being full of belly laughs, but a second reading 20 years later reveals it to be more wit than pratfall. It is no less satisfying for that. The character of Skullion, head porter at Cambridge's fictional Porterhouse College, deserves to go down as a mythic figure in literature as defender of tradition against a new master. His name itself — evoking skull, skullery, hellion, even scorpion — is cause for a smile whenever he appears. No one is protected from Sharpe's poisonous pen, and the Buster Keaton-like calamity, when it comes, provides the laughs of memory.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

The authorities tapping phones, journalists making things up, reputations destroyed — the storyline of Heinrich Boll's slim novel from 1974 will resonate with readers four decades later. As in Group Portrait with Lady, but here on a smaller scale, Boll assembles facts from documentary sources, all fictional, into a beautifully forged dagger aimed at the heart of German (or any) society. What makes the critique all the more damning is the matter-of-fact presentation of the "facts" and the author's sardonic remove.

The Dark Room

In an effective, understated way, action becomes meaning in Rachel Seiffert's three-piece novel of ordinary Germans dealing with war. In the first two parts, especially, there is little explication. The characters — a German, born in 1921, with a physical defect who becomes a photographer; and an adolescent on the run in 1945 with her siblings — simply go from here to there and do this and that, witnesses to a Germany either heading into war or in ruins afterwards. The third section, set in the late 1990s, more traditionally addresses issues of guilt and responsibility, with the characters making plain in words the trauma caused in a family when the past is unearthed.

Puckoon

Spike Milligan's humor is dry and sly. This short novel about the Irish border being drawn through the town of Puckoon contains at least a smile, if not a chuckle, on every page, although many readers will tire of the absurdist pyrotechnics long before reaching the end.

Strange Interlude

This 1928 Eugene O'Neill play is running in London through August, cut from its original five hours to about three and a half. I saw an apt description of the published work on a website: high-brow soap opera. But in London one of the characters is being played, apparently successfully, mostly for laughs. With this in mind, the reader can stretch the work beyond its limits on the page. The play also benefits from O'Neill's technique of having characters speak thoughts that are heard only by the audience. Nina is the center of the play, a professor's daughter who loses her beloved in World War I. The ghost of this character, Gordon, haunts her throughout the play, following her into an ill-advised marriage, an abortion, an affair, and other travails. The title is referred to directly twice: The first time it represents the actual living present, which is the strange interlude between the memories of the past and the hopes for the future that make up real life. Not all of the characters are thwarted, but Nina ends up in a placid, otherworldly existence stripped of all conflict. Is that life? It can be.

Gone Girl

Good writers are able to paint vivid descriptions in a few quick strokes. Bad writers pile on the adjectives and neologisms and end up with an unbelievable mess. It doesn't take many pages of Gone Girl to learn that Gillian Flynn falls into the second category. She overdescribes and overwrites nearly every scene. At more than 400 pages, this pulp entertainment works as a page turner, just, but would have greatly benefited from a 100-page pruning.

Gantenbein

I remain a fan of Max Frisch, but this novel was a chore, even soporific at times. It is a series of variations on two imagined lives. One character, Gantenbein, pretends to be blind so he can observe how people really behave. These are the most fruitful scenes, often delivering a jolt of insight. At other times, the novel lives up to its English title in a previous edition, A Wilderness of Mirrors, and becomes a numbing labyrinth.

The Tom Sharpe Project

Summer is a good time for Tom Sharpe, so I've decided to make a project of reading (in some cases re-reading) all 16 of his novels in chronological order before season's end. Is there anyone writing today like him? O'Rourke and Buckley are thin beer, comparatively. Maybe Michael Frayn? I've not read him but have his latest, Skios, on my list. The world is in dire need of a new Tom Sharpe.

Tom Sharpe

The British novelist Tom Sharpe has died, aged 85. I remember sitting on a plane somewhere waiting to take off, my nose buried in one of Sharpe's books, perhaps Blott on the Landscape. I came to a passage that made me laugh, and then continued reading and laughed harder, and then went back to the start of the passage and laughed so hard that tears were popping from my eyes. I hurt my side. Literally. Since this was pre-9/11, I wasn't carried off the plane for interrogation. Tom Sharpe was, as the obituaries said, like a cross between Wodehouse and Waugh, multiplied by LSD. I think I came across his books poking around a used bookshop in London about 25 years ago. The sad occasion of his death provides a happy excuse for re-reading his work.