Smile

Roddy Doyle's novel will rise or fall in the reader's estimation in large part on his or her assessment of the final few pages. Victor Forde, mid-50s, is looking back on an adult life that started with some promise but has landed him in a pub, alone, looking for new friends. In walks Fitzgerald, apparently a schoolmate from the 1970s. Forde doesn't remember him, but Fitzgerald seems to know quite a lot about Forde. After a school trauma is revealed, the stage is set for the surprise ending. It is genuinely disorienting, but the publisher's note in my edition assures readers that there is no "trick," that everything in the novel adds up. I suspect a second reading would confirm that.

Moon Tiger

As she lay dying, historian Claudia Hampton writes her own life history in this Penelope Lively novel. One great love (and loss) is at the center, from her time in Egypt during World War II as a young reporter. The account is wide-ranging, both wistful and hard-nosed, and envelops the reader.

Delano

John Gregory Dunne's account of the grape pickers' strike in Delano, California, led by Cesar Chavez, balances perfectly the roles of disinterested observer and decent human being. Dunne can see what is in front of him, which is rare (cf. Orwell), but he has no illusions about the purity of any particular side. The historical background provided (large-scale theft of land by the railroads and others) is valuable in setting the context out of which this struggle arose.

Heather, the Totality

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner's attempt at a novel reads like a cross between Sherwood Anderson and Don DeLillo. A flat, affectless prose is used in service of a story about a well-to-do New York family and a down-and-out construction worker. That the paths of these two factions will cross is inevitable, but the climax is a bit of a damp squib. This is a very short novel, really more a long short story with four characters, easily and pleasantly read and then forgotten.

18 Stories

Heinrich Boll's stories put on display in a concentrated form his incisive understanding of the varieties of human behavior. The idea that flowers could become a necessity in demolished, postwar Cologne figures in one; how a crooked scale cheated peasants for decades features in another. The trick to these is to be wise in the ways of the world but still capable of wonder. In that, Boll excels.

The Middle Ground

To learn what London was like in the late 1970s, a reader could do a lot worse than consult this Margaret Drabble novel. It is kaleidoscopic and drills deeply into the personal and societal challenges of the era. Kate Armstrong, approaching 40, is the central character, and rarely has a person's muddling to get along been invested with such thoughtful perception. As often with Drabble, the plot is not the point; the point is life.

The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

To have found Penelope Lively's 2016 book of stories in a recycling bin is another one of those fortunate reading discoveries that come from poking around, like how stumbling on Margaret Drabble's The Millstone in a dusty bookstore in Maine opened me to her incisive mind and winning prose. In these stories, Lively, who is 84, demonstrates a penetrating understanding of human nature and a flair for the dramatic. Such is the intensity of some of them that they provoke a powerful physical response.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

This book, edited by Bandy X. Lee, M.D., is subtitled, "27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President." It evaluates the behavior of the president and its current and potential consequences. Potentially, it is not farfetched to imagine that a person as impulsive, erratic, and pathological as the president could lead the world into a nuclear holocaust. As for the here and now, the book explains how the president's behavior has a damaging effect on the mental health of the population as a whole. 

War and Turpentine

Stefan Hertmans's novel is a tender account of a 20th century life touched by ghastly inhumanity and, ultimately, unceasing grief. The writer's grandfather is the subject, and the tale is told through scraps of memories and, most directly, a diary. An exemplary soldier in Belgium in the Great War, Urbain Martien endures and describes the horrors of that conflict in the novel's central section. The bookending sections tell of his childhood and postwar life, which were colored by his own father's work as a church painter restoring the images of saints. The result is a family saga that is compellingly told, with layers peeled off and secrets effectively withheld until the very end.  

The Edible Woman

Deep in this highly readable and entertaining first novel by Margaret Atwood is a statement that I take to be its thesis: A person doesn't live by principles; a person lives by adjustments. That is true of the protagonist, Marian, a young woman in Toronto on a path toward a "normal" life of marriage and children. Atwood subverts what could have been a dreary domestic novel with a text that is just slightly off-kilter and studded with oddities. The old social and sexual patterns are very much in evidence in this 1969 book, but they are straining to break the leash.