All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle...

All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of ; Homer’s “Iliad”; Christopher Logue; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 54 pp., $18

War Music: An Account of Books 1 to 4 and 16 to 19 of Homer’s “Iliad”; Christopher Logue; University of Chicago Press: 240 pp., $16

The literature of war begins with literature itself, with “The Iliad.” Homer’s epic about the Greek siege of Troy, composed perhaps 2,800 years ago, still stands unexcelled as an expression of the devastating power of war, the tragedy it begets and the emotions it unleashes -- its glamour as well as its horror. Although “The Odyssey,” the other epic poem by Homer, has a sexier storyline and more sensational supernatural effects, among connoisseurs of classical poetry “The Iliad” retains a position of unassailable paramountcy, for its greater antiquity and its profound insights into the human condition. No work of art has ever done a better job of explaining why men go to war, and it does so not with explanations but by a succession of compelling, unforgettable images. The challenge of rendering “The Iliad” into a modern idiom remains the same now as it was 400 years ago, when George Chapman produced the first English version: how to express those images in a way that speaks to the contemporary reader directly, as the Greek text did.

Christopher Logue’s “Iliad” began life in 1959 as an assignment to work on a radio script for the BBC. He had never studied Greek, so he worked entirely from translations, ranging from Chapman’s to E.V. Rieu’s sturdy prose version, published in 1950 (but surprisingly, it seems, without consulting Richmond Lattimore’s widely praised rendering). His work on the project was desultory; the first volume, “War Music,” didn’t appear until 1984. Three more volumes have followed: “Kings” (1991), “The Husbands” (1994) and now “All Day Permanent Red.” (Although Logue has never, as far as I know, stated an intention to create a full version of “The Iliad” -- and having covered less than half of it thus far, the 77-year-old poet probably won’t do so unless he picks up the pace significantly -- he has produced a considerable body of verse.)

The result is, above all, brilliantly original, consummately crafted English verse, dominated but by no means constrained by iambic pentameter and, secondarily, fabulous Homer. The cumulative effect is to bring the ethos of Homer to life for English speakers with a vigor and immediacy that surpass every available modern translation. Logue’s Homer satisfies the first requirement of a classic: It is a work completely unlike any that came before it. It solves one of the thorniest problems of translation, faithfulness to the original, simply by ignoring it -- by being not a translation but rather an imaginative re-creation. Logue, with unfaltering confidence, sets his own poetic vision supreme and treats the original text as a continuously flowing river of source material, parallel but subordinate. The Greeks had a word for it: hubris. The result is flawed, and sometimes ugly, but it is poetry that shines with greatness.

-- Jamie James

*

American Woman, A Novel; Susan Choi; HarperCollins: 370 pp., $24.95

Politics beckons the artist. The world’s vexed histories have a ready-made appeal for readers -- rooting interests, partisan interests, plenty of chances to satisfy the lust for moral outrage. And without our help, we think, history isn’t good enough. We all need the actors’ motives revealed at a level only the imagination can reach. We need to know the fantasies that made reality. Politics, though, can be a fatal attraction for an artist. In a work of literature, Stendhal famously said, politics is “like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert ... loud and vulgar, and yet a thing it is not possible to ignore.” Politics, that is to say, can wreck the texture of imaginative work. Susan Choi here bases her novel on the remnants of the Symbionese Liberation Army -- characters guaranteed to arouse partisanship, contempt or moral opprobrium, all of which would ruin the novel’s music. But Choi handles that difficulty with an amazing sense of control.

-- Jay Cantor

*

Any Human Heart, A Novel; William Boyd; Alfred A. Knopf: 500 pp., $24.95

William Boyd has, during the last 20-odd years, garnered the kind of recognition most writers only dream of. His first novel, “A Good Man in Africa,” won both the Whitbread Book Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Ignoring the conventional wisdom that after so auspicious a start, the follow-up has to be an anticlimax, a year later he knocked off “An Ice-Cream War,” which not only collected the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize but also was short-listed for the Booker. “Brazzaville Beach” picked up the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, while “The Blue Afternoon” won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award in Britain and this paper’s Book Prize in fiction.

Boyd has an exceptional ability to tell a really compelling story, in dense, imaginative detail, about characters endowed with complex, and convincing, emotional lives. This is no mean achievement. What Boyd offers us this time is one creative tour de force enshrined inside another: not merely the fictional life of Logan Mountstuart, minor novelist, art fancier, man-about-town and wartime intelligence agent, but this fiction presented as Mountstuart’s bona fide journals, complete with lacunae, editorial notes and linking passages, and a remarkably thorough index.

Boyd takes tremendous risks in making this not over-talented, ambitious sensualist draw so full and unflattering a portrait of himself. That he succeeds so triumphantly is chiefly a tribute to the never-failing realism of his historical ghost-raising, the rich and loving detail with which he invests each fresh scene and character, the pitch-perfect ear with which he catches the musings, not only of Logan himself but also of his friends and relatives, at each successive stage of their lives. And for this, as the Grossmith brothers proved with the classic “The Diary of a Nobody,” your protagonist doesn’t need to be clever or dominating, let alone nice. What Boyd has created is a seedy, sexually grubby, literary Everyman to carry the shabby banner of the last century’s British upper-middle classes. I’ve already read this book twice and probably shall again. Of how many novels can that be said?

Peter Green

*

The Book Against God, A Novel; James Wood; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 258 pp., $24

On the scene but not a literary personality, writing with passionate intelligence and richly metaphorical style, James Wood has ignored the opaque aridity of literary theory and insisted on the human relevance of classic and modern literature. Wood set forth his aesthetic and religious principles in his first book, “The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief” (1999). The big gun in Wood’s critical armory is theology. The autobiographical sections of “The Broken Estate” set out ideas he develops in his novel. He asserts that our religious belief was broken in the mid-19th century, when “the supposition that religion was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the Gospel narratives were supernatural reports” began to collapse; when “historical biblical criticism began to treat the Bible as if it were a biography or even a novel.” A key argument in both his criticism and his novel is that there is no correspondence between religion and morality, that “God-fearing Europe ... does not seem to have been obviously more moral than God-questioning Europe” after Voltaire and Hume. The hero of Wood’s novel, who thinks the Bible is merely a collection of myths and that religion does not improve human behavior, wrestles with the consequences of abandoning religious belief. The witty, serious and intelligent “The Book Against God,” its theological meaning cradled in the arguments of “The Broken Estate,” matches Wood’s high critical standards.

-- Jeffrey Meyers

*

Brick Lane, A Novel; Monica Ali; Scribner: 374 pp., $25

Monica Ali takes us into the crooked, narrow streets of Brick Lane, London, a neighborhood crowded with Bengali immigrants, and follows the tight perspective of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi immigrant woman who comes to a slow awakening. “Brick Lane” is an earnest tale of female empowerment with some of the spirit of the popular British film “Bend It Like Beckham,” only “Brick Lane,” as a novel should be, is better and deeper, with great flair and sensitivity. Though the novel is seemingly narrow in focus, that confinement creates an atmosphere of impacted intelligence and power, the sentences jammed up, idiosyncratic, full of marvelous insight, as if the author has crammed all her novelistic ambition into Nazneen’s head.

“Brick Lane” is a tender, traditional immigrant tale wherein strong, silent women prove to be the real backbone of family. This is an old story but a durable one, and fortunately Ali makes it fresher by investing each emotional turning point with Nazneen’s own brand of patient compassion. This is fiction that is at once sophisticated and innocent, premodern and postmodern -- and above all, compassionate and entertaining.

Marina Budhos

*

Collected Poems; Robert Lowell; Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 1,186 pp., $45

Robert Lowell died in 1977, so there has been a rather extraordinary delay -- a quarter of a century -- in publishing his “Collected Poems,” remarkable considering that Lowell was nothing less than the most renowned, most lauded, most influential poet of his day, the last to command the public stage, to be featured on the cover of Time and to be called, by one critic, “the greatest poet writing in English.” But the delay -- having allowed the melodramatic dust of the life to settle -- has resulted in an edition as unfashionably, ruthlessly serious as the poet himself, one he doubtless would have appreciated. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, it features an unusually elaborate scholarly apparatus for a collected work: notes, chronology, bibliography, even a glossary. The magnitude of Lowell’s achievement -- an achievement won against horrific odds -- can now come fully and magnificently into view. “We only live between / before we are and what we were,” Lowell once wrote, but his work in this “Collected Poems” stands secure, timeless, outside the relatively brief span that was his bedeviled life.

-- Caroline Fraser

*

The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth; Edited by Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow; Copper Canyon Press: 768 pp., $40

Kenneth Rexroth worked to establish a West Coast identity for American poetry, one that would reflect the unique geographical, historical, cultural and ethnic qualities of the region. “I am NOT Ivy League,” he once asserted, as if anyone could have ever confused his autodidactic libertarian anarchism with Ivy League elitism or New Critical detachment. He was both a populist and an intellectual, a potent combination of cultural values in the right circumstances. Rexroth also understood that regional literary identity need not, indeed must not, be provincial. His international sense of literary enterprise led him to translate from the Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish and Greek, all relevant sources for a California literary identity.

Rexroth’s place in the American literary canon, like that of many other California poets, such as Robinson Jeffers, William Everson, Josephine Miles, Yvor Winters, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, remains open to critical debate. Consistently ignored or underrated by the Eastern literary establishment, these poets continue to exercise an active influence on West Coast writers, and they continue to be read, though largely outside the academy. Amid his huge body of published work, Rexroth left a small but enduring body of original poems, elegant translations and potent essays. He may not be quite a major poet, but he remains a significant and important one, and his combined achievements as poet, critic and translator make him one of the chief American poet-critics of his age. Scholars and critics who endeavor to discuss mid-20th century American poetry responsibly ignore him at their peril.

-- Dana Gioia

*

Deep Purple, A Novel; Mayra Montero; Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman; The Ecco Press: 182 pp., $22.95

Does a solo violinist make love differently than a clarinetist or a cellist? Ask classical music critic Agustin Caban, the protagonist of “Deep Purple,” Mayra Montero’s viscerally erotic novel, and he would tell you they perform worlds apart in the bedroom. “[I]f she’s a clarinetist, you have to be careful, very careful of her lips.” Regarding a virtuosa violinist, Agustin observes that “there is no more noble service to fine music, no more imperishable support one can offer a soloist, than to throw her facedown on a bed. There they finally explode.... Cellists howl more than the others. And almost all of them tend to be wildly passionate, or too demanding.”

Montero may be one of the most under-recognized Latin American writers of our time. In “Deep Purple,” as in “The Last Night I Spent with You,” she explores primitive worlds, re-imagining them as sexual energy in the insular world of classical musicians. Buried in its pages are the mysteries of human desire; what some may see as a one-note novel is a dizzying work of art.

-- Adriana Lopez

*

Diary, A Novel; Chuck Palahniuk; Doubleday: 262 pp., $24.95

Chuck Palahniuk’s fifth novel, “Diary,” is at once madly inventive and shamelessly derivative, instructive and infuriating, serious and cartoonish, tender and sadistic. It simply, exuberantly escapes literary categorization. Think Stephen King meets Robert Coover meets Jonathan Swift; that’s how a desperate Hollywood pitchman might try to convey the book’s mix of flavors to a mogul producer -- a description unlikely to result in a deal.

Palahniuk’s legion of die-hard fans needs no pitch for this new tale by the author of “Fight Club,” which became a 1999 movie. This book could be as well, because this purported diary of “Misty Wilmot, the greatest artist throughout history” is all about the visual: the twinned natures of insight and illusion; and, intrinsic to the convoluted plot, the nitty-gritty of painting.

The complex plot skates on the edge of our disbelief, touching down into plausible cause and effect before soaring into the supernatural. Beneath the gore and pyrotechnics and satire on old blood versus new money, Palahniuk is trying to sift out the connection between misery and inspiration, suffering and access to the collective subconscious, and in the process an amazing range of grist gets swept into his mill: Carl Jung, Jainism, the Essenes, the lethal potential of pigments, masochism and a startling phenomenon called the Stendhal Effect.

-- Bernadette Murphy

*

Disaffections: Complete Poems, 1930-1950; Cesare Pavese; Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock; Copper Canyon Press: 380 pp., $17 paper

When Cesare Pavese started publishing in the early 1930s, Italian fascism was at its height. Everything about fascism, not least of all its nationalism, was repugnant to Pavese, who was arrested for subversive activities and sent for three years to a remote town in southern Italy. During his time in the south, which was commuted to eight months, Pavese finished his first book: his sequence of narrative poems, “Lavorare stanca” (literally “working tired,” but translated for “Disaffections” as “Work’s Tiring”), one of the most singular collections of Italian poetry in the 20th century. Pavese went on to become a celebrated novelist, writing relatively little poetry between 1940 and 1950, when he committed suicide at age 42.

Until now, Pavese’s poetry hasn’t been available in an English translation that carries both the colloquialness of his language and the haunting rhythms of his verse. Geoffrey Brock’s fine new translation has met this need so that, also given the recent reissue of several of Pavese’s novels, American readers can have the pleasure of getting to know him in some depth. Brock’s translations are faithful to Pavese’s tone, even as they usually stay close to the literal meaning. It is an impressive achievement.

-- Andrew Frisardi

*

Do Everything in the Dark, A Novel; Gary Indiana; St. Martin’s: 276 pp., $23.95

“Do Everything in the Dark” is set in New York, but it is basically a backdrop for a group portrait. There’s no conventional “atmosphere.” A single sentence is enough to establish the setting: “Sleepwalkers armed with credit cards spilled along the sidewalks, filling outdoor tables of fifth-rate pizzerias and bistros -- the East Village’s Kmart parody of Montmartre.” And the collective mood is evoked by a list of everything that no longer excites the group, from drugs to hip-hop, sex to meditation, Rolfing to “ever-refined electronic gadgets that seemed to promise some control over the gathering chaos.”

As in his earlier novel “Resentment,” the lives of Gary Indiana’s leading characters are cunningly interwoven, but especially in “Do Everything in the Dark,” which is written partly in the omniscient third person and partly in the first, Indiana himself the narrator. “People tell me things,” he explains. “I listen. I watch and wait.” In a tour de force of storytelling, he creates the effect of being invisibly present at every scene, a self-acknowledged member of a social microcosm “getting older in an age when everybody had seen too much by the time they were thirty-five.”

-- Gavin Lambert

*

Drop City, A Novel, T.C. Boyle; Viking: 444 pp., $25.95

Who would have thought that T.C. Boyle would write a defining novel about the hippie side of the 1960s? Yet in “Drop City,” Boyle has written a vastly entertaining tale that balances the exuberance and the excesses, the promise and the preposterousness of the counterculture perhaps better than any other work of American fiction. It’s not a satire, though it’s often very funny; not a mere exercise in nostalgia, though every detail shines with what seems to be Boyle’s total recall. It’s realistic.T.C. Boyle a realist? He has done many things in fiction, antic and outrageous things; his career trajectory, from “East Is East” through “The Road to Wellville,” “The Tortilla Curtain,” “Riven Rock” and “A Friend of the Earth,” resembles the multiple, fizzing arcs of fireworks. But here he arrives at something solid. Not just because of the details -- though after reading “Drop City,” we almost feel we could build a log-and-sod hut, cook moose stew or camp out in the snow at 40 below ourselves -- not just because Boyle, instead of circling above his characters as before, comes down among them and sees their genuineness as clearly as their pretensions; but because we can finish this book and think: Yes, that’s probably how it really was.

-- Michael Harris

*

Dumb Luck, A Novel; Vu Trong Phung; Translated from the Vietnamese by Peter Zinoman and Nguyen Nguyet Cam; University of Michigan Press: 190 pp., $19.95

The Western world knows little of the fine tradition of Vietnamese literature, although a few works have made their way abroad in recent years since Vietnam’s doi moi reforms and the encouraging of fuller cultural expression. Now, for the first time, a novel by Vu Trong Phung, a brilliant and prolific satirist who has been compared to Balzac and lauded as arguably the greatest Vietnamese writer of this rich literary period, has been published in English. Banned by the North Vietnamese authorities until 1986, his works later became required reading in schools and are now as integral to Vietnam’s educational system as “The Catcher in the Rye” or “The Grapes of Wrath” are to our own.

Before dying in 1939 of the combined effects of tuberculosis and opium addiction one week shy of his 27th birthday, Phung had written eight novels, seven plays, several dozen short stories, five book-length works of nonfiction reportage and hundreds of reviews, essays and articles. His best-known work, “Dumb Luck,” which first appeared in serialized form in a Hanoi newspaper in 1936, has now been translated into English by a husband and wife team of academics from UC Berkeley, Peter Zinoman and Nguyen Nguyet Cam.

“Dumb Luck” centers on a street-smart urban trickster named Red-Haired Xuan. He is a clever Candide who, far from dodging misfortune after misfortune, bumbles through life’s amusing adventures to find that, in fact, every seeming adversity does indeed result in the best of all possible worlds -- for him, at least, while everyone else is none the wiser. The setting is Vietnam in the 1930s, when the country was undergoing enormous social change. The pressures for modernization, for Vietnam’s elite to adopt French language, fashion and cultural mores were enormous.

Phung’s translators offer a 24-page introduction of meticulously footnoted narrative analysis that painstakingly places the work in context, but it is best read and fully appreciated after reading Phung’s fine, funny and still relevant work.

-- Sheridan Prasso

*

Evidence of Things Unseen, A Novel; Marianne Wiggins; Simon & Schuster: 386 pp., $25

Marianne Wiggins is not afraid to announce sky-high ambitions in her bold, breathtaking new novel. The author takes as her epigraph a section about plutonium from John McPhee’s cautionary 1974 portrait of a nuclear physicist, “The Curve of Binding Energy,” then opens her own narrative with a bravura description of the Trinity Atomic Test Site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was exploded: “Somewhere in the heart of North America there is a desert where the heat of several suns has fused the particles of sand into a single sheet of glass so dazzling it sends a constant signal to the moon.” Subsequent chapters begin with quotations from “Moby-Dick,” and even as she emulates Melville, enlacing flights of scientific, political, social and philosophical speculation within a stirring human drama, Wiggins’ voice remains triumphantly her own. “Evidence of Things Unseen” becomes a love story lit up by the heavens.

With this poignant, realistic portrait of two people who love one another deeply but not equally, Wiggins may have tapped a vein of common humanity that will bring “Evidence of Things Unseen” a wider audience than her earlier work. Such novels as “Eveless Eden” (1995) and “Almost Heaven” (1998) were as ambitious as “Evidence of Things Unseen”; “John Dollar” (1989) was very nearly as accomplished. But it was hard with these books to get beyond Wiggins’ savage depictions of human nature and society. By softening the bite of her writing, Wiggins has created a story as compelling as it is devastating.

-- Wendy Smith

*

The Fortress of Solitude, A Novel; Jonathan Lethem; Doubleday: 470 pp., $26

“Let’s pretend that I want to write a novel concerning the people or some of the people with whom I grew up,” James Baldwin, a native son of Harlem, once proposed in a talk called “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel.” What would this novel be like? For one thing, “the social realities with which these people ... were contending can’t be left out of the novel without falsifying their experience. And -- this is very important -- this all has something to do with the sight of that tormented, falling down, drunken, bleeding man I mentioned at the beginning. Who is he and what does he mean?”

In his sixth novel, Jonathan Lethem has written a book uncannily to the specifications of Baldwin’s grand hypothesis. In “The Fortress of Solitude,” Lethem’s narrator is a rare white kid in a black and Puerto Rican neighborhood, the son of a fanatically solitary abstract painter and a flaky, pot-smoking mom in 1970s Brooklyn. He’s a boy in just about the same role of odd man out that Baldwin described more than 40 years ago: “I only knew Negroes except for one Jewish boy, the only white boy in an all-Negro elementary school.” As for that tormented, bleeding, falling down man, here his name is Aaron X. Doily, a homeless drunk whom Dylan Ebdus, the white kid, sees dropping from the sky one day.

Doily may be a human wreck, but he is also something of a comic-book superhero: the possessor of a magic ring that enables him, however poorly, to fly. Expiring in a hospital, he passes the ring and its powers along to Dylan, who shares his new capacities with his best friend, Mingus Rude. Dylan and Mingus are close friends into adolescence. They come together over an identical taste in comics, and as they grow up and culturally move on, they make a silent deal of unconditional acceptance: “What was new in the other you pretended to take for granted, a bargain instinctively struck to ensure your own coping on the other end.” It would be a mistake not calling this love, and the boys handle their supernatural powers in much the same way as their love -- as something awkward, astonishing, fitful and private.

Can white men talk? “The Fortress of Solitude” is a funny and very sad book, exceptionally well made and keenly observed. It is what lots of contemporary novels mean to be and few are: both intimate and vast, giving us social and private realities without seeming to falsify either. Lethem has done something remarkable.

-- Benjamin Kunkel

*

Four Spirits, A Novel; Sena Jeter Naslund; William Morrow: 544 pp., $26.95

Forty years ago, four young girls were killed when a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. As Sena Jeter Naslund reminds us in one of several deftly inserted passages of historical exposition in her fervent new novel, 16th Street was African American Birmingham’s wealthiest congregation, cool to the fiery activism of Bethel Baptist minister Fred Shuttlesworth and only slightly more receptive to the less confrontational stance of out-of-towner Martin Luther King Jr. “Their class of colored wanted to negotiate,” thinks Gloria Callahan, a fictional 16th Street parishioner who has tentatively joined the civil rights movement. Mocking that class’ hesitant entry into the fray, Gloria’s combative friend Christine Taylor sneers: “Now educated, rich Negroes talking to rich white folks.” But moderates and militants alike were all “niggers” to the white men who set the bomb, and murder was their chosen way of backing up Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace’s vow to preserve segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.

The bombing and other brutal real-life events form a backdrop against which Naslund’s large cast of characters confronts ethical, political and even romantic dilemmas in the city that came to symbolize white intransigence. Herself a Birmingham native, a college student there during the most intense years of the struggle for racial justice, Naslund recaptures that period with immediacy and intimacy. She has written a stirring popular novel that vividly conveys the everyday texture and moral significance of a movement that permanently changed American society.

-- Wendy Smith

*

The Furies, A Novel, Fernanda Eberstadt; Alfred A. Knopf: 452 pp., $26

The flinty topography of contemporary marriage is the terrain mapped by Fernanda Eberstadt (“When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth”) in her newest novel, “The Furies,” a cautionary tale for those who would live in wedded bliss. Reminiscent of classical mythology in the author’s use of archetypal themes, the narrative is also up to the minute in its exploration of the difficulties plaguing modern marriage.

Eberstadt’s writing is up to the epic task she sets herself. Her descriptions of new parenthood are incisive, capturing both the awe and the exhaustion an infant brings, along with the wedge it can interpose in even the closest relationship.

Though their romance is not as Olympian for readers as it is for the lovers, the couple’s dissolution is devastating. Eberstadt limns crisply, achingly, the slow erosion of their marriage, the little sharp-tongued comments that build until the “result is a bloodless scoreboarding: does she get along with your friends, how good’s the sex, does he talk about his feelings. Sexuality being something that’s not in every glance, every smile ... every FIGHT, but another multilateral treaty -- I’ll [have sex] if you do the dishes -- another improving activity, another thing to ‘work on.’ ”

In myth, there are hideous creatures to slay. In Eberstadt’s novel, the creatures are within us. We carry the germ of our own ruin -- and the ruin of the person we love. We must not provoke these creatures, her tale reminds us, for they wreak immense damage: “[W]hen you’ve broken a horse, you’ve got a ride, but break your lover, and all that’s left is your own arid will, a bed turned to rocky soil that will never take the plough.”

As tragic as any classic myth, and haunting in its brutality, “The Furies” is an intelligent if disheartening look into the forces at work inside marriage.

Bernadette Murphy

*

Genesis

A Novel

Jim Crace

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 246 pp., $23

There are writers -- though not many -- who permanently alter the way you view even the most quotidian subject. Anyone who’s read Nicholson Baker’s “The Mezzanine” will never again regard a shoelace as just a bit of string. Similarly, anyone who’s read Jim Crace’s “Being Dead,” winner of the 2000 National Book Critics Circle award, will no longer think of a corpse as just a body that has ceased to breathe. And after reading Crace’s latest, “Genesis,” chances are your conception of conception will also mutate. Jim Crace is one of the most stunningly original novelists writing today. In “Genesis,” Crace shifts his biological focus from the end of human life to its very beginning. This time, his subject is the nexus of love, sex and biology, as they contribute to this most unpredictable and contradictory occurrence, at once so fleeting and yet having such lasting consequences. He dazzles readers with a fresh, wry slant on something that happens anywhere and everywhere, eon after eon: new life.

-- Heller McAlpin

*

Good Faith

A Novel

Jane Smiley

Alfred A. Knopf: 424 pp., $26

Only a writer of consummate craftsmanship and scope could write a novel about a series of real estate deals in a small town an hour and a half from New York City and make it so fully satisfying as to be thrilling. Jane Smiley has done it. She has tackled the shift in our country’s attitude toward money during the dawn of the Ronald Reagan era: that moment in American history when suddenly it seemed there was free money to be had, thanks to changes in the tax code; when deal-making took on a brand-new sophistication; and when the conflict between developing and preserving land reached a turning point. Smiley’s range is broad, her technique masterful as she explores the forces that upset the balance in love, in work, in a country’s economy, in a region’s ecology. The light note upon which “Good Faith” ends keeps it within the framework of the comic, but not without first giving a detailed and devastating look at the greed and corrupt business practices that ultimately brought the savings and loan industry and some of our country’s major corporations and accounting firms to their knees. “Good Faith” is a cautionary prequel just right for our times. And great fun, to boot.

-- Jane Ciabattari

*

The Great Fire

A Novel

Shirley Hazzard

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 278 pp., $24

Shirley Hazzard writes for grown-ups. Her long-awaited new book, “The Great Fire,” can be counted with “Middlemarch” as one of the few novels in English that can hold the attention of an adult without recourse to comedy, freakish plot turns or sentimentality. It is also a classic romance so cleverly embedded in a work of clear-eyed postwar sagacity that readers will not realize until halfway through that they are rooting for a pair of ill-starred lovers who might have stepped off a Renaissance stage. As readers of “The Transit of Venus” will remember, the greatest pleasure is Hazzard’s subtle and unexpected prose. Of a robust military wife, she writes that she had “a piping voice, active with falsity.” She describes another character as a man in whom “an intense, original lode of high feeling had been depleted: he was working, now, from a keen memory of authentic emotion.” Never lyrical for the sake of lyricism, Hazzard’s prose follows the sensible course of her characters -- open to beauty and alert to its dangers.

-- Regina Marler

*Great Neck

A Novel

Jay Cantor

Alfred A. Knopf: 710 pp., $27.95

“Great Neck” is a big, brilliant, social novel swarming with laments. Jay Cantor’s book traverses several decades, opening in 1978, as six childhood friends from Great Neck, Long Island, reunite in a courtroom. One of them, Beth Kaplan, has been accused of setting bombs a decade earlier to protest the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Now, 10 years later, she seems a casualty of bad timing, the float that arrives long after the parade has passed.

This sense of how history can strand a person is one of Cantor’s accomplishments. Here is an encyclopedia of rage: black rage, Irish working-class rage, the rage of youth, of young women, righteous rage, lovers’ rage, rage at the past, at futility, at being alive -- as if that too was a punishment -- scary, painful, adolescent, political rage, rage in a wheelchair, genius thwarted, genius squandered. Rage at how quickly things happened and how quickly they were over. Nobody has a happy ending. “There is plenty of hope,” Cantor quotes Kafka. “Just not for us.”

-- Leslie Brody

*How to Breathe Underwater

Stories

Julie Orringer

Alfred A. Knopf: 228 pp., $21

A little girl, her front tooth coming loose, fidgets in her velvet party dress one particularly hot Thanksgiving in New Orleans. Ella, her parents and her younger brother Benjamin, dressed in his Pilgrim costume, are en route to spend the holiday not, as usual, with relatives, but with strangers: people who eat seaweed and conduct exotic healing rituals. Ella’s mother has been undergoing chemotherapy and has also been pursuing spiritual and holistic approaches to treating her cancer. Thanksgiving with these strangers is simply another oddity for the family to cope with. “Shoes off now!” a crayoned sign directs them on arrival, and this is only the mildest of several shocks that Ella will experience in the course of the visit. “Pilgrims,” the first of nine short stories in Julie Orringer’s arresting debut collection, “How to Breathe Underwater,” displays this writer’s gift for portraying the world from a child’s (or, in other stories, a teenager’s) perspective. Many writers have a knack for evoking a child’s sensibility. (For aspiring authors, adopting a juvenile viewpoint has practically become a default mode.) But the ability to tell a story -- and keep readers eagerly turning pages -- is less common than might be supposed. Throughout the collection, Orringer’s engaging wit, her eye for social detail, her ear for patterns of speech and thought, and her insights into human nature proclaim her a writer to be reckoned with.

-- Merle Rubin

*Hunger

Elise Blackwell

Little, Brown: 134 pp., $16.95

It’s a stretch to call this exquisite little book by Elise Blackwell a novel. In fact, it’s barely a novella, even though there’s something about the momentum of it that makes it much more than a short story that has outgrown its bounds. And then there’s the way that Blackwell craftily weaves history and botany through this utterly devourable narrative; it reminds us of those delicious genre crossings -- equally full of fancy and fact, plot and digression -- that the wonderful Italian writer Aldo Buzzi has elevated to a new literary art form. “Hunger” is a compact embarrassment of riches.

-- Mark Rozzo

*If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

A Novel

Jon McGregor

Mariner Books: 288 pp., $13

Jon McGregor published this novel a year ago in England. Nominated for a Man Booker Prize, it disappeared for a time, only to resurface on our shores. This is fast fiction, as fast as the mind works: sentences unfinished, assumed understandings, cultural references. It’s what James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (and others less successful) worked to achieve. Then came the age of irony, of story, of word-processed sentences. But this novel’s 26-year-old author captures the feeling of a city, a street, a day, an accident -- and a larger world that couldn’t care less, the rest of us in parentheses.

“So listen,” he writes. “Listen, and there is more to hear. The rattle of dustbin lid knocked to the floor. The scrawl and scratch of two hackle-raised cats.” Listening is what McGregor does best, with his ear to the keyholes of some 25 apartments on one street. But he can also see inside, way inside. He sees the man with burnt hands who failed to save his wife from a fire and now is raising their 4-year-old daughter. He sees the mother of twin boys. He sees the ex-soldier, the pierced teenagers in love and the girl with square glasses who is our narrator. And he sees the young man in No. 18, scribbling on Polaroids of the neighbors, obsessed with urban archeology and the girl with the square glasses. Each chapter hurtles toward the moment when a car hits one of the twins and the man from No. 18 leaps into the street in a vain attempt to save him. And that doesn’t even begin to give away the story. In another age, this would be a book everyone had to read.

-- Susan Salter Reynolds

*I’ll Take You There

A Novel

Joyce Carol Oates

The Ecco Press: 290 pp., $25.95

With her new novel, “I’ll Take You There,” Joyce Carol Oates reiterates her position as one of the big talents at the forefront of the most significant movement in American fiction, which is the turning away from the mono-ethnic novel in favor of the frontier where all the issues of integration are raised. From boy meets girl, to God and man, to goods and services, to low-down and dirty politics, integration is the most important theme in literature. That is all writers have ever talked about: how two things quite different or seemingly different can be brought together.

“I’ll Take You There,” told in flashbacks, takes us back to the 1960s. It is avant-garde in its structure: Three movements function like musical choruses in which themes are laid out, symbols are manipulated, and tools that will appear at the end, like the mirror, keep expanding as the narrator, a female writer, recalls three events from her early womanhood that she realizes are emotionally connected because they all brought her closer to maturity. In each case, she moves from macro to micro, from some big theme or some big situation, to something very intimate, a moment between the narrator and one person. She takes us from a class situation in a sorority house, to an interracial romance, to a confrontation with the face of death as it appears in a sliver of a looking glass used to secretly peep at a dying parent.

Each of the movements is about a spirit having to endure rejection and surmount its own sorrow and its own fear, sometimes asserting itself through a defensive anger that can be self-deprecating or mockingly aggressive. The novel is about six things: self-confidence, bigotry, class, race, parentage and geography. In the song that may have inspired the title of this novel, the Staple Singers tell us that they know of a place where nobody is crying, where no one is worried, where there are no false, smiling faces, where there is no lying to the races, and that they can take us there. Joyce Carol Oates is telling us exactly the opposite. But, instead of depressing us, she lifts our spirits with the tragic optimism that is at the center of her poetic impulse, a force that, word by word, never fails to rise up from the dark, sorrowing bowels of this novel.

-- Stanley Crouch

*I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company

A Novel

Brian Hall

Viking: 420 pp., $25.95

While Stephen Ambrose was writing “Undaunted Courage,” I accompanied him one summer canoeing up the Missouri River retracing the footsteps of Lewis and Clark. The pristine scenery was magnificent, and at night, around a roaring Montana campfire, we would read passages from the journals out loud. The journals, overflowing with keen observations, illuminate Lewis as both gifted writer and astute naturalist. But what is missing from these priceless journals -- or for that matter, from the hundreds of books written about the expedition itself -- are introspective character profiles of the leading players in the rugged drama.

Brian Hall, author of two previous novels and a handful of nonfiction books, has brilliantly accomplished what Ambrose hoped to do. “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company” -- the title is Lewis’ words to Clark inviting him on the expedition -- fills in the blank pages of the Lewis and Clark journals, offering marvelous character studies of five key participants in the historical trek.

Hall, a spellbinding prose-stylist, writes with the kind of ethereal poetic sweep found in the historical novels of Michael Ondaatje and Wallace Stegner. With consummate skill he weaves the true 1804-06 journey with a deep psychological probe of his enigmatic characters’ mind-sets. To his credit, he stays as close to the historical circumstances surrounding the expedition as can be hoped for in fiction. There is, in fact, a seamless narrative flow to “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company,” which earmarks this hybrid book as approaching the coveted status of classic American literature.

-- Douglas Brinkley

*The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens

A Novel

John Rechy

Grove Press: 324 pp., $24

John Rechy, rather like Henry Miller, is best known for his depiction of raw and shocking sexuality and yet best loved by some readers for his expression of a passion so sublime that it approaches a state of rapture. He began in 1963 with “City of Night,” a book about the sordid life of a gay street hustler, but he also gave us, for example, “The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez,” the tale of a poor middle-aged Mexican American woman who is redeemed when she’s granted a marvelous vision.

Rechy’s novel, “The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens,” is a potent compound of sex and rapture. Lyle is a beautiful and beguiling young man who starts out as the child of star-crossed lovers in a sleepy Texas town and ends up as “the Mystery Cowboy,” an enigmatic figure who materializes among the lost souls on Hollywood Boulevard. This remarkable story, as Rechy tells it, is sly, smart, sexy and laugh-out-loud funny, but it is also tinged with sorrow and ultimately elevated into the realm of magic. Rechy renders the mean streets and the elegant watering holes of contemporary Los Angeles with a wry and knowing sense of humor.

-- Jonathan Kirsch

*Little Infamies

Stories

Panos Karnezis

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 282 pp., $24

Picture a ramshackle Greek village of no more than 30 houses, a place so far off the beaten track that the government is planning to build a dam on its site and relocate the inhabitants. Envision a crumbling church, a tavern, a barbershop, a butchery, a coffee shop, a dilapidated train station, whitewashed houses and a cast of variegated eccentrics including a sour, narrow-minded, but not entirely unsympathetic priest; a lonely spinster given to afternoon dreams; a clerk who tries to teach his parrot to recite Homer; a landowner so cruel and rapacious, he’s a veritable mini-Stalin; and a widower so crushed by his wife’s death in giving birth to twin daughters that he keeps the girls chained up like dogs.

The 19 linked stories that make up Panos Karnezis’ noteworthy fiction debut, “Little Infamies,” reveal a grim bedrock of poverty, superstition, filth, mean-spiritedness and hardship beneath the deceptively picturesque surface of a quaint village. Innocence, sweetness and hope exist, but they often prove to be delusions. Love, when it does occur, all too easily turns into poisonous hate. Karnezis is a deft stylist: clear and direct, yet subtly ironic -- a style well-suited to the short story. And, like many of the masters of this genre -- Guy de Maupassant, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty -- Karnezis is adept at delivering one startling surprise after another.

-- Merle Rubin

*Lost Light

A Novel

Michael Connelly

Little Brown: 362 pp., $25.95

“Lost Light” is yet one more pungent, hurtling, intricate Michael Connelly caper that thrusts a throbbing read at you. A young woman’s murder four years ago, complicated by a robbery-murder on a movie set, further roiled by a coffee shop shooting and the inexplicable disappearance of an FBI agent, are the ingredients of the polyphonic plot that drives LAPD detective Harry Bosch, now retired, to delve for answers to long-unanswered questions. Bosch no longer has a badge nor the resources of the LAPD to help him hack his way through tangles of deceit and danger. But he still has a few friends to lend a reluctant hand when he needs it most. And he has the Mercedes ML55 that he bought after retirement from a guy moving to Florida. The $55,000 price was steep, but not too steep for the fastest SUV on the road and one that blends in, since “every fifth car in L.A. was a Mercedes, or so it seemed.” You might ask what’s the use of a fast SUV when freeways have turned into parking lots. But “getting there” is half the fun, as Bosch’s saxophone instructor says. Although a bit battered, Hieronymus Bosch will get there in the end. A lot of the guys who stand in his way will not.

-- Eugen Weber

*Middle Earth

Poems

Henri Cole

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 58 pp., $23

In 1949, Wallace Stevens -- 35 years along in his argument that God should be spelled with a lowercase “g” and six years shy of his supposed deathbed conversion -- wrote that “[t]he great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.” He was being modest, but happily poets such as Henri Cole continue to respond to his challenge. “Middle Earth,” Cole’s transcendent fifth collection, is a gift to pagan literature.

A questioning Catholic, Cole finds another religion in seeing. These are the poems of a conjurer, ceremonial and hypnotic. He sets the mood in the title poem, turning down the lights and beginning an ars poetica mantra: “I repeat things in order to feel them, / craving what is no longer there. / The past dims like a great, tiered chandelier. / The present grows fragmentary / and rough.”

This collection marks the birth of Cole, a writer in his late 40s, as a poet for a wider audience. He displays his sense of humor and takes an unguilty pleasure in his visions. The animal poems get funny; the creatures are more human and less tame. He is a remarkable fabulist, now writing the poems of his career. “I felt like a realist, recovering from style,” he says in a poem. It isn’t true: He is still afflicted by great style (and rhythm and rhyme and timing), and the realism -- of emotional pitch and wisdom -- is spectacularly dressed up.

-- Dana Goodyear

*Monkey Hunting

A Novel

Cristina Garcia

Alfred A. Knopf: 258 pp., $23

When writers are likened to jazz musicians, it’s usually in admiration of a startling linguistic virtuosity or an unbridled imagination; it might be noted, for example, that a novelist possesses a pyrotechnic energy to match that of Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. But Cristina Garcia’s “Monkey Hunting” is much more like one of those haunting Miles Davis solos. Like the trumpeter, Garcia has a rare gift for concentrating beauty by leaving things out. Here is a miracle of poetic compression, a novel that manages to trace four generations of a family not by revealing every last detail of personal histories but rather by revealing people’s dreams, their unuttered concerns and observations -- the things that strike them when they hear the hoot of an owl, or when they try on a pair of their great-grandfather’s glasses in front of a mirror.

To inherit the sensibility of one’s ancestors is to inherit a mirror that magically stores all of its reflections. Without treacle or trickery, “Monkey Hunting” follows one such mirror’s long line of bequeathal, and in doing so presents us with characters we come to care about deeply. We don’t follow them throughout their entire lives, and we don’t need to get the true sense of who they are. With the confidence of an artist who knows exactly what can be left out, Garcia has made a small masterpiece -- an epic of anecdotes, a vista of brief and beautiful glimpses.

-- Jeff Turrentine

*The Noonday Cemetery And Other Stories

Gustaw Herling

Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston

New Directions: 282 pp., $25.95

The narrator of these 13 beautifully crafted, mysterious, often unsettling stories is an elderly Polish writer living in Naples, Italy. Ailing and an insomniac, he spends his semi-retirement as a metaphysical sleuth piecing together accounts of ancient and modern acts of unspeakable evil, outbreaks of cruelty and self-destruction, downfalls of illustrious families and cases of moral debasement of seemingly stalwart characters. Though hardly enjoying those spectacles of desolation -- they sometimes make him physically sick -- he seems to be on a personal mission to record some of the devil’s more imaginative exploits. The reason for this strange fascination, we are led to believe, is hidden somewhere in his own past. From scattered remarks we learn that he was a soldier in World War II, lived through a shattering personal tragedy and has intimate knowledge of the horrors of the 20th century. In those respects, the narrator is a literary double of the book’s author, Gustaw Herling, one of the finest Polish memoirists and fiction writers, who died in 2000.

Written in the last years of the author’s life, the stories may at first seem morbid and obsessive. And yet, by the force of Herling’s perfectly poised, dispassionate, Stendhalian prose, they show something beautiful, even uplifting in those parables about people at their limits, plunged in total isolation, where they have to decide whether to reject life or to affirm it despite it all. In the face of these two possibilities, the narrative voice remains detached and unprejudiced. Yet the author also lets us know that he would rather stand with those who reach the finish with unconditional defiance. “When it comes down to it, what is hope?” asks Herling, a former prisoner, soldier, exile and witness to his century. “Impotent rebellion against despair. Whoever says that one can’t live without hope is simply asserting that one cannot live without constant rebellion.”

-- Jaroslaw Anders

*The Other Side of Silence

A Novel

Andre Brink

Harcourt: 312 pp., $25

In 1904-07, the Hereros and other natives of German Southwest Africa revolted against their colonial masters. The Germans brought in Gen. Lothar von Trotha, who, as Thomas Pynchon dryly recounts in his novel “V.,” had demonstrated “a certain expertise in suppressing pigmented populations.” Von Trotha ordered the extermination of every Herero man, woman and child his troops could find. He “is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000 people,” Pynchon says. “This is only 1 percent of 6 million, but still pretty good.”

Such atrocities, which prefigure those of the Nazis and of the apartheid regime South African writer Andre Brink spent much of his career protesting against, are the background for Brink’s latest novel, “The Other Side of Silence.” The heroine, Hanna X, arrives in the colony in 1902 aboard one of the ships that supplied single German women to its sex-starved soldiers, prospectors and farmers. An orphan, intelligent but plain, beaten down by a childhood of abuse and by housemaid jobs that amounted to indentured servitude, Hanna believes she has nothing to lose by emigrating.

Brink’s last novel, “The Rights of Desire,” had an elderly hero and an autumnal tone, but there’s nothing geriatric about “The Other Side of Silence,” in which Hanna, who learned strategy by playing chess with one of her less odious employers in Bremen, is forced to face the moral dilemma of every revolutionary: How can she fight evil without becoming evil herself? This bloody fable, rooted in bloody reality, is one of Brink’s most powerful works.

-- Michael Harris

*Our Lady of the Forest

A Novel

David Guterson

Alfred A. Knopf: 336 pp., $25.95

“Our Lady of the Forest” is another virtuoso performance from David Guterson, whose first novel, “Snow Falling on Cedars,” won the 1994 PEN/Faulkner Award. His gripping, darkly comic new novel marks an expansion of his vision, a deepening exploration of the richly layered realm of the Pacific Northwest that Guterson has come to own as surely as William Faulkner did his Yoknapatawpha County. Like Faulkner and the magnificent August Wilson, whose cycle of plays chronicles the African American community in Pittsburgh, Guterson sings the song of place with perfect pitch. In “Our Lady of the Forest,” Guterson leads us into the still grandeur of the rain-drenched forest of northwest Washington, then unflinchingly dares us to examine the mysteries of faith and redemption. His uncanny sense of place is at work from the opening paragraph. His transporting novel balances on the tension between belief and despair without ever losing its sense of mystery.

-- Jane Ciabattari

*Pattern Recognition

A Novel

William Gibson

Putnam: 358 pp., $25.95

Cayce Pollard is the cutting edge of contemporary culture. An uber-cool young urban woman, Cayce is able to recognize hip trends before they take off, thereby allowing her marketing clients to “commodify” those trends and reap abundant profits. “It’s about group behavior pattern around a particular class of object,” Cayce explains in William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition,” an intriguing novel of technology, art, marketing manipulation and mystery. “I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does,” Cayce explains, and then “I point a commodifier at it.”

Gibson succeeds in bringing to light the subtle and sometimes frightening aspects of today’s Internet culture. “Pattern Recognition” works compellingly on two levels: As an intriguing mystery with delicious vigor and bite, the novel lures readers into unfamiliar provinces and unforeseen situations to solve the problem at hand. On a deeper level, the tale is a social commentary, taking a long, hard look at the monoculture in which we live: “whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other, that dissolves the membranes between mirror-worlds.”

Combining old-fashioned storytelling techniques with a recognition of yet-to-be-defined patterns, Gibson’s tale is a robust inquiry into the many (and often veiled) ways that marketing shapes the world in which we live.

-- Bernadette Murphy

*The Photograph

A Novel

Penelope Lively

Viking: 240 pp., $25.95

Penelope Lively’s fiction has a retrospective cast. Although she is not a historical novelist in the mode of Mary Renault, Barry Unsworth or A.S. Byatt, she is sensitive to the allure of the past. More accurately, however, one might describe her as a historian of individual consciousness, in particular of the role played by memory in shaping it. Her characters move forward by looking backward.

“The Photograph” is one of Lively’s most satisfying novels: cleverly conceived, artfully constructed and executed with high intelligence and sensitivity. It is also a surprisingly suspenseful story, with developments unfolding in two directions, as the characters find out new things about a past they thought they knew and as their radically altered perceptions and feelings continue to sway their relationships. Lively has exceeded herself in her portrayal of these characters. Not only has she created a cast of memorably distinctive and believably complex individuals, but she has also succeeded in the subtle and difficult task of showing us how their feelings and conceptions are being transformed, by the revelations about the past and by their ongoing, sometimes painful, encounters with each other in the present.

-- Merle Rubin

*Poets of the Non-Existent City

Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era

Edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak

University of New Mexico Press: 274 pp., $19.95 paper

“Poets of the Non-Existent City” is a homage to an era and a place -- Los Angeles in the decade after the end of World War II -- and to the dedicated few poets who worked to create a decent society during the shameful decade of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. A collection of poetry, prose and graphic arts of the era, culled from the pages of the journals California Quarterly and Coastlines, the book brings together 19 poets representing 13 years in the life of the city.

For those who ask what it was like to write under such circumstances, the answer is contained in this remarkable volume from the University of New Mexico Press, and the answer is nothing short of inspiring. “Poets of the Non-Existent City” is also a very useful book -- a handbook for the maintenance of sanity -- for the poets of today as well as anyone else interested in an honest and accurate use of language in the current storm of lies and deceits. Anyone who thinks the American political climate is the worst it’s ever been should have a look. We’ve got no idea what bad is. With a little help from our friends, we might develop the pluck these writers had.

-- Philip Levine

*A Sad Affair

A Novel

Wolfgang Koeppen

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

W.W. Norton: 178 pp., $23.95

Like an acrobat poised on a tightrope, or better yet a slack-rope, lurching wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous, German writer Wolfgang Koeppen’s amazing first novel, “A Sad Affair,” written in 1934, tells the story of one man’s obsessive love for an emotionally elusive femme fatale.

The lover is an intensely romantic young student named Friedrich; the object of his devotion, a delicate-looking aspiring actress named Sibylle. Their romance unfolds against the backdrop of pre-World War II Europe, with its cabarets, refugees and looming societal unrest. But in Friedrich’s Sibylle-centric mind, the ominous political atmosphere fades to insignificance beside the blazing colors of his grand passion.

Koeppen’s seriocomic paean to romantic love was viewed by the Nazis as yet another specimen of decadent art and banned in 1936. In the 1950s, Koeppen trained his sights on the larger picture of politics and society with three powerfully satiric novels about postwar Germany, including the matter of former Nazis finding their way into the government. In a life that spanned almost the entire 20th century, Koeppen, who was born in 1906 and died 90 years later, wrote only five novels. But, as translator Michael Hofmann tells us in his sparkling introduction to “A Sad Affair,” when this mercurial and exasperating author did sit down to write, “the results were unexpected and worth having.” Many writers have sung the joys and sorrows of love, the ecstatic agonies of romantic obsession, but few have done so with the sheer ebullience that animates every page of “A Sad Affair.”

-- Merle Rubin

*San Remo Drive

A Novel From Memory

Leslie Epstein

Handsel Books: 244 pp., $24

Leslie Epstein is an accomplished and prolific writer, perhaps best known for his tragicomic Holocaust novel, “King of the Jews.” But the key to understanding and appreciating his latest book is that he is the son of Philip G. Epstein and the nephew of Julius J. Epstein, the Oscar-winning screenwriters of such Hollywood classics as “Casablanca” and “Arsenic and Old Lace.” Epstein’s family can be discerned just beneath the surface of “San Remo Drive,” a haunting and ultimately heartbreaking account of what it was like to grow up in the movie colony of Southern California in the 1940s and ‘50s.

“San Remo Drive” grabs and holds our attention -- and our sympathy -- because Epstein allows us to glimpse Hollywood in its golden age through the eyes of someone who knows it firsthand, and he populates the landscape with men, women and children whose fears, yearnings and failings are perfectly credible and wholly compelling. Epstein is a master storyteller at the height of his powers, and his book is a worthy addition to the literature of Los Angeles in general and Hollywood in particular.

-- Jonathan Kirsch

*The Scheme for Full Employment

A Novel

Magnus Mills

Picador: 204 pp., $19

Magnus Mills is a slave driver. Find yourself in one of his novels, and chances are you’d either be a fence builder, an odd jobber, an excavator -- or, in his latest, “The Scheme for Full Employment,” a delivery van driver, shuttling spare parts from one depot to another. Less a novelist than a writer of parables, Mills writes fictions that are satiric, didactic, subtle and blatant all at once. His characters have seemingly fallen out of the sky and landed in a world so surreal yet so completely realized that they, and perhaps you, will never once question its strangeness, and while Mills’ stories may provide a fair wage for the reader -- humor, provocation, unpredictability and the like -- they come with a hidden cost. But that’s in the fine print; for now, The Scheme’s the thing.

“The Scheme for Full Employment” contains not only the recognizable small dramas of the workplace but also the larger interplay among the heavyweights of modern labor. It’s the Keynesians versus the Von Hayeks, the Fords versus the UAWs, the Stakhanovites versus the shirkers. The lessons that arise may seem inadvertent, as if Mills might have stubbed his toe in the telling, but there’s more art and intention in these pages than first meets the eye.

-- Thomas Curwen

*Shroud

A Novel

John Banville

Alfred A. Knopf: 264 pp., $25

Of a certain kind of soprano, it is said in tones of reverence tinged with pity that she never draws attention to her voice but always subordinates it to the requirements of the score. The tinge of pity comes from the fact that such a soprano is always of the second rank. One can no more ask a Wagnerian prima diva like Jane Eaglen not to draw attention to her voice than one can ask Shaquille O’Neal not to draw attention to his size.

So it is with the prose style of John Banville in “Shroud.” The style -- the voice -- is a phenomenon, a wonder in itself. It cannot fail to draw attention to itself. Asked in Paris if he was English, Samuel Beckett replied, famously, not “Non” but “Au contraire.” Banville, who is Irish, writes English not as if it were Irish (he is from Wexford, not Galway) but, au contraire, as if it were French. He uses it, in other words, with an elegant, seigneurial detachment, as if it were a mistress whose body he knew and enjoyed in every secret detail but whom he would never dream of marrying.

It is a truism that few critics ever manage to write good fiction. Less often noted is the fact that few novelists ever manage to write good criticism. As a group, they like to tell stories and imagine characters rather than pursue arguments and explore ideas. Banville may be, in our day, the supreme exception to this double rule. Thinking back to his boyhood, Axel Vander mocks: “What self? What sticky imago did I imagine was within me, do I imagine is within me, even still, aching to burst forth and spread its gorgeous, eyed wings?” Oh, to be done with such stuff forever! But we never are, and down to the last page of this dazzling novel, neither is the stained and shrouded Axel Vander.

-- Jack Miles

*The Songs of the Kings

A Novel

Barry Unsworth

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 342 pp., $26

A mighty army poised to invade the Middle East is delayed by unfavorable weather. Its commander in chief struggles to keep his allies from deserting him. Sports are used as a distraction; religious leaders and the media are enlisted to trumpet the justice of the invaders’ cause. The superiority of Western culture is cited. But something more, it seems, is needed -- something to shock and awe all onlookers....

Who knows if Barry Unsworth had the United States and Iraq in mind when he wrote his latest novel, “The Songs of the Kings,” but this retelling