Isabelle Beauchamps's List: Novels

Short stories by author of "Bright LIghts, Big City"

Amos Oz has been obsessed with the land and the state of Israel and the city of Jerusalem — where he was born in 1939 — for all his writing life. Oz once wrote that he loved Jerusalem “as one loves a disdainful woman,” but he has often reproved what he loves. A lifelong Zionist, he is also a staunch advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict, which he has characterized as a clash of “right against right” and, more recently, as “wrong against wrong.” His views have made him controversial in Israel, even as his writing (most recently the haunting memoir “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” set mostly in the Jerusalem of his boyhood), has made him beloved. “My stories and my articles,” he admitted long ago, “have often unleashed a storm of public fury against me.”

The virtuoso storyteller Elmore Leonard has been rightly praised for his technique: hot, fast narrative, tasty dialogue, strokes of character so quick they’re invisible, never a detail that doesn’t move things ahead. It’s wonderful how much Leonard can do with a five-­syllable sentence like “She left with the check.”

Twenty years ago, John Updike published a memoir, “Self-­Consciousness,” which opens with an extended reminiscence of his hometown. The author has been stranded for the evening while his mother and daughter are at the movies, and he walks the streets of Shillington, Pa., in a light rain, reliving the past in the incantatory detail with which he informed and illuminated his fiction, summoning up the names of departed local merchants, of his teachers and elementary school classmates, recalling the material texture of his childhood right on down to the candies, magazines and coloring books offered for sale at the variety store, recording the essence of his time amongst us. “The street,” he writes, “the house where I had lived, seemed blunt, modest in scale, simple; this deceptive simplicity composed their precious, mystical secret, the conviction of whose existence I had parlayed into a career, a message to sustain a writer book after book.” That message, that testimony of an individual and recollective consciousness as it relives and reviews the matter of a lifetime and grapples with the effects of aging, disease, decline and death, is the focus of Updike’s final collection of new fiction.

At the beginning of Damon Galgut’s latest novel, the protagonist, Adam Napier, is driving toward a small settlement outside Cape Town when he’s pulled over for running a stop sign. When he arrives at his destination, he learns that the town has a new name, only halfway spelled out by the stones on a nearby hilltop. These details — suggesting interruption and irresolution — reflect Adam’s greater sense of self. Twenty years ago, he published a book of poems called “The Flaming Sword,” only to stagnate ever since in a Johannesburg office. Now, having lost his job and forfeited his home, he yearns to write again. He’s come to the flat, dry landscape of South Africa’s Karoo region to live in a dilapidated house owned by his developer brother.

Nearly everything about Kate Walbert’s new novel is wickedly smart, starting with the title: “A Short History of Women.” Does it connote modesty or grandeur? “Short” sounds modest. “History” sounds grand — grandiose, in fact, when affixed to a work of fiction. But “Women” clinches it: modest, then. After all, what more trifling subject could one elect to research? Such, at any rate, is the prevailing view in the world inhabited by Walbert’s characters — all five generations of them. One of the book’s accomplishments is that it persuades us that this sentiment holds no less currency in 21st-­century America than it did in late Victorian England. But Walbert’s primary concerns — unlike those of some of her characters — aren’t political. Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art.

For all the hoopla that greeted Petit’s walk, it was largely forgotten until 9/11, when it was rediscovered amid the sudden nostalgia for all things twin towers. There was Petit’s own memoir about the walk, “To Reach the Clouds,” as well as a memorable New Yorker cover on the fifth anniversary of the attacks and an Oscar-winning documentary, “Man on Wire.” Now Colum McCann has repurposed Petit’s daring act as the leitmotif for “Let the Great World Spin,” one of the most electric, profound novels I have read in years.

M. J. Hyland goes to great lengths to disguise the depth and richness of her art. Her third novel, “This Is How,” begins — as did her previous two — in the first person, in the present tense, right in the middle of what would appear to be a very ordinary day. “I put my bags down on the doorstep and knock three times. I don’t bang hard like a copper, but it’s not as though I’m ashamed to be knocking either.” Not so different from the opening of her impressive debut, “How the Light Gets In” (“In less than two hours this airplane will land at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. It’s lunchtime. My window shutter is open, the sky is vast and blue and the earth is brown and flat”), or the Man Booker finalist “Carry Me Down” (“It is January, a dark Sunday in winter, and I sit with my mother and father at the kitchen table. My father sits with his back to the table, his feet pressed against the wall, a book in his lap”). She makes it look so simple, with her words of one syllable, with a style almost entirely devoid of affect; but there is nothing simplistic about her achievement. “This Is How” is an unflinching, absorbing, morally complex portrait of one life gone suddenly and terribly awry.

In opera, they say a tragedy ends with a funeral and a comedy ends with a wedding. Richard Russo’s new novel, “That Old Cape Magic,” declares itself at once: it starts with a wedding, as well, of course, as ending with one. Russo has written six previous novels, among them the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Empire Falls,” and we’ve come to expect certain things: a complicated skein of plotlines, deep connection to place, and affection for the large cast of characters who blunder and struggle through his pages. “That Old Cape Magic” does not disappoint.

As a timid person, as someone who apologizes for bumping into inanimate objects, I’m often drawn to large-scale personalities, to people who refuse to behave themselves.” This confession appears a third of the way into “I Shudder,” Paul Rudnick’s collection of uproariously self-deprecating essays about being gay and Jewish in suburban New Jersey and downtown Manhattan, and about his career as a playwright and script doctor in Hollywood and on Broadway. But Rudnick’s readers will greet his protestations with a high degree of skepticism. By this time, after all, we’ve watched him gleefully banter with the rambunctious patients on a mental ward, deliver an authoritative lecture on the intricacies of papal dogma to a roomful of snarling studio executives and insist, during a Pringle- and Twinkie-filled paean to his lifelong junk-food diet, that the only thing he’ll agree to eat when invited out, even at the most exclusive dinner party, is dessert. Admittedly, the events involving the cherry-red Rolls-Royce convertible and the yacht full of spring-break revelers were orchestrated by someone else, but wouldn’t a certain amount of bravado be required, just to go along for the ride?

William Trevor’s 14th novel begins about 50 years ago with a funeral in the Irish country town he calls Rathmoye. The deceased is Mrs. Eileen Connulty, a prosperous widow who ran a local lodging house for traveling salesmen, Number 4 The Square, and who, as death came near, “feared she would now be obliged to join her husband and prayed she would not have to.” The emotional realignments Mrs. Connulty’s two middle-aged children will undergo as a result of her passing are in the normal order of things; her funeral’s true importance, however, will lie not in its grim grinding of life’s usual gears but in the way it fatefully joins two bystanders.

IN the 1920s, a disaffected Soviet encyclopedia editor named Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky — a man haunted by Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and by Communist realities — began writing a series of philosophical, allegorical, fantastical short stories. Seven of them appear in “Memories of the Future,” a selection of his fiction that takes its title from the book’s longest entry — the tale of a brusque monomaniac who builds a “timecutter” to eject himself from 1920s Moscow. None of these ­stories were published in Krzhizhanovsky’s lifetime. This was not because the work had been rejected or because it was, well, a little weird. Krzhizhanovsky, it seems, was too proud, too shy or (more likely) too frightened to show them around — given that he was spinning his dystopic fictions at about the same time that Stalin was collectivizing the Soviet countryside.

Nick Hornby is again having fun with — making fun of — an obsessive music fan. What’s different now, 14 years after “High Fidelity,” is that fans live out their obsessions on the Internet, a place where distances shrink, time collapses, and it’s very easy to get lost. Hornby seems, as ever, fascinated by the power of music to guide the heart, and in this very funny, very charming novel, he makes you see why it matters.

It’s been two years since Kurt Vonnegut departed this world, and it’s hard not to feel a bit rudderless without him. Late in his life, Vonnegut issued a series of wonderfully exasperated columns for the magazine In These Times. During the darkest years of the Bush administration, these essays, later collected in “A Man Without a Country,” were guide and serum to anyone with a feeling that pretty much everyone had lost their minds. In a 2003 interview, when asked the softball question “How are you?” he answered: “I’m mad about being old, and I’m mad about being American. Apart from that, O.K.”