Books

"Gliff" is a word which can mean "a short moment," "a wallop," and "a post-ejaculatory sex act;" to "dispel snow," "to frighten," and to "escape something quickly." It’s "really excitingly polysemous," says one of Ali Smith’s characters. It’s certainly an apt title for a book which can’t seem to define itself. At its center are two children, Briar and Rose, who have been abandoned. Their mother is absent, caring for a sick sister, and their other responsible adult leaves to find her. The children exist in a stock dystopian world (people are surveilled by CCTV cameras and zombified by screens) with a twist: they repeatedly wake up to find that a red line has been painted around their house or camper van. They are on a list of "Unverifiables.

The high-water mark of the American naturalist novel lasted for about forty years — the period bookended by Frank Norris’s 1899 McTeague and John Steinbeck’s 1939 The Grapes of Wrath, taking in along the way such highlights of the form as Upton Sinclair’s 1906 The Jungle, Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 Main Street and James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy of 1932-35. But these are all subsidiary crags on the path to Mount Olympus, for the novel that towers above them all and draws each of them — to mix the metaphor a little — into its remorseless slipstream is Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 An American Tragedy.

Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written The Voyage Home, a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism. Agamemnon’s return home to Mycenae after ten years of war is told entirely from the points of view of women. The narrator is Ritsa, Cassandra’s maid, her intimate “catch-fart.” (There is no reticence throughout about the use of crude colloquialisms.) Agamemnon the victor becomes the victim.

William Boyd It makes grim, compelling and minatory reading, but Hitler’s People (Penguin, $35) by Richard J. Evans is not only the only book you ever need to read about Nazi Germany but a salutary example of what happens when crazed populist leaders win power. Twenty-two short portraits of the key players and lesser apparatchiks of the Nazi years manage to encompass the whole history of the Third Reich and its baleful legacy. Evans’s hundred-page chapter on Hitler — the “Boss” — is masterly. Evie Wyld’s fourth novel, The Echoes (Knopf Doubleday, $28) with its edgy and moody supernaturalism (the narrator is a ghost) establishes her growing reputation as one of our finest young writers.

Will Self’s recent, exceptional fictional trilogy, comprising Umbrella, Shark and Phone, displays a deep preoccupation with the ways that time, memory, family, psychosis and history interact. The novels are complex, multigenerational narratives, composed in a late modernist style as engaging as it is experimental. Formal playfulness, with the prose switching between its characters’ consciousnesses, sometimes even midsentence, is married to solidly satisfying plots. Having already excavated his own life in a memoir, Will, Self has now turned to his mother in a novel, Elaine. Self has written about Elaine Rosenbloom before (in the short story “North London Book of the Dead”); she also appears as the narrator, Lily Bloom, in How the Dead Live.

Commentary on the young Romantics can be curiously puritanical. Not on saintly John Keats, who died too young to cause any trouble. But Byron and Shelley? Beastly to women, negligent as parents, destructive as friends, oblivious to their own privilege. Feminist observers tend to resemble the English visitors to Geneva in 1816 who borrowed telescopes to spy on the renegade inhabitants of the Villa Diodati across the lake, hoping to be scandalized. A central character in the summer that saw the birth of Frankenstein was the only non-writer of the villa’s gathering, Byron’s young lover and Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

Ten years ago David Cameron, as the British prime minister, pledged $65 million for the centenary of World War One. The focus was on “capturing our national spirit in every corner of the country, something that says something about who we are as a people.” Beyond a celebration of the Tommy on the Western Front and a belated acknowledgement of colonial Britain’s sacrifice, it was a missed opportunity. There was little attempt to better understand the region where the war began — and where, according to Nick Lloyd’s exhaustive The Eastern Front, it never really ended.

"Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.” So begins Susanna Clarke’s modern masterpiece Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, first published two decades ago and now regarded, rightly, as the greatest work of British fantasy literature since the Gormenghast novels. Revolving around two indelible characters — the fussy, pedantic “practical magician” Gilbert Norrell and the swashbuckling, Byronic Jonathan Strange — it has an epic sweep and dares to take the existence of magic, and magicians, wholly seriously, giving its oft-maligned genre an intellectual and emotional heft that few other comparable books possess.

"My God, the suburbs!” John Cheever, the short-story writer who has rejoiced in the nickname “the American Chekhov,” had what can only be described as ambivalent feelings about the twentieth-century housing developments that grew up on the outskirts of major cities. He said of them that “they encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity, and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.” Cheever was not wholly consistent himself.