Ingratitude

Lionel Shriver is a first-rate storyteller. And yet… A Better Life is a satire on the immigration problem that particularly faces the US. All the clichéd arguments on both sides of the debate are laid bare. In fact, the whole novel is a cliché. Yet clichés come into existence because their substance is what everyone is talking about. Shriver’s problem is that her plot and her characters can seem like ciphers for her polemical views; they dominate the novel’s form. Gloria Bonaventura, a 62-year-old divorcée, lives with Nico, her 26-year-old, Fordham educated, unemployed layabout son, in a Queen Anne mansion in a fashionable part of New York. Her liberal, humanitarian

Endless Flight is the first biography in English of the novelist Joseph Roth. This is very surprising, since Roth’s short, violent life traverses some of the most compelling episodes in 20th-century European history. He was a supremely elegant, intelligent and clear-sighted writer, despite living out of suitcases, in hotel rooms, always on the run. If most of his novels are flawed in one way or another, they are all interesting in others. He also wrote what must be one of the dozen greatest European novels, The Radetzky March, translated at least three times into English since 1933. (We are now lucky to have Michael Hofmann’s superb, comprehensive translations, which perfectly