Culture

Abbie Devereaux, the heroine of Land of the Living, finds herself hooded and bound and a prisoner of a man who is just a whispering voice. She has a violent headache and cannot remember anything about how she has come to be lying on concrete in this damp, smelly place, or even anything leading up to her present situation. The man, who feeds her four spoonfuls of bland gluck daily and pulls down her trousers and puts her shuffling, hand-cuffed body onto a bucket once a day for her to relieve herself, smells of onions and dirt. He makes it plain that once she is sufficiently broken he will kill her. He does not rape or fondle her. We have all been there in fiction too many times before. Luckily for us, Abbie escapes and the rest of the novel begins.

Although Janet Malcolm has written in depth about an extraordinary range of subjects, from psychoanalysis and photography through to literary criticism, the art world, journalism, biography and the law, in thematic terms she has actually been one of the most consistent non-fiction writers of our time. Certainly, she is one of the most brilliant. I never feel such a keen sense of anticipation - the kind of adrenalised mental anticipation that feels almost luxurious to indulge - as when I start out on a new piece of writing by Malcolm.

Can it be said that anyone is sane, that anyone is healthy - or does all life consist of degrees of illness and madness? Is love a kind of madness? Is grief an illness? Is art whatever we say it is, or are there limits? Can murder be art? These and many other questions hover around Siri Hustvedt's third novel, a compassionate and gripping drama. The novel tells the story of Leo Hertzberg, an art historian at Columbia University whose life is changed when he buys a painting by Bill Wechsler and is drawn into the contemporary New York art scene.

Sven Lindqvist used to be a fairly flabby intellectual Swede with a natural disclination to engage in any kind of sporting activity whatsoever (well, he did a bit of sluggish swimming) - especially team sports. Then, at some point before 1988 (when this book was first published in Sweden), by which time he had reached the precarious age of 53, he met a rather threatening, gleamingly muscle-bound skinhead in a gym who changed his life. No, he didn't fall in love with the man. He fell in love with the idea - and the ideals - of body-building. The skinhead was himself a body-builder - every last, well defined pectoral testified to that fact. Sven, being a sedentary writer, had always pooh-poohed the whole thing - how vain, ridiculous, self-serving!

How many people have heard of Michael Reeves? Most biographies are written about famous people or people who hobnob with famous people or lesser-known people who have led particularly interesting lives. Michael Reeves is none of these. He was an English ex-public school boy, obsessed by cinema, who made three low-budget horror films and died from a barbiturate overdose at the age of 25. With such a short and relatively uneventful life, why should anyone bother to write a 360- page biography of him? The reason is that one of his films achieved 'cult' status. There seem to be two definitions of a cult movie.

It is rare for a first novel to be launched with the degree of enthusiasm that Fourth Estate have bestowed upon this saga of the American civil war. The jacket comes trumpeting its triumph on release in the USA. 'Deserves the Pulitzer Prize', it quotes from the Toronto Globe and Mail. A cynic might say, on observing that the author holds dual Canadian citizenship, 'Well, the Toronto Globe and Mail would say that, wouldn't they?' But then, so would I. And, what is more, that goes for any other literary prize for which Paulette Jiles is entitled by birth, age or gender, for with Enemy Women she has worked something of a wonder of storytelling.