Simon Baker

A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years, is how very short the stories are. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Feeding of the Five Thousand — in spite of their familiarity they are raced through in just a few lines. It is, however, perhaps the very terseness of the Bible that has caused at least as much ink as blood to be spilled in its cause; had it spelled the answer out, for instance, medieval scholars could never have whiled away so many jaw-droppingly fatuous hours in wondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and other pressing questions. In his new novel Richard Beard draws attention to this brevity and uses it as a springboard.

Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. At her latest party a guest named Miles, whom she’s never met before, locks himself in the spare room, and refuses come out. In the first of the novel’s four sections, Genevieve contacts Anna, who had met Miles during a holiday in 1980, hoping that a familiar voice will persuade him to leave, but it does not.

Here is the latest Bookends column from this week's issue of the Spectator: Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). However, the less desirable influence of Roald Dahl seems to preside more tellingly in many of these yarns, which recall Tales of the Unexpected in their predictable twists and spooky presences.

It is impossible (as I prove in this sentence) to review Philip Roth without mentioning the surge of creativity that began when the author was around 60 and which now sees him publishing a novel every year (his next one, Nemesis, is already finished). However, I would argue that it is only recently that we have seen Roth’s genuine late style. In three of his last four books — Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and this one, The Humbling — there has been a shift towards winter in his writing. Those are short works, lacking the manic humour that energised Roth’s earlier fiction.

At first, the plot of Nick Hornby’s new novel, Juliet, Naked, seems too close to that of his first novel, High Fidelity (1995). At first, the plot of Nick Hornby’s new novel, Juliet, Naked, seems too close to that of his first novel, High Fidelity (1995). We have the no-longer-young man — Duncan this time — who refuses to move on in the usual ways (children, marriage, etc.) and devotes his time instead to pop music, and in particular to the reclusive singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, a less famous (and fictional) peer of Dylan and Springsteen, who has not released anything since his masterpiece album, Juliet, in 1986. We also have the long-suffering girlfriend — this time, Annie.

We Are All Made of Glue, by Marina Lewycka The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton Yalo, by Elias Khory, translated by Humphrey Davies We Are All Made of Glue is Marina Lewycka’s third novel — or, more accurately, her third published novel, since she famously made her way through several other works and a rain-forest’s worth of rejection-slips before finding success with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) at the age of 59. It is a multi-stranded book narrated by Georgie Sinclair, a Yorkshire-born woman in her forties who now lives in London.

Nocturnes is a collection of five longish short stories, four about musicians and a fifth about friends who once bonded over musical tastes. As the title neatly suggests, the book is filled with characters living in obscurity; the stories are populated by people, often musicians, who have been forced to downgrade their ambitions dramatically. While the title also suggests classical music, however, jazz and its related forms feature more prominently. The standout success among the five is ‘Malvern Hills’, which features a university drop-out who is trying (like countless others) to write songs, while helping out at his sister’s café in Worcestershire.

Rhyming Life and Death, by Amos Oz Rhyming Life and Death is set in Tel Aviv during one night in the early 1980s, and concerns a man we know only as ‘the Author’, who spins fiction from his surroundings to pass the time. The Author is a famous middle-aged novelist, who happens also to be an accountant — a contrast suggesting that his artistic life is an intensely private matter which he deliberately keeps hidden beyond a functional day-to-day persona. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, he is not looking forward to the evening ahead, since he is to deliver a talk at a nearby community centre, and expects to be assailed with the usual questions about his writing habits and what he considers to be the meaning of his work.

A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz Pollard, by Laura Beatty Chatto & Windus Inside the Whale, by Jennie Rooney Chatto & Windus Slaughterhouse Heart, by Afsaneh Knight Doubleday AFraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz, was one of two debut novels on the Booker shortlist — and is, one could argue, a more distinguished offering than the other debutant, which won. A rambling and hilarious tale about perpetual failure, it takes the form of an immense anecdote from a father, Martin Dean, to his son, Jasper. Martin has lived his life in the shadow of his brother, Terry, Australia’s most notorious (and oddly popular) criminal. Terry began life as a sports star, but soon diverted his energies into less innocent pursuits, eventually becoming a modern-day Ned Kelly.

Indignation, by Philip Roth Indignation, Philip Roth’s 29th book, is about the sophomore year of its narrator, Marcus Messner, who attends college in 1951, a time when the Korean War hangs in the background, waiting to devour America’s youth. Marcus is a brilliant student, the first of his family to enter university, but he has recently suffered unrest. He spent his freshman year at college in his native Newark, which enabled him to live at home. It should have been ideal for a quiet boy such as Marcus, who wanted nothing more than to achieve good grades, but his normally easy-going father had a breakdown of sorts which made him irritable and intrusive to the point where Marcus could no longer live with him.

Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff  This book contains ten new stories from Tobias Wolff, plus a selection from the three volumes of short stories he published between 1981 and 1997. It affords the reader a fascinating panorama of Wolff’s entire career, and shows that, like Bach’s variations, Wolff’s stories move around the same central themes, exploring them in different ways so as to extract every possible nuance from them.