Could there be a worse time to make a case for John O’Hara? Not that there isn’t a case to be made. O’Hara is the greatest social novelist America produced since Edith Wharton, though the very idea of “American society” as it appeared to writers of his generation now seems itself to be an artifact of history. Over the course of 800 pages, the new Library of America O’Hara volume, dedicated to his stories, makes the case for the sharpness of his craft and observation, displaying the marvel of a writer who knew his subject effortlessly. And it needs to be said that given the wealth and quality of stories to choose from (twelve volumes, half of this prodigious body consisting of fat volumes that appeared from 1961 to 1968), the editor, Charles McGrath, must have been in the position of a man who has amassed a first-rate library and is moving into a studio apartment. I hope he’s relaxing somewhere with a vodka Gibson and the satisfaction of a job well done.

The problem with making a case for O’Hara has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of his work and everything to do with living in an era when it’s routinely assumed that the aim of art should be social justice, and that the proper purpose of fiction about the American privileged should be moral condemnation. You can’t blame people for being disgusted with the rich or for feeling something has to give. A Seattle entrepreneur named Nick Hanauer recently wrote a piece in Politico dedicated to his fellow plutocrats and entitled “The Pitchforks Are Coming,” and it’s hard not to feel “it’s about time.”

But as Fran Lebowitz, an O’Hara admirer, remarked in the Martin Scorsese documentary Public Speaking, “there’s too much democracy in the culture, not enough democracy in the society.” Given that both the creation and experience of literature is that of sympathetic imagination, we should be well past the notion that we have to morally justify fiction about people we wouldn’t feel much for in real life. And in O’Hara’s case, the subject was writing about a substratum of American power that was fading – not always gracefully — even as he was chronicling it.

There’s no denying O’Hara felt a trace of envy for the well-to-do (not filthy-rich) families of the midsized Pennsylvania towns he took as his subject. O’Hara was the son of a prosperous Pennsylvania doctor but was plunged into rough times when his father died at the age of fifty-seven, in debt and without a will. Sudden poverty prevented the young O’Hara from attending Yale. (Six years before his death in 1970 at age sixty-five, he was still asking Yale president Kingman Brewster to grant him an honorary degree. Brewster refused, “because he asked.”) When O’Hara details the fictional sojourns of those comfortable families’ sons in the Ivy League and then in Washington and in New York he is, at least in part, detailing the life he wanted to lead. But envy never got in the way of O’Hara’s unfailingly accurate — occasionally withering — powers of observation.

O’Hara’s people are the sort once called rock-ribbed Republicans: conservative, loyal to those in their set and to accepted notions of decency and business and tradition, publicly very careful in their behavior. O’Hara’s characters know the price of violating those accepted notions. For Julian English, the protagonist of O’Hara’s first novel, Appointment in Samarra, it’s his destruction, as it is for the respectable old gentleman of the story “Over the River and Through the Wood,” the hominess of that title almost a cruel joke given what transpires. These families are not, however, America’s ruling class. These are not the Rockefellers or the Mellons, the Peabodys or the Saltonstalls. O’Hara’s characters may encounter representatives of those dynasties, may attend the same universities or even belong to some of the same clubs, but they are not movers and shakers. They are the loyal home front, provincial perhaps to some higher up the social register but perfectly capable, when business or pleasure brings them to Philadelphia or New York, of knowing where to stay, where to dine, where to shop. And, if that pleasure includes an affair, which in O’Hara it often does, knowing how not to be found out.

O’Hara himself had, to borrow the words of another great American writer, Johnny Mercer, seen him some big towns and heard him some big talk. Hollywood, chief among them. His 1962 novel The Big Laugh, and his Hollywood short stories, especially the best of them, the chilling “Natica Jackson,” belong on the same small shelf with the very finest Hollywood fiction: Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, Gavin Lambert’s The Slide Area and Inside Daisy Clover, and the three novels comprising Don Carpenter’s Hollywood Trilogy. But O’Hara was content mostly to write about the Pennsylvania territory he named Gibbsville and to cover the years in which this, for want of a better word, suburban tier of American power knew its greatest influence, roughly from just before World War I to just after World War II. By today’s standards, it can’t help but look a bit provincial, if not reactionary. Apart from servants and tradesmen, the working classes do not feature in O’Hara. Ditto, for the most part, black people. (Though a black family is the subject of a sentimental but sweet story in the Library of America collection called “Bread Alone.”) O’Hara depicts a world in which women do not publicly assume roles other than wives or mothers, and he is well aware of that in the moments when he assays the private confusion and turmoil that results when they confront themselves as sexual beings, almost always outside of their marriages. (One of the uncomfortable truths O’Hara specialized in was that, at least as far as society was concerned, the romantic notion of marriage had still not fully overtaken the idea of marriage as an alliance for the sake of appearance, power, and wealth. Naturally, as with almost all of the truths in O’Hara, it’s one his characters would vigorously deny while knowing it was true in their bones.) The excitement and price of sexual freedom is everywhere in O’Hara. The moment in “Natica Jackson” when O’Hara shifts his focus from the movie star of the title, having an affair with a married man, to the man’s wife, who would have been called in those days “a poetess,” is a terrifying slide into the airless existence of a sexual hysteric.

O’Hara’s reputation was unsettled even in his own day. That had partly to do with his apparent talent for making enemies easily, partly with the monstrous need for acclaim that expressed itself as monstrous vanity. He was given a National Book Award in 1955 for his novel Ten North Frederick. He believed he was going to get a Nobel Prize for the 1958 From the Terrace. The critical line on O’Hara hasn’t really changed much since 1949, when his first long novel, A Rage to Live, was pilloried by Brendan Gill in The New Yorker. (The review prompted O’Hara to not submit another story there until the early ’60s. He wound up publishing more stories in the magazine than any other writer.) That line is that after two compact and brilliant early novels, Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8,and despite his mastery of the short story, O’Hara embarked on big, prestigious novels that dissipated his talent. It didn’t help that those big novels were very popular with the public. (But then, in America popularity has never helped anyone’s literary reputation.)

Of the ones I’ve read, I’d say there are four masterpieces: Appointment in Samarra, BUtterfiled 8, Ten North Frederick (O’Hara’s best, I’d say), and Ourselves to Know. From the Terrace is a flawed and maddening novel that fails at a higher level than most novels attain. And there is much pleasure to be had from the minor novels, like 1963’s Elizabeth Appleton. It is, hard though, to imagine that the ’60s reading public could not find that an old-fashioned novel. Certainly that was the basis on which critics in the last years of O’Hara’s career dismissed him — if they deigned to notice him at all.

The only purpose of noting that a writer is no longer read or is out of fashion is simply that, the stating of a fact. No one’s literary worth can be decided by such a judgment, and given the fate of Melville, out of print and forgotten for years after his death, or the fact that The Great Gatsby was out of print when Fitzgerald died, American critics should be especially wary of relying on that formulation.

But the question remains, why is O’Hara worth reading? Foremost for a reason too many literary critics overlook but which a great critic, Leslie Fiedler, noted as the only real reason anyone reads: for pleasure. O’Hara was a great storyteller, whether the stories are the sprawling family chronicles of the novels or the compact tales in this volume. In the space of five pages in the story “Are We Leaving Tomorrow?” O’Hara, by simply relating an anecdote or two, suggests the entire life of a couple whose existence consists of drifting from resort to resort because the husband, an alcoholic, regularly manages to break the rules of propriety that, in this set, mean social death. The wife’s reaction to his latest offense, as they sit late in a hotel bar, is to ask:

“I wonder if the man is still there at the travel desk. I forgot all about the tickets for tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Are we leaving tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

He stood up and pulled the table out of her way, and when she had left he sat down to wait for her.

There are years wasted, the wreckage of lives in what is unsaid in that exchange, and an aftertaste that is bitter, and even foreboding. What is entirely absent is melancholy.

The story takes place in Fitzgerald territory (Fran Lebowitz has called O’Hara the “real Fitzgerald”). But you find none of the melancholy such a situation would call forth in Fitzgerald (or Noël Coward, for that matter), none of the romantic charisma of wreckage. Even the fact that O’Hara is, in most cases, writing about a society and time that is passing does not invite nostalgia into his work, the nostalgia you can find in Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons (and exquisitely in Orson Welles’s film) or, in Europe, in Lampedusa’s The Leopard (and exquisitely in Luchino Visconti’s film). O’Hara is certainly motivated by memory in the explicitly autobiographical story “The Doctor’s Son,” in which a version of O’Hara as a young teen assists the doctor his exhausted father has called in to deal with the Spanish flu epidemic in their town. But he is not motivated not by fond recall. The undertow of this long story, which feels the product of an abiding anger the writer has mastered but never gotten over, is a determination to get down exactly what he saw and to leave implicit what such sights wreaked on a young man’s psyche.

Offhand, I can’t think of another novelist so steeped in, so assured in relating, the details of the milieu he has chosen. O’Hara knew his subject as few novelists ever know theirs. There are two stunning examples of this in Ten North Frederick. Early on O’Hara spends nearly two pages describing the front door of the title residence belonging to the Chapin family. What he is able to do, by describing the dips worn in the stone steps, the tarnish on the gold nameplate, the switch from a pull bell to an electric bell, is to convey the passage of years and fashion, and just how settled are the Chapins in their privilege to have weathered all of this. Later, in a scene at a dinner party thrown before a winter dance for young people home for the Christmas holiday, O’Hara goes around the table to tell us not just where each young man is matriculating but which particular fraternity pin adorns his tux. There’s an element of the parlor trick in this — most of these characters we never meet again. But O’Hara isn’t just showing off. He is telling us that what would appear minor details to most are just the sort of distinctions that are crucial in this world, subtler but no less telling than the downwardly mobile residences the heroine of his novella “Imagine Kissing Pete” winds up in.

O’Hara’s empathy is its own peculiar beast, not judgmental or chilly. And it doesn’t approach the cruelty of, say, Madame Bovary. But nothing, no hardship or tragedy, gets in the way of O’Hara’s desire to get down the truth of each situation on the page. You can come away from an O’Hara novel or short story realizing that you have been emotionally invested in the fates of his characters without really warming to them. Honesty, not just the rub-your-nose-in-it variety favored by the tough guy or the barroom philosopher, is nothing that will make you friends, and the sharper the observations behind the honesty the fewer friends you will make. O’Hara provides documentary reporting about a certain stratum of society in the way that Galsworthy or C. P. Snow or William Dean Howells or Edith Wharton did (he is in many ways the American realist progeny of Wharton). But what makes O’Hara so compelling is finally that his use of a setting in which it was imperative to keep up appearances is a heightened version of the war between our public and our private selves, and the distance that exists between people who can never fully know each other’s reality. It’s no surprise that this often expresses itself most strongly in sex, in marriages gone bad, in affairs entered into with haste or calculation, and then in the cold determination not to deny the dissatisfaction, even the hatred, that prompted the affair when it is revealed.

George Cukor, who directed the film versions of the plays of another great Pennsylvania writer, Philip Barry, Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, talked about the playwright’s gift for “throwaway candor,” the way, watching his plays, we are lulled by the wit flying back and forth only to be confronted with the sudden cruelty of one character’s cold assessment of another. O’Hara’s candor is not throwaway but deliberate. Not only didn’t he have the wit with which Barry could both sharpen and soften the blow; the point-by-point precision of O’Hara’s writing — the particularity of detail and description, the acuity of psychology — does not lend itself to catharsis. Often at the end of his stories and novels O’Hara the realist leaves you in the midst of the catastrophe that has transpired without anything like tragic grandeur to lift you above it. This can be a problem. The 900 pages of From the Terrace lead you, in the final sections, to the realization of a failed and wasted life from which there is, neither for the character nor for you, any escape. (The book knocked me into a funk that didn’t lift for days.)

More often, though, O’Hara has left me grateful for his candor, for the rare feeling that I am not being lied to. He was the novelist as reporter, without the impulses toward social activism or satire you find in Sinclair Lewis (another American novelist whose importance and achievement need to be reaffirmed). He was the social anatomist savvy about power and appearance and not given to romanticizing or glamorizing his milieu. And he was a truth teller without the hardboiled tendency to sentimentality or romantic fatalism. It says on O’Hara’s tombstone in Princeton, New Jersey, “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.” What’s appalling is that he composed it himself, one of those needy outbursts that have surely contributed to his underappreciation. Better than anyone else? No, and what kind of person would admit that even if he thought it? That should not keep us from admitting that the last part is not merely just but an understatement. Even in a moment of self-praise, O’Hara couldn’t help but be honest.

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Louise Doughty is one of those rare writers who can infuse a moment of stillness, of waiting, with palpable dread. Her superb 2013 novel Apple Tree Yard, for example, opens at the fatal instant when the narrator, standing trial for murder, is caught out in a series of lies; the moment when “it is all about to tumble.” And Doughty’s new novel Black Water sets us down in a tropical forest in 1998, inside the mind of a man waiting for his killers to arrive. If not that night, then soon. “The roof above him creaked, the night insects chirruped and hollered – but there was no rain. One thing he was sure about: they would wait for rain.”  John Harper should know; he is a professional. Now in his mid-fifties, he has returned from Holland to Indonesia where his murky career began and where, thirty years later, it is about to end. Is he a spy?   A scapegoat? Doughty keeps us guessing, allowing only glimpses of Harper’s life to emerge in the pitch-dark night: an ex-wife, an alcoholic mother, a boss in Amsterdam, and the memory of “black water, long strands of hair, clinging like seaweed to his wrist.”

The narrative rewinds briefly to1965. In a dank backroom in Jakarta, a man is tortured as Harper looks on because “his handler at the embassy had told him to win the trust of a filthy gangster who may or may not have good contacts with the military.” The scene is a poisonous sliver, expertly inserted. Doughty returns to 1998, to daylight and to Harper’s first encounter with Rita whose love may offer him escape if not redemption, but the novel’s dark course is set. It will take us back to Harper’s childhood in Indonesia and California, to Holland where he drifts into his covert career and to the Far East of the 1960s where Communist insurgencies, military coups and Western-backed dictatorships jostle for supremacy. (And where corporate interests are always paramount.) This shadowy terrain, so familiar from the novels of Graham Greene, John le Carre and Eric Ambler, is new ground for Doughty, but she makes it her own, creating an enveloping sense of intimacy with the elusive Harper and the treacherous world he inhabits.

“You’re not so stupid as to believe…that ugly things can’t happen in beautiful places,” a local agent jokes, “What Abang meant was, you’re not white.” Harper’s mother is Dutch, his father was Dutch/Indonesian; his real name is Nicolaas Den Herder and he is the perfect rootless recruit for “The Institute of International Economics,” a Dutch intelligence contractor whose major clients are American. “There was a community of shadow men out there,” young Harper learns, “around the world, in airports and railway stations – on the streets, hidden in hotel rooms, disguised as ordinary people and indistinguishable to everyone but others of their kind…all playing the same game.” Ugly things do happen. In 1968 Harper delivers a list of names to the military, for example, and hundreds are tortured and killed. He suffers attacks of panic, then of conscience and is recalled to a desk job. But one bloodbath stains him irrevocably, the truth behind it emerging only when Harper returns to Jakarta in 1998, this time on an economic assignment. “Thirty years of human rights suppression had brought the foreign investment flooding in,” he observes when he lands, “momentarily dazzled by the light striking the silent spin of the glass revolving door that swept him through to an air-conditioned lobby.”

Black Water is rich in such details. Whether Doughty is describing “a vast steep wall of misted palm trees” or imagining the condemned “kneeling next to ditches by the sides of the roads with their hands tied behind their backs” each scene materialises with cinematic clarity. At the same time, more is suggested than seen. The air seems to thicken for example, when Harper notes of some dawdling boys, “…there was something in their smiles he didn’t like,” and from the first page the novel’s brooding atmosphere feels charged with inchoate danger. Those familiar with Doughty’s fiction will not be surprised. Menace has always been a stealthy presence in her novels whether the setting is contemporary London (Whatever You Love, Apple Tree Yard among others) or Nazi-era Bohemia (Fires in the Dark.) But here malevolence is woven into every strand of an elegantly coiled narrative. And the novel’s darkest revelation — perfectly timed and brilliantly understated — binds Harper’s past and present together in a deadly, final twist. When Rita protests, “The world is different now,” Harper responds, “They thought the world was different then.”

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“Most children have two whole legs and two whole arms but this little six-year-old that Dinesh was carrying had already lost one leg, the right one from the lower thigh down, and was now about to lose his right arm.” From the very first sentence of Anuk Arudpragasam’s astonishing debut novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, the reader is made fiercely aware of the body on the page, and what it’s like when bodies are stretched to their extreme limits. Focusing on a single day in a Sri Lankan refugee camp near the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War, Arudpragasam follows a young man in his twenties, Dinesh, and teenage Ganga, his new wife. They barely know each other but marry to satisfy her father’s wish. It’s a bittersweet arranged marriage during a moment of extreme duress.

The Story of a Brief Marriage is a claustrophobic tale that is deeply uncomfortable to read, but it’s also one of the most extraordinary novels of the year. We follow Dinesh as he bathes and defecates, during his most intimate routines in a place where individualism and humanity are a distant memory.

An astonishing number of civilians were killed toward the end of the twenty-six-year war between the Sinhalese rulers and Tamil rebels seeking self-determination: approximately 40,000. Anuk Arudpragasam grew up as a Tamil in Colombo, the capital city, but was sheltered from the war because he came from a privileged family. He was an undergraduate studying philosophy at Stanford, comfortable in his academic life, when grainy cell phone photos and videos of dismembered, bloody bodies began to emerge on the Internet.

“I wrote this book out of violence to myself,” Arudpragasam said recently in the backyard of a Cobble Hill bakery. It was a bright, sunny day, one of the last lazy summer afternoons. Our pleasant surroundings — the lush greens of the plants — stood out as a vivid contrast to our intense conversation. “I wrote this out of a desire to mock myself for living a life in ignorance of these things . . . and so I guess the reader is [also] being mocked in so far as the reader is like me.”

The self-taught writer never even took a literature class. He wasn’t allowed to leave the house by himself until he was sixteen, so he spent a lot of time on his roof, reading books like The Republic by Plato and Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy.

When he was twenty, a friend turned him on to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. It was then that he realized he wanted to write his own books. After he graduated from Stanford, he lived in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu for a year and spent eight hours a day rewriting stories that he liked by famous authors, such as James Joyce, and setting them in Sri Lanka.

When he returned to the United States, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia. It was there, in the fall of 2011, that he started writing The Story of a Brief Marriage and focusing on the startling images from his home country.

“There was just a sense of ‘Where was I when this happened?’ ” Arudpragasam said. “What was I thinking? I don’t know what I was doing, whether I was laughing or joking or reading or obsessed with whatever I was obsessed with and this was all happening and I didn’t know.” His fiction emerged partly “in response to the sense of guilt that comes from [the fact that] I speak the same language; we share a history; we share a culture.”

So why did the author choose to focus on the corporeal in such a devastating scenario, where land and language and relationships have been taken away from people? “The only thing I could think of that I had in common with them was my body or a body,” Arudpragasam says. “It was my mode of access.”

This idea for the first scene he wrote – in which Dinesh is given the opportunity for a long-awaited bath — came from a photo the author saw of an actual refugee camp boy holding a bucket over his head as water cascaded over his body. In the novel, this moment gives way to a sudden reflection on everything the boy has lost: “He could no longer remember the faces of his mother, father, or brother, could no longer remember anything of the routine of their lives or the mood in which they had lived, and anything he said about that time would have been devoid of substance, like black-and-white outlines in a children’s coloring book,” Arudpragasam writes.

For such a bleak topic — writing about people who may very well not survive — the author focuses on “a gratitude that comes from saying goodbye.” There’s a particularly devastating moment when Dinesh talks about a doorknob he found, one of the very few objects he possessed, and “out of a slowly mounting fear that he would lose or be forced to abandon his companion, he decided at last to preempt the possibility by saying goodbye to it once and for all.” So he buries this object in the earth.

The marriage, conducted quickly by Ganga’s father, is a last attempt at perhaps protecting his daughter. But it’s also an eye-opener for Dinesh; he possesses his memories once again, and he’s confronted with the severity of his situation. “There’s all this stuff about saying goodbye,” Arudpragasam says. “Feeling sad at having to depart from your body, from your arms and legs and hairs and your eyebrows. And this gratitude to [his body] for having worked for him all his life.”

One writer Arudpragasam credits as an inspiration is Peter Nádas, the Hungarian author of The Book of Memories. “He focuses a lot on gaze, on gesture, on gait, on body language, on sex, on shitting, on urinating, on mood,” Arudpragasam says. “And in a really meticulous way. There will be four or five pages on two people, like one person lifting their gaze up to make eye contact with another and then moving away. There’s a scene in which — maybe five to ten pages, two boys are in the snow in their childhood. The main character’s remembering it. And he looks up and he looks down, and the whole ten pages is structured around it. It’s really meticulous with the body.”

And so, too, is Arudpragasam. The Story of a Brief Marriage is a profound meditation on bodies in turmoil. It’s a book that lives in the body long after you finish it.

 

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During the final months of World War II, American publishers Blanche and Alfred A. Knopf began receiving reports out of Paris about a brilliant young writer named Albert Camus. Eager to import his novel The Plague into the United States, they were told that to seal the deal they would also have to publish Camus’s first novel, The Stranger — the terse story of affectless Meursault, who attends his mother’s funeral, shoots an Arab stranger on the beach, and is sentenced to death.

Dismissing The Stranger as “neither very important nor very memorable,” a reader for Knopf declared: “My best guess is that it will appeal to very few readers and produce something less than a sensation.” Knopf published Camus’s debut novel anyway, and, though The Plague was a huge critical and popular success, The Stranger proved to be nothing less than a sensation, in the United States even more than in France, where it became the bestselling mass market paperback ever. It was the vade mecum of a generation of Americans who read the book as the bible of existentialism, the definitive embodiment of postwar angst and alienation. Even a president of the United States would later attest to the novel’s impact when George W. Bush, trying to counter his image as an intellectual lightweight, announced that he was reading The Stranger. From its first, startling words — “Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know” (Matthew Ward translation) — The Stranger became one of the most spectacular literary debuts of the twentieth century. Then twenty-eight, Camus would be famous for the rest of his life, which ended at forty-six. (By contrast, Henry Roth, too, was twenty-eight when his first novel, Call It Sleep, was published, in 1934, but it would languish in obscurity for the next thirty years). Though it is now seventy-four years old, The Stranger continues to astonish with its innovative cleansing of French prose and its deft framing of evergreen issues such as individual identity, personal responsibility, gratuitous violence, and capital punishment. Relations between Europeans and non-European Muslims are even more estranged today than they were when the outsider Meursault poured five bullets into the body of an Arab stranger.

In Looking for The Stranger, Alice Kaplan, whose previous books include French Lessons, a memoir of her infatuation with the language, and The Collaborator, a study of the French fascist author Robert Brasillach, does not set out to rival biographies of Camus by Herbert Lottmann and Olivier Todd or biographical sketches by Elizabeth Hawes and Robert Zaretsky. Instead, she provides a biography of his first and most influential novel. She acknowledges inspiration from Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, Michael Gorra’s masterly account of the genesis of The Portrait of a Lady. Kaplan’s book is a distant cousin to the numerous Making of volumes, accounts of how Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Avatar, and other popular movies came into being. Though its prose is more graceful and its erudition less ponderous, it is the grandchild of John Livingston Lowes’s 1927 The Road to Xanadu (1927), a 972-page inquest into the literary sources and personal circumstances that gave birth to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

Kaplan traces the origins of The Stranger to Camus’s fatherless, impoverished childhood in French Algiers. She notes the encouragement he received from mentors Jean Grenier and Pascal Pia, his experience reporting injustices within the Arab population, and the heightened awareness of mortality caused by contracting tuberculosis at seventeen. She examines the earliest versions of the novel in A Happy Death, a manuscript that Camus abandoned but that was published in 1971, eleven years after a car crash ended the author’s life. She follows the gestation of The Stranger chapter by chapter as its author moves from Algeria to France and the German occupation forces Camus, a participant in the Resistance, to carry his growing manuscript with him from Paris to the relative safety of central France.

During an early stage of composition, Camus wrote in his notebook, “This story begins on a burning hot blue beach, in the tanned bodies of two young people — bathing in the ocean playing games in the sea and sun.” Kaplan traces the story more specifically to a knife fight on an Algerian beach between Arabs and Europeans in 1939. She visits that beach and even interviews the aging brother of the Arab who stabbed a European.

André Malraux read the unknown Camus’s manuscript and wrote to Gaston Gallimard, the most prestigious of French publishers: “Watch out: this will be an important writer, in my opinion.” Malraux’s opinion would be widely shared, especially by readers in English. L’Etranger was first translated into stiff British English by Stuart Gilbert and published simultaneously by Hamish Hamilton in London and Knopf in New York. While the American edition used The Stranger as its title, the British edition went by The Outsider, because, Kaplan explains, Hamish Hamilton wanted to avoid confusion with a Polish novel titled The Stranger it had already published. It has since been translated into English four more times, but British and American editions maintain their separate titles. It would have been fascinating to follow its fortunes in Thai, Japanese, Hebrew, and other languages, but, though she mentions two film adaptations, the Cure’s song “Killing an Arab,” and The Meursault Investigation, Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud’s 2013 rewrite from the perspective of the murdered Arab’s brother, Kaplan remains focused on Algeria, France, and the United States.

In 1957, The Stranger was the only one of Camus’s three novels cited by the Swedish Academy when it awarded him the Nobel Prize. However, by then, Camus, weary of fame and irritated by the worldwide fixation on his fictional debut, yearned to bury it and move on. Nevertheless, as Kaplan notes, “As long as people keep reading novels, The Stranger will live on.” The Stranger was constructed to culminate in the death of its exemplary, feckless antihero. Thoroughly, cogently, Looking for The Stranger traces the birth of a literary classic.

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The first volume of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was published on September 30, 1868. The novel was an immediate bestseller, bringing the thirty-five-year-old Alcott a cult following of teenage girls and a hero status she grew to regret. “Don’t give anyone my address,” she wrote her publisher before leaving on a European tour in 1870. “I don’t want the young ladies’ notes.” Similar thoughts occurred during the writing of the book: “I plod away,” she wrote in her journal, “though I don’t really enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters . . . ”

But the novel, along with three dozen other books and hundreds of stories, made good Alcott’s vow that, though a woman, she would make both her own and her parents’ living, and do it by writing. This vow was made necessary by Bronson Alcott, a madcap for schemes of high ideal and low pay. Recognizing that her father was unlikely to change, “Duty’s Faithful Child” (Bronson’s term for her) set aside her aspirations for serious writing and, urged on by her publisher, turned her eye to the market.

Alcott’s fiction ranged from wholesome, sentimental tales of family life to, at the other extreme, dark fantasies of romantic desire and frustration — the kind of thing that Jo, Alcott’s Little Women heroine, might have peddled to “The Weekly Volcano.” Published under various pseudonyms, Alcott’s potboiler romances often featured female protagonists determined to triumph, and dangerous if thwarted:

Never had she looked more beautiful as she stood there, an image of will, daring, defiant, and indomitable, with eyes darkened by intensity of emotion, voice half sad, half stern, and outstretched hand on which the wedding ring no longer shone. (Pauline’s Passion and Punishment)

In Marmee and Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother, Eve LaPlante attributes the highest biographical and literary significance to the above passage. The usual view, developed in John Matteson’s Pulitzer-winning biography, Eden’s Outcasts, is that Bronson Alcott was the dominant formative influence on Louisa. In contrast, LaPlante shows how Abigail Alcott’s defiant resistance to her husband’s naïve utopian plan, the Fruitlands group living experiment, salvaged the family and cemented a bond between “the most famous mother-daughter pair in American literary history”:

Louisa and Abigail were born into a world that constrained and restricted them, but they dreamed of freedom. The story of their struggle to forge a new world began with Abigail. Indeed, we cannot understand Louisa without knowing her mother . . . The imaginative child of an inspirational mother, Louisa studied Abigail’s life and character, appropriated them, and embedded them in her fictional worlds.

LaPlante says that, a century and a half on, women continue to grapple with the dilemmas faced by Abigail and given voice by Louisa in her novel — how to balance work and love, public and private, relationships and independence. Alcott scholar Anne Boyd Rioux agrees that the problems faced by the women in the novel remain relevant and compelling, as do the solutions:

Little Women is about four very different girls, and so many readers can find themselves in at least one of the March sisters. Perhaps that is why we still have today so many novels and television shows about four sisters or girlfriends trying to figure out how to grow up on their own terms . . . [T]hey can all be traced back to Little Women, the original story of four women coming of age, helping us see that we have choices in life and that different ways of growing up are valid. That is a powerful message still in a world that tries to limit our horizons to a one-size-fits-all ideal of womanhood.

Rioux is at work on Reading Little Women, due out in 2018 to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the novel’s publication. Rioux’s study will explore both the back-story and the legacy — how the book became a children’s and feminist classic, adapted and argued by generations. Gabrielle Donnelly’s The Little Women Letters is one recent fictional application of exactly that, with three imagined descendants of Jo March borrowing from her story to shape and empower their own.

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“Perhaps the greatest travel book, the most unpredictable of all,” Andrés Neuman suggests in the closing paragraphs of How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, “would be written by someone who doesn’t go anywhere and simply imagines possible movements. Facing a window that seems like a platform, the author would lift his head and feel the rush of the horizon.” It’s a line that operates as both valedictory and epigraph. How to Travel Without Seeing, after all, is a travel book by an author who is ambivalent about travel . . . or, at least, about travel’s theoretical rewards. “These days,” he insists, “we go places without moving. Sedentary nomads, we can learn about a place and travel there in an instant. Nevertheless, or perhaps consequently, we stay at home, rooted in front of the screen.”

If this sounds like a contradiction, that’s part of the point. This elusive travelogue offers an epigrammatic record of Neuman’s 2009 book tour of Latin America, beginning in Buenos Aires, where he was born and lived until he was fourteen, when his family moved to Spain. The intent is to craft a record of disruption, to frame travel not as connective so much as the other way around. “I deal with the trauma of displacement through writing,” Neuman told The New York Times in 2014, shortly after his novel Talking to Ourselves appeared in English. That book, too, opens with a journey, although it is a journey of a very different sort. “Each novel,” he has said, “should refute the previous one” — which explains the shifts from book to book. And yet, this also provokes (for American readers, anyway) one more layer of dislocation, since of Neuman’s eighteen books, only four have been published in the United States.

Such fragmentation highlights one of the challenges of literature in translation: We can only read what is available to us. And yet, in Neuman’s work, that is almost paradoxically the point. Traveler of the Century, the first book of his to be translated into English, is a 600-plus-page picaresque, unfolding along the boundary of Saxony and Prussia, in an imagined Europe that blends history and allegory. The Things We Don’t Do gathers thirty-four stories, many of them microfictions, including four “bonus tracks,” or dodecalogues, which string together a series of aphorisms in an extended commentary on the storyteller’s art. “The extreme freedom of a book of short stories,” he writes there, “derives from the possibility of starting from zero each time. To demand unity from it is like padlocking the laboratory.” A similar argument might be made about all his books. Talking to Ourselves is a prime example, a novel so riveting that no sooner had I finished than I started reading it again. Comprising three alternating first-person narratives — a ten-year-old boy, his terminally ill father, and his mother, who plays her mourning out by way of sexual conflagration — it describes a family unraveling, one misunderstanding or betrayal at a time. For Neuman, though, the only betrayals that matter are those we visit upon ourselves. “From then on,” the mother tells us, in the wake of her first dalliance, “everything that happened, how can I put it? acted like an antidote. Every word, every gesture conspired to block my path and prevent my escape.” She is referring both to the relationship and to her family: a situation in which there are no rules, no codes of behavior, just a set of specific circumstances that determine their response.

What Neuman is after is to play with our expectations, as well as his own. His work is constantly creating its own vernacular. Certainly, that’s the case with How to Travel Without Seeing, which makes a point of sticking to the surfaces. “[E]verything is possible because nothing happens,” he writes, articulating such a point-of-view. The idea, in other words, is to deconstruct what it means to travel — not to immerse in other landscapes so much as to express the self as it moves through these places, by turns alien and contained. Thus, even as we follow Neuman from Argentina to Uruguay to Chile, Peru to Ecuador to Venezuela, what we learn about these locations is glancing, indirect. In La Paz, he discovers a poem graffitied by the feminist collective Mujeres Creando: “After making your dinner / and making your bed / I lost the desire / to make love to you.” In Guatemala City, he comes across the Kafka bar, named, a waitress tells him, for “a Swedish writer the owner likes a lot.” The ironies and inconsistencies only heighten the experience, for in a globalized world, everything is up for grabs. Neuman quotes the Argentine poet Santiago Sylvester:, “Whatever is not a window is a mirror.” The statement is worth keeping in mind. As How to Travel Without Seeing progresses, it increasingly functions on these terms, as a set of vignettes, reflections, shards of memory or observation that add up in the only way such fragments can, as an approximation of consciousness.

That such consciousness is discontinuous goes without saying; the world through which Neuman moves is an unapologetically postmodern one. Even our definitions are open to conjecture, an idea he makes explicit by including Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico, in his travelogue. Still, the question this raises is not whether these cities are part of Latin America but rather whether all of it, Neuman’s whole itinerary, illuminates a broader notion of the Americas, in which the border is first and foremost a psychological, or an emotional, dividing line. “To travel the world today,” he writes from Lima, “is to witness the same debates in different languages and dialects.” It’s an impression that echoes throughout the book. In San Juan, the Spanish-speaking capital of an unincorporated U.S. territory, he riffs on the evolution of language: “Puerto Rican bilingualism sometimes works like Google Translate, copying words and syntactic structures from English. When I arrive, they announce that the airport is under construction — bajo construcción rather than en obra. In the hotel, they explain to me that Wi-Fi is complimentary — complementario rather than gratis . . . The Spanish they speak here is simultaneously familiar and strange, under construction and complimentary. If the language needs something, it takes it. And it no longer knows where it’s coming from.” Neuman is describing a condition all of us recognize, that odd feeling of statelessness bestowed by contemporary travel, in which “movement itself was the last of our concerns.” Late in the book, while flying from El Salvador to Costa Rica, he offers a telling anecdote. “From the window of the plane,” he recalls, “I see the dark green squares of the fields, the blue dent of a lake among the folds of the mountain range. With a mixture of knowingness and emotion, I think: It looks like Google Earth! This is the way things are. This is the way our eyes work. Birds-eye images on screens don’t evoke the feeling of being on planes. For us, it’s the reverse: planes are like screens.”

I love, I have to say, that exclamation point, its breath of recognition, even (or especially) if the recognition is generic and belongs to everyone. This is what it means to travel now, Neuman tells us, not the shock of the new but of the familiar, the ways in which identity blends. The book was written in 2009, but it’s impossible to read without reflecting on current realities; what does all this mean beneath the shadow of a border wall? Neuman doesn’t shy away from such complexities; How to Travel Without Seeing is full of references to the politics and culture of the countries he visits, although the most ubiquitous signifiers are the effects of a region-wide flu epidemic and the death of Michael Jackson, which occurs as Neuman embarks. In any case, his offhand, aphoristic structure flattens out reaction, rendering each impression as just another momentary idea. What ties them together is that nothing ties them together — there is no master narrative. There is only the self, moving through a world of mass migration and entertainments, inauthentic and authentic at the same time, as travel always is.

In the end, that makes How to Travel Without Seeing less a book about travel than about boundaries, a succession of airports and border guards. The experiences it describes are liminal, occupying the interstices between departing and arriving, being there and being gone. “Before I leave,” Neuman writes, “a friend tells me, ‘If you publish the notes you’re writing, at some point you’ll have to present them in every city that appears in the book.’ ” Double image, double mirror. The tension sits at the center of Neuman’s work. “I imagine myself,” he continues, “presenting the book in every place that appears in it and writing, at the same time, a journal about that second trip, which could be presented again, city by city, and so on to infinity. Once you start on a journey you can never quite end it.”

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“You once wrote me a letter . . . telling me that I would never be lonely again. I think that was the first, the most dreadful lie you ever told me.”

This wrenching lines appear twice in Ruth Franklin’s magisterial biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and are, by some measures, the beating heart of the book. They are taken from an undated letter Jackson wrote to her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. But Franklin employs them not so much for what they reveal about Jackson’s frequently unhappy marriage but instead to tease out the many murky nuances of what “lonely” meant for Jackson — as a writer whose work frequently defied categorization, as a woman chafing against her era’s notions of what a woman could be, and as an artist of singular talent in a time and place when singularity was often suspect..

Like countless writers — particularly writers who are women — Jackson seldom felt a sense of belonging, not in her stolidly conventional family, nor in the starry New York City literary scene, not in the conservative New England towns in which she and Hyman raised their own family, nor, more largely, in the suffocating, gender-polarized environment of midcentury America. The manner and force by which this loneliness fired her imagination and drove her talent — fierce, complicated and, mostly sustaining — is the story Franklin tells.

”Shirley Jackson has always been an original who walks by herself,” wrote Orville Prescott in his New York Times review of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. “There is magic in her books, and baffling magic some of it is, too.” Indeed, since Jackson first began publishing stories in the early 1940s, there have been critics, editors, and befuddled readers who simply did not know what to do with her. From her psychologically twisty novels to her madcap family memoirs and her wildly diverse stories, which range from Puritan Gothic to family sketches to deft studies in social mores, Jackson’s work both defies simple categorization and exposes the limits of such categories, of genre itself.

Born in 1916 and raised in comfortable bourgeois surroundings in and around Burlingame, California, Jackson was inspired from an early age by voracious reading of folktales, mythology, the Oz books, and commedia dell’arte. Writing was an escape from her family’s efforts to, as Franklin puts it, “mold their daughter into a typical upper-middle-class California girl: proper, polite, demure.” When she was seventeen, her family moved to Rochester, New York, transplanting Jackson from her home and friends to a frigid industrial city where she felt even more out of place. Her late teens and early twenties were a series of half-starts and depressive episodes, including a troubled stint at the University of Rochester, before finding a happier home at Syracuse University. There, she began making important friendships with fellow outsiders and artists, including one that would change her life.

When Jackson met budding intellectual Stanley Hyman at Syracuse in 1938, their connection was swift and intense. They would remain together, for better or for worse, until Jackson’s death to heart failure at age forty-eight. It was with Hyman that Jackson initially found the personal and intellectual communion for which she so longed, and Franklin ably captures the intoxicating and brainy energy of the early years of their relationship, from shared reading adventures to liquor-fueled parties with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, one of Hyman’s closest friends, and Dylan Thomas — who either did or didn’t drunkenly chase Jackson around her house and share a private moment with her outside in the snow. Franklin even offers a delicious anecdote of a party at the Hyman-Jackson home in 1950 that included a neighbor who brought an old college friend: Bette Davis. Jackson took out a guitar and a sing-along ensued.

Before they even married, however, Hyman confessed to liaisons with other women, suggesting Jackson accept his infidelity as part of his nature. “They were a perfect pairing, writer and critic, gentile and Jew, S & S,” Franklin writes. But, for Franklin, their symbiosis to often turned “parasitic.” She speculates that Jackson’s lifelong fascination with magic and witchcraft may have been a way to counteract the “lack of agency she felt in her own life and her corresponding longing to harness power.” Hyman had the unique capacity to energize and yet undermine her work, to cling to her and yet strip her of her confidence by his affairs, to encourage her writing but to push her to write “socially conscious” stories he favored or, eventually, the domestic ones that sold.

As their family grew, ultimately to four children, Hyman urged his wife to take on lucrative assignments from the likes of Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, and Woman’s Day, even criticizing her for squandering her writing time on letters to relatives or friends. As a result, Jackson spent most of her adult life fitting writing into every spare corner of time while she ran a busy household, maintained her role as faculty wife, and managed her publishing career. Hyman, meanwhile, took years to complete his considerably less lucrative books of literary criticism. The pressures, compounded by her sense of being the “eccentric” in Bennington and the other New England towns in which they landed, weighed heavily on Jackson.

Jackson’s experience of motherhood was far less complicated. Franklin offers a portrait of an engaged and loving mother, deeply curious about her children and eager to celebrate their differences. Thanks to the participation of all of the children, Franklin brings to vivid life the chaotic and lively Jackson-Hyman household but also untangles it from the spirited portrayal in Jackson’s wildly popular domestic memoirs, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957) — books that were authentic reflections but also shaped by an author very aware of the marketplace.

According to Franklin, the greatest pressures on Jackson and the source of much of her anxiety and unhappiness, which eventually led her to periods of agoraphobia and what Jackson called “nervous hysteria,” are a consequence of the era in which she lived. The expectations and demands postwar America placed on middle-class women to keep home and hearth and achieve a kind of domestic perfection were uniquely high. Even Jackson’s New York Times obituary refers to her as a “neat and cozy woman” and features the reassuring subheading “Housework Came First.” Jackson couldn’t escape strictures from the opposite side of the ideological aisle, either: Franklin reports Betty Friedan’s critique of Jackson as one of those “new breed of women writers” who reject their craft in favor of cloying, propagandist accounts of domestic pleasure. Friedan’s narrow point of view didn’t allow for Jackson’s unique, incendiary power. As Franklin ably argues, Jackson’s family memoirs contain “genuinely subversive” elements, such as showing both a mother’s faux-murderous frustration in much of her responsibilities and her unabashed pleasure in escaping them, whether into a “weekend away or . . . two martinis to get through the dinner hour.” Touchingly, Franklin quotes a condolence letter from a “housewife on Long Island” to Hyman after Jackson’s death, noting, “She was one of us, and greater and smarter, and funnier than any of us. It was good to know she was there.”

While her memoirs made Jackson a bestseller and her brilliant and virtuosic novels — foremost We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House — have ensured her legacy, most readers today, if they know Jackson, know her from her unforgettable (and endlessly anthologized) short story, “The Lottery.” Its publication in The New Yorker in 1948 changed Jackson’s life forever. Franklin shows how — her privacy invaded, her personal life parsed, her mailbox flooded by frequently angry or accusatory letters from readers across the globe — Jackson came to rue the story’s success even as she knew it made her name. By approaching the well-worn story and its impact on Jackson from every angle –literary, cultural, and personal –Franklin breathes new life into it, and it is in such close parsing of the texts themselves that A Rather Haunted Life truly dazzles.

Rare is the author biography (Blake Bailey’s study of Richard Yates is another) that so thoroughly explores and illuminates the subject’s writing itself. Franklin offers inspired discussion of every novel, both memoirs, and many of the major stories. It is with the same keen literary-investigative eye that Franklin makes astute but measured connections between Jackson’s work and life.^_ One illuminating example is a discussion of two letters Jackson wrote but never sent. The first occurs after Jackson receives a note from her mother — a source of lifelong anxiety for Jackson — criticizing her appearance after seeing her daughter photographed in a Time magazine profile. Jackson’s initial, unsent reply demands her mother cease her “unending” critiques. Franklin finds a canny parallel when, early in their relationship, Jackson wrote Hyman an angry, broken letter after he confided an infidelity. Once more, she never sent it, never let her pain reach its source. Both mother and husband provoke her rage and break her heart, yet Jackson stifles herself — not on the page, but the pages never reach their intended recipient. Her fiction, however, is where those feelings find their home.

If there is a constant in Jackson’s stories and nearly all her novels, it is on a character feeling alone among others, even her own family (The Bird’s Nest, Hangsaman, The Haunting of Hill House), or a family standing apart and isolate from the larger community or world (We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Sundial). In the last few years of her short life, the spotlight more intense, her marriage foundering, children leaving the household one by one, Jackson’s loneliness and anxiety seemed to overwhelm her. But she mined these emotions always and found an immense readership by doing so. “Insecure, uncontrolled, i [sic] wrote of neuroses and fear,” she wrote in her diary, “and i think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety.” That is a statement that, however specific to Jackson’s psyche, denotes something larger and more resonant: how a writer’s anxiety, pain, and anger can take darkly luminous shape, ready to be shared with readers in a way that we don’t comprehend so much as experience as revelation. Jackson’s imagination transmits to us the hauntedness of love and of family and the essential loneliness that stories (and perhaps stories alone) have the power to efface.

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This weekend, among more serious and frightening headlines, one news story offered a bit of relief: some patrons of a Brooklyn bar found themselves ordering drinks from a man who looked suspiciously like the actor Bill Murray. And that was, of course, because it was in fact the star of Ghostbusters and Lost in Translation, who appeared to work a shift at his son’s soon-to-open establishment. Involving charismatic performance, an everyday ritual of hospitality, and an invitation to revelry, the role of bartender surely fits Murray’s role as a trickster-god within the celebrity pantheon.

 The appearance was actually scheduled in advance, but it carried the flavor of the improvisatory engagements with the surrounding world Murray has made a second career out of, since the days before Saturday Night Live and a raft of films made him famous (on the streets of Manhattan he would call out to passersby, “Hey, there’s a lobster loose!”), from playing to (and with) the spectators at celebrity golf tournaments to the many reported occurrences of Murray crashing bachelor parties, switching places with his cab driver (so the man could spend time practicing his saxophone), or sneaking up on people to put his hands over their eyes (offering the teasing farewell “No one will ever believe you”).

In his new book The Tao of Bill Murray, Gavin Edwards tracks down and compiles the history of interwoven life, work, and play from an actor who seems determined to blur the line that ordinarily separates the audience from the performer. The resulting book, presenting the portrait of a star unlike any other, a study in hilarity, creativity, and surprising moments of pathos. Among the tasks required: watch (or in Edwards’s case, largely re-watch) the Murray cinematic oeuvre, which ranges through a surprising range of comedy and drama, hits and misses. He volunteered to share a set of the most memorable, revelatory and sometimes unjustly overlooked moments in Murray’s characteristically unpredictable career. – Eds.

 

While writing The Tao of Bill Murray: Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing, I watched every movie Bill Murray’s ever made: over sixty of them. Because Bill makes his choices based on personal loyalty and what messages get left on his 1-800 number (no, really — he has no agent or manager), his output can be erratic. So there are some stinkers: if you’re feeling masochistic, the two worst are the 1980 sketch anthology Loose Shoes and the 2012 Charlie Sheen vehicle A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. On the other hand, Bill has made his fair share of amazing films, most of which have received the praise they deserve. My top five would be Lost in Translation, Ghostbusters, Rushmore, Broken Flowers, and Tootsie, which are generally acknowledged as stone-cold classics.

As I worked my way through a Netflix queue devoted to the four-decade cinematic output of Bill Murray, I treasured the moments when I saw Bill inventing himself onscreen, showing off talents he had kept to himself or discovering new aspects of himself. Sometimes it was over in an eyeblink: for example, Bill plays the venal mayor of an underground city in the middling YA dystopia City of Ember. There’s a wonderful moment when a look of malice flashes across Bill’s face, quickly replaced by his public smile. I can’t recommend that you watch the movie just for that split second, but I’m glad I saw it.

These are ten great but lesser-known movies with sneakily great performances by Bill, where he showed off unexpected talents or gave his career a new spin.

 

1. Quick Change (1990)

Most people remember this as the movie where Bill pulls off a bank heist while dressed as a clown, answering a guard’s question as to what type of clown he is with the answer “The crying on the inside kind, I guess.” Some know that it’s the only time Bill directed a movie — he had the clout and the ability to direct more, but decided it was too much work. But I remember it for a scene where that clown swindles a hostage out of an extraordinarily expensive Audemars Piguet watch: it was a self-winding timepiece, but if Bill didn’t wear it for a couple of months during filming, it’d get out of sync and he’d have to pay $150 to have it professionally wound. Bill had Howard Franklin (his screenwriter and codirector) write that scene so his character could wear the watch. It’s a reminder that Bill’s real life and onscreen identity bleed into each other in unexpected ways.

 

2. Mad Dog and Glory (1993)

Offscreen, Bill can be winsome or withering, depending on his mood. Usually, the public gets to see his delightful side — the difficult behavior is reserved for his collaborators. But a performance like this, where Bill plays a steely gangster (opposite Robert De Niro’s nebbish), shows us that there’s a corner of his psyche filled with barbed wire.

 

3. Kingpin (1996)

Bill has improvised his way through an astonishing number of his films: especially on comedies, his M.O. has been to show up, read whatever pages he’s supposed to be performing that day, and then throw out the screenplay and improvise something much funnier. When he’s playing the lead, he’s responsible for “driving the boat,” as he puts it — but when he’s in a supporting role, he can make choices that are even more off-kilter (like the scene in Tootsie where he eats a plate full of lemon slices). Here, playing the villain “Big Ern” in a bowling comedy, he accessorizes with a spectacular comb-over hairstyle and a bowling ball that has a rose embedded in Lucite. Best improvised line in a movie stuffed with genius Bill-isms: “I finally got enough money that I can buy my way out of anything!”

 

4. Hamlet (2000)

Bill plays Polonius, the windbag adviser to the king (or in this modern-dress version, the CEO) who becomes an early victim in Hamlet’s killing spree. Hewing to Shakespeare’s text means that Bill has no room to improvise, but he gets right into the flow of the iambic pentameter. This part feels like a window into an alternate universe where Bill made his living as a member of a repertory theater: supporting role in a Shakespeare tragedy one week, leading man in a new musical comedy the next.

5. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Bill stepped down from the lead role in Rushmore to playing just one member of a large ensemble in The Royal Tenenbaums: it turned out that his personal repertory company was being in Wes Anderson movies. He plays Raleigh St. Clair, who’s married to Margot Tennenbaum, the unfaithful wife portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow. His closer relationship is with his test subject Dudley, which provides a sad gloss on his opening scene in Ghostbusters, when he administers fake ESP tests: these are the limits of smart-assery.

6. Ed Wood (1994)

Bill agreed to be in Ed Wood (the Tim Burton movie about the misfit transvestite director) before he read the script, and then was dismayed to discover that the part was written as a gay stereotype. “The last thing I want is to be obvious, direct, and offensive,” he said. Instead, he delivered an unforgettable performance as an upper-crust heir yearning for a sex-change operation, unlike anything else on his resume: smooth, unflappable, and so covered with powder that in the film’s black-and-white footage, he glows.

 

7. Get Low (2009)

Bill’s reason for agreeing to make this movie: “Well, no one’s ever asked me to work with Robert Duvall before.” Bill delivers a sly performance in this period piece as a struggling undertaker, and he and Duvall bring out the best in each other — really, Bill should make movies with all of the Godfather principals.

 

8. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Bill has a great rapport with Frances McDormand — both in Olive Kitteridge and in this Wes Anderson movie, where they play a married couple, both lawyers, on a New England island. In a movie that’s centered on the love story between two runaway twelve-year-olds, Bill has a scene-stealing turn that feels like it’s drawn from a wild night out in his own life: He wanders unsteadily past a Parcheesi game played by three kids. Wearing plaid pants and no shirt, with an ax in one hand and a bottle of booze in the other, Bill announces, “I’ll be out back. I’m going to find a tree to chop down.”

 

9. The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997)

This forgotten gem is a farce with misunderstandings so finely tuned that Bill couldn’t modify most of the dialogue. But playing a video store clerk who gets pulled into a web of international intrigue in London, Bill gets to play sustained naiveté, displaying innocent joy at all his new adventures, whether he’s kissing a beautiful operative or driving through a line of orange cones on the motorway.

 

10. Hyde Park on Hudson (2012)

Bill is underestimated as an impressionist: it’s a skill that he needed for Saturday Night Live (when he was playing, say, Walter Cronkite) but that’s rarely needed in his film career. When he wanted to play his badger lawyer character in Fantastic Mr. Fox with a strong Wisconsin accent (Wisconsin is the Badger State), he prepared by listening to lots of Wisconsin NPR — but director Wes Anderson vetoed that choice. Here, playing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he does a marvelous job of vocal (and physical) impersonation, which frames his version of FDR: brilliant, impish, randy.

 

11. Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

The foundation of a myth: when you’re a customer at a late-night café, you might find that your waiter, for no reason at all, is Bill Murray. But no one will ever believe you.

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The first American newspaper was published in Boston on September 25, 1690. The opening editorial of Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick outlined the newspaper’s aims, which included helping people “better understand the Circumstances of Public Affairs” and doing “something towards the Curing, or at least the Charming, of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us.”

The first issue included reports on a local suicide, a bountiful harvest, and a range of military troubles with the Indians and with the French colony in Canada. No doubt it was the military news that alarmed the British colonial authorities in Boston. Finding Publick Occurrences full of “reflections of a very high nature” and “sundry doubtful and uncertain reports,” they banned it after one issue and decreed that all future newspapers would require a government license.

The colony’s first attempt at a free press was undoubtedly “a tiny and timid affair conducted by a handful of people in a remote backwater of the great British Empire” (Christopher B. Daly in Covering America). Fourteen years later, when that Empire thought its colonists were ready for the news they deemed appropriate to share, they authorized and subsidized The Boston News-Letter, generally regarded as the first successful American newspaper. It published from 1704 until 1776 — a year in which the colonists had some news of their own for the Empire. By 1791 the First Amendment would enshrine the principle of a free press, reflecting Thomas Jefferson’s opinion that good government required that its citizens get, and be capable of grasping, “full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers”:

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

The enduring significance of Jefferson’s comment, reapplied to our multimedia era, is noted in Andrew Pettegree’s The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself. But Pettegree also notes the significance of a contemporaneous comment by Benjamin Franklin about the power and the potential abuse of the printed word:

The facility with which the same truths may be repeatedly enforced by placing them daily in different lights in newspapers which are everywhere read, gives a great chance of establishing them. And we now find it is not only right to strike when the iron is hot, it may be very practicable to heat it by continually striking.

In Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil say that the power of today’s media conglomerates, and the hot-iron reach of today’s digital technologies, threaten to take us from “the age of information to the age of affirmation,” the free press envisioned by the Founding Fathers having been hijacked by a free-for-all of belief-driven claims and counterclaims. Given that the informational gates are all but kicked in, making journalism’s traditional “gatekeeper” role problematic or obsolete, Kovach and Rosensteil argue that reporters must hone their skills — as sense makers, witness bearers, investigators — to create a “next journalism” that “joins journalists and citizens in a journey of mutual discovery.”

There is undoubtedly no going back, but two recent books, Peter Rader’s biography Mike Wallace and Dan Rather’s memoir Rather Outspoken, suggest that we may not yet have the consensus needed for finding a way forward. Rader praises Wallace for being “decades ahead of his peers in realizing that in order to sell the news, you have to sex it up.” In contrast, Rather laments that his career witnessed (and fell victim to) the increasing corporatization, politicization and trivialization of the news, and reminds us of another Jeffersonian caution:

In 1823 Thomas Jefferson put it succinctly: “The only security of all is in a free press.” Alas, when you have a press that has become compliant to politicians, owned by corporations and staffed by people who only want to entertain and obey their corporate masters, the plan fails. The “free press” is no longer a check on power. It has instead become part of the power apparatus itself.

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Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a cold-case novelist, a writer whose characters — though not detectives — investigate the long lost and almost forgotten. In The Sound of Things Falling, the 2013 novel with which the Colombian Vásquez broke through to a large and appreciative North American audience, a law professor looks into the life of his murdered billiards partner, an inquiry that leads back to the death of the man’s wife years earlier and to the violence of drug cartels in the 1980s. In this new novel, Reputations, the protagonist thinks of Colombia as an “amnesiac country obsessed with the present,” a “narcissistic country where not even the dead are capable of burying their dead. Forgetfulness was the only democratic thing in Colombia: it covered them all, the good and the bad, the murderers and heroes.” Vásquez doesn’t forget. The narrator of his first novel, The Informers, attempts to understand why his father contributed to the detention of immigrants in Colombia during World War II. Vásquez’s second novel, The Secret History of Costaguana, goes further back in history to imagine the protagonist’s relation to Joseph Conrad, his Nostromo, and the creation of the Panama Canal.

The three earlier novels had the leisurely sprawl of oral storytelling, digressions and inventions, historical facts and temporal gaps. At 187 large-print pages, Reputations is shorter and tighter. It takes place in two settings over three days and resembles a closet drama, a play about closeting the past. The protagonist, the sixty-five-year-old newspaper caricaturist Javier Mallarino, is being officially celebrated in Bogotá as a national hero for his forty years of fearless political cartoons. The next day, a young woman named Samanta comes up to his mountain home, ostensibly to interview Mallarino for a blog — in fact, she wants access to his house. At the celebration she recognized slide-show images of the interior and remembered that she had been there once twenty-eight years before to play with Mallarino’s daughter, Beatriz.

Samanta wants to know what Mallarino remembers of that night, so Part Two is a detailed but inconclusive flashback to the visit and its aftermath. During a housewarming party, the seven-year-old girls drained the dregs of drinks and were put to bed unconscious. Something happened (I’m being purposely vague here) that caused Mallarino to draw the next day a caricature that ruined the life of a politician attending the party — and perhaps eventually caused his death. Pressed to recall by Samanta, Mallarino, rather self-servingly, thinks of the “past as a watery creature with imprecise contours, a sort of deceitful, dishonest amoeba that can’t be investigated because, looking for it again under the microscope, we find that it’s not there, and we suspect that it’s gone, but we soon realize it has changed shape and is now impossible to recognize.”

Because only one person can resolve the uncertainties of that night, in Part Three Samanta and Mallarino come down from the mountain intending to interview this informant, though both are ambivalent about knowing the truth — Samanta because she was happy before memory intruded on her present, Mallarino because he may have defamed an innocent man in the past and may have his artistic reputation in the future soiled should the interview be made public.

The visit by Samanta seems like a recipe for a familiar sort of confrontation, but the appeal of Reputations is not its quickly concatenating plot but the questions about the motives for and the effects of events. Looking back at three days and twenty-eight years, Mallarino and readers have to consider if his prideful certitude about the accuracy of his physical intuitions and about the gadfly effects of his art may have fractured three families: his own, because his wife and he split years before over the threat of reprisals from the powers he mocked; the family of the politician, who left behind two young sons; and Samanta’s family, abandoned by her father when she was fifteen, perhaps because of that evening at Mallarino’s house. Though his caricatures serve the public by speaking presumed truth to power in dangerous times, we discover that Mallarino enjoys his subjects’ “humiliation,” a much-repeated word rhyming with the title. Whether or not he achieves a saving humility at the end readers will decide.

Vásquez’s first historical inquiries were humble in their engagement with history, raiding archives but also proposing counterfactuals, playfully calling attention to their own fictionality, more surprised and bemused than enraged at the past unearthed. Their versions of history entertain and instruct but do not insist. The investigation of history becomes more serious for the protagonist of The Sound of Things Falling, who ultimately recognizes his obsession with the past has endangered relations with his wife and daughter. Reputations extends the danger of remembering, for Samanta, Mallarino, the newspaper for which he works, and the public that believes in him as the national conscience may all be affected if a disturbing secret is exposed.

“Life turns us into caricatures of ourselves,” Mallarino says at the celebration of his career. Vásquez’s characters are not exactly caricatures but are given little space to develop. The novel, though, is like a mathematical gnomon, adding to and caricaturing Vásquez’s earlier works, presenting a small sketch in black and white of their complex amplitude. When Mallarino can’t think of a contemporary political subject to satirize, he sends his editor a caricature of himself. Perhaps Reputations is a self-examination, Vásquez’s second — or fourth — thought about his cold case orientation and earlier narrative methods. Mallarino wonders if his amusing caricatures have served only to defuse political discontent. Maybe Vásquez wonders if his entertaining stories could have more efficaciously attacked the Colombian “forgetfulness” Mallarino diagnoses. At sixty-five, Mallarino has difficulty imagining his future. At forty-three and recently returned from many years in Europe to live in Colombia, Vásquez may be imagining in Reputations his possible future as an artist, creating a self-cautioning tale about the temptation of artistic and cultural pride. Most probable, though, is that Reputations intends to comment on tendentiously political artists, novelists, and others who are, like Mallarino, cocksure about their representations of and interventions in public life. Vásquez’s plural title refers to his protagonist’s repute, to the reputations of others whom he may have sullied, and possibly to artists who achieve their reputations through ideological affinities in the politicized literary landscapes of Latin America.

Vásquez’s first three novels have first-person narrators with distinctive voices. Vásquez uses limited omniscience in Reputations, and I think it an unhappy choice. As I said in my review of The Sound of Things Falling, Vásquez has a remarkable lightness of touch given his subjects. Though briskly paced, Reputations is sometimes heavy with the kind of ponderousness that omniscience seems to encourage, as in the following passage about couples:

They too were worn down by the diverse strategies that life has to wear lovers down, too many trips or too much togetherness, the accumulated weight of lies or stupidity or lack of tact or mistakes, the things said at the wrong time, with immoderate or inappropriate words, or those that, the appropriate words not having been found, were never said; or worn down too by a bad memory, yes, by the inability to remember what’s essential and live within it (to remember what once made the other happy: How many lovers had succumbed to that negligent forgetting?), and by the inability, as well, to get ahead of all that wearing down and deterioration, to get ahead of the lies, the stupidity, the lack of tact, the mistakes, the things that shouldn’t be said, and the silences that should be avoided . . .

Because the passage doesn’t really sound like Mallarino, its repetitiveness leaves the impression that Vásquez is trying to add weight, as well as length, with generalizations about situations that have been only minimally dramatized in the novel. While Vásquez’s other three novels seem to have been selected from a large stock of materials outside the works’ frames, Reputations appears to have been expanded from limited material to novel length. Mallarino paraphrases Michelangelo when the caricaturist thinks about “trying to extract the sculpture from the stone.” It’s difficult to imagine what Vásquez may have chipped away from Reputations.

Vásquez has said Reputations “was written in the spirit of the short novels I love, those concentrated studies of one character in his predicament.” Although he doesn’t specify those novels, in interviews he often mentions American writers — such as DeLillo and Roth — as influences, and has said Reputations seems to him more like an American novel than his other books. The context here remains political, but the past to be investigated is highly personal and, as Vásquez has said, “intimate.” Both DeLillo and Roth have written short novels about old male writers reconsidering their personal failures — Point Omega and Exit Ghost — but Reputations is closest in its outlines to a novel that Vásquez has specifically referred to: Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, in which an elderly, isolated, and proud commentator on contemporary politics and sexuality learns humility at the end of the novel.

An admirer of Vásquez’s wider and larger novels, I’m both disappointed by and fascinated with Reputations. I can say that for those who don’t know his earlier work, this new novel may be a good place to begin, a Vásquez primer in cold-case forensics and unsolved mysteries, an introduction with American echoes. Reputations also shouldn’t diminish his faithful readers’ respect, for Vásquez is an artist who experiments with the form, narration, and tone of his work — unlike the artist he puts at the center of his novel. For those familiar with his fiction, Reputations is a provocative coda to what’s come so far, a work that again solicits reexamination of the past — this time Vásquez’s own.

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