The title of Netherland, the third novel by Irish-born Joseph O’Neill, refers not to “Neverland” or a place at the end of mist and mystery; it embraces rather the Dutch origins of New York City. The events of 9/11 plant dismay in a modern marriage, not eased by a move into the Chelsea Hotel. Rachel is inclined to go back to London with their son, while Hans, a banker, stays in the city and tries to work things out. The novel never sounds Irish, despite the yearning and unwinding strains in Mr. O’Neill’s writing. But does it really sound Dutch (the author was raised in Holland)? If not, where is the steady pull of the language coming from? This is as much of a puzzle as the city that Hans begins to discover, thanks in part to his Trinidadian friend Chuck Ramkissoon, whose great cause in life is to restore cricket to the New York area.

Far too little happens. Mr. O’Neill has no urgency or facility at developing character or plot. But there are many back-of-the-hand ways in which we feel a real novelist’s spin at work. Above all, this involves an eye and an ear for the local groupings, habits and foods of the New York area. In the gentlest possible way, Netherland appreciates a city of so many preoccupations—cricket being no stranger than the passion for security—in an urban structure where unfamiliar cultures are on a conversational footing.

It’s hard to make a great case for Netherland, though this is being attempted by elements of the literary establishment. It really doesn’t want to be found in possession of the kind of lofty ambitions that presage a great novel. But Joseph O’Neill writes quite beautifully—whether describing the breeze of nature on cricket, or companionship warming lonely immigrants.

And that is the true stuff of our urban modernism. Netherland may be what comes in the years before a great novel—a tender mapping out of territory and its alien occupants, a way of seeing that New York is far from just an American city.

The undeclared irony within the book is that in sniffing out a thing called cricket that may ease an untidy world, Mr. O’Neill has to ignore what he knows to be true—that cricket itself is a dying pastime, nearly eclipsed by the crowd-catering vulgarities learned from soccer. So there’s an elusive Arthurian possibility hovering over the best evocations of that charmed and unlikely game: “You do not know whether a twenty-two-yard strip of turf, often cut so closely as to appear grassless, will deliver a quick or slow or high or low bounce, whether a spinning ball will deviate upon bouncing and if so to what degree and with what speed. You do not know if it will be a featherbed, or a dog, or a slow- and low-bouncing pitch dispiriting equally to batsman and bowler. Even after you’ve begun to play on it, you do not know what it holds in store. The nature of earth, like the nature of air, is subject to change.” All of a sudden it seems like a game at which Chekhov might contest Oscar Wilde.

David Thomson’s “Have You Seen …?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films will be published by Knopf in October. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Standard Operating Procedure—the film—is a mannered, stealthy web, the product of an artful, rather self-important yet depressed spider who sees Abu Ghraib prison as the obligingly ambivalent provocation for "an Errol Morris picture."

It’s as if, after The Fog of War, that infinitely articulate and reticulated study of Robert McNamara’s mixed feelings over the Vietnam War, Mr. Morris believes his mere gaze (despite the blunt impact of his head-on lenses) brings auspicious mystery to any subject. By contrast, the enormous punch of the book on the same subject, co-authored by Mr. Morris and Philip Gourevitch, is such that you can hardly read it without throwing up. Ignore the layering and the ambiguity of the film, and try to forget the glaringly inappropriate music (by Danny Elfman), which is like something from Batman lost yet growing wistful in the airless corridors of the Morris mind; the book is an old-fashioned shocker that makes you want to rip that haunted prison to shreds and impeach the face cards in the Bush administration.

Does the book exist because someone had doubts about the film? This is not in Mr. Morris’ nature, or his track record. He has not sought to go into film and print simultaneously before. We’re told that Philip Gourevitch, and he alone, wrote the book—after a year and a half of continuous conversation with Mr. Morris, and access to the hundreds of hours of interview material assembled for the film. But just as Mr. Morris has been widely attacked by film critics for his movie, so he’s smart enough to register the directness and the smashing effectiveness of the book.

Most people who last out the film are going to be muddled over its exact target and its prettifying methods—why did Mr. Morris need actors in blurry, noir re-creations of situations that are stark enough already in the helpless assembly of snapshots? Why does the film dwell on dripping blood or need so many makeup artists? How does its intelligent eye lose focus on the squalor of Abu Ghraib? There’s a sneaking feeling attached to the movie that Mr. Morris had an urge to make not just a noir, but fiction nearly in which we begin to understand how we’re all in prison, all weak and vicious, and mad on photographs taken to prove that we were there (and that we were only watching, not an organic part of it all).

Mr. Gourevitch never mentions the Morris movie, and so he has no need to dismiss its sophistication. He knows that he has his subjects lined up like candidates for an execution; that the American Army reached its nadir in Abu Ghraib both in terms of effectiveness and as a breeding ground for the most un-American traits. This was foreseeable: For every Iraqi, the prison was fatally infected by its own history and by the death chambers Saddam had made there. A 6-year-old child would have had the wisdom to tear the place down—so many worthier Iraqi institutions were sent to hell in that great burst of American stupidity that followed the taking of Baghdad.

But it’s as if some malign author had stayed the child and said, no, keep the place, for nothing else is more likely to embody America’s need for hellish failure or so undermine the morale of this American mockery—the volunteer army. The same 6-year-old would know that yes, the grinning participation in horrors by raw kids in uniform amounted to crimes against the Geneva Conventions and military law just as surely as the highest commanders were complicit in those crimes—not just former Brig. General Janis Karpinski, the pale-eyed female camp commander who was shown what thugs show a commander when they’re doing far worse things, but Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez (who has his own Pilate’s Progress book just out) and every raddled commander above him all the way to the poisonous top, unique in its indifference and its invulnerability against evidence and reality-based experience. You know the jerk. Don’t shame his office further by naming it.

Mr. Gourevitch tells the story using Mr. Morris’ tapes, though sometimes getting into reports that do not figure in the movie. It’s not a difficult story to tell, not a tragedy likely to leave the reader with much ease or confidence. It goes toward making clear not just the universal folly of the war but the dreadful way in which its conduct has betrayed and confused an army in which jargon and high-tech toys wrestle with educational failure and family collapse. We know how well equipped the American military is, but the book, Standard Operating Procedure, is a portrait of an institution where evil itself has gown in the cracks left by lack of preparation and a failure to notice the brute facts on the ground.

The book does not include a single photograph, though it argues modestly toward a very useful indictment: that in our time and in a world like Abu Ghraib, the taking of "private" photographs by participants and onlookers is fed by the fear of being exposed and accused, and the nagging urge to prove existence. Again, this riddle is more thoroughly approached in the book than in the film. Mr. Gourevitch knows that his readers do not need illustration. He trusts that we will want to forget those small footprints of depravity and insolence—I say that because the deep lesson of book and film alike is the insurrectionary disobedience, the "fuck you, world" spirit that gathers like spoiled pulp in the face of Lynndie England, the Dickensian waif who was clowning around on piles of naked bodies, and the young thug who looks at Errol Morris as if he were a bug she might just squash.

It’s iniquitous that people like Lynndie England have done jail time while their superiors are untouched. Except that the full story of an American Abu Ghraib, the killing field of Philip Gourevitch’s exemplary book, will take its toll for years.

David Thomson’s "Have You Seen …?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films will be published by Knopf in October.

There’s a lot of noise already about Charles Bock’s first novel, Beautiful Children. It was there already before I began reading. I was at liberty to go to the book’s Web site, the sheer empty-headed monotony of which at last drove me to start reading the book itself. As I advanced, I saw (in Interview magazine, its “Falling in Love With America All Over Again” special issue) that Mr. Bock’s parents owned a pawnshop in Las Vegas, which gave the kid access to all that city’s wonders. The same promo (it’s called Writer Spotlight, but it’s an ad) shows Mr. Bock as a nerdy-looking dude who can be made cool in the right lighting and the right clothes (blazer by Boss Selection, shirt by Boss Black, jeans by 7 For All Mankind). Mr. Bock stands there in the picture trying to be helpless or looking like a suspect in a police lineup. But he looks too smart to be so foolish. Surely he knows he’s been styled by James Worthington Demolet, just as he has lent himself to the notion that Beautiful Children is a buzz book instead of just a buzz.

Mr. Bock can write. I’m sure that even in Vegas, and certainly at Bennington and at prisons like Yaddo and Ucross, plenty of inmates have told him that. Hell, this book is getting a launch, big names and blurbs on the jacket, from A.M. Homes (“a major new talent”) to Sean Wilsey “(a masterpiece”) and Walter Kirn (“Trust him, follow him”).

Let me add my 10 cents straightaway: Mr. Bock can write up a storm and is always likely to break into his own version of Bock ’n’ Roll, especially if there’s no sign of a plot or characters on the horizon. He takes encouragement from an idea he attributes to Don DeLillo: If the novel is dead, then the writer can “swing for the fences.”

I was reminded of Barry Bonds: Did someone tell him that because baseball was dead, just go for the fences? Or was Mr. Bonds doing his bit, killing off baseball in the human heart? I watched Bonds for years, here in San Francisco, and I knew two things all along: that he was as great a natural hitter as I had ever seen, and that he had a coldness, an arrogance and a sense of himself being above the game.

I’m not being facetious or wildly out of line if I say that Mr. Bock has a phenomenal swinging talent. He can hit. I don’t mean to imply that Mr. Bock is taking any illegal or unfair substances. It’s simply that he’s laboring under a mighty handicap or privilege (you can read it either way): He doesn’t know what a novel is or might be.

Beautiful Children is set for the most part in the environs or the atmosphere of Las Vegas, and Mr. Bock gets just about everything right—except the killing boredom of the place (that’s why the Hunter Thompson version remains infinitely superior). But he’s attempting a story about a 12-year-old, Newell Ewing, who goes missing. The blurb adds that the mystery of his disappearance weaves together the lives of “seemingly unconnected strangers.” No, not seemingly unconnected but helplessly adrift and unconnected—and two of them are his parents, Lincoln and Lorraine. These figures say they miss Newell and need him back, but we never feel those losses or why the breaks occurred. Indeed, there’s a far more interesting and tough book hidden here—one in which going missing is hardly noticed, because the apartness goes way back to the grim truth that people are never “together.”

THERE’S NOTHING HERE like an arc or a flow. Mr. Bock has admitted that he wrote or assembled the book over 10 or 12 years, and I can easily believe that. He strikes me as a brilliant writer who can write a burning page every day, but who has no conviction about how they might be ordered or organized or novelized. Those may seem archaic ideals, but the “dead” novel is actually a great deal livelier than Mr. Bock seems to know, and what his searing word processor needs is a mind that can see words and literary structure instead of a raw paragraph to slap on a Web site and get the kiddies shaking.

That he possesses the skill is in no doubt, and it may be enough to make Beautiful Children a big seller. After all, there are enough people who can muster the patience to find the passages in which a lap dancer shaves her pubic hair in pretty patterns or inserts screws in her vagina. There are enough people who can take a few paragraphs of this and think they’re in touch with genius.

This is Lincoln the father, sinking into the alienation that is the gravitational force in the novel:

“Evenings he would have given her a million dollars if she would just let him eat in silence, okay? When, short of taking a dinner knife and cutting out each of their rotting hearts, about the only thing he could do was get up, stand right up from the dinner table, and walk out of the dining room he had gone into debt for, wordlessly and without comment heading through the house he was still paying for, and into the clandestine tomb of his garage with all its dusty cartons and boxes of obsolete crap that he’d bought his family over the years. There were evenings when Lincoln would get inside his car and sink deflated into the driver’s seat of artificial leather, and a bottle of peach Schnapps would be withdrawn from the glove compartment and Lincoln would not for one second longer be able to ignore the beast his child was turning into, and for one minute longer he would not be able to deny the shrew that his wife had become. And there would be nothing in his power that could be done to delay the inexorable destruction of his homestead, the all-but-destined dissolution of his family, and Lincoln would feel deathly afraid because the awful and cold and most assured truth was that he welcomed this dissolution, he wanted the destruction.”

There is the keynote for a great novel—first or last. But Charles Bock has not pushed it in our face. There’s no actor in the writing for whom the story matters. It’s as if novel-making was now the reader’s task.

David Thomson’s new book, Have You Seen…? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films will be published by Knopf in the fall. He can reached at books@observer.com.

There’s something rare and frightening about actors and actresses. It amounts to a kind of religious worship in which these figures are experienced, “known” by millions of strangers, “loved” by those who will never meet them, when they—the person inside, the person wearing the name and the legend—may sometimes realize, “Well, there’s not much left for me, is there?” You may remember that Katharine Hepburn called her own book (published in 1991, and emphatically not ghostwritten) Me, as if she had always had the fear of being left out. I can only add that if she’d lived to face Mr. Mann’s book, I think she would have put it down, dry-eyed but full of tears, and admitted, quietly: “me.”

There have been many books, some of them since her death in 2003 (Scott Berg’s memoir, Kate Remembered, self-serving and suspect, seemed to appear even as she died; it had evidently been kept back in anticipation of the event). I’ve read them all, and I don’t think there’s a dull book among them, though Barbara Leaming’s was a disappointment. The richness of those books is a tribute to Hepburn. She abhorred dullness and hated vanity—rather, let us say, she avoided dullness and hated to be caught in vanity.

That she was by turns self-centered and cold did not diminish the pleasure of her company, her wit or her warmth (this is not a contradiction). Those attributes, all professionally useful, merely confirmed what you gathered, and hoped for in advance: that she was a constant performance. She was being “Hepburn” and surely sometimes said, “The hell with Kate!” But here’s the point: Mr. Mann’s biography is not just the best on Hepburn—it’s a book that sets new standards in movie biography.

Sometimes it’s easy to think that some woman took up the theater and movies to escape a dreadful childhood—or circumstances that did not offer her enough “life.” That’s not the case with Kate. Her father a noted surgeon, her mother a suffragette, she was born in Connecticut and raised in a wise but idiosyncratic family and in houses she loved. She was educated at Bryn Mawr, and she was smart. Coming of age in the late 1920’s, in a context that believed in women, she could have excelled in so many other fields—medicine, law, politics, education. You can see her like that, in a worldly career. Yet there were flaws: A brother committed suicide, and her marriage to an amiable but rather vague broker—“Luddy”—ended after six years, though it never lost its friendship.

It’s in the matter of that brother, Tom, that you realize how serious and searching Mr. Mann is prepared to be. I call it a suicide, but the significance of the loss was that people—Kate included—were not sure. Tom had troubles: He was sexually uncertain, like his sister. He was strangled—but he might have been play-acting, or doing the real thing. Mr. Mann examines the shifts in opinion throughout the family, and he lets something very tricky emerge: that Tom for Kate was a mystery because they were close. It’s as if, with both brother and husband, she reckoned that terrain too close to her could hardly be inhabited.

She went out to Hollywood in 1932, in pants, with Laura Harding (an American Express heiress) as her pal. There was talk, and in her early films she gave every impression of being too smart and chilly for her own good—or to be a star. She did remarkable early work: Morning Glory in 1933 (winning an Oscar but not very likeable); Little Women (1933)—as Jo; Alice Adams (1935); Sylvia Scarlett (1935); Mary of Scotland (1936)—for a sweetheart, John Ford; Stage Door (1937); Bringing Up Baby (1938).

The latter, for Howard Hawks, with Cary Grant, is one of the greatest comedies ever made in America. She knew it was good, and she had to face the report—in Variety—that she was “box office poison.” America got the shivers when it watched her. This was the age of Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy. You could be smart and classy, but a woman was expected to be sexy, and there Hepburn drew a blank.

But what about Kate? It’s the steady question of this book. Kate was romanced by Ford and Howard Hughes; she was one of the few MGM stars who got on with Louis B. Mayer (it may have helped that she was very close to Mayer’s daughter, Irene). Were these love affairs? Was there sex involved? Or was Hughes just another cerebral worrier who funded and helped manage her career? Hughes set her up with The Philadelphia Story (1940), and he was the secret lawyer in her very serious efforts to get the role of Scarlett in Gone With the Wind. The producer, David O. Selznick, refused her because he thought she wasn’t sexy enough, and Mr. Mann finally is not sure how much sex (heterosexual sex, anyway) really meant to her.

What’s fascinating in his account is the complete way in which Hepburn took charge of Kate around 1940, softening her looks, learning to be sexy, deliberately taking on roles where she was obedient to men—witness Woman of the Year (1942). The orthodox clincher in this buildup has always been “met Spencer Tracy,” and that did happen in Woman of the Year.

Tracy was, in some ways, the man’s man she favored. But he was also an alcoholic wreck—no book has made that more clear than this one, even to the point of exposing Tracy’s rather maudlin gay life. Kate was gay too, to be sure, but it was the strongest, most private part of her. Hepburn took advantage of Tracy because she realized how “perfect” they were onscreen together—indeed, that ease was a mercy to both of them as they grew older.

There’s a lot of new stuff in this book, plus a very shrewd account of how far Garson Kanin’s book, Tracy and Hepburn (1971) helped shape and deepen the legend. The truth was much more complex and not nearly as sentimental. Readers in the course of William Mann’s thorough and generous narrative can discover it for themselves. It’s no small point that the writing here has a subtlety and a forgiveness such as these untidy lives require.

Finally Kate died, and now Hepburn has to make her way alone. At this point, the only person left alive who was a big movie star in the 1930’s is Olivia de Havilland. The great ones of that generation changed our lives. But do kids respond to them now—kids who hardly knew them? No one can be sure, so we must keep our museums large and open, if that’s where Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962), Susan in Bringing Up Baby, Amanda in Adam’s Rib (1949) and Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story must live. Yet maybe that great myth is not enough. Maybe you have to have been alive with Kate as well as Hepburn to feel the game the two of them played.

In history, a “great actress” can turn as stuffy as Bernhardt, Rachel or Sarah Siddons. Of course, film helps the moment live. But if you want to remember the sudden mischief and the flaring face of Jeanne Moreau, Anna Karina or Katharine Hepburn, you had to be there and stand in line for their new movies when they were fresh.

David Thomson’s most recent book is Nicole Kidman (Knopf).

There’s something rare and frightening about actors and actresses. It amounts to a kind of religious worship in which these figures are experienced, “known” by millions of strangers, “loved” by those who will never meet them, when they—the person inside, the person wearing the name and the legend—may sometimes realize, “Well, there’s not much left for me, is there?” You may remember that Katharine Hepburn called her own book (published in 1991, and emphatically not ghostwritten) Me, as if she had always had the fear of being left out. I can only add that if she’d lived to face Mr. Mann’s book, I think she would have put it down, dry-eyed but full of tears, and admitted, quietly: “me.”

There have been many books, some of them since her death in 2003 (Scott Berg’s memoir, Kate Remembered, self-serving and suspect, seemed to appear even as she died; it had evidently been kept back in anticipation of the event). I’ve read them all, and I don’t think there’s a dull book among them, though Barbara Leaming’s was a disappointment. The richness of those books is a tribute to Hepburn. She abhorred dullness and hated vanity—rather, let us say, she avoided dullness and hated to be caught in vanity.

That she was by turns self-centered and cold did not diminish the pleasure of her company, her wit or her warmth (this is not a contradiction). Those attributes, all professionally useful, merely confirmed what you gathered, and hoped for in advance: that she was a constant performance. She was being “Hepburn” and surely sometimes said, “The hell with Kate!” But here’s the point: Mr. Mann’s biography is not just the best on Hepburn—it’s a book that sets new standards in movie biography.

Sometimes it’s easy to think that some woman took up the theater and movies to escape a dreadful childhood—or circumstances that did not offer her enough “life.” That’s not the case with Kate. Her father a noted surgeon, her mother a suffragette, she was born in Connecticut and raised in a wise but idiosyncratic family and in houses she loved. She was educated at Bryn Mawr, and she was smart. Coming of age in the late 1920’s, in a context that believed in women, she could have excelled in so many other fields—medicine, law, politics, education. You can see her like that, in a worldly career. Yet there were flaws: A brother committed suicide, and her marriage to an amiable but rather vague broker—“Luddy”—ended after six years, though it never lost its friendship.

It’s in the matter of that brother, Tom, that you realize how serious and searching Mr. Mann is prepared to be. I call it a suicide, but the significance of the loss was that people—Kate included—were not sure. Tom had troubles: He was sexually uncertain, like his sister. He was strangled—but he might have been play-acting, or doing the real thing. Mr. Mann examines the shifts in opinion throughout the family, and he lets something very tricky emerge: that Tom for Kate was a mystery because they were close. It’s as if, with both brother and husband, she reckoned that terrain too close to her could hardly be inhabited.

She went out to Hollywood in 1932, in pants, with Laura Harding (an American Express heiress) as her pal. There was talk, and in her early films she gave every impression of being too smart and chilly for her own good—or to be a star. She did remarkable early work: Morning Glory in 1933 (winning an Oscar but not very likeable); Little Women (1933)—as Jo; Alice Adams (1935); Sylvia Scarlett (1935); Mary of Scotland (1936)—for a sweetheart, John Ford; Stage Door (1937); Bringing Up Baby (1938).

The latter, for Howard Hawks, with Cary Grant, is one of the greatest comedies ever made in America. She knew it was good, and she had to face the report—in Variety—that she was “box office poison.” America got the shivers when it watched her. This was the age of Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy. You could be smart and classy, but a woman was expected to be sexy, and there Hepburn drew a blank.

But what about Kate? It’s the steady question of this book. Kate was romanced by Ford and Howard Hughes; she was one of the few MGM stars who got on with Louis B. Mayer (it may have helped that she was very close to Mayer’s daughter, Irene). Were these love affairs? Was there sex involved? Or was Hughes just another cerebral worrier who funded and helped manage her career? Hughes set her up with The Philadelphia Story (1940), and he was the secret lawyer in her very serious efforts to get the role of Scarlett in Gone With the Wind. The producer, David O. Selznick, refused her because he thought she wasn’t sexy enough, and Mr. Mann finally is not sure how much sex (heterosexual sex, anyway) really meant to her.

What’s fascinating in his account is the complete way in which Hepburn took charge of Kate around 1940, softening her looks, learning to be sexy, deliberately taking on roles where she was obedient to men—witness Woman of the Year (1942). The orthodox clincher in this buildup has always been “met Spencer Tracy,” and that did happen in Woman of the Year.

Tracy was, in some ways, the man’s man she favored. But he was also an alcoholic wreck—no book has made that more clear than this one, even to the point of exposing Tracy’s rather maudlin gay life. Kate was gay too, to be sure, but it was the strongest, most private part of her. Hepburn took advantage of Tracy because she realized how “perfect” they were onscreen together—indeed, that ease was a mercy to both of them as they grew older.

There’s a lot of new stuff in this book, plus a very shrewd account of how far Garson Kanin’s book, Tracy and Hepburn (1971) helped shape and deepen the legend. The truth was much more complex and not nearly as sentimental. Readers in the course of William Mann’s thorough and generous narrative can discover it for themselves. It’s no small point that the writing here has a subtlety and a forgiveness such as these untidy lives require.

Finally Kate died, and now Hepburn has to make her way alone. At this point, the only person left alive who was a big movie star in the 1930’s is Olivia de Havilland. The great ones of that generation changed our lives. But do kids respond to them now—kids who hardly knew them? No one can be sure, so we must keep our museums large and open, if that’s where Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962), Susan in Bringing Up Baby, Amanda in Adam’s Rib (1949) and Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story must live. Yet maybe that great myth is not enough. Maybe you have to have been alive with Kate as well as Hepburn to feel the game the two of them played.

In history, a “great actress” can turn as stuffy as Bernhardt, Rachel or Sarah Siddons. Of course, film helps the moment live. But if you want to remember the sudden mischief and the flaring face of Jeanne Moreau, Anna Karina or Katharine Hepburn, you had to be there and stand in line for their new movies when they were fresh.

David Thomson’s most recent book is Nicole Kidman (Knopf).

The holiday pretense works, up to a point. These traveling readers may hike and roam and take in 100 pages a night of The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge or Jude the Obscure. But they discover that a steep side street in some exquisite town, falling away to realms of pasture and golden distance, has been used in TV commercials for cereal, butter, crusty bread and life insurance. In fact, you can kid yourself you’ve had breakfast in Hardy Country without going anywhere. And in some ways, that’s because no one has taken up the real burden left by Hardy—of following the lives led on Egdon Heath and seeing the fate of the nation and humanity in those tales.

I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that Emily Barton is a full-fledged rival to Thomas Hardy—but Ms. Barton is only in her 30’s, the age at which Hardy had written Far from the Madding Crowd and not much else. In fact, I suspect that Ms. Barton already has more voices in her head than Hardy possessed, as well as a sturdier hope for the lives we lead. But what makes Brookland such an enormous achievement, and such a complete world in which to escape, is that this place is not Wessex (now full of antiques and cream-tea nostalgia—a dead end), but that corner of the world where the East River snakes around the edge of Manhattan island, the opportunity that Brooklyners and Americans have to inspect New York and wonder what happens there.

Prudence is the daughter of Matty Winship, a devout and proud gin-maker in Brooklyn at the time of the War of Independence. She’s a child with thoughts of death and sadness, and when she’s told that her mother could be pregnant again, her reaction is typically grim: “Father packed me off into the yard, but I knew why she was crying: Infant after infant had quit her womb, unfinished. I had learned this from Johanna, who had, I thought, intimated the foetuses might have chosen to return to God because they were unwilling to call such a gloom box as me Sis.”

Before the new baby’s birth, Prudence took her best doll, Nell, lifted up her yarn hair and hammered nails into the skull. “When I paced along the crest of Brookland’s Heights, battered Nell in hand, I raged less against the interloper than against my own mortifying rage.” The sister—named Pearl—is born with damaged vocal cords. “Even when she emerged from the womb, she could emit no sound but a rasping sigh, such as a person makes choking on a fishbone.”

And so the novel proceeds, with sisters wrapped together in kinship and guilt, forever comparing and contrasting, and as different as a human quality and a stone found in nature. But Prudence is as methodical as she is dark, and her father counts on her to succeed him in the gin-distilling business. With that information, you know the two great worlds that Brookland holds for you—not just the prospects of and from Brooklyn in the 100 years or so between the War of Independence and the building of the Roeblings’ bridge, but the intricate practice of making gin. We go with Prudence in an education that begins when she is 10, and which finally must always bump up against her own father’s insistence on the magic beyond technology and learning. There’s no end of the things that may be added to the strong spirit. At one point she wonders: attar of lavender?

“‘Can do, but it needn’t,’ [her father] said. She knew her eyes must have widened, for he went on, ‘I’d think by now you wouldn’t be surprised to find it all so complicated. There’s no fixed receipt for gin, love, not in general. For Winship gin, I’ve my own certain way, but I still make the slightest adjustments from one batch to the next. It’s the great pleasure of the work, and the place a gin man proves ’is mettle.’”

Prudence takes over the business in her 20’s. She has her own family. And she fills the span of her mind with thoughts and images of a bridge that will one day connect Brooklyn and Manhattan—this after an early Christmas-like jaunt, a great day in the city, when the whole family walks over the ice. The bridge means easier, regularized access; it means trade; but it also means—and this becomes mysterious—a connection between the great land, the dark fields of the Republic, and the place that Prudence sometimes thinks of as the City of the Dead.

This is a long story, and one that unwinds slowly, but with stunning enough effect to satisfy the waiting. The patience to stick with Prudence comes from the steady beauty of Ms. Barton’s writing. There are two strands to the book: letters written by Prudence as a mature woman (letters that capture both the eloquence and the idiosyncrasy of early 19th-century writing by unschooled people), and a more withdrawn narrative that is seldom modern or up-to-date.

I take this backwards look—the bulk of the book—to be the largest part of Ms. Barton’s research (evidently extensive) and her talent (seemingly unlimited). And it may be worth stressing that many Hardy novels were set not in the year they were written but in a prior age, lost and enchanted. Ms. Barton’s prose voice is as good and supple as anything being written in America today. But in its “period” tone (if that’s the word), it reaffirms the unswerving adage of the novel reader: Describe a world well enough and I am its member. This is the voice of a great novelist:

“At ten years old, Prue had thought it a marvel to travel to New York City and ponder her late misconceptions about the place. At fourteen, when Congress was sitting in that city while it awaited a more permanent home, Prue’s head was full of belts and batches, but she still thought about bridging the East River. It would ensure easy shipping of gin in winter, after all; she continued to dream about it when she stood gazing out over the straits. She brooded on the terrible thing she had done to Pearl, the one truly mean-spirited action of her life thus far, and still worried someone in her family would learn her secret. Though she no longer had as much time as she’d had in childhood to ruminate on death, she remained anxious it would come for her father or her sisters, to whom she grew daily more attached. Where once New York had seemed a sacred destination, she now made deliveries there in all kinds of weather, and had twice been pitched into the cold, salty water en route. She knew the streets on which a small pedestrian was likely to be run down, and those on which she could buy candy; she knew her father’s customers by name. She accompanied him regularly to the gloomy bank. Over time, his banker—Timothy Stover, who had the carriage and voice of a Quaker but lacked the sober manner—came to answer her questions as carefully as her father’s.”

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer. His next book, Nicole Kidman, will be published in the fall.

The holiday pretense works, up to a point. These traveling readers may hike and roam and take in 100 pages a night of The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge or Jude the Obscure. But they discover that a steep side street in some exquisite town, falling away to realms of pasture and golden distance, has been used in TV commercials for cereal, butter, crusty bread and life insurance. In fact, you can kid yourself you’ve had breakfast in Hardy Country without going anywhere. And in some ways, that’s because no one has taken up the real burden left by Hardy—of following the lives led on Egdon Heath and seeing the fate of the nation and humanity in those tales.

I don’t necessarily mean to suggest that Emily Barton is a full-fledged rival to Thomas Hardy—but Ms. Barton is only in her 30’s, the age at which Hardy had written Far from the Madding Crowd and not much else. In fact, I suspect that Ms. Barton already has more voices in her head than Hardy possessed, as well as a sturdier hope for the lives we lead. But what makes Brookland such an enormous achievement, and such a complete world in which to escape, is that this place is not Wessex (now full of antiques and cream-tea nostalgia—a dead end), but that corner of the world where the East River snakes around the edge of Manhattan island, the opportunity that Brooklyners and Americans have to inspect New York and wonder what happens there.

Prudence is the daughter of Matty Winship, a devout and proud gin-maker in Brooklyn at the time of the War of Independence. She’s a child with thoughts of death and sadness, and when she’s told that her mother could be pregnant again, her reaction is typically grim: “Father packed me off into the yard, but I knew why she was crying: Infant after infant had quit her womb, unfinished. I had learned this from Johanna, who had, I thought, intimated the foetuses might have chosen to return to God because they were unwilling to call such a gloom box as me Sis.”

Before the new baby’s birth, Prudence took her best doll, Nell, lifted up her yarn hair and hammered nails into the skull. “When I paced along the crest of Brookland’s Heights, battered Nell in hand, I raged less against the interloper than against my own mortifying rage.” The sister—named Pearl—is born with damaged vocal cords. “Even when she emerged from the womb, she could emit no sound but a rasping sigh, such as a person makes choking on a fishbone.”

And so the novel proceeds, with sisters wrapped together in kinship and guilt, forever comparing and contrasting, and as different as a human quality and a stone found in nature. But Prudence is as methodical as she is dark, and her father counts on her to succeed him in the gin-distilling business. With that information, you know the two great worlds that Brookland holds for you—not just the prospects of and from Brooklyn in the 100 years or so between the War of Independence and the building of the Roeblings’ bridge, but the intricate practice of making gin. We go with Prudence in an education that begins when she is 10, and which finally must always bump up against her own father’s insistence on the magic beyond technology and learning. There’s no end of the things that may be added to the strong spirit. At one point she wonders: attar of lavender?

“‘Can do, but it needn’t,’ [her father] said. She knew her eyes must have widened, for he went on, ‘I’d think by now you wouldn’t be surprised to find it all so complicated. There’s no fixed receipt for gin, love, not in general. For Winship gin, I’ve my own certain way, but I still make the slightest adjustments from one batch to the next. It’s the great pleasure of the work, and the place a gin man proves ’is mettle.’”

Prudence takes over the business in her 20’s. She has her own family. And she fills the span of her mind with thoughts and images of a bridge that will one day connect Brooklyn and Manhattan—this after an early Christmas-like jaunt, a great day in the city, when the whole family walks over the ice. The bridge means easier, regularized access; it means trade; but it also means—and this becomes mysterious—a connection between the great land, the dark fields of the Republic, and the place that Prudence sometimes thinks of as the City of the Dead.

This is a long story, and one that unwinds slowly, but with stunning enough effect to satisfy the waiting. The patience to stick with Prudence comes from the steady beauty of Ms. Barton’s writing. There are two strands to the book: letters written by Prudence as a mature woman (letters that capture both the eloquence and the idiosyncrasy of early 19th-century writing by unschooled people), and a more withdrawn narrative that is seldom modern or up-to-date.

I take this backwards look—the bulk of the book—to be the largest part of Ms. Barton’s research (evidently extensive) and her talent (seemingly unlimited). And it may be worth stressing that many Hardy novels were set not in the year they were written but in a prior age, lost and enchanted. Ms. Barton’s prose voice is as good and supple as anything being written in America today. But in its “period” tone (if that’s the word), it reaffirms the unswerving adage of the novel reader: Describe a world well enough and I am its member. This is the voice of a great novelist:

“At ten years old, Prue had thought it a marvel to travel to New York City and ponder her late misconceptions about the place. At fourteen, when Congress was sitting in that city while it awaited a more permanent home, Prue’s head was full of belts and batches, but she still thought about bridging the East River. It would ensure easy shipping of gin in winter, after all; she continued to dream about it when she stood gazing out over the straits. She brooded on the terrible thing she had done to Pearl, the one truly mean-spirited action of her life thus far, and still worried someone in her family would learn her secret. Though she no longer had as much time as she’d had in childhood to ruminate on death, she remained anxious it would come for her father or her sisters, to whom she grew daily more attached. Where once New York had seemed a sacred destination, she now made deliveries there in all kinds of weather, and had twice been pitched into the cold, salty water en route. She knew the streets on which a small pedestrian was likely to be run down, and those on which she could buy candy; she knew her father’s customers by name. She accompanied him regularly to the gloomy bank. Over time, his banker—Timothy Stover, who had the carriage and voice of a Quaker but lacked the sober manner—came to answer her questions as carefully as her father’s.”

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer. His next book, Nicole Kidman, will be published in the fall.

Discovery will come from the person who surely has the most right to know her: her teenage son Jason, a bright kid and, therefore, much at a loss as he comes of age. “My mother is a stranger,” he’s realized. “And she is strange. I am not sure at all what she thinks or feels about anything. And it’s funny because she should be wondering about me, not the other way around. I should be thinking about rock-and-roll and girls and drugs. Not why she gets so fuzzy and confused sometimes.”

This is the set-up for Dana Spiotta’s brilliant and haunting second novel, Eat the Document, the essential secret of which has to be admitted if one is to make any sense in a review. The story has been drastically shaped by Ms. Spiotta (and there may be arguments over whether she’s always followed the best strategies) in a riveting first chapter where Mary Whittaker is about to go underground. The time is 1972, and Mary and her radical colleague and lover, Bobby DeSoto, are going their separate ways into lives as vague and ungraspable as mist.

“[A]s Caroline she could put these two irrefutable facts together, plain and woman. It meant she could move somewhere new and go to the store or apply for a job and people wouldn’t feel threatened or aroused. She knew she could go unnoticed. She could not recall her own face if she wasn’t staring in a mirror. This smeary obscurity that had caused her pain her whole life became an asset now, her anonymity her saving attribute. Her looks had finally found their perfect context as a fugitive. Born to it by being chronically forgettable. (Which was also part of how she got in this position in the first place. Walking slowly, half smile on her face, clutching an innocuous purse, or a package, or a suitcase. Would anyone bother to stop such a person?)”

Mary and Bobby had designed a series of protests against the Vietnam War. We even see Mary begging entrance at the home of industrialists, and leaving a bomb in their bathroom. We’re left to gather that someone died because of it in those days when over 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam (to say nothing of the locals who proved the efficacy of all the research and development on napalm and Agent Orange). Bobby is a romantic figure, a kind of Godardian filmmaker and a true lover; Mary is glimpsed sometimes in still pictures from the age of Nixon, or heard laughing in a fragment of movie, a wondrous, lovely figure. And that silent opening—Mary in a motel room, dyeing her hair and committing her new identity to heart—is as compelling as the start of a great movie in which we watch a real person becoming an actress and a show of herself.

I can imagine Ms. Spiotta exulting at this opening, and then relishing the time, later on, when she can be Jason, the smart kid, putting two and two, as well as x and y, together to fathom his mother’s odd indecisiveness. I can even imagine her being tempted to make the book just Jason and his baffled failure to relate to his mother—is that just because he’s an adolescent, or because of his mother’s self-imposed caution, her inability to be her old self? That would need a tour de force, as well as some cunning plotting as Jason begins to piece together the jigsaw of the past with more recent discoveries.

Between 1972 and 1998 (which is when we meet Jason), but decisively before 2001, Eat the Document elects to take two other paths—surveying the low-level radical climate of the late 90’s in the Pacific Northwest, and giving a sketch of how Mary made her journey from one life to the next. Alas, these are less interesting than Mary and Jason warily together, and I’m not sure that the first, lengthy excursion into the lives of smaller characters named Henry, Nash and Miranda won’t put off some readers gripped by the book’s opening. Still, in this story there are several things that need to be revealed, and if you’re as smart as Jason, you’ll pick up on the clue I’ve already dropped in your lap. The revelation, when it comes, is not unpredictable, but it has a satisfying tingle of closure.

The other point to make about this book is that its quite sharp appreciation for the decline in young American radicalism since the days of 1972 is rather muffled by the decision not to come up to date. The question as to why young people are no longer as disturbed as their parents were 35 years ago is one of the subtler causes for sorrow in our present plight, and a sign maybe that our peril now—our risk of losing America—is far greater than it was in a time of mere dirty tricks.

I can see why a novelist might shy from these complications. Still, what’s most arresting about this novel—and I recommend it thoroughly—is the limbo condition of the mother and the troubled response of her son. Against that pressure, the lives of many of Ms. Spiotta’s supporting characters seem fairly inconsequential. In other words, this is one of those very accomplished novels that a ruthless and discerning screenplay might make better still—a challenging portrait of a mother and a son, and a withering comparison of two types of anger and the America that provoked them. (Remade as a novel, that work may need a Conrad, and Ms. Spiotta is not quite there yet.)

Never mind—this is a novel prepared to grapple with modern history and able to see how the great decline of our society has picked up pace and may be unstoppable. It’s a book that digs into our memories of recent history, knowing when Beach Boys harmonies shifted from sweet to sinister—and as you take a break from the pages, you could do worse than look at some Godard and listen to the great medley of music that runs through it, as liquid and unforgettable as napalm.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer. His next book, Nicole Kidman, will be published in the fall.

Discovery will come from the person who surely has the most right to know her: her teenage son Jason, a bright kid and, therefore, much at a loss as he comes of age. “My mother is a stranger,” he’s realized. “And she is strange. I am not sure at all what she thinks or feels about anything. And it’s funny because she should be wondering about me, not the other way around. I should be thinking about rock-and-roll and girls and drugs. Not why she gets so fuzzy and confused sometimes.”

This is the set-up for Dana Spiotta’s brilliant and haunting second novel, Eat the Document, the essential secret of which has to be admitted if one is to make any sense in a review. The story has been drastically shaped by Ms. Spiotta (and there may be arguments over whether she’s always followed the best strategies) in a riveting first chapter where Mary Whittaker is about to go underground. The time is 1972, and Mary and her radical colleague and lover, Bobby DeSoto, are going their separate ways into lives as vague and ungraspable as mist.

“[A]s Caroline she could put these two irrefutable facts together, plain and woman. It meant she could move somewhere new and go to the store or apply for a job and people wouldn’t feel threatened or aroused. She knew she could go unnoticed. She could not recall her own face if she wasn’t staring in a mirror. This smeary obscurity that had caused her pain her whole life became an asset now, her anonymity her saving attribute. Her looks had finally found their perfect context as a fugitive. Born to it by being chronically forgettable. (Which was also part of how she got in this position in the first place. Walking slowly, half smile on her face, clutching an innocuous purse, or a package, or a suitcase. Would anyone bother to stop such a person?)”

Mary and Bobby had designed a series of protests against the Vietnam War. We even see Mary begging entrance at the home of industrialists, and leaving a bomb in their bathroom. We’re left to gather that someone died because of it in those days when over 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam (to say nothing of the locals who proved the efficacy of all the research and development on napalm and Agent Orange). Bobby is a romantic figure, a kind of Godardian filmmaker and a true lover; Mary is glimpsed sometimes in still pictures from the age of Nixon, or heard laughing in a fragment of movie, a wondrous, lovely figure. And that silent opening—Mary in a motel room, dyeing her hair and committing her new identity to heart—is as compelling as the start of a great movie in which we watch a real person becoming an actress and a show of herself.

I can imagine Ms. Spiotta exulting at this opening, and then relishing the time, later on, when she can be Jason, the smart kid, putting two and two, as well as x and y, together to fathom his mother’s odd indecisiveness. I can even imagine her being tempted to make the book just Jason and his baffled failure to relate to his mother—is that just because he’s an adolescent, or because of his mother’s self-imposed caution, her inability to be her old self? That would need a tour de force, as well as some cunning plotting as Jason begins to piece together the jigsaw of the past with more recent discoveries.

Between 1972 and 1998 (which is when we meet Jason), but decisively before 2001, Eat the Document elects to take two other paths—surveying the low-level radical climate of the late 90’s in the Pacific Northwest, and giving a sketch of how Mary made her journey from one life to the next. Alas, these are less interesting than Mary and Jason warily together, and I’m not sure that the first, lengthy excursion into the lives of smaller characters named Henry, Nash and Miranda won’t put off some readers gripped by the book’s opening. Still, in this story there are several things that need to be revealed, and if you’re as smart as Jason, you’ll pick up on the clue I’ve already dropped in your lap. The revelation, when it comes, is not unpredictable, but it has a satisfying tingle of closure.

The other point to make about this book is that its quite sharp appreciation for the decline in young American radicalism since the days of 1972 is rather muffled by the decision not to come up to date. The question as to why young people are no longer as disturbed as their parents were 35 years ago is one of the subtler causes for sorrow in our present plight, and a sign maybe that our peril now—our risk of losing America—is far greater than it was in a time of mere dirty tricks.

I can see why a novelist might shy from these complications. Still, what’s most arresting about this novel—and I recommend it thoroughly—is the limbo condition of the mother and the troubled response of her son. Against that pressure, the lives of many of Ms. Spiotta’s supporting characters seem fairly inconsequential. In other words, this is one of those very accomplished novels that a ruthless and discerning screenplay might make better still—a challenging portrait of a mother and a son, and a withering comparison of two types of anger and the America that provoked them. (Remade as a novel, that work may need a Conrad, and Ms. Spiotta is not quite there yet.)

Never mind—this is a novel prepared to grapple with modern history and able to see how the great decline of our society has picked up pace and may be unstoppable. It’s a book that digs into our memories of recent history, knowing when Beach Boys harmonies shifted from sweet to sinister—and as you take a break from the pages, you could do worse than look at some Godard and listen to the great medley of music that runs through it, as liquid and unforgettable as napalm.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer. His next book, Nicole Kidman, will be published in the fall.

Family is fate. Get on with it—or leave, walk out. See how far you can travel and still not shift the quiet drone of despair and outrage in your head.

Family is probably at the heart of more great novels than sex, battles, success and moneymaking. Family can make you feel shabby about holding all four aces with just one remark. There are generals and artists who rule the world who can be crippled by an offhand word from their mother.

I have a 16-year-old son who’s studying William Faulkner, and you can see it changing his sense of life, reading and family. If you’re in his family, it’s a tough breakthrough to live with. And I had much the same feelings as I read Send Me, a first novel by Patrick Ryan, a man who’s said to be 40 but looks a bit younger on his book jacket. (These days, on your book jacket, you can just about hire an actor.)

Get a feeling for this. It’s Joe talking about his brilliant younger brother, Frankie, who tops him at everything—from being a freak to being gay:

“There were times when I saw Frankie as a kind of prodigy. There were other times when he just seemed weird. After coming out at fourteen (before I even realized I was in the closet), he declared himself a gay alien at fifteen, and by the time he turned sixteen he was human again (and still gay), claiming his previous incarnation hadn’t been him but a ‘proxy clone’ marking his place while he explored the galaxy. He wore his clothes backward every third Wednesday throughout his sophomore year because he claimed it helped reset his gravity. He took Grant Jenkins, the drum major, to his junior prom and slow-danced to ‘I Want to Know What Love Is.’ His senior science fair project was a thoroughly illustrated plan to colonize—exclusively with homosexuals and macaws—an as-yet-undiscovered planet called Gaystar. And still, somehow, he managed to make it out of high school without once getting beaten up.”

Need I add, this is an American family, loosely grounded in Florida, not that far from Cape Canaveral, but in the shadow of Star Wars and its gaudy mythology. The time is 1965 to now—which is Mr. Ryan’s span of years so far. Teresa is the mother, and in 1965 she’s already been abandoned by Dermot Ragazzino, who left her with two children (Matt and Karen) and the vague feeling that she resembles a figure in a Watteau painting. She’s barely hanging on, but she gets herself a second husband along the way, Roy Kerrigan, who gives her two more kids—Joe and Frankie—and sticks around in the noise and the chaos as long as he can stand it before going off with another woman.

There’s very little blame for anything that happens, and there’s no sense of that thunderous destiny or patterning that drives Faulkner’s characters mad (except those characters who are running the rotten world of the South). But as in Faulkner, nothing is escaped or forgotten. Matt will go off to take on the forlorn task of looking after his father. Karen, who seems to show the promise of a serious sexual career, will lock herself into marriage with a born-again salesman. Frankie will get AIDS and will finally turn his wild artistic skill to painting a picture of his mother where she seems to have stepped out of her Watteau frame.

It’s a light-handed narrative (which is good—heavy-handedness would have crushed this modest tale), yet something like weight or heaviness is needed. Mr. Ryan has broken his narrative up into a fairly haphazard arrangement of different voices and times. Yet I don’t think he’s fully earned this playful structure. I had the feeling that it might have been rearranged endlessly, or that the fragments were in disorder because the author was too close to being bored at telling the story in sequence and completely.

Faulkner often shuffles the pack the same way, but he leaves you with the feeling that his collection of wounded or broken parts could only ever have assumed the order he’s given them. Faulkner himself was stricken by family and damaged by his South, and in the end he couldn’t tell whether he loved the place and his necessary family ties—the ties that imprisoned him.

Patrick Ryan, I think, is preoccupied by the same paradox. He’s temperamentally driven to believe in kindness and tolerance and the futility of change—he’ll abide by that frustration. His vision is lit up by the Day-Glo colors of Frankie’s childlike art, and by the real fireworks of the space program in the Florida sky. All of which means that Send Me is cool, ironic and just a touch too flip for its own good, no matter that it’s highly readable and a debut of great promise. An important debut, even. This is the kind of first novel that can presage something like a real career.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ryan’s sidestepping with time seems like one of Frankie’s slow dances, not the dire march that besets the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury. And let’s remember that though this is a winning book for a 40-year-old, at that age William Faulkner had already written The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!

We tell ourselves that our kids grow up very fast nowadays, but sometimes it’s awesome to realize what an earlier, more sheltered youth achieved.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer. His next book, Nicole Kidman, will be published in the fall.