Roberto Bolaño meant 2666 to be his masterpiece. It was the tome he toiled away at in the rush before his death in 2003, sick with liver disease at the age of 50. At 900 pages, it groans with ambition, knitting together five different novellas in a sprawling story spanning decades, continents and styles. Mysterious and full of dread, 2666 is cluttered with hundreds of characters introduced by name—hungry writers, hapless detectives, hustlers and hookers, journalists and pugilists. It conveys, with literal heft, what’s glorious about art and what’s terrifying about death. There’s much to explore and revisit, to ruminate on and be haunted by. Yet sometimes it feels like hard work to think of this unwieldy volume as a single coherent novel.

That hasn’t stopped 2666— translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer—from becoming this autumn’s literary fetish object. The Chilean-born Bolaño enjoys a cult following for his romantic, political, darkly sexy books. His unconventional stories offer a vitality, an adventurousness, that’s mostly missing from contemporary American literature. His reflections on the human condition are at once lofty and unstylish; his characters often tortured, omnivorous and full of desire—they seem unaware of the fact that we are too post-whatever to consider our proximity to the abyss. The overall effect is rare and bracing.

With The Savage Detectives, his remarkable breakout novel (also translated by Ms. Wimmer and published by FSG last year), Bolaño shouldered his way into the literary canon—like a grapho-maniac Borges, a Latin American Sebald, and also something completely different. Readers would do well to come to 2666 with grand expectations and a good deal of patience. A dreamy, difficult book, it demands time and gives back frustration. (“Behind every answer lies a question,” observes one character.) You don’t just read this book, you wrestle with it.

IT BEGINS PLAYFULLY WITH “The Part About the Critics.” This section features a love quadrangle of academics all drawn to the same obscure German author. Bolaño depicts their fixations and romantic intrigues with sardonic insight. His sentences tend to be long and profoundly torqued, and flashes of brilliance glitter in his prose. Here he’s describing his young literary conference-goers:

“[T]hose eager and insatiable cannibals, their 30-something faces bloated with success, their expressions shifting from boredom to madness, their coded stutterings speaking only two words: love me, or maybe two words and a phrase: love me, let me love you, though obviously no one understood.”

Bolaño packs a lot in, and the density calls for rereading. (When in doubt, presume he’s describing a lonesome misunderstanding.)

The first section is the most accessible for its entertaining drama and richly drawn characters. The scene shifts when the critics head to Mexico—that “unfathomable and hostile land”—in search of their beloved author. They hear he’s been spotted in Santa Theresa, a grim industrial town just south of the border, but their hunt is fruitless and weirdly ominous. The section ends abruptly, and we never hear from these scholars again. (Bolaño often lets loose ends flap, and occasionally frays them for good measure.)

We linger in Santa Theresa, amid the “anarchic sprawl” of low-wage maquiladoras, bordellos, seedy bars and shanties, for most of the next three sections. We meet a literature professor who’s losing his mind (“The Part About Amalfitano”), and a reporter sent to Mexico to cover a boxing match (“The Part About Fate”). These sections are often disorienting, with odd, prolonged digressions, strange monologues and underdeveloped characters against a melancholic landscape. They feel portentous and only occasionally compelling. I was missing the easy momentum of the first section even before I plunged into the 300 horror-soaked pages of the fourth (“The Part About the Crimes”).

“The girl’s body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores.” So begins Bolaño’s catalog of victims—all women (or girls), mostly poor—raped and murdered in Santa Theresa (a town based on the real-life Ciudad Juarez, where some 450 women have disappeared). With an almost clinical sense of duty, Bolaño itemizes each mutilated body discovered over several years, most of them unclaimed, unsolved, dumped in public graves. He writes about the detectives involved, the cases dropped, the evidence lost. These pages are relentless. There’s so much violence, most of it senseless, rooted in desperation, and we learn so little, after all, about the victims. It’s tempting to skim and skip, but Bolaño seems to be challenging us to consider these women, to mourn them, to grant them the individual scrutiny they have otherwise been denied. “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them,” one character observes.

The final book (“The Part About Archimboldi”) comes as a relief. We leave Mexico and learn the story of the German author lionized in the first section. We find out about his time in the Second World War, about his love, about his stretch on the brink of madness. And then we learn about how he became a writer. Eventually, ultimately, the narrative nudges him to Mexico, which delicately, tenuously ties the end to the beginning. Or perhaps this is the beginning. …

It’s hard to know what to make of 2666. It reads like a puzzle crafted by a sadistic, sympathetic literary master. Given the way it rambles without urgency, it’s hard to believe it’s is the work of someone at death’s door. There are long stretches when I felt abandoned as a reader. (That he’s not here to explain himself makes for a perfect punch line.) Yet Bolaño reveals enough to keep us reading—a turn of phrase, a captured moment that just feels so confident, so singular. “Mothers should never write letters,” someone sighs, after observing the “nakedness” of his mother’s grammar mistakes and shaky handwriting. And what about: “Outside the air had a liquid texture. Black water, jet-black, that made one want to reach out and stroke its back.”

If there’s something, anything, that ties these five books together, perhaps it’s a sense of the nakedness of life, the proximity of death and the occasional yearning to reach out and stroke the liquid air. It should be noted that although many lives are snuffed out in these pages, the writers seem to live on. 2666 may not be Bolaño’s masterpiece, but it’s also inescapable, unignorable and lasting.

Emily Bobrow is an arts contributor to The Economist and editor of More Intelligent Life (moreintelligentlife.com). She can be reached at books@observer.com.

SWAY: THE IRRESISTIBLE PULL OF IRRATIONAL BEHAVIOR
By Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
Doubleday, 206 pages, $21.95

THE DRUNKARD'S WALK: HOW RANDOMNESS RULES OUR LIVES
By Leonard Mlodinow
Pantheon, 252 pages, $24.95

ABOUT 30 YEARS AGO, THE WORLD of economics took a zinging slap. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists, published a paper about how we actually make decisions, rather than how we should. If standard economic theory assumes that we’re perfect judges of our own best interests—that more choice leads to better choices, and the market corrects for flaws—these two academics found otherwise. After a series of experiments, they discovered that we’re bumblingly irrational actors: We hate losing more than we enjoy winning; emotion often trumps reason; and our decisions depend on how the options are framed. Essentially, at times we’re a little dumb.

"Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk" was the first paper to introduce psychology into the study of economics—a landmark moment. If economics is based on human behavior, why not empirically examine actual human behavior? Alas, in economic theory, it takes time for common-sense lessons to trickle down. Few practitioners wanted to give up those beautiful, abstract models of human decision-making, the clean calculation of supply, demand, cost and utility. So pure—untarnished by our silliness.

The tide has turned. Early adopters cited Kahneman and Tversky in the late ’80s, but psychology really began informing the discipline only about 10 years ago. (Mr. Kahneman received the Nobel Prize for his work in 2002; Tversky had died some years earlier.) Now behavioral economics—sometimes called neuroeconomics—is gaining traction in academia and clogging best-seller lists. Practical books with snappy one-word titles expose our daily blunders and their larger consequences. It’s a near irresistible mixture of "gee-whiz" science, dinner-party-ready questions (why do placebos work? why do I procrastinate?) and self-help advice. Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink (2005), is the patron saint of this trend. Economics, once the preserve of market-loving, equation-wielding ideologues, is suddenly cool again.

"INDIVIDUALS MAKE PRETTY BAD DECISIONS," observe Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in Nudge. From their offices at the University of Chicago, where Mr. Thaler teaches in the Graduate School of Business and Mr. Sunstein is at the law school, they take pains to skewer the traditional idea that freedom of choice enables smart choices. In fact, we’re lazy, impressionable and biased in favor of the status quo. We spend less time on important financial decisions—like how to invest in a 401(k)—than on picking out a new tennis racket. Everyone plans to exercise, diet or save money, but few actually delay gratification or read the fine print.

That we live in a time of unprecedented prosperity and opportunity makes our hamfisted decisions more embarrassing. We really only have ourselves to blame. Yet part of the problem is the sheer quantity of choices we now have, which makes it harder to pick the right one. People get suckered into things like subprime mortgages in part because the market has become more complicated. (That the market also creates incentives for mortgage brokers to exploit human frailty hardly helps.) Choosing the best credit-card plan seems to require voodoo powers.

But all’s not lost. Mr. Thaler, a founder of behavioral economics, and Mr. Sunstein, an impressive jack of all trades (both of whom occasionally advise Barack Obama), have a solution: "libertarian paternalism." This is a system for arranging choices that encourages (or "nudges") people toward the one that serves their best interests. An example of "choice architecture" is the way food is arranged in a cafeteria. The director of food services for a large city school system found that she had the power to change consumption of specific foods by as much as 25 percent: If she put carrots at eye level, for example, she could influence healthier decisions without limiting choices.

Libertarian paternalism "alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options," write Messrs. Thaler and Sunstein. The authors first outline our irrational instincts, then use these lessons to make detailed policy recommendations (so detailed as to nudge some readers to skip to the conclusion, surely). For example, given that people tend to stick with their current situation ("status-quo bias"), few take the time to halt the automatic renewal of a magazine subscription. That same inertia could be harnessed to get people to save more money, by having companies adopt an automatic enrollment plan for a retirement account, which employees could "opt out" of. For particularly complicated choices (e.g., investment portfolios, software downloads), sensible default options are best. As for all those byzantine pricing schemes for insurance policies and credit cards, businesses should be forced to become as transparent as possible, and provide customers with itemized receipts of costs and fees.

Much of this makes sense. Nudge also describes something called "the spotlight effect," which is the misguided feeling that everyone notices what we’re doing. This is what motivates us to conform socially, and what moves us to apologize for faux pas no one else picks up on. Choice architects should understand that the best way to get people to do something (exchange plastic bags for canvas totes, say) is to convince them that they’ll look foolish if they don’t.

But are nudges enough to protect us from ourselves? And can we rely on the private sector to push us in directions that serve our own interests? Given that our mistakes can harm others—witness the subprime mortgage crisis—shouldn’t we hope that the most harmful choices will be removed from the menu? These boundaries of influence are difficult to draw. ("We are not for bigger government," Messrs. Thaler and Sunstein insist.) But Nudge helps us understand our weaknesses, and suggests savvy ways to counter them.

IF NUDGE WAS WRITTEN WITH EMPLOYERS AND lawmakers in mind, Sway seems like a beach read for M.B.A. students and CEOs in training. Ori Brafman, a business strategist, and his brother Rom Brafman, a psychologist, have crafted a very readable, anecdote-heavy look at the latest research into our counterproductive instincts. It’s a slim, informative, coattail-riding "greatest hits" book about our biases and presumptions, cobbled together from the studies of others. (Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, similar but better, came out earlier this year.)

The Brafmans tell the story of a mysterious street violinist in a D.C. metro station in 2007. Over 1,000 people passed the nondescript performer, but hardly anyone stopped. Alas, the man playing Bach’s notoriously challenging "Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin" on a $3.5 million Stradivarius was the virtuoso Joshua Bell. The study, conducted by The Washington Post, reveals the power of "value attribution," by which we discern the value of something from its context, rather than by judging it on its own merits. This is also why we’ll buy a shirt in an expensive boutique that we might overlook at a stoop sale. It’s logical to correlate value with price, but too clumsy an assumption only creates an incentive for retailers to bump up their prices.

The pratfalls of misper
ception feature prominently in Sway. We cling to labels at the expense of contradictory evidence ("diagnosis bias"), and we fail to ignore sunk costs and let go ("loss aversion"). The brothers write about Captain Jacob Van Zanten, an accomplished pilot who became hotheaded when his 747 aircraft was detoured in 1977. Reluctant to lose more time, he made a tragic mistake that killed his entire crew and all of his passengers—584 people total. So much for averting loss. But like the similarly unempirical example of the Vietnam War dragging on and on, this anecdote is based purely on rearview mirror speculation. Even as a metaphor it’s fatuous, as Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard’s Walk, would surely argue.

It’s easy to construct a neat explanation for what happened yesterday—"but this logical picture of events is just an illusion of hindsight with little relevance for predicting future events," writes Mr. Mlodinow, a trained physicist. In fact, our lives are governed by chance, which makes it impossible to know what will happen next. We routinely misinterpret patterns of randomness as signs of success or failure, mainly because it feels terrible to think we don’t have control over what happens.

THE DRUNKARD'S WALK IS LESS ABOUT economics than probability and decision-making, but it scratches the same itch—that is, the mistakes we all make. Mr. Mlodinow takes us on a chronological tour of various theories of randomness, lavishing affection on the odd men who cooked them up. (Blaise Pascal became a bit of a nutter before he died at 39; most of the others were serious gamblers.) There’s some interesting math here, much of it befuddling. "Our brains are just not wired to do probability problems very well," as one Harvard professor remarks.

Mr. Mlodinow’s point is that the more we understand about randomness patterns, the more skeptical we will be about both explanations of the past and prophesies of the future. "[W]e often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person," he observes. Succumbing to "value attribution," we assume rich and successful people are incredibly talented, and poor or marginal folks are getting what they deserve. But a chance happening—such as IBM seeking out Bill Gates in 1980 after the companies’ first contract fell through—can dictate the course of a life. Many a best-selling novelist had her first manuscript rejected over and over. It’s better, in short, to judge ability than achievement.

A nice thought. Easier said than done. Firing a CEO after a couple of bad years, even though before that he had a long run of good years, ignores the unlucky inevitabilities of probability—but what other metrics are there for measuring performance? Charisma? Good intentions? As for the existential can of worms opened here (what control do we have, anyway?), Mr. Mlodinow explains that since chance plays a role, an important factor in success is "the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized." The more times we flip the coin of our lives, the more often it will come up heads. Just keep going for it.

Indeed, there’s one trend we can predict with certainty: There will be many more attempts to cash in on the fruitful conjunction of psychology and the dismal science. Our self-help solipsism looks dapper in a lab coat.

Emily Bobrow is an arts contributor to The Economist and editor of More Intelligent Life (moreintelligentlife.com). She can be reached at books@observer.com.

I missed the deadline with this book review. Although I had plenty of time to work on it (having pitched it in December), I procrastinated and ultimately pulled an all-nighter to get it in. This sacrificed my personal utility—that is, the amount of satisfaction I have derived from this assignment. Clearly, this was not a very rational thing to do.

Why on earth did I do it? According to Predictably Irrational, a fascinating new book of behavioral economics by Dan Ariely, to dither is human. “We have problems with self-control, related to immediate and delayed gratification,” he writes. We’re inclined to put off work, even if this makes little sense in light of our long-term goals.

We also have trouble saving money, and we rarely know what things should cost (and so we’re easily manipulated as consumers). We make all sorts of mistakes, and we make them often. In short, we’re not nearly as efficient at calculating our best choices as standard economists would like to believe.

But Mr. Ariely, a professor at M.I.T., makes a convincing case that our errors of judgment, though “irrational” (i.e., influenced by emotions, irrelevant cues and shortsightedness), are also consistent and worthy of closer scrutiny. “Wouldn’t economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?” he asks. He joins a growing band of behavioral economists, all of whom seem to be busily telling us what we don’t know about ourselves (often in clever, readable books). Mr. Ariely’s spin is positive: Once we learn what we’re doing wrong, we can devise plans to correct these missteps. In some ways this is a self-help book, swaddled in empirical data.

For example, why might I buy the same scarf for either $10 or $100? If I first saw the scarf on the street, described as “cashmink” on a cluttered table, I could safely presume from this context that its quality was low. But if I saw the same scarf in a boutique, surrounded by elegant garments at excruciating prices, I might then discern its finer qualities and be convinced to pay a much higher price. “We don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth,” Mr. Ariely explains. Instead, we rely on context and relativity (is this scarf better or worse than the scarf sitting next to it?), which makes us gullible consumers. Often we let a price give an object its value, not the other way around.

This is how the black pearl became a luxury good. We learn that James Assael, a postwar “pearl king,” had little luck in unloading the gunmetal fruits of black-lipped oysters when he first introduced them to America in the 1970’s. But then he convinced his buddy Harry Winston to display a string of these lovelies in his Fifth Avenue window, together with an outrageous price tag. The rest is history.

In a similar vein, a recent study revealed that inflating the price of a bottle of wine enhances the pleasure of the person drinking it. We use the price as a measure of the wine’s value, and consider the bouquet’s merits accordingly. Conversely, underpricing a bottle of wine undermines the experience of quaffing it.

In countless entertaining experiments, Mr. Ariely examines the ways we’re duped out of making choices in our best interest. In one, he finds that merely suggesting an arbitrary number (e.g., asking students to write down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers) will influence the amount people are willing to pay for something (a bottle of wine, in this case). In another, he discovers that offering three choices is a reliable way to get people to choose the middle one, which inevitably seems the most reasonable in this context.

In a chapter called “The Cost of Zero Cost,” he investigates the way we’re unduly drawn to freebies—even when what we really want costs only very little. (I was reminded of this on a plane yesterday, when the man sitting next to me complained about the in-flight sandwich, but then blurted, “Hell, I ate it because it’s free.”)

Some of the advice Mr. Ariely offers seems unnecessary (do we really need to be told that serving wine in expensive glasses will enhance the experience of drinking it?), and sometimes his prose is a touch too conversational, littered as it is with rhetorical questions and chummy asides. On the whole, though, this is a lively and interesting book, full of inspired queries and creative answers.

But then again, I got it for free.

Emily Bobrow is an editor at Economist.com and the editor of Moreintelligentlife.com.

We’ve waited a long time for a novel from Junot Díaz. The Dominican-American author blasted the publishing world in 1996 with Drown, a book of short stories mainly about the macho scrambling of Dominican immigrants in industrial New Jersey. Fresh and gritty, it heralded a confident, new urban voice in literature, and scooped up plenty of awards and attention. So, how does The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao fare beneath the crushing weight of expectation? “Negro please,” as Mr. Diaz would write, it was worth the wait.

We’re retreading some of the same Dominican-diaspora territory here—Santo Domingo; Paterson; Nuevo York—but with fleshier, richer characters. The story spans three generations of a family with grand origins and a tragic fate. The grandparents are Dominican aristocrats with lovely daughters and a rambling villa in La Vega. But decades, bad politics and misfortune generate Oscar, a rotund, Elvish-speaking, comic-book-loving ghetto nerd in Jersey. Oscar, with his “enormous Section 8 glasses,” is the kind of boy who says, “I have a plethora of new Japanimation for your viewing pleasure.” In college he asks his roommate if it’s true “that no Dominican male has ever died a virgin.” The family, once so proud, has suffered a great fall.

So what happened? Well, a series of murders, suicides, beatings, humiliations and broken hearts, among other things. The family may have been cursed with a “fukú,” which struck anyone stupid enough to mess with Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s brutal dictator from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Trujillo’s almost supernatural brand of sadism, which saw him feeding enemies to sharks or drowning them in boiling oil, is worthy of paranoid lore. But, as Yunior, our smack-talking, yarn-spinning narrator for most of the book, says, “Shit, what Latino family doesn’t think it’s cursed?”

This is a hard-luck tale, to be sure. Darkness seems to be an essential ingredient in any Latin American novel, given the continent’s politics of tyranny and sputtering revolution. But the breezy, ballsy informality of the narration keeps the action light and kinetic, as if Yunior, our slightly mysterious guide, is entertaining friends over beers. He delivers the story in a Spanglish vernacular, but it helps to be fluent in comic book and Tolkien, too, so that you have your bearings when he tosses off lines such as “our boy wasn’t no ringwraith, but he wasn’t no orc either.” Well, I suppose we know what Mr. Díaz was reading when he was in middle school in Jersey.

Despite the street talk, Mr. Díaz still paints some beautiful sentences, particularly when he’s describing people. There’s Ana, one of Oscar’s many crushes, who laughs “as though she owned the air around her.” Or Oscar’s sister Lola, once “a long slender-necked ibis of a girl” with “big innocent teeth.” Oscar’s mother, Beli, a woman of tragic beauty, becomes a “hardnosed no-nonsense femme-matador” with skin “the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s last light.”

Not many writers can litter and lift a story of a family’s dissolution with humor and beauty. Junot Díaz has written the novel we’ve been hoping to get from him. If we’re lucky, we won’t have to wait so long for the next one.

Emily Bobrow is an editor at economist.com.

When Bolaño, a peripatetic Chilean who also lived in Mexico and Spain, died of liver failure in 2003, at the age of 50, he left behind 10 novels and three short-story collections, all written in the last decade of his life. His major works are The Savage Detectives and 2666, a massive posthumous novel which will be published in English for the first time next year.

An epic omnibus of earlier characters and thematic obsessions (irreverent itinerant poets, exile, political unrest), spanning many countries and more than two decades, The Savage Detectives begins on Nov. 2, 1975, as the journal of Juan Garcia Madero, a 17-year-old law student in Mexico City with a hunger for poetry. Two rugged aesthetes—self-described “visceral realist” poets—confrontationally crash Juan’s dreary poetry workshop and read aloud what Juan describes as “the best poem I’d ever heard.” Seduced, he follows them to a bar to talk about poetry for hours. The two poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (a lanky Chilean, and Bolaño’s main alter ego), both in their early 20’s, invite Juan to join their anti-establishment (i.e., anti–Octavio Paz) “gang.” “I said yes, of course. It was all very simple …. [T]ogether we would change Latin American poetry.”

The first part of the book consists of Juan’s breathless journal entries over the next two months, as he acquires the postures of an avant-garde poet. With the self-consciousness of youth, he skips classes, steals books, scribbles away for hours at bars and cafés, and nurses the proud wound of virginity freshly lost. He leaves home and moves in with a barmaid, “in a tenement straight out of a 1940’s movie.” Everything is feverish and new, and Lima and Belano are the giants of this world.

This section ends dramatically on the eve of the New Year, with Lima and Belano peeling out of Mexico City in a borrowed Impala. They are shepherding a woman away from her belligerent pimp, with Juan giddy in the back seat (“I realized that I’d always wanted to leave”). They are bound for the Sonora Desert, where Lima and Belano hope to find a woman named Cesárea Tinajero, a poet from the 1920’s who helped originate Mexico’s first band of visceral realists. Her shadow seems cast over everything that Lima and Belano do.

The tone shifts suddenly, and for the next 400 pages the book becomes a series of accounts from scores of people who have something to say about Lima, Belano or visceral realism. (Juan disappears.) These scraps of oral history, collected over 20 years, seem like responses to questions, but we never know the interviewer. They vary dramatically, revealing Bolaño’s remarkable ear for voices. But they all feel delicately tragic, perhaps the way anyone sounds when grasping for a distant brightness in some vaguely remembered past. (“[B]ack then we thought we were going to be writers and would have given anything to belong to that essentially pathetic group, the visceral realists,” says one guy. “Youth is a scam.”)

This extended chorus gives shape to the two poets by filling in much of the negative space. The various accounts also chip away at our first impression of Lima and Belano. We learn of their hapless travels, odd jobs, failed relationships and unwritten poems. There’s romance in some of these stories—many inspire wanderlust—but also the bitterness of promises unfulfilled, of people duped. “Belano and Lima weren’t revolutionaries,” someone vents. “They weren’t writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don’t think they were poets, either. They sold drugs.”

Something ominous pervades the wanderings and frayed friendship of Lima and Belano, implying a story untold, perhaps from their road trip. We do finally rejoin them on this trip and re-experience their vibrancy for the book’s last 50 pages. It’s a refreshing return, but also stained by what we know of their future. A character’s earlier lamentation sticks: “[W]hat a shame that time passes, don’t you think? What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away and leaves us behind.”

Emily Bobrow is an editor at Economist.com.

Mr. Ferris begins his book in the halcyon days of the dot-com boom. The employer is an unnamed advertising company. Jobs are secure, benefits generous and career fulfillment a luxury everyone can afford. “We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.”

But then the economy sours, clients dry up, and the company starts letting people go. The layoffs begin as a steady trickle, like sniper attacks, and build to a torrent, leaving whole swathes of the office desolate, cubicle ghost towns. The survivors—huddled together at the coffee bar or strategizing in a colleague’s office—live in fear. They struggle to look busy before the ax falls. The rules have changed. Despite all the blather about quitting to become a rafting instructor, no one wants to pack up while others look on with the same thought: “thank god it wasn’t me.”

Our chorus of idiosyncratic protagonists all belong to the same advertising team. The story, such as it is (I challenge you to find an arc), evolves from swapped anecdotes as they band together in the collective struggle of their days. Mr. Ferris’ observations are often ticklish, making the book feel like the one we have rattling in our heads. But the slippery monotony of the tone—coasting along on “we saw” and “we heard”—deprives it of any sort of narrative build, or investment in the characters. “Some of us knew how to turn a misshapen paper clip into a projectile that could hit the ceiling,” he writes. “If our attention was drawn to the ceiling, we usually recounted our tiles.” I snickered with familiarity, but I also felt a little bored.

Still, Mr. Ferris does breezily capture some larger truths about professional wage-slavery. “We were delighted to have jobs. We bitched about them constantly.” Sartre’s play No Exit comes to mind: Hell isn’t fire and brimstone; it’s close quarters with other people. Or maybe it’s just a job we desperately need and thoroughly despise.

Emily Bobrow is an editor at Economist.com.

With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—­are the key units of natural selection, Richard Dawkins made his grand entrance into the world of evolutionary biology. A rakish lecturer on zoology at Oxford, he soon earned a reputation for wittily demystifying scientific riddles for laypeople. He also became known for his snarling brand of atheism. “Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings,” he lamented in this first book. “It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven.”

For over three decades, Mr. Dawkins has argued that the natural world is divine enough without the imposition of mystical mumbo-jumbo; Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Readers of The God Delusion will find that time—and the religious upheaval of the last five years—has intensified this conviction. “If this book works as I intend,” Mr. Dawkins promises in his preface, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” Here he has marshaled his full case against the existence of God, and the result is compelling, fairly familiar and often entertaining.

Mr. Dawkins tends to preach to the choir, so to speak, as few God-fearing folk care to brave his scorn. He gets his name-calling in early, describing the God of the Old Testament as “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” But it would a pity for theists to stop reading there, as this book offers a strong test of faith. Mr. Dawkins goes on to undermine philosophical proofs of God’s existence; use evolution to explain our religious tendencies; illustrate the poverty of the Bible as a moral guide; and get foamy-mouthed over religious hypocrisy. Not all of it is convincing—witness his theory that religion springs from the evolutionary advantage of having gullible children. (Obediently trusting kids survive, you see, but this means they’ll believe anything: “[O]nce infected, the child will grow up and infect the next generation with the same nonsense.”) But on the whole, Mr. Dawkins’ aggressively rational attack on faith makes for a satisfying—if sometimes disconcerting—read.

He’s particularly vexed by the rise of “religious fanaticism” in America. He begins by suggesting that atheists are the homosexuals of yesteryear—besieged, unelectable and in the closet. Many are the “victim of childhood indoctrination,” trapped in the religion of their parents. But he also blames the country’s religiosity, “the theocrats of early twenty-first century Washington,” who “would have horrified Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams and all their friends.” He emphasizes the thoughtful skepticism of our founding fathers—relying mainly on Jefferson, who once wrote: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, He must more approve of the homage of Reason than that of blindfolded Fear.”

This is a constant refrain from Mr. Dawkins: Why is believing in God the best thing we can do for Him? Wouldn’t He be more pleased if we were kind or humble or charitable or logically skeptical? Mr. Dawkins suggests that the problem is faith, which glorifies the worship of God without proof or reason. He also criticizes the “poverty of agnosticism,” a lazy predilection for putting God’s existence and non-existence on equal footing, despite the statistical implausibility of the latter. And don’t get him started on the “pernicious” practice of “teaching children that faith itself is a virtue.” Children should never be considered Christian or Muslim, he argues, but rather the children of Christians or Muslims. Imposing faith on a child is a “grievous wrong.”

Critics of Daniel Dennett’s recent book Breaking the Spell will accuse Mr. Dawkins of indulging in a similar biological reductionism, boiling human behavior down to evolutionary instincts. Some will also complain that he neglects more elegant explanations of faith, preferring instead to highlight the absurd e-mails of angry Christians. And his suggestion that God is statistically improbable won’t trouble believers, who tend to think God does just fine without the help of science. But ultimately, he makes an interesting case for dumping our “overweening respect for religion” and demanding that religious people justify their faith. Hiding behind religious moderation won’t do, as this only enables the violent spread of religious extremists.

Mr. Dawkins is referring here to Sam Harris’ argument in The End of Faith (2005), an impressive best-seller in which Mr. Harris wrote that religious tolerance “is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.” Religious moderation may seem sensible—I enjoy celebrating the holidays with my family, but I don’t really want to convert others or die for my faith—but according to Mr. Harris, it “represents a failure to criticize the unreasonable (and dangerous) certainty of others.” Our moderation means we neglect Scripture and tolerate zealots, betraying both faith and reason. At a time when criticizing religion is politically incorrect and yet the brutal consequences of faith abound, this is an eye-opening argument.

Letter to a Christian Nation is Mr. Harris’ slim follow-up, which touches on a lot of the same territory. Weighing in at less than 100 pages (the perfect stocking-stuffer: one polemic), the book seems like a slick way to cash in on his earlier success. Mr. Harris has consolidated his disdain for religion into a withering attack on Christianity, delivered in the form of an open letter. Like Mr. Dawkins ( The God Delusion tops a list of recommended books at the end of Letter to a Christian Nation), Mr. Harris is responding to the rising religiosity of America—a time of “moral and intellectual emergency,” when over half the country believes in creationism and 87 percent claim never to doubt the existence of God. Mr. Harris wants to grab your lapels and give you a good shake.

Like Mr. Dawkins, he highlights the nasty bits of the Bible to prove that we don’t get our morality from it. We no longer like to beat rude children with a rod (despite the good council of Proverbs 13:24, 20:30 and 23:13-14), and selling daughters into sexual slavery is passé. There are plenty of lines that are perfectly nice, but the problem is that “[p]eople have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise.” How is it moral to spend more energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide?

Religion, he argues convincingly, divorces morality from the reality of human suffering. Religious dogma actually increases human misery by, for example, hindering national policy on sex education, stem-cell research and the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. Teenagers in America—where abstinence is often taught as a way to curb pregnancy—are far more likely to be infected by H.I.V. than their counterparts elsewhere in the developed world, and girls are four to five times more likely to become pregnant. As for Jesus’ advice about loving neighbors, “We need not believe that he was born of a virgin or will be returning to earth as a superhero to take these teachings to heart.”

Mr. Harris shows that there’s little correlation between religious conservatism and societal health. Much of the developed world is relatively irreligious, and these countries (e.g., Norway, Australia, Canada and Britain, among others) are also the healthiest when measuring life expectancy, literacy, income, education, etc. In America, the most dangerous cities are mainly in red states. Though these facts may illustrate the link between religion, poor education and poverty, they also show that widespread belief in God does not ensure a healthy society.

His new book may be smug in spots, but Mr. Harris makes a good case for a new and intellectually honest conversation about morality and human suffering. “Nothing stands in the way of this project,” he writes, “more than the respect we accord religious faith.”

But when God is taken away, what fills the gap? Sam Harris suggests that we can still use ritual to mark the big moments in life without “embracing the preposterous.” Richard Dawkins is less conciliatory: “Maybe life is empty,” he suggests. “There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.” Instead, he explains, our lives are as meaningful as we choose to make them. He illustrates this point of view with a quote from James Watson, the Nobel Prize winner who helped discover the structure of DNA: “Well, I don’t think we’re for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say ‘Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.’ But I’m anticipating having a good lunch.”

Emily Bobrow is an editor at Economist.com.

With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—­are the key units of natural selection, Richard Dawkins made his grand entrance into the world of evolutionary biology. A rakish lecturer on zoology at Oxford, he soon earned a reputation for wittily demystifying scientific riddles for laypeople. He also became known for his snarling brand of atheism. “Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings,” he lamented in this first book. “It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven.”

For over three decades, Mr. Dawkins has argued that the natural world is divine enough without the imposition of mystical mumbo-jumbo; Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Readers of The God Delusion will find that time—and the religious upheaval of the last five years—has intensified this conviction. “If this book works as I intend,” Mr. Dawkins promises in his preface, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” Here he has marshaled his full case against the existence of God, and the result is compelling, fairly familiar and often entertaining.

Mr. Dawkins tends to preach to the choir, so to speak, as few God-fearing folk care to brave his scorn. He gets his name-calling in early, describing the God of the Old Testament as “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” But it would a pity for theists to stop reading there, as this book offers a strong test of faith. Mr. Dawkins goes on to undermine philosophical proofs of God’s existence; use evolution to explain our religious tendencies; illustrate the poverty of the Bible as a moral guide; and get foamy-mouthed over religious hypocrisy. Not all of it is convincing—witness his theory that religion springs from the evolutionary advantage of having gullible children. (Obediently trusting kids survive, you see, but this means they’ll believe anything: “[O]nce infected, the child will grow up and infect the next generation with the same nonsense.”) But on the whole, Mr. Dawkins’ aggressively rational attack on faith makes for a satisfying—if sometimes disconcerting—read.

He’s particularly vexed by the rise of “religious fanaticism” in America. He begins by suggesting that atheists are the homosexuals of yesteryear—besieged, unelectable and in the closet. Many are the “victim of childhood indoctrination,” trapped in the religion of their parents. But he also blames the country’s religiosity, “the theocrats of early twenty-first century Washington,” who “would have horrified Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams and all their friends.” He emphasizes the thoughtful skepticism of our founding fathers—relying mainly on Jefferson, who once wrote: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, He must more approve of the homage of Reason than that of blindfolded Fear.”

This is a constant refrain from Mr. Dawkins: Why is believing in God the best thing we can do for Him? Wouldn’t He be more pleased if we were kind or humble or charitable or logically skeptical? Mr. Dawkins suggests that the problem is faith, which glorifies the worship of God without proof or reason. He also criticizes the “poverty of agnosticism,” a lazy predilection for putting God’s existence and non-existence on equal footing, despite the statistical implausibility of the former. And don’t get him started on the “pernicious” practice of “teaching children that faith itself is a virtue.” Children should never be considered Christian or Muslim, he argues, but rather the children of Christians or Muslims. Imposing faith on a child is a “grievous wrong.”

Critics of Daniel Dennett’s recent book Breaking the Spell will accuse Mr. Dawkins of indulging in a similar biological reductionism, boiling human behavior down to evolutionary instincts. Some will also complain that he neglects more elegant explanations of faith, preferring instead to highlight the absurd e-mails of angry Christians. And his suggestion that God is statistically improbable won’t trouble believers, who tend to think God does just fine without the help of science. But ultimately, he makes an interesting case for dumping our “overweening respect for religion” and demanding that religious people justify their faith. Hiding behind religious moderation won’t do, as this only enables the violent spread of religious extremists.

Mr. Dawkins is referring here to Sam Harris’ argument in The End of Faith (2005), an impressive best-seller in which Mr. Harris wrote that religious tolerance “is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.” Religious moderation may seem sensible—I enjoy celebrating the holidays with my family, but I don’t really want to convert others or die for my faith—but according to Mr. Harris, it “represents a failure to criticize the unreasonable (and dangerous) certainty of others.” Our moderation means we neglect Scripture and tolerate zealots, betraying both faith and reason. At a time when criticizing religion is politically incorrect and yet the brutal consequences of faith abound, this is an eye-opening argument.

Letter to a Christian Nation is Mr. Harris’ slim follow-up, which touches on a lot of the same territory. Weighing in at less than 100 pages (the perfect stocking-stuffer: one polemic), the book seems like a slick way to cash in on his earlier success. Mr. Harris has consolidated his disdain for religion into a withering attack on Christianity, delivered in the form of an open letter. Like Mr. Dawkins (The God Delusion tops a list of recommended books at the end of Letter to a Christian Nation), Mr. Harris is responding to the rising religiosity of America—a time of “moral and intellectual emergency,” when over half the country believes in creationism and 87 percent claim never to doubt the existence of God. Mr. Harris wants to grab your lapels and give you a good shake.

Like Mr. Dawkins, he highlights the nasty bits of the Bible to prove that we don’t get our morality from it. We no longer like to beat rude children with a rod (despite the good council of Proverbs 13:24, 20:30 and 23:13-14), and selling daughters into sexual slavery is passé. There are plenty of lines that are perfectly nice, but the problem is that “[p]eople have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise.” How is it moral to spend more energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide?

Religion, he argues convincingly, divorces morality from the reality of human suffering. Religious dogma actually increases human misery by, for example, hindering national policy on sex education, stem-cell research and the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. Teenagers in America—where abstinence is often taught as a way to curb pregnancy—are far more likely to be infected by H.I.V. than their counterparts elsewhere in the developed world, and girls are four to five times more likely to become pregnant. As for Jesus’ advice about loving neighbors, “We need not believe that he was born of a virgin or will be returning to earth as a superhero to take these teachings to heart.”

Mr. Harris shows that there’s little correlation between religious conservatism and societal health. Much of the developed world is relatively irreligious, and these countries (e.g., Norway, Australia, Canada and Britain, among others) are also the healthiest when measuring life expectancy, literacy, income, education, etc. In America, the most dangerous cities are mainly in red states. Though these facts may illustrate the link between religion, poor education and poverty, they also show that widespread belief in God does not ensure a healthy society.

His new book may be smug in spots, but Mr. Harris makes a good case for a new and intellectually honest conversation about morality and human suffering. “Nothing stands in the way of this project,” he writes, “more than the respect we accord religious faith.”

But when God is taken away, what fills the gap? Sam Harris suggests that we can still use ritual to mark the big moments in life without “embracing the preposterous.” Richard Dawkins is less conciliatory: “Maybe life is empty,” he suggests. “There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.” Instead, he explains, our lives are as meaningful as we choose to make them. He illustrates this point of view with a quote from James Watson, the Nobel Prize winner who helped discover the structure of DNA: “Well, I don’t think we’re for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say ‘Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.’ But I’m anticipating having a good lunch.”

Emily Bobrow is an editor at Economist.com.

Mr. Bouillier begins his story in September 1990, “the day Michel Leiris died.” (Leiris, a French ethnographer associated with the surrealist movement, is considered an influence on Mr. Bouillier, whose award-winning 2002 memoir, Rapport sur Moi— Report on Myself—has not been translated.) It’s a Sunday afternoon, and Mr. Bouillier is in bed, asleep in his clothes—“Cold and oblivion were all I was looking for at the time”—when a phone call wakes him up and he finds himself groggily chatting with the woman who walked out on him years ago. Though he’s imagined this moment many a time, foreseeing a tearful reconciliation in which she begs for his forgiveness and he’s gracefully magnanimous, it seems that she has not called to finally explain why she abandoned him (“the way they abandon a dog chained to a tree”). Instead, she asks him for a favor: She wants him to come to a birthday party for a contemporary artist named Sophie Calle. He would be this year’s “mystery guest,” as per Ms. Calle’s birthday tradition, “and that was the reason, the one and only reason, for her call.”

This opening segment is pretty wonderful, as Mr. Bouillier’s mind races through all the scenarios that might have led this woman, this unnamed romantic specter, to call him. (“How I yearned for this moment!”) Simultaneously, he’s horrified that she caught him asleep in the afternoon, and he struggles to hide the fact, though his “drowsy-sounding” voice is “soft and gummy.” (It’s words like “gummy” that draw attention to the artful precision of Mr. Stein’s translation.) Once he discovers the reason for her call—just an invitation to a party—his feelings veer from rage to something like euphoria and then back again, until he settles on a single conclusion: “The rest of my life depended on that party.”

Anyone whose anxieties tend to buzz in the ear, creating a din that makes it impossible to act unself-consciously, will enjoy this slim volume. Mr. Bouillier is looking back and poking fun at himself, but the events are captured with a raw immediacy, making his parade of humiliations feel fresh and profound. He expounds at length on the “sartorial neurosis” he acquired after his girlfriend left him: turtlenecks as undershirts. He wears these shirts because they’re revolting, he says, but no one really seems to care. Not even the woman he’s dating sees the true significance of his clothing: “[It] would have made me feel so much less burdened and alone, would have meant such a sharp rise in the value of her affections, if only I’d known that she loved me with open eyes. But no, she saw no secret meaning in my layered look.” How endearingly, empathetically absurd is his insistence that every action, every decision, have such heady ramifications. The company of a woman who accepts his turtlenecks effectively makes him feel even more alone. Woe is the man whose layered look is misunderstood.

Given the shape of his despair, Mr. Bouillier’s actions are often vengeful, pre-emptive strikes against the low expectations he presumes everyone has of him. His preparations for the party have thrown him into a tizzy of paranoid speculation (“Was she bent on my complete and utter annihilation? Was the whole thing some kind of plot?”) and find him agonizing over what to give as a birthday gift. After endless deliberations, he decides on a bottle of 1964 Margaux, a wine that’s well beyond his means, chosen as an extravagant shield against the narrowing, judging eyes of the party’s guests. “I wanted to sacrifice everything, I wanted to shame them as I climbed up on the pyre. We’d see how haughty they looked then.”

Sure, Mr. Bouillier’s neurotic self-indulgence can get a little annoying, but he keeps his voice light and his book short (unlike, say, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which is about twice as long and relentlessly dark). When Mr. Bouillier enters the party, where he believes all the secrets of his last relationship will be revealed, his awkwardness is poignantly recognizable: “I took off my coat with the air of a man who knows how to take off his coat wherever he happens to be.” Perhaps we all always take off our coats in this way, waiting for others to call us out as the frauds we truly are.

The party is the real meat of the memoir, making up the longest of the four chapters. After that, the final chapter feels a bit hasty and underwhelming, but it doesn’t detract from the strength of The Mystery Guest. Grégoire Bouillier confirms that while the fruitless pursuit of life’s many secrets may be tragic, conducting this search while bitterly swaddled in a turtleneck is delightfully ridiculous.

Emily Bobrow is an editor at Economist.com.

Mr. Bouillier begins his story in September 1990, “the day Michel Leiris died.” (Leiris, a French ethnographer associated with the surrealist movement, is considered an influence on Mr. Bouillier, whose award-winning 2002 memoir, Rapport sur Moi—Report on Myself—has not been translated.) It’s a Sunday afternoon, and Mr. Bouillier is in bed, asleep in his clothes—“Cold and oblivion were all I was looking for at the time”—when a phone call wakes him up and he finds himself groggily chatting with the woman who walked out on him years ago. Though he’s imagined this moment many a time, foreseeing a tearful reconciliation in which she begs for his forgiveness and he’s gracefully magnanimous, it seems that she has not called to finally explain why she abandoned him (“the way they abandon a dog chained to a tree”). Instead, she asks him for a favor: She wants him to come to a birthday party for a contemporary artist named Sophie Calle. He would be this year’s “mystery guest,” as per Ms. Calle’s birthday tradition, “and that was the reason, the one and only reason, for her call.”

This opening segment is pretty wonderful, as Mr. Bouillier’s mind races through all the scenarios that might have led this woman, this unnamed romantic specter, to call him. (“How I yearned for this moment!”) Simultaneously, he’s horrified that she caught him asleep in the afternoon, and he struggles to hide the fact, though his “drowsy-sounding” voice is “soft and gummy.” (It’s words like “gummy” that draw attention to the artful precision of Mr. Stein’s translation.) Once he discovers the reason for her call—just an invitation to a party—his feelings veer from rage to something like euphoria and then back again, until he settles on a single conclusion: “The rest of my life depended on that party.”

Anyone whose anxieties tend to buzz in the ear, creating a din that makes it impossible to act unself-consciously, will enjoy this slim volume. Mr. Bouillier is looking back and poking fun at himself, but the events are captured with a raw immediacy, making his parade of humiliations feel fresh and profound. He expounds at length on the “sartorial neurosis” he acquired after his girlfriend left him: turtlenecks as undershirts. He wears these shirts because they’re revolting, he says, but no one really seems to care. Not even the woman he’s dating sees the true significance of his clothing: “[It] would have made me feel so much less burdened and alone, would have meant such a sharp rise in the value of her affections, if only I’d known that she loved me with open eyes. But no, she saw no secret meaning in my layered look.” How endearingly, empathetically absurd is his insistence that every action, every decision, have such heady ramifications. The company of a woman who accepts his turtlenecks effectively makes him feel even more alone. Woe is the man whose layered look is misunderstood.

Given the shape of his despair, Mr. Bouillier’s actions are often vengeful, pre-emptive strikes against the low expectations he presumes everyone has of him. His preparations for the party have thrown him into a tizzy of paranoid speculation (“Was she bent on my complete and utter annihilation? Was the whole thing some kind of plot?”) and find him agonizing over what to give as a birthday gift. After endless deliberations, he decides on a bottle of 1964 Margaux, a wine that’s well beyond his means, chosen as an extravagant shield against the narrowing, judging eyes of the party’s guests. “I wanted to sacrifice everything, I wanted to shame them as I climbed up on the pyre. We’d see how haughty they looked then.”

Sure, Mr. Bouillier’s neurotic self-indulgence can get a little annoying, but he keeps his voice light and his book short (unlike, say, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which is about twice as long and relentlessly dark). When Mr. Bouillier enters the party, where he believes all the secrets of his last relationship will be revealed, his awkwardness is poignantly recognizable: “I took off my coat with the air of a man who knows how to take off his coat wherever he happens to be.” Perhaps we all always take off our coats in this way, waiting for others to call us out as the frauds we truly are.

The party is the real meat of the memoir, making up the longest of the four chapters. After that, the final chapter feels a bit hasty and underwhelming, but it doesn’t detract from the strength of The Mystery Guest. Grégoire Bouillier confirms that while the fruitless pursuit of life’s many secrets may be tragic, conducting this search while bitterly swaddled in a turtleneck is delightfully ridiculous.

Emily Bobrow is an editor at Economist.com.