Will Self. (Photo: Polly Borland)

Zack Busner, the naïve neurologist in Will Self’s new novel, Umbrella (Grove Press, 448 pp., $25), thinks he can use the drug L-Dopa to cure a disease called Encephalitis lethargica. It last broke out during World War I, and its sufferers have been catatonic for 50 years, but Busner predicts “miraculous” results. “In the upper storeys of these rundown minds,” he thinks, “true sentience remains.” This hunch is vindicated when the “enkies” wake up to the ’70s and start displaying Edwardian attitudes. Audrey Death, the liveliest enkie, calls her Kenyan nurse “the blackie.” Unfamiliarity induces raptures as well as racism—another woman spends whole days being amazed by a light switch. A novelist might envy the enkies’ responsiveness to life, like a Martian’s or an infant’s in its rawness. Yet there’s a witty scene in which Busner corrals “his guinea pigs” for an outing to a church. As cultural tourists, they fall into the usual clichés of curiosity, unconsciously parodying their awe at the new world by faking it for the old one: “they stop to marvel at the enormous organ, with its three-storey-high pipes.”

Umbrella is a novel that ceaselessly contrasts real wonder with sham versions. Even encephalitis is like this, a travesty of regard for the basic propositions of being human. A risen enkie recalls his catatonic inner life as a run-on sentence of hysterical repetitiveness: “a dreadful copybook sort of arithmetic ... I am what I am what I am.” Umbrella spans a century but repeats its themes. When Stanley Death, a soldier, sends telegrams to his sister Audrey from the Battle of the Somme, all that they say is “I am.”

The novel fictionalizes an episode from the life of the English-born neurologist Oliver Sacks: while consulting on a chronic ward in the Bronx in the ’60s, he awoke a group of enkies with experimental doses of L-Dopa. But as the enkies adjusted to the drug, their symptoms resumed and they sank back into “sleepy sickness.” They were like Rip Van Winkle in their renewal, like Eurydice in their relapse into darkness. In 1973, Dr. Sacks published Awakenings, a book that mixed case studies with numinous guesswork, to global applause (W.H. Auden: “A masterpiece”). Awakenings inspired a one-act play by Harold Pinter as well an Oscar-nominated 1990 film that took its name. “The human spirit is more powerful than any drug,” said Robin Williams in his role as “Doctor Sayer.”

Mr. Self once wrote a novella about a rugby player who grows a vagina in his knee. He’s an old hand at the outré, and is the first artist to appropriate the enkie story while abjuring melodrama. He also abjures chapter breaks and, for the most part, paragraphs. Umbrella consists of four interior monologues that alternate mid-sentence and jump-cut across time. The conscious Modernism can seem daunting, yet Mr. Self has his reasons. Written in a style reanimated from another era, Umbrella is a carefully sequenced fugue on the theme of being out-of-sequence. It’s often beautiful, notwithstanding its author’s compulsive grisliness. Describing a fat neck as a “pimpled wimple of flesh” is characteristic, but Mr. Self’s perceptions are original (“a faint applause of pigeons”), and he is Ronald Firbank-like in his ability to shape poetry from prattle. An enkie compares his period of catatonia to an empty picture frame: “This is me ... the framing of nothing, I had lost the general idea of what it was to have ... a general idea!” Some puns are merely bad, others so bad that they’re Beckettian. A janitor notes a spree of suicides-by-hanging: “[T]his decade is proving quite as swinging as the last!”

Mr. Self’s deviations from the facts are few but telling: he has set his novel in North London rather than the South Bronx. Friern Hospital, the real-life London madhouse where Busner’s new on staff, was bombed in the Blitz before becoming a condo complex in 1993, and Mr. Self makes its story the anchor for a plot that covers a lot of history. This history is entirely English and is quirky in its foci, a bit lopsided with theorizing. Rupert Brooke comes up once, but for the most part the gossipy possibilities of the historical novel are forgone.

The book sticks with its monologists: Busner, Audrey and her two brothers, Albert and Stanley. Albert is the eldest, a savant with few scruples who gets into arms manufacturing in time to profit from World War I. Albert has his star turn in Umbrella’s greatest set piece, thrashing two industrialists in a golf game as he calculates the parabolic arcs of “the dimpled moonface.” His younger brother, Stanley, is his opposite—a Fourierist. A tide of stylized ennui takes him from the bed of an older woman to the front lines of the Battle of the Somme. The “flame-haired” middle child, Audrey incarnates their contradictions. She’s a suffragette who sleeps around, and a munitionette who makes bombs in one of Albert’s factories. This makes her more interesting than either of her brothers, whose symbolic yokes leave them little agility to surprise, though it may also be what drives her insane. She’s a modern woman—i.e., a woman undone by modernity, “beset,” like the London she inhabits, “by [her] own contrariety.” Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Mechanism and humanism contend for her soul.

Umbrella casts a wide net of allusion, but sometimes the richness of its weave points up a threadbareness in the characters captured within. The enkies “were the war’s bumper crop”; “L-Dopa is our tank.” When Audrey surfaces from her catatonia, she tells Busner to “think of me as a sort of soldier but recently returned from the Front.” Such lines make you miss the randomness of fiction less concerned with its symbolic standing. Mr. Self’s high-minded Modernist style distances him from the drama of his plot—that Audrey will crack up and L-Dopa disappoint is never doubted—but that style is also distanced from itself by coy nods to its own historicality. Yet just as all maps beget “maps of maps that were themselves only the maps of all this ... fucking confusion,” so all self-awareness is an arch through which gleams that untraveled world ... of more self-awareness. If Umbrella relies on a pastiche imposture, it also makes of imposture a motif. Albert tweaks his last name to “De’Ath,” Audrey is misidentified as “Deeth” and “Dearth,” the enkies twist backward in kyphosis—a physical imposture—while in the background London churns through a hundred years of venal makeovers. Diagnosis, too, is distortion. “The post-Encephalitics have borne the brunt of every successive wave of psychiatric opinion,” Busner thinks, each of them “historically synchronized and so entirely arbitrary.”

It’s one of many lines that suggest Mr. Self has been keeping up with his Foucault. This would help make sense of the title. “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella,” reads the novel’s epigraph (it comes from Ulysses), and images of umbrellas recur throughout, fairly twinkling in their keenness to be interpreted. Mr. Self tips his hand halfway in: “When ... did the umbrella first become an article to be routinely forgotten rather than assiduously remembered?” This is where Modernity begins; hence the modernism. Nostalgic in its literary mechanics, Umbrella identifies forgetfulness as the grammar of power—forgetfulness of family and history, but mainly of wonder before technology, the blindness bred by its routinization. It is a difficult but profound idea. Mr. Self has dusted off these old devices to do an interesting new thing with his talent.

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Saul Steinberg. (Photo by Gjon Mill/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Saul Steinberg was the best-loved nonwriter in the history of The New Yorker. He did cartoons, fake maps, trick diplomas and tinkered-with postcards, a sketchbook from behind the Iron Curtain and another on the road with the Milwaukee Braves. Often he just did the doodles (the “spots,” as editors called them) adorning the columns of spotless prose. He even drew some of the advertisements that appeared in the magazine’s margins, until he got so rich he stopped needing the work. The Romanian-born Steinberg did his first New Yorker drawing for Harold Ross in 1941 and his last for David Remnick in 1999, the year of his death. Along the way, he did 90 covers, a number that continues, posthumously, to rise; Steinberg’s ghost most recently had the cover last week. His masterpiece appeared 36 years earlier, on March 29th, 1976: “View of the World From 9th Avenue,” his emblem of New York self-centeredness, in which the expanses of Ninth and 10th Avenues give way to a fat strip of the Hudson, the foreshortened flyover states and the tapered specks of far-off Asia.

Steinberg was an intellectual who made a big deal of not being too intellectual. With William Shawn, his friend and editor, he shared a lighthearted, no-bullshit style. “The true lover of art,” Steinberg once said, goes through a museum “on roller skates and is extremely tired after five minutes.” He could be ironic about his adoptive homeland. His America was a green land of Red Indians, road trips and cliché. His classic drawings—of an ordinary “E” contemplating a jazzed-up “É” in a thought bubble, of a stick-figure knight on horseback tilting his lance at a giant baby, of Santa Claus and Sigmund Freud presiding over a pyramid of Americana—have the character of agreeable riddles. They were existential cartoons for people who thought existentialism was too serious and cartoons not serious enough. Steinberg’s knack for being deep without being difficult made him the darling of gallerists and editors. By the time he died, at age 84, it had long since made him famous. In his obituary for Steinberg, Adam Gopnik proclaimed him the “greatest artist to be associated with [The New Yorker] and the most original man of his time.”

Between the greatness of the artist and the originality of the man, the biographer builds a bridge. Deirdre Bair’s Saul Steinberg: A Biography (Nan A. Talese, 752 pp., $40), a tremendous feat of fact-gathering marred by a lot of bad writing, provides the reader with evidence to construct several versions of its subject. Steinberg was by turns a striver, a genius, a prankster, a victim, a great friend, a bad husband, a self-deluding roué and a grim old man whose “suicidal ideation” was only halted by the pancreatic cancer that killed him. The biography teeters under the weight of these contradictions, and one often wishes that Ms. Bair had tried harder to give her findings the shape of a story.

As for her prose style, one wishes that Ms. Bair had tried harder in general. Perhaps it’s inevitable that a figure as sui generis as Steinberg would be stalely praised for “refreshing originality,” but a sentence like “His contribution to the genre’s evolution was with innovative drawings that departed from the expected and took the viewer into the realm of the surprising and unexpected,” which makes a bland observation and then repeats it three times, is so bad that it casts doubt on both the writer and the editors behind her.

It’s the kind of sloppiness that can sometimes detract from an interesting story. Laid out in full, Steinberg’s life assumes the dimensions of a cautionary tale about the human costs of a career in irony. One of his favorite images was of a “toothpick bird” perched inside the maw of a crocodile: “Nobody in the world is as safe as that bird in the crocodile’s mouth.” It’s easy to see Steinberg, who liked to laugh in the teeth of tragedy, in that bird, but his biography gives one cause to wonder what all the crocodile breath may have done to his soul. It turns out that he was a pretty unpleasant guy who was capable of ugly behavior. One surprise of Ms. Bair’s biography is that Mr. Gopnik, no indifferent parent, would show such personal esteem for a man who, rumored to have a thing for too-young women, once gave a sleeping baby a static shock on purpose. “All he wanted was to create a situation where the child would always remember him,” as Steinberg explained over the baby’s tears to its mother.

The ability to be childlike even in child abuse wasn’t the only one of Steinberg’s paradoxes. He was a depressive who liked to drive sports cars, a perfectionist who preferred his work to appear in the pages of a perishable, general-interest weekly, a self-described “writer who draws.” He preferred the company of art critics like Harold Rosenberg to the crazy artists Rosenberg wrote about. Ms. Bair makes it clear that Steinberg was a man who lived for adultery, yet he could also be improbably loyal: for decades, he funded the lives of parents he didn’t like (he modeled his caricatures of Mussolini on his mother), a half-dozen cousins he hardly knew, a college girlfriend who cheated on him and the guy she cheated on him with. That guy, Aldo Buzzi, was such a close friend that he ended up with the byline on Steinberg’s memoirs; it’s hard to write about Steinberg without recourse to oxymorons of this kind.

Ms. Bair describes Steinberg’s life as “a parallel to the history of the twentieth century,” and it’s true that he lived on a grand scale. Steinberg was raised by lower-class Jewish parents in the Bucharest of the 1920s. In 1933, he moved to Milan to study architecture, where he got his start cartooning for a satirical weekly called Bertoldo. Soon, the precarious expat with the “X-ray” physique had a fan base, a few girlfriends and enough spare cash to stand drinks for friends. Success stories are always a little opaque, but Ms. Bair still might have done a better job explaining the ease with which Steinberg transformed doodling into a living. He continued to draw for Bertoldo until 1938, when Mussolini began enacting a raft of anti-Semitic legislation and work dried up for “the foreign Jew.” By 1940, he had surrendered himself under pressure to his local police chief, who remanded him to the Italian concentration camp at Tortoreto.

This disaster set the stage for five decades of professional windfalls. Steinberg’s term in Tortoreto only lasted a month, as Romanian relatives living in America successfully intervened to get him out of Europe. He ended up in Santo Domingo, a city he found “vulgar.” He surfaced on the radar of New Yorker founder Harold Ross. “I’m told he’s in his twenties, and a man of ideas,” Jim Geraghty, The New Yorker’s art director, told Ross, and by late June of 1942 he had helped Steinberg immigrate to the United States. He’d hardly arrived when, in 1943, he was packed off to China by “Wild” Bill Donovan’s OSS. “God knows how your knowledge of the Italian people will benefit you in China,” commented Geraghty, “but perhaps the Navy knows best.” By the time he returned, Steinberg was engaged to the Romanian-American painter Hedda Sterne. He was already endeared to New Yorker readers, for whom he’d done a series of well-liked drawings about his forays in the Orient.

Settling in America involved Steinberg in a lot of traveling beyond America. He was a frequent flier when flight was glamorous, haring around the globe to meet deadlines, arrange exhibitions, have sex with women Ms. Bair leaves unnamed and dine with friends whose celebrated surnames are searchable in her index. Ms. Bair works hard to untangle these itineraries, and though the researcher in her is clearly game, the writer can seem overwhelmed. I lost count of the number of times that she described Steinberg’s lifestyle as “frenetic.”

It’s true that with his trademark big glasses and bald head, Steinberg could seem omnipresent. He was popular, promiscuous and lucky. Typical was his trip to Russia, where The New Yorker dispatched him in 1956. On the flight over, he was seated next to Graham Greene. It was their only meeting, and they got drunk together. Greene told Steinberg what kind of coat to take to the tundra. This cameo kicks off one of the biography’s funnier sequences, in which Steinberg, bored by Soviet hosts who repeatedly send him to pompous cultural events (“Once again he had to sit through Don Quixote”), starts ducking away between arias for quickies with strangers (“Girl from Swedish Embassy”). Though Steinberg, like his biographer, was mostly discreet enough not to name names, he wasn’t above itemizing his trysts in a diary he knew his wife was bound to read. “Do you want to live with such a monster?” he once asked her.

Sterne left Steinberg in 1960. To the extent that Ms. Bair has given her material dramatic shape, it’s as a tragedy culminating in the suicide of Sigrid Spaeth, Steinberg’s chief girlfriend for the next 35 years, with Steinberg’s personal coldness in the role of nemesis. (He “deflavorized” emotions, according to Sterne.) Spaeth was a German woman 20 years Steinberg’s junior whom Steinberg met at a party. She became his sexual obsession. She used to joke about her parents’ role in Kristallnacht at dinners on the Upper East Side. Ms. Bair theorizes that Steinberg, who donated to Jewish charities, found this exciting. Though he paid her expenses, Steinberg couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, do much for her career as a designer of book jackets. Spaeth depended on his stipends even when they weren’t speaking. She was always high-strung, but it’s possible that Steinberg’s combination of munificence and neglect drove her insane. “I hope I am not dying,” she wrote of one failed suicide attempt—“despite the interesting side effects it would have on Saul.”

When, in 1996, Spaeth fatally jumped off the roof of her apartment building on Riverside Drive, Steinberg mailed photocopies of her suicide note to friends. This seems to have been his way of grieving for her. Though he had given her nearly everything she owned, Spaeth willed the bulk of her assets to her analyst, a Jungian whom Steinberg had placed on retainer. Steinberg fell into a melancholy, and when he became suicidal, he was persuaded to try electroshock therapy, which damaged his memory but didn’t work. He died in 1999, his self-loathing, to all appearances, intact. “Mr. Steinberg, you don’t know how to be close, only in the mind,” Spaeth wrote him in 1970. “But I am human not an idea and the caress of a bum at the right moment when I needed it was more assuring than all your words.”

The opposition of life and art—of “the caress of a bum” and the “brooding of the hand,” as Steinberg once described doodling—is a heavy subject; yet the Steinberg-Spaeth psychodrama doesn’t carry the weight it should. This might be because Ms. Bair has so little to say about Steinberg’s work. “By putting his own particular spin on what he drew,” she writes, “he could turn his subjects into an ‘aha!’ moment for those who beheld his work.” Discussion of “aha!” moments is about as epiphanic as her art criticism gets, and it’s a shame. A biographer who saw more in the art might have seen more to like, or understand, in its maker. For this “sweetest of cruel men” was well aware of the tax he paid on his devastating gifts. “I have tried so hard to break through the asbestos that coats me,” he said. “Inside, deep inside, I am soft.” Whether the softness within would excuse the asbestos without was a question for which Steinberg didn’t have an answer. He knew that “work was ... the only form of altruism the artist has.” Did he work hard enough?

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Rushdie.

Last June, officials at a software expo in Tehran announced that production had begun on a new computer game—“The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and the Implementation of his Verdict.” “We felt we should find a way,” said a spokesperson, Mohammad-Taqi Fakhrian, “to introduce our third and fourth generation to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and its importance.” Being cast as the bad guy in an educational first-person-shooter wasn’t the first of Mr. Rushdie’s tribulations in the entertainment business. In a well-known episode of Seinfeld, Mr. Rushdie’s life in hiding is the subject of a joke, and in a less well-known movie, International Gorillay, three flying Korans burn the villain, “Salman Rushdie,” with lightning bolts. There were weirder indignities. Bono based a “haunting ballad” on one of his books, then pursued him into a parked car to make Mr. Rushdie listen to it on repeat. Warren Beatty once hit on Mr. Rushdie’s girlfriend while the author watched from the other end of the table, and during the filming of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Hugh Grant kissed him on the mouth. Of his cameo in that movie—he surfaces at a book party to point Renée Zellweger to the toilet—Mr. Rushdie writes in his new memoir, Joseph Anton (Random House, 656 pp., $30), “It was harder than he expected to play a character called Salman Rushdie.”

Salman Rushdie was a private person who became a public problem, and somewhere along the way he got famous. Like the lives of many celebrities, like any life heightened by the attention of strangers, his story has prompted a mix of pity and envy. Mr. Rushdie was already a distinguished author when The Satanic Verses came out in 1988. His first novel, Grimus, had been a flop, but his second was 1980’s Midnight’s Children, which beat out books by Ian McEwan and Doris Lessing to win the Booker Prize. A late-bloomer at 41, he seemed poised for a long career of short lists, but reaction to his third novel was febrile. The Satanic Verses wasn’t loved by its first reviewers. As Mr. Rushdie recalls, there was an “apocryphal ‘Page 15’ club of readers who could not get past that point.” It didn’t matter. The Satanic Verses was an exemplary book of its century: it would belong not to its readers, but to its nonreaders. It was a scandal before it was available. There were riots in India and Pakistan, in which people died; there was a book-burning in Bradford, England; and onValentine’s Day 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeinei issued a fatwa: Mr. Rushdie had been “sentenced to death.” “He was considered to be in more danger than anyone in the country except, perhaps, the queen.” Words had gotten him into a mess they couldn’t get him out of. He went underground.

Mr. Rushdie would spend the next decade in the crabbed embrace of British state security. It was a “calamitous distortion of the quotidian.” “Salman vanished,” as Martin Amis says in the book, “into the front page.” Depending on whom you ask, these were years of frustrationor ascension, of thwarted lockdown or trendy captivity. Mr. Rushdie became a Knight of the British Empire, but he was prohibited, for nine years, from flying British Air, and you get the feeling few of his bowel movements in the ’90s went unnoted by MI6. Book tours, certainly, were never more fraught.

Joseph Anton takes its title from the code name Mr. Rushdie used to communicate with his bodyguards while in hiding, though the pseudonym had a provenance of its own: “[Joseph] Conrad, the translingual creator of wanderers … and [Anton] Chekhov, the master of loneliness and melancholy.” This pedigree failed to register with the “prot” team. “Jolly good,” said one bodyguard. “You won’t mind if we call you Joe?” Actually, Mr. Rushdie writes, he did mind. That he includes this deflationary anecdote while refusing to be taken down a peg by it is only one of many signs that Mr. Rushdie is not fully in control of the irony of his story. The first thing readers will notice about this memoir is that the memoirist has written it in the third person. It is not a perspective often associated with self-awareness.

“Human life was rarely shapely, only intermittently meaningful, its clumsiness the inevitable consequence of the victory of content over form, of what and when over how and why,” Mr. Rushdie writes. Unexpectedly, he seems to be okay with this. Joseph Anton is a book with an agenda—it deals with Mr. Rushdie’s early life in an efficient 80 pages, devoting the remaining 500 to the fatwa years—but it doesn’t have much of a structure. This happens, then that happens, but there are few flashbacks and no deeper patterns of recurrence. The writing is diaristically raw. This conveys, or enacts, something of the delirium of Mr. Rushdie’s predicament, as he lurches from wine with Harold Pinter to a paean to free expression to “crouching in shame behind a kitchen counter to avoid being seen by a sheep farmer.” When an ordinary man is made to feel the pinch of geopolitics, you think, this is what it looks like. Yet it can sometimes lead to a boringness problem. Most of the gossip flies by (Margaret Thatcher was “touchy-feely”; Pinter faxed his bad poetry to friends), but there are also great wads of Clinton-era dope about the book trade, and it doesn’t help that Mr. Rushdie is always off strenuously getting divorced. (He has been married four times.) You are left with an impression of life unvetted by art, a pileup of happenings.

Or rather, non-happenings. “It was the unchangingness that was the story,” he writes, “the intolerable eternity of it.” The memoir is destined for a merciful anticlimax. Since 2000, Mr. Rushdie has lived like anyone else; the threat posed by the fatwa has mostly receded. Although his Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator assaulted and his Norwegian publisher shot three times in the back, the closest Mr. Rushdie himself ever came to harm was in an unrelated car accident with a manure truck.

We are left with the tale of a tormented non-event: the long wait for assassins that don’t arrive, in which the protocols of state protection take center stage. For Mr. Rushdie, this amounted to being told what to do all the time. The book is a nightmare of officiousness. “Everything that was not expressly allowed,” he notes, “was forbidden.” The state would keep him breathing, but beyond that life could wait. Mr. Rushdie’s struggles with his keepers to extend the limits of the allowable give the story what little momentum it has. Finally, his son is allowed to spend the night; finally Mr. Rushdie is allowed to give a speech, to go to America, to go to the movies, to go to dinner in downtown London. These banal gains are farcically hard-won, and you feel his frustration with their slowness. Perhaps, as a reader, you feel it too much.

In Mr. Rushdie’s telling, the mullahs alone don’t bear blame for his ordeal. Much of the book is given over to more local vexations—some of them seemingly trivial. Penguin’s refusal to release a Satanic Verses paperback provides an oddly major subplot that consumes more than a hundred pages. “There was nothing to be gained by bearing a grudge,” Mr. Rushdie writes, and yet here they come, the droves who let him down: prime ministers, presidents, publishers, ex-wives, fellow writers, prize-awarding committees, loose-mouthed policemen, the “he-knew-what-he-was-doing, he-did-it-on-purpose party.”

On the other side are the “Friends Without Whom Life Would Have Been Impossible.” “Your friends are going to close around you like an iron circle,” said Bill Buford, the former Granta editor, “and inside that ring you will be able to lead your life.” Mr. Buford was right. Most tolerated his impositions with a smile; for a book about an “invisible man,” the story is conspicuously, and even promiscuously, social. These favors usually took the form of vacating a house for the novelist to go hide in, though friends also turn out to have been the movers behind Mr. Rushdie’s crucial meetings with John Major, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. This makes it all the more unexpected, in a story so touched by the power of friendship, when Mr. Rushdie points out that his friends were plainly half in love with the pageantry of his personal hell: “When he asked them for memories of those days, they gave him memories of policemen ... He was becoming a sideshow and the police were the main event.” Yet he lets it go at that, and the dark thought goes unpursued.

It’s not the first time in this memoir that complexity gets pushed to the side. “The crisis was like an intense light shining down on everyone’s choices and deeds,” Mr. Rushdie writes, “creating a world without shadows, a stark unequivocal place of right and wrong.” One interest of the book is seeing who will thrive in this Manichean glare. The late Christopher Hitchens looks like a contender. Though he was loved for much that Mr. Rushdie lacks—comic timing, a charismatic prose style, a gift for filleting sitting ducks—they shared a belief that the “Rushdie Affair” was simple. Islamists had attacked a basic right. Enlightenment values needed to be affirmed. They were “defending free expression from barbarism,” as Hitchens put it in his memoir.

It doesn’t occur to either writer that they may have had a regressive agenda of their own. Leave it to Norman Mailer to stick his foot in it. “The Ayatollah Khomenei has offered us an opportunity to regain our frail religion,” Mailer wrote in 1989, “which happens to be faith in the power of words and our willingness to suffer for them.” Mr. Rushdie still writes best-sellers, but it bears remembering that he has been caught for two decades in the amber of a crisis from the ’80s, when “literature still felt important.” “He had been lucky to be attacked,” as he says, “just before the dawn of the information age.” Of course, you can’t burn an e-book, but maybe that’s his point.

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"Capital." (Courtesy W. W. Norton & Company)

In 2010, the English novelist and critic John Lanchester published a book about the credit crisis of 2008. It’s called I.O.U. Presented as a guidebook to the dark side of fiscal complexity, I.O.U. also covers simpler terrain. Half of its usefulness lies in the author’s talent for unraveling the deviousness of modern finance, but the other half lies in his willingness to explain, and then punctually re-explain, the basics of how money works. The pyrotechnic frauds and cutting-edge ruses that impelled the credit crunch are exposed—and sometime before that there’s a set of instructions about how to draw up a balance sheet. This was a winning formula; I.O.U. became a bestseller. It can’t have hurt that Mr. Lanchester is a witty and likeable writer, and that his conclusions are so passionately fair-minded. After three decades of the rough-and-tumble of laissez-faire boom and bust, Mr. Lanchester proposed we smarten up and just shrink: “We in the West can do something that no people in history have done: we can show the world that we know when we have enough.”

With the guidebook behind him, Mr. Lanchester set to the task of writing a Big Book, for which he has chosen a high-profile title: Capital (W.W. Norton & Company, 528 pp., $26.95). This new novel opens in the winter of 2007 in London, and it ends there a year later. It is the chronicle of an annus horribilis in the big city. Ruptures are appearing in the real estate bubble, there’s been a run on Northern Rock bank, and a rising fever of paranoia afflicts the globe’s financiers. This is Capital’s point of departure; as we all know, the decline from here will be drastic.

It’s possible that no single person leads an exemplary financial life, or has a particular experience of money capable of standing in for the universal experience. Being poor is so unlike being rich—which is so unlike being middle class. Wanting is so much different than having. It may be that this is true—which in turn may explain why, in lieu of focusing on a single character, Mr. Lanchester focuses on a road: Pepys Road, on which “history had sprung an astonishing plot twist”: “all of the houses in Pepys Road, as if by magic, were now worth millions of pounds.”

A postal code, then, in place of a protagonist. It’s quite a mandate for a novelist. “One thing about London,” as a character thinks at one point: “there was a lot of it.” And there’s a fair bit of it just on Pepys Road: The plot of Capital has more strands than a bowl of spaghetti. As well as the inevitable banker plot, which provides something like a center of gravity, there’s a terrorist plot, a soccer plot, a dying grandmother plot, a Zimbabwean refugee plot, a Polish builder plot, a Hungarian nanny plot, a Pakistani family plot, a few lawyer plots, a postal harassment plot and a plot about a Banksy-like guerilla artist. This last character is the dying grandmother’s grandson: Graham, aka “Smitty.” The lone artist among the dramatis personae, Smitty is—of course—ruthlessly acute about money, a fact relayed without much subtlety. “You can’t commodify this shit,” Smitty says of his anonymity to the public. “Which is the whole point. But it adds to your mojo, to your aura. And that allows you to make shit you can sell. See?”

Riding alongside the main plots are the subplots and their side characters: the bored policemen, the scheming subordinates, the chucked girlfriends. If this all sounds slightly hysterical—well, it is. But it’s not as hysterical as it must sound. At 500 pages, Capital is a quick (relatively) and coherent read. One factor in this is undoubtedly Mr. Lanchester’s grace as a stylist. Another is the novel’s suspensefulness, its bag of middlebrow tricks. There are twists, reversals, cliffhangers, sentimental payoffs. But the major factor is that Mr. Lanchester is skilled at the business of composition. All the disparate pieces of Capital line up—and are enriched by their alignment. And the pacing, the sense of overall development, doesn’t flag. However you feel about the results, you must concede that as a feat of narrative engineering, Capital is—to quote Mr. Lanchester’s verdict on one failed financial instrument in I.O.U.—“very, very clever.”

Capital doesn’t have a hero, but it does have a character who seems to have auditioned, at some point, for the role, the banker Roger Yount. “Looking at him, women would often find themselves wondering: tall, rich, well-dressed, clean: why isn’t he sexy?” This dapper clunker has a plum job, a pretty wife, a swanky townhouse. Yet the lifestyle turns out to have the same quality of sterile luster as the man to whom it belongs. Roger’s useless at work, for instance. Finance has been mathematized, and though he’s a boss, Roger in practice defers to his deputy, a nerd of writhing ambition named Mark. Roger’s wife, Arabella, is also disappointing: a frigid spendthrift, a fiend for spas and a spacey parent to the two Yount children. “Arabella knew that if she drank any more she would have a hangover,” Mr. Lanchester writes, “and part of the point of being in this luxury spa was to go home looking and feeling fabulous, so she went to her room and read a novel set in Afghanistan.” She is the most repulsive character in the book.

The Younts are poised for a comeuppance, and though he’s not credited with much intelligence Roger senses this. One of the running jokes of the novel’s early pages is Roger’s campaign to persuade himself that he merits a £1,000,000 bonus. It’s a sum he’s overextended enough to need but still lucid enough to find absurd: “The figure of £1,000,000 had started as a vague, semi-comic aspiration and had become an actual necessity, something he needed to pay the bills and set his finances on the square.” One thing that poverty does to people is exercise editorial restraint on their lifestyles, but for Roger that restraint has relaxed; his life has become a “semi-comic” extravaganza of self-pampering. It’s a condition of self-caricature.

Capital could be criticized for its reliance on exaggerated stock types: the gruff Pole, the vapid blonde, the boisterous Pakistanis, the jaded policeman, the puritanical young Muslim. But the problem is really that it doesn’t exaggerate enough, that Mr. Lanchester doesn’t let his characters become grotesque. For a novel called Capital, it contains less decadence than you might expect. One novel it invites comparison with is Martin Amis’s Money, and it’s an instructive comparison. Mr. Lanchester doesn’t have Mr. Amis’s relish for excess, for distemper; he never thrills to the infamies of his characters. I.O.U. is a book much given to nostalgia for “old-fashioned” fiscal conduct—for the days before “the idea of value” was “replaced by the idea of price.” Sometimes you wonder if Mr. Lanchester’s rational distaste for the vulgarities of the financial present hasn’t hampered his novelization of it.

And yet that doesn’t make the distaste any less compelling. “This just wasn’t enough to live by,” Roger thinks after the fall. “You could not spend your entire span of life in thrall to the code of stuff. There was no code of stuff. Stuff was just stuff. You couldn’t live by it or for it. Roger’s new motto: stuff is not enough.”

editorial@observer.com

"Canada." (Courtesy Ecco)

Near the end of Canada (Ecco, 432 pp., $27.99), the new novel by Richard Ford, the narrator suggests a few literary parallels to the story he’s just finished telling. It’s quite a crib note:

[These books] to me seem secretly about my young life—The Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, The Sheltering Sky, The Nick Adams Stories, The Mayor of Casterbridge. A mission into the void. Abandonment. A figure, possibly mysterious, but finally not...

Only someone fairly certain of his bearings would presume to insert himself into the middle of that lineup. Hemingway, Hardy, Fitzgerald, Conrad and Bowles—and Ford. It is unthinkable that a first-time novelist, for example, would risk placing himself (in print) alongside even one of them. But Mr. Ford, who has written seven novels and won a Pulitzer prize, is a grandee—some would say a great. Can he pull it off? That his immodesty merely makes you frown (that it doesn’t make you send his book flapping to the floor) is a measure of Canada’s success. The new novel isn’t Conrad, but who cares? It’s good enough to rise above its pretensions to greatness.

Canada takes place in 1960. It describes a spate of “very bad things” that swamps a 15-year-old boy living in Montana as the adult version of that boy broods on them. You could call it a coming-of-age story, but you could equally call it a horror story, and perhaps that’s the point. “It was the event of our lives, wasn’t it?” the narrator’s sister reflects. “A great big fuck-up, with everything piled on top.” I suppose you would have to call Canada an ugly story. It contains a stickup, a suicide, a double-homicide and a drunken night of incest, and its locales are unvaryingly unlovely. The bulk of the action takes place in the “hell-hole” of Great Falls, Mont., and a “terrible shack” in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan (“the void”). They are landscapes of inexorable nullity, meant to put one in mind of The Sheltering Sky—though the kooky names of the key characters do it first. Dell Parsons, the narrator, has a fraternal twin sister named Berner. Their parents are Beverly and Neeva. “Bev,” surprisingly, is the father.

It is this unhappy couple who kicks off the great big fuck-up. Having incurred “a trivial debt … to a small group of ineffectual Indians,” Bev and Neeva decide to rob a bank in North Dakota. The results are predictably dismal; the desperate klutzes of a film like Fargo are not far away. “You two don’t seem like bank robbers,” notes the policeman who arrests them a few days later. “You look like people who’d work in a grocery store.” Soon the Parson parents are in prison and their twins have hit the road. Berner goes to San Francisco; Dell heads north, and it is his fate that, by default, we follow, as a family friend drives him over the Canadian border and into the lair of  Arthur Remlinger, an American hotelier living in exile on the Canadian prairie. Remlinger is stylish like Jay Gatsby and psychopathic like Kurtz. His life is a powder keg of lies. Dell is first his drudge, then his mentee, then his patsy. “To say something’s founded on a lie isn’t really alleging much,” Remlinger tells him. “I’m much more interested in how those lies hold up.” Canada is mostly about lies that break down.

The novel is a small-time tragedy that does a lot of nodding at big names. As well as the lessons he has taken from the many greats he explicitly cites, Mr. Ford quotes from Yeats, Ecclesiastes and Rimbaud, and “William Maxwell’s presence will be obvious to any reader,” as he notes in the “Acknowledgments.” Yet for all its loans and allusions, Canada is very much a novel by Richard Ford. Great Falls, where Canada begins, is the closest thing Mr. Ford has to home turf; it provides the setting for many of his finest short stories, as well as his 1990 novel, Wildlife. Canada’s themes will be similarly resonant to readers familiar with Mr. Ford’s oeuvre. “How amazingly far normalcy extends,” Dell notes as he imagines his parents passing the time on their doomed drive to North Dakota. Later, having acquired a more dramatic proof of this point, Dell will urge us: “Think how close evil is to the normal goings-on that have nothing to do with evil. Through all these memorable events, normal life was what I was seeking to preserve for myself.”

The emptiness just beyond the edge of normal American life has always been the great subject of Mr. Ford’s fiction. “The more normal the April day the better for me,” thinks Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of the Bascombe Trilogy. Frank is Mr. Ford’s most famous character (the second Bascombe novel, Independence Day, won the Pulitzer). He is a writer of short stories who gives it up to be a sportswriter, a trade he subsequently drops to sell real estate. Frank’s life has been willfully scaled down, and so too his ambitions: “to participate briefly in the lives of others at a low level” is all he wants from a career. He is a deep thinker who sticks to small talk, a romantic who has become besotted with suburbia. Of course, it’ll never work out. He gets “dreamy” at crucial moments, he can’t keep a woman close, and garrulous strangers pick on him with their sob stories. Frank wouldn’t want to be a novelist’s good character, but usually he can’t help it.

Canada’s hero, Dell, is like that: if he’s not a dull kid, it’s not for lack of trying. As his world goes to pieces, his aim monotonously remains “to find a way to be normal.” One difference between Frank and Dell is that Frank’s abnormality is a matter of character, whereas Dell’s is imposed by circumstance. This manifests itself in Mr. Ford’s prose style. Not much happens in the Bascombe books. They are adventures of the inner life, and what drama they possess tends to rise and fall on whether Frank thinks his way in or out of a good mood. This leads to self-consciously loopy prose. The idea, presumably, is to suggest a man who spends an unhealthy amount of time in his head. He calls a bedroom a “nuptial sanctum,” and death a “wormy stupor”; “the gradual numbly-crumbly toward the end stripe” probably means something like existence.

Though the Bascombe novels are long, they confine themselves to short spans of time and move slowly, a formula that affords great scope to their hero’s habit of dizzy abstraction. Horrible things actually do happen in Canada, though, and Mr. Ford’s tics as a stylist are accordingly muted. The results are gratifyingly spare. “The jail was a place you smelled more than anything else,” Dell thinks at one point. It’s a sharp apprehension of an alien environment, vivid on its own—something a narrator like Frank Bascombe might have fussed the energy from.

Of course, fuss isn’t all bad, and Canada’s ultimately no less thoughtful than any of the Bascombe books. “To me, it’s the edging closer to the point of no return that’s fascinating,” Dell thinks, brooding on the outcome of his parents. He proves a storyteller much preoccupied with pinning down his points of no return—the country of Canada (“Indistinguishable. Same air. But different”) has a symbolic function here—and one thing he does is catalog the final times he does anything. It’s a practice that is shocking at times (“I never saw [Dad] again”) and at others endearingly neurotic: “We left the café,” Dell notes of one unremarkable Saskatchewan diner. “I was never there again.” The gloomy vigilance of an unhappy child, one of its effects is to make an adult reader wonder if he’ll ever return to the page on which he read about it. Somehow, the thought would be less morbid if the pages weren’t numbered. Surely Frank Bascombe, the dreamer, would agree. As Paul Bowles put it, “It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much.”

editorial@observer.com

Bill Clegg. (Photo by Christian Hansen/AP)

In 2005, Bill Clegg, the handsome, gay cofounder of a thriving Manhattan literary agency, went on a two-month crack spree that destroyed his life. He was 33. It was, as he put it in his first memoir, 2010’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, his “Jesus year.” That book is a stylish record of his swan dive to rock bottom. It’s very readable, in the sense that you’d have to be a Martian to find it boring. It’s short, there’s lots of sex, and whenever a worried friend pops up or remorse sets in there’s always a “thick cloud of crack smoke” to put things in perspective. Mr. Clegg spends much of the book half-naked in hotel rooms, getting high and drinking vodka with “my towel cinched low on my hips.” Usually he has a “partner in crime,” and when he doesn’t he turns to porn. Crack makes him paranoid: he sees DEA agents everywhere, hears footsteps, infers conspiracies. He believes the cabdrivers of Manhattan are malevolently leagued against him. “Lose nothing or lose everything,” he thinks, but ultimately he just loses a lot. As well as $40,000 in savings, he loses his friends, his clients, his business, his reputation, his libido, his boyfriend and 40 pounds. The debauchery is punctuated by bathetic episodes in which he tries to get new holes pierced in his belt; his pants don’t fit him anymore.

Near the end, Mr. Clegg smokes $2,000 worth of crack in a room at the SoHo Grand, downs a bottle of sleeping pills and nearly dies. “What now?” he thinks, bankrupt in his hospital bed, so of course it’s off to rehab. A few months later, he returns to the city: “Gradually, mornings become merely mornings, not panic-stricken hours managing the consequences of not coming home before daybreak.” There are signs, though, that he may have more writing in him. Vignettes from a troubled past interweave the narrative of his binge. There is an atmosphere of things not dealt with, of stewing neuroses. “I am not in a hurry to leave this process of letting go of the many secrets that I had spent a lifetime squirreling away,” he thinks at the tail end of one futile trip to detox. Still, when Mr. Clegg, now sober, unexpectedly gets offered another job in publishing, the book more or less wraps on the spot. Things have cooled down, and the vein of good copy has dried up.

The new book, Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery (Little, Brown and Company, 208 pages, $24.99), fills out a story that was telescoped into a few paragraphs in the old book: it is about Mr. Clegg’s return to New York. The process by which the panic-stricken dawns became mere mornings, it turns out, was prolonged. He kept smoking crack, and the good copy kept coming. The title refers to “a milestone that many fellowships and organizations dealing with alcohol and substance abuse use to mark a strong foothold in sobriety.” Pursuit of this foothold structures the memoir, as it structured the period of Mr. Clegg’s life it covers, and there is many a slip and stubbed toe. He gets within “spitting distance of ninety days,” and then he relapses. He goes a few weeks; and then he relapses again. “Enough is enough,” says his mother, and he agrees—but soon enough he’s “on autopilot,” which in Cleggian means having a crack-stoked foursome in Soho. He’s up, he’s down, he’s up, and he’s down. “Why do I always want to die?” he wonders “impatiently.”

In the last chapter of the book, which was completed last year, Mr. Clegg admits that he relapsed again recently, after five and a half years of spotless sobriety. “For me, there are no finish lines,” he writes. “No recovered, just recovering.” Then he describes the apotheosis of admitting this in a “meeting.” This completes a shift of emphasis that the whole book works to enact. For it is the meetings of addicts, not the “terrible but hilarious stories” of their addiction, that he commemorates in Ninety Days.

Post-rehab, Mr. Clegg was jobless, aimless and nearly penniless, “a Dickensian speck in a city that no longer [had] use for me.” His social life was moribund, he was “qualified to do absolutely nothing,” and he didn’t have an apartment: he slept on a futon in the West Village studio of an understandably wary former friend. All Mr. Clegg had to fill his days were the meetings of “a fellowship” for addicts. The fellowship was suggested by his sponsor, Jack—a jukebox of the platitudes of recovery: “[Jack] metabolizes what I imagine are insurmountable obstacles into simple phrases like One day at a time and Take it easy, which I find at once baffling, patronizing, and comforting.” Mr. Clegg goes to a lot of meetings, and by the end of the book he is “cling[ing] to” these phrases he used to “cringe at.” More than the saga of his recovery, Ninety Days is the story of his embrace of the methodology of recovery: its mores, credos, precepts. In the final pages of Portrait, he had noted a stirring of his feelings toward “something less self-concerned.” He has delivered on this stirring by writing a memoir that is an ode to a community. It is “the flip side” of his crack paranoia. He does not “count days” alone.

Thus we meet Annie, an actress who went on a bender and totaled her career, and Polly, a cokehead who lives with her twin, Heather (another cokehead). Polly and Mr. Clegg attend meetings together and walk dogs in Union Square Park. They are bantering competitors in the race to 90 days. He relapses, and she scolds him. She relapses, and he scolds her. They are “fluent in the language of falling apart”; Polly jocosely calls him “Crackhead.” We also meet Asa, a heroin addict and urban planner. With his “halo” of “preposterous” red hair, the serendipitous Asa is always around the corner and primed to intervene when Mr. Clegg starts in on a “death dance.” Somewhat less serendipitously, Asa falls in love with him. “Let’s face it,” Mr. Clegg tells him. “I’m hardly a catch.”

Recovery, for Mr. Clegg, is an even mix of bonhomie and boredom. “I wonder what I’ll do all day, how I’ll fill up the hours, where I’ll go,” he thinks. Besides going to meetings, he works out, eats granola and looks forward to afternoons of Oprah with “the fizzy energy of watching the Academy Awards.” Mostly, though, he sits around waiting for the old urges and the crises they entrain—or for addict friends to call him up and yak about their urges. He is good at evoking the persistence of addiction—the “sudden craving, the world narrowing to one desire.” He isn’t as good as Burroughs or Exley or Jim Carroll (or, more recently, Edward St. Aubyn), but he is good enough for the tale of his rehabilitation to give you an unseemly nostalgia for the tale of his dissolution. Sometimes the burdens of dramatizing his rise from the abyss send his style into free fall: “I can make it, I think desperately, meaning both the meeting and in general.”

More generally, though, the problem is that Mr. Clegg doesn’t explain how a man who lives for language could subscribe to a program that employs it so carelessly. His embrace of the culture of recovery makes emotional sense—he is weak, he wants consolation, he needs the camaraderie of addicts like he needs “oxygen”—but it doesn’t make literary sense. The personal redemption comes at the cost of a host of unredeemable clichés. At one point, he alludes to James Frey, a guy who wrote with “macho arrogance” and went on Oprah to crow about “how he relied on his own willpower to quit.” Though he admits that, in the thick of his addiction, he “strongly identified” with Mr. Frey’s attitude, Mr. Clegg doesn’t tell us how he got past that attitude, except by reminding us of the chaos it led him into. It leaves one wishing he had told a slightly larger story, of how a stylist of his powers found sustenance in rhetoric like “The truth will set you free”—of how he learned to speak in “a voice that is mine and not mine.” As it is, the heart and the mind are split. You root for him as he finds an apartment, a romance, a friend group and finally a job. But you count on the relapses to keep it interesting.

editorial@observer.com

"Going Solo." (Penguin)

Hell is other people, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre; and this may grant perspective on the news that solitude is in vogue in the United States. “Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single,” writes Eric Klinenberg in Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (Penguin Press HC, 288 pages, $27.95) “and 31 million—roughly one out of every seven adults—live alone.” Why so lonesome, Americans? A professor of sociology at New York University, Mr. Klinenberg spent years on the trail of typical specimens of contemporary singleness, from rake to recluse to divorcée. Now he has written a book, which reveals that most Americans live alone not because they must but because they would rather. Incidentally, it also suggests that the selfless gene may be recessive. As one interviewee puts it, “I just like that I don’t have to worry about anybody else’s anything.” That attitude is ahead of the curve—but only by a hair. “Our species has about 200,000 years of experience with collective living,” Mr. Klinenberg writes, “[but] only about fifty or sixty years with our experiment in going solo on a massive scale.” We live in the dawn of the first millennium of me time.

In preparing Going Solo, Mr. Klinenberg interviewed hundreds of real-life solo dwellers, whom he calls “singletons.” He even flew to Europe, where he observed “the intensity of Swedish social life.” Nevertheless, he avows in an appendix that his mission to render the average experience of singleness sometimes stymied his instincts as a storyteller: “The cost of [my] approach is that some intriguing personalities, extreme perspectives, and entertaining anecdotes are excluded from your consideration.” Thus, all the kooks and psychos have been left on the cutting room floor. There are no Miss Havishams, no Ted Kaczynskis, and only one guy who is vaguely like Bobby Fischer. “I recite poetry,” admits this interviewee, Guy. “And I drink—the best thing is Canadian vodka.” Then he starts in on the Star of David.

But we don’t meet other guys like Guy. The travesties of solitariness—the comb-overs, the cat fluff—are of little interest to Mr. Klinenberg, who is far keener on its trends. And when it comes to keeping others at bay, overwork is our master alibi. The singletons of our century tend to be too strung out with email to pursue the call of their loins, let alone to get in touch with their feelings. “Relationships are demanding and distracting,” Mr. Klinenberg writes. “They can slow you down or, worse, compromise the quality of your work. What’s more, few of them last. Don’t you owe it to yourself to prioritize work?” If it is true that “contemporary solo dwellers are primarily women,” their hearts are generally neither broken nor throbbing to be bared. And then, as Helen, one of his interviewees, declares, “Marriage is fucking boring.”

So what has the sociologist uncovered? Apparently if you take a freshly uncorked female workforce, toss in a lifespan ripened by modern medicine, swirl them in the shakers of Twitter and Google, then drain the result into the martini glass of a modern city, what you get is a cosmopolitan who does not mix well with roommates. Add the garnish of a famously brisk divorce rate, and there go spouses, too. Just watch out for the spillage—“a new population of marginal men.”

Singletons are not monolithic—neither politicians nor advertisers have devised a means of capturing them en bloc—but their numbers have swollen with the same transformations. “The rise of women, the communications revolution, mass urbanization, and the longevity revolution,” writes Mr. Klinenberg of these phenomena, “created conditions in which the individual could flourish.” Precisely how the individual would flourish was unclear. Going solo first grew widespread in the 1960s, when there were “no historical examples to learn from,” Mr. Klinenberg writes, “no precedents to mimic or avoid.” So the singletons winged it; Mr. Klinenberg counts among their founding influences the mores of places like Greenwich Village and the dictates of people like Hugh Hefner. They were firm about fluid bedtimes, but little else. Mr. Klinenberg repeats Gertrude Stein’s phrase, “life without a father.” Singleness was from the start synonymous with lack of supervision. Perhaps for this reason, “the stigma of living alone is not entirely gone.”

But it has, in latter days, decreased. Singleness, in our era, tends to take the form of an interlude. It is the bit between the family you are born into and the one you form; or it is the bit between your spouses; or it is the bit between your roommates. For many, it is literally a halfway house: addicts in the throes compose a major singleton constituency. To the geriatric, it may be the foyer of the grave; to the young, the antechamber of adulthood. Some consider it “a reward for success.” Whereas for others—for Lou (57, twice-divorced)—“the fact that I have been alone for so long is probably the biggest failure in my life.” Singleness can be a short stretch or a long haul, or a hole through which your prime years hemorrhage. It rots or renews.

Regardless, singletons recoil from claims made on their time, almost categorically. Their lives are scheduled. They are ticket-buyers and event-attenders, gym-users, “‘crack-berry’ junkies.” They prefer the selective intimacies of friendship to the aimless closeness of the couple. Their lives are compartmentalized. They have support networks for support, drinking buddies for drinks, gossips for gossip; but they do not support friendly gossips while drinking with them. Yes, their lives are tidy—unless they are so chaotic “you can’t even walk on the ground because it’s packed with stuff.”

Their sex lives are unenviable, mixing long spans of sexless solitariness with the occasional bout of loveless sex. For singletons are old hands of the chaste night in. But even when they get out, they tend to get by with a minimum of chivalry. Male singletons masturbate twice as frequently as boyfriends or husbands. Women, however, irrespective of relationship status, admit to an identical masturbatory habit: 7 percent do it once or more a week—wives, sweethearts, spinsters, all. Singletons of both sexes, inevitably, have less sex than the spoken for, with females being the particular paupers: “77 percent of unmarried divorced women,” for instance, “[say] they [have] not had sex” in six months. Yet the sexual plusses of singledom are nontrivial, if not quite tangible. “Some would surely prefer to have less sex with more partners than more sex with the same partner,” Mr. Klinenberg allows. Perhaps scarcity brings clarity. Singletons can be fortifyingly illusion-free about love. “She broke things off when [Victor’s] health began to fail,” writes Mr. Klinenberg of Eva, a “remarkably fit” septuagenarian widow—“not to be heartless, but because she didn’t want to become his caretaker as things spiraled downward.”

Mr. Klinenberg struck on the concept for Going Solo while researching his first book, an account of the ravaging of Chicago by the heat wave of July 1995. Within a week, 700 people had died—many of them, Mr. Klinenberg would soon realize, members of “a secret society of people who live and die alone,” for which “the heat wave was a morbid birth announcement.” It occurred to Mr. Klinenberg that it might just be an American thing. After all, the bosom of individualism could not exist without an underbelly. “It’s tempting to treat the soaring rates of living alone as a peculiar American condition,” Mr. Klinenberg writes, “an expression of what the literary critic Harold Bloom called the nation’s ‘religion of self-reliance.’” But the Bloomian eloquence is not predictive. In fact, Sweden “contains the greatest proportion of people who live alone,” trailed by “Norway, Finland, and Denmark.”

Another surprise is that Mr. Klinenberg doesn’t see singletons as a plague. He is out to explain the phenomenon—but also to defend it from an abundant literature of alarm. Mr. Klinenberg catalogues its touchstones: “The Lonely Crowd, The Pursuit of Loneliness, The Fall of Public Man, The Culture of Narcissism”—and of course, “Bowling Alone.” “The cultural critics and political officials who worry about the rise of living alone,” he writes, “don’t acknowledge that living alone is an individual choice that’s as valid as the choice to get married or live with a domestic partner.”

Mr. Klinenberg could have thought harder about his prose style. He prefers the edgeless diction of the nonpartisan report, with its reliance on woolly qualifiers like “valid” and “creative,” and he plumbs for clichés whenever they are available. A disaster is “unmitigated,” a lawn is “verdant,” a voice is “full of sadness and resignation.” And, of course, every variation of obviousness is “no surprise.” He also has a weakness for booming truisms. “But alas,” he writes, “our most astounding accomplishments are all too often the sources of our most difficult challenges.”

Yet for all that, Going Solo is invigoratingly open-minded. Even as he bows to clichés of expression, Mr. Klinenberg avoids a larger cliché of skepticism. It is a relief to read a work of nonfiction that doesn’t presuppose the superior virtuousness of “the family.” The planetary increase in Me Time does not have to be an omen of the End Times. Mr. Klinenberg advises us to “accept the fact that living alone is a fundamental feature of modern societies,” and even sees in it the outlines of a retort to the encroachments on our inner lives by this age of overconnectedness. “There’s such a thing as too much togetherness,” says Madeline, an elderly San Franciscan. It is to his credit as an intellectual that Mr. Klinenberg, a husband and father, can sympathize.

editorial@observer.com

"At Last." (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Patrick Melrose used to be an alcoholic, back when he was still a husband—though some time after his stint as a heroin addict, which was when he was young. Back then, Patrick was still rich. Not, to be sure, “as rich as God,” like “the Tescos,” yet certainly rich enough for a spot of sin. “Ten thousand [dollars] in two days,” he thinks in Bad News (1992), after lighting through a gram of heroin, six of cocaine and a crowd of lesser chemicals on a trip to New York. “Nobody could say he didn’t know how to have fun.” (The exception, of course, being Patrick himself: “I might as well have been shooting up a vial of my own tears.”) It was back then, when he was in his late 20s and still measured out his trust fund with blackened spoons, that Patrick identified his “type”: the “Hiso Bitch.” “The Hiso Bitch,” Patrick reminisces, “had to be … glamorous, intensely social, infinitely rich in the pursuit of pleasure, embedded among beautiful possessions. As if this was not enough (as if this was not too much), she also had to be sexually voracious and morally disoriented.”

Patrick Melrose is the invention of the English writer Edward St. Aubyn, who has followed him from boyhood to a bedsit and middle-age over the five books in which Patrick stars. The newest novel, At Last (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages, $25.00), begins where it ends, on the day of the cremation of Patrick’s mother, Eleanor. It is, as his ex-wife, Mary, admits, “one of the more legitimate throes of [Patrick’s] perpetual crisis.” Yet one wouldn’t want to make light of those other throes—just as it would be rash to grant special gravity to this one. “I think my mother’s death is the best thing to happen to me …,” as Patrick says, “well, since my father’s death.” That happened in Bad News, the second Melrose installment, where Patrick goes on his binge. “Thank God his father had died,” he thinks. “Without a dead parent there was really no excuse for looking so awful.” But like the Hiso Bitch, the closest Mr. St. Aubyn’s writing gets to looking awful is looking slightly overdressed. Mr. St. Aubyn is a connoisseur of bliss and malice. He is also simply a connoisseur. There are always Chippendales to look out for and Tiepolos to inspect, bottles of Burgundy beading on the table. Martin Amis once complained of a “head-in-air” quality in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, a “supercharged vein”: “The characters … don’t walk,” he wrote, “they ‘stride’; they don’t chew, they ‘munch’; they feel entitled.” And Mr. St. Aubyn’s fiction, where characters don’t “say” things, but “gasp” them; where they don’t “enter” rooms, but “surge” into them; and where “striding,” too, usurps the duty of “walking,” can easily make such an impression. Its manners are undemocratic. And so is its cast. “I firmly believe that one should have the widest possible range of acquaintances,” says a side character, Nicholas Pratt, in Some Hope (1994), “from monarchs right down to the humblest baronet in the land.”

Yet Mr. Amis eventually circles back to retract this judgment, praising Nabokov as a “witty enemy” of snobbery. The same goes for Mr. St. Aubyn, who excoriates the manners he so smoothly mimics—the smug good breeding of the “high-net-worth community,” which expels vulgarity while laying a place for viciousness. “Eleanor still found it inexplicable,” as he writes in Never Mind (1992), “that the best English manners contained such a high proportion of outright rudeness and gladiatorial combat.” Patrick Melrose’s personality contains these proportions too; he is a martyr to the conditions his author mocks and laments. For Patrick was a “nasty little boy.” And we all know that the child is father of the man. “There was no doubt about it,” Patrick thinks, early on in Bad News, “he was a fattist and a sexist and an ageist and a racist and a straightest and a druggist and, naturally, a snob, but of such a virulent character that nobody satisfied his demands.” This Bright Young Thing with blood-dark track marks also has a “melt-down-and-die stare.”

Yet Patrick didn’t come up with this killer look on his own. The child also has a real father. “After all,” thinks David Melrose, Patrick’s dad, in Never Mind, “what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about”—though amid this unlimited number, there are a few things of matchless potential. It is halfway through Never Mind that David first sodomizes the 5-year-old Patrick, in supposed discipline for an infraction David refuses to name. “Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one couldn’t boast about homosexual, paedophiliac incest with any confidence of a favorable reception,” David allows. But David will do it again anyway. He was never one to flinch at what the neighbors thought. “Other people labored through the odd bigoted remark,” thinks Nicholas Pratt, now in attendance at Eleanor’s funeral, “but David had embodied an absolute disdain for the opinion of the world.”

Information Mr. St. Aubyn has made public confirms Patrick’s story to share both the marquee traumas and much of the trivia of his own. Both are articulate sons of great English families that were undone by serial disinheritance; both were raped by their fathers as young boys; both were interminably rehabilitated in early manhood; both went to Oxford, where Mr. St. Aubyn is supposed to have snorted heroin through a hollow pen during his finals. They presumably share another habit. “Forget heroin,” Patrick thinks in At Last. “Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”

Patrick’s desire to be in two places at once is traceable back to his rape, when, “split in half by this incomprehensible violence,” he detached from his pinned child’s body to envision what was being done to him from the perspective of a gecko. But the tokens of this desire are omnipresent. “Speed was the last thing he wanted,” Patrick thinks after buying quite a lot of that plus some Quaaludes in Central Park, “but he didn’t like to buy a drug unless he had the capacity to contradict it.” Unlike the Melrose males, the late Eleanor rarely employed irony, probably because she was too busy running its errands. This was the woman who went to “Chad with Save the Children” while her husband was raping her son. “The absolute banishment of irony from Eleanor’s earnest persona,” Patrick thinks, “created a black market for the blind sarcasm of her actions.”

As the service yields to a party, and canapés supplant Yeats and St. Paul, Patrick finds himself yearning for an end to irony, its “consolatory system.” He has an epiphany (he is prone to epiphanies): “I just recognize how many things there are to be detached about,” Patrick says. “The incandescent hatred and the pure terror don’t invalidate the detachment, they give it a chance to expand.” He spends the rest of the novel expanding on this sense of expansiveness: “He imagined not taking life so personally, [and] the heavy impenetrable darkness of the inarticulacy turned into a silence that was perfectly transparent, and he saw that there was a margin of freedom, a suspension of reaction, in that clarity.”

Mr. St. Aubyn is an adept of these skies-asunder moments; there is, as Nicholas Pratt might put it, “a sort of swelling orchestra effect.” Yet the ability to take life less personally—the kernel of Patrick’s new outlook—may presuppose a weightier claim to personhood than Patrick has. Patrick seems to be his author’s alter ego, but of course he is not. He is Mr. St. Aubyn subtracted of novelistic talent—or rather, since Patrick is a far better speaker than most novelists are writers, he is Mr. St. Aubyn subtracted of the drive to novelize experience. But Patrick lacks more than that. A few references are made, in Mother’s Milk (2006), to Patrick’s job as a barrister, but they are half-hearted. By At Last, this afterthought of an occupation has been reduced to the vapor of an attitude: “the prosecuting style [Patrick] adopted when defending himself.”

It is not that Patrick floats above the shabbiness of money. Money is his wound and tormentor. In Some Hope he even acknowledges, “to his horror,” that “he would have to get a job.” The problem is rather that Patrick, like the vampire to which he so often compares himself in Bad News, does not exist from 9 to 5. We have seen him at funerals and dinner parties, as we have witnessed his dying falls and his falling-down drunkenness. But we have not seen his downtime. He lacks a lower key. “Nothing but the best, or go without,” went David Melrose’s credo; and Patrick’s life is like that. He drinks Champagne or eats dirt. He doesn’t take a walk unless he plans to have a Wordsworth moment. He doesn’t take a drug unless he’s willing to die. His personality is an effect of his ability to sustain unsustainable levels of personal intensity. Like the “Ah-ha Box” at his mother’s new age foundation—“for those little moments of epiphany and insight when we think, ‘Ah-ha!’”—Patrick is more of a container than a character: the place where Mr. St. Aubyn drops off his ideas, not the place he develops them.

The Melrose novels are among the smartest and most beautiful fictional achievements of the past 20 years, and it is doubtless slightly ungrateful to continue past recognition of that. But they are a mansion for a character who does not fill out a complete set of human dimensions. If Patrick Melrose is Mr. St. Aubyn’s alter ego, he is not yet another self.

editorial@observer.com

The name of the novelist Michel Houellebecq, with its little landslide of vowels, is less known in the United States than it is in France, his country of birth. But there, Mr. Houellebecq is a brand. Or at least he is an act. “I am about as ill-adapted as it is possible to be for a public role,” Mr. Houellebecq has written, and so, of course, he is a vivid public figure. Known for his attested habit of abruptly coming on to his female interviewers, he is also an epic smoker, an espouser of Sarkozy and a recluse. His surliness is a matter of public record. In 2002, Mr. Houellebecq was sued, and subsequently acquitted, for incitement of religious hatred, after calling Islam “the stupidest religion” in an interview. His mother wrote a whole book maligning him. The book is called L’Innocente. “It’s pretty scary that the old cow found a publisher,” the son responded in a book of his own.

Mr. Houellebecq’s first novel, Whatever (1994), followed several months in the life of an agricultural computer programmer. Little happens. Perhaps four things almost happen. (“Anything can happen in life,” Mr. Houellebecq has written, “especially nothing.”) There is an abortive attempt at murder, and an abortive attempt at self-castration; there is even an abortive attempt at finding a car the protagonist parked down a side street a few hours earlier. But he gives up the search after a few minutes, and decides to report the vehicle as stolen. “I’ve lived so little I tend to imagine I’m not going to die,” he thinks. Whatever is a book about the tyranny of dreariness. It contains no proper sex scenes, but in their absence exudes a heavy atmosphere of lust gone sour. This atmosphere recurs in Mr. Houellebecq’s second novel, The Elementary Particles (1998). “I met Anne in 1981,” says Bruno, a main character. “She wasn’t really beautiful, but I was tired of jacking off.” This book contains proper sex scenes.

So do the author’s later novels: Platform (2001), a sort “Tristan und Isolde” of sex tourism, and The Possibility of an Island (2005), a dystopian meditation on bodily decay. At one point in Island, Daniel, the protagonist, is grieved to realize that his long-standing girlfriend “preferred that I take her from behind,” which he melancholically attributes to “an inclination of the vagina or something.” Less sensitive readers might consider this a quirk love could survive, but it takes Daniel a mere pensive paragraph to go from there to the certitude that the relationship is doomed: “We would never know that infinitely double look of the couple united in happiness, humbly accepting the presence of organs, and limited joy; we would never truly be lovers.”

From “an inclination of the vagina,” to “the infinitely double look”; from the anatomical to the maudlin. One of the paradoxes of the Houellebecqian world view is that it is as sentimental in its principles as it is brutal in its particulars. “Maybe, like [H.P.] Lovecraft, all I have ever written are materialist horror stories,” he wrote. Swingers’ clubs have never known such an exalted literary champion. Yet Mr. Houellebecq has also written this: “Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two.”

There is something adolescent about this zero-sum vision, in which the world, held to high standards, is deemed hopelessly base for not meeting them. Mr. Houellebecq has acknowledged as much. “Adolescence is not only an important period in life,” he has written, “it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word.” But if the bitter pill of adulthood must be swallowed—well, then, why not down the whole bottle? Mr. Houellebecq is a kind of laureate of the tantrum, a writer whose body of work enacts a systematic overreaction to the letdowns of life after 14. It makes for a style of blunt contrasts, which can shift within a paragraph from helpful tips on the art of the hand job to an aperçu about Pascal. This author is an exponent of Thai prostitutes whose adverb of choice is “gently.”

Mr. Houellebecq’s new, Prix Goncourt-winning book, The Map and the Territory, is a rather mild offering by Houellebecqian standards. There is less sex and heresy than in any of the novels since Whatever. Instead, there are liberties of a different order: what Kingsley Amis, in response to his son Martin’s 1984 novel Money, called “buggering about with the reader.” For this novel by Michel Houellebecq also features a character called Michel Houellebecq, who shares Mr. Houellebecq’s résumé and persona. He will play a pungent supporting role in the proceedings. “He stank a little, but less than a corpse,” the hero thinks on meeting the author, who “looked like a sick old turtle.”

The hero is Jed Martin, an artist living in Paris who becomes famous, “singled out … by the law of supply and demand.” The novel is thus intimately preoccupied with the peculiarities of artistic stardom in a French milieu—and with the art market, a realm whose incongruities of innocence and cynicism Mr. Houellebecq is tartly alert to. Some of the jokes are inscrutable to an Anglophone. But not all. On learning the value of one of his paintings, Jed thinks, “Seven hundred and fifty thousand euros …: that made no sense. Picasso made no sense, either; even less, probably, if you could establish a grading in senselessness.” He has already met a man at an opening “who had spent three hours trying to dress artistically.”

There are two types of male character in Mr. Houellebecq’s fiction: the sex-starved loser, who goes through life stockpiling Viagra and signing up for singles’ retreats; and the asexual savant, who cruises on a wave of inborn ability toward some world-historical destiny. One can’t find his way into adult life. The other can’t get far enough away from it. Both, for different reasons, tend to go home alone. Jed is a savant, a shrinking, shrugging type who accidentally embodies a paradigm of cool. “Floating among the others with polite disinterest,” Mr. Houellebecq writes, “Jed adopted, without knowing it, the groovy attitude that had made Andy Warhol successful in his time.” As with most novels about the fine arts, the fine art itself is slightly nonplussing. Jed first breaks through with an exhibition of his photographs of Michelin maps of France, from which the novel takes its title: “THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY.”

Jed then abandons photography, showing nothing for a decade while his aura matures; it is a spiritual decision that nonetheless has the force and appearance of a strategy of self-promotion. As an art student, Jed had encyclopedically photographed manufactured objects. Now “he [became] interested, during the second half of his life, in their producers.” Jed starts painting, and undertakes a set of portraits titled the “Series of Simple Professions”; Houellebecq agrees to write a preface for their catalog. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology is generally judged Jed’s best, but he also does a Baconesque likeness of Houellebecq in a blur of fury, which “some have not hesitated to describe as demonic.” When eventually the work is exhibited, it is a sensation—but of course Jed, with his allergy to acclaim, will not enjoy it.

The final portion of the novel is given over to the investigation of a monstrous murder. Though it would be bad form to give more away, much of this section feels like bad form itself—a dark, dragging prank anchored to a book that didn’t need it. It is presumably a further, queasy experiment in the book’s controlling idea, juxtaposition. “I think I’ve more or less finished with the world as narrative,” says the character Houellebecq. “I’m now only interested in the world as juxtaposition.” Juxtapositions structure the book, as territory squares off against map, work against value, author against avatar. Mr. Houellebecq is an agile theorist, but not an ingenious one; the sections in which these themes are explicitly handled retain our interest while seeming a little stale. The need for an “artisanal” union of “design and execution” has already been expressed in Marx, and at Whole Foods.

But perhaps it is stale on purpose; perhaps staleness is “the flavor of authenticity.” “[Jed] sometimes had the hypermarket all to himself,” the author writes—“which seemed to be quite a good approximation of happiness.” Mr. Houellebecq’s characters are depressives who are most depressing when their depression lifts, and they savor the humiliating smallness of their lives. No writer better conveys the shrinkability of human expectations. “Reading the owner’s manual of a Mercedes remains a real pleasure,” Jed thinks. He later rejoices at the addition to his local grocery of “a magnificent, brand-new self-service salad bar.” “I wasn’t completely happy in all aspects of life,” says the character Houellebecq, “but at least I had that: I could, at regular intervals, buy my favorite boots.” Is it a matter of wonder, or of horror, that an adult male should be appeased by a pair of boots? Or even by a work of art? Mr. Houellebecq is an imperfect novelist, but he is childish like a great novelist; he reminds us of the consolatory nature of adult life. “I’ll look at it sometimes,” says Houellebecq of the portrait Jed does of him. “It’ll remind me I had an intense life—sometimes.”

editorial@observer.com