The world consists of matter, energy and information.

Energy can be displaced, but it cannot be destroyed. Matter can be destroyed, but it’s messy. But if a weapon were invented that could suck all the information out of matter—the treeness out of a tree, the DNA out of a man—that bit of matter might disappear. It might simply stop existing. It might go away.

It’s giving away no surprises to explain that an information-sucking weapon—the Go-Away Bomb—has already been invented and deployed when Nick Harkaway’s first novel, The Gone-Away World, opens. Moreover, contrary to assurances, the weapon produced a kind of fallout that, in the aftermath of the Go-Away War, quickly began to make uninhabitable the parts of the globe that had not already vanished.

A small group of survivors, former soldiers of both genders headed by their hero and mascot, William (Gonzo) Lubitsch, worked together with other survivors to help create the Livable Zone. Afterward, they stayed together, building a community in a mostly abandoned corner of the Livable Zone. Now, years later, they’re called upon to save the world again, when another unthinkable disaster occurs: “We stared at the [TV] screen,” the narrator recalls. “It looked, for a moment, as if the Jorgmund Pipe was on fire—but that was like saying the sky was falling.”

But it was on fire.

The Jorgmund Pipe encircles the globe, emitting a constant spray of FOX, the mysterious potion that somehow neutralizes the fallout and creates a Livable Zone. The Jorgmund Company comprised “a mosaic of power we called the System, and the idea was that they upheld the law and maintained the army—the people like Bone, who patrolled the edges of the Livable Zone and chased off bandits and worse things than bandits. But in the end Jorgmund ran the show, because Jorgmund had—was—the Pipe, and that was the thing we couldn’t do without.”

It’s at this point—long after the war, after the Jorgmund Pipe catches fire but before Gonzo & Co. try to put it out—that we time-travel back through history and start catching up with events through the adoring lens of Gonzo’s best friend, the narrator—from the playground sandbox where they met at age 5, through school, martial arts training, college, radical politics, the army, love, the war, the aftermath and—whoa!—back to the beginning, which is actually the middle. It’s only for the duration of this flashback that we can relax a bit, confused but totally hooked.

IF YOU'RE BEWILDERED, that’s because you’re meant to be. Nick Harkaway performs a high-wire act, and the only cloud in the reader’s sky is the near-certainty that he won’t be able to bring it off—which, in literary terms, means to make the ending just as hair-raising and original as the beginning and middle, while continuing to make sense.

He does it, though. He really does. He does it so well that when I’d finished reading it, I wanted to go back and read it again, just to see how all the jigsaw puzzle pieces fit.

It’s a thriller, but not just a thriller. It features Chinese Gong Fu masters, mimes and ninjas, and contains elements of sci-fi, fantasy, old-fashioned romance, apocalyptic horror, adventure, war and even bildungsroman. It’s also blackly funny, a Catch-22 for the 21st century: Looking for a job after a run-in with the System in college, for instance, the narrator learns there’s a “secure annexe” attached to his file. Confused, he asks what it contains, but “my interviewer shushes me … that information has been deemed classified, and she has no desire to be apprised of it in contravention of Section 1, para (ii) of the Information Act and 15, (vi) of the Dissemination & Control Act, and several assorted acts and orders which are themselves secret under section 23 (paras x-xxi) of a piece of legislation whose name is also too sensitive for general release. Unfortunately, with this significant question mark hanging over me, she also cannot offer me a job. And nor, as I have discovered, can anyone else.”

O.K., THE GONE-AWAY WORLD has a neon-pink cover. Toxic pink—with a furry texture. And there are unnecessary digressions, as well as a few passages that go on so long they begin to sound like a particularly clever but obnoxious adolescent showing off.

But these are minor glitches in a work of extraordinary imagination and charisma. Sometimes, there’s matter and energy and, instead of mere information, there’s genius—which, if you’re lucky, is when you get Nick Harkaway and The Gone-Away World.

Nan Goldberg is a freelance writer and book critic living in Maine. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

Annie Dillard gets it right twice in her second novel. As well as being the compelling story of a couple who marry just after World War II, The Maytrees is an ode to the unique, open-skied beauty of Provincetown, “the tip of Cape Cod, that exposed and mineral sandspit.”

Ms. Dillard, who has clearly spent time both in Provincetown and in marriage, makes a deceptively simple analogy between the Maytrees’ “ordinary” marriage and the “ordinary” changes of the seasons and landscapes of P-town: “The Maytrees’ lives … played out before the backdrop of fixed stars .… The slow heavens marked hours. They lived often outside. They drew every breath from a wad of air just then crossing from saltwater to saltwater. Their sandspit was a naked strand between two immensities, both given to special effects.” The special effects are the point, as is the extraordinariness of marriage.

Tongue in cheek, Ms. Dillard describes the couple’s life as the epitome of routine, in which Toby writes a little poetry and quiet Lou sometimes paints. Excepting their huge appetite for literature and natural virtuosity with each other in bed, neither spouse seems exceptional. Nothing unusual happens to the Maytrees, nor are they actors in any world-shaking dramas: “Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading.”

But a high tide, no matter how often you see it, carries a majesty that takes your breath away; and the placid surface of a marriage can disguise momentous emotional currents. In the Maytrees’ marriage, the tide turns after 14 years, when “in [Lou’s] company [Toby] wrapped himself in misery like a robe. Between them self-consciousness bulked as a river silts its channel.” One evening, Toby confesses to being in love with their mutual friend Deary. Then he takes a walk on the beach. “His hot eyes cooled. Invisible clouds blocked the sky and its atmospheres where noises of people dissolve. The sea beside him, a monster with a lace hem, drained east.” The next morning, he leaves for Maine with Deary, abandoning Lou, their son, Petie, and Provincetown.

“Maine’s beauty was not of sky but of earth,” Ms. Dillard writes (with total accuracy). “Sunlight hit black spruces and died, or sprawled in fields. This cold forest stopped [Toby’s] eyes. Brown needles underfoot became his sand.”

This is where Toby and Deary live for 20 years, until Deary is fatally ill and Toby breaks both arms falling on ice. Unable to care for her, he brings Deary back to Provincetown, knocks on Lou’s door, and asks her to take him and Deary in. What happens next plays out the logic of a marital intimacy that, today, is rarer than a unicorn.

Writing about Provincetown, Annie Dillard does the near-impossible: She matches the simple splendor of language to the subtle magnificence of place. And writing about the Maytrees, she captures the entwining and transformation of two people who marry and then grow up.

Nan Goldberg, a freelance writer and book critic, once lived in Provincetown and now lives in Maine.

Why? Danny himself could never begin to explain it, and Jennifer Egan’s narrator hardly thinks it’s worth the effort: “Wondering why Danny’s older cousin had so much power over him is like wondering why the sun shines or why the grass grows. There are people out there who can make other people do things, that’s all.”

Danny and Rafe returned to the picnic and said nothing to anyone, not even by late afternoon when the adults noticed that Howie was missing. Not even when they launched the search parties. Not even three days later, when Howie was discovered, semi-conscious, in the cave—a different Howie, though, who couldn’t sleep with the lights out or be alone in a room without his mother, and whose nerdy sweetness was gone forever. Suddenly transformed into a sullen, self-destructive adolescent, Howie started taking drugs, acquired a gun and tried to rob a 7-Eleven, and ended up in reform school.

And still, Danny never told.

Flash-forward some 20 years: Howie has straightened out, become a bond trader, made a fortune, gotten married, had kids and retired at 34. Danny has gone nowhere, accomplished nothing and spent most of his energy avoiding certain memories.

When Howie calls Danny out of the blue and asks him to fly to Eastern Europe to help renovate an old castle he’s bought, Danny—unemployed and without other options—decides to go. Which is where Ms. Egan’s contemporary Gothic novel begins, at about 2 a.m., with Danny miserably lugging his suitcase and satellite dish (for cell and Internet reception) several miles to the castle after waiting in some weird European village for a bus that never arrives.

As soon as the current situation and history are established—or perhaps even a little earlier—Ms. Egan introduces another character, her first-person narrator, Ray. Or rather, Ray introduces himself. Ray is writing this story, which he describes as “just stuff a guy told me,” for the writing class he’s taking in prison (Ray is serving time for murder). At first he was only interested in the class because it meant time away from his cell, but now, a few weeks later, he’s developed a crush on the writing coach, Holly, who obviously thinks Ray has some talent, and he starts to work seriously on his manuscript.

Ray tells his story from Danny’s perspective, though he makes it clear that he himself is not Danny. This sets us up for the main exercise of this mazelike novel, which is to figure out what happened and is happening through the perspectives of two unreliable narrators: Ray, the convicted murderer who writes; and Danny, the ne’er-do-well whose point of view Ray has adopted.

At the castle, the motley group of would-be renovators include Howie (who reintroduces himself to Danny as “Howard”); Howard’s wife, Ann, and their son; an undifferentiated batch of graduate students; and finally Mick, Howard’s No. 2 man. Mick is clearly a man with a past, tattooed all over not only with ink but with the telltale “tracks” of a drug addict. His relationship with Howard seems inexplicable until you remember that Howie had spent a number of years in reform school, and that the devoted Mick—as loyal to Howard as the ghoulish Renfield was to Dracula—is a relic of that long-ago time.

Danny, whose whole life has been spent anticipating Howard’s revenge, is wary of them all; “paranoid” would not be too strong a word, particularly in the creepy atmosphere of the decrepit 900-year-old castle, which is, unbelievably, still occupied by a baroness in her 90’s—the last descendant of the von Ausblinker family, which built it.

The baroness lives in the keep—a tower-like structure unattached to the castle, which once served in wartime as an impregnable shelter—and explains to Danny, whom she uncharacteristically invites into the keep: “‘I will never leave this place. I am this place. I am every person who has lived here for nine hundred years. It’s beyond ownership. It simply is.’

“The idea caught in Danny: all those generations. At times he had trouble even believing that one chain of days connected his first day in New York to this day, right now.”

Underneath the keep, the baroness tells him, is the ancient dungeon, complete with weapons and instruments of torture, located inside a series of underground tunnels that only she knows how to navigate. The baroness is aware that Howard would give anything to get to it: “Imagine if he could show his tourists that! But he has no idea of how to find it.”

Nor, she adds, will she ever reveal it. “You may tell [your cousin] that,” she instructs Danny, who does.

Well, of course Danny stumbles onto a map of the tunnels (this is, after all, a Gothic novel), and reports this to Howard, who cannot contain his excitement long enough to wait till morning to get in there and start exploring. He takes the entire crew with him, including his wife and child, Benjy, and of course Mick, and Danny too. You would think that Howard had had enough of dark tunnels and caves, but his childhood trauma seems to be the farthest thing from his mind—until Benjy becomes frightened and Danny and Ann take him back to the cave entrance—to find it sealed. On the other side of the barricade, they hear the old baroness cackling away, with no intention of ever letting them out.

Upon hearing this news, the carefully constructed Howard disappears and little Howie returns, terrified to the point of disintegration, incoherent except for a repeated wail: “Danny! Danny! Danny help me, please let me out! Danny please, I’ll do anything …. I’ll give you anything you want …. Don’t leave me here!”

And that’s as far as I’m going to take you, because the rest—the unpredictable part—is what makes this novel the intelligent, intense and remarkably intuitive work that it is.

The best parts, by far, belong to Ray, whose impervious toughness gradually softens as he continues writing and falling for Holly, his teacher. Ray, we know from the start, “coulda been somebody,” as Marlon Brando so famously said in On the Waterfront. But we also understand, more and more clearly as the book progresses, that Ray’s flaws and weaknesses are way too huge to be overcome by his intelligence, talent and compassion.

This is not the kind of novel in which the protagonist grows stronger and wiser and is finally transfigured. Despite the supernatural and fantastic aspects of Ms. Egan’s Gothic plot, at its core is a harsh realism: The protagonist grows stronger and wiser, all right, but not nearly enough to change his life.

In one scene toward the end of the book, Ray is in the prison hospital, where Holly visits him, and he tells us: “I get a flash of some kind of life we could’ve had—barbecues, dogs, kids flopping over us in bed—it rolls through me fast but strong and clear, like one of those cooking smells that blows in the window so sharp you can pick out the ingredients. And then it’s gone.”

No happy endings here. Instead, Jennifer Egan gives us the satisfying thunk of a fully understood, if unexpected, kind of sense.

Nan Goldberg reviews books for The Boston Globe and writes a monthly column for nyc-plus.

Why? Danny himself could never begin to explain it, and Jennifer Egan’s narrator hardly thinks it’s worth the effort: “Wondering why Danny’s older cousin had so much power over him is like wondering why the sun shines or why the grass grows. There are people out there who can make other people do things, that’s all.”

Danny and Rafe returned to the picnic and said nothing to anyone, not even by late afternoon when the adults noticed that Howie was missing. Not even when they launched the search parties. Not even three days later, when Howie was discovered, semi-conscious, in the cave—a different Howie, though, who couldn’t sleep with the lights out or be alone in a room without his mother, and whose nerdy sweetness was gone forever. Suddenly transformed into a sullen, self-destructive adolescent, Howie started taking drugs, acquired a gun and tried to rob a 7-Eleven, and ended up in reform school.

And still, Danny never told.

Flash-forward some 20 years: Howie has straightened out, become a bond trader, made a fortune, gotten married, had kids and retired at 34. Danny has gone nowhere, accomplished nothing and spent most of his energy avoiding certain memories.

When Howie calls Danny out of the blue and asks him to fly to Eastern Europe to help renovate an old castle he’s bought, Danny—unemployed and without other options—decides to go. Which is where Ms. Egan’s contemporary Gothic novel begins, at about 2 a.m., with Danny miserably lugging his suitcase and satellite dish (for cell and Internet reception) several miles to the castle after waiting in some weird European village for a bus that never arrives.

As soon as the current situation and history are established—or perhaps even a little earlier—Ms. Egan introduces another character, her first-person narrator, Ray. Or rather, Ray introduces himself. Ray is writing this story, which he describes as “just stuff a guy told me,” for the writing class he’s taking in prison (Ray is serving time for murder). At first he was only interested in the class because it meant time away from his cell, but now, a few weeks later, he’s developed a crush on the writing coach, Holly, who obviously thinks Ray has some talent, and he starts to work seriously on his manuscript.

Ray tells his story from Danny’s perspective, though he makes it clear that he himself is not Danny. This sets us up for the main exercise of this mazelike novel, which is to figure out what happened and is happening through the perspectives of two unreliable narrators: Ray, the convicted murderer who writes; and Danny, the ne’er-do-well whose point of view Ray has adopted.

At the castle, the motley group of would-be renovators include Howie (who reintroduces himself to Danny as “Howard”); Howard’s wife, Ann, and their son; an undifferentiated batch of graduate students; and finally Mick, Howard’s No. 2 man. Mick is clearly a man with a past, tattooed all over not only with ink but with the telltale “tracks” of a drug addict. His relationship with Howard seems inexplicable until you remember that Howie had spent a number of years in reform school, and that the devoted Mick—as loyal to Howard as the ghoulish Renfield was to Dracula—is a relic of that long-ago time.

Danny, whose whole life has been spent anticipating Howard’s revenge, is wary of them all; “paranoid” would not be too strong a word, particularly in the creepy atmosphere of the decrepit 900-year-old castle, which is, unbelievably, still occupied by a baroness in her 90’s—the last descendant of the von Ausblinker family, which built it.

The baroness lives in the keep—a tower-like structure unattached to the castle, which once served in wartime as an impregnable shelter—and explains to Danny, whom she uncharacteristically invites into the keep: “‘I will never leave this place. I am this place. I am every person who has lived here for nine hundred years. It’s beyond ownership. It simply is.’

“The idea caught in Danny: all those generations. At times he had trouble even believing that one chain of days connected his first day in New York to this day, right now.”

Underneath the keep, the baroness tells him, is the ancient dungeon, complete with weapons and instruments of torture, located inside a series of underground tunnels that only she knows how to navigate. The baroness is aware that Howard would give anything to get to it: “Imagine if he could show his tourists that! But he has no idea of how to find it.”

Nor, she adds, will she ever reveal it. “You may tell [your cousin] that,” she instructs Danny, who does.

Well, of course Danny stumbles onto a map of the tunnels (this is, after all, a Gothic novel), and reports this to Howard, who cannot contain his excitement long enough to wait till morning to get in there and start exploring. He takes the entire crew with him, including his wife and child, Benjy, and of course Mick, and Danny too. You would think that Howard had had enough of dark tunnels and caves, but his childhood trauma seems to be the farthest thing from his mind—until Benjy becomes frightened and Danny and Ann take him back to the cave entrance—to find it sealed. On the other side of the barricade, they hear the old baroness cackling away, with no intention of ever letting them out.

Upon hearing this news, the carefully constructed Howard disappears and little Howie returns, terrified to the point of disintegration, incoherent except for a repeated wail: “Danny! Danny! Danny help me, please let me out! Danny please, I’ll do anything …. I’ll give you anything you want …. Don’t leave me here!”

And that’s as far as I’m going to take you, because the rest—the unpredictable part—is what makes this novel the intelligent, intense and remarkably intuitive work that it is.

The best parts, by far, belong to Ray, whose impervious toughness gradually softens as he continues writing and falling for Holly, his teacher. Ray, we know from the start, “coulda been somebody,” as Marlon Brando so famously said in On the Waterfront. But we also understand, more and more clearly as the book progresses, that Ray’s flaws and weaknesses are way too huge to be overcome by his intelligence, talent and compassion.

This is not the kind of novel in which the protagonist grows stronger and wiser and is finally transfigured. Despite the supernatural and fantastic aspects of Ms. Egan’s Gothic plot, at its core is a harsh realism: The protagonist grows stronger and wiser, all right, but not nearly enough to change his life.

In one scene toward the end of the book, Ray is in the prison hospital, where Holly visits him, and he tells us: “I get a flash of some kind of life we could’ve had—barbecues, dogs, kids flopping over us in bed—it rolls through me fast but strong and clear, like one of those cooking smells that blows in the window so sharp you can pick out the ingredients. And then it’s gone.”

No happy endings here. Instead, Jennifer Egan gives us the satisfying thunk of a fully understood, if unexpected, kind of sense.

Nan Goldberg reviews books for The Boston Globe and writes a monthly column for nyc-plus.

And yet Janna Malamud Smith, Bernard Malamud’s daughter, a therapist with a master’s degree in social work, indulges in the kind of facile speculation about her father’s needs and motives that only the most careless biographer would put to paper.

Her memoir, so far the only life of Malamud, is riddled with Freudian clichés. Remembering the bedtime stories her father used to invent, Ms. Smith writes: “Having [his fictional hero] Rattledox defeat the milk-withholding witch and deliver the goods seems emblematic of the kind of continual creative act my father must have felt his psychic survival required, albeit often unconsciously.”

Here’s another (of many): Malamud once told Janna a short morality tale about Abraham Lincoln working as a grocery clerk and running after a customer in the severe winter cold in order to return five or 10 cents’ change. Ms. Smith later found a similar story in his novel The Assistant (1957); she speculates that it was actually Max, Malamud’s father, who chased the customer through the frigid streets, and then asks herself why Malamud might have substituted Lincoln for her grandfather: “Maybe, in the novel, he wanted to offer the dead storekeeper some of Lincoln’s stature. Or maybe, child in lap, he unconsciously wished that his daughter had had Lincoln as her grandfather, and that he had had a great, heroic American, rather than a sad, defeated Jew, as his father.”

Oy.

Squeezed in among the speculations, surrounded by the irritating therapeutic language, are some actual facts. Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn in 1914, to immigrant parents: Max, a grocer, and Bertha, who gradually became depressed and delusional. When Bernard and his brother, Eugene, were still children, their mother was institutionalized; she was still in the asylum when she died a few years later—probably a suicide. As a young adult, Eugene too became mentally ill and was briefly hospitalized; he remained impaired for the rest of his life.

In 1945, Bernard Malamud married Ann deChiara, the child of Italian Catholic immigrants. They remained married until his death, despite difficulties that Ms. Smith leaves mostly unspecified. Their son, Paul, was born in 1947; Janna was born in 1952.

In addition to writing, Malamud taught: first at a high school, then at an agricultural college in Oregon, and finally at Bennington, an all-girls school where the “decadent” moral code—the students went braless and the male faculty had no qualms about seducing their students—anticipated the cultural revolution to come later in the 60’s.

While at Bennington, Malamud fell in love with a writing student, Arlene, with whom he maintained some kind of relationship to the end of his life. Arlene was only a few years older than Janna, and she too ultimately became a therapist: She attended medical school and worked as a psychoanalyst.

Malamud himself was fascinated by Freud’s theories, having discovered them as a young man still groping for a style and a subject. It was Freud, Ms. Smith believes, who showed him that “it’s just possible that God’s impossible laws initially sprang from some poor schlemiel’s overactive conscience. The step from this discovery to the one that powers his fiction is small: grand moral struggles belong to the common man as much as to the hero. Therefore, a Brooklyn storekeeper’s son can take on the big questions by writing about the characters he knows from his days behind the delicatessen counter. By attaching the pain and effort of their familiar, mundane lives to larger mythic or moral frames, he can create resonant, uncanny stories.”

Malamud’s first published book was The Natural (1952), followed by The Assistant, the story collection The Magic Barrel (which won a National Book Award in 1958), The Fixer (which won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1966), The Tenants (1971) and Dubin’s Lives (1979), among others.

A distant though adoring father, he worked constantly, either teaching or writing, and seemed to have no idea how to relax. He fought depression all his life. He died at age 71, of a heart attack.

Quoting liberally from Malamud’s diaries and letters, Ms. Smith attempts to make public the private man. The virtue of this memoir is its unique, very personal access to its subject, but sadly, Ms. Smith has left out key elements. There’s no description, much less characterization, of her own brother, Paul; no portrait of the relationship between her parents; and no sense of the relationship (if there was one) between her mother and Arlene, whom Ms. Smith describes as weeping side by side with Ann at Malamud’s funeral. She refers to Arlene’s child but never mentions who that child’s father might be. Nor does she have much to say about Malamud’s Judaism, despite his having achieved fame as a distinctly Jewish writer. She does quote this intriguing line from a letter her father wrote to Arlene: “All men are Jews.” Here, where analysis would have been welcome, Ms. Smith doesn’t bother.

As for her own relationship with her father once she became an adult, Ms. Smith drops only a few hints: “He gulped down my little girl admiration, I his fatherly delight. But we became touchy and awkward when, as I grew up, I sought to free myself.” And unless I somehow missed it, she never explains the odd title she chose for the memoir: My Father Is a Book—it sounds significant, but what does it mean?

Finally, Ms. Smith provides virtually no literary insight into her father’s fiction. About Dubin’s Lives, for instance, a novel about a middle-aged, married biographer who falls in love with a younger woman, she writes: “In truth, I could make no objective assessment of the literary work, for I experienced it as a … way-too-intimate view of my father’s confused feelings. Lately, as I reread it for the first time, I felt again a vague nausea, and the notion ‘virtual incest’ came to mind.” I suspect she experienced even more complicated and painful emotions when she read through 22 years of letters between Bernard and Arlene.

Ms. Smith’s memoir is much more about herself than her father, and that’s no surprise. What’s surprising is how ordinary Bernard Malamud’s daughter turned out to be.

Nan Goldberg reviews books for The Boston Globe and writes a monthly column for nyc-plus.

And yet Janna Malamud Smith, Bernard Malamud’s daughter, a therapist with a master’s degree in social work, indulges in the kind of facile speculation about her father’s needs and motives that only the most careless biographer would put to paper.

Her memoir, so far the only life of Malamud, is riddled with Freudian clichés. Remembering the bedtime stories her father used to invent, Ms. Smith writes: “Having [his fictional hero] Rattledox defeat the milk-withholding witch and deliver the goods seems emblematic of the kind of continual creative act my father must have felt his psychic survival required, albeit often unconsciously.”

Here’s another (of many): Malamud once told Janna a short morality tale about Abraham Lincoln working as a grocery clerk and running after a customer in the severe winter cold in order to return five or 10 cents’ change. Ms. Smith later found a similar story in his novel The Assistant (1957); she speculates that it was actually Max, Malamud’s father, who chased the customer through the frigid streets, and then asks herself why Malamud might have substituted Lincoln for her grandfather: “Maybe, in the novel, he wanted to offer the dead storekeeper some of Lincoln’s stature. Or maybe, child in lap, he unconsciously wished that his daughter had had Lincoln as her grandfather, and that he had had a great, heroic American, rather than a sad, defeated Jew, as his father.”

Oy.

Squeezed in among the speculations, surrounded by the irritating therapeutic language, are some actual facts. Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn in 1914, to immigrant parents: Max, a grocer, and Bertha, who gradually became depressed and delusional. When Bernard and his brother, Eugene, were still children, their mother was institutionalized; she was still in the asylum when she died a few years later—probably a suicide. As a young adult, Eugene too became mentally ill and was briefly hospitalized; he remained impaired for the rest of his life.

In 1945, Bernard Malamud married Ann deChiara, the child of Italian Catholic immigrants. They remained married until his death, despite difficulties that Ms. Smith leaves mostly unspecified. Their son, Paul, was born in 1947; Janna was born in 1952.

In addition to writing, Malamud taught: first at a high school, then at an agricultural college in Oregon, and finally at Bennington, an all-girls school where the “decadent” moral code—the students went braless and the male faculty had no qualms about seducing their students—anticipated the cultural revolution to come later in the 60’s.

While at Bennington, Malamud fell in love with a writing student, Arlene, with whom he maintained some kind of relationship to the end of his life. Arlene was only a few years older than Janna, and she too ultimately became a therapist: She attended medical school and worked as a psychoanalyst.

Malamud himself was fascinated by Freud’s theories, having discovered them as a young man still groping for a style and a subject. It was Freud, Ms. Smith believes, who showed him that “it’s just possible that God’s impossible laws initially sprang from some poor schlemiel’s overactive conscience. The step from this discovery to the one that powers his fiction is small: grand moral struggles belong to the common man as much as to the hero. Therefore, a Brooklyn storekeeper’s son can take on the big questions by writing about the characters he knows from his days behind the delicatessen counter. By attaching the pain and effort of their familiar, mundane lives to larger mythic or moral frames, he can create resonant, uncanny stories.”

Malamud’s first published book was The Natural (1952), followed by The Assistant, the story collection The Magic Barrel (which won a National Book Award in 1958), The Fixer (which won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1966), The Tenants (1971) and Dubin’s Lives (1979), among others.

A distant though adoring father, he worked constantly, either teaching or writing, and seemed to have no idea how to relax. He fought depression all his life. He died at age 71, of a heart attack.

Quoting liberally from Malamud’s diaries and letters, Ms. Smith attempts to make public the private man. The virtue of this memoir is its unique, very personal access to its subject, but sadly, Ms. Smith has left out key elements. There’s no description, much less characterization, of her own brother, Paul; no portrait of the relationship between her parents; and no sense of the relationship (if there was one) between her mother and Arlene, whom Ms. Smith describes as weeping side by side with Ann at Malamud’s funeral. She refers to Arlene’s child but never mentions who that child’s father might be. Nor does she have much to say about Malamud’s Judaism, despite his having achieved fame as a distinctly Jewish writer. She does quote this intriguing line from a letter her father wrote to Arlene: “All men are Jews.” Here, where analysis would have been welcome, Ms. Smith doesn’t bother.

As for her own relationship with her father once she became an adult, Ms. Smith drops only a few hints: “He gulped down my little girl admiration, I his fatherly delight. But we became touchy and awkward when, as I grew up, I sought to free myself.” And unless I somehow missed it, she never explains the odd title she chose for the memoir: My Father Is a Book—it sounds significant, but what does it mean?

Finally, Ms. Smith provides virtually no literary insight into her father’s fiction. About Dubin’s Lives, for instance, a novel about a middle-aged, married biographer who falls in love with a younger woman, she writes: “In truth, I could make no objective assessment of the literary work, for I experienced it as a … way-too-intimate view of my father’s confused feelings. Lately, as I reread it for the first time, I felt again a vague nausea, and the notion ‘virtual incest’ came to mind.” I suspect she experienced even more complicated and painful emotions when she read through 22 years of letters between Bernard and Arlene.

Ms. Smith’s memoir is much more about herself than her father, and that’s no surprise. What’s surprising is how ordinary Bernard Malamud’s daughter turned out to be.

Nan Goldberg reviews books for The Boston Globe and writes a monthly column for nyc-plus.

Until I Find You, John Irving's massive new novel, is of
a type that you often hear referred to as “sprawling”—which, when you think
about it, just means “extremely long and somewhat disorganized.”

Except,
in this case, calling it “John Irving's sprawling new novel” would be
understating.

Splatting new novel, perhaps. Or spludding.

I
say this with the utmost sympathy for Mr. Irving, the author of some fine
novels of perfectly normal length, such as The
Water-Method Man (1972), The
158-Pound Marriage (1974) and The
Cider House Rules (1985).

I
blame his editors.

Of
course, if you're publishing a best-selling author, knowing his novel will make
the best-seller lists regardless of length or quality, and knowing also that
pissing him off with editorial suggestions would be a bad career move, you
might hesitate to explain to him that fully one third of the book isn't only
unnecessary, but destructive: John, the
book's obese; it's drowning in its own fat.

Yeah,
I can see how that might be a difficult conversation to initiate—but dammit,
that's an editor's job. Leaving it to
critics is like trying to shove the stink back into the skunk.

Until I Find You is a life of Jack Burns, perennial boy
without a father who grows up to be a Hollywood movie star. Jack was born and
raised in Toronto by his single mother, Alice, a tattoo artist. His father,
William Burns, was a gifted organist so obsessed with tattoos that eventually
they would cover every inch of his body. But William left Alice before Jack was
born.

When
Jack was 4, “Alice announced that she would work her way through northern
Europe in search of Jack's runaway dad. She knew the North Sea cities where he
was most likely to be hiding from them; together they would hunt him down and
confront him with his abandoned responsibilities.”

Until I Find You begins with this year-long voyage
undertaken by Alice, with Jack in tow, zigzagging northern Europe from
Copenhagen to Stockholm to Oslo to Helsinki to Amsterdam. In each city, they
apparently just miss finding William, but Alice is able to learn his
destination. All this is recounted strictly from the 4-year-old's perspective.

In
the book's last third (approximately), this journey is repeated in its entirety
by Jack, alone now and in his 20's, who discovers that his memories of the
first trip may have been grossly manipulated by his mother. They might, in fact,
be about as accurate as the reflection in a funhouse mirror. The original story
of the North Sea voyage to find Jack's father is turned upside down. Every
single fact he thought he knew might have been a lie. Nothing was the way it
was told to him. Nothing was how he “remembered” it. The descriptions he hears
of his father, if accurate, would necessarily make his mother a liar, a monster
and a total stranger to him—not unlike the person he pictured as his father.

"In
this way,” Mr. Irving tells us, “in increments both measurable and not, our
childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event but often in a
series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”

The
two bookend journeys in search of the missing father are the heart of the novel;
the middle section is where the sprawl comes in. It's also where comparisons
will be made (again) to Dickens, for Mr. Irving has a similar gift for
invention—the rare art of making up
narrative as opposed to disguising or adapting stuff that happened to you or
somebody you know or have read about. Jack also shares with many Dickens
characters (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby) a childhood
marked by repeated abuse.

In
this middle section, Jack enters St. Hilda's, an all-girls' school that has
begun to accept a few boys. He's virtually hypnotized by the girls:

"The
girls never stood still …. Sitting down, they bounced one leg on one knee—the
crossed leg constantly in motion. The extreme shortness of their gray pleated
skirts drew Jack's attention to their legs and the surprising heaviness of
their upper thighs. The girls picked at their fingers, at their nails, at their
rings; they scratched their eyebrows and their hair. They looked under their nails, as if for
secrets—they seemed to have many secrets.”

That
first day, Jack meets Emma Oastler, an upper-class student who becomes his
enemy and physical tormenter, progresses into his sexual abuser, then his
avenger against another sexual abuser, and ends up his roommate, virtual sister
and best friend.

As
he grows into a man, he is both nurtured and tortured by an assortment of girls
and women, a couple of whom leave an imprint (especially Emma and Miss Wurtz,
his third-grade teacher and acting coach), and most of whom leave nothing
discernible. An awful lot of them spend time holding his penis. (An absurd
amount of space is devoted to discussing the diminutive size of that penis.)

And
even though Miss Wurtz, it turns out, was once William Burns' lover, it's hard
to find an essential connection between this middle part and the two journeys
on either side of it.

After
boarding school and college, Jack goes off to Hollywood, where he becomes
famous playing transvestites (but why?) in terrible movies, then slightly
better movies, then good movies. He sleeps with numerous women and avoids his
mother, who's in a long-term sexual relationship with Emma's mother (why?) and
won't answer Jack's questions about his father. He stays in touch with Miss
Wurtz, his third-grade teacher (why?). When Emma dies, he wonders why he
doesn't feel anything and whether he can
feel anything, or if he can only act.

The
middle section contains so much lovely writing and so many comical vignettes
that it's with real regret that I say it's utterly gratuitous.

It
occurs to me that with some really sharp editing (are you listening, Random
House?), there may be two very satisfactory novels to be had here instead of
one borderline awful one. The first one—the child's stolen memories, his stolen
father—is nearly finished if you remove the incoherent center. It even ends
rather beautifully; I'd have been moved if I hadn't been so relieved to reach
the last page.

I
can't say how the Dickensian novel should end, or even what it's about (look,
Random House, I'm not going to do all
the work for you), but there's wonderful potential there: the lively writing,
the great comedy, the signature Irving characters. And also, you know, it's a
normal-sized novel. Eliminate the references to Jack's “smallish penis” (or at
least insert a reason why) and then you'll have something.

Two somethings.

Nan Goldberg recently moved
to Maine and continues to write regularly for New York metropolitan-area
newspapers.

Until I Find You, John Irving's massive new novel, is of a type that you often hear referred to as "sprawling"-which, when you think about it, just means "extremely long and somewhat disorganized."

Except, in this case, calling it "John Irving's sprawling new novel" would be understating.

Splatting new novel, perhaps. Or spludding.

I say this with the utmost sympathy for Mr. Irving, the author of some fine novels of perfectly normal length, such as The Water-Method Man (1972), The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) and The Cider House Rules (1985).

I blame his editors.

Of course, if you're publishing a best-selling author, knowing his novel will make the best-seller lists regardless of length or quality, and knowing also that pissing him off with editorial suggestions would be a bad career move, you might hesitate to explain to him that fully one third of the book isn't only unnecessary, but destructive: John, the book's obese; it's drowning in its own fat.

Yeah, I can see how that might be a difficult conversation to initiate-but dammit, that's an editor's job. Leaving it to critics is like trying to shove the stink back into the skunk.

Until I Find You is a life of Jack Burns, perennial boy without a father who grows up to be a Hollywood movie star. Jack was born and raised in Toronto by his single mother, Alice, a tattoo artist. His father, William Burns, was a gifted organist so obsessed with tattoos that eventually they would cover every inch of his body. But William left Alice before Jack was born.

When Jack was 4, "Alice announced that she would work her way through northern Europe in search of Jack's runaway dad. She knew the North Sea cities where he was most likely to be hiding from them; together they would hunt him down and confront him with his abandoned responsibilities."

Until I Find You begins with this year-long voyage undertaken by Alice, with Jack in tow, zigzagging northern Europe from Copenhagen to Stockholm to Oslo to Helsinki to Amsterdam. In each city, they apparently just miss finding William, but Alice is able to learn his destination. All this is recounted strictly from the 4-year-old's perspective.

In the book's last third (approximately), this journey is repeated in its entirety by Jack, alone now and in his 20's, who discovers that his memories of the first trip may have been grossly manipulated by his mother. They might, in fact, be about as accurate as the reflection in a funhouse mirror. The original story of the North Sea voyage to find Jack's father is turned upside down. Every single fact he thought he knew might have been a lie. Nothing was the way it was told to him. Nothing was how he "remembered" it. The descriptions he hears of his father, if accurate, would necessarily make his mother a liar, a monster and a total stranger to him-not unlike the person he pictured as his father.

"In this way," Mr. Irving tells us, "in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us-not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss."

The two bookend journeys in search of the missing father are the heart of the novel; the middle section is where the sprawl comes in. It's also where comparisons will be made (again) to Dickens, for Mr. Irving has a similar gift for invention-the rare art of making up narrative as opposed to disguising or adapting stuff that happened to you or somebody you know or have read about. Jack also shares with many Dickens characters (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby) a childhood marked by repeated abuse.

In this middle section, Jack enters St. Hilda's, an all-girls' school that has begun to accept a few boys. He's virtually hypnotized by the girls:

"The girls never stood still …. Sitting down, they bounced one leg on one knee-the crossed leg constantly in motion. The extreme shortness of their gray pleated skirts drew Jack's attention to their legs and the surprising heaviness of their upper thighs. The girls picked at their fingers, at their nails, at their rings; they scratched their eyebrows and their hair. They looked under their nails, as if for secrets-they seemed to have many secrets."

That first day, Jack meets Emma Oastler, an upper-class student who becomes his enemy and physical tormenter, progresses into his sexual abuser, then his avenger against another sexual abuser, and ends up his roommate, virtual sister and best friend.

As he grows into a man, he is both nurtured and tortured by an assortment of girls and women, a couple of whom leave an imprint (especially Emma and Miss Wurtz, his third-grade teacher and acting coach), and most of whom leave nothing discernible. An awful lot of them spend time holding his penis. (An absurd amount of space is devoted to discussing the diminutive size of that penis.)

And even though Miss Wurtz, it turns out, was once William Burns' lover, it's hard to find an essential connection between this middle part and the two journeys on either side of it.

After boarding school and college, Jack goes off to Hollywood, where he becomes famous playing transvestites (but why?) in terrible movies, then slightly better movies, then good movies. He sleeps with numerous women and avoids his mother, who's in a long-term sexual relationship with Emma's mother (why?) and won't answer Jack's questions about his father. He stays in touch with Miss Wurtz, his third-grade teacher (why?). When Emma dies, he wonders why he doesn't feel anything and whether he can feel anything, or if he can only act.

The middle section contains so much lovely writing and so many comical vignettes that it's with real regret that I say it's utterly gratuitous.

It occurs to me that with some really sharp editing (are you listening, Random House?), there may be two very satisfactory novels to be had here instead of one borderline awful one. The first one-the child's stolen memories, his stolen father-is nearly finished if you remove the incoherent center. It even ends rather beautifully; I'd have been moved if I hadn't been so relieved to reach the last page.

I can't say how the Dickensian novel should end, or even what it's about (look, Random House, I'm not going to do all the work for you), but there's wonderful potential there: the lively writing, the great comedy, the signature Irving characters. And also, you know, it's a normal-sized novel. Eliminate the references to Jack's "smallish penis" (or at least insert a reason why) and then you'll have something.

Two somethings.

Nan Goldberg recently moved to Maine and continues to write regularly for New York metropolitan-area newspapers.

There is a sense in which reading fiction especially short stories, which by definition must cut quickly to the chase is like eavesdropping. It's eavesdropping with permission, of course; that's what the binding means. Nevertheless, most stories represent a conversation the author is having with himself, just as criticism is frequently a conversation the critic is having with the author (who happens not to be present).

But some books are so personal, they can make you well, make me doubt the relevance of literary criticism. Rick Moody's new collection of stories, Demonology, is one of these.

Mr. Moody, once dubbed in these pages one of New York's "literary lion cubs," likes to challenge the literary stereotypes imposed upon him. His first two novels, Garden State and The Ice Storm, were traditional (if unusually well-written) narratives set in the New Jersey and Connecticut suburbs; they naturally drew comparisons to John Cheever's work. Flattering as that was, Mr. Moody disliked being classified as a chronicler of the suburbs. So in his next book, a collection of stories called The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, not only were the settings conspicuously urban, but the techniques had become experimental, postmodern, metafictional, and the subjects widely diverse. Whereupon Mr. Moody's work was criticized for being too cerebral, too ironic: It lacked authentic emotion. His response was Purple America which, as the title suggests, was a veritable emotion-fest.

In short, Mr. Moody can be expected to do the unexpected, and even his failures are interesting. Devoted Moody readers, then, who probably expect something weird or different or both from this collection, may be disappointed. Mr. Moody isn't going for weird this time around, though he does play a few postmodern tricks. Mostly he has more urgent matters to deal with.

The 13 stories in Demonology come in very different shapes and sizes; several have odd, parenthetical plot lines. But they are all, ultimately, about the same thing: the vicious randomness of tragedy. Again and again, he zeroes in on the unbelievably offensive fact of death.

The seminal tragedy and inspiration for Demonology was the untimely death of Mr. Moody's sister while he was in the midst of writing Purple America. A sister dies in three of these stories: "The Mansion on the Hill," "Boys" and the title story, which so closely renders her death that it's not exactly true to label it fiction.

Other stories include a shooting ("On the Carousel"), a motorcycle crash and a child with leukemia ("Forecast from the Retail Desk"), a fatal boating accident ("Hawaiian Night"), a near rape, cruelty and arson ("The Carnival Tradition"), drug addiction and failure ("Wilkie Fahnestock, The Boxed Set"), suicide, madness and fatal illness ("Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13"). For the most part, such tragedies are not even the subject of the story but a mere event among other events all random, all sad and depressing and stinking of frustration and disappointment and failure.

Demonology both the story and the collection is a shriek of pain, a rending of garments, a howl. How does one critique a howl?

Years ago, John Barth wrote an essay entitled "The Literature of Exhaustion," which had to do with the "used-up" quality of various literary conventions (realism, for one) given the existential truth that had become apparent in the last half of the 20th century: that human beings are as alienated from one another as they are from nature, that the search for meaning is doomed, that meaning itself is a fiction.

In the aggregate, the stories in Demonology comprise a literal as well as a literary expression of Barth's thesis. In tale after tale, the overarching emotions are despair and a nearly paralyzing grief. Demonology is a literature of emotional exhaustion. And at the end of the book, in the title story, it is fiction itself that Rick Moody finds used up and inadequate.

In that final story, the author is torn between wanting to make art out of something otherwise unredeemable (death at a young age) and wanting to make it ugly as ugly as it really is. "I should let artifice create an elegant surface," he admonishes himself at the end. "I should make the events orderly, I should wait and write about it later, I should wait until I'm not angry, I shouldn't clutter a narrative with fragments, with mere recollections of good times, or with regrets, I should make Meredith's death shapely and persuasive, not blunt and disjunctive ... I should have a better ending, I shouldn't say her life was short and often sad, I shouldn't say she had her demons, as I do too."

The story is a seemingly random compilation of memories imposed upon a two-day chronology of events two days that ended with Meredith's death. The technique is unpolished, the emotion veers wildly between raw, in-your-face grief and a kind of spooky, reportorial calm. But "Demonology" is not really a short story at all; in his autocritique ending, Mr. Moody lists the essential elements of fiction that are missing. It's more like an essay.

Still, like Lorrie Moore's similarly journalistic story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here" (her baby son was diagnosed with cancer), "Demonology" won an O. Henry award for best short story and has already been included in several anthologies. I don't know what to say about that. Do editors give extra points for real blood? Or is it their helpless gut response to the dropping of all artifice, to the author's despairing admission that "figurative language isn't up to the task"?

If it's the gut response, I sympathize. I'm not sure I can do my job properly either. It seems totally beside the point to ask whether these stories are good, or bad, or entertaining. They're overwhelming. For me, the appropriate response to a book like this is an answering cry, a matching confession.

So here goes. Here's my review: There was a period in my life when so many things had gone wrong, and they had gone so terribly wrong, that my beliefs about the meaning and value of life itself underwent a crippling dislocation. One result was that, for the longest time, I could not write anything. It wasn't writer's block; it was that, in the face of horror after horror after horror, I could think of no adequate response. I had absolutely nothing to say. But I imagine that if I were a brilliant writer, and if I had been able, during that period, to put words one after another on a page, with luck they might have sounded like the stories in this collection.

Nan Goldberg has written reviews for The Boston Globe, Salon and the New York Post.