A middle-aged woman named Gill arrives at the home of her recently deceased Aunt Rosamond and discovers an empty Scotch glass, an empty bottle of sedatives and a set of cassette tapes stacked near a recorder and microphone. “These are for Imogen,” says a note near the tapes. “If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself.” This irresistible opening—as economic, in literary terms, as a flinch or a raised eyebrow in a comic sketch—establishes the tense, elegiac tone of Jonathan Coe’s small masterpiece, The Rain Before It Falls. A departure from the boisterous novels Mr. Coe is known for (his breakthrough was 1994’s What a Carve Up!, inanely retitled The Winshaw Legacy in America), the new novel traces the roots of a savage act through four generations of women.

Imogen, a second cousin of Gill’s, was adopted out of the family at age 3. As the tapes make clear, the dying Aunt Rosamond wanted to give Imogen a sense of her own history: “a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you.” She has chosen 20 photographs from her albums, and plans to describe each one to Imogen, who is blind. “I want you to know what they looked like, the people who came before you,” Rosamond says into the microphone, “the houses that they lived in, the places they visited. … It will give you a context in which to understand the difficult things, the painful things you will hear at the end.”

The history imparted is Rosamond’s, too: mainly the story of her friendship with her cousin Beatrix, Imogen’s grandmother. They had grown close during the war, when 8-year-old Rosamond was evacuated from Birmingham to her aunt and uncle’s farm in Shropshire. Describing the photographs from that summer, Rosamond wavers between nostalgia—clearly a dominating emotion in her life—and bitterness. Her aunt had not been kind to her; worse, had not been kind to Beatrix.

LOVE IS THE currency that’s spent, given, hoarded, withheld among the women in the novel. For lack of love from her parents, Beatrix becomes selfish and erratic, with a cruel streak. Rosamond, who has a surplus of love, can’t supply what Beatrix needs. Still, Rosamond remains loyal to her, and even parents Beatrix’s abandoned daughter, Thea, for two years until Beatrix snatches her back. Thea, too, was in danger of not being loved:

“Saving her from this fate had become my secret responsibility. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that it had taken on, for me, the nature of a sacred duty. But then after all these years, Imogen, nothing seems quite so simple, quite so clear-cut. Was it really your mother who was starved of love, or was it me?”

Here and there, in her legato progression through the decades, Rosamond follows a tangent about her own emotional life—a lost love, or her obsessive viewings of a film of the late 1940’s in which she and Beatrix can be glimpsed as extras. These digressions yield the richest ore in the novel. But it’s also satisfying when Gill—who listens to the tapes with her two adult daughters—periodically turns off the oral history, drawing the reader back to the present-day and the search for Imogen.

LAST OCTOBER IN the Guardian, Mr. Coe described his discovery, at 21, of the Virago Modern Classics: paperback reprints of significant but largely forgotten women writers like Dorothy Richardson and Rosamond Lehmann (who had a sister named Beatrix). While his friends were clamoring over Martin Amis and other clever young men, Jonathan Coe was making his way through the Virago novels, steeping himself in prewar women’s writing—often experimental and political work, kicking against the unreality of what passed for realistic fiction at the time, as well as the dim expectations for women writers. The Rain Before It Falls, he remarks, “is intended (among other things) as an homage to the whole list and the authors which it reintroduced.”

It’s hard to imagine a more affectionate tribute to these writers than Rosamond’s mesmerizing voice—kind but unsparing, inexorably advancing toward events she can hardly bear to describe. The exuberance in the novel belongs to Beatrix and Thea, but faithful Rosamond has the last word.

Regina Marler is a regular contributor to The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

You’ve heard of the unreliable narrator, the antihero, the evil twin. Now meet the enigmatic heroine. Louise Forrest, the watery and tentative central figure of Susanna Moore’s The Big Girls, is a prison psychiatrist­—a master of motives whose own motives are unclear. Why did Louise choose to work in a women’s prison? Why does she fall for the handsome, sneering Captain Bradshaw, a former undercover narcotics detective? Why can’t she effectively parent her 8-year-old son Ransom, who drops a horse turd in her suitor’s cup of coffee? She doesn’t know, and for most of the novel, the reader doesn’t either. If Louise weren’t so unflinching a witness to her own passivity and neediness, she would fade off the page.

Honesty transforms Louise—as it does Ms. Moore’s superb novel, which would otherwise be a joyless catalog of injustices. When Captain Bradshaw, a smoker, first comes to Louise’s apartment, she leaps for an ashtray and finds “a delicate clay bowl that Ransom had taken five months to make in first grade. I watched, impressed by the alacrity of my betrayal, as Bradshaw put out his cigarette in my son’s present to me.”

Another astute observer has her eye on Louise: Helen, her new patient at the Sloatsburg Correctional Institution on the Hudson, who killed her children during a psychotic break. The women pass the narrative between them, with some contributions by others. Helen’s voice is livelier than Louise’s, but both are truth-tellers. From their different vantages, they conduct a casual field study of Sloatsburg. Louise offers dry, ironic notes on its history, current protocols for doctor-patient relationships, and the mutual distrust between doctors and guards, while Helen supplies the nitty-gritty of an inmate’s life: the fights, the “families” and illicit sex, the constant testing of rules.

At the same time, Helen begins to allow the story of her childhood sexual abuse—the origins of her mental illness—to surface. It’s a dangerous process, as Louise realizes. What if a patient’s delusions are what keep her alive? “These THINGS are so real to me or, as [Louise] would put it, so NECESSARY TO ME, I can’t have imagined them,” Helen remarks, “If the Horsemen aren’t real, then I am just insane. The Horsemen believed in me, and I believed in them. They have been with me since I was a little girl. The idea that I might of imagined them, well, I deserve to die if that is true. If the Messengers are made up, and it was me who made them up, then I won’t even get to be with my babies. I will be drowning in the Burning Pits of Hell.”

The failure to protect children like Helen—and the long-term consequences of that failure—is a major theme of The Big Girls, and the reason you will not chuckle your way through this novel. But Ms. Moore isn’t concerned with crime and punishment so much as with the small acts of courage that get children (and adults) out of trouble: telling the truth; believing another’s truth; not being snowed by a sensational tale. The author rises above sensation herself by being nervy and ruthless, never picking the easy way when she could be planting thorns, puzzles and harsh wisdom in the reader’s path.

Regina Marler is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

Although each of these essays is titled after some notable (though sometimes forgotten) figure, the names are just points of departure. An essay on Miles Davis is actually about the cushioning and corrupting effects of money on artists, while an essay called “Sir Thomas Browne” is about book titles. (Mr. James raided Browne’s Urn Burial for his 1977 collection of television writing, Visions Before Midnight.) Some titles are a tease. You can learn much about Anna Akhmatova from the essay below her name, but next to nothing about Evelyn Waugh from “Evelyn Waugh.”

Some figures, like the Nazi collaborator and sputtering anti-Semite Robert Brasillach, who published the names of Jews so that the Gestapo could find them more easily, seem to have been included solely as negative examples, a foul smell wafted toward us for a few pages. Don’t forget this, the author seems to say. Maybe you’ll recognize it when you smell it again.

Although he takes aim at literary theory, academic obscurantism, racism, reverse-racism and intellectual dishonesty of every stripe, Mr. James’ recurrent theme is the danger of political ideologies. Signing onto an ideology entails ignoring all evidence to the contrary. It’s a mind-shutting maneuver. His particular targets are “intellectuals who shamed themselves and their calling by bringing superior mental powers to the defence of misbegotten political systems that were already known to be dispensing agony to the helpless.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, please stand up.)

Writers who earn Mr. James’ praise are those who, like George Orwell and Thomas Mann, eventually loosened up their rigid politics, or at least began to take in the darker implications of their early beliefs.

Mr. James’ tone ranges from confiding to bombastic, and he’s entertaining at either extreme. His conclusions are brilliantly reasoned, but his relentless focus on World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges and extreme authoritarianism is enough to convince you that there were no hula hoops, no soap operas, no cupcakes in the 20th century—in fact, that intellectual seriousness demands that there be no cupcakes. His essay titled “Coco Chanel” devotes one paragraph to her achievements in fashion, the rest to the concept of small luxuries, culminating with the 70 years of deprivation suffered by ordinary Soviet citizens.

But also—as with every mid-century French figure that Mr. James mentions—he points out Chanel’s degree of collaboration during the Occupation. Collaboration is more than a minor theme of Cultural Amnesia. We get examples of great bravery (the historian Marc Bloch, tortured and killed for fighting with the Resistance), good intentions (Albert Camus, who played down his modest anti-Nazi efforts) and self-serving zeal (Jean-Paul Sartre, who called for the death of collaborators when his own resistance was slight). Mr. James is even more alert to the whereabouts and political activities of German intellectuals before and during the war, and his essay on Jorge Luis Borges focuses on his tacit support for an increasingly brutal Argentine regime.

Wielding his scissor hands, Mr. James cuts many a famous writer down to size. But he also proves a generous guide to the century, offering reminiscences from his writing life and common-sense asides about translations, the best biographies, the importance of at least a basic reading knowledge of Spanish. His focus may veer without warning, but his prose is clear and quotable. Trading jokes with Jay Leno wasn’t a conversation, but “more like mouth-to-mouth assassination.” The Gods “poured success on [Camus] but it could only darken his trench coat: it never soaked him to the skin.”

At over 800 pages, this is a weighty tome in more ways than one, but the only unreadable parts come when Mr. James pulls the wings off a joke or a poetic effect by trying to explain how the writer came by it. Norman Mailer wrote, “In the middle classes, the remark, ‘He made a lot of money,’ ends the conversation. If you persist, if you try to point out that that money was made by digging through his grandmother’s grave to look for oil, you are met with a middle-class shrug.” In admiration, Mr. James manages to stretch Mailer’s moment of inspiration by another 10 sentences: “You are having a drink with him, and he wants to describe someone who will do anything for money. The standard idea comes into his head of a man selling his mother or grandmother. Instantly he sees that the idea needs improvement …. ”

These passages, and any mention of Stalin past about page 300, feel like being cornered at a party. The wet kiss can’t be far behind.

Readers who chafe at the author’s constant recourse to Stalin will find a partial explanation at the end of a critique of “desk-bound Western intellectuals” who persist in describing Stalin as a military genius, when it was his indifference to suffering and waste that allowed him to send millions of soldiers to their deaths. “I still can’t believe that these obscenities happened in my time,” Mr. James writes, “and that during the Anzac Day march through Sydney in 1946 I was actually wearing a forage cap with a badge on it celebrating Stalin’s heroism and genius.”

Clive James wants the rest of us to rip off our badges—then we can join the rambling, unrehearsed and irresistible conversation that humanism makes possible. “When we talk about the imponderables of life, we don’t really mean that we can’t ponder them,” he writes. “We mean that we can’t stop.”

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

Still, this is unmistakably Sontag—grave and sensual, with the signature white streak of hair. Closing the book between essays, you confront her off-center gaze, finding it pensive, warm or accusatory, depending on what you’ve just read. And if you consider that she died soon after she wrote most of these pieces, it makes reading At the Same Time an eerily intimate experience.

Sontag thought her novels represented her more fully than the essays. “The essays, I’m kind of cranking myself up and trying to say something true and eloquent and useful,” she told an interviewer, “but they are a bit of a straitjacket.” You wouldn’t know it to read them. The book opens with “An Argument About Beauty,” a playful trouncing of centuries of aesthetic theory. Characteristic of Sontag are the meaty, often portentous assertions—“Thinking about the history of beauty means focusing on its deployment in the hands of specific communities”—supported by impassioned arguments and odd examples, all nestled in dense, crackling prose.

To the academic reader, these are provocative, even flashy performances. To the common reader, they’re like shots of intellectual espresso. You want to tear through the Duino Elegies in time to make it to the Whitney, a fringe production of Aristophanes and a coffee-house poetry reading of a Latvian émigré.

Sontag is at her best when she’s advancing her private enthusiasms, like the bookstore bargain-bin discovery of Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden—a virtually unknown novel written with no hope of publication by an obscure, politically disfavored doctor in Soviet Russia. Sontag finds the novel “among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction and parafiction.” All her admiration and zeal emerge in “Unextinguished: The Case for Victor Serge,” an introduction to his novel, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and a grim primer in literary politics of the 20th century.

In a forward to this volume, David Rieff—Sontag’s son—recalls teasing his mother about her essays of appreciation, which he found “more self-revealing than she perhaps imagined.” Her speeches, too, are self-revealing—sterner, stiffer, statelier, as if the face she brought to the podium had to be different from the one she brought to her computer each morning. I endured one of these public talks many years ago and can remember trying to suppress my deep, self-pitying sighs. On the other hand, they include moving passages of reminiscence, in one case a description of Sontag’s childhood reading, and in another—for the German Book Trade award, the Friedenspreis—her relationship (as a Jew, as a writer) with German culture: “[M]y entire childhood was haunted by Germany, by the monstrousness of Germany, and by the German books and the German music I loved, which set my standard for what is exalted and intense.”

As you would expect, the most challenging works in this volume are about 9/11. Sontag’s diatribe against the instant public-relations spin in America was published by The New Yorker immediately after the attacks, drastically edited; it appears here for the first time in its intended form. “The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by nearly all American officials and media commentators in these last days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy,” she wrote. “Our leaders have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management.”

Two essays that follow demonstrate Sontag’s evolving response to the catastrophe. She had been in Berlin on 9/11, glued for 48 hours to her hotel television. “In those first days after my return to New York,” she explains in “A Few Weeks After,” “the reality of the devastation, and the immensity of the loss of life, made my initial focus on the rhetoric surrounding the event seem to me less relevant.”

Sontag was brave to publish her furious first impression of 9/11, which earned her enemies; even braver to temper and expand on it in subsequent statements. Similarly, in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) and in “Regarding the Torture of Others” (collected here), she shrugged off some of the famous views she expounded in her great classic, On Photography (1977). Her new collection includes another short essay on the subject, “Photography: A Little Summa,” in which she argues that photography is not seeing but a way of seeing, and that this characteristically modern way of seeing—this fragmenting and framing, this way of accessing realities beyond our own lives—gives “shape and form to our experience” at the same time that it “denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real.”

That is why we need writers, whose job is to be aware—and make us aware—of more: the messy, thrilling world beyond the edges of the photograph. Although this book is full of vigorous arguments on various topics, its recurrent themes are the importance of literature (Sontag defines literature as works not just worth reading, but worth rereading, translating, advocating) and the writer’s job. She expects a lot from writers.

“Not to have opinions but to tell the truth.”

“To depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture.”

“Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn’t just express themselves differently from the hegemonic discourse of the mass media. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show.”

Who will speak over the communal drone, now that Susan Sontag’s is gone?

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

Motherless from the age of 5, Blue is brought up by her father, Gareth van Meer, a political-science professor who intentionally stalls his career with single-semester teaching gigs at obscure colleges, the better to concentrate on his writing (e.g., “Steel-toe Stilettos: The Designer Fashions of American Foreign Aid”) and on the education of his only child. Gareth’s parenting is a cross between Auntie Mame and John Stuart Mill’s father. While other kids spend vacation cross-country drives shouting “Padiddle!” at cars with one burned-out headlamp, Blue joins her paternal unit in Sonnet-a-thons or The Van Meer Radio Theater Hour, featuring plays likely to appear on A.P. exams. “Dad could meticulously divide a state end to end,” she explains, “not into equal driving shifts but into rigid half-hour segments of Vocabulary Flash Cards (words every genius should know), Author Analogies (‘the analogy is The Citadel of thought: the toughest way to condition unruly relationships’), Essay Recitation (followed by a twenty-minute question-and-answer period), [and] War of the Words (Coleridge/Wordsworth face-offs).”

Good-looking in the rumpled way of fathers in novels--“he resembled an aged silent movie star”--Gareth attracts a colorful stream of determined women over 35. Blue (who was named after a butterfly, the Cassius Blue, her mother’s easiest meadow catch) calls these “June Bugs.” Each June Bug believes she’ll be the one to domesticate Gareth, but he gallantly claims Blue’s mother, who died in a car accident, as his one and only love. He ducks out of every lasso before it tightens, falling back on embarrassment, regret and caller ID.

From the beginning of the novel, we know that something terrible has happened, possibly a result of a conspiracy among gifted students of an elite school, and that Blue is now compelled to write about it. In this and other ways, Ms. Pessl’s debut recalls Donna Tartt’s Secret History (1992). (Ms. Pessl, like Ms. Tartt when she published her first novel, is 28 and photogenic.) But the tone is different.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a wordy, funny book, crowded with closely observed details and jokey literary references that veer into the kind of brainy silliness you could imagine from postgraduates huffing helium. Blue’s sexual education, for example, consists of a stack of books her father handed her when she was 12, including “C. Allen’s Shame Culture and the Shadow World [1993], Somewhere Between Puritans and Brazil: How to Have a Healthy Sexuality [Mier, 1990], also Paul D. Russell’s terrifying What You Don’t Know About White Slavery [1996].”

Blue is no stranger to new schools or cliques or infatuation with teachers. Her knowing quality, which--as it usually does--masks a lamb-like innocence about others, carries her through the first weeks at St. Gallway. She comments drolly on her dangerous new friends, known around school as the Bluebloods, and recognizes, from her extensive reading every stage of their evolving relationship--from their resentful inclusion of her (at the instigation of their mentor, the film-studies teacher, Hannah Schneider) to their alcoholic bonding to her shock and pain when they close ranks again near the end of the novel. Like a lot of literary bloggers, she uses capital letters to signal her ironic distance from events: “[T]hen I was in her killer whale of a Mercedes, all Disbelief, Awkwardness and Outright Panic as I compulsively glanced at the speedometer trembling toward 80 mph.”

Ms. Pessl, too, seems eager to assure us that she knows there’s nothing new about private-school thrillers or romans à clef featuring motherless girls watchful of their fathers’ love life. The difficulty with this kind of self-conscious satire is that the reader is held at a remove, enjoying the author’s performance but not risking belief. Most of the ominous action is undercut with giddy humor. While Blue and her friends spy from a parked car on Hannah Schneider, for instance, one of the girls is “stuffing her mouth with licorice now, chewing goatishly.” This works beautifully until the crucial twist, about 150 pages from the end of the book, when we’re expected to follow Blue through a mystery plot involving not only the dead film-studies teacher--who seems to have killed herself during a camping trip with Blue and her friends--but clandestine romance, double identities, underground revolutionaries and political assassinations. Suddenly, Blue knows nothing.

However exhilarating the story is after Hannah Schneider’s death, it’s hard to empathize with Blue as a grieving amateur sleuth, having the spent the novel smirking alongside her. Marisha Pessl’s special talent is for arresting similes (when getting drunk for the first time, Blue “found it impossible to focus on the conversation; it was like that cruel little blurry line at the bottom of an eye chart”) and fresh, merciless physical descriptions. These keep us hooked when the Implausible Plot Shifts threaten to shake us loose.

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

Motherless from the age of 5, Blue is brought up by her father, Gareth van Meer, a political-science professor who intentionally stalls his career with single-semester teaching gigs at obscure colleges, the better to concentrate on his writing (e.g., “Steel-toe Stilettos: The Designer Fashions of American Foreign Aid”) and on the education of his only child. Gareth’s parenting is a cross between Auntie Mame and John Stuart Mill’s father. While other kids spend vacation cross-country drives shouting “Padiddle!” at cars with one burned-out headlamp, Blue joins her paternal unit in Sonnet-a-thons or The Van Meer Radio Theater Hour, featuring plays likely to appear on A.P. exams. “Dad could meticulously divide a state end to end,” she explains, “not into equal driving shifts but into rigid half-hour segments of Vocabulary Flash Cards (words every genius should know), Author Analogies (‘the analogy is The Citadel of thought: the toughest way to condition unruly relationships’), Essay Recitation (followed by a twenty-minute question-and-answer period), [and] War of the Words (Coleridge/Wordsworth face-offs).”

Good-looking in the rumpled way of fathers in novels--“he resembled an aged silent movie star”--Gareth attracts a colorful stream of determined women over 35. Blue (who was named after a butterfly, the Cassius Blue, her mother’s easiest meadow catch) calls these “June Bugs.” Each June Bug believes she’ll be the one to domesticate Gareth, but he gallantly claims Blue’s mother, who died in a car accident, as his one and only love. He ducks out of every lasso before it tightens, falling back on embarrassment, regret and caller ID.

From the beginning of the novel, we know that something terrible has happened, possibly a result of a conspiracy among gifted students of an elite school, and that Blue is now compelled to write about it. In this and other ways, Ms. Pessl’s debut recalls Donna Tartt’s Secret History (1992). (Ms. Pessl, like Ms. Tartt when she published her first novel, is 28 and photogenic.) But the tone is different.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a wordy, funny book, crowded with closely observed details and jokey literary references that veer into the kind of brainy silliness you could imagine from postgraduates huffing helium. Blue’s sexual education, for example, consists of a stack of books her father handed her when she was 12, including “C. Allen’s Shame Culture and the Shadow World [1993], Somewhere Between Puritans and Brazil: How to Have a Healthy Sexuality [Mier, 1990], also Paul D. Russell’s terrifying What You Don’t Know About White Slavery [1996].”

Blue is no stranger to new schools or cliques or infatuation with teachers. Her knowing quality, which--as it usually does--masks a lamb-like innocence about others, carries her through the first weeks at St. Gallway. She comments drolly on her dangerous new friends, known around school as the Bluebloods, and recognizes, from her extensive reading every stage of their evolving relationship--from their resentful inclusion of her (at the instigation of their mentor, the film-studies teacher, Hannah Schneider) to their alcoholic bonding to her shock and pain when they close ranks again near the end of the novel. Like a lot of literary bloggers, she uses capital letters to signal her ironic distance from events: “[T]hen I was in her killer whale of a Mercedes, all Disbelief, Awkwardness and Outright Panic as I compulsively glanced at the speedometer trembling toward 80 mph.”

Ms. Pessl, too, seems eager to assure us that she knows there’s nothing new about private-school thrillers or romans à clef featuring motherless girls watchful of their fathers’ love life. The difficulty with this kind of self-conscious satire is that the reader is held at a remove, enjoying the author’s performance but not risking belief. Most of the ominous action is undercut with giddy humor. While Blue and her friends spy from a parked car on Hannah Schneider, for instance, one of the girls is “stuffing her mouth with licorice now, chewing goatishly.” This works beautifully until the crucial twist, about 150 pages from the end of the book, when we’re expected to follow Blue through a mystery plot involving not only the dead film-studies teacher--who seems to have killed herself during a camping trip with Blue and her friends--but clandestine romance, double identities, underground revolutionaries and political assassinations. Suddenly, Blue knows nothing.

However exhilarating the story is after Hannah Schneider’s death, it’s hard to empathize with Blue as a grieving amateur sleuth, having the spent the novel smirking alongside her. Marisha Pessl’s special talent is for arresting similes (when getting drunk for the first time, Blue “found it impossible to focus on the conversation; it was like that cruel little blurry line at the bottom of an eye chart”) and fresh, merciless physical descriptions. These keep us hooked when the Implausible Plot Shifts threaten to shake us loose.

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

Daniel, a middle-aged Frenchman famous for dark, abrasive political comedy, shares a social outlook and many biographical details with his author. As a performer, Daniel is an equal-opportunity offender, following an “Islamophobic burlesque” entitled Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine! with an anti-Semitic porn flick called Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler): “The actresses were authentic Arab immigrant girls, guaranteed to originate from the hardest Parisian suburbs—sluts but veiled, just the right type.”

Daniel’s profession allows him “to behave like a complete bastard with impunity, and even to profit hugely from [his] depravity, in terms of sexual conquests and money.” Alas, most of his female fans are pushing 40: “Some of them had fat asses, others breasts like flannels, sometimes both. In other words, there was nothing arousing about them.” Whatever fleeting glamour or validation these women may have hoped for in pursuing him, Daniel can only confirm to them “the decline of their erotic value” and their suspicion that it was “not maturity that awaited them, but simply old age.”

Eventually, Daniel meets his match, a magazine editor named Isabelle whose sexual frankness and “incredibly firm and supple body” obscure, for a moment, the canker on the rose: She’s 37 years old. They have three years of happiness, capped with a marriage ceremony, before the dreaded onset on physical decay. At 40, she begins to wince slightly when Daniel glances at her naked body. He would have liked to reassure her that she remains just as desirable as she did at 39, but he can’t. “I never felt, in the slightest way, capable of lying to her,” he explains. “I recognized the look she wore afterward: it was that humble, sad look of the sick animal that steps away from the pack, puts its head on its paws, and sighs softly, because it feels itself wounded and knows that it can expect no pity from its fellow creatures.”

Having shaken off any Muslim, Jewish or female readers, Mr. Houellebecq warms to his typical themes: alienation, nihilist fantasy, cloning, the failures of Western social reforms and sexual frustration. But the canker knows no gender. Daniel, after allowing Isabelle to slink away in shame at her perimenopausal weight gain, realizes with increasing bitterness that his own erotic stock is shrinking. Age—that thief of pleasure—dogs him through the second half of the novel. His ass and balls sag. He follows his fugitive hard-ons with the devotion of a whale watcher, scouting for flukes. After Isabelle, he falls in love with a beautiful, much younger woman named Esther, who bounces on his lap for a while before drifting off to be with other beautiful young people.

Daniel finds Esther so profoundly sexy that he has to use a German cream to stave off premature ejaculation. The application of this cream to his glans before a blowjob is perhaps the least erotic passage you may read this year. At heart, Daniel’s story is a swan song to erectile function, a plea for the continuation of a kind of sexual allure, opportunity and vigor that is in the realm of fantasy for almost everyone.

In all his books, Michel Houellebecq blames sexual liberation for the application of market forces to sex: “In a totally liberal economic system,” he wrote in his first novel, translated as Whatever (1994), “certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment in misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.” It’s a sad picture, based on a ludicrous assumption. Sexual competition is not a byproduct of liberalization, as any visit to the nearest ape cage—or even the nearest bird-filled tree—will demonstrate. And sexually restrictive cultures only mask the competition. It’s not as if the names of the bride and groom are drawn from hats.

Nevertheless, Mr. Houellebecq proposes different, interesting solutions to sexual competition in each of his books. In Whatever, the main character tries to talk his romantically unsuccessful friend into killing a woman. In Platform (2001), the two central characters collaborate to form a Thai-based sex tourism business for Westerners, since Asia contains “several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation, and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality.” His second novel, The Elementary Particles (1998), is the closest in theme to The Possibility of an Island. In the earlier novel, two wounded brothers, victims of a self-centered, sexually liberated mother, lunge and shudder through life, one sex-obsessed but physically repugnant and the other too captivated by his molecular-biology research to kiss his first girlfriend. The scientist brother, called Michel, eventually helps humanity transcend sex altogether by developing human cloning.

This resolution is carried further in The Possibility of an Island, and half of the book is narrated by Daniel24, one of the clones of the original Daniel, who became involved with a Raelian-like cult called the Elohimites and contributed to a murky, post-apocalyptic future both his DNA and his life story—a vital tool, it seems, to supplement the memory transfer possible between an original and his clones. Eternal life turns out to be a sedate, solitary undertaking rather than the joyful, sex-filled and harmonious wait for their extraterrestrial creators advertised by the Elohimites. There’s no sexual desire, and social contact is limited to occasional lyrical bursts of e-mail from other neohumans. Outside the security fence, in the blasted landscape, bands of savage human survivors roam.

If Mr. Houellebecq had imagined writing for these contemplative neohumans, rather than for his savage human readers, he might have taken the trouble to shape his flat but expressive prose into a narrative that transcends cynicism, Muslim-baiting and personal bitterness, on the one hand, and sentimentality on the other. The only very funny scene in his new novel (it features Karl Lagerfeld eating with his hands from a buffet) demonstrates Mr. Houellebecq’s comedic gift, but his sour fictional enterprise is, like Daniel’s sagging testicles, showing the effects of age and overexertion.

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

Daniel, a middle-aged Frenchman famous for dark, abrasive political comedy, shares a social outlook and many biographical details with his author. As a performer, Daniel is an equal-opportunity offender, following an “Islamophobic burlesque” entitled Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine! with an anti-Semitic porn flick called Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler): “The actresses were authentic Arab immigrant girls, guaranteed to originate from the hardest Parisian suburbs—sluts but veiled, just the right type.”

Daniel’s profession allows him “to behave like a complete bastard with impunity, and even to profit hugely from [his] depravity, in terms of sexual conquests and money.” Alas, most of his female fans are pushing 40: “Some of them had fat asses, others breasts like flannels, sometimes both. In other words, there was nothing arousing about them.” Whatever fleeting glamour or validation these women may have hoped for in pursuing him, Daniel can only confirm to them “the decline of their erotic value” and their suspicion that it was “not maturity that awaited them, but simply old age.”

Eventually, Daniel meets his match, a magazine editor named Isabelle whose sexual frankness and “incredibly firm and supple body” obscure, for a moment, the canker on the rose: She’s 37 years old. They have three years of happiness, capped with a marriage ceremony, before the dreaded onset on physical decay. At 40, she begins to wince slightly when Daniel glances at her naked body. He would have liked to reassure her that she remains just as desirable as she did at 39, but he can’t. “I never felt, in the slightest way, capable of lying to her,” he explains. “I recognized the look she wore afterward: it was that humble, sad look of the sick animal that steps away from the pack, puts its head on its paws, and sighs softly, because it feels itself wounded and knows that it can expect no pity from its fellow creatures.”

Having shaken off any Muslim, Jewish or female readers, Mr. Houellebecq warms to his typical themes: alienation, nihilist fantasy, cloning, the failures of Western social reforms and sexual frustration. But the canker knows no gender. Daniel, after allowing Isabelle to slink away in shame at her perimenopausal weight gain, realizes with increasing bitterness that his own erotic stock is shrinking. Age—that thief of pleasure—dogs him through the second half of the novel. His ass and balls sag. He follows his fugitive hard-ons with the devotion of a whale watcher, scouting for flukes. After Isabelle, he falls in love with a beautiful, much younger woman named Esther, who bounces on his lap for a while before drifting off to be with other beautiful young people.

Daniel finds Esther so profoundly sexy that he has to use a German cream to stave off premature ejaculation. The application of this cream to his glans before a blowjob is perhaps the least erotic passage you may read this year. At heart, Daniel’s story is a swan song to erectile function, a plea for the continuation of a kind of sexual allure, opportunity and vigor that is in the realm of fantasy for almost everyone.

In all his books, Michel Houellebecq blames sexual liberation for the application of market forces to sex: “In a totally liberal economic system,” he wrote in his first novel, translated as Whatever (1994), “certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment in misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.” It’s a sad picture, based on a ludicrous assumption. Sexual competition is not a byproduct of liberalization, as any visit to the nearest ape cage—or even the nearest bird-filled tree—will demonstrate. And sexually restrictive cultures only mask the competition. It’s not as if the names of the bride and groom are drawn from hats.

Nevertheless, Mr. Houellebecq proposes different, interesting solutions to sexual competition in each of his books. In Whatever, the main character tries to talk his romantically unsuccessful friend into killing a woman. In Platform (2001), the two central characters collaborate to form a Thai-based sex tourism business for Westerners, since Asia contains “several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation, and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality.” His second novel, The Elementary Particles (1998), is the closest in theme to The Possibility of an Island. In the earlier novel, two wounded brothers, victims of a self-centered, sexually liberated mother, lunge and shudder through life, one sex-obsessed but physically repugnant and the other too captivated by his molecular-biology research to kiss his first girlfriend. The scientist brother, called Michel, eventually helps humanity transcend sex altogether by developing human cloning.

This resolution is carried further in The Possibility of an Island, and half of the book is narrated by Daniel24, one of the clones of the original Daniel, who became involved with a Raelian-like cult called the Elohimites and contributed to a murky, post-apocalyptic future both his DNA and his life story—a vital tool, it seems, to supplement the memory transfer possible between an original and his clones. Eternal life turns out to be a sedate, solitary undertaking rather than the joyful, sex-filled and harmonious wait for their extraterrestrial creators advertised by the Elohimites. There’s no sexual desire, and social contact is limited to occasional lyrical bursts of e-mail from other neohumans. Outside the security fence, in the blasted landscape, bands of savage human survivors roam.

If Mr. Houellebecq had imagined writing for these contemplative neohumans, rather than for his savage human readers, he might have taken the trouble to shape his flat but expressive prose into a narrative that transcends cynicism, Muslim-baiting and personal bitterness, on the one hand, and sentimentality on the other. The only very funny scene in his new novel (it features Karl Lagerfeld eating with his hands from a buffet) demonstrates Mr. Houellebecq’s comedic gift, but his sour fictional enterprise is, like Daniel’s sagging testicles, showing the effects of age and overexertion.

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

There are a few such stories in Mr. Saunders’ third and darkest collection, In Persuasion Nation—a smorgasbord of satires, from the mild to the dementedly brilliant. One of them, “Brad Carrigan, American,” follows the misadventures of a pretend family on a floundering “reality” show. Brad knows that his distaste for the poop jokes and violent plot turns foisted on them by the all-powerful producers are losing him points with his pretend wife, and that he’ll be written off the show if he doesn’t “accentuate the positive.” He tries to suppress his compassion for the still-living corpses—victims of a far-away ethnic cleansing—that have somehow appeared at their home as backyard décor, and muster some enthusiasm for the new trend of FunGeese—malleable garden sculptures created by spraying live Canadian geese with a styrene coating which kills them yet leaves them flexible enough to arrange into wacky poses. “Interesting is good, Brad,” his ratings-conscious wife reminds him. “Surprising is good.”

One evening, the Carrigan family gathers in front of the television to enjoy a show-within-a-show called FinalTwist. On FinalTwist, five college friends take a sixth out for dinner, ostensibly to introduce him to a girl, but “actually to break the news that his mother is dead. This is the InitialTwist. During dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the SecondTwist. The ThirdTwist is, not only are all their mothers dead, the show paid to have them killed, and the fourth and FinalTwist is, the kids have just eaten their own grilled mothers.”

Like the loving God who appeared at the end of Mr. Saunders’ novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), Mr. Saunders lets his fantasy worlds go entirely to hell before he reaches in to tweak the ending. When Brad’s character is cancelled and his personality dissolved, Brad hopes he’ll at least reincarnate as someone who acts on his compassion sooner, who doesn’t waste his life “on accumulation, trivia, self-protection, and vanity.” You can feel the weight of the author’s approval behind this belated epiphany. (Don’t worry about Brad—if he doesn’t get the message now, there may be other chances: The dead in these stories tend to stick around.)

Although human frailty gets its share of wallops, Mr. Saunders’ most frequent target in this collection is consumer culture, as in the savage title story, a fable of competing brands in which hapless actors and anthropomorphized junk-food products cycle through repeating vignettes of cruelty to attract sales. You may never look fondly on a Dorito again.

The eponymous hero of “Jon” is a young man raised from infancy as part of a sheltered elite of product testers (the teenagers are celebrities in the world outside their glass-walled enclosure). His brain implant continually supplies advertisements (“location indicators” or “LIs”) to fill the place of actual memories and in answer to the slightest emotion. When his new wife suggests they ditch their implants and make a life with their baby outside the program, Jon is terrified, imagining the paucity of his own thoughts. How can they communicate without their shared software? “If I wish to compare my love to a love I have previous knowledge of,” he thinks, “I do not want to stand there in the wind casting about for my metaphor! If I want to say, like, Carolyn, remember that RE/MAX one where as the redhead kid falls asleep holding that Teddy bear rescued from the trash, the bear comes alive and winks, and the announcer goes, Home is the place where you find yourself suddenly no longer longing for home (LI 34451)—if I want to say to Carolyn, Carolyn, LI 34451, check it out, that is how I feel about you—well, then, I want to say it!”

Mr. Saunders is often compared to Kurt Vonnegut for his playfulness, his genius for the vernacular, and his pained recognition that it’s not only under totalitarian regimes that you’ll find cultural lock step: People love to conform, even if they have to chew off their own nonconforming bits. What sets Mr. Saunders apart is that his ideal of goodness—protection of the weak, bravery, open dissent—has a pop-spiritual basis. In “CommComm,” perhaps the strongest story in the collection, a beleaguered office worker fails to tell his spectral parents that they’ve been murdered. He can’t bear to let them go. A happy ending becomes possible only when he breaks the news to them, moments before he himself is murdered. “Feels super,” says his weary mother, finally tuning in to the celestial choir. “‘Like you had a terrible crick and then it went away,’ Dad says. They smile, step through the wall, vanish in two little sudden blurps of light.”

Despite the consolations of the afterlife, In Persuasion Nation has sharper edges than Mr. Saunders’ first two collections. It’s tempting to read it as a war protest, and to picture the author grinding his teeth over the compliant, brand-loyal American masses, not so much blind to suffering as eager to follow the leader and accentuate the positive.

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

There are a few such stories in Mr. Saunders’ third and darkest collection, In Persuasion Nation—a smorgasbord of satires, from the mild to the dementedly brilliant. One of them, “Brad Carrigan, American,” follows the misadventures of a pretend family on a floundering “reality” show. Brad knows that his distaste for the poop jokes and violent plot turns foisted on them by the all-powerful producers are losing him points with his pretend wife, and that he’ll be written off the show if he doesn’t “accentuate the positive.” He tries to suppress his compassion for the still-living corpses—victims of a far-away ethnic cleansing—that have somehow appeared at their home as backyard décor, and muster some enthusiasm for the new trend of FunGeese—malleable garden sculptures created by spraying live Canadian geese with a styrene coating which kills them yet leaves them flexible enough to arrange into wacky poses. “Interesting is good, Brad,” his ratings-conscious wife reminds him. “Surprising is good.”

One evening, the Carrigan family gathers in front of the television to enjoy a show-within-a-show called FinalTwist. On FinalTwist, five college friends take a sixth out for dinner, ostensibly to introduce him to a girl, but “actually to break the news that his mother is dead. This is the InitialTwist. During dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the SecondTwist. The ThirdTwist is, not only are all their mothers dead, the show paid to have them killed, and the fourth and FinalTwist is, the kids have just eaten their own grilled mothers.”

Like the loving God who appeared at the end of Mr. Saunders’ novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), Mr. Saunders lets his fantasy worlds go entirely to hell before he reaches in to tweak the ending. When Brad’s character is cancelled and his personality dissolved, Brad hopes he’ll at least reincarnate as someone who acts on his compassion sooner, who doesn’t waste his life “on accumulation, trivia, self-protection, and vanity.” You can feel the weight of the author’s approval behind this belated epiphany. (Don’t worry about Brad—if he doesn’t get the message now, there may be other chances: The dead in these stories tend to stick around.)

Although human frailty gets its share of wallops, Mr. Saunders’ most frequent target in this collection is consumer culture, as in the savage title story, a fable of competing brands in which hapless actors and anthropomorphized junk-food products cycle through repeating vignettes of cruelty to attract sales. You may never look fondly on a Dorito again.

The eponymous hero of “Jon” is a young man raised from infancy as part of a sheltered elite of product testers (the teenagers are celebrities in the world outside their glass-walled enclosure). His brain implant continually supplies advertisements (“location indicators” or “LIs”) to fill the place of actual memories and in answer to the slightest emotion. When his new wife suggests they ditch their implants and make a life with their baby outside the program, Jon is terrified, imagining the paucity of his own thoughts. How can they communicate without their shared software? “If I wish to compare my love to a love I have previous knowledge of,” he thinks, “I do not want to stand there in the wind casting about for my metaphor! If I want to say, like, Carolyn, remember that RE/MAX one where as the redhead kid falls asleep holding that Teddy bear rescued from the trash, the bear comes alive and winks, and the announcer goes, Home is the place where you find yourself suddenly no longer longing for home (LI 34451)—if I want to say to Carolyn, Carolyn, LI 34451, check it out, that is how I feel about you—well, then, I want to say it!”

Mr. Saunders is often compared to Kurt Vonnegut for his playfulness, his genius for the vernacular, and his pained recognition that it’s not only under totalitarian regimes that you’ll find cultural lock step: People love to conform, even if they have to chew off their own nonconforming bits. What sets Mr. Saunders apart is that his ideal of goodness—protection of the weak, bravery, open dissent—has a pop-spiritual basis. In “CommComm,” perhaps the strongest story in the collection, a beleaguered office worker fails to tell his spectral parents that they’ve been murdered. He can’t bear to let them go. A happy ending becomes possible only when he breaks the news to them, moments before he himself is murdered. “Feels super,” says his weary mother, finally tuning in to the celestial choir. “‘Like you had a terrible crick and then it went away,’ Dad says. They smile, step through the wall, vanish in two little sudden blurps of light.”

Despite the consolations of the afterlife, In Persuasion Nation has sharper edges than Mr. Saunders’ first two collections. It’s tempting to read it as a war protest, and to picture the author grinding his teeth over the compliant, brand-loyal American masses, not so much blind to suffering as eager to follow the leader and accentuate the positive.

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.