“I think it’s fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. … The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for the shot who bags the most sitting ducks on a clear day. There are other kinds of shooting, but they don’t give prizes for it. There is the kind of shooting that you get in the Abruzzi in the May snows and underwater shooting and the kind of lonely shooting that you have when you take your sights in a pocket-mirror and bring down a grizzly over your left shoulder but they don’t give prizes for that kind of shooting. Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mr. Herman Melville did that kind of shooting but they never got any prizes.”

The parody, please note, precedes by five years Hemingway’s own Nobel prize. As far as I know, there’s no record of Cheever’s reaction to Hemingway as laureate—no pastiche of Faulkner dissing Papa—though I like to think he would have used the phrase “outraged disbelief.”

JOHN UPDIKE’s last review for The New Yorker (March 9, $4.99)—an unwelcome thought on all counts—was of Mr. Bailey’s Cheever biography. Though he hailed Mr. Bailey’s book as “a triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal,” Updike also made it clear that he found the task of reading at length about Cheever’s unhappiness a fearsome burden. Who can blame him? He was already gravely ill with the cancer that would kill him only weeks later.

How amazing, then, to find that the review, though written under a death sentence, is dotted with phrases charged with the signature Updike élan. About Cheever’s journals, for instance: “an embarrassment of riches and a richesse of embarrassment.” About Cheever’s closeted homosexuality: “Repression and expression: twin causes of complication and disharmony with others.” And again: “There was, between his shadowy ‘proclivities’ and his luminous work, an almost organic disconnect.”

Updike’s professionalism has always been a source of wonder to me—the furious work rate; the invariably high standard of the vast oeuvre; the impeccable, universal civility—but this last instance of his devotion to his craft tops it all. Hats off.

THE BRILLIANT and mischievous Hilary Mantel, musing in The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) about the famous moment when Coleridge, in the midst of composing “Kubla Khan,” was interrupted “by a person on business from Porlock,” admits to herself that most writers have occasion to pray for the diversion of an interruption, especially when they know they’re ready to start writing:

“The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticize them later. You give this advice but can’t always take it. You dread setting off down any one narrative path, because you know your choice will make most of the others impossible. Select one, write it, and it begins to seem in some sense pre-ordained, natural, correct; the other options fade from memory. Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. Writers, as generations of jealous spouses have learned to their cost, are not naturally monogamous. We don’t want to choose; we want to keep open all the possibilities, fill a lifetime with fresh and less-than-final versions.”

I’m particularly sensitive to those remarks because I’m about to embark on a daunting project (a biography of the heroic John Updike, no less), which will interrupt, for a couple of years, the writing of the Bookie. I’m grateful to The Observer for generously allowing me to take an extended sabbatical—and I hope no one suspects that I signed up to write the book merely to avoid a weekly deadline!

Well, let me stir up these muddy waters with a selection of reviews, alternately ecstatic and apoplectic, from the British press. First, a Times vs. Times match-up that should leave your head spinning: Whereas Ms. Kakutani considers The Kindly Ones “a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks, pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies” (note the repetition of “pointless”), historian Anthony Beevor, writing in the London Times, flatly declares that it’s “a great achievement to have made this horrific tale recounted by such a profoundly unsympathetic character so gripping”—and, in case you have lingering doubts, that it’s “a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come” (note the repetition of “great”).

Not sure which Times to believe? Well, Peter Kemp, fiction editor of The Sunday Times assures us that The Kindly Ones is “so bloatedly inept that its reverential reception across the Channel seems barely comprehensible.” He, too, wants to make sure we know how he feels: “[T]his Third Reich novel, for all its plethora of detail, carr[ies] as much conviction as a plastic Iron Cross”—which means, I guess that with the score two to one against, we’ll have to wait for The New York Times Book Review to show its hand before we declare the four-way Times tournament a draw or a defeat for Mr. Littell.

To confuse matters further, some critics are themselves of two minds. Donald Morrison, writing in the Financial Times, zigzags deliriously: “The Kindly Ones … is revolting, overlong and far from lucid. But it is also erudite, pitiless and mesmerising.” So what’s the verdict? On the one hand Mr. Littell “leaves no dead horse unbeaten, no atrocity undescribed, no depth of depravity unplumbed. Little wonder The Kindly Ones is so exasperating”—but on the other hand, it’s a book that “tries to ask the big questions. And fails magnificently.” Andrew Hussey, writing in The Independent, is similarly conflicted: He calls it both a “deeply flawed work” and “an entertaining read” (two of the hoariest clichés from criticism’s vast trove of worn-out phrases) before concluding, unhelpfully, that “it may not be ‘Holocaust porn’ but it is ‘Holocaust kitsch.’”

George Walden knows exactly what he thinks, but he’s mixed up about altitude. Writing in The Telegraph, he judges that “with its sex ‘n’ fascism horror comic theme, at heart this is a low, conventionally minded novel”—before pivoting neatly: “This is a work of high vulgarity and great cynicism, whose only attraction is its inadvertent humour.” Thumbs down, I guess.

It may be wrong to wrap up so many contradictory assertions in a neat package, but I can’t resist pointing out that although the prescient Mr. Walden’s review appeared two years ago (when only the French edition was available), he and Ms. Kakutani settled on the very same adjective to describe Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones: “odious.”

To give you a taste of the sheer verve of Ms. Haskell’s writing, here’s her summary description of Leigh, Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo before they were transformed into bona fide stars: “These actresses hadn’t yet had their eyebrows plucked, their teeth whitened and straightened, their breasts raised, their hairlines changed—in other words, been submerged in the Hollywood developing emulsion that raises star power to its full electromagnetic force.”

COLLECTING RARE BIRDS is a hobby worthy of a Flannery O’Connor character, and her famous fascination with peacocks fits, too, but the odd touch that’s perfect—a tidbit I picked up from Brad Gooch’s excellent Flannery (Little, Brown, $30)—is that O’Connor more often referred to her peacocks as “peafowl.” That hint of perversity, of stubborn precision, evoked for me in a word the full, creepy splendor of the author of Wiseblood and The Violent Bear It Away. O’Connor worked on the latter, her second novel, for six years; she prayed for it when she was visiting Lourdes—and reported to a friend that her “little vacation from the Opus Nauseous seems to have done me some creative good anyway.” Shall we say that the O.N. grew into a miraculously fine piece of work?

Mr. Gooch’s is patient and tactful with the publicity-shy and dauntingly complex O’Connor. His book is a welcome introduction to the quiet, narrow life of a fiercely funny and unnervingly powerful writer.

(Flannery is graced with an apt blurb from Joel Conarroe: “A good biographer is hard to find.”)

DAVID GRANN’s The Lost City of Z (Doubleday, $27.50) is also a biography of sorts—of Percy Fawcett, the indefatigable British explorer who spent two decades crisscrossing the Amazon jungle in search of an ancient civilization (which he called “Z” and the rest of us would probably call Eldorado). Fawcett never located his lost city; he found only misery and disease and more biting insects than there are fish in the sea. Fawcett, his 22-year-old son and his son’s best friend all vanished in 1925, somewhere in the Mato Grosso, and their fate remains a mystery to this day.

Mr. Grann’s book is a story of obsession: Fawcett’s; that of the 100 or so explorers over the years who have died trying to find out what happened to him; and Mr. Grann’s, which sent the New Yorker writer into the Amazon in search of his own Z—“a hidden metropolis of words and paragraphs”—a blockbuster tale of adventure. I’m pleased to report that he found it.

The photos in I Heard God Talking to Me, all black and white, are by Edward Weston and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, the Harper’s Bazaar photographer who brought Edmondson’s work to the attention of curators at MoMA.

Amazon seems to think it’s a children’s book (“Reading level: Ages 9–12”); the publishers’ classification over the bar code mentions African-American Studies—but I’d say that Elizabeth Spires’ I Heard God Talking to Me (FSG, $17.95) is a stunningly handsome art book, a fine tribute in poems and photographs to the sculpture of William Edmondson, the first black artist to be given a one-man show at MoMA. (That was in 1937, when Edmondson was about 63 years old, about six years after the retired hospital janitor had begun carving stone with a railroad spike and hammer.)

The photos in I Heard God Talking to Me, all black and white, are by Edward Weston and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, the Harper’s Bazaar photographer who brought Edmondson’s work to the attention of curators at MoMA. The poems are by Ms. Spires, and they are indeed easy to read; some of them are merely Edmondson’s own words arranged in stanzas. And the sculptures … well, the artist thought he was divinely inspired (“I’se just doing the Lord’s Work. I didn’t know I was no artist till them folks told me I was”); I may be a card-carrying atheist, but I wouldn’t want to argue with him: His figures are limestone brought to life.

I Heard God Talking to Me comes together in splendid harmony—a beautiful book, simple and powerful. Like Edmondson’s sculpture, it’s a work of art without being in the least artsy.

IF IT WEREN'T FOR the Philip Pullman blurb on the cover, I would assume that no atheist could properly appreciate David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives (Pantheon, $20), a collection of imaginative prose doodles about what could happen after we die. I found myself very occasionally amused, in particular by the scenario that has the virtuous rotting peacefully in their graves while the iniquitous endure suburbia for all eternity: “Only sinners enjoy life after death.” (Nice choice of verb.)

A neuroscientist who has three more books coming within the next two years, all of them purely scientific, Mr. Eagleman is a capable writer. But his ideas about the hereafter aren’t nearly startling enough. Almost all of them presuppose some kind of supernatural agency—which means I immediately lose any real interest. Inertia and mild curiosity kept me reading, even after the repetition of the standard formula “In the afterlife …” began to grate.

The author’s most successful trick is to play on our preconceived sense of scale. Humans, in this vignette, “are merely the nutritional substrate”:

“There is no afterlife for us. Our bodies decompose upon death, and then the teeming floods of microbes living inside us move on to better places. This may lead you to assume that God doesn’t exist—but you’d be wrong. It’s simply that He doesn’t know we exist. He is unaware of us because we’re at the wrong spatial scale. God is the size of a bacterium. He is not something outside and above us, but on the surface and in the cells of us.”

Wow. Takes me right back to those dorm-room bull sessions.

FROM DANIEL ZALEWSKI'S very long and somewhat solemn profile of Ian McEwan in The New Yorker (Feb. 23, $4.50): “The idea of an afterlife, that we’ll meet again in some … theme park? There seems no good reason to think so.”

Mr. Zalewski’s best moment:

“McEwan’s presiding interest has always been psychology, and, like many scientists of his generation, he has shifted his intellectual allegiances. At first, he studied perversity; now he studies normality. His first god was Freud. Now it is Darwin.”

Mr. McEwan’s, saved for the very end:

“You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They’ve got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you’re fiddling around with something that’s already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be.”

If your first thought is Mad Men, think again. Though Ogilvy, a Scot born in England who remained a British citizen all his life, loved to make a splash (arriving at his New York office in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce, sporting the finest tweeds and a black, full-length, crimson-lined cape) and certainly looked the part, tall, handsome and fond of pretty women, he was also a tireless worker—“the least lazy person,” a colleague called him.

It helps, if you’re reading The King of Madison Avenue, to have some interest in advertising, but it’s not absolutely necessary. Though Ogilvy’s peculiar genius was most successfully expressed in his professional life, it was manifest in many other areas as well. A shame that Norman Mailer snared the title Advertisements for Myself—it would have suited Ogilvy admirably.

“I’m a lousy copywriter,” he liked to say, “but a good editor.” Mr. Roman, who worked with him at Ogilvy & Mather for 26 years, is more effusive:

“Being edited by Ogilvy was like being operated on by a great surgeon who could put his hand on the only tender organ in your body. You could feel him put his finger on the wrong word, the soft phrase, the incomplete thought. But there was no pride of authorship, and he could be quite self-critical. Someone found a personally notated copy of one of his books in which he had written cross comments about his own writing: ‘Rubbish,’ ‘Rot!’ ‘Nonsense.’ He would send his major documents around for comment, with a note: ‘Please improve.’”

That’s my kind of hero.

A WORD OF advice to the duo (Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser) who edited Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak (Harper Perennial, $10): Three books of six-word memoirs is too many (and so is two, but the urge to publish a follow-up to the original volume of mini-memoirs, Not Quite What I Was Planning, must have been irresistible—especially after the debut spent a talismanic six weeks on the best-seller list). Of course there are some gems in the new collection, but not enough of them to warrant a second sequel. Quit while you’re ahead!

Six favorites:

“Don’t trust a man who waxes.” —Noelle Hancock (a former Observer reporter)

“Met him online. Blogged our divorce.” —Kristy Sammis

“It never hurt as good again.” —Marc Ecko

“I should have seen him coming.” —Kelly Bruce

“He sees the me I don’t.” —Mary Catherine Hamelin

“I was smitten, now I’m smote.” —Bobby Wynne

AND SPEAKING OF love and heartbreak, Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire (Ecco, $24.99) is just as good as the various rave reviews promise. With a minimum of psychobabble and a maximum of tight-focus unsentimental and unsqueamish reporting, Mr. Bergner tells the story of four people with “abnormal” sex lives: a foot fetishist, a dominatrix, a man obsessed with his stepdaughter and a man sexually attracted to amputees.

The reader, of course, is transformed into a voyeur—but the author’s cool authoritative tone and openhearted acceptance of what he’s exposing wash away all taint of kinky vicarious thrill. It’s enough to make you think that in this case, good reporting isn’t just morally neutral. It spreads the love.

“Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion—between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalization, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God’s-eye view.”

A FEW OF my favorite passages from the flood of eulogies:

“I love Updike’s writing so much I can barely read it. My eye falls on a sentence. My mood has already improved. I slam the book shut. Another sentence may do me in. Still, I read on, and my mood goes vaulting upward yet again. This isn’t reading; this is drinking. I read him in order to become ebullient. Those extra words he plunks into his sentences, the unusual images, the way that everything seems to shimmer, his habit of dissolving each new visible thing into microscopic radiant glints of God knows what—every last over-the-top element of Updike’s prose has the effect of lighting me up.” —Paul Berman

“Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that. He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom. It’s as if nothing human seemed closed to his eye.” —Martin Amis

“Even when his essays included a harsh criticism, he politely coiled it, tucked it inside, part snake, part rose, and the reader would feel the bite sprung silkily only at the end—in a balletic allegiance to both generosity and candor.” —Lorrie Moore

“Updike’s example seemed the model of a real writer’s life, in that this was an existence spent not in talking about writing, promising to write, boasting of having written or telling other people how they should write, but simply in the act of writing, every day, for decades.” —Zadie Smith

“Now and then he would turn up at the office, startling me once again with his height and his tweeds, that major nose, and his bright eyes and up-bent smile; he spoke in a light half whisper and, near the end of each visit, somehow withdrew a little, growing more private and less visible even before he turned away. The fadeaway, as I came to think of it, may have had to do with his exile from his own writing that day, while travelling; the spacious writing part of him was held to one side when not engaged, kept ready for its engrossing daily stint back home.” —Roger Angell

AND HERE—one last fadeaway—is the first paragraph of an interview Updike gave just three months ago (the interviewer is the eminent Peter Conrad):

“‘Lately,’ said John Updike, ‘I’ve been feeling not so much a wish to die as a wish that being alive didn’t generate so many demands.’ Sitting across from Updike in a Boston hotel suite with my notebook open, I was the demand, and I have to say that he looked equal to it: now 76, with a wintry shock of white hair, his eyes gleamed in his angular, beveled face, and his mouth curved in wry amusement. ‘You write a book,’ he went on, ‘and that generates demands, like this interview—though of course I’m sure it will be perfectly delightful!’”

Updike was right, as usual: The interview is a delight, Updike as the polished old pro, charming, sly, gracious, generously intent on the task at hand.

To get to the analysis of the speech, skip Mr. Raban’s rather long warm-up (an overview, aimed at British readers, of inaugurations past, followed by a brief introduction to Jon Favreau, Mr. Obama’s 27-year-old chief speechwriter); proceed directly to the paragraph in which he declares that many of Mr. Obama’s phrases “had the dull patina of silver that has jingled in dead presidents’ pockets.” In the next paragraph Mr. Raban refers to “somewhat moth-eaten metaphors”—and for a moment it looks like a harsh review.

And then comes the twist:

“What needed to be said had to be phrased in language as well-worn and conventional as possible, to give the illusion of smooth continuity”—even as Mr. Obama, in a notable deviation from precedent, categorically rejected “the political philosophy and legislative record of the previous occupant of the White House.”

Mr. Raban believes that Mr. Obama’s address—couched in “familiar and emollient language”—“is as near as George W. Bush has come to being impeached.”

In other words, the moth-eaten metaphors were just a ploy—and Mr. Raban’s review is a rave.

WE'RE ALL LOOKING FORWARD to the day when we can contemplate Cuba without wincing at the thought of Camp Delta. When that day comes—less than a year from now, with any luck—the title of Richard Fleming’s delightful travel book, Walking to Guantánamo (Commons, $27), will lose its inapt political overtones.

Mr. Fleming, a New Yorker in his late 30s who feared he was on the brink of a nasty midlife crisis, set out to walk from one end of Cuba to the other, west to east, a plan he nursed for five years before actually taking the first step. An integral part of the plan, of course was to write a book about his adventures.

Charmingly candid and laid back, resolutely friendly with the Cubans he encounters and always ready to complain to the reader about blisters and bad knees and other aches and pains, Mr. Fleming is refreshingly post-ideological—he has no agenda other than the urge to scratch the itch of his curiosity.

Walking to Guantánamo offers a view of the island entirely free from the “political venom” that poisons perspectives on both sides of the Straits of Florida. You won’t be perhaps surprised to hear that Mr. Fleming experiences a “gradual, almost osmotic, personal disillusionment with Castro’s politics”—but that’s in effect irrelevant to his eyewitness report on the daily life of a neighboring nation that’s fabulously foreign.

NOW THAT THE ACADEMY of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has ratified Rex Reed’s judgment and guaranteed that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will be remembered as a good or even great movie, we can disclose the sad secret behind its success: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, from Tales of the Jazz Age (Juniper Grove, $11.99), is slapdash and unfunny, at once clunky and utterly insubstantial. It’s all premise—there’s no plot and no characterization, and even the prose is lackluster. In other words, the director, David Fincher, and the writers, Eric Roth and Robin Swicord, took from Fitzgerald only an idea (which Fitzgerald had filched, in turn, from Mark Twain) and a pleasantly alliterative title; unburdened, they let imagination roam free.

Consider the compound ironies: Fitzgerald hated Hollywood (“Isn’t Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word?” he asked). His West Coast stint, from 1936 up to his death in 1940, was mostly miserable, and a good deal of the misery was inflicted by a studio (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). I can’t help thinking that his failure as a screenwriter played a part in his rapid decline over those four years. And the flip side: The movie industry has never made a decent film out of any of his books—until now. Success at last … with one of his weaker stories.

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.”

In the first dozen pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ remarkable new novel, Lark & Termite (Knopf, $24), an American soldier caught up in the surreal and deadly chaos of the first month of the Korean War considers how his weeks of language immersion in Seoul “only deepened [his] belief in language and sound as the only tincture of reality.” As he fights for survival in the panicked retreat, the memory of his pregnant wife’s words (“private sounds soft with darkness”), are his anchor, his help and stay secure.

Lark & Termite has an engaging plot, an elegant, intricate structure and a clutch of characters who live and breathe—but it’s also a celebration of language. Though Ms. Phillips makes sure that the reader’s basic needs are always met, she feels free to revel in the sound and layered sense of her writing. There’s joy here, and the bold confidence of a mature talent at full stretch.

Take for example, the phrase “belief in language and sound as the only tincture of reality.” I can’t prove it, but my guess is that Ms. Phillips wanted us to ponder all the many meanings of the ancient and wonderful word “tincture,” which comes from the Latin tinctura, a dyeing. She’s using it here to mean something like “distilled essence”—but she could also be reminding us that language and sound color reality, or that reality is suspended in language the way an element (gold) or a chemical compound (opium) is suspended in a tincture.

Lark and Termite are half-sister and -brother. Lark is 17, a young high-school graduate learning to be a secretary, living with her aunt in a small West Virginia town in the late 1950s. Termite is 9 and unable to speak or walk (“He doesn’t need words,” says Lark). He can make sounds—incoherent moans he thinks of as singing—but he has no language. (He’s also, by the way, the son of the soldier we met fighting in Korea.)

Lark is one of the novel’s narrators, a delightful, seductive voice, clear-eyed and fresh. As for Termite, Ms. Phillips shows us his world—his reality—in chapters that bring to mind Faulkner’s “idiot” Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. But whereas Benjy acts as a first-person narrator (even though he can’t, in fact, speak), Ms. Phillips spares us that conundrum: She uses a close third-person perspective, providing words that are not Termite’s words, but do the trick nonetheless. When we are first allowed into his head, he’s playing with a strip of colored plastic torn from a dry-cleaning bag:

“He sees through the blue and it goes away, he sees through the blue and it goes away. He breathes, blowing just high. The blue moves but not too much, the blue moves and stays blue and moves.”

Ms. Phillips is trying to show us a world unsecured by language. (I’m tempted to say that the ribbon of blue plastic is the tincture of Termite’s reality.)

One more taste. Here’s loving Lark (“I’m so used to being with Termite, he feels like alone to me”) giving him a lesson in botany:

“Lark names the flowers and he says the names but the sounds are not the flowers. The flower is the shape so close he sees it still enough to look, blue like that, long and tall, each flared tongue with its own dark eye. Then the shape moves and the flower is too close or too far. The shape becomes its colors but he feels Lark touch it to his face and lips like a weightless velvet scrap.”

Lark & Termite is Jayne Anne Phillips’ first novel in nine years—what a pleasure to welcome her back!

The action begins in Mr. Wilentz’s introduction, where he sneers at the “picturesque costume dramas that commonly appear under the heading of popular history and biography.” Perhaps the sharpest put-down comes from Edmund Wilson, who deplores the “romantic and sentimental rubbish” written about the Great Emancipator and wonders whether “the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”

FRANK RICH BEGINS HIS most recent column (www.nytimes.com) with a literary allusion that’s very nearly a perfect fit. Mr. Rich compares George W. Bush to “the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan,” Daisy’s bad boy husband in The Great Gatsby. Tom and W. are both Yalies, true, and it’s also true that both are arrogant, narcissistic hypocrites, children of privilege and victims of arrested development with zero self-awareness and a supercilious manner. It might be a stretch to call Tom “the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties” (all we know about his pedigree is that his family were “enormously wealthy” Midwesterners), but we can surely agree that Tom and Mr. Bush share the carelessness that smashes up things and creatures and lets other people clean up the mess. Fitzgerald’s famous condemnation of the Buchanans must be the point of the comparison. So far, so good.

But here’s what Mr. Rich actually wrote: “He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.” That last sentence spoils it. Tom may be stunted in a moral and intellectual sense (when Tom and Nick Carraway run into each other at the end of the novel, Nick feels as though he were “talking to a child”), but the image of Tom that sticks in every reader’s mind is of overpowering animal force. Fitzgerald insists on it from the first: “Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.” Daisy complains that she has married “a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen.” Tom protests that he hates “that word hulking,” but Daisy has nailed it. Physically, he’s larger than life, a hulk in every sense.

A QUICK GLANCE AT the contents page of Ali Smith’s disappointing new collection, The First Person (Pantheon, $23.95), is enough to confirm the suspicion aroused by the title that this is going to be a self-reflexive wallow. “True Short Story,” “The Third Person,” “The History of History,” The Second Person,” “Writ”—what are the chance of finding a good yarn in there? None.

Here’s proof, from the title story:

“You’re not the first person to spin me a yarn, I say.

“I’m pre-yarn, you say. I’m post-yarn. Yarn.

“You say the word yarn like you said the word yawn this morning. I try not to laugh.”

Yes—I think we can manage to repress our laughter.

A pity, because Ms. Smith truly is “a skilled, majestically confident writer”—that’s from a blurb on the back of The First Person attributed to The Observer. I confess that I wrote those words (about Ms. Smith’s prize-winning novel, The Accidental). Now that I’ve read her latest short stories, I’d like to amend my judgment: Ms. Smith is a skilled, majestically confident writer who must in the future work very hard to avoid solipsistic self-indulgence.

Melville House, the small press based in Brooklyn with a bookstore at 145 Plymouth St. (closed for the holidays, alas, from Dec. 23), has a first-rate series of 25 classic novellas, astutely selected and attractively packaged, each one $10 or less. You can play it safe with indisputably great works (Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Joyce’s The Dead, Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno); or spring a surprise with a neglected gem (George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Chekhov’s My Life, Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarrelled); or risk a curiosity such as Conrad’s Freya of the Seven Isles (odd for Conrad because it features a tragic heroine) or Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs, which features, yes, a pair of chatty canines.

Perhaps the oddest and most relevant title is Proust’s The Lemoine Affair, which is the story of a real-life financial scandal in which Proust himself was stung (Henri Lemoine claimed he could make diamonds out of coal—Bernie Madoff with a product). The sorry tale is served up in a series of pastiches in which Proust mimics Balzac, Flaubert and other 19th-century French authors. This is the first English translation of The Lemoine Affair—Michael M. Thomas, who wrote The Midas Watch in The Observer for many years, calls it “absolutely amazing.”

Two suggestions for additions to the Melville House list: Stephen Crane’s The Monster, and another Tolstoy novella, Hadji Murad. Maybe next Christmas….

THE LEAST EXPENSIVE, most portable and most improving present you can give is to memorize a poem and recite it for the lucky poetry lover on your list. How about “The Snow Man,” a wintry one-sentence masterpiece from Wallace Stevens, which is free on the web (www.poets.org) and still cheap in book form (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, $12.50)?

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

OR HOW ABOUT a poem by Elizabeth Alexander, the poet and Yale professor who’s scheduled to read at Barack Obama’s inauguration? This one, “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe,” is from American Sublime (Graywolf Press, $14):

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?