by suffocated anger in the streets and heart palpitations in the night. Didion's merciless matter-of-fact descriptions of body dumps and daily violence refuse to console readers with the sentimental delusion that awareness is sufficient. Instead, she implicates everyone — herself and readers alike — in the devastation she finds.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Rebecca Goldstein's new book is 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. For the Wall Street Journal she named a five best list of novels of ideas.

One book on the list:

Herzogby Saul BellowViking, 1964

The hilarious tack that Saul Bellow takes in "Herzog" is to address immortal thinkers in grave earnestness, demanding of them relevance to his own very mortal predicament, to wit: his discovery that he is being cuckolded by his best friend.The book is veined by unsent missives, howling with outrage against reality and its learned mediators. "Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression 'the fall into the quotidian.' When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?" Herzog has been betrayed not only by his beautiful young neurotic of a wife but also by the entire Western canon, not to speak of God, to whom he also dashes off a few choice lines. The blend of high-mindedness and low farce yields a rare form of tragic comedy, "King Lear" as filtered through Milton Berle.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best bells in literature.

One novel on the list:

Notre Dame de Paris by