THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN by Garth Stein

It's a little juvenile, and it comes across as a sort of self-help book, but it has its appeal, especially if you're a car racing fanatic. Also, it's narrated by a dog, Enzo, who understands a lot more about what's going on than some of the people. Denny, his owner, experiences setback after setback, heartbreak after heartbreak, but keeps on trucking, so to speak, and doggedly, I might add. In fact, Denny is a little too perfect. Enzo expects to be reincarnated as a man with all of Denny's best qualities, including his love and aptitude for racing. In this life, unfortunately, Enzo can't speak, and that inadequacy, along with the lack of opposing thumbs, is a source of endless frustration for him. He's pretty much on target, though, in his assessment of the various human characters that populate the book; I love it that he dubs Enzo's in-laws the Evil Twins, a moniker that they richly deserve. Mostly, the book offers up car racing as a metaphor for life. Even though I thought the writing was pedantic (What can you expect from a dog?), I boohooed at the emotional ending.

FAT OLLIE'S BOOK by Ed McBain

Fat Ollie is a detective investigating the assassination of a local politician. He's an equal-opportunity bigot, and his novel, except for the last chapter, has been stolen from his patrol car. Yes, he's written a very short (30+ pages) novel, Report to the Commissioner, and has no backup copy, because he composed it on a typewriter. So there are two crimes being solved here, and how they become intertwined is hilarious. The transvestite prostitute, Emilio/Emmy, who stole the novel, doesn't realize that it's fiction and starts doing some sleuthing of his own to locate the people in the book. There's also a drug deal going down in the middle of it all, with some two-bit crooks who have no idea what they're getting into. Needless to say, this is not a thriller or a serious mystery. Fat Ollie's novel is included in its entirety and provides lots of laughs, especially as its author repeats himself to be sure that he's covered all the bases grammatically. And the protagonist of Ollie's book is a female cop, so that it's almost as if Ollie is channeling a woman in the book. It's a not-too-subtle parallel with the Emilio/Emmy character.

AMERICAN WIFE by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld imagines the life of Laura Bush with obvious fictional embellishments. The novel largely focuses on the conflict between staying true to one's principles and being a supportive spouse. Alice Lindgren is the stand-in for Laura, and Charlie Blackwell represents George W. Bush here, and the setting is Wisconsin instead of Texas. Charlie is a ne'er do-well from a rich and powerful Republican family with a mother whose nickname is Maj (short for Her Majesty). Alice has a middle-class background and leans left of center politically. The couple's political differences don't so much hamper their marriage as they have the potential to undermine Charlie's political aspirations. Plus, Alice has a few skeletons in her closet, and, of course, Charlie's transgressions are sort of swept under the rug after he gets religion. Alice makes the observation that it's much more difficult to be mildly famous, in which case people come out of the woodwork wanting a piece of you, than to be really famous, in which case you're totally insulated from all that. From my perspective, though, I realized that Laura Bush probably has had a much more colorful life than I have given her credit for, even if she didn't do most of the stuff in the book. Since my political leanings are more in line with Alice's than with Charlie's, I enjoyed the book. Your reaction may be different if you lean the other way, because certainly some of Alice's behaviors are very un-First-Lady-like.

THE SECRET HISTORY by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt's The Secret History is a book about a murder, but more in the vein of Crime and Punishment than Presumed Innocent. Richard, our narrator, joins a group of five young men and one woman in the study of classic Greek at a small private college in Vermont. He goes to great lengths to conceal the fact that he's there on scholarship, as this fact might alienate him from his blue-blood classmates. We learn on the first page, though, that the group will murder Bunny (short for Edmund), one of their own. The way that this plays out is sort of a horror story, as Bunny, virtually blackmailing the others in the group, seems unaware that he's digging his own grave and leaving his friends with no other solution. The aftermath of the murder is even darker, as Bunny's friends have to feign grief while staying at Bunny's parents' home during the weekend of the funeral. The fear of discovery and the degeneration of trust within the group are, of course, much more difficult to bear than the problem that the murder was intended to solve. Remorse seems to be generally lacking. I did not love this book, partly because it's overly long, but also because it's impossible to imagine how these students, drunk most of the time, ever became Greek scholars. However, there are some interesting forces at work. Richard is a hanger-on, blinded by misplaced admiration for the other members of the group and mesmerized by their charismatic professor. The price he pays for trying to fit in is very high indeed.

THE FALLING MAN by Don DeLillo

This book opens with an apocalyptic-type scene where a man is walking through ash and debris. Three pages later we realize that the scene is New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Keith is a lawyer who escapes from the South Tower and goes home to his estranged wife Lianne and young son Justin. He brings with him a briefcase belonging to Florence Givens, who lost it during a fall in the stairwell. The book is about these 4 people, primarily Keith and Lianne, plus Hammad, one of the terrorists. The Falling Man is a performance artist who seems to re-enact the leaps from the burning towers by falling head first with a harness and a non-bungee-like tether. (My favorite image is that of the Falling Man as a Tarot card.) Symbolically, Keith is the falling man, though, as he has a brief affair with Florence and then becomes a full-time poker player—possibly in some kind of homage to his poker-night friends who died in the World Trade Center. DeLillo makes copious use of pronouns, so that it sometimes requires several paragraphs of reading to determine who is the antecedent of "he" or "she." This technique emphasizes the disconnectedness of the characters that is prevalent throughout the novel. The tragedy has caused them to become somewhat robotic and caused me to consider the lives of the survivors and their families. The inclusion of Hammad's story, brief and incomplete, seemed unnecessary to me, and he doesn't come to life nearly as well as the terrorists did in The Garden of Last Days by André Dubus III. As far as Keith and Lianne are concerned, DeLillo sums them up in what is probably the most quoted and most telling line in the novel: "She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not."

Amazon: 3.5 stars (86 reviews)

Barnes and Noble: 3 stars (14 reviews)

AWAY by Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom's tone in Away is a bit detached, so that the main character, Lillian Leyd, comes off as a bit detached also. That's somewhat appropriate, though, since Lillian has emigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s alone after the murder of her husband and parents in Russia. Her 4-year-old daughter Sophie escaped the massacre but is missing and presumed dead. Lillian's blunt plea at a hiring call for theatre seamstresses earns her a job and also the role of mistress to a theatre bigwig and to his handsome son, who needs a cover for his homosexuality. When Lillian receives word that Sophie is alive and living in Siberia, a friend advises her to take the land route to retrieve her. Adventures ensue as she travels cross-country in train broom closets, becomes an unwitting accomplice to a murder in Seattle, and eventually heads up through the Yukon toward Alaska. Lillian remains enigmatic and aloof throughout the novel, but I had to admire her sheer determination and an almost reckless fearlessness, which stems from the fact that she really has nothing to lose. The pace of the book is quite brisk, and I loved the periodic snippets that summarize the future of characters that are abandoned along the route. These and the last fifty pages make this book a very memorable read.

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Juliet is a thirty-something writer in post-WWII England, contemplating a subject for her next book. She receives a letter from a Dawsey Adams in Guernsey, one of the Channel islands, who owns a book that was formerly hers. Thus begins the correspondence between Juliet and the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The club was formed as a ruse for being out after curfew during the German occupation of the island. (Potato peel pie--mashed potatoes sweetened with beets in a potato peel crust--was invented when there was little to eat there.) The book consists entirely of letters written by the various characters to one another, which make it easy to read in small bites, but you won't want to. The war stories from Guernsey are alternately tragic and hilarious. Coupled with Juliet's other correspondence--with her gay publisher, with her handsome but smarmy suitor, and with her friends--these letters make for a lively tale. The Guernsey residents, with a few villainous exceptions, are caring and nurturing but not without a sense of humor and a zest for life. They have weathered the worst for five years and come out with their sanity intact. Juliet eventually visits the island and then finds it increasingly difficult to leave as she finds herself drawn to both a motherless child and a man. This is the type of book that you savor, and I want to reread it already.