In 1991, Don DeLillo wrote Mao II, a prophetic little novel that examines (among other things) the tension between terrorists and novelists. Everything that’s happened after 1991 considered, it’s a pretty prescient book, especially when main character—a reclusive novelist in the Salinger/Pynchon vein—gets around to talking about the battle for the soul of culture: “For some time now I’ve had the feeling that terrorists and novelists are playing a zero-sum game… What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.”

Nearly twenty years later—after 9/11, after our overreaction to 9/11, after the fear and the paranoia, after fewer and fewer people reading novelists, after cable news, after seemingly everything—DeLillo’s conclusion seems pretty foregone. Of course terrorism infiltrates and determines our mass consciousness. Of course. Of course novelists can no longer rise above the din of violence and cable news or blogs or whatever form of media you love to hate. Of course. Even the idea of a novelist so prominent that he or she could tangle with terrorists seems a little quaint now.

With the possible exception of DeLillo himself. Because even if you’ve never read a word of him (other than the sentence quoted in the first paragraph, obviously), you still know about DeLillo: even if you’ve never heard of DeLillo, you’ve heard of DeLillo. Just about anything dealing with media saturation—even the current recursive tendency for the media to report on media saturation—owes a debt to DeLillo’s White Noise. He didn’t invent the topic, sure, but he did make it popular and set the way we talk about it. Same with intellectualism and consumerism and violence, among others. It’s rare for a novelist these days, but DeLillo can actually take on culture with a recognized legitimacy and moral authority and influence the way that we talk about things. Even reactionary literary critics who don’t like his postmodernism (see, for example, James Wood) still can’t help singing DeLillo’s praises: he’s probably the closest thing we have now to a Dickens or a Tolstoy, someone who can actually (as DeLillo says) “alter the inner life of the culture.”

Which is what makes his newest novel, Point Omega, so disappointing and unsatisfying. Actually, perhaps calling it a novel is a bit charitable: Point Omega—the author’s first book since 2007’s Falling Man—is a slim 117 pages and, with its almost nakedly stripped prose, the kind of thing you can knock out in an hour or two. The plot is similarly light: set in the summer and fall of 2006, most of the novel is narrated by Jim Finley, an unsuccessful filmmaker looking for a new project after being left by his wife. Finley very much wants for that project to be a film about Richard Elster, an elderly scholar recruited by the Bush administration several years earlier to advise on the invasion of Iraq, to “give them words and meanings.”

Elster’s now retired and retreated to the seclusion of his home in the desert of southern California, a vast stretch that’s treated to many ample and occasionally gorgeous descriptions throughout the book. Finley comes down to the desert to try and convince Elster to participate in his newest film—in which Elster would be the only participant, “just a man and a wall”—but ends up staying for weeks, sitting up late at night and talking with Elster about the old man’s favorite obsession: the nature of time. This is exactly as tedious as it sounds. Let one of Elster’s sermons stand for the whole: “Day turns to night eventually but it’s a matter of light and darkness, it’s not time passing, mortal time. There’s none of the usual terror. It’s different here, time is enormous, that’s what I feel here, palpably. Time that precedes us and survives us.”

Not that this is poorly written or lacks intellectual depth (two criticisms of DeLillo that are never accurate), but it doesn’t feel like a novel: it feels like an essay. Elster and Finley are drawn so thin, flat and one-dimensional that they’re incidental to what they’re talking about. There’s not really the sense of anything being at stake, even when Elster’s daughter shows up about halfway in; sure, she’s an almost-love interest for Finley and provides what semblance of a plot Point Omega has by her mysterious disappearance, but she’s a little too insubstantial for us to care much. Same goes for the vignettes that bookend the main plot, which describe a man viewing 24 Hour Psycho, an installation in New York’s Museum of Modern Art that features Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed down to a full day. The prose is incredibly tight and often beautiful here, but except for the occasional mention of the unnamed and wholly attributeless man, it reads like an essay on concept art (albeit a very good one).

Although big DeLillo-heads (myself included) are often loath to mention it, this has really always been a problem with the man’s work: he’s often very bad at writing characters. You usually don’t notice because this lack of depth is often a part of his scalding satire (as in White Noise) or drowned out by the sheer volume of his manic plotting (Libra, Underworld), but even the characters that DeLillo tries to flesh out (like Underworld’s Nick Shay) are mostly boring. His work usually has so many other strengths that his weakness with character is outweighed, but it’s a fatal flaw here because Point Omega is so thin otherwise, lacking the black humor and passionate morality and epic weight of his best.

Which is a shame, because with things as on the verge of explosion as they seem now, we could really use a new DeLillo novel. Perhaps I’m just being naively optimistic and sentimental here, but with all the insanity that’s happened since, well, as far back as I can remember, is it really too insane to imagine that someone could write a great book and recapture that place that DeLillo imagines for novelists, a dangerous novel that “absorbs our terror,” influences mass consciousness, and finally strikes back against all those terrorists who shape our thought now? Given his considerable skill and unrivaled position within our culture, DeLillo seems like our best hope for it. Point Omega, unfortunately, is not that novel.

There’s nothing like dying to make you famous. Case in point: Roberto Bolano, a Chilean novelist who had little success up until the almost instant canonization that followed his 2003 death. Besides death, part of the reason for the recent rise of Bolano’s critical stock is that many of his books are just now being translated into English, most recently 2666, his posthumous final novel. 2666 is an ambitious, massive book (almost 900 pages) that seeks to do no less than to prove that literature can be meaningful in a world full of death and incomprehensible violence. Befitting its epic scope, 2666 is many things: funny, boring, stunning, confusing, depressing, and ultimately so powerful and so enigmatic that it validates Bolano’s rave reviews and guarantees people will be puzzling over him for a long time.

2666 is a writer’s book, a book about writing populated almost solely by writers. It divides into five parts (which Bolano originally intended to publish as five separate novellas): Part 1—“The Part About the Critics”—follows the romantic and professional entanglements of four European literary critics who have based their careers around the works of Benno von Archimboldi, a reclusive German writer. The critics eventually follow a dubious tip and head out in search of Archimboldi, which brings them to the Mexican border city of Santa Teresa before Part 1 abruptly and inconclusively ends. In The New York Times’s review of 2666, Jonathan Lethem compares Bolano to David Foster Wallace, which is pretty accurate in terms of plot: like Wallace’s gigantic Infinite Jest, 2666 traces a number of different storylines that sometimes skirt in and out of each other but never really quite intersect. (The two, however, are probably polar opposite in terms of prose, with Bolano’s lyrical, ironic style coming closer to someone like Garcia Marquez or Kundera than Wallace’s big-hearted, discursive voice.)

Parts 2 and 3 take place in Santa Teresa as well and depicts two other writers: Amalfitano, an unbalanced professor at the University of Santa Teresa, and Jack Fate, a magazine reporter sent to Mexico to cover a boxing match. The critics and these other writers all find themselves out of place in Santa Teresa, a city where hundreds of young women have been violently murdered over the course of a decade (modeled on the real-life killings in Ciudad Juarez). Their writings can do nothing to help them understand their own subjects—the critics never find Archimboldi and Fate never understands boxing or writes his article—let alone the horrific murders happening all around them.

2666 may at first seem like it’s trying to show the inability of literature to deal with these things, but it takes its most ambitious step in Part 4 (“The Part About the Crimes”), where it seeks to represent each and every one of the hundreds of Santa Teresa’s murders in excruciating, documentarian detail, with no writer-protagonist to hold it together. Almost fittingly, this part is where 2666 seems to drag the most, as if Bolano is fulfilling the novel’s prophecy about the inability to write meaningfully about death. Bolano sucks all the humor and lyricism out of his writing in this section in an attempt to depict the bare brutality of the murders, but he’s not quite successful. The writing here renders the murders indistinguishable from each other, muting their emotional impact and making the 300 pages of this section a painful slog.

But just when it feels like 2666 will never end, Part 4 moves into the final section (“The Part About Archimboldi”), where the reclusive writer himself actually appears. Part 5 traces Archimboldi’s life—from a soldier in the Nazi army to the “vanished writer” up for the Nobel Prize—and ties up most of the novel’s complex patterns of imagery, even if the plot doesn’t really come together in the same way (though it’s a little unclear whether Bolano actually finished this section before he died). This part of the novel is dreamy, enigmatic, and by far the best-written part of 2666, but I’m still kind of at a loss for what to say about it. Maybe Bolano’s description of Archimboldi’s writing also works for 2666: “The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed didn’t lead anywhere… All that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely.”

Archimboldi walks off of the last page of 2666 and into some place I can’t even begin to guess at, following Bolano and the secrets of the novel into the void that the book tries to name and understand. The novel is full of secrets (right down to its title, which is never once mentioned in the text), but even if it never yields up everything, 2666 still proves its point, even in its missteps showing that literature can be just as big and confusing and downright mysterious and beautiful as life.

I get many, many letters from readers asking me, “When will someone finally combine the work of Jose Luis Borges and the movie Jaws into a novel?” Well, readers, please do not write me any more letters, because this book already exists: Steven Hall’s first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, combines postmodern conceptuality and shark filled adventure stories into a weird genre bending book that ultimately proves a satisfying read, even if it gets bogged down a little too much with its complex plot and mythos.

The Raw Shark Texts begins with its narrator, Eric Sanderson, waking up on the floor of a house without any memory of who or where he is. A note in the house eventually leads him to Dr. Randle, a psychologist who tells Eric about his particular medical condition: after the accidental death of Clio Aames, the girl he loved, Eric lost his memory completely and inexplicably, and continues to lose it every couple of months. Randle tells Eric it’s better not to try to remember his past, and while Eric struggles to adjust to the idea of having no personal history, letters and packages begin arriving at his house, fragments of his past addressed to Eric Sanderson and from Eric Sanderson. It’s just as Eric begins to realize that their may be more to his memory loss than Dr. Randle lets on that the shark attacks.

When I read the book jacket for The Raw Shark Texts, I assumed that this shark was metaphorical, since the idea of a real, literal shark flying around someone’s house sounds, well, sort of stupid. But the novel makes it very clear: the shark is real, not metaphor but a fish made of concept and ideas that feeds on memories. Eric apparently lives in some bizarre Platonic where universe ideas and concepts are real things which occasionally attack and try to kill you. I could spend the whole review trying to explain the idea of the book’s conceptual shark and it still wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. This is probably The Raw Shark Texts‘s biggest problem: as Eric seeks escape from his conceptual shark, the plot becomes intensely convoluted as Hall tries to build a mythology around the idea of conceptual fish. There are a couple of spots in the middle of the book where you’ll probably want to stop reading, where Hall starts throwing out “Luxophages,” “Ludovicans,” human supercomputers and all sorts of other pseudo-sci-fi stuff. This leads to a schizophrenic sort of book, with Eric contemplating lost love one moment and the next fighting off word sharks with a digital harpoon.

Even though the mythology is complicated and messy, I can’t really bring myself to dislike The Raw Shark Texts. Most of the characters are well drawn and interesting, and the interactions between Eric and Clio (shown in flashback) seem particularly genuine. Even Eric’s pet car Ian becomes an endearing character (and I generally hate pet sidekicks). You feel compelled to plow through all the nonsensical sci-fi stuff to see what happens to these characters, and there’s ultimately a pretty satisfying (if not slightly ambiguous) pay-off at the end, as the last hundred or so pages reenact the last hour of the movie Jaws, with Eric finally squaring off against his conceptual shark.

The Raw Shark Texts has a real heart and distinctiveness to it, for all its convolution, and is definitely worth a read for anyone not scared off by the prospect of being confused and frustrated for a few pages.

Tom Wolfe is usually associated with the 60s New Journalism movement and his habit of wearing all-white suits, but he is also, apparently, “America’s greatest living novelist.” This is according to the back cover of my paperback copy of Wolfe’s latest novel, 2004′s I Am Charlotte Simmons. I picked up Charlotte Simmons over Christmas break, mainly because I’d heard of Wolfe and read some his shorter stuff, but had never bothered reading any of his books; he always seemed like one of those guys I should read, but never really got around to. (And yes, I’m doing a book review of something that came out four years ago, but please indulge me anyway.)

I Am Charlotte Simmons is Wolfe’s purported expose on what college life is really like; although it’s a novel, he apparently did years of research following college kids around at Duke, University of Florida, University of Michigan, and Stanford. The novel’s eponymous heroine is a beautiful small-town girl from Sparta, North Carolina who gets a full-ride scholarship to the prestigious Dupont University (a very thinly veiled Duke). Dupont is the stereotypical big American college, stocked with decadent rich kids, unruly frat boys, and athletes that are treated like campus royalty. Charlotte is, predictably, horrified by all the intricacies and commonplaces of big city, college life-drinking, sex, frat parties, coed bathrooms-and her looks and intelligence attract the attention of several “big men on campus,” including sleazy frat boy Hoyt and basketball star Jojo. She struggles to balance her desire to be popular and fit in with studying and retaining her special “Charlotte Simmons-ness,” with fairly predictable.

The biggest problem with Charlotte Simmons is that while it pretends to be an expose on the bacchanalia of college life, it seems like Wolfe hasn’t paid attention to pop culture since the early 70s. He insists on putting newfangled slang words like “hot” and “cool” (as in, “That’s a cool all-white suit you’re wearing”) in quotation marks, and almost all the attempted pop culture references ring hollow, like they were written by someone who has had popular music described to them but has never actually heard it. This leads to a good deal of unintentional comedy, including a two page description of a brand new drinking game Wolfe has discovered called “Quarters.” The sex scenes are almost unreadably awkward; I was going to quote from it here, but I can’t bring actually bring myself to reread the scene without feeling intensely creeped out by an old man describing two teenagers having sex.

Wolfe is usually acclaimed for his ear for dialogue, which he using extensively here, with plenty of “unnngghh”s and “whaaaazzup”s. I don’t really know if his ear is that good, since I’m not really familiar with the rural North Carolina or Northeastern prep school accents, but even if it’s spot on, the phonetic dialogue trick gets old pretty quick. Wolfe insists on bludgeoning the reader with his ability to depict accents, often writing out full sentences, then re-rendering phonetically: “‘Isn’t that right?’ In’at riot?” Up to a point, using dialogue like this can be interesting and help build character, but the way Wolfe abuses it makes it seem really gimmicky, like he’s beating the reader over the head with the one thing he knows he’s good at.

All these stylistic problems only hide the book’s biggest problem. Even though it’s a page-turner (I plowed through its 800 pages in about two days), a lot of it is really boring. All the characters are flat stereotypes that could’ve been borrowed from any teen movie made in the last twenty years, and Wolfe’s writing has a tendency towards the melodramatic that only exaggerates his character problems. Apparently this has troubled Wolfe consistently, since Hunter Thompson (a much better “literary journalist” than Wolfe, by the way) basically summed up my feelings on Charlotte Simmons in the early 70s: “Wolfe’s problem is that he’s too crusty to participate in his stories. The people he feels comfortable with are dull as stale dogshit, and the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird that they make him nervous.”

I Am Charlotte Simmons ultimately offers an unfulfilling look at a topic that has been done much better elsewhere (see Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction) and a disappointing effort from someone who obviously aspires to be as good as he’s hyped up to be. The “America’s greatest living novelist” and weird suit wearing shtick would probably be endearing on a better writer, but it just makes Wolfe seems pompous (my cursory internet research also shows that he’s a die-hard Bush supporter, which is inexcusable). Perhaps I should actually read some of his early work for a better idea, but, for now, he’s not even close to being America’s best journalist or novelist. Maybe we should be a little more mistrustful about who They tell us our legends are…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a cynical, white twenty-something slacks off at a job that he hates, is completely apathetic towards all his relationships, and routinely indulges in some bizarre activity to let off the steam of living in a fake, consumerist society. No, it’s not Fight Club or Office Space (or pretty much everything made in the 90s); it’s Paul Neilan’s first novel, Apathy and Other Small Victories. Apathy may not be the most innovative book ever published, but what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in its sarcastic, brilliant humor, even if it’s a little disappointing in the end.

In the case of Apathy, the cynical, white twenty-something is Shane, a slacker living in a grotesque, distorted parody of modern American life. His apartment complex is inhabited by weird guys like Mobo, a New Age freak who Shane suspects is having sex with his pet guinea pig late at night, and Bryce, the landlord who waives Shane’s rent on the condition that Shane have weekly sex with his wife. Shane’s girlfriend is a physically abusive corporate climber who eventually gets him a job interning at her insurance company. Instead of working and playing along with all the office team-building exercises, however, Shane comes to work drunk everyday and sleeps in the handicapped stall. To escape the drudgery of office life, Shane goes to his shell-shocked dentist Doug nearly everyday, mostly to talk (or, rather, sign) to his deaf assistant Marlene. One day, Marlene is found dead and Shane is the prime suspect, forcing him on a quest to clear his name that covers most of the rest of the book.

The plot is fairly standard modern-jaded-guy stuff-comparable to Palahniuk, with absurdity and gross-out humor to boot-that wraps itself up nicely, if a little pointlessly, in the end. What sets Apathy apart from the pile, however, is how funny it is. Neilan has a gift for bizarre, hilarious descriptions that show character better than any exposition can. Many of these passages actually had me laughing out loud, including my favorite, Shane’s description of his rent-subsidized sex with the landlord’s wife: “We were like two dead fish being slapped together by an off duty clown, swinging us by our tails, both of us slippery and cold, our eyes open and glassy, looking away. That’s about how passionate it was.” I can’t really improve on the phrase “off duty clown sex,” so I’ll just say this: the rest of the book is just as funny.

This ends up being Apathy‘s main problem, though: Shane has all the cynicism and snide remarks of Holden Caulfield or the unnamed Fight Club narrator, but none of the heart. He’s a little sympathetic just because he’s the narrator, but Neilan never really gives Shane the depth to make Apathy anything beyond funny; by the last page, you don’t really care if Shane if guilty or not, or what happens to him. Combine this with a contrived, deus ex machina ending that has Shane uncharacteristically riding off into the sunset, and you get the feeling that Apathy could have been a lot more than it ends up being.

Like its protagonist, Apathy has a lot of failed potential, but, despite its unoriginality, it’s still really hilarious and entertaining. Neilan has a lot of possibility and is definitely an author to watch, but he doesn’t quite pull it off here, besides all the funny bits. Still, I have a hard time holding anything against a book that uses the phrase “off duty clown sex.”

Gentlemen of the Road, the newest novel from critically acclaimed author Michael Chabon, was originally titled Jews with Swords. It’s one of the greatest mistakes in all of publishing history that the original title wasn’t kept; Jews with Swords evokes a humorous, anachronistic sense of adventure that sums up the spirit of the book in a way that the bland title Gentlemen of the Road can never hope to do. The failed potential of its title aside, Gentlemen of the Road is still worth considering; not only is it an interesting departure for Chabon, but it’s also a quick, fun read, a light and entertaining adventure reminiscent of Dumas and other serial adventure stories.

Chabon is best known for his complex, literary works, including 2000′s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a dense historical novel tracing the lives of two Jewish comic book writers in the years surrounding World War II. Gentlemen of the Road, first published in installments in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year, is certainly a different direction for Chabon: the novel is set in 950 A.D. in the kingdom of Arran, in present day Azerbaijan, and deals mostly with the Khazars, a Turkish people who embraced Judaism and sometimes fought their Christian and Muslim neighbors. The premise sounds as obscure as something out of Pynchon, but Chabon does a good job keeping the history from dominating the story. Most of the time the historical elements add some exotic flavor to the standard swashbuckling, although there are a few points that may require you to consult the map in front of the book to figure out what the hell’s going on.

Although it borrows heavily from 19^th century adventure serials, the protagonists of Gentlemen of the Road are a perfectly mismatched duo straight out of buddy comedy movie: Zelikman is a chronically depressed, pale, thin Frank with a penchant for jaunty hats, while Amram is a hulking, witty African with a gigantic axe. The pair travel all over Arran, conning whoever they can find out of whatever they’ve got, until they encounter Filaq, who claims to be the deposed heir to the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria. Zelikman and Amram, both Jews in exile themselves, feel somewhat obliged to help the young boy, and go from his personal escorts to full scale general in the revolution. Rest assured, there’s plenty of swordplay, sex, and secrets on the way to the very satisfactory, if not completely expected, conclusion.

Chabon’s ornate, complex writing style is in full force here. He has a real gift to render even the most basic of things in intense, descriptive detail, sometimes to a fault; Chabon can’t just say that Amram threw his knife, but he “reached his left hand into his right buskin and, in a continuous gesture as fluid and unbroken as that by which a falconer looses his fatal darling into the sky, produced as a shard of bright Arab steel, its crude hilt swaddled in strips of hide, and sent it hunting across the benches.” This only occasionally gets annoying, however; most of the time, Chabon’s descriptive powers add a vivacity that more than makes up for the historical obscurity of the book.

Gentlemen of the Road isn’t anything earth-shattering, but it’s a fun throwback to the days when adventure stories were in vogue and a solid way to pass some time over the holiday. I just can’t help thinking I wouldn’t like it a little more if it were called Jews with Swords.

“Now single up all lines!” begins Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, a fairly simple beginning for an author known for being convoluted and obscure. I’ll take any chance I can get to write about Pynchon, and the first paperback release of Against the Day seems to warrant it. In case you missed its original release last winter, the novel typical Pynchon: a sprawling epic filled with hundreds of characters, stretching across the world (and beneath it, and a few other places not on the map) and spanning the era from 1893 to World War I. Although it doesn’t quite equal the achievement of his earlier work, Against the Day is a solid entry into the Pynchon canon, consistently offering enough fantastic characters, absurd and expansive settings, and bizarre humor to make it his most entertaining work to date.

Against the Day is a behemoth of a book (1085 pages in paperback), fitting for its author, one of the giants of postmodern literature, and, in my opinion, the best living writer. Pynchon’s personality (or lack thereof) has gained almost as much notoriety as his work; he is famously reclusive, refusing to give interviews, promote his books, or even be photographed, creating a weird mystique about him (although he did lend his voice to an episode of The Simpsons a few years ago, in which he appeared with his head covered by a paper bag). He published his first novel, V., in 1963 to rave reviews; V. established the themes and styles he would build on in his later work: paranoia, entropy, the preterite and the elect, and obscure and abstruse knowledge. In 1973, his masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow, was published; a gigantic book covering nine months at the end of World War II and featuring over 400 characters, it was too big to be ignored, causing some to hail it as the greatest work of the twentieth century and others to call it completely unreadable.

Against the Day is clearly set in the mold of Gravity’s Rainbow, on a larger scale, if possible. It’s hard to summarize such an enormous book, but I’ll try anyway. The major plot strand concerns the Traverse family: Webb, the father and a miner who is mixed up with an anarchist group and killed early on in the book; Reef, the street-smart oldest child who travels across the world hustling and barely making his way; Frank, the middle son, an engineer who chases his father’s killers into Mexico; Kit, the youngest, who pursues a career in theoretical mathematics in Europe and elsewhere, sponsored by those who had Webb killed; and Lake, their sister, who marries one of Webb’s killers. Webb and his family are pretty standard Pynchon fare, a group of disparate rebels struggling against Them, personified here by the wealthy robber baron Scarsdale Vibe. This Wild West drama is offset by the other major plot thread: The Chums of Chance, a group of plucky airship-riding lads who travel the world righting wrongs and promoting the American way, not unlike something from a turn of the century boys’ novel. These are just the main plot strands, however, and there are hundreds of hilarious minor characters, from Oscar Wilde-style fops to Al-Mar Fuad (say it out loud to get the joke), a Uyghur who talks with a discernable lisp about hunting “wabbits.”

There isn’t really a plot arc, besides the Traverses coming to terms with and avenging Webb’s death; it’s mostly just characters bouncing around the world and trying to live within the System, unaware of the impending world disaster. It seems like this would be a bad thing, but it really lets Pynchon embrace the storytelling aspect that’s been subdued in some of his other work. The way he intersects all the various plots and the generally entertaining episodes make the novel an engaging read, despite its length, and hearken back to the literature of the period he’s writing about, especially in the Chums of Chance chapters. In this way, Against the Day is his most accessible work since The Crying of Lot 49; you never really get too bogged down trying to figure out what’s going on. Despite the entertainment value, it’s not an intellectual slacker. There’s a lot going on here with doubling and light, as well as the standard Pynchon stuff, and it takes multiple reads to scratch the thematic surface.

That alone makes Against the Day a worthy entry into Pynchon’s body of work, but it never really measures up to his best. It lacks the enormous monumentality of Gravity’s Rainbow, slightly diluting its grand, apocalyptic vision (though it comes close when it describes the destruction of an anonymous city by a mysterious Arctic object early in the novel). And although Against the Day has some great and funny characters, they all seem a little like caricatures and cutouts, as in his early work; in 1997′s Mason & Dixon, Pynchon proved he was capable of heartfelt, human characters, but he doesn’t deliver them here. There’s also the matter of obscure knowledge: as with every Pynchon book, you’ve got to have a strong backing in science, math, and pretty much everything else to understand the novel, or be willing to do a lot of research. There’s less work in Against the Day than some of his earlier work, but it’s still Pynchon, after all.

All the work’s worth it, ultimately; though it’s not his best, Against the Day is still very, very good, and a great starting place for anyone new to Pynchon. Pick it up and prepare to lose yourself for a few weeks in the grandiose, epic vision of a genius, to have your mind thrilled and expanded by our greatest living writer.

I never like to admit that Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is one of my favorite writers, mainly because I don’t want to seem like the type of person whose favorite writer is Hunter Thompson. In my experience, the average Thompson fan is the kind of person who only likes him for his excesses, his massive consumption of drugs and alcohol; a person who has seen the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas movie but never got around to reading the book. The popular perception of Thompson is his Vegas phase, but there’s a lot more to his life and work, which Gonzo, a new biography by Jann S. Wenner and Corey Semour, makes clear.In case you’re not familiar, Hunter Thompson is a journalist best known as the author of Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. He wrote for Rolling Stone with Wenner and Seymour from the 1970s until his death by suicide in 2005, giving a demented take on politics and culture in his signature style of “gonzo journalism,” where the writer becomes the focus of his piece rather than a passive observer. Besides his writing, Thompson was also famous for his public image: his trademark aviator glasses and cigarette holder, erratic and weird behavior, and copious intake of every drug imaginable. He was a phenomenon in the late 60s and 70s, meeting with everyone from Richard Nixon to Allen Ginsburg, but slid into a slight obscurity after a sharp decrease in written output in the 80s and 90s. The publication of Gonzo marks a kind of high point in a Thompson renaissance that began with the 1998 film adaptation of Vegas starring Johnny Depp (who provides the foreword to Gonzo) and has continued after his death.

My biggest concern with Gonzo before reading it was that the book would only present the shallow, over-mythologized side of Thompson, especially since it’s an oral biography, told only through select interviews strategically arranged. Fortunately, the interviews are chosen and arranged well; the interviewees are Thompson’s closest friends and family-including famous friends Depp and Jack Nicholson, among others-so most of their comments are intimate and revealing, beyond the standard Hunter hero worship. When it is included, the glorification of Thompson is tasteful and only rarely overdone: he was always spawning outrageous stories, and the many hilarious anecdotes are one of Gonzo‘s highlights, especially when told by those who experienced them firsthand. The chapter dealing with his failed run for sheriff of Aspen on the “Freak Power” ticket is the funniest, stuffed with great stories like Thompson’s campaign promises to rename Aspen as “Fat City” and not chew jimsonweed while on the job.

Since this is the first major book on Thompson published since his death, it has a tragic, somber undertone running beneath its surface. The final chapter of the book, the one that deals with his suicide, is probably the most interesting; his closest friends and family seem to have a strange understanding and acceptance of his death, turning his suicide from failure and dejection into a kind of noble, empowering event.  Thompson’s idolization of Hemingway is mentioned throughout, heavily foreshadowing his eventual suicide. The Hemingway references also seem to point toward what Gonzo suggests is Thompson’s real tragedy: his image. Like Hemingway, Thompson is depicted as trying to live out the character portrayed in his work; “[Hunter] almost would ask himself, ‘What would Hunter do?’ He was driven by that,” says one of his ex-girlfriends. Not only does this add some significant depth to what could have been a just a story of drugs and decadence, but it also serves the book’s other motive: depicting Thompson as a major literary figure rather than a period piece on the fringe. Along with Hemingway, Thompson is compared to Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Norman Mailer throughout the course of the book, along with glowing pronouncements like, “Hunter’s voice is going to echo the longest of any writer of his generation.” The praise can get heavy handed and overwrought, but it’s still interesting to see a different take on Thompson and his literary legacy.

That said, Gonzo is certainly not for the uninitiated; if you didn’t care about Hunter S. Thompson, you won’t after. The book also requires some background knowledge. Gonzo never attempts to be a straight biography of Thompson, so if you’re not familiar with the general arc of his life, some of it may be disorienting. It does succeed, however, at offering a different personal and literary perspective on Thompson, cutting through the acid-eating, coke-snorting fiend down to the man. Like his work, it may not be the highest of art, but it evokes some thought and consistently entertains, both hysterical and intelligent. To subvert one of the good Doctor’s favorite sayings: Buy the book, take the ride.

On principle, I should hate a book with a corny last line like “I think that’s what Tony Hawk was trying to tell me all along,” and it’s to Nick Hornby’s great credit that I don’t. Hornby is known for his skilled writing about stunted male adolescence and obsession in his novels High Fidelity and About a Boy and-despite the last sentence that sounds like it was ripped from a middle school essay-his newest novel, Slam, lives up to his well-deserved reputation, providing a quick and satisfying tale of growing up and taking responsibility.

Slam’s title comes from skateboarding slang; a slam is a wipe-out while attempting a trick, and the novel’s narrator, the fifteen year old skater Sam, suffers a particularly nasty one when he accidentally gets his girlfriend pregnant. Understandably, he has a hard time coping with the idea of being a father and, with no one else to talk to, begins talking to his poster of skating legend Tony Hawk; the poster “talks” back, though only in quotes from Hawk’s autobiography, which Sam has practically memorized. The typical Hornby protagonist is an aimless twenty-something boy trapped in the body of a man, so making the move to writing actual adolescence isn’t that hard. Even though all the novel’s promotional material bills it as a “young adult” novel, it’s not just a diluted version of one of the author’s other books; there’s plenty here, whatever age you are. Sure, the narrator sounds like a less jaded, skating obsessed version of Holden Caulfield, but there are enough funny and emotional moments here not to write the book off as an angst-fest.

If this sounds really cheesy, it’s because it is, but Hornby’s strength has always been taking the clichéd and sentimental and turning it into something affecting and honest. Slam is no different; by the end, you’re astounded that Hornby has made such a trite premise into a character who’s both alive and sympathetic. Slam’s greatest strengths are also its biggest weaknesses, however. Even though Hornby can turn the conventional into something more, there’s always some of it that misses, that stays sort of bland; you occasionally end up with a boring scene or hackneyed sentence (see the last line above). Also, the book’s a little short: I knocked it out in about three hours, with the occasional interruption. Of course, it’s also a really fast read and serves as a good introduction if you’re new to Hornby (or the “young adult” that the book is apparently aimed at). Slam doesn’t really reinvent Hornby, but it’s a solid addition to his body of work and a great example of what he does best: transform tired and emotionally charged set-ups into fresh and revealing experiences.

“The infrastructure will collapse,” sings Thom Yorke on Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows, which describes not only Yorke’s usually gloomy lyrics, but the effect of In Rainbows on the recording industry. More than enough words have been devoted to this in the past few weeks, but here’s a quick run-down, in case you haven’t heard: Radiohead, one of the most respected and commercially successful bands in the world, were without a label after their recording contract with EMI expired in 2003. The band began recording their new album in 2005, fueling two years worth of speculation over what label they would sign with. Then unexpectedly on October 1st they announced they would be releasing the album themselves in ten days, available only online through their website. Not only would the album only be released online, but downloaders could pick their own price, with even the choice of getting the album for free (another option was an $80 disc-box containing a hardcopy CD version, a double 12″ vinyl version, and a bonus CD to ship out in December). No doubt some pretty revolutionary stuff (and from the looks of it, successful too; In Rainbows had 1.2 million within two days of being released), but does the music live up to the immense hype?

Fortunately, In Rainbows is more than a marketing gimmick. Radiohead is often derided (somewhat fairly) for being overly depressing and obscure, but the new album shows a different side: accessible and emotional. Of course, there are the standard downers-the album’s closer, “Videotape,” is about a dying person recording their last message onto VHS, set over three droning piano chords and some morose electronic blips-but there are just as many upbeat, personal moments; “House of Cards,” for example, has Yorke singing “I don’t want to be your friend/I just want to be your lover,” with a slow reggae grooving guitar riff and an array of ambient strings. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” sounds likes it’s about to turn into a murky let-down as the guitars drop out and Yorke sings “I get eaten by the wolves/And weird fishes,” but then the beautiful, spacey guitar riff returns and everything’s okay again: “I hit the bottom and escape.”

Just because the lyrics are nakedly honest and emotional doesn’t mean the album’s sound is stripped down. Very few of the songs include the kind of electronics that characterize the band’s later work (Kid A onwards) and that have alienated many listeners, making In Rainbows friendlier to a wider audience. Instead of electronic noise, Radiohead opts for lush orchestral arrangements, fleshing out a melodic side that hearkens back to early work like The Bends. Additionally Yorke’s voice is fully explored on this album, best showcased on the ethereal “Nude,” with its layered vocal harmonies backed by moving strings, as well as on “Faust Arp,” which finds him almost chanting to a baroque acoustic guitar and orchestra. The heavy orchestra/vocal harmonies make this Radiohead’s “prettiest” album, full of densely melodic songs: including the aforementioned “Nude” and “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” as well as “Reckoner” and “All I Need,” a piano drenched tune that explodes into a white noise climax, one of the best moments on the album.

That’s not to say it doesn’t rock. “Bodysnatchers” lets guitarists Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien loose in a fiery guitar frenzy, both blasting an epic amount of noise over a rhythm guitar riff that sounds like it’s being played out of an amp about to blow out. The opening track, “15 Step,” rocks just as hard while as highlighting the often neglected rhythm section of Colin Greenwood on bass and Phil Selway on drums. With its funky 5/4 beat and their sporadic array of off kilter percussion, this song is meant to be played as loud as your speakers can handle. Greenwood and Selway are at their best on this album, underpinning the otherworldly vocals and strings with intricate, almost danceable, beats. “Jigsaws Falling Into Place,” for example, brings all these elements together: it starts with a tight bass and drum beat over a Spanish-sounding acoustic guitar riff, then breaks open and spills out as both guitars come in with Yorke howling, “Wish away the nightmare/You’ve got a light/You can feel it/On your back.”

Like all great albums (and all Radiohead albums), In Rainbows takes multiple listens to fully understand, though once it has sunk in, it fills a musical gap no other band can satisfy. Their unique sound allows for a nearly infinite replay value: I listened to it at least three times the day it was released and more since, and still haven’t got fully appreciated or tired of it. The album ranks among Radiohead’s best work and shows that they’re not content to just rehash and recycle. In both marketing and music, In Rainbows is a revolution.