THE BROOKYN NOVELS
Daniel Fuchs

Daniel Fuchs died in 1993, just too soon to witness the transformation of the Williamsburg of his youth into a hipster playground. The idea that this waterfront slum would one day have an aura of cool would have amused and appalled him. The rough glamour of the immigrant is part of what gives Williamsburg, and the Lower East Side, their fashionable allure. Reading “The Brooklyn Novels,” however, offers a quick cure for that kind of sentimentality. The first two novels, in particular, present old Jewish Williamsburg as one of the deeper circles of Hell: A dirty, crowded, poor, pitiless, and fiercely materialistic world, where the only form of communication is complaint. Much has been written about the bitter eloquence of Yiddish and Yiddish-inflected English, those dialects that contributed so much to the American vernacular; and the greatest strength of Fuchs’s writing is the way it captures the distinctive tones of Jewish speech.

— Adam Kirsch

THE LIVES OF ROCKS
Rick Bass

Rick Bass’s new collection suggests that the writer’s compulsion to write, or “sing,” has as much to do with psychology as it does with landscape. Mr. Bass dramatizes the temptations of purple prose. He turns the pathetic fallacy on its head, and instead of projecting his feelings onto the view, he invents characters who try to use the view to interpret their own feelings. Beneath his rigorous concern for beloved landscapes lies an appreciation for cycles and a doubtfulness about permanence. In “Fiber,” a barely fictional confession, Mr. Bass complains that storytelling “has gotten so weak and safe.” That may be true, but the stories in “The Lives of Rocks” are valuable more for the complexity of Mr. Bass’s descriptions of nature than for pure storytelling. — Benjamin Lytal

THE MIDDLE SEA

Though John Julius Norwich claims no scholarly credentials, he has demonstrated his familiarity with Mediterranean peoples through three magisterial volumes on the Byzantine Empire and one on Venice. He is intimately acquainted with the region, being one of those English aristocrats who had the good sense to fall in love with sunnier climes. His task, of course, is impossible — to achieve in one teeming volume what whole libraries cannot do—and he tells us at the outset he will be “mercilessly selective” in his account. What saves him and us is a genuine storyteller’s determination not to bore. You can see this right off the bat when, racing through an account of Egypt’s pharaohs, he pauses at the bust of Nefertiti, which “suggests that she was one of the most ravishingly beautiful women who ever lived.” A mischievous footnote adds, “Though I wish someone would do something about her left eye.”

— David Mason

THE LAY OF THE LAND
Richard Ford

“The Lay of the Land” is a great American novel that never resorts to paranoid hyperbole or beatific road-running. Richard Ford’s long-time protagonist Frank Bascombe, the seasoned salesman and the worn-out husband, is happy just to be a neutral observer. Mr. Ford’s novel is a huge book, and like many epics can be too episodic. Not deeply moving, it at least convinces the reader that its picture of America is real and will do all of us a service, like the time capsule Bascombe’s son Paul buries at its end, near the beach.

—B.L.

ECHO PARK
Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly’s new book, “Echo Park,” is a hard-boiled cop novel, but a poignant one, examining with clarity and insight two equally powerful drives: The internal struggle of a good man as well as the external challenge of solving a mystery with finality, etching the solution in marble, so that it’s able to withstand the magnified examinations of time. The book begins when, by sheer happenstance, the police stop a van at 2:00 a.m. and discover two trash bags filled with women’s body parts. The arrest clearly suggests a solid case. As Mr. Connelly puts it, “Nothing like being caught in the possession of body parts. A defense attorney’s nightmare; a prosecutor’s dream.”

— Otto Penzler