“Author, Author” (Viking, 389 pages, $24.95) is a good book that must live in the shadow of not one author, but two. For David Lodge has had the misfortune to publish a novel based on the life of Henry James in the same year as, but several months later than, Colm Toibin. Mr. Toibin’s “The Master,” even covers the same periods of James’s life. And Mr. Lodge’s is much an inferior novel.

Each books was written in ignorance of the other, but both have a common motive: They are offered as redress to the fear that James, in his lifetime, was insufficiently loved. Mr. Toibin focused on James’s sexuality. This at least gave him a dimension of the author’s life that, for lack of pertinent information, the author could imaginatively expand. Mr. Lodge, a veteran of satirical campus romances, does not pursue anything so ghostly as latent homosexuality.

Rather, Mr. Lodge wants to consummate the romance between reader and author. His tale is book ended with scenes of Mr. James’s deathbed, in which the master’s servants enact a heartwarming scene. James’s manservant makes a point of referring to “the old toff,” while others prefer to say “HJ.” Even if you can’t understand his books, the Master can still be loveable.

The substance of “Author, Author” is the crisis of ego that overtook James when his ambitions for wide fame and riches died with the failure of his play, “Guy Domville,” in 1895. Mr. Lodge’s instinct for ivory-tower politics intensifies James’s well-documented ambition for worldy success. But it is that weakness of James – for fame – that makes tributes such as Mr. Lodge’s such poignant objects.

Mr. Lodge spends most of his novel building up to the moment when James is booed off the stage – and he depicts this moment with fulsome typography: “Alexander shook his hand and drew him to the centre of the stage, and as he turned to face audience … as he turned to face … as he turned …” Mr. Lodge seems here to intend an allusion to the famous opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday” (a poem, of course, James could not have read). Must a book about a man who wrote books be so bookish?

In Mr. Toibin’s novel, the “Guy Domville” debacle makes a sharp first chapter and then throbs subtly in the background. Mr. Lodge, by contrast, leaves James’s theater business only to build up James’s friendship with George Du Maurier, author of the fin de siecle blockbuster “Trilby.” Du Maurier and James share a “Bench of Confidences” that provides a vehicle for Mr. Lodge’s prosaic expositions of James’s opinions.

Elsewhere, in conversation with Constance Fenimore Woolson, James baldly declares that “I think you will admit that there may be a conflict of interests between – not women and art – but marriage and art.” It is hard to imagine James speaking so frankly to the woman who, some say, killed herself because James’s love for her was so ambiguous. James was Woolson’s executor and, for circumstantial reasons, had to drown her dresses in the Venetian lagoon.

That episode typifies the differences of “The Master” and “Author, Author.” Mr. Toibin sneaks up to it, worrying the reader with the problem of what to do with the clothes until James realizes his solution. But Mr. Lodge drops the episode pre-interpreted, into the reader’s lap: “But that train of thought summoned up what was possibly the most unwelcome memory of all those attached to Fenimore’s demise … It had seemed such a good idea at the time.”

It should be noted that such cliched phrases do not belong in indirect discourse in Henry James’s mind. Mr. Toibin hardly lets James speak; when he does, he lays golden eggs. Mr. Lodge’s James, discussing “Trilby,” James tries on our current academese: “her sin is, as it were, displaced on to her posing for the figure, and thus made redeemable. “As it were, indeed.

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Prison camp novels are by nature over determined. Only so many things can happen while the guards are looking. That’s why the small things – a bartered cigarette, for example – become so important. Ivan Denisovich’s bricklaying is one of the best things in modern literature.

Ha Jin’s third novel, “War Trash” (Pantheon, 351 pages, $25) concerns a series of POW camps but takes a much broader frame than the typical gulag story. Political implications are present in any prison, but Ha Jin abandons the minutiae of camp life for the minutia of politics.

He is being true to a historical reality. His hero, Yu Yuan, is a soldier from the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Korea, captured by Americans. The Americans have appointed Chinese nationalists, loyal to Chiang Kai Shek, as subcommanders in their camps. Thus the camps became miniature theaters of war, sometimes between rival Chinese factions, sometimes including Korean prisoners, under the ambivalent watch of U.S. forces.

Ha Jin tells Yu’s story in the form of memoir. Like his creator, Yu knows English well, but it is not his native language. Because Yu can translate, he is popular with both nationalists and communists. But he is only interested in getting back to Szechuan province, where his mother and fiancee wait. He is not ideological; he slowly realizes he “couldn’t fit in any political group among my compatriots.” Yu lets himself be tossed from camp to camp; he becomes “war trash.”

Remarkably, Yu encounters many of the same characters in different camps. But they rarely impinge on his heart. At the end of his memoir he warns: “do not take this to be an ‘our story.’ In the depths of my heart I have never been one of them.” Ha Jin’s novel suffers from this atmosphere of pained ambivalence.

Without warm loyalties to people or factions, Yu is left to observe the vicissitudes of nationalists and communists in a clean, flat voice: “A petition, signed by thousands of men with their blood, was delivered to Colonel Wilson, the commandant at Camp 13, stating that the POWs would fight to the death before submitting to being moved north to listen to the Communist’s persuasion. The Americans were disconcerted, and a deadlock ensued.” In this impersonal mode, Ha Jin’s frank, laconic voice can become monotonous. As the axes of Yu’s world shift, illustrating a magnificent complex in international politics in the 1950s, Yu’s personal story fails to drive that larger story.

Ha Jin’s excellent short fiction, as in the collection “Ocean of Words,” often peek into the lives of army men, illustrating a foreign psyche with the economy and sharp delineation of a folk tale. But in the longer form, where he dwells so long in the mind of his typical character – the nonopportunist – Ha Jin’s powers flag. “War Trash” is a very ambitious book, thoroughly researched and valuable as a window on the POW camps of this period. But it does not approach the piquancy of Ha Jin’s shorter fiction.