'The Graduate' - Charles Webb

Before Dustin Hoffman ogled Anne Bancroft, before Simon and Garfunkel wrote one of the sixties' catchiest choruses, and long before Abe Simpson pounded the glass and cried 'Mrs Bouvier!', The Graduate existed only as a slender, debut novel by Charles Webb.

When Benjamin Braddock returns to his commodious family home after finishing college with exceptional results, he finds himself entirely disaffected with his situation. His parents are suffocatingly proud of his achievements, but also excruciatingly out of touch with the thoughts Ben foments over days on the sunlounge and nights in front of the TV. Only two characters in this novel - Ben and Elaine Robinson - are of college age. All others are adults of his parents' age. His mother and father organise dinners and parties where Ben is exhibited in a fashion similar to what they expect him to do with his new sportscar (a graduation gift). Ben labours under a claustrophobic lack of options. For his parents and their friends there is no choice to be made: he will of course take up a teaching scholarship. For Ben, his choices are limited to acquiescence or rebellion. In his narrow cultural corridor of upstanding, upper-class West-coast American citizens of the 1960s, that rebellion needs to be overblown to be effective.

It begins with a concerted effort at doing nothing - sleeping til afternoon, sunbathing for hours, drinking lashings of beer and bourbon while watching random TV shows. Then, enter Mrs Robinson.

The affair between them makes up but a short part of the novel: the crux of the story is really not about their relationship but instead about the challenges of identity that Webb found in his post-college situation. Given that this is a mid-sixties novel, and the relationship is between a 21-year-old man and a much older, married woman, the lack of sordidness in the description of the affair is as good an indication as any of the crispness of Webb's style. Lack is in fact the defining motif of his writing. The majority of questions posed in dialogue, for example, lack a question mark: the speakers lack either enthusiasm or any genuine interest in the answer.

There is a very high proportion of dialogue throughout the novel, and little exposition. Within the conversations one speaker's turn rarely extends beyond a line. The novel maintains a rapidity that lends an urgency to what are often banal, unfulfilled exchanges. This sustained technique tells the reader a lot about Ben's outlook and attitude to the future. So much about his character is revealed through conversation, yet all of his interactions are filled with miscommunications and a lack of understanding. When Ben pursues Elaine, Mrs Robinson's daughter to Berkeley, their unlikely affection for one another - never presented in any truly romantic setting - is plausible since every other interaction has been so falsified.

Ben is not a particularly likeable character; his redeeming features are few. However, his apathy and disaffection are presented against some particularly loathsome, self-interested adult characters. This doesn't necessarily absolve him of the effects of his behavious, but it does emphasise the assumptions made by many about what makes one successful or even worthy. Ben wants to take a better path; for him the 'road less travelled'. We aren't taken far enough along that road to know if he succeeds but wherever he ends up at least he is taking self-awareness, rather than purely self-interest, along with him.

'Slaughterhouse Five' - Kurt Vonnegut

An American man, Billy Pilgrim, who experienced the Dresden fire bombing of 1945 while a prisoner of war (incarcerated at the town's abbatoir in Slaughterhouse 5) is taken by aliens from the planet of Tralfamadore, who explain to him the infinity of time and allow him to travel back and forth through the events of his life. So it goes. This is the premise of Kurt Vonnegut's extraordinary, seminal novel from 1965.

Vonnegut himself witnessed the firestorm in Dresden. Tellingly, the first few pages of this novel are from a different narrator's perspective. It is clear that this work is in many ways autobiographical, notwithstanding the fact that so many of its strengths come from fictional techniques, most notably those borrowed from science fiction: time travel and alien life. The novel even features a character, Kilgore Trout, who is a frustrated science fiction writer, read almost exclusively by one of the casualties Billy meets in a war hospital.

The novel is extremely satirical, evoking the kind of black humour at the human condition and our preoccupations that is often only created through experience of war (cf Heller's Catch 22). When Billy meets the Tralfamadorians they explain that the human way of looking at time and events is the same as looking at the world through a tiny peephole. They understand that all things that will happen have happened, and when a Tralfamadorian sees a dead creature they know they have simply seen it at a bad moment, since it is simultaneously being born and living every moment of its life.

This concept forms a compelling contrast when it is set against the Dresden fire bombing. (Current historians put the death toll from this event at around 40,000, whereas Vonnegut reports it, as many did in the years after the event, at around 135,000.) Vonnegut employs the refrain 'so it goes' after every mention of someone's death. With World War II as a background for the story it is repeated often. It is most effective for the reader when they have read the refrain before they even realise that the narrator has just described a death: at such moments the Tralfamadorians' belief seems apt indeed.

Humour is slotted into the novel at various levels. The meetings and connections between many of the characters are improbable in our consciousness, but entirely likely to the Tralfamadorians. Having to explain notions in the book through the two perspectives provides ample opportunity to look at human pre-occupations and assumptions with a humourous intent. The zoo set up on the Tralfamdorian planet to house Billy and a porn-star imported from earth as his companion is a less-than-subtle poke at our race's obsession with superiority. One of Kilgour Trout's novels reinvents Jesus as a far less likeable guy, with fewer friends in 'high places', to prove the point that 'before you kill somebody' you should 'make absolutely sure he isn't well connected'.

Frequently, the action or purpose of a passage is filtered through several voices before it reaches the reader. In the above example the novel's narrator recounts what a character tells Billy about what he has read in a book. This technique could be interpreted in any number of ways. It invokes the mess of noise that surrounds so many people in their urban living; it reflects the crassness of the media and their distance from the purity of a story; it enunciates the difficulty in obtaining the truth of an event when every witness carries a different perspective. It is also the technique of someone unable to deal with an event in their past: many characters suspect this is Billy's problem when he pontificates on the existence of aliens, and many have paralleled this with Vonnegut and his difficulty in dealing with what he witnessed in the war.

The plot, with its multiple narrative voices, occasional full page illustrations, and science fiction techniques, is quite implausible. Yet it is set against a true event that, 60 years after taking place, has never been unequivocally explained. The themes of existence and meaning that permeate the book, however, are entirely relevant. These heavy themes are not buried beneath inaccessible prose, though there are undoubtedly many readers who find the novel too fractured to elicit any coherent message. Alternatively, however, one can see this as a novel devoid of artifice; one that, without becoming crass or overblown, disregards niceties and proprieties to tell a pure story.

'Adverbs' - Daniel Handler'

It has been some time between book reviews. I would struggle to draw parallels between the last book I reviewed, a novel of teen angst, and this one, Daniel Handler's intriguing, innovative and inscrutable collection of stories, 'Adverbs'.

The book is a collection of explorations on the topic of love. In each story, a way of loving is examined - to love 'immediately', 'particularly' or 'wrongly' - and hence the book's title. The stories are loosely linked, with characters from earlier stories appearing strongly or tangentially in later ones. There is an overarching narrative voice: that of the author. One of the later stories is entitled 'Truly' and in this piece the writer speaks to the reader directly, giving details about writing the book and his personal experiences. Keeping track of each of the characters had been proving a challenge and suddenly, so far in, the author informs us that there are multiple Steves throughout the book, multiple Andreas. Just because two characters have the same name, doesn't mean they are the same character. What the reader should be looking for, he asserts, are the birds.

The stories are all founded on this level of irony. Can one love ironically? I think not, but one can undoubtedly discuss it ironically. Literature is, in fact, full of couples who are in love but spend most of their dialogue saying one thing when the audience knows they mean another. Handler, on the other hand, is masterful at saying exactly what he means in ways that I would postulate no one has thought of before. Why note someone as simply good-looking when they could be 'as handsome as a new truck'?

I am on record as being sceptical of books that come overly recommended. This one does not have international bestseller splashed all over the front, which, frankly, is not a surprise, since it is very far from the poorly thought out, overly accessible narratives that normally top the lists. What is does have is commendations from Michael Chabon and Dave Eggers. It could be a dissertation on the modern relevance of Handler's alter-ego, Lemony Snicket, and Jim Carrey's handling of one of her characters and I'd still crave to read it.

'The Sportswriter' - Richard Ford

The eloquence and dreamy philosophising of Independence Day had led me to seek out the two other novels that bookend Ford's trilogy of the musing Frank Bascombe. The Sportswriter, the earliest, was hailed at its release as a masterly and remarkable work, significant to the future of American literature. Which indeed it is, but it is a testament to Ford's ongoing development that the second novel is in fact superior to this earlier, worthwhile and intelligently written work.
Very early in the novel Ford displays his skill for beautiful turns of phrase: discussing his routines with his recently divorced wife he indicates he sought only "the normal applauseless life of us all". Meeting his ex-wife in a graveyard on their deceased son's birthday, she asks if he plans to re-marry. Frank immediately notes in response that he smells the chlorine of a suburban swimming pool. Rather than digress on the mental makeup of his character, this note from Ford reveals what we need to know about the character's attitude: the details he notices tell us that he will treat any relationship intellectually, immediately putting him at odds with the notion of marriage, an irony heightened by the fact that it is his estranged wife asking him the question.

Two of the key themes of the novel and Frank's musings are love and mystery. Many women feature in the novel: his ex-wife, current lover and other interests, and past girlfriends. He considers and discusses at length the "love" he feels for Vicki, his current girlfriend. This is not stomach-butterfly love, however. It is the love of having that person in his life, the love of what she would contribute and what it would mean he had achieved. There is indeed a yawning gap between the first feelings of interest for a person, and that of being truly in love, and for many of us it is difficult to pinpoint or verbalise where we lie on that spectrum. Ford is brave enough to take his protagonist there and try to locate him within that scale.

He muses as well on the difference between realism and factualism: on the one hand accepting things as they are and on the other over-analysing the circumstances leading to an event. The latter morphs into the notion of mystery, something Frank is at pains to preserve. To that end he cannot retain a college teaching position as the lecturers inevitably remove mystery from literature by dissecting and defining it. As Frank moves through a thinking man's version of Nick Hornby's About a Boy - calling up several old girlfriends for their comfort and familiarity - we realise that love - for people dead and alive, for lovers past and present, for places and possessions ordered from catalogues - is the most mysterious of entities, too shrouded to be simplified as a consequence of romance.

For all the philosophising on relationships and Frank's ability to commit to them in various guises, the attitude to women in this 20-year-old novel is not always welcome. Their arses are commented on in preference to their personalities and in relationships they can be disenfranchised, serving only Frank's purposes. It's interesting that when talking to his 83-year-old lady neighbour, he feels compelled to "watch his age", to not appear too immature, when he has just spent a weekend in Detroit comfortable in his superiority in age and education over Vicki.

Frank Bascombe is written as a man intensely aware of his relationships with men and women around him, and is a character placed irretrievably in a certain circumference on the American East Coast. His openness of philosophy, however, allows readers of diverse background, location age and of both genders to share his intellectual journey.

'Independence Day', Richard Ford

Published in 1995, Independence Day is the second in a trilogy of novels about Frank Bascombe (The Sportswriter was published in 1985 and the last book, The Lay of the Land in 2005). Each can be read independently. In Independence Day, for example, Frank mentions the death of his son several times, without going into detail - this event was dealt with in the first novel.

Frank is a contemplative man. The novel runs across his experiences on the titular long weekend in the late 80s, so at 450 pages it's slow-paced, musing and reflective, spending as much time in the past filling in details as elucidating current events. Frank, now a real estate agent, spends much of the first day dealing with the Markhams, impossible customers looking for a house, a location and a price-range that doesn't exist. Here is the modern dream turned sour, the Markhams' insistence on being able to get what they want infusing a vile taste into their marriage and leading them into blame and retribution, rather than establishing a happy family home.

Over the weekend Frank interacts with three other key characters - his ex-wife, their 15-year-old son, and his current lover, Sally. Ford discusses notions of love quite tenderly through Frank's interactions with each of these characters. Frank is simultaneously aware that he still loves his ex-wife, but that it is too problematic for them to be together. Throughout the book he ponders the strength of his commitment to Sally, questioning how much true affection he can give to someone else, as distinct from merely being buoyed by his own feelings. He is desparate to spend time with his son, Paul, but is brutal in assaying how much he can love a difficult, irascible teenager.

These events are backdropped by the upcoming Presedential elections - G Bush the First is in the running against Dukakis. Knowing what's going to happen in that backstory, knowing that the world is still being bullied twenty years on, and that houses haven't become any more affordable, gives the reader a stinging insight into the veracity of Ford's words.

And they are beautifully crafted words. Ford often has a very interesting turn of phrase: he uses language correctly, but for his (or his characters') own purpose. He mixes adjectives and nouns quite a lot, for example saying 'defiance cries' rather than 'defiant'. A beautiful example is 'to swoon off into profound unconscious while the cicadas sang their songs in the silent trees'. To have used the noun, 'unconsciousness', would have unbalanced the harmony of the sentence. His commentary on 'independence', and its arbitrariness, is insightful and cutting: the monster trucks taking part in the big day's parade will be later 'crush some Japanese cars out at the Revolutionary War Battlefield'

I was lulled by this booked. Frank spends an enormous part of it driving his car and I had the feeling of being a passenger, of progressing towards a destination without having to be in control of the vehicle, and taking lots of detours, down tree-lined lanes and highways alongside panoramas, on the way there. It's a novel that trusts its reader to bring their own notion of irony, cynicism, politics and how the world works to the book, engage in dialogue with the characters, and learn something if you will.