How much Larry McMurtry is too much? Ready or not, here he comes again with the third installment of his seriocomic Berrybender Narratives a scant six months after book two. By Sorrow's River (Simon & Schuster) won't win him another Pulitzer, but the pages blow by like a prairie wind in this 1830's-era yarn about taciturn trappers and hedonistic Brits braving Indian territory for the sake of adventure in the New World. Reviewed by Mike Shea
The King Is Dead (Knopf), Austinite Jim Lewis's sterling novel of politics, race, fidelity, and regret, is a model of literary economy. In an epicworthy tale packed into a brisk 260 pages, Walter Selby, a top aide to Tennessee's governor, wrestles with the dodgy ethics of political life and the toll it takes on his marriage; his breakdown—inevitable and violent—becomes a mystery for his son to crack. Lewis dredges up the dirty secrets behind his characters' public faces, not gratuitously, but to reveal their true nature. This is grand fiction. Reviewed by Mike Shea
Before the curtain rises on DBC Pierre's coal-black comedy Vernon God Little (Canongate), fifteen-year-old Vernon Little is just another potty-mouthed high school loser trapped in the fictional Texas town of Martirio. After his much-abused friend Jesus shoots sixteen classmates and then himself, Vernon is branded a probable psychokiller (or at least a very strange boy) by the cops, the press, and his loony mother's kaffeeklatsch. Our antihero is drolly hilarious—he's the bastard child of Holden Caulfield and Ignatius Reilly—and astoundingly unlucky; he lands in a Texas courtroom in a trial worthy of Kafka. Shortlisted for the U.K.'s prestigious Booker prize, Pierre's raucous farce skewers the media for their shameless exploitation of tragedy and small-town folk for their small-mindedness; it's a profane plea for sanity in our crazed times. Reviewed by Mike Shea
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