James Wolcott

James Wolcott, Vanity Fair columnist and author of the upcoming novel The Catsitters (HarperCollins, $25), chooses five of his favorite comic novels.

Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell (out of print). Before he orchestrated the multivolume A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell dashed off shorter, quirkier novels about bohemians, poseurs, and spongers crashing parties and spouting utter absurdities. This one’s his most inspired and eccentric, the sentence-rhythms slightly off yet impeccably right: ragtime set to words.

Stanley and the Women by Kingsley Amis (Books on Tape, $48). No, it doesn’t have the youthful kick of Lucky Jim (what does?), but the rueful griping of its middle-aged crocks about wives and marriage has a woozy humor that’s like eavesdropping on barroom philosophers at their most puffed-up. (Nobody nailed bores better than Amis, who became something of a bullfrog himself.)

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell (Steerforth Press, $14). Dawn Powell was the Dorothy Parker of postwar Greenwich Village—hard-drinking, wisecracking, impossible to fool. (Like Parker, Powell’s at her smiling-cobra best when she’s writing about other women.) This bittersweet comedy, Powell’s last (and finest), says fond farewell to the Village as its artist’s models, hack writers, and glorious has-beens give way to rising rents and pushy careerists.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino (Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95). No novel has made me laugh harder or more often. A cult classic, this group study of New York writers on the make is so zingingly on-target that even the footnotes are funny. When he parodies bad poetry (we’re talking really bad), he achieves a kind of lunatic rapture.

Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn (Faber $6.99). I just started reading Frayn’s fiction after being wowed by his drama Copenhagen. This early gem, set in a Fleet Street now lost in the mist, sets up its jokes so gingerly that they seem to spring with twice the surprise impact. (The description of a TV panel discussion that goes kerflooey is classic.) The characters’ petty maneuverings remind one of Kingsley Amis, the newspaper satire recalls Evelyn Waugh, but the action is staged with the wizard knack of a born playwright.