I keep reading novels of the Indian underworld, and they keep being good. I’m going to have to balance it out with A Suitable Boy, a non-crime novel about family relationships and manners and class. M. loved it, which is reason enough to read it, but also I suspect that if I skip it I’ll be developing a skewed and unwholesome view of desi fiction. But first… one more tale of crime and dissolution.

Narcopolis, by Jeet Thayil, takes place over about 30 years, as Bombay becomes Mumbai and the license raj gives way to global capital. In the slums, that’s less important. There, the ebb and flow of tension and violence between Hindu and Muslim is unceasing, and the only real difference is that chandu (opium) is replaced by garad (heroin). The rich and privileged dabble in drugs, get sucked in, get clean, relapse, get clean again. The poor start out hopeless and never have a chance. Everyone has an excuse and a justification and time stretches out to nothing.

As a companion, consider Steven Martin’s memoir Opium Fiend, which explains a lot about the elaborate and now-outdated opium smoking equipment (it actually just vaporizes, rather than burns, the drug) that seems to play as important a role as the poets and dreamers who get sucked into the opiate undertow of Narcopolis.

Frances “Frankie” Fitzgibbons wakes up one day transformed from the complacent, gentle bank loan officer into a mad emperor who flexes her power with over the top self-confidence and charisma. Her first act with her new found powers is to seduce the high school drum major before she tackles taking over the bank. First published in 1991, the novel satirizes the excesses epitomized by the banking crisis of the late 1980s. Given the financial turmoil of the past few years, Ride a Cockhorse is just as relevant, and just as funny, today. You’ll find yourself both repulsed and attracted to Frankie as she gathers her entourage around her like a mad dictator. Her ludicrous, hilarious ride to the top is not to be missed.

It’s sort of over to debate the merits of continuing to distinguish between genre fiction and literary fiction. Ursula K. LeGuin and Margaret Atwood were the ones who pointed it out to me first, and of course John Banville/Benjamin Black has hashed that out again more recently.

Nonetheless, I think it’s worth pointing out Imogen Robertson. Yes, there’s a murder involved in her stories, and an eccentric investigator and an intrepid lady. But Robertson doesn’t allow those elements to be a crutch. The characters are still finely drawn, the historical background carefully researched and annotated.

And frankly, the historical setting makes all of it quite plausible. In the late 18th century, there were in fact quite a large number of eccentric natural philosophers and intrepid ladies struggling against the confines of their societal expectations. Robertson’s fiction may involve murder and intrigue, but you’re doing yourself a disservice if you pigeonhole and ignore her.

Her latest, Island of Bones, should be available any day now. If you haven’t read the first two — Instruments of Darkness and Anatomy of Murder — start now and you’ll be able to sink into all three in a row.

From My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss:

I guess, dear reader, I want to tell you that even when you have found your person in this world, the person who you know, deep down in your mitochondrial DNA, is meant to be by your side in this life, it is no guarantee that this person will not also drive you completely batshit insane at some moments along the way. It is unfair to expect your sweetheart to be a perfect person or to consider yourself above reproach just because you love each other. Even if you have found your one true love, you will have exact ideas about how to clean a floor, whether your family is nuts of simply lovable, and just what, exactly, are the requirements for being a good driver.

I can’t tell you how much this paragraph spoke to me. Reading it makes me  even more eager to meet her at our event next Tuesday, October 2nd. Details are here.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A crusading investigative journalist with a knack for seducing disproportionately hot women finds himself in trouble when he uncovers…

Tarun J Tejpal’s new novel The Story of My Assassins (available for pre-order now and on shelves next month) isn’t that book. It’s way better.

For one thing, it’s better written. Maybe I just think that because of the way it’s littered with wonderfully new and exciting Hindi profanities, but I’m pretty sure it’s because it’s actually just well written.

And while the narrator is not exactly a likeable guy, I feel that he’s more believably unsympathetic than the characters in a certain series of Scandinavian thrillers.

Here’s how it opens: Sunday morning, he goes to the office of his failing news magazine to get away from his wife. His wife calls, but he’s ignoring her. Co-workers call, but he doesn’t want to deal with work either. Eventually the police and his wife and several TV news crews arrive and tell him there’s been an attempt on his life and they’re going to have to put him under 24 hour police protection. He ducks away from them all and heads to his mistress’ house. He doesn’t tell her about any of this, and she finds out from watching the news. He’s not, in other words, very honest or good to his family, his co-workers, his career, or even his mistress.

He’s not even sure if there’s actually been an attempt on his life. Maybe there has. Maybe he’s being set up for notoriety and there will be some kind of a sting later. The most likely explanation, he thinks, is that the assassins are being set up, and he’s just a convenient pawn. Despite his reputation as an investigative journalist, he makes every effort to avoid knowing the truth, but it eventually seeps in around the edges. It whispers in his ear: This isn’t even about you. You’re just a coincidence.

Later, the book profiles the five maybe-assassins, tracing their rise and fall, the coincidences and ways that their lives, too, are beyond their control, that the plot and theme involve them but don’t actually care about them.

It’s kind of brutal like that. And kind of brilliant.

From Mr. Bookdwarf:

I’m loving Three Ways of the Saw. It reminds me of the Denis Johnson short stories in the way it evokes a sort of fractured intensity of emotion.

Is there a better observer of English life than Zadie Smith? I suppose Phillip Hensher would be the other contender, although books like King of the Badgers illustrate a totally different England.

I also suppose I can’t really be a judge of authenticity. I haven’t organized an orgy in a gossipy seaside town, or been a poor teenage girl struggling to find my way in Northwest London. I don’t know if Hensher or Smith are truly accurate. But they certainly feel real.

I read an excerpt of NW in the New Yorker and loved it, and then tried to read the whole novel, but it just seemed so unutterably sad, and the characters so full of misgivings about themselves, that I had to stop. Beautifully rendered, realistic, heartbreaking sadness. I’m not… I just couldn’t do it.

My sister and I were obsessed with the channel AMC when we were kids. Left home along during the hot Alabama summers, staying indoors was often our only choice. This was way before their new programming with shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, when you could flip on the television to find some black and white movie playing at all hours (except in the middle of the night when it was all infomercials of course). We watched it all–the Thin Man series, anything with Cary Grant or Fred Astaire. Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon made us laugh hysterically.

I grew to love the Westerns. I was indiscriminate at the time, watching anything with cowboys and guns. Stagecoach might be on my top ten favorite  movies of all time. As I grew older, I became more discerning and critical of movies, as one does. Several movies made me realize that they could transcend the genre–The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of couse. And in particular Unforgiven in 1992 changed the way I watched Westerns, like many movie goers I imagine.

Of course as a huge reader, my movie habits transcended into my reading habits. I admit it, I read a bunch of Louis L’Amour. It was like my Sweet Valley High: Formulaic easy reads that fed my need for cowboys, a little dirty, doing stuff, with hearts of gold etc. I grew out of it when I discovered John Steinbeck.

But I still get excited when I see novels set in the West. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt was one of my favorite novels of 2011 (my dog Lucy thought it should have won the Booker). When I read about Little Century by Anna Keesey, my Western Spidey sense tingled. The novel mixes the classic genres of frontier and western, which is fine by me–after all, my sister and I also  loved Little House on the Prairie.

The novel opens with the arrival from Chicago of Esther Chambers to the small town of Century, Oregon; the town desires more than anything the railroad building a station and tracks through the town. Esther travels there after the death of her mother to find the last living relative. In Century, she finds a town in limbo, struggling between cattle herders and sheep herders. Her cousin Pick is a cattle herder and immediately she senses the animosity between the two groups. Pick talks Esther into helping his cause by falsely filing a claim on a piece of land that gives him control of the town’s water supply. At first, Esther gives her cousin her full support but as she lives in Century, she gets to know more people and sees beyond the black and white picture Pick paints for her. She also meets Ben Cruff, a sheep herder, whose friendship turns into a romance that will change her mind.

Though seemingly a conventional novel, I found Keesey’s writing really elevated the story. Long descriptions of the landscape, the cold winters, and her relationship with both Ben and Pick make it an artistic success as well as a home-run for Western fans.

Originally published in 1984 in the UK and just as fast out of print, Some Girls, Some Hats, and Hitler was rediscovered by a British editor, who bought a used copy last year, read it, loved it, and decided to bring it out again. It’s a pretty remarkable story about a charismatic milliner in the late 30s, who designs for the creme de la creme of Vienna. She’s fun, has lovers, hangs out in cafes. Of course we all know what’s coming–Hitler and World War II. Trudi falls in love with Walter Ehrlich, a romantic businessman, but once the Germans arrive they find themselves desperate to escape.

It’s a fascinating true story from someone who witnessed much tragic history. I’m glad that it’s been found again.

Bookseller confession time–up until now, I have never read any of Zadie Smith’s novels. I really like her essays but just haven’t gotten to White Teeth or the rest. When an ARC of her forthcoming book NW showed up, I grabbed it.

The novel focuses on a housing estate in northwest London. It’s split into different sections with different narrators for each and different styles. It took me a while to get into the rhythm of the book but by the second section however, I was hooked. You’re following these characters and their messed up lives, trying to will them to not make these mistakes but they make them anyway because they feel trapped or broken or just don’t know what to do. This is a really strong novel, one that makes me think I’ve been missing out by not having read her other books, something I hope to remedy soon.

Note: There’s a long piece of the novel in the July 23rd issue of the New Yorker. Here’s an interview with Zadie Smith about it.