Mo Lehrnman is a prototypical rock climber: fearless, wildly spontaneous, and filled with marvelous stories of triumph and near misses. His best friend, Ray Connelly, is everything Mo’s not. But when Ray “borrows” Mo’s tales for a book, the pair take their struggle to the beauty of Yosemite’s El Capitan, the crown jewel of rock climbing. An amusing look at the high-altitude world of twentysomething climbers, Daniel Duane’s Looking for Mo delights readers with its majestic description of Yosemite and a friendship saved by carabiners and ropes. Reviewed by Mark Luce.

Bruce Springsteen’s album “Nebraska” evokes the spare spirit of the Midwest perhaps better than anything in American music. Terence Malik’s haunting Badlands does the same thing in American cinema. Now, Goodnight Nebraska, a phenomenal debut novel by Tom McNeal, accomplishes in literature what The Boss and Malik did for the Great Plains in other forms. Randall Hunsacker didn’t want to come to the hamlet of Goodnight, Nebraska. The arrival of the 17-year old was forced after his involvement in a shooting, a car theft, and the twisted steel carnage of a subsequent crash in Utah. Randall is an outsider in a town where whispers, a stubborn resistance to change, and something dangerous simmers beneath rigid appearances. Randall falls for Marcy Lockhardt, the high-school’s most pristine and promising student, and she falls for Randall’s mysterious past and quiet introspection. Despite their desire to escape the drudgery of Goodnight, they are sucked even deeper into the strange town by marriage and lost ambition. If you have ever spent time in a small plains town, you know the feel the invisible pull that keeps people in a depressing place with their secrets, lies, and unrealized hopes. Randall and Marcy are no different. Their tumultuous marriage is punctuated by silence and indifference. Much in the manner of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, McNeal seamlessly weaves their story with intense, sometimes graphic tales of the other townspeople. These interlocking stories chronicle the unknowingly unhappy, and the vulgar that underpins what for all appearances is simple, bucolic. Further, McNeal’s incredibly cinematic descriptions tellingly dramatize the slow, dull aches of hearts stuck in muddy, rutted roads of emotion. McNeal writes with a quiet intensity, and his scenes of domestic heartbreak and terror happen in the middle of paragraphs. While frightening, the scenes work to underscore that life, especially on the hardscrabble plains, and are not broken neatly into chapters. Affairs happen, friendships fail, marriages fray, and people die in strange, violent ways. This is a day in the life. All this simply occurs. Without warning. Without headlines.

Like the later stories of Raymond Carver, Goodnight Nebraska demonstrates that under the callused hands and hearts lie a soft-beating hope the chance for reconciliation and acceptance. McNeal has written an uncommonly human novel; he describes a landscape where, however briefly, the numbness disappears and things as insignificant as interlocked hands, a simple statement, or even a drive on dirt roads means something larger, the promise of something better.

Reviewed by Mark Luce.

From the perspective of a nine-year-old girl, The Everlasting Story of Nory celebrates the splendor of childhood curiosity. Nicholson Baker, whose writing revels in the oft-ignored nuances of everyday life, is at ease imitating the style and manner of a child. Baker, whose book was inspired by his daughter Alice, explains its title in the words of Nory: “The idea of everlasting life came partly from the kinds of things you say in Cathedral, and partly from a movie called The Neverending Story, which was an extremely good movie in many ways, one of which was that it was unusually rare to have a two-part movie and have the second part be just as interesting as the first, basically.” Although the arc of the story does not include a standard exposition or development, by the end of the book a subtle picture of Nory has been drawn. In 54 brief chapters, Baker reveals her world in a collage of independent episodes. Many of the scenes take place in the Threll Junior School, where Nory ponders everything from the fate of Achilles to the intricacies of a compass. “Really the compass is called a Ôset of compasses,’ and the things that stick out are called the Ôarms of the compass.'” Having moved with her family from the United States to England, Nory learns to cope with the peculiarities of her new British classmates, who use words like “bin” and “false palate” to describe garbage cans and retainers. Baker’s love for quirky speech shines through here, as he conveys the conversations of children in school. But there is more to this story than witty depictions of child-like language. In portraying the kindness with which Nory befriends the bullied Pamela, Baker illustrates a child’s potential for goodness. In Nory’s world, kids are not simply sidekicks complementing the adults who surround them. They are the main characters here, puzzling over curiosities and acting out their dreams. It may seem odd that The Everlasting Story of Nory was written by the same man who dreamed up Vox and The Fermata, the sexy novels for which Baker is widely known. But like this one, those earlier books were essentially about fantasy, imagination, and the importance of affection. With fine descriptive skill, Baker has once again created a poignant portrait of emotional intimacy, this time through the eyes of a child. Reviewed by Jeremy Caplan.

Finding the right woman is not easy. They come in all shapes, sizes, colors, temperaments, and ages. Very few come with warranties or owner’s manuals. Most require shots of various kinds, dental work and their own space in the closet. Some even require varying amounts of cosmetic surgery. Is it any wonder that some men opt for a wide-screen TV instead? It is this search for the right woman that is at the core of the debut novel Girlfriend 44 by a promising new British writer, Mark Barrowcliffe. The two male protagonists in this story Harry, a fattish, middle-aged television researcher who drinks too much, and Gerrard, a thin, middle-aged perfectionist who drinks too little are roommates who are forever commiserating over the lack of acceptable women on the open market. Harry is looking for girlfriend number 44 and Gerrard is looking for perfect girlfriend number three. Meanwhile, all they have is each other.

Enter the ideal specimen, Alice, a woman who is so perfect it is nauseating, and you can perhaps divine where the story is headed. The fact that she likes both men only makes the ultimate stakes higher for each man. Neither wants to lose to a loser.

Despite its cosmic social implications, Girlfriend 44 shouldn’t be misjudged; it is a comic look at the expectations men and women have for a process that few people of either sex ever master. Dating is only a microcosm of life itself you’ll do just fine, as long as you never convince yourself that you will somehow come out of the experience alive. Barrowcliffe is an exceptional writer, but the genius of this work is his apparent realization that if he combined every prejudice women have about men and injected them into the genes of Harry and Gerrard, he would have the makings of a bestseller and he is probably correct.

Read it and weep.

Author James L. Dickerson abandoned his search for the right woman with the publication of his book, Women on Top. These days he watches a lot of television.

impressive, ambitious and extraordinarily imagined new novel from a Columbia anthropologist and New Yorker writer chronicles the modern history of Burma, from the 1885 British invasion to the political turmoil of present day Myanmar (as Burma is now called). The events are seen primarily through the eyes of Rajkumar Raha, an intrepid 11-year-old Indian orphan who finds himself on the eve of the British invasion stranded in Mandalay. A romantic and ambitious boy, Rajukmar becomes enthralled with the large fort that houses the Burmese royal family, vowing to “find a way in” the Glass Palace, the compound’s inner sanctum, named for its “shining crystal walls and mirrored ceilings.” His chance comes sooner than he imagined. When British troops invade and loot the royal compound, the locals stampede the Glass Palace, searching for treasure. Therein, Rajkumar encounters 10-year-old Dolly, the queen’s favorite and most beautiful maid. Instantly smitten, Rajkumar is crushed when, a day or so later, Dolly departs with the rest of the royal entourage, who have been exiled to India.

The first half of the novel follows Rajkumar, who makes his fortune in the teak industry, and Dolly, who plods through her days in Ratnagiri, the remote Indian town to which the Burmese royal family are exiled. Almost 20 years later, Rajkumar finds Dolly and convinces her to marry him. In the novel’s second half the plot shifts, focusing on Rajkumar and Dolly’s grown children and Uma’s nieces and nephew. Although the various entanglements and dilemmas of this younger generation prove compelling, some of these characters have the feel of props, inserted in order to illustrate some aspect of the horrors of war and colonialism.

This is a small complaint, however, and one that perhaps should not be applied to an epic, episodic novel of this sort. For The Glass Palace resembles less a contemporary American plot-driven novel, than a sprawling work like Dos Passos’ USA or a Greek epic. This is a major accomplishment from an important writer, worth reading if only for a greater understanding of Burmese and Indian history, and for a great thinker’s perspective on the problems of colonialism and post-colonialism.

Joanna Smith Rakoff is the book editor for Shout magazine.