David Caute
For late-night laughter I have been sus- tained by Garrison Kelllor's The Book of Guys (Faber, £14.99). The general thesis is that any male foolish enough to venture into adult life is in trouble. Keillor lays his man-traps — almost invariably the whirling Dervish male ego — at nasty angles. His 20 stories carry a guarantee that we will die laughing. For late-night melancholy and stagnant odours on the Atlantic passage, V. S. Naipaul remains the master mariner. A Way in the World (Heinemann, 14.99) perfectly displays his scorn for invention and for the urgencies of mundane story- telling, while deploying exceptional literary cunning and oblique lines of empathy which prevent the reader from closing the book. Finally Nicholas Tredell's Conversa- tions with Critics (Carcanet, £25) may not be the sexiest title of the year, but Tredell's astute interrogations bring the best and worst (in appropriate proportions) out of his gurus: how they saw the light and how they lit fires.
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