Patrick Skene Catling
William Trevor surpassed his usual high standards with The Silence in the Garden (Bodley Head, £9.95), a novel about Anglo-Irish decline. I greatly enjoyed Black Box by Amos Oz (Chatto, £11.95), an Israeli writer who cleverly portrays national and family loyalties in a context of harsh worldliness. Of course it was a pleasure then to turn to Philip Larkin's Collected Poems (Faber, £16.95). For totally unserious relief, I recommend Holly- wood Anecdotes (Macmillan, £13.95), a fat compilation of familiar and some un- familiar stories of tinseltown which were gathered by Paul F. Boller Jnr and Ronald L. Davis. They are stories as telling as this: 'F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed he liked Sam Goldwyn because "You always knew where you stood with him: Nowhere".
On the debit side of the year's publica- tions were Blue Eyes, Black Hair (Collins, £10.95), an irritatingly pretentious, rather old-fashioned modern French novel by Marguerite Duras, who called this pur- ported love story 'the greatest and most terrifying it has ever been given me to• write', and Picture This (Macmillan, £12.95), Joseph Heller's tiresomely didac- tic exhibition of research into the lives of Rembrandt, Aristotle, Socrates and mil- lions of others, which was offered as a novel but came across as a facetious lecture in an American high school.
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