The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 ★★★★½

Life with America's Most Wanted

The Great American Novel, it turns out, is a crime story. The Great Gatsby may be known now as refined literature or even worse, high art, but what makes it so immediate and enjoyable is the milieu it sprang from, of gangsters, flappers, body counts and bootleg gin.

That and the fact it is so much fun to read should divest it of any perceived responsibility for uplifting the mind. It has a message, deep if not especially brilliant, but the novel’s main takeaway is the setting and its people, aristocrats basking in the high life along Long Island Sound.

Nick Carraway is a striving bond salesman and Yale graduate who becomes enmeshed when his married second cousin Daisy takes up an affair with Nick’s rich neighbor Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is an enigma; no one seems to know how he got his money, only that he has a lot of it.

George Washington Slept Here – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1940 ½★

When the Well Runs Dry

Country life was a popular subject for American entertainment in the 1940s, with movies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, comic strips like “Li’l Abner,” even paintings like Andrew Wyeth “Christina’s World.” Why not screwball comedy, too?

The writing team of Kaufman & Hart, enjoying enough success from their collaborative playwriting to afford new homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, decided to make their next play about the experience of country living. George Washington Slept Here was the result.

While a good idea, the play suffers from all the triteness and contrivances of the pair’s earlier work with fewer sparks of originality. Perhaps because country comedies were not so popular in the beginning of the 1940s as they became in the end, there is a potted, been-there done-that feeling about the thing which maybe it doesn’t quite deserve.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams, 1987 ★★★½

 And Now for Something Slightly Different

Is it a mystery? A fantasy? A comedy? A spiritual satire? A free-range, deep-dish metaphysical contemplation of time itself?

The most fun readers may have with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is making guesses after every chapter as to what it is they are reading, then revising them after a few more pages.

Probably the happiest takeaway from reading this novel is the sneaking sense its author was having fun writing again. Douglas Adams leaves the increasingly dour Galaxy of his recent past behind to bring forth a distinctly different yet still engagingly silly Universe involving a fictitious British university and the ghost of a computer billionaire.

Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson – Evelyn Waugh, 1939 ★★

Taking Oil, Dumping God

Marxism is one of the most profound political movements in the history of mankind. Love it or hate it, the rise of the “workers’ revolution” has left few neutral observers in its wake.

Evelyn Waugh was one of the haters. He condemned Marxism for its negative impact on national economies, its removal of public liberties to serve a nebulous public good, and most especially its avowed atheism. In Mexico in the late 1930s, he called out this “object-lesson” for what he describes as its ruinous effects.

Waugh writes: “Just as the United States earned the gratitude of the world by ‘trying out’ prohibition, so the Mexicans may be said to be trying out Marxism.”

The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford, 1915 ★★★★★

A Different Kind of Mystery Novel

Reading The Good Soldier is like being trapped in a room with one of the windiest, endlessly digressive bores you can imagine. And then the penny drops and you realize you are in the middle of a rather fun mystery.

Who is this odd narrator, John Dowell, and why is he so in the thrall of a strange English couple, the Ashburnhams? What is the deal with Dowell’s wife? And why did Ford Madox Ford give this novel the title The Good Soldier, given there is nothing in it relating to the Great War then raging across Europe?

Another mystery less difficult to explain is the hold this elliptical book has had over generations of readers, only gaining stature in later critical surveys. The Good Soldier is a probing, devastating, subtly but persistently comedic examination of duty, religion, and so much else that falls under the heading of what one is brought up to believe.

The Cutie – Donald E. Westlake, 1960 ★★½

Even Bad Guys Get the Blues

Straightforward mystery or crime fiction? I go back and forth with this one. The plot centers on a murder, a series of them as it unfolds, with mysterious phone calls and lengthy interrogations that double as exposition. Your standard mystery, basically.

But what it really is about is the life of a criminal, a hoodlum who thinks he’s in the driver’s seat until things start going wrong. As a character study, The Cutie is involving, full-on crime fiction. Yet most of the way through, it is tied to this formulaic mystery that leaves too many holes.

Our protagonist, Clay, works as a top operative for Manhattan gang boss Ed Ganolese. One night, at home with his latest girlfriend, the doorbell rings. It’s Billy-Billy Cantell, a junkie who claims the police are after him for murdering a woman he swears he doesn’t know.

Lincoln’s Lieutenants – Stephen W. Sears, 2017 ★★★★

Epic Battles Led by Petty Minds

They were eventual victors in the highest-stakes battles their country ever fought, enduring gut-wrenching reversals and hellish casualties all the way. They also included enough whiny, bratty, narcissistic headcases to fill the cast of an ‘80s teen comedy.

With such leaders was the Union saved.

The main takeaway from this book, the first by Civil War historian Stephen Sears to cover the entire war rather than a specific campaign, is just how brutal a spectacle it was not just during specific battles but all the way through. Yet the prima donna aspect hits home, too.