There is generosity as well as spite in his assessments and when he talks to people – notably Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon and Keanu Reeves – the results are far more interesting and, by implication, respectful, than the run-of-the-mill celebrity interview. And the devotion to frivolity cannot conceal a well-developed moral sense, especially when he swaps easy targets (pop stars with film careers) for the odd difficult one. He attacks the brutish machismo of Oliver Stone: ‘If Stone were not peddling a politically fashionable Anti-Americanism that never goes out of style in Hollywood, feminists would be all over him as one of the most reactionary sexist film-makers of all time.’
This is about as serious as he gets. Elsewhere, one-liners like ‘If God is truly all-knowing and all-powerful, an omnipotent force, why doesn’t he do something about Daphne Zuniga?’ hold sway to amusing effect. His appreciation of Melanie Griffiths (‘The message of Melanie Griffiths is a message of hope.

But it is also a message of defiance.’) makes a convincing case for sarcasm as the highest form of wit.. JONAS COLLINGWOOD, the hero of Benjamin Cheever’s second novel, is a distinguished but under-recognised writer. The author of no less than 18 novels, including the Updikean Agricola, Agricolae, he lives in Westchester County, upstate New York, together with his long-suffering wife, Elspeth, and his two adopted children, Nelson and Narcissus Ballard. On the face of it, this book is about issues of literary and genetic authenticity. Are Jonas’s novels really based on his experience with the Italian partisans during the Second World War, or are they pure invention? Are Nelson and Narcissus really – as their adoptive parents insist – the unwanted offspring of a high school major and an auto-mechanic, or are they more intimately connected than they realise to the man they call ‘Uncle’?
The narrative begins with Collingwood’s 18th novel, My Life as a Woman, receiving belated recognition in the International Herald Tribune. The article contends that his novels have all been thinly veiled autobiography, that he is in fact a great tough-guy in the Hemingway mould. This Collingwood does nothing to deny, as reporter after reporter arrives at the house to interview him and solicit pearls of his idiosyncratic wisdom.Along with the reporters comes a deeply unpleasant Ivy League media-cum-literary type whose designs on the eponymous ‘partisan’ are both venal and meretricious.

As the narrative unfolds, the destinies of the four family members become deviously intertwined with the entrails of Collingwood’s literary reputation.Our version of these events is provided by the son, Nelson, a lovelorn 20-year-old film major at NYU who has a wiseacre’s take on the follies of the techno-crazed modern world and who comes from a long line of knowing, adolescent narrators in American fiction. It is Nelson who is responsible for dealing with Jonas’s chaotic literary affairs and mediating between the self-willed members of his odd family.And that’s where problems with The Partisan arise, for while I was happy enough to enjoy the in-jokey acerbity of the Collingwoods’ exchanges, I couldn’t help feeling that it was all a little too cutesy. Jonas is of that well-established literary type, the crotchety, libertarian, American paterfamilias, given to sassy and irreverent observations: ‘I don’t take local streets because I’m afraid of being killed on the highways. I take them because when I drive on the highways for any distance I feel like I’ve already died and am being punished.’ He also has a nice descriptive urge; his children are ‘fire sale babies’, and the unborn child of a collaborator during the war is termed ‘a Nazi in pupa stage’.Jonas despises money, drives an ancient Ford, is derisive about the pretensions and peccadilloes of the powerful – a little reminiscent of Allie Fox in Paul Theroux’s novel The Mosquito Coast and of a host of John Irving characters. The trouble is that his rebellion is both too anodyne and too bourgeois (not having a television) to justify the admiration his family have for him.When Jonas accepts a commission to write a non-fiction memoir of his wartime experiences in order to pay off his sister-in-law Lily’s tax debts, it transpires that his and Lily’s relationship to the ‘adoptive’ children is far more partisan than we had been led to believe.

The novel ends with revelations concerning both life and literature.This is a well written and engaging novel with plenty of pace, but the red herrings are perhaps a little too red for this reader, and I wasn’t entirely convinced of the importance of all the points Cheever seems to be making. Read it for the author’s own turn of phrase, which can be both delicate and amusing, rather than for the more weighty pronouncements of his protagonists.. THIS DAZZLING, memory-haunted sequence of seven stories is as intricately woven as an autobiographical novel. In one story we are told that ‘as if by the touch of an invisible hand, in the air of the wooden hut the threads of time began to interweave’. In all of them we are confronted by warpings and doublings of time as the narrator, excavating his own memories of childhood in post-war Communist Poland, borrows those of an older generation – his parents, uncle, neighbours and chance aquaintances – who remember the German occupation, the persecution of the Jews, the Warsaw uprising and all the cultural fissures of mid-century Poland. The stories are intensely local, quests mainly set on terribly divided home territory.

One speaks of a ’snail’s geography’ and although another is set in Dublin and several involve dreams of ships and travel, they all revolve around early memories of family life in and around Gdansk. Circumscribed they may be, but they use the lens of the anecdotal to focus almost mythopoeic historical forces.
The first, about a table the narrator’s parents bought from a German after the war, is typical: ‘An invisible borderline now ran across Mr Polanske’s table, just like in 1939, when the land of their childhood, scented with apples, halva, and a wooden pencil case with crayons rattling in it, was ripped in half like a piece of canvas, with the silver thread of the river Bug glittering down the middle.’In ‘Rain’, a small boy wades among puddles ‘like God stooping over the earth’, mapping the mysterious transformations of their ‘promontories, headlands and secret isthmuses’, with whole countries disintegrating in the twinkling of an eye. Accompanying his father on snail-collecting expeditions, he discovers in a graveyard ‘a veritable kingdom of snails’ – ‘envoys of the underworld’ – and the story ends with a vision of a mass of them futilely climbing a monolith ’shaped like a tear’. The anecdote comes to seem like an epic encounter with the dead.The title story describes the narrator, on the night before moving house, staring into a big room at the Miss Havisham-like former owner of the house in which they rent an apartment. Invited in, he finds himself spellbound by Miss Greta’s past world of Wagnerian operas and German high Kultur, but forced to confront the contradiction between their romantic appeal and the grim realities of the Nazi period remembered by his mother.