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Her affecting if somewhat warmed-over new novel "The Amateur Marriage" gives us a similar portrait of a 30-year-long marriage between a warm, ditzy blabbermouth and her cautious, stick-in-the-mud husband -- minus the road trip.

Indeed, the latter novel is an altogether darker, less comic production than its predecessor.

The cloying cuteness that has curdled some of her recent fiction is largely absent here, and so is the tetchiness of her last novel ("Back When We Were Grown-Ups") that pushed its characters perilously close to caricature.

Two years later in this progress, an entire novel, resplendently poetic and loftily sorrowing, “The Confessions of Max Tivoli,” by Andrew Sean Greer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $23), has appeared.

Growing against the grain of time, he feels time densely; the terror of transience and the tragedy of life’s limits permeate this novel in a way that makes “Lolita” seem, relatively, a merry book, sporting an immigrant’s amusement at America and connivance in its vulgar freedoms.

Naipaul, who only in his latest novel, “Half a Life,” got down and dirty about the sexually seething immigrants’ London he encountered in the nineteen-fifties.

Perhaps no novel can do justice to the ancient and still popular concept of leaving our bodies, which are both our enablers and our prisons.

In “The Radetzky March,” Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there is an Army surgeon, Max Demant, whose wife loathes him.

One night, a young lieutenant—Baron Carl Joseph von Trotta, the hero of the novel and Demant’s only friend—innocently walks Frau Demant home after the opera.

Thus, a third of the way through his novel, Roth kills off its most admirable character, in a scene of comedy as well as tears.

Much of the language of the novel is like that of a fairy tale, and in the end Mendel is saved by a fairy-tale reversal of fortune.

Roth later said that he couldn’t have written this ending if he hadn’t been drunk at the time, but in fact it is perfect, as “Job” is perfect, and small: a novel as lyric poem.

Marlene Dietrich always said it was her favorite novel.

He laid plans for a sweeping, nineteenth-century-style historical novel, “The Radetzky March.” He took special pains over it, more than for anything else he ever wrote.

Formerly Joseph Trotta, a peasant boy from Sipolje, in Silesia, he becomes Captain Baron Joseph von Trotta und Sipolje, with a lacquered helmet that radiates “black sunshine.” The remainder of the novel flows from that event.

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