I WALK BETWEEN THE RAINDROPS by T.C. Boyle

invests in “good causes.” The husband, dosed with LSD, gets what’s coming. (“Is it possible to have a satirical hallucination?” asks a chapter heading.) Tony, while being pursued by his former partner for a share of the big payoff, is pressured into traveling to an Austrian resort to rescue an American woman and her young son from the nasty clutches of her billionaire Russian husband, Grigor God Voloshin. Guns get pulled, people get killed, and Tony survives to spin out tough-guy witticisms and random thoughts, dropping cultural references ranging from Nietzsche to The Mickey Mouse Club to The Maltese Falcon. Determinedly offbeat, the book has as one of its characters a well-connected novelist named Larry Beinhart. The riffing can at times be a bit much. But the enjoyment the real Beinhart derives from his spritzing, free-wheeling approach lifts the book, which at its best is a cross between Stanley Elkin and Raymond Chandler.

Bialosky, Jill Counterpoint (304 pp.) $26.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-64009-024-8

A middle-aged Manhattanite uses ancient art as a respite from her tumultuous personal and professional life. The narrator of Bialosky’s latest novel tells us on the opening page: “Something terrible has happened and I don’t know what to do.” The “something” is revealed only gradually, but there are many things in the woman’s life going wrong: her son’s flailing first year at a fancy liberal arts college in Maine, the passionless marriage she endures, a career as a teacher and poet that has always seemed to hover on the brink of Major Literary Figure without ever quite getting there. The only people who ever seem to truly understand her plight are her neighbor’s daughter, an intellectual girl who turns to the narrator for mentorship, and the Visiting Poet, a man who has recently blown through the narrator’s life, leaving her reeling in the aftermath. To cope, she obsessively visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art, turning to ancient art and its myths, finding solace even in the face of unthinkable betrayals. Bialosky’s premise here—that female artists are subjected to artistic, emotional, psychological, and physical ravages that have prevented their full blooming—is admirable; one feels that Bialosky, the author of five collections of poetry as well as a memoir about poetry, among other works, is speaking at least partly for herself. But the novel goes lightly over scenes that have dramatic potential, such as the narrator’s son being assaulted at school, and pours a great deal of energy into detailed recountings of the Met’s holdings, complete with photos. The result reads more like a guidebook written by an earnest docent than the page-turning suspense novel, or even the meditative volume of lyric poems, it might have been.

Boyle, T.C. Ecco/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $28.99 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-0-06-305288-8

The prolific Boyle continues to have fun and make literary mischief with his latest story collection. There’s no reason why these 13 stories should seem so funny, as most of them confront individual mortality and some sort of cultural collapse. They run the gamut from the subversively real to the surreal in such a way that they blur the distinction between the implausible and the inevitable. The epigraph quotes the promise/threat in Willie Dixon’s “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man”: “I’m goin’ to mess with you.” And mess with you these stories do, whether it’s removing the blinders from a series of privileged and deluded narrators or messing with the reader’s understanding