Sebastian Smee

Can a writer be guilty of an excess of sympathy for his characters? Sympathy, we are forever being reminded (Tolstoy and Chekhov being the great exemplars), is the hallmark of great fiction. But unless it is combined with a touch of icy objectivity, it can come to cloy, honeying the sensibility rather than truly taxing it. William Trevor, in all other ways a marvellous writer, rains sympathy down on his characters until they are drenched in the stuff. More than half the stories in this new collection are excellent. But, cumulatively, they suffer from an excess of sentiment which leaves you yearning for a burst of nastiness or an inexplicable outbreak of mayhem. That, however, is not the kind of writer Trevor is. His writing is bracing precisely for its lack of histrionics.

Nick, the central character in Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful new novel, is a young, alert middle-class boy with precociously refined aesthetic sensibilities and a gift for endearing himself to others. ‘He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity.’ He has come out as gay shortly before the novel’s opening, but lacks — at least until chapter two — any actual experience. His friendship with the straight son of a junior minister in the Thatcher government — actually a longstanding erotic infatuation kept painfully under wraps — has led to a successful wooing of the friend’s entire family.

Rivalled only by the Rabbit novels, John Updike’s early stories — the 100 or so pieces of short fiction he wrote for magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and Playboy between 1954 and 1975 — now seem very close to being the best things he has written, surely placing them among the finest 20th-century writing by anyone. This 800-page book is a collection rather than a selection (Updike suggests the winnowing is better left to others after he is gone), but the stories are, to a surprising and satisfying degree, all of a piece. For the most part, they are organised chronologically according to the age of their hero or narrator.

Robert Hughes has suffered no shortage of appalling things over the past five years. He has experienced deep depression and a second divorce; he suffered atrocious injuries in a car crash which came within inches of killing him, and has had to undergo 12 operations to piece his body back together again; a feeble attempt was made to blackmail him; he was tried for reckless driving; a scathing attack on his character was conducted in the Australian media on account of his perceived arrogance; he became an unwelcome figure of contempt in his own country, and his estranged only son committed suicide. From an outside perspective, all this has been dramatic and newsworthy, to be sure.

Although Janet Malcolm has written in depth about an extraordinary range of subjects, from psychoanalysis and photography through to literary criticism, the art world, journalism, biography and the law, in thematic terms she has actually been one of the most consistent non-fiction writers of our time. Certainly, she is one of the most brilliant. I never feel such a keen sense of anticipation - the kind of adrenalised mental anticipation that feels almost luxurious to indulge - as when I start out on a new piece of writing by Malcolm.

The first story in this very fine collection takes the most risks, not unlike its protagonist. Ariel, a sophisticated, self-aware, American wife pays for two high-class prostitutes to entertain her wealthy Italian husband: 'It's a birthday present,' she explains over the phone, trying hard to picture the girl on the other end of the line as she speaks. The idea is the suggestion of her husband's provocative friend, Flavio, for whom Ariel has come to feel affection. Five or six years ago, Flavio 'gave up trying to seduce Ariel, and settled for the alternative intimacy of tormenting her subtly whenever they meet'. But to this particularly intimate taunt Ariel has a surprising response: she agrees to the idea, and the birthday present is crisply, efficiently arranged.

Not for nothing has Jeffrey Eugenides, on the strength of just one novel published seven years ago, been cropping up again and again in magazine lists of the top 10 or 25 young novelists in America. He has spent all these years in seclusion in Berlin cooking up a very cunning solution to the notorious literary divide between women's fiction and men's fiction: hermaphrodite fiction. A marketing dream. The narrator of Eugenides' second novel, Middlesex, is a hermaphrodite, and, at least through the second half of the novel, which relates the narrator's own life, you are sure to find aspects of Eugenides' hero/heroine with which to identify, no matter what your gender. One minute it's plucking eyebrows, the next it's picking up the tab.