A LLAN M ASSIE Like many I was amazed that Andrew O’Hagan’s
novel Be Near Me (Faber, £16.99) didn’t even make the Booker short-list. I thought it brilliant: a social study which was also a moving personal drama. It was so good I wished I had written it myself. Two other very fine novels were Weekend by William McIlvanney (Sceptre, £16.99) and The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky (Harvill/Secker, £12.99). McIlvanney is the finest Scottish novelist of my generation, and this, his first novel for ten years, is sad, funny, and intelligent. Cozarinsky, an Argentinian who lives in Paris, is perhaps better known as a maker of documentary films, but this short novel, like the collection of short stories, The Bride from Odessa, which Harvill published a few years ago, is masterly. Nevertheless the novel of the year must be Suite FranVaise by Irène Némirovsky (Chatto, £16.99). The book, really the first two novels of what was intended as a fivevolume sequence, recounts the exodus from Paris in 1940 and then the first months of the German occupation. It is an astonishing piece of work, all the more remarkable for being written at the time of the events described. Némirovsky was transported to Auschwitz and died there in August 1942.
For me the most overrated book was Philip Roth’s Everyman (Cape, £10), but then I’ve never cared for Roth’s novels, self-indulgent and self-pitying.
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