Fiction

What the main character in “Shroud,” Axel Vander, does know all about, though, is the unreliability of identity. An old man, and an unrepentantly scurrilous one — a misanthropic rascal, as a matter of fact — he is also not what he seems. He enjoys no small reputation as a literary critic specializing in theories about “the random nature of reality” and the nonexistence of any “essential, singular self,” along with the idea that “every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith.” Bad faith could be called Vander’s specialty, but he also excels at being rude, volatile and occasionally cruel. His success lets him get away with it.

Vander, originally from Antwerp, Belgium, but currently living in Berkeley, Calif. (which he inexplicably calls Arcady), goes to Turin in response to a letter from someone who has discovered that he is not Axel Vander after all. He expects to find a vengeful professional rival, but Cass Cleave turns out to be a young, emotionally fragile Irishwoman who, while researching his background in Antwerp, was tipped off to his false identity by the mysterious red-headed man.

In short order, Vander grasps that Cass is “barely held together,” suffering from a rare, epilepsy-like neurological disorder that causes seizures, aural hallucinations, and the pervasive sense that everything is connected and somehow ordained: “She could trace the dissolution of empires to the bending of a blade of grass, with herself at the fulcrum of the process.” Her madness, if it can be called that, is the exact opposite of his vision of the world.

This unlikely pair begins an affair, a foggy exchange of care (Vander, a drunk, suffers an attack of alcohol poisoning and Cass nurses him), faith and blackmail. He can’t figure out exactly what she knows about his past, and the parts of the novel written in his voice — addressed to her, or perhaps to his dead wife, Magda — eventually unspool his history, beginning with his youth during World War II. That story contains an additional set of mysteries: How did the real Axel Vander die? Was he a Nazi sympathizer or a Resistance fighter? Who wrote the letter that saved the life of the man who stole his name? And why, perversely, adopt the identity of a seemingly reprehensible wastrel?

Banville has always been a ravishingly beautiful writer, and while some of his novels bog down in non-event, “Shroud” has bones as good as its skin. His prose is clean and unfussy, decidedly not what passes for “lyrical” these days, and his images and metaphors have a visionary keenness that’s almost violent; they strike the reader like blows. Vander’s companion in a train compartment has a nose that is “huge, pale, high-bridged, and pitted all over, like the stone head of a ceremonial axe.”

Cass, learning of her grandmother’s easy death, contemplates being “gone like that, without a sound, like slipping out of a room and turning and quietly closing the door; in her mind she saw a hand, it was hers, slowly relinquish the polished knob and her miniature, curved reflection on it shrink to a dot of darkness and disappear.” When Axel is suddenly seized with desire for Cass, it is, appallingly, as much rage as lust: “Even her nakedness would not be enough, I would open up her flesh like a coat, unzip her from instep to sternum and climb bodily into her, feel her shocked heart gulp and skip, her lungs shuddering, clasp her blood-wet bones in my hands.”

Vander has many secrets, some of them quite nasty, but he takes pride in his “shiftiness,” in being “a virtuoso of the lie.” Cass upsets all that and leaves him scrambling for purchase. “I am all frontage,” he pronounces, until their affair becomes for him a last-ditch shot at authenticity, something he never knew he wanted or even believed in. As the novel loops gracefully to its conclusion, Vander discovers that the lies he’s concocted have themselves been based on lies. Entirely by accident, with the intention of doing anything but, he has arrived at a kind of truth. Whether it is fate that takes him there, or just the perversity of chance, he cannot tell, and Banville, blessedly, isn’t saying. That odd red-headed man, last seen fleeing down the street for parts unknown, may be the only one who knows for sure.

Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.