It is in this happier frame of mind that I turn to “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team,” edited by Rob Fleder. Among the two dozen pieces is the funniest consideration of Yankee hating I have ever read. “Take Me Out to the Oedipal Complex” is illustrator and writer Bruce McCall’s confession that, because his father was a Yankee fan, he himself embraced hating the team, leaving little anti-Yankee pamphlets of his own making around the house for his father to stumble upon. It was his own “unique form of patricide” and constituted his identity: “We Yankee-haters, by God, knew who we were. We were losers. We also knew that the devoted Yankee fan, wallowing in his smug prosperity, betrayed a contemptible character flaw. He was not only a front-runner but also a weakling and a sissy and a stranger to the humiliation and failure that toughens the spirit, readying you for more humiliation and failure.”

All-out Yankee attacks are actually few in this book, Frank Deford’s may be summed up succinctly: Y$a$n$k$e$e$s, and Nathaniel Rich’s more forlornly: Mets fan. Charles Pierce, though a Red Sox supporter from birth, writes sympathetically of the proud ethnic divisions in his native Worcester, which — thanks to Joe DiMaggio — put an island of Italian-American Yankee fans in the middle of Massachusetts. Among the other contributors, who range from Jane Leavy to Colum McCann, are Peter Dexter with a mean-spirited, humblebragging consideration of Chuck Knoblauch, and Dick Telander with an appreciative one of Jim Abbott. Economist James Surowiecki provides an excellent assessment of George Steinbrenner’s contribution (marketing genius). Derek Jeter has two big fans in Roy Blout Jr. and Tom Verducci, while Bill James asks the question that may — or may not — have given you sleepless nights: “Did you ever find yourself wondering which season was the greatest ever by a Yankee catcher?” I will reveal the season (1950) and the player (Yogi Berra) because that is only the beginning. James, a driven man, pushes on, with amusing commentary, to rank the 100 best seasons for Yankee catchers.

The catcher who appears most often in high places on that list is also the costar of Harvey Araton’s “Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift.” Guidry, who had played for the Yankees during Berra’s time as a coach and last tenure as manager, has, for over a decade, picked up the ancient backstop every spring at the Tampa airport to drive him to the Yankee training camp. Around that annual journey are spun a number of tales including the story of Berra’s mighty fourteen-year umbrage at a highhanded George Steinbrenner, which was finally resolved in a July 1999 celebration of Berra’s return to Yankee Stadium. The event was elevated by the perfect game pitched that afternoon by David Cone — triumphantly bringing back the memory of Berra’s own role in Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. We find here too the introduction of frogs’ legs by the Louisianan Guidry into Berra’s diet and a sense of the deep friendship between two great baseball men.

The title of Tim Wendell’s “Summer of ’68: the Season That Changed Baseball, and America, Forever” is one that could be used, mutatis mutandis, as we say around the farm, for any number of seasons. Nonetheless, outside the park, 1968 was a doozy, marked by assassinations, riots, an increasingly unpopular war, and a violent Democratic Convention in Chicago. The effects of this were felt inside the park as racial tensions increased and a number of players had to interrupt their time on the field for military training. As for the game itself: it was a season of phenomenal pitching, with the magnificently fearsome Bob Gibson emerging with a preternatural 1.12 ERA (and 1.67 in the World Series). Alas, the season’s hurling greatness changed the game forever: the next year saw the mound lowered by six inches and the designated hitter appear in the American League. The book includes excellent photographs and is strongest when it concentrates on baseball.

The “gentlemen’s agreement” that banned black players from organized profession baseball was struck behind closed doors toward the end of the nineteenth century. In “Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball,” Chris Lamb shows that the ban was maintained in great part by its existence never being acknowledged. The book is a chronicle of bad faith, on the part of owners and organizational big bugs, and of a press that remained generally silent on the subject. It is also an absorbing account of how that silence was finally broken. Key to this were a few white sports reporters, a few black ones from the black press, and the (Communist) Daily Worker, a paper that, until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was far more influential than most of us can quite take in today. The entrance of the United States into the war against a racist regime made baseball’s own racial hypocrisy increasingly untenable, which fact was increasingly reflected in the formerly circumspect mainstream press. In the largest sense, Lamb shows how pivotal the desegregation of baseball was to that of the nation as a whole.

Mitchell Nathanson claims that “A People’s History of Baseball” “is baseball history from an alternative point of view,” and to that end it visits some of organized professional baseball’s most notorious institutions and episodes, among them segregation; the Reserve Clause; the banning of players from the game without due process; the blind eye turned by club owners to “performance-enhancement drugs” and subsequent scapegoating of a few players; and the battle over who owns baseball statistics. Nathanson’s goal is to reclaim baseball and its story from those who have spun a falsely uplifting version, first among the guilty being Henry Chadwick (a.k.a. the Father of Baseball), who promoted ideologically skewed statistics (in Nathanson’s opinion) and offered baseball as an edifying example of individual sacrifice and teamwork (bad). To offer Chadwick as villain is a real stunner to my way of thinking, but in this case even more so as his success in making statistics integral to baseball made possible what Nathanson considers — most eccentrically — to be the means of restoring the game to both players and fans. That is fantasy baseball: the game that takes the actual game out of baseball.

“Another Time, Another Life” begins on April 24, 1975, with an actual event, the takeover of the West German Embassy in Stockholm by members of the Baader-Meinhof gang in an attempt to force the release of their leaders being held for trial in Germany. Police arrive at the scene and lay siege to the building, whereupon the occupiers shoot and kill first one and then another of the German members of the embassy staff. They promise to shoot more, one an hour, until their demands are met. The standoff is brought to a fiery end — here and in history — when one of the gang members accidentally ignites the explosives they’ve brought with them. The remaining hostages escape without further harm, two of their captors are killed, and the rest, though injured, are quickly shipped back to Germany. Thank God.

What had happened was definitely not a cheerful story, but in the general misery the government could be happy that public opinion was united behind them. In addition, for once the goodwill was shared by the populace and the media. The man on the street was, to put it simply, furious. The whole thing was very un-Swedish, and at the same time it was typical for the Germans to foist their problems on their peaceful neighbors — something the Germans unfortunately had been in the habit of doing for far too long. In brief, you got the terrorism you deserved, and besides everyone who had been abroad in winter knew that the Germans always push ahead in the lift lines at the most popular ski resorts, despite the fact that these were in Austria and Switzerland.

Persson excels in evoking a mood with this sort of sardonic riff, in the present case capturing a very Swedish form of self-righteousness and hand-washing and elsewhere of bureaucratic self-aggrandizement and official temporizing. In the same vein, he records throughout the disparaging inner commentary of various members of the police and secret service as outwardly they mouth routine waffle. The salient fact about the Sweden of Persson’s novels — darkly comic at times, sinister at others — is that a great deal goes on below the surface. Coverups abound, individually and nationally: Past involvements are tucked away — or tick away — starting with roles played in the Second World War and the Cold War and moving on to the violent radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the case of the embassy affair, it is clear that the German invaders must have had Swedish accomplices, people who had housed and fed them at the very least. The secret police are handed a few leads, but, really, this incident in all its “un-Swedishness” and unexpectedness is not the sort of investigation they favor, “in contrast to activities you initiated and guided yourself in the form of surveillance, infiltration, and the organized gathering of information through telephone monitoring, other types of eavesdropping and radio surveillance.” The increasing autonomy and self-defeating proactiveness of the security forces in Sweden is a theme that runs through these novels.

Now we zoom ahead to November 1989 and the discovery of a murdered man in a Stockholm apartment building. The month also marks the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of its power in the Eastern Bloc — and, more to the point where this story is concerned, to the opening of East Germany’s secret-police files. There are many, Swedes among them, who know that the infamous records kept by the Stasi will reveal some of their own more regrettable activities. Could it be that the murder victim is among them? Not in the opinion of the detective inspector put in charge of the case, a loathsome creature called Bäckström, a glutton and a sot whose overwhelming foulness was such a treat in the first volume. It is clear to him, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the murder is the result of a homosexual imbroglio. He is assisted in his incompetence by another loser of our acquaintance, Wiijnbladh (first names are in short supply in these pages), whose chief goals in life are avoiding work and, more ambitiously, killing his wife. This worthless duo is the despair of a couple of other old friends from the first volume, Bo Jarnebring and Lars Johansson, whose lives we have followed back and forth in time.

Once this murder case has been thoroughly bungled, we move on to the year 2000, at which juncture a number of chickens come home to roost (and we have the great pleasure of learning what life has handed the many characters we have come to know). It is at this point, too, that Persson’s true genius becomes evident, and that is his cunning in conflating his plot with history’s, for seating fictional events in a force field created by powerful economic interests and global Realpolitik. Need I say that a CIA operative is involved? But his manipulations are only one strand in a splendidly convoluted denouement that, were it not fiction, would simply have to be true.

“A Game of Hide and Seek” is the story of an enduring, infelicitous passion. Harriet and Vesey meet when they are eighteen, thrown together while she is looking after his aunt’s children. Though drawn to each other, they are unable to share a “simple intimacy,” their relationship confounded by a “confusion of shyness, pride, self-consciousness, fear of rebuff or misunderstanding.” Vesey has literary ambitions, or at least dreams: “At school he had often turned to the index of a History of Literature and in his mind inserted his own name — Vesey Patrick Macmillan — between Machiavelli and Sir Thomas Malory.” He is also inattentive, contrary, and feckless, and is sent away by his aunt — a decision which brings to an end, for a time, whatever there is between the two young people.

Harriet is devastated. But after a wonderfully portrayed stint working in a dress shop, she eventually marries Charles, a man somewhat older than herself. In this she has acted, if not romantically, at least sensibly. He is solid and dependable in everything except his mother, Julia. She is a former actress who, no longer receiving the attention of audiences, devotes herself to bullying her paid companion and stirring up trouble. Harriet and Charles have one child, Betsy, who is fifteen when we first meet her. This is when Vesey, who has ended up as a down-at-the-heels actor in a touring company, reappears, hoping to kindle the old attraction into an affair. The trouble that ensues is observed from many misapprehending viewpoints, most tellingly from Julia’s and Betsy’s. Misunderstanding, choked communication, balked desire, and the very dreadfulness of the possibility that Harriet — who is both happy in her marriage and in love with Vesey — will succumb, produce a terrible feeling of constriction. It would be grim were it not for the redeeming tartness and wicked social comedy that Taylor sets jouncing alongside the torment.

You could see the novel “Angel” as a dark fancy, as the tale of the overweening vanity, penchant for embellishment, and willfulness that rumbles in the depths of every writer, even in such an exquisitely controlled one as Taylor. We meet Angel Deverell in 1901, as the much-cosseted daughter of a village shopkeeper’s widow, Emmy, whose sister, Lottie, is a lady’s maid at a grand country house nearby. Both sisters are intent on giving Angel advantages they never had, paying her fees at a private school in the expectation that she will secure a job in an office, “with good money and meeting nice people” — an odious, unthinkable fate in Angel’s view. She lives in her imagination, a glorious arena of highborn splendor and forbidden love, a vision she passes on as her secret history to two village children. When they, in turn, pass this interesting news on to their parents, a great social humiliation follows, and Angel refuses to return to school. Instead she sets herself to writing a novel, which she eventually sends off to the Oxford University Press, having found its address in one of her old schoolbooks.

A couple of rejections later, the manuscript gains a publisher and becomes a commercial success. Angel, it emerges, has an animal facility for conjuring the fantasies of a large female readership, of serving up the lives of rich and reckless aristocrats, bedizened — as she herself might put it — in richly garbed, jewel-studded prose, stories that are decidedly louche. Angel’s mother and aunt are scandalized:

     “Emmy!” Aunt Lottie lowered her voice and her cheeks flushed. “Tell me, where did she find out all that…you know…the facts of life.”
“Certainly not from me,” said Mrs Deverell proudly.

The critics are exuberant in their scorn, much to Angel’s mortified fury. Still, her triumphs continue; her ego swells; her publisher pays her arduous homage; she takes the husband she desires; and all is well — as far as she is aware, which is all that counts — until she takes her pen off her public’s pulse and begins to write novels with social messages. Angel’s decline is as fantastic as her ascent, but, strangely, we have come to feel for this vain, demanding, lonely woman, a person in whom naiveté and pig ignorance are inseparable, and who is “for ever exhorting some unknown power — not God, but some vague enemy, the one who upset her plans and frustrated her at every turn.”

Angel comes from a milieu in which respectability and niceness are bywords; Harriet, a cut above her in social class, from one in which, for women especially, life’s guiding principle is to act “sensibly.” The particularly cramping economic and social circumstances of Taylor’s characters and the premises of her plots are pretty much obsolete today; yet the human predicament she lays out, the conflict between desire and order, indeed between desire and happiness, is enduring. Taylor goes at it, in part, by way of comedies of manners, possessing a special gift for stuffed shirts and their pronouncements, for little acts of selfishness, for displays of petty spite and one-upmanship, and for scenes of social discomfiture (“The words seemed to freeze in crossing the room and broke with a brittle commotion in Mrs Deverell’s head”).

But the novels are also pervaded by loneliness and guilt, conveyed and amplified through depictions of mid-20th-century England. Lack of variety, absence of heat, pervasive damp, and the social taboos and stifling narrowness of women’s opportunity are matched up with a sense of free-floating obligation and inadequacy which seems to be woman’s lot — that is, unless she’s a lonely monster like Angel. Somehow Elizabeth Taylor makes it all both austerely poignant and ineffably funny, presenting this world with an understated humor that rarely makes you laugh outright but keeps you simmering with quiet, unholy joy.

The first four novels have just been published in one paperback volume, beginning with “Never Mind,” a title of apt and dismal pathos. Here we meet Patrick Melrose, five years old and living in a château in Provence with his parents. His alcoholic, drug-befuddled mother, Eleanor, is an American heiress to some part of a dry-cleaning fortune, and it was that attribute that had captivated Patrick’s sadistic English father, David. Trained as a doctor, he abandoned his practice upon marriage — though, we are told, “there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.”

The novel takes place over one terrible day and night, during which — and I must reveal this, as it is pivotal to the entire series — Patrick is raped by his father. While it is happening, the boy manages to disassociate himself from the event, seeing himself perched above the scene, mentally escaping his body. This split — between being there and not being there, between immediacy of experience and fending it off — bedevils Patrick from then on in every area of existence. That breach and his efforts to repair or at least bridge it, through drugs, alcohol, sex and tormented self-examination, make up the cycle’s shattering theme.

As for Patrick’s mother, Eleanor: she is unmindful of everything but pills and booze, charitable causes, and the sure prospect that her husband will humiliate her, publicly if possible, at every opportunity. Absent from home the morning Patrick was attacked and oblivious to it, she later pauses, while writing a check to the Save the Children Fund, to consider Patrick’s subdued demeanor, marveling “at how well her son had turned out. Perhaps people were just born one way or another and the main thing was not to interfere too much.” Patrick’s fear and confusion, Eleanor’s obtuseness and self-involvement, and David’s viciousness and “nimbus of insanity” provide the atmosphere amid which a dinner party is staged. The guests, characters we will meet again in following volumes, introduce us to the first principle of the decadent British upper caste: Nothing is so insufferable as a bore.

In this view, or, rather, under this obsession, a bore is a person who is genuinely tedious — and there are some terrifically funny representatives of that species in these novels — but a bore is also a person who cares about things. The surest defense against being branded a bore is to avoid the appearance of sincerity or compassion and to display a certain outrageousness. As David contemplates his violation of his son at this novel’s conclusion, he reflects, “He must try not to do it again, that really would be tempting fate. David could not help smiling at his own audacity.”

“Bad News,” the second novel, is not exactly a breath of fresh air. Patrick is now 22 and a heroin addict (with a sideline in Quaaludes, amphetamines, cocaine, and alcohol). He is in New York, having received news that his father has died there. Eleanor, now divorced from her tormenter and even more devoted to charitable works, is not on the scene. Patrick has to deal with the body’s cremation and, more pressingly, with replenishing his drug supply. He is a mess: needle-scarred and bruised, his psyche a tangle of anxiety, hatred and self-loathing. The pain is excruciating, the comedy ghoulish: Storming down the street carrying his father’s ashes, he realizes that “it was the first time he had been alone with his father for more than ten minutes without being buggered, hit, or insulted.”

“Some Hope” brings us Patrick at 30, his past lying “before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.” He lives in London, free of drugs and drink but more than ever engaged in an interior battle with the demons of the past: with his father, and, to an extent, with his mother, who, for all her ceaseless do-gooding, failed to protect her own son. The novel was meant to complete an intended trilogy, and it does end with Patrick finding a certain amount of peace — and some hope. Aside from that, it is enormously funny, the story organized around an elaborate, snob-infested country house party, a scene of social striving and mortification — the guests, among them Princess Margaret, are described with glorious malice.

With “Mother’s Milk,” Patrick Melrose breaks free of the trilogy and emerges as a married man with two children, though — need it be said? — he is back in a state of “agitated despair.” He is drinking again, can’t sleep, and has a slight problem with Tamazepam, “namely that it wasn’t strong enough. The side effects, the memory loss, the dehydration, the hangover, the menace of nightmarish withdrawals, all that worked beautifully. It was just the sleep that was missing.” His troubles are further compounded by the fear that he will pass on his dark and riven consciousness to his children, just as his parents passed on their own sickness of soul. Meanwhile, Eleanor, who, we learn, may not have been entirely ignorant of Patrick’s father’s abuse, is in the process of disinheriting her son. She is handing over her estate in Provence to a New Age charlatan, a smarmy back rubber and would-be shaman who has set up a “Transpersonal Foundation” on the premises.

Profiting from the three-book foundation upon which it is built, “Mother’s Milk” is a triumph, once again both gruesome and funny. There are wonderful comic set pieces, including a dreadful family vacation in New York City. But the grim work of psychological excavation also continues, this time with Eleanor as its chief object, as Patrick considers the machinations by which the weak exercise their grotesque tyranny. But something new has entered the picture: the children, two little boys, bringing with them an element of sweetness and genuine love.

And so we come to “At Last:” Patrick is 45, and his mother has died: With both parents gone, he feels that he has “been waiting all his life for this sense of completeness.” But even as he pats his mother’s coffin “as an owner might pat a winning race horse,” we see that things are not splendid. He has given up drink but is also separated from his wife and children — and he is also still mystified and tormented by the chaos of his psyche.

How, I sense you wondering, can this still be interesting? It really is: Not only because St. Aubyn is so entertaining a writer but because of the increasing philosophical depth he brings to the story. As Patrick delves deeper and deeper into the mystery of memory and identity, we wonder with him if they are, in fact, the same thing. And if so, the urge to escape is, in his case at least, irresistible — if not through drugs and drink, then through irony: “Forget heroin,” he tells a former mistress. “Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”

And yet Patrick’s unwinding story never really loses this double nature, its devotion to pain and the comedy that only partly holds it at bay. St. Aubyn’s own experiences inform these novels, and his unhappy circumstance no doubt endows Patrick’s with its sense of urgency and anguished intensity. But whatever the author’s actual state of mind has been or is now, its expression in art is a complete success.

The novel opens in July 1876, less than a month after Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn. This shocking reversal of U.S. military might in the West has left settlers terrified, many of them abandoning their farms and ranches to camp outside forts. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army continues to harry and starve American Indians, a craving for revenge now added to the goal of forcing them onto reservations. The escalating hostilities in the Montana Territory have presented the Canadian government with a big headache and a twofold objective: to discourage Native Americans from fleeing into Canada and to prevent those who do cross over from using Canada as a base of operations for attacking the United States. To fail in this, as one Canadian high governmental official points out, is to “provide an excuse for the American Army to deal with the problem, not on their soil, but ours … This cannot be allowed to happen. When Americans pay a visit, they have a habit of staying. Think of California, New Mexico, Arizona, all lost to Mexico. There are still plenty of annexationists in Congress looking forward to relieve us of territory.”

The relations between Canada and her overmighty southern neighbor are further complicated by anti-British Fenians, many in the U.S. Army: Irish partisans who would like nothing better than to put some hurt on the British Dominion of Canada. All these, plus the hatred seething in the bosoms of veterans of the vanquished Confederate Army, come together here.

But what of the story? The action takes place chiefly between Fort Benton in Montana, which is under the command of the German-American Major Guido Ilges, and Fort Walsh, in what is present-day Saskatchewan, where Major James Walsh, a man sympathetic to the Indians’ grim plight, is in charge. The two officers, ordered by their respective governments to prevent violence in a territory drenched in anger, desperation and fear, cannot stand each other. Walsh, especially, is a problem. He has little taste or talent for the meeching role of the diplomat, flying off the handle when tact is required and priding himself for doing so. Enter the book’s main fictional character, Wesley Case, the alienated son of one of Ottawa’s wealthy, hard-nosed political insiders. When we meet Case, who long ago rejected the career in politics his father had intended for him, he is quitting the North-West Mounted Police at Fort Walsh to become a rancher near Fort Benton. He reluctantly accepts the frustrating job of running interference between Ilges and Walsh.

Forsaking the Mounted Police to become a rancher is not the first change of course for Case. He has tried journalism, architecture and, as a young man, membership in a militia, from which he was expelled in disgrace over a deed committed in battle. This act, the tragic details of which we only gradually learn, caused his fiancée to dump him. Now, some 10 years later, Case falls in love with an unhappily married woman, Ida Tarr. The ups, downs and repercussions of this affair — threatened by the menacing presence of a competitor for Tarr’s hand, a brutal hit man named Michael Dunne — constitute an absorbing and suspenseful part of the plot, yet all that pales before Vanderhaeghe’s development of Case’s and Walsh’s predicaments of conscience and dilemmas of duty in the face of the realpolitik crushing the Native American population on either side of the border.

Wesley Case is sickened by the sort of political maneuvering at which his father is adept but has, nonetheless, absorbed his unsentimental view of the world, the view shared by most white people of the time. It is just a fact to him that the Indians’ tenure on the land is finished, that they will be moved to reservations, and that he will profit. Further, he brings a jaded, disparaging eye to Sitting Bull, who with other tribal leaders has found refuge at Fort Walsh.

If Major Walsh’s view of things is more sympathetic than Case’s, it cannot be called realistic: He is a romantic. Musing to himself on what it would have been like had he been born a Sioux 50 years ago, he contemplates its joys: “A bellyful of fresh-killed meat, a skirmish now and then to keep the blood from going mouldy, a life on the back of a horse. Go off to some spot in the wilderness and dream up your own religion. Each man his own parson. Each man his own boss.”  Instead, he is lumbered with obligations which put him in conflict with both his conscience and the authorities. As commander of Fort Walsh, he has the power to offer relief to refugee Indians, but as commander he is also bound by the orders of his superiors. Their goal is to cooperate with the United States in getting these Indians moving south to the barren reservation to which — in the U.S. government’s infinite bad faith — they’ve been reassigned.

It is certain that trust exists between Walsh and Sitting Bull — a fact that gradually dawns on Case — but it is just as certain that circumstances will lead to the betrayal of this trust. The working-out of this sad business, projected from a number of points of view, is heartbreaking, and Vanderhaeghe’s descriptions of the Plains and the life there are stunning. Finally, in its melding of character, plot, and history, “A Good Man” is an extraordinary novel, unquestionably the trilogy’s crowning achievement.