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wife and servants to read, then you wouldn’t have asked for your money back.
    A lot of books containing descriptions of sex have been written since the 1960s, and I pride myself on having read at least part of every single one of them, but there was something about Carpenter’snovel that dated the dirty bits, and sent me right back to my 1960s childhood. Every now and again, I would, if I delved deep enough in the right drawers, come across books that my father had hidden carefully away—John Cleland’s Fanny Hill , for example, first published in 1749, but still being read surreptitiously, in the U.K. at least, over two hundred years later. (Wikipedia tells me that Fanny Hill was banned in the U.K. until 1970, but I found the family edition long before that, so I don’t know where my father got his copy. He has gone up even further in my estimation.) We are long past the time when literature was capable of doubling as pornography, and I doubt whether twenty-first-century teenage boys with access to a computer bother riffling through The Godfather and Harold Robbins paperbacks as assiduously as I did in the early ’70s. These days, regrettably, sex in novels must contain a justifying subtext; what dates the coupling in Carpenter’s novel is that, some of the time at least, the couples concerned are simply enjoying themselves. I can’t remember the last time I read a description in a literary novel of a couple doing it just for fun. (And if you have written exactly such a novel yourself, I am happy for you, and congratulations, but please don’t send it to me. It’s too late now.)
    Hard Rain Falling is a hard-boiled juvenile-delinquent novel, and then a prison novel, and then a dark Yatesian novel of existential marital despair, and just about every metamorphosis is compelling, rich, dark but not airless. Carpenter is, at his best, a dramatist: whenever there is conflict, minor characters, dialogue, people in a poolhall or a cell or a bed, his novel comes thrillingly alive. The energy levels, both mine and the book’s, dipped a little when Carpenter’s protagonist Jack Levitt finds himself in solitary confinement, where he is prone to long bouts of sometimes-crazed introspection. Form and content are matched perfectly in these passages, but that doesn’t make them any more fun to read. Most of the time, though, Hard Rain Falling is terrific—and if you’re reading this, Michael, then I’d like you to know you have earned a third recommendation.
    I finished Hard Rain Falling in Dorset, in a wonderful disused hotel which pitches its atmosphere halfway between Fawlty Towers and The Shining ’s Overlook. I was there with family and friends, and, though I never forgot that I am a reader—I read, which helped to remind me—I completely forgot that I am a writer. This meant that the flavor of The Conversations , a collection of Michael Ondaatje’s erudite, stimulating, surprising interviews with the film editor Walter Murch, was different from what it would have been had I devoured it during the rest of the year. In these pages a couple of months ago, I said that books about creativity and its sources are becoming increasingly important to me as I get older, but this has to be something connected with work—when I read these books (Patti Smith’s memoir was the most recent, I think) I try to twist them into a shape that makes some kind of sense to me professionally. There is so much that is of value to writers in The Conversations; any book about film editing that manages to find room for the first and last drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” in their entirety, has an ambition and a scope that elude most books about poetry. If I’d been in a different mode—in the middle of a novel, say—I’d have been much more alert to the book’s value as a professional aid; and just occasionally, something that one of