Well, let’s just dump out the entire wheelbarrow of book-reviewing cliches: “Wildly inventive.” “Rich with detail.” Verbally dazzling.” “Wise and insightful.” “Poignant and moving.” “You’ll laugh your guts out.”

These are the numb yet cogent terms that continually revolved in my mind — like airliners stacked in a holding pattern around a control tower — as I read “Dear American Airlines” (Houghton Mifflin, $22), the first novel by Jonathan Miles, cocktail columnist for The New York Times and book columnist for Men’s Journal, appropriate avocations for the author of a novel drenched in alcohol and bookishness. “Dear American Airlines” is, actually, rich and wild and dazzling and insightful and fall-on-the-floor funny and sad and tender, a first-person confession, mea culpa, erstwhile suicide note and epic letter of complaint to the airline in question for trapping its writer, Benjamin R. Ford, on the way to the wedding of the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Once he starts writing, fueled by anger, frustration, loneliness and cigarettes, be can’t stop.

Bennie Ford is a failed poet — “back when I was scramming delicious fellowships,” he says, “for the third-rate poems I was writing” — a failed lover and father, a failed person. “God, Bennie, that’s so like you,” says Stella, the long -absent mother of the long-neglected daughter. “Offering up the impossible. The stupid ideal.” Bennie views these impossibilities and ideals, likely gleaned from his suicidal, “artistic” southern belle mother, with a mixture of romanticism and cynicism, hates himself for not living up to any standard of responsibility and decency, his own or anyone else’s. He makes a resplendent addition to the legion of smart, sensitive, observant, egotistical, rueful, raging, self-destructive and well-intentioned drunkards — i.e., American men — with which American fiction is rife.

As the hours at the airport wear wearily on, Bennie plunges deeper into the chastening acid-bath of his sins, putting into his letter a catalog of gross (and often hilarious) misjudgments, misbehaviors and missteps; he may have been a drunk, but he was a drunk on a grand, operatic scale, and some of his antics make “The Lost Weekend” look like “The Good Ship Lollipop.” The device of the letter of complaint is preposterous, of course, but among Miles’ many virtues as a fiction writer is making readers believe in it the letter and believe in Bennie’s rampaging and doleful personality and the necessity for this great unleashing. Since giving up poetry, with a sense of relief, Bennie has made a living of sorts as a translator of modern Polish literature; he includes in his massive missive passages from his latest translation, a novel called “The Free State of Trieste” by Alojzy Wojtkiewicz. Its hero is Walenty Mozelewski, a hapless Polish soldier who loses a leg at the battle of Monte Cassino, boards the wrong train after his convalescence, and finds himself in Trieste. These digressions — “you’ll have to permit me my digressions,” Bennie says — not only do not detract from the enterprise but they develop, with lovely subtlety, a parallel between the aspects of alienation and longing that permeate the spirits of these two lost men, the fictional character and the fictional-fictional character.

“Self-mythologizing,” Bennie writes, “like drinking for fourteen hours a day, will eventually grind you into residue.” There’s the point. Fed a truckload of mythologizing by his mother, ruined by the grandiosity of book-reading (no one should encounter Holderlin at 16, as I did), Bennie perceives everything through the lenses of his crippling self-regard. We root for him because his recklessness is partially leavened by the agents of his self-deprecating wit, his mordant eye for absurdity (others’ and his own) and his verbal virtuosity. Miles smartly withholds solace and keeps us guessing: Will Bennie make it to his daughter’s wedding? Will humility finally strike him, like Saul on the road to Tarsus (though rerouted through Damascus with a layover)? Will he run out of ink and paper?

You’ll have to read “Dear American Airlines” to find out. It’s as exhilarating as flying First Class on frequent flyer points.

Jonathan Miles will be at Off Square Books in Oxford, Miss, Wednesday from 5 to 6 p.m. to read from and sign “Dear American Airlines.” Call (662) 236-2262.

When Franz Kafka was dying horribly of tuberculosis in 1924, he asked his good friend and executor Max Brod to burn all of his papers and manuscripts. Though regarded since the 1940s as one of the progenitors and masters of 20th century literary modernism, Kafka was unknown in his lifetime, having published only a few short stories. After Kafka died, Brod disobeyed his friend’s request and began to edit and publish his books; thus those icons of angst, dread and black humor, the novels “The Trial” (1925), “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927), as well as Kafka’s “Diaries,” which Brod also edited and published, became available . The landscape of 20th century literature, indeed of European and American culture itself, would be far different without Kafka’s immense presence and influence.

Did Brod betray his friend? Or did his responsibility lie with his faith in Kafka’s genius and his belief that the world would profit from knowing Kafka’s writings? Brod justified his action by saying that he repeatedly told Kafka that he would not execute his wishes: “Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand.” This statement may illustrate a fine bit of legal sophistry — isn’t an executor required to carry out the instructions of a will (as long as they’re not illegal)? — but who, having read and been affected by Kafka’s work, would not thank Brod for what he did, or, rather, didn’t do?

A new and similar case has arisen.

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Beth Ann Fennelly’s third collection of poems, “Unmentionables” (W.W. Norton & Co., $23.95) is substantial in every way. The title is cute and tricky and deep. “Unmentionables” are, as the Shorter OED reports, “(chiefly joc.) underwear, esp. women’s. E19.” That is, in the early 19th century, women’s underwear began to be referred to, humorously, as “unmentionables.” For me the word conjures an image of flappers in their flimsy, filmy undergarments sipping gin and cavorting in a fountain; it’s a word Cole Porter could have fun with. On the other hand, there are the themes we often avoid mentioning: desire, loss, sorrow, obligation, culpability, death, the unmentionables that define the shadows and the inevitabilities of human life.

Fennelly meshes these seemingly incompatible motifs with brash wit, lyrical verve and verbal legerdemain, balancing, with the riskiness of a tightrope walker sans pole, sans net (perhaps sans rope), her multiple personae: a young mother both selfless and selfish; a former bad girl trying to be good; a Yankee living in the Deep South; a hard-working and successful poet — “Unmentionables,” her third book, holds 118 pages-worth of poems — still questioning her talent and confronting her masters. The ride she offers along the back roads of Lafayette County, Mississippi, one imagines in a rusty blue pick-up truck, windows wide open to humidity, honeysuckle and mosquitoes, is rough, unsettling, passionate and joyful.

Though “Unmentionables” contains a number of stirring and exciting individual poems (as well as, among them, the book’s weakest moments), its heart lies in three sequences: “Berthe Morisot: A Retrospective,” an impressionistic 15-poem biography of the French Impressionist artist; “The Kudzu Chronicles,” a witty homage to the South’s ubiquitous ground-cover and a metaphor for the poet’s sense of displacement in and acceptance of the South (Fennelly was born in New Jersey and grew up in Chicago); and, “Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle,” a stunning evocation of, challenge to and plea for the eccentric greatness of John Berryman, the troubled poet who committed suicide in 1972 and whose most notable work (now largely unread) was his long series of “Dream Songs.”

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Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction deftly, uncannily and poignantly treads the delicate lines that connect and separate fantasy and science fiction; dream and nightmare; fable and parable. Brockmeier grounds his fiction in reality, but turns reality inside-out or at least slightly askew, asking readers to look around ordinary corners into odd angles where small but potent revelations stand illuminated. In the touching novel, “The Truth about Celia,” for example, a father attempts to deal with his sorrow and guilt about the disappearance of his daughter by writing a series of widely divergent short stories in which she figures (more or less), only to find that the truth about Celia is more complicated than his imagination can grasp.

Brockmeier lives in Little Rock. His new collection of stories is “The View from the Seventh Layer” (Pantheon, $21.95). The author will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers Tuesday at 6 p.m. to read from and sign the book. His previous efforts are the short story collection “Things That Fall from the Sky”; another novel “The Brief History of the Dead”; and the children’s books “City of Names” and “Grooves: A Kind of Mystery.” The store is at 387 Perkins Ext. in Laurelwood. Call 683-9801.

The following interview with Kevin Brockmeier was conducted by Corey Claireday, a student of creative nonfiction in the English department at the University of Memphis.

Corey Clairday: What’s a typical writing day like for you? What’s your routine?

Kevin Brockmeier: Well, I try to treat it as a regular job, so I wake up in the morning, I eat my breakfast, and I do my morning routines. And then I usually get started sometime around 9:30 or ten o’clock, keep writing into the late afternoon typically. And take breaks, do a little reading, or eat lunch, or do the dishes, or do something like that. And most often my day ends around four thirty or five o’clock, but sometimes if I feel I haven’t gotten enough done or if I still have enough mental energy, I’ll keep writing into the evening.

CC: So how much do you get written in a day typically?

KB: A good day for me is about a page. I’m the kind of writer who works very, very slowly. Sentence by sentence. Creeping forward and trying my best to perfect everything as I go along. A terrible way to work, but I just find myself mentally compelled to work that way.

CC: I was wondering if your background in acting in high school has influenced your writing at all.

KB: Perhaps it has. I studied acting in high school and also in college um and and I think I discovered that I was fairly good at taking on the mental and emotional habits of a human being but very, very bad at taking on the physical habits of a human being, and that’s important if you’re going to place your body out there on the stage and try to present yourself as a different person. It’s not as important if you’re writing. So to that extent maybe it gave me a little bit of training in taking on other personalities, but I doubt that it gave me as much training as simply reading books did.

CC: So how do you feel about teaching?

KB: I enjoy it, but I always feel that it’s taking a lot of mental energy that I would otherwise be applying to my writing. So I taught for a few years after graduate school at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Pulaski Technical College as an adjunct professor. I taught English Composition for a while and Creative Writing. But once I got my first book contract I decided, I had a little bit of money in the bank and time to concentrate exclusively on my writing for a while and see what I could get done, and basically that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I went back to Iowa for a semester in 2005 to teach as a visiting professor, and that was pleasurable for me, and rewarding, and I would certainly be happy to do something like that again, but as long as I can continue devoting most of my time to writing. I think that’s what I’m going to try to do.

CC: You got your MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. What was the program like?

KB: Well, it was a good place for me. Iowa in particular. Well, first of all I knew nothing about the program or its reputation before I applied. You know I simply asked my college professors you know I’m applying for MFA programs where should I send my applications? And they suggested I apply to schools that were in communities I particularly wanted to live or schools that had professors I wanted to be taught by, plus Iowa. You know, they said no matter where you apply, you apply to Iowa. Um, so I did and was admitted, to the delight of my professors because nobody at my school had ever gotten into the program before. And kind of stepped off to the school without really knowing much about it. Once I was accepted I read a book by the professors who were there but I didn’t know their writing ahead of time, however much I came to admire it later on. It was a good place for me to be. It’s a very non-academic program. They don’t confer grades on you. You’re not really expected, the only class you’re expected to attend and participate in diligently is your workshop. Um you know the other classes you know there are no essays required of you or anything like that. It’s really just designed to allow you to take as much time as you need to concentrate on your own work. And for about a semester I found that really difficult because I was used to being a student and I was no longer being asked to do that kind of work anymore. But after I got used to the idea that I was going to need to structure my own day and I really was being permitted to fill it as much as I could with writing, it became a pretty good fit. I think there were people there who had a slightly more awkward go of it than I did. And it was certainly a place where it was easy to waste an awful lot of time not getting work done, if you were inclined. I would say, probably like every MFA program, if nothing else it gave me two years to concentrate on my writing in an environment filled with other people who were also concentrating on their writing and cared about writing and cared about literature and cared about books. And I also read an awful lot of stuff when I was there that I hadn’t discovered before.

CC: Right. So could you talk about how you got your first book published?

KB: Yeah, it was a lucky break. I had a friend from graduate school, Kyung Cho was his name, who became a literary agent. He wasn’t my agent at the time. We were still in touch, and he was my friend basically. He was having lunch one day with an editor in New York, her name was Jenny Minton, and she worked for Random House. And he asked her whether she had read anything she had really liked lately by a new writer. And she said, yeah I read this story in the Georgia Review called “These Hands” by this guy called Kevin Brockmeier, and I’ve never heard of him before, but I really enjoyed it. And Kyung said, I represent Kevin Brockmeier. And so that was it. That was how I got my agent, and that was how I got my editor. And I was half a country away and really had very little to do with it other than having worked really hard on the story that brought those two people together.

CC: I’ll switch to talking more about your actual stories. Some of your stories, a lot of them actually, experiment with form like The Truth About Celia and “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device,” and I was wondering about your interest in experimentation of form in fiction.

KB: You know, I suppose more than anything else, it’s something that energizes my own imagination. I don’t know that I really have an aesthetic justification for it. When it’s something that strikes me an interesting new form, or at least new to me, occurs to me, I feel this burst of enthusiasm, and it’s always good to feel that when you’re sitting down to begin something. So it’s often the case when I begin a new piece of writing that I set myself some kind of formal challenge to keep the story’s muscles working, to keep the energy kind of kerning in on itself.

CC: Going off the form thing, some of the stories I just mentioned, The Truth About Celia and the Choose-Your-Own-Story piece, seem to hinge on reader participation, like with The Truth About Celia, keeping in mind that it’s being written by the character. I was wondering about your thoughts on reader participation in your work.

KB: Well, I think it’s very important. My editor has told me that as far as he can tell almost every short story I’ve written will contain some line in the middle that shifts the story radically to one side. And if you’re not paying attention and if you miss it, you won’t really understand what the story is trying to do. And I think that’s probably true. With Celia in particular, I think it’s reader participation that turns that book into a novel rather than a collection of short stories. I kind of look at the book as a collection of short stories by Christopher Brooks that together comprise a novel by me, and as long as the reader is kind of making the connection between those stories, then he’ll be participating in the book and he’ll receive it as a conjoined whole rather than eight disparate elements.

CC: On the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story in the new collection, what was the process you went through in writing that type of story?

KB: Well, it was an unusual story for me to write. I don’t often begin a story with an outline, but in this case, because the pages sort of cascaded apart in this curious way, I had to create a kind of map for myself before I began writing the piece so that I would know where everything fit into place, so that I could incorporate the right sounds at the right time. In every thread of that story at some point there’s a siren that passes through, and I had to remember in which section of the story that would take place. There’s also a page you may or may not have discovered, it’s not actually linked up to any of the other pages. You’ll only read it if you happen to turn to that page or if you’re very diligently searching to make sure that you’ve read every single section of the story. Otherwise, you would never make a choice that sends you there. So I wanted to have this hovering window there in the middle of the story that gave you another perspective on what the story was trying to do. It was a curious story for me to write. I think it’s the longest short story I’ve ever written and can be the longest short story in the book depending on how you treat it. It’s either a six—I’m thinking in manuscript pages here—a six page story if you read it through once making one set of choices, or it’s a thirty-three page story if you work through every possible set of permutations.

CC: In other interviews you’ve talked about the importance of having a title before you start a story, and I was wondering about where your titles come from.

KB: From all over the place. Sometimes I’ll have generated an idea for a story, and I’ll just sit on it for a while and wait until a title occurs to me. Sometimes a title will seem obvious from the premise. If you take a story like “The Ceiling,” the title had a very symbolic weight to it. And occasionally I’ll have a title that predates a story. Looking at The Truth About Celia again, the very last section of that book was the first section that I wrote, and that section arose out of the title. I had this title in my head “Love is a Chain, Hope is a Weed” for about a year before I actually sat down and figured out what story ought naturally to fall under the umbrella of that title. So that kind of generated the whole book. It never would have existed if I hadn’t had that title in my mind. Sometimes you’re listening to conversations or you’re reading a book or you’re watching a movie and a phrase will just leap out at you as an interesting title for a story. And that happens to me all the time. Most of those prospective titles I just forget, but occasionally one of them will seem consequential enough that it will linger with me.

CC: So how much is research a part of your writing process?

KB: Relatively little for most of the books I’ve written. I tend to do piecemeal research as I’m going along. For instance, I’m working on a story right now in which a character has the upper portion of her thumb amputated, and so I’m kind of digging around online as I need to just to figure out what that medical procedure would be like and what her process of recuperation would look like. But most of the books I write don’t demand a lot of preliminary research. Even with The Brief History of the Dead which takes place half in the Antarctic, I read a couple of books about the Antarctic just to give myself a basic working knowledge of the landscape. There are writers who work much differently than this. I have friends who write historical fiction and some of them tell me that they’ll read hundreds of books before they sit down to begin working on a piece. I’ve always felt that for the kind of writing I do, I should do just enough research so that I don’t look like a total idiot to the people who really know the subject I’m writing about, but no more than that. That way you’ve got a little bit of something to work with, but you can allow your imagination to fill in all the rest of the details. I’m afraid that if I do too much research, I’ll feel the obligation to incorporate great gluts of information that don’t really have a natural place in the story.

CC: I’ve heard other authors talk about how they choose the order for their short stories to appear in a collection. I was wondering how you choose the order for your stories in the collections.

KB: Well, I do deliberate on it. In the case of the new collection it’s thirteen stories, four of which are these short little pieces with absurdly long titles, fables of one sort or another, and I wanted to stagger those throughout the collection. So what I have is the four fables, and in between each of them are three longer stories. My initial idea for the book was that it would progress from stories that were mostly fantastic to stories that were mostly realistic. And you can see a little bit of that progression in the collection as it now stands, but some of it fell by the wayside as I reshuffled things. The book as it now looks is like it looked when I initially submitted it to my editor, but he did suggest that I flip a couple of stories around, and the suggestion seemed smart to me so I followed them.

CC: Could you talk about how your interest in fairy tales and fantasy and science-fiction influences your writing?

KB: Yeah, I grew up reading an awful lot of fantasy and science-fiction. I read bits and pieces of classic fiction and literary fiction as I was growing up, mostly because I was assigned to read for class, but I didn’t really begin exploring that terrain of literature avidly until I was in college. So a large part of my reading background is made up of fantasy and sci-fi. Now the stuff I enjoyed when I was a kid isn’t the same fantasy and science-fiction I enjoy today, but I’m still discovering wonderful fantasy and science-fiction that seemed to me to offer every bit as much to a discriminating reader as the best literary fiction does. So I think a lot of my work combines an interest in the fantastic with an interest in the realistic. Certainly, the work of mine that’s gotten the most attention does that, and it never seemed obvious to me in any way that those are two fields of story-telling that need to have a hard and fast separation between them. One book that I guess was eye-opening for me when I was in college is a story collection by Peter Carey called The Fat Man in History, and it was one of the first works of contemporary literary fiction that I kind of stumbled upon on my own and was enraptured by. And one of the things I liked so much about that book was the way in which he incorporated elements of the fantastic into stories that were very clearly meant to be received as literature and also the great heart that was behind the stories and the great precision of language. All of that was eye-opening to me. And I started reading great volumes of recent literary fiction after I discovered that book.

CC: In “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device” there’s a line about Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon and Arthur C. Clarke all practicing literature as a form of nostalgia, and it seems like some of your work is kind of nostalgic like “Andrea is Changing Her Name” and a lot of the stuff in Grooves, and I was wondering what role nostalgia plays for you in your writing.

KB: I guess I would say first nostalgia plays a large and perhaps regrettable role in my life. And because of that it plays a significant role in my writing. I just have my eye turned to the past an awful lot of the time. “Andrea is Changing Her Name” in particular is by far the most autobiographical story I have ever published. And it’s not that the material hasn’t been fictionalized. And some of it is flat speculation. But there’s also awful lot of my own experiences in there in a way that’s completely free of disguise. Whereas in a lot of the other stories I’ve written, you might find my own experiences, but unless you’ve actually lived through them with me it’s not the kind of stuff that a reader would pick up on right away.

CC: Sometimes you borrow characters like Rumpelstiltskin, Captain Kirk, and the girl from the National Geographic cover and make their narratives your own. I was wondering what your interest in doing that is.

KB: I hadn’t seen that until just now as a trend in my writing. I think I had a specific interest in each of those characters. The National Geographic photo, like a lot of people, I was really taken with that when I first saw it, and it’s kind of lingered in my head ever since. Rumpelstiltskin, of all the stuff that I published, that’s the earliest written piece. I wrote that when I was a senior in college, and that story was generated out of the Mad Libs passage, that came first. I wanted to find a way to write a Mad Libs story for adults somehow, and I couldn’t figure out a way to turn it into a whole story, but I had been reading an edition of the classic fairy tales while I was pondering this idea and it occurred to me that Rumpelstiltskin ends the story as half a human being and it might make sense to tie that into a Mad Libs passage, which is in some way half written. So that’s how that idea arose. And then the Captain Kirk thing: the story’s dedicated to a friend of mine Justin Turner, and Justin and I have a long-standing joke about confusing the great Russian short story writer and playwright Anton Chekov with Star Trek ensign Pavel Chekov. It’s such a ridiculous idea but I couldn’t get it out of my head. And eventually I decided I need to write this story and see if I can turn it into something. So I combined Anton Chekov’s best known story “The Lady with the Pet Dog” with the Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” to see what I could do. And it’s still a ridiculous idea but I was pretty happy with the way the story turned out. It seemed to me to have more heart to it than I imagined it would when I began writing it.

I remember where I was when I learned that Frank O’Hara was dead. I was sitting in the reading room of the library at the University of Iowa, in August 1966, my first semester of graduate school. The New York Times Book Review ran a memorial essay about the late poet, except that I didn’t know that he had been killed, run down by a Jeep on Fire Island on July 24. One of my favorite and essential poets had been dead for two months, and I hadn’t known. It felt as if I had lost two months from my life.

A massive “Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara” was published in 1971, followed by a “Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara,” derived from the first volume, in 1974. More of O’Hara’s work came to light, however, in the intervening years, and was published in various editions that editor Mark Ford drew upon for this handsome new “Selected Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf, $30) that expands, to some extent, our awareness of O’Hara’s achievement, especially in the early phases.

I read a story once that when the young Stephen Spender met T.S.Eliot in the mid or late 1920s — and Eliot was a renowned literary figure by that time — Eliot asked Spender what he intended to do with his life, and Spender replied, “I want to be a poet,” to which Eliot said, “I don’t know what you mean” or something like that. To Eliot, writing poems was something that someone did; as a vocation, it did not define you. To Spender, writing poetry meant being a poet; it was a state of existence and consciousness . Frank O’Hara, along with poets like Keats, Shelley and Hart Crane, embodied the idea of being a poet. Poems poured from O’Hara with the intoxicating scintillation of a martini from a silver shaker. He could scarcely stride along the sidewalks of his beloved Manhattan — he calls Whitman “my great predecessor” — without thinking of a poem, writing a poem in his head or rushing back to his office at the Museum of Modern Art after lunch to roll some paper into his typewriter and compose a poem. Significantly, his little book published in 1964 by City Lights was called “Lunch Poems.”

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Jonathan Miles’ debut novel “Dear American Airlines” is due to be released by Houghton Mifflin on June 5. However, if you go to www.dearamericanairlines.com, you can download the complete novel for free; the offer is good for a week, according to an ad that ran in this morning’s New York Times.

Why do we care?

Because Miles grew up in Oxford, Miss., hung out, drank tons of beer, attended a few classes at Ole Miss but never graduated and was a prodigious protege of the novelist and short-story-writer Larry Brown, who died in 2004. In fact, Miles became such a part of Brown’s family that he is listed on Brown’s tombstone along with his other children. Not that “Dear American Airlines” is like anything that Brown wrote; oh no.

Miles, who lives north of New York City, is a prolific freelance writer, a contributing editor for Men’s Journal, the book editor for Maxim, as well as writing the weekly cocktail report in the Times’ “Sunday Styles” section. O supreme gig! Two weeks ago, at The Oxford Conference for the Book, Miles served as moderator for a panel on the art and the state of print book-reviewing; I was a member of that panel, along with Dwight Garner, senior editor at The New York Times Book review, and J. Peder Zane, former book review editor for the News and Observer, in Raleigh, N.C., now that paper’s “ideas” columnist — another supreme gig — and editor of “Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading” and “The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.”

Heady company, indeed, and it got headier when, after the conclusion of our panel discussion, we met at Ajax on the Oxford town square for a lunch of chicken and dumplings, country fried steak and the restaurant’s signature pimiento cheese po-boy. Joining us were Miles’ wife Cat, who works for the wine importer Bartholomew Broadbent, and their three amazingly well-behaved children, and Zane’s wife Jeanine. Many beers and Bloody Marys were consumed. It was a long, hilarious lunch, but somehow not long enough.

There’s an excellent (and pretty hilarious) interview with Jonathan Miles at popmatters.com.

One has to be careful reviewing a novel by Patrick McGrath. From the first page, he begins laying clues and dropping hints about the bomb he’s going to drop on readers at the end of the book, though he’s also clever enough that some of his hints and clues lead to false trails, a feat particularly easy when he manipulates the device of the unreliable narrator as well as he does (and perhaps turns that device inside out). So a reviewer constantly has to parse what he’s revealing to make certain not to give away the multi-layered game.

Let’s say this: Patrick McGrath’s new novel “Trauma” (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95) is narrated by a psychiatrist — as was “Asylum,” his fourth novel — who cannot follow the dictum, “Physician, heal thyself,” though he understands that some  horror hidden inside is making his life increasingly untenable. The setting is New York in the 1970s and ‘80s; Charlie Weir specializes in treating Vietnam veterans and other patients suffering from post-traumatic syndrome. One of the most traumatized of his clients is Danny Magill, whose terrors brought back from Vietnam leave him almost silent, strenuously alcoholic and severely depressed.

The novel begins with the death of Charlie’s theatrical, needy, depressive mother, who had been abandoned years before by her shiftless husband. At her funeral, Charlie sees his former wife, Agnes, whom he left (along with their daughter) seven years ago after the suicide of her brother — yes, Danny, the haunted Vietnam vet. Gradually, as the chronology shifts back and forth, against a backdrop of Danny’s increasing violence and death (Charlie finds him with most of his head blown off), of Charlie’s guilt about Danny’s suicide and his feeling that Agnes can never forgive him, we learn more about Charlie’s horrendously dysfunctional family, the enmity between him and his brother and about incidents from his childhood whose psychic wounds fester deep within, so deep that even as a psychiatrist he cannot see what they are, though he feels the effects more and more dramatically. The novel’s narrative flaw is that the revelation of what Charlie’s trauma really is and who dealt it to him is handled almost summarily: Whoop! There it is! End of story!

There’s a point in “Trauma” at which readers may want to call Suspended Disbelief Inc. and order a truckload of that stuff delivered to their door-steps. That’s the point (for me, anyway) at which the re-married Agnes, offering solace (but still mistrustful), comes back into Charlie’s life and bed, at the same time as he launches an affair with the beautiful, troubled Nora Chiara, who is introduced to Charlie by his brother. If you can wrap your mind around this erotic juxtaposition and its complex network of anger and blame, you won’t have a problem with the book.

Fortunately, McGrath makes it pretty easy to become absorbed in Charlie’s descent into the hell of guilt, isolation and near-madness. Unlike the prose in McGrath’s previous novels, “Port Mungo” and “Martha Peake,” where the author fully indulged his talent for verbal intensity on a Grand Guignol scale, the writing in “Trauma” is appropriately deft, straightforward and punchy. New York, quickly etched, has never seemed wearier, more jungle-like or squalid than in McGrath’s hands. It’s a suitable backdrop for a tale that follows a Freudian path into the fiery furnaces of family life in which trauma is forged that can neither be forgiven nor forgotten.

Patrick McGrath will be at Burke’s Book Store Wednesday from 5 to 6:30 p.m., with a reading of “Trauma” at 6. The store is at 936 S. Cooper, in the Cooper-Young neighborhood. Call 278-7484.