That 70s Show

Boyd's last novel, Armadillo, was a smart, vivid take on contemporary London, hilariously funny in places and populated by some extremely odd characters. More often, though, he has reached back into the early 20th century (The Blue Afternoon, The New Confessions) for inspiration, and so his new novel finds him on familiar ground. What he conveys so convincingly here is the sheer length of a life lived to the full, the accumulation of decades, and how, at a certain moment, one's existence can be changed forever. Logan's boyhood is spent in Uruguay, after which he studies at Oxford, where he launches himself as a writer by penning a biography of Shelley. A successful, slightly outré novel then follows, and Mountstuart is propelled on what looks certain to be a lucrative and productive literary career. In fact, he will publish only two more books in his life, though he keeps up a stream of freelance articles for decades. He serves as a spy in World War II, becomes an art dealer in New York in the 1950s and '60s, and spends his last productive years in Africa as a university professor before succumbing to old age in England and then France.

There's plenty of tragedy in Mountstuart's life (his second wife and daughter are killed in a bombing raid in World War II, his son dies of a drug overdose in New York), but he always seems able to shake it off, somehow untouched. Perhaps that's why the second half of the book is the best, when enough adversity has accumulated for even a born survivor to feel tested as he starts down the long slide to oblivion. The last part of his life really begins when he is still riding high as an art dealer in New York and enjoying carnal relations with a girl who, it turns out, is a lot younger than she's been letting on. Threatened with arrest, Mountstuart flees to England, and years later (by this time he's in Africa) reflects that his sex life -- he's been celibate ever since — effectively came to an end the day the girl's father showed up at his apartment in New York.

Boyd excels at depicting such sudden reversals of fortune. His account of his hero's old age, when, forgotten as a writer, he lives off dog food in a grim London apartment while taking care of an old flame dying of lung cancer, is extraordinary. But even after he foolishly becomes entangled with a group of grim revolutionaries with ties to Baader-Meinhof — which does seem a bit improbable — Mountstuart once again bounces back and is granted an almost idyllic, if solitary, old age in the French countryside. Mountstuart's life may be too extraordinary to belong to any old human heart, but heart is something this superb book is full of.

MAKING THINGS BETTER | By ANITA BROOKNER | Random House | $24 hardcover | 275 pages

THE SEVEN SISTERS | By MARGARET DRABBLE | Harcourt, Inc. | $25 hardcover | 320 pages

ANY HUMAN HEART | By WILLIAM BOYD | Alfred A. Knopf | $26 hardcover | 498 pages