The Little Book

Told by his surgeon that he has ""every hope of more months, even a year or two, as many as five"" to live, a 60-ish British novelist vacationing on the Isle of Wight is haunted by the idea of a book--he calls it The Little Book--that will shock its various readers (an editor, an academic, a lord, a lady, a workman) into noticing the world around them. That is the ironic premise of this charming, oddly unsettling novel from British novelist Hughes (The Pork Butcher), which physically resembles the fictional Little Book but never attempts--so it claims--that imaginary book's grand task. Lacking the tight plotting and chiseled architecture of a Borges story, Hughes's novel nonetheless recalls Borges, both in its emphasis on the narrator's self-delight (or self-absorption; all the characters are, the narrator explains, refractions of himself) and in its efforts to describe the artwork as a microcosm. Indeed, descriptions of the imaginary Little Book make up the best part of the real one: ""It was the length of a television docudrama, a stint of digging in a retired Hampshire garden, an after-dinner snooze near the Oval on a Sunday, a political rally in a cold hall to the west of Brecon, a round of two large whiskies in good company,... a domestic quarrel all over the place, or making slow love anywhere in the world."" Slightly longer than its fictional namesake, this slim volume--cool, cerebral and somber--is a bright meditation on the redemptive power, whether real or desired, of art. (Nov.)