Novels range from outstanding to insufferable

Mommy dearest
Essayist Ayelet Waldman has made a career out of compulsively discussing her ambivalence about parenthood, and she continues with “Love And Other Impossible Pursuits” (Doubleday, $24), a novel about an insufferable young woman struggling with the demands of a new family.

The deck is cartoonishly stacked to manufacture sympathy for Emilia Greenleaf. Her five-year-old stepson is a mean know-it-all, his mother is a one-dimensional shrew and Emilia herself has just suffered the death of an infant daughter. It is shocking that she remains so entirely impossible to care about.

Emilia perfunctorily flogs herself for her affair with her husband during his first marriage, for resenting a five-year-old, and for being totally unable to think of anyone but herself. After finally wearing out the patience of everyone she has treated so badly, she abruptly explodes in lecturing homilies, suddenly understanding everyone and everything and revealing that in the navel-gazing tradition of stories of this kind, everything is her parents’ fault.

The moral seems to be that not all women who resent small children are jerks, which is certainly true. The book fails because tragedy or no tragedy, Emilia is basically a jerk, and her unconvincing redemption does nothing to right the ship.    —Linda Holmes

In good ‘Company’
In Max Barry’s novel “Company” (Doubleday, $23) the employees of Zephyr Holdings perform irretrievably stupid tasks for incompetent managers in a prison-like building where a stolen donut can ignite a firestorm of backbiting. If you work for a large business, you might be thinking, “So? What’s the big deal? At least they have donuts.”

Barry, who wrote the conglomerates-at-war book “Jennifer Government,” crafts a novel that will be both shockingly familiar and hilarious to cubicle dwellers, a “Dilbert”-meets-Nick Hornby smartass manifesto against corporations that would be soulless if their bottom lines had any margin left for the existence of souls. New employee Jones uncovers a company secret that explains Zephyr’s jargon-filled mission statement and grants him access to its mysterious power structure. “Company” barrels toward an apocalyptic ending propelled by Barry’s sage observations about corporate America.

Barry, who was employed for a time at Hewlett-Packard, knowingly tears apart outsourcing, corporate restructuring and most humorously, the human-resource department, which resembles nothing less than Satan’s waiting room. And Zephyr’s secret is a clever one, nourishing what might otherwise be a by-the-numbers tale of office ennui. Some peripheral characters feel one-dimensional, but it’s satire Barry’s after, and he scores with bits about cattle-themed smoking areas, downed networks and clueless corporate climbers. The liberating cubicle comedy of “Company” reads like a satirical office memo from someone just days away from getting fired.    —Omar L. Gallaga

Wonderful ‘World’
What motivates people to think they can save the world? And who gets sacrificed along the way? Those are just two of the questions raised by Julia Alvarez’s latest novel, “Saving the World” (Algonquin, $25), the story of two women whose lives are entangled with men who are driven by seemingly good intentions.

Alma is a modern-day writer who finds herself intrigued by the story of Isabel, who accompanied a doctor from Spain to the New World in 1804 to help rid the world of smallpox. Through the alternating chapters of the two women's varying journeys, the reader delves into the minds and hearts of women who are drawn to men who do good only to find that altruism isn’t as simple as it seems. In Isabel’s story, young orphaned boys are used as the carriers for the smallpox vaccination. In Alma’s, an AIDS research clinic is built in the middle of a Dominican village while locals go without health care entirely.

Alvarez successfully guides her reader into thinking globally about the cost of trying for the greater good, although Alma’s story does veer a bit into melodrama toward the end, undercutting its earlier power. In the end, it is Isabel’s story which stays with the reader. The mere act of removing the veil from her pox-scarred face helps her realize that even if she can’t save the world, perhaps she can save herself.    —P.N.

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Books Editor. Paige Newman is MSNBC.com's Movies Editor. Sarah D. Bunting is a writer in Brooklyn. Linda Holmes is a writer in Bloomington, Minn. Omar L. Gallaga is a writer in Austin, Tex.

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