Cities and novelists seem to have a special, symbiotic relationship. No other literary form can render a city as richly as the novel can, and probably no other setting--sprawling, crisscrossed with relationships, randomly cruel and beautiful--better suits the novel's strengths. Certainly, masterpieces have been written about smaller communities, but the correspondence between city and novelist is unique, and so it is that we refer to Dickens' London, Balzac's Paris, Joyce's Dublin.
Three new American novels that are not of quite the same quality as those by the authors mentioned above nonetheless hope to update this tradition. One is superb; another, which...
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