With his next he moves to the more recent past: Acts of Mutiny Fourth Estate Jan is set on

With his next, he moves to the more recent past: Acts of Mutiny (Fourth Estate, Jan) is set on board an Australia-bound ocean liner in 1959. Firmly in the world of men, and unhappy about it, is the protagonist of Riven Rock by T C (formerly Coraghessan) Boyle (Bloomsbury, May). Stanley McCormick, given to bouts of sexual mania, is under house-arrest by squadrons of psychiatrists. Set in the first half of this century, the story charts the relationship of Stanley and his wife, negotiating vast bogs of misunderstanding, misogyny and love in the process.
Geoff Nicholson demonstrated an admirably full-on attitude to the sex/violence interface in his carnal reworking of the A-Z, Bleeding London.

February sees the publication, by Gollancz, of Flesh Guitar, which promises to be even more outre. Enter Jenny Slade, with something unusual in her guitar case…Tackling that difficult second novel is Derek Beaven, whose debut, Newton’s Niece, was an ambitious alternative Orlando, with its sex-changing, long-living heroine rubbing shoulders with the likes of Swift and Handel. Yet there is nothing inherently parochial or nostalgic about British subject matter, as DeLillo himself showed when he wrote about the Hillsborough disaster in Mao II. It’s amazing how much sneering you can do with a chubby smile on your face. John Tollefson, the titular boy, leaves the midwest to run a campus radio station and fall in love with a tiresome anti-feminist academic.

Keillor taps into the familiar strain of sentimental conservatism – don’t we all wish life was the way it used to be, with kids safe to play outdoors? – but this cutesiness masks a faint yet persistent misanthropy. The fictional year gets off to a great start with Don DeLillo, but there are plenty of other pleasures lining up, from big, established talents to intriguing newcomers. Names don’t come much bigger or more established than Garrison Keillor, whose Wobegon Boy is published by Faber in March. With great writers, no matter what nation they belong to, anything seems possible Underworld is certainly a Big American Novel.

But it’s also, more importantly, an empowering book, a redemption and keepsake of the debris of the modern world.`Underworld’ is published by Picador at pounds 18. Reading it prompts the thought that even the most talented and ambitious of British novelists find it hard to work on this size of canvas, at any rate when they’re writing about Britain: imagine beginning a novel with a cricket match, not a baseball game, and all the difference that would make to tone as well as scale. A 1927 gangster film called Underworld is also alluded to, and there’s inevitably a feeling of a Dantesque infernal circle about the basement, with its furnace room, where Nick descends to commit his fateful act. But it’s in Italian working-class homes in the Bronx that the novel’s values are rooted: “The family was an art to these people and the dinner table was the place it found expression.”The novel takes its title from a “lost” Eisenstein film called Unterwelt, which – at its showing to an arty, hippie-ish New York audience in 1974 – is described in such exhaustive detail that you start to believe it might really exist.

I lived in the real.” DeLillo does Klara’s bohemianism in good faith, and his treatment of her current project – stripping down deactivated fighter planes and bombers in the desert, and repainting them in bright colours – is far from being a satire on contemporary art. But DeLillo’s novel is more grounded than Pynchon’s, less burlesque. Whereas to Klara, a true child of the Sixties, “everything is vaguely – what – fictitious”, Nick, who has a much larger share of the story (and more of the author’s sympathy, you feel), remains a feet-on-the-ground Bronx boy: “I didn’t believe the nations play-act on a grand scale. That everything is connected to everything else is a belief solemnly held by a number of characters here: Nick himself as a young man sees number 13 wherever he looks, and, this being a novel of the Cold War, other characters voice conspiracy theories about waste disposal, nuclear contamination, secret weapons and even why the crowd for that famous baseball game was so small: “You have to understand that all through the 1950s people stayed indoors We only went outside to drive our cars .. There was a hidden mentality of let’s stay home. Because a threat was hanging in the air.”The great contemporary novelist of paranoia is Thomas Pynchon, and the conspiracy theories of Underworld do sometimes recall Gravity’s Rainbow, which teased us with the premise that wherever in London the hero made a sexual conquest a V2 rocket would fall next day. It touches on public events we’ve read about many times before – the Cuban Missile Crisis, McCarthyism, civil rights marches, Vietnam – and makes room, for example, for generous, seemingly verbatim excerpts from the performances of Lenny Bruce.