The latest paperbacks reviewed.
That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx, Harper Perennial, £7.99
Naive, scheming young loser Bob Dollar arrives in a small town in the Texas panhandle intent on conning some poor sucker into selling their ranch or smallholding to the dastardly Global Pork Rind, so that it can build yet another brutal, smelly hog farm. The locals, who bear Proulx's trademark cartoon faces and names, don't much like hog farms. They are also, luckily for Dollar, talkative, in particular his landlady, La Von Fronk, a tiny local historian with a flair for monologue. Daftly heavy-handed, the narrative lurches from one grotesque gag to the next. Proulx, as ever, lards it with digressive yarns. Less dark and nowhere near as good as the finest of her short stories, this is an entertainingly goofy, if barbed, skit, offering perceptive social history about a closed, underwritten region where Texas and Oklahoma almost merge. - Eileen Battersby
Personality. Andrew O'Hagan, Faber & Faber, £7.99
This book tells the story of a pint-sized Scottish-Italian child- singing sensation who develops an eating disorder. As with all truly wonderful novels, though, the story is only part of the story. Personality is about emigrants struggling to come to terms with a tough place at a bad time; it's about the dynamics of family; it's about society's definition of success and the nature of celebrity; it's about love. O'Hagan uses letters, snatches of dialogue, newspaper ads and multiple narrative viewpoints in a technical tour de force which is all the more remarkable for its apparent offhandedness. The tone is original - quizzical, sharp, funny and sad - and the characters, including Hughie Green (of Opportunity Knocks) and his dad, are superb. - Arminta Wallace
Wild Geese. Lara Harte, Phoenix, £6.99
Late 18th-century Dublin, and the living is sleazy. Isabella Carroll - orphaned as a girl by the death of her mother and the absence of her father - is brought up by her wealthy socialite aunt and uncle. To escape the unsavoury yet financially fortuitous marriage(s) they are arranging for her, headstrong Isabella votes with her feet, and takes up the invitation to go to Paris issued by her father, who has decided to retire there. She boards a ship, coincidentally in the company of young Dr Connor who, with his liberal ideas, is returning to Paris, where he can join the intellectual underground opposition to the ancien régime. The plot thickens when Isabella encounters cousins also living with her father who see her as a threat to the inheritance they are hoping for. The characters and story are, like the lace on the cover, a bit flimsy, but Harte has done her homework on the history. - Christine Madden
Beyond the Coral Sea. Michael Moran, Flamingo, £9.99
While Papua New Guinea has certainly not escaped Western culture, it still seems to hold a healthy resentment of it. Initially, for Moran, everything seems to hold a latent menace, from the looks of the locals to bullet-holed taxis. He travels to the more remote islands of New Britain and New Ireland, and it is here that his trepidation gives way to a meticulous study of the locals, conducted with the instincts of a reporter and the eye of an anthropologist. Tales of cannibalism abound, and you can sense the anxiety when he asks what's for dinner. There are also tales of the island's more unorthodox inhabitants, such as a young Errol Flynn, and the Rev James Chalmers, who carried a Bible under one arm and a shotgun in the other. This is a rich study of Melanesia, reflecting the sadness of a declining culture in a remote region. - Laurence Mackin
52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: A Poem for Every Week of the Year. Ruth Padel, Vintage, £6.99
This is the book for you if you've ever wondered how to explain why you like (or dislike) a poem. The poems and commentaries first appeared in the Independent on Sunday and there is not a duff one among them. Occasionally Padel is so exhaustive that she overburdens the reader, but her introduction is more than worth its paper weight. She covers the conventions of poetry, the evolution of rhythm, rhyme and structure, but never sounds like a course-book. Instead, the emphasis is on pleasure and context. For example, Padel tells how poets learned "to say the unsaid" at a time when censorship was rife in Russia and Eastern Europe. Feminism and the charge of elitism are among other topics dealt with in this thought-provoking handbook. - Kate Bateman