I flicked through the first few pages of this in a bookshop. I was impressed, but not enough to actually buy the book.

A few weeks later, when I borrowed a library copy, I struggled to see what I'd liked about it. The Subject Steve is written in a very distinctive, compressed style. There are very few descriptions of what people are wearing, or what they look like, or what sort of people they are. Instead, there's a great reliance on dialogue to move things forward. Much of the novel is filled with short exchanges of conversation, which reveal the characters' pessimistic, bleak outlook. You'll either like that, and know exactly where Lipsyte is coming from, or you won't care.

Initially I liked it, and then I didn't care. Gradually, The Subject Steve becomes difficult to read. The characterisation is so sketchy that it becomes harder to maintain an interest in the dialogue. Characters arrive, shoot off a few snappy lines, and disappear. And all the conversations mean that it becomes difficult to be sure what's actually happening. By the time I got to the end, I couldn't remember what had happened at the start, or what had happened since then. Something about a guy who may or may not be dying, I think, and some kind of violent cult.

Lipsyte is very skilled at using hip, up to the minute language. He has a keen ear for the words and phrases and ideas of our time, and he plays with them, and takes them further. As a result, you get this sort of thing:

The pilot's voice came over the speaker to announce we'd be taking off shortly.

"I'm feeling good about the whole takeoff thing right now," he added.

Lipsyte gives this distinctive, enigmatic dialogue to all his characters, which is good, but most of his characters hate each other, which isn't so good. They treat each other with indifference and disregard, and all their wit eventually counts for little.

The Subject Steve is a grim, dark ride. If that doesn't sound like your thing, avoid it. Or as one of Lipsyte's characters might say: respect your decision not to get involved.

Like many balanced, sensible people, I keep a list of things I'm obsessed with. Almost every item comes from the worlds of art, music and words, and a random sampling would include the stand-up album of Woody Allen, the Steve Earle song "Ft. Worth Blues," and, of course, the cartoons of the New Yorker.

Robert Mankoff describes his job as "the best in the world," and he has sound reasons for this claim: he's the New Yorker's cartoon editor. He started working there as a cartoonist at some point in the Seventies, and is responsible for some of the best cartoons of the last two decades or so. (One of his cartoons depicts a businessman standing alone in his office, and saying into the phone: "No, Thursday's out. How about never? Is never good for you?")

Mankoff starts The Naked Cartoonist with a brief autobiographical introduction, which is interesting, and quickly moves on to a brief introduction to the world of the New Yorker cartoon, which is also interesting. Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that the entire book is a brief introduction. There's very little depth here, and very little substance. The book claims to be "a new way of accessing your creativity," but this a hollow claim. Mankoff's concept of developing ideas is no more sophisticated than "sit and think and hopefully after a while you'll come up with something good. In fact, if you come up with something really good you might even be able to sell it to me. So get going! And good luck!"

Even so, there are some interesting observations scattered throughout these pages. At one point he says that "reality, brought to you directly by your senses, tends to be the endpoint for the conscious mind, but the starting point for the creative or unconscious one." And he provides a nice illustration of the way cartoonists can take a visual image and reinterpret it in their own fashion. The example he uses is the Grim Reaper, and he shows how different cartoonists have added variations to the basic stereotype. An early example shows a hooded figure with a scythe confronting a man pleading for mercy, but later examples show the same hooded figure in very different contexts: on a golf course, outside a travel shop, and so on. It's a great way of showing how one good idea can give rise to a dozen others, for the pleasure and fascination of all.

Mankoff also illustrates the "what if" concept particularly well, providing dazzling visual answers to questions such as "What do you get when you cross a holdup with a checkup?" and "What do you get when you cross haberdashery with TV news?" There's also an intriguing section which analyses the exact wordings of captions, which explains in useful detail how the wording of a punchline can weaken or improve a joke.

The biggest problem with The Naked Cartoonist is the style of writing. Mankoff knows exactly how to approach an audience in a cartoon, but not in a full length book. There are times when he writes like a desperately insecure teenager, blurting out his anxieties. Even worse, thirteen pages before the end, he makes the candid admission that he doesn't have enough material. I've seen comedians make this kind of thing work in front of a live audience, but it falls flat on the page. Mankoff finishes an intermittently interesting book with the impression that he's mainly interested in your money.

The Naked Cartoonist takes about half an hour to read, and it's definitely worth flicking through it if you see it on a library shelf. And if you've never investigated the world of the New Yorker cartoon, you should: a paradise awaits. Be warned, though: there are better starting points than this one.

1926's most famous book is probably A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, though it was also the year that produced Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Marazan, Nevil Shute's first book.

And, of course, this one, Hope Mirrlees' story of the town of Lud-in-the-Mist. Initially I was a bit puzzled by the style of storytelling, especially the strange tendency to switch between characters, as if the book didn't know whose story it was telling. At some stage, on or before the one hundred page mark, it suddenly became clear that it was Nathaniel Chanticleer's story, the mayor of Lud, and not any of the other characters who are introduced in the first few chapters. As soon as this became clear, I enjoyed the story a great deal and read the last 180 pages in one sitting.

Mirrlees has a superb ability with language, and is a never-ending source of startling proverbs and sayings. She creates a believable world, and entices you into it with a vivid display of intriguing details. The book has a timeless quality, and it becomes difficult to remember that it was first published nearly eighty years ago: Lud-in-the-Mist seems always to have been there, gently awaiting discovery. One small surface indication of its age can be found in its typography. Latin and French words are always presented in italics, so your eye hovers longer than necessary over dossier, ex cathedra and terra firma. I was also struck by the word "password," which is spelt "pass-word."

("Pass-word" was distinctive in another little way. At one point Nathaniel is stopped at a locked door, and is asked by someone on the other side for the password. He successfully guesses it, which makes for a great exchange. But then, only a few pages later, he becomes overwhelmed by other events and forgets the password. In these, the great days of Unix, this seems unbelievable and unforgivable.)

Like a lot of people, I came to this book through Neil Gaiman, who has a secondary career of championing overlooked gems such as this. (Lud-in-the-Mist dwelt in undeserved obscurity for nearly half a century.) He provides a brief but effective introduction, in which he says that Lud is ultimately about reconciliation. This is true, but it's not true enough. Towards the end Mirrlees shies away from describing several key events, leaving the reader a little unsatisfied. The ending satisfactorily resolves the storyline, but it's easy to see how the last twenty pages could've been three times that length, and three times more satisfying.

Still, there's a beautiful sense of creativity and imagination throughout the story. One of the chapters is called "Panic and the Silent People," and the characters have names like Endymion Leer, Professor Wisp, Moonlove Honeysuckle. Early on there's a wonderful description of the garden of Nathaniel Chanticleer, which casually finishes with:

There was also a pleached alley of hornbeams.

The nature and purpose of a pleached alley of hornbeams remains unclear, and this is entirely as it should be. This is a book to make you wonder, in all kinds of ways, about all kinds of things. I really liked it.

(The entire book can be downloaded at The File Library.)