Our Critic’s Tip Sheet On Current Reading: Week of June 18th, 2007

Jesse Browner has written a lush and sorrowful novel about how to die. It’s set in 66 A.D., but when it comes to our common doom, not much has changed in the last two millennia. The Uncertain Hour (Bloomsbury, $23.95)—the title is borrowed from Eliot’s “Little Gidding”—presents us with the last night on earth of Titus Petronius, author of The Satyricon, who knows he will receive a death sentence from the emperor Nero at dawn and chooses, as a noble Roman, to commit suicide rather than submit to execution. Petronius makes his case early on: “The way a man dies is just as important as the way he lives.” His young protégé Martialis is not convinced: “Why can’t you die in confusion, and shame, and doubt, and anger, and fear, as you have lived? Isn’t that the more honest death? Isn’t there honor in that, too?” Bracketed by these impassioned arguments is a splendid Roman feast, lusciously described. Trust me, this novel is not grim—it’s gorgeous.

If you prefer Italy in the present day—no despots, no slaves—pick up a copy of novelist Anthony Doerr’s engaging, sharply written memoir, Four Seasons in Rome (Scribner, $24). The descriptions of the eternal city are both exact and loving, and the love is contagious.

Home to Manhattan: Holly Peterson has a story or two to tell about network news (she worked for a decade as a producer at ABC), and she’s a prickly satirist, delightfully cruel when she ridicules the odious rich of Park Avenue. Sadly, she’s wrapped her first novel, The Manny (The Dial Press, $25), in the cutesy pink of feel-good chick lit. True, she holds off until page 70 before allowing her heroine to exclaim “Omigod”—without a hint of irony. It’s an Omigod moment: She’s just hired “a nanny of the male persuasion” to straighten out her unhappy son. The Manny will sell—it can hardly fail, being handsomely blurbed by Tina Brown, Dominick Dunne and Plum Sykes, and there’s also a movie deal in the works. But was that the point? Ms. Peterson is the daughter of Pete Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group. Surely she already knows everything she needs to know about what her heroine’s avaricious corporate lawyer husband likes to call “real, fuck-you money.” Maybe next time around Ms. Peterson will chuck the genre and its cloying formula and let her wickedness run wild.