“The Ghost Script”

Jules Feiffer

Liveright, $26.95

Sam Hannigan was a two-fisted, Depression-era detective — he’d brawl with a buddy as a way of shaking hands; he was all-American yet open to immigrants, as long as they’d sign on to the American Dream, looking for freedom, not handouts. He is also just one of any number of specters spooking the margins of “The Ghost Script,” the concluding volume of Jules Feiffer’s noir trilogy of graphic novels, which first raked in the accolades four years ago with “Kill My Mother.” 

Outwardly if not in profession, Sam calls to mind Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity,” the 1944 movie, though you’ll be hard pressed to find him uttering a line as choice as “I wonder if a little rum would get this up on its feet,” eyeing a glass of iced tea in hand. That’s from a Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder script, based on the James M. Cain novel, of course.

Sam’s the hero of the trilogy’s second book, “Cousin Joseph,” and he’s missed in this final installment, as previously he brought clarity and focus to a gritty tale of union busting and jingoism, which now wraps up 20 years later in a nebulous story of Hollywood in the blacklist era of the early 1950s. 

About Chandler, when Howard Hawks was making his novel “The Big Sleep” into the 1946 film noir, the director cabled that the plot didn’t entirely make sense. “Who killed the chauffeur?” Or words to that effect. “No idea,” came the writer’s response.

Here, the story becomes hard to follow, even convoluted, such are the number of subplots and characters. There’s Sam’s blind widow, Elsie, for one, reinvented as radio’s “Miss-Know-It-All, your official glamour gal of gossip,” and their daughter, Annie, for another, likewise trying to make a go of it in Tinseltown, as a director and writer — in fact, she’s the one who comes up with the idea for a “ghost script,” ostensibly to expose the Hollywood blacklist and those responsible for it. 

One of whom, the so-called Cousin Joseph, a Red-baiting, New Deal-hating Methuselah behind Our Forefathers for Freedom, a kind of film code authority committed to rooting out “communist and pro-communist sympathies” in all facets of production, at one point turns a detective’s questioning into a disquisition on the America “you have never seen,” before regulations and unions, in other words, as he putters about in his vast greenhouse modeled after General Sternwood’s in “The Big Sleep.” (Speaking of.)

The rabbit hole of summation and explication will not be entered here, but one element at work is that a clearinghouse has been set up in which blacklisted screenwriters toil under pseudonyms for a cut rate. Movies get made, people are employed, the public’s morale is kept up — er, everybody wins, right? 

This plot, or something like it, has been roiling in Mr. Feiffer for decades, ever since the lefty playwright Clifford Odets returned, seemingly triumphantly, after being “lost in Hollywood hackdom for years,” Mr. Feiffer writes in his foreword, only to turn and promptly “name names” as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee. 

“Am I going crazy?” Mr. Feiffer thought. “What kind of country am I living in?”

Graphically, the draftsman is as expressive as ever, not to mention cinematic in his sepia-toned storytelling, with what you could call crane shots, tracking shots, point of view — all of it put to good use. 

The trademark balletic violence beautifully recalls his mentor, Will Eisner, whose most famous character, the Spirit, perpetually beaten up, constitutes yet another allusion, this one from the mouth of the similarly slapped-around Archie Goldman. (“Did I win that one?” he thinks after one of his antagonists drops dead of a heart attack mid-fight. “Do I know the difference between losing and winning? Can you live your life without knowing the difference?”)

A kid in “Cousin Joseph,” Archie has grown to be a detective like his hero, Sam Hannigan, but a schlub of one, so plagued by self-doubt that one night in the desert he drives in circles of indecision, talking to himself, over a full seven pages in what might be the most realistic sequence in this book of sequential art. Until, that is, the deus ex machina ending. 

But that’s the world we live in, isn’t it.

Jules Feiffer lives on Shelter Island. He’ll be at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on July 28 at 5 p.m. and at the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night on Aug. 11 in Amagansett. 

“The Banker’s Wife”

Cristina Alger

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $27

The domestic detective appears to be having her moment. Amid all the “girl” thrillers — “Gone Girl,” “The Girl on the Train,” “The Good Girl,” “The Girl Before,” and “The Perfect Girl” — we now have the “wife” suspense novels: “The Silent Wife,” “The Wife,” and “How to Be a Good Wife.”

Domestic noir, as the author Julia Crouch coined the genre in 2013, usually involves a crime surrounded by twisting plots, creeping unease, and sly insistence that the home isn’t a haven but rather a place where anything and everything can go wrong. At the core of these stories are women who are often smart yet far from independent, who are weak, confused, and overly reliant on men, but who, in the end, get their comeuppance.

Into the milieu comes “The Banker’s Wife” by Cristina Alger, a part-time Quogue resident and New York City native who was a Goldman Sachs analyst and a corporate attorney before becoming a writer. This is her third novel, following “The Darlings” in 2012, which concerned a family of enormous Wall Street wealth brought down by a Ponzi scheme, and “This Was Not the Plan” in 2016, about a top-flight workaholic lawyer who is forced to reconsider life’s priorities. 

“The Banker’s Wife” has two female protagonists, both of whom, like most of the female characters in this story, are stunning, intelligent, of Ivy League pedigree, and professional — although one has shelved her career to follow her banking husband to Geneva and the other is about to give up work to become a more acceptable socialite wife. 

The story begins with the death of the banking husband, Matthew Werner, whose private plane crashes in the Alps, also killing his fellow passenger, the mysterious Fatima Amir, a hedge fund investor with ties to the corrupt Syrian regime and who is blessed with “striking, photogenic features: a strong Romanesque nose; pronounced cheekbones; full, sensual lips.” 

Meanwhile, Annabel Werner, the banker’s wife, learns of her husband’s death as she awaits his return in their luxurious Geneva apartment “wearing a black cocktail dress and the long sable coat that Matthew had bought her when they first moved to Switzerland. A hairdresser on the Cours de Rive had coaxed her auburn hair into a twist. Her shoes, five-inch pumps that a salesgirl in a boutique on rue de Rhone convinced her to buy against her better judgment, pinched at the balls of her feet. In the dressing room mirror, the shoes had made Annabel’s legs look impossibly long and slim.”

Despite having it all, Annabel is unhappy and drifts through her affluent Swiss life like a less vivacious Emma Bovary. She is bored and listless, but “not wanting to be a stick in the mud,” she suppresses her needs and growing loneliness to play the beautiful, dutiful wife. Until, that is, Matthew’s death, when she realizes it’s time to kick off the stilettos and start playing Nancy Drew instead.

Alternating through the plot is Marina Tourneau, an investigative journalist, who is engaged to Grant Ellis, a well-connected investment banker whose father is preparing to run for president of the United States. Despite her passion for her job, and her rise to the top of Press, a New York-based magazine, Marina will soon be quitting because “there were things one had to do to be the wife of a C.E.O. of a multinational corporation. Not to mention the wife of the president’s son, should it come to that. She couldn’t work and be Mrs. Grant Ellis. At least not at the same time. There was no question what was more important to her. She had to quit.”

But there is one last story she simply cannot resist: the truth behind Matthew Werner’s death and that of her mentor, which, once she starts digging, uncovers corruption and moral high jinx among some of the most powerful men in finance and politics. 

Into the plot comes Matthew’s beautiful young assistant, Zoe, who even in the middle of the night “looked fresh-faced and chic in black jeans, high-top sneakers, and a fur vest. Her skin glowed in the dark hallway, the moonlight glinting off her high cheekbones.” 

Zoe reassures the grieving Annabel that Matthew’s love was unwavering and also produces Matthew’s laptop, on which he had secretly compiled evidence against Swiss United, where they worked, after he discovered the bank was doing business with terrorists, arms dealers, and dictators. Why Matthew would tell his assistant such damning details is one of many looming but unanswered questions.

Nonetheless, the pacing of the story is particularly lively. There’s plenty of suspenseful plotting and a quest for conclusive answers as the story swings convincingly between Geneva, Paris, London, New York, the South of France, and ultimately, the Caribbean.

But unlike many of the “girl” and “wife” thrillers, which tend to be less about the investigation of a mystery than about psychology and the shifting perception of what we think to be true, “The Banker’s Wife” offers little in the way of insightful character development. Too often, characters and their relationships with each other are so overidealized that their trajectories are telegraphed well in advance. The story appears to be written not to mine a reader’s imagination but to pique the interest of Hollywood.

Yet even a flawed crime thriller like “The Banker’s Wife” serves a useful purpose in today’s tumultuous world in which political corruption, violence, and gender politics have gained fresh relevance. For in times of uncertainty we often seek redemption and resolution. And what could be better than getting lost in a book in which good triumphs over bad? Where evil is punished and the good guys mostly win after solving the puzzle? 

It helps put the balance back in life and makes all seem right with the world. Even if only fictionally.

Cristina Alger will be at the Quogue Library on July 29 at 5 p.m. and at the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night on Aug. 11.

If Jonathan Silin is reading from new work at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday, it might make sense first to type his last name into the search box on the homepage of The Star’s website. Two entries down will be his essay from April on the subject matter — the “young-old” stage of the life cycle, “the period between 60 and 80,” he said in a recent email, “when so many of us are now challenged to live fully engaged lives.”

Bringing the point home, the Amagansett part-timer added, “The East End has more than its share of young-old.”

Throat cleared, settled in at the chockablock bookshop for the appointed 5 o’clock hour, the spine he’ll be cracking belongs to a slim but hardbacked volume in the Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood series from Palgrave Macmillan, titled “Early Childhood, Aging, and the Life Cycle: Mapping Common Ground.”

All of which sounds (and looks) rather academic — Mr. Silin is a fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, after all — but it’s in fact personal, a memoir, lessons and study from a lifelong educator imparted through storytelling, the essay mentioned above being just one example.

About that “lifelong,” South Forkers of long tenure and a lefty bent might recall his early-1970s time with the young ’uns and occasional wandering goat at the old Hampton Day School. He went on to join the faculty of the Bank Street College of Education in New York, teaching there for 17 years, and he remains the editor in chief of its Occasional Paper Series.

“Regarding the book,” he said of the business of promoting it, “I do my best to summon up whatever bit of Zen I can find inside of me, most likely left from a prior incarnation — certainly nothing from my New York Jewish heritage applies.”

There’s more to the man, of course. For 30 years, he lived here with Robert Giard, the photographer known for his portraits of gay and lesbian writers (Edward Albee and Lanford Wilson, to name just two out of the nearly 600), a series he began at the height of the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s. After Giard’s death in 2002, Mr. Silin started the Robert Giard Foundation, which awards filmmakers, photographers, and videographers with $7,500 fellowships yearly to support their work on matters of gender identity, sexuality, and the L.G.B.T.Q. experience generally.

“It’s a commitment to making gay lives visible,” Mr. Silin once said. As of 2014, Girard’s archive is part of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Pay no attention to that too-cute-by-half headline above. Two reading series may be starting up this week, but they have nothing in common other than East Hampton Village geography, free admission, and that they’re here, and it’s now, summertime on the population-exploded South Fork.

First, at 7 on the night of Thursday, July 5, at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons on Woods Lane, John Leland, a New York Times Metro reporter, will inaugurate the season’s Authors Studio talks with one about his recent “Happiness Is a Choice You Make.” Its subtitle, “Lessons From a Year Among the Oldest Old,” reflects the source of the book, a series of newspaper articles he wrote that followed six over-85 citizens in their daily struggles and successes. Wisdom was imparted, you might say. 

The upshot? Don’t obsess over those dear to you but now out of touch or gone entirely, or the family members who have let you down. Neither should you dwell on physical diminishment, but rather focus on what you can still do. Leaving aside the jargon of the social scientists, uh, make the most of your remaining time?

But don’t take my word for it, I haven’t read the thing, so head over and hear it yourself from the horse’s empathetic mouth. Beyond that, just a quick nod here to next week’s author appearance, on July 12 also at 7 — Alan Zweibel with his send-up of a Passover Seder’s Haggadah, “For This We Left Egypt?” — before your not entirely faithful correspondent directs you to the J.C.O.H.’s attractive and easily navigable website for a rundown of the rest of the series, which wraps up at the end of August.

Meanwhile, a short walk through the hustle of Range Rovers and Maseratis is bucolic James Lane, where sits the colonial-era Mulford Farm, and there in its barn, a change of setting from Amagansett’s Marine Museum, the poets of the venerable Poetry Marathon will gather to read, listen, and afterward chat over comestibles likely more elevated than Ritz Crackers, complemented by beverages of an appropriate alcohol content.

It begins on Sunday, July 8, at 5 p.m. with Philip Asaph, whose work has appeared in journals of note like Glimmer Train and Poetry, and George Wallace, former poet in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace in Huntington Station and the author of more than 30 chapbooks. 

The readings continue at Mulford on July 15 (Walter Donway and Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan) and July 29 (members of the East Hampton Poetry Workshop). Note that on July 22, the venue will be the East Hampton Library, and the time will be 3 to 4:30 p.m., with Gladys Henderson, the current Suffolk County poet laureate, doing the honors.

The solstice is past. That means it’s high time for another Fridays at Five series of author readings at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, the grande dame of such series, of which, let’s be honest, there are many. But this one’s out of doors, don’t you know. And it serves wine.

The summer’s lineup begins tomorrow, not with Hamptons celebrity schlock, but with heart — with Alice McDermott. She’ll settle in at the lectern with her latest, “The Ninth Hour,” which came out in September from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, it’s a historical novel involving nuns in the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor convent who serve a Brooklyn neighborhood in the early 20th century. The tale tells of their interactions with one another and with the put-upon locals. (The title refers to the time of afternoon prayers, the biblical hour of Christ’s death.) 

Ms. McDermott has been a summertime visitor to East Hampton since she was a child. Tickets to hear her read, followed by questions and answers, cost $25. Passes to eight readings in the series can be had for $175.

And now, forthwith, for posting by refrigerator magnet, or thumbing into your iPhone calendar, or mental notation with a 50-50 chance of recall, the remaining Fridays at Five laundry list.

Friday, July 6: Lauren Weisberger talking about “When Life Gives You Lululemons” with Bonnie Grice of WPPB radio. July 13: Meryl Gordon and “Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend.” July 20: Maureen Sherry and her novel “Opening Belle.” July 27: James Patterson reading from “The President Is Missing,” written with Bill Clinton. Aug. 3: Ken Auletta, a part-time resident of Bridgehampton who writes about the media for The New Yorker, with “Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else).” Aug. 10: Martin London, defense lawyer to bigwigs, and “The Client Decides.” 

And then on Aug. 17, Walter Isaacson will read from “Leonardo da Vinci,” with the series concluding on Aug. 24 as Min Jin Lee discusses her novel “Pachinko” with Bill McCuddy, an entertainment reporter.

They may be private residences in one of the world’s wealthiest communities, but don’t worry, the photo ID and background check are likely to be skipped, and no bulge will conceal a security goon’s Glock, if anything merely ardor for the written word.

Or the written word spoken, as that’s the deal with One for the Books, the yearly fund-raiser for Sag Harbor’s John Jermain Memorial Library, in which writers, mostly, but also the occasional artist or filmmaker, discuss books, usually, at cocktail parties around town, the first being tomorrow night at 8 at Lou Ann Walker’s place, where the Stony Brook Southampton prof will welcome a recent hire in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature, Amy Hempel.

An author of short fiction, and of one of the most memorable examples of such since Reagan was in office, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” Ms. Hempel will tackle that genre, in the words of the library’s website, “from Kafka to Kawabata.” The latter is a reference, just in case, to Yasunari Kawabata, the Nobel Prize winner whose “Snow Country,” a melancholy short novel from the 1930s set at a remote hot springs and involving a geisha and a wealthy ne’er-do-well, remains particularly worth checking out.

The parties continue Saturday night — six more of them, in fact — and this is where your faceless correspondent will direct you to the John Jermain website, where you can see more about gatherings with Jennet Conant (“Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist”), James and Kate McMullan (on his “Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood”), Melissa Bank (on Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge”), David Friend (on his recent “The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido”), Susan Lacy (on examining the lives of the likes of Steven Spielberg and Jane Fonda through film), and April Gornik (who will consider Ben Lerner’s novel “Leaving the Atocha Station”).

Admission to any of the parties is a cool Franklin.

“Paul Simon: The Life”

Robert Hilburn

Simon & Schuster, $30

I can still clearly recall the silence maintained by all 10,000 of us, in rapt attention under a late-afternoon sun at Indian Field Ranch in Montauk, all eyes on Paul Simon and the South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo as they sang the transcendent, a cappella “Homeless” from Mr. Simon’s 1986 hit album, “Graceland.” 

That memorable moment, in late August 1990, was one of so many, as the artist and his band, many of them Africans, repeatedly brought the audience to ecstasy, as with spirited renditions of the triumphant “You Can Call Me Al” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” also from “Graceland.” Billy Joel stopped by, too, drawing cheers at the mention of Montauk in “The Downeaster Alexa,” his song about beleaguered baymen.

It was easy to feel that we were witnessing a rare and exceptional moment. Paul Simon, a prolific author of a quarter-century’s worth of hit songs, and now a resident of our still-sleepy hamlet, had added alchemist to his résumé, and before our eyes was somehow blending the doo-wop and pop of his New York City youth with the faraway sounds of the Zulus, creating an entirely new vibration that had a most magical power. You really should have been there.

It was a moment of jubilation, but for Mr. Simon, who, at 76, has recently embarked on “Homeward Bound — The Farewell Tour,” only one of too many to count. Of course, behind the massive success lies a man susceptible to the flaws and foibles of his species; failures, be they artistic, commercial, or personal, have sometimes accompanied that success. 

A thorough portrait of the artist is found in “Paul Simon: The Life” by Robert Hilburn, who has penned biographies of Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen, as well as “Corn Flakes With John Lennon and Other Tales From a Rock ’n’ Roll Life.” 

If not quite hagiography — literally, the biography of a saint — Mr. Hilburn clearly sees “The Rhythm of the Saints,” Mr. Simon’s 1990 follow-up to “Graceland,” and almost all the rest of his subject’s oeuvre as works of staggering genius. But whatever one thinks of Mr. Simon’s music, be it the iconic 1960s output with Art Garfunkel, his 1970s catalog with hits like “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” “Mother and Child Reunion,” and “Still Crazy After All These Years,” or the last three decades’ exploration and incorporation of sounds and rhythms from around the globe, his impact on popular and world music is indeed staggering. 

He was born in Newark in 1941, but fate soon took young Paul Simon to Queens, where he first remembered seeing Mr. Garfunkel, in 1951, at P.S. 164. The fourth graders were at an assembly, where Mr. Garfunkel sang “Too Young,” which had been a hit for Nat King Cole. Though baseball was his obsession, two things struck him, Mr. Hilburn writes: “The loveliness of Art’s voice and the strong impression he had on the girls.” 

Soon after, Elvis Presley and, particularly, the Everly Brothers showed the young duo the way forward; as teens they scored a few minor hits under the name Tom & Jerry. But Mr. Simon’s decision to record a couple of songs on his own, not instead of but in addition to another Tom & Jerry record, was a stinging betrayal, as Mr. Garfunkel saw it. The wound would come to define the singers’ relationship forevermore. 

Mr. Hilburn chronicles Mr. Simon’s years in England, where he found some success and lifelong friends, before a return to New York and the fast upward trajectory of Simon and Garfunkel. But Mort Lewis, their manager, saw the rivalry beneath their friendship, Mr. Hilburn writes. “Paul often thought the audience saw Artie as the star because he was the featured singer. . . . Meanwhile, Artie knew Paul wrote the songs and thus controlled the future of the pair. I don’t think he ever got over what happened with Tom & Jerry.” 

When Mr. Simon feared that Mr. Garfunkel was moving toward an acting career and would have quit the duo should it prove successful, he ended the partnership, infuriating Mr. Garfunkel. “The relationship was too restrictive,” Mr. Hilburn writes. “Simon wanted the freedom to move beyond the mostly soothing folk strains that lifted Simon and Garfunkel to superstar status in rock. He heard a whole new world of music in his head, and he wanted to pursue it.” 

The split allowed Mr. Simon’s artistry, for which experimentation was crucial, to fully blossom, and the hits began straightaway with his self-titled solo debut in 1972, continuing through the following year’s “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon” and 1975’s “Still Crazy After All These Years.” A friendship with Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” developed around the same time and also yielded decades’ worth of successful television appearances. 

But amid the peaks, valleys would lie. “One Trick Pony,” the 1980 film that he wrote and starred in, was poorly received, and while its soundtrack album featured the hit “Late in the Evening,” it was his first to fall short of the Top 5 in the United States. With MTV and a new crop of pop stars ascendant, the 1983 album “Hearts and Bones” was another disappointment. (“The Capeman,” a musical play based on the life of a convicted murderer that Mr. Simon co-wrote with the late poet and playwright Derek Walcott, was savaged upon its short run in 1998.)

Around the time of “Hearts and Bones,” Mr. Simon’s second, brief marriage, to the actress Carrie Fisher, also ended, and the depression that has sometimes afflicted him reared anew. “He felt numb some days,” Mr. Hilburn writes, “able to think of nothing better to do than sit in his car and idly watch workmen build a house that he had planned for Carrie and himself in Montauk. . . . At the construction site, Paul would often smoke a joint (which he had picked up again after an eleven-year break) and listen to tapes, choosing them pretty much at random — until he noticed one day that he had been playing a particular tape of South African music over and over.” 

Thus began a personal and professional resurrection, albeit one that brought its own controversies. Mr. Hilburn amply covers charges that Mr. Simon was breaking a boycott of South Africa, then in the late, violent stages of apartheid, and engaging in cultural appropriation. Opinion remains divided on both topics, but “Graceland” surely marked a transformation in Mr. Simon’s approach to music. Instead of sweet folk harmonies over an acoustic guitar, he was constructing songs with sounds sampled from around the world, and leading large groups of equally disparate musicians onstage. 

The fitful reunions of Simon and Garfunkel are detailed, and this aspect of Mr. Simon’s career has a less happy ending than the entirety of it. For Mr. Garfunkel, though, it’s quite a bit worse. The onetime team is apparently not on speaking terms, following a 2010 tour that was marred by vocal problems Mr. Garfunkel developed shortly before it began. 

In the end, Mr. Simon is a songwriter and musician, and while the Rolling Stones may not have recorded an essential album in decades, who are we to tell them to stop? They, like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, are among the iconic artists of the 1960s who continue to perform well into their 70s, and fans continue to buy tickets. 

For his part, Mr. Simon, who found domestic bliss with the singer Edie Brickell, with whom he has three children, has continued at his own pace, scoring a minor hit with “Wristband” from 2016’s “Stranger to Stranger,” and sharing honors with Dion on the earnest 2015 duet “New York Is My Home.” 

A London date on his 2016 tour coincided with the American presidential election. “The election put a pall on everything,” Mr. Hilburn quotes his subject saying, “looking exhausted as he sat in a chair. . . . With a word change here or there, the road-weary lyrics of ‘Homeward Bound’ applied again.” 

But, Mr. Hilburn writes, Mr. Simon brightened as he saw one era of his life ending and another beginning. “He now planned to go to Hawaii with Edie and the kids for a monthlong vacation and try to figure out if he could really walk away. Whatever, he felt blessed. Only three months ago, he and Edie had renewed their vows overlooking the ocean at their home in Montauk.”

“Rocky Graziano: Fists, Fame, and Fortune”

Jeffrey Sussman

Rowman & Littlefield, $36

Let’s begin at the middle. Because for Rocky Graziano that also means the peak, his epic trilogy of title bouts with Tony Zale from 1946 to 1948, “the bloodiest, most intensely fought middleweight fights of the 20th century,” Jeffrey Sussman writes in his new biography, “Rocky Graziano: Fists, Fame, and Fortune.” They matched the immigrant slums versus the industrial heartland, he writes, “the streetfighter, the Italian delinquent, the ex-convict who fought like a junkyard dog against the upright, all-American, clean-living good guy.”

Graziano was one of history’s hardest punchers. Zale, “the Man of Steel,” earned that sobriquet in part because of his past in the steel mills of Gary, Ind., but also for the strength of his impervious jaw, and yet by the third round of their first meeting at Yankee Stadium his face was “a mask of blood. The handsome Midwesterner looked as shattered as if he had been in a terrible car crash. . . . A plume of blood flew in an arc from Zale’s face with each punch.” Graziano’s gloves were wet with it.

Both fighters hit the canvas. But Zale was legendary for his body blows, and one such to Graziano’s solar plexus in the sixth round left him gasping for air. It was the turning point. Zale knocked him out.

“Hell, he looked like the loser, me the winner!” the outwardly unscathed Graziano told a reporter. 

The opposite would be the case in the rematch in 1947 in Chicago, when, with the likes of Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover in the audience, Graziano, his face “like raw, bloody hamburger,” won the title, again in the sixth round, but only after a cornerman wielding a quarter “broke the skin of the swelling” under his purpled egg of a right eye, clearing his vision sufficiently to allow him to make of Zale’s head “an inanimate, disengaged speed bag that was turning a brighter shade of red with each punch.”

“Ma, Ma,” Graziano shouted into the ring announcer’s microphone, “your bad boy done it, he’s world champion.” The stuff of the movies, really. Better than the movies. The dead end kid makes good. 

A year later Zale would regain the middleweight crown from Graziano, who, notoriously reluctant to train and only too happy to indulge in the good life once he had the means, wasn’t in his best shape. But historically it’s nearly an afterthought, for “the Wop, the Guinea, the guy with olive-oil hair, the Noo Yawk greaseball from the Lower East Side,” as the author imagines him thinking after his loss to Zale, “the thug, the former gangster wannabe,” who went AWOL from the Army after slugging an officer, showed himself, when he was champion, to be personable, charming, self-deprecating. He quickly became almost as big a star as Sinatra himself, and by his own estimation more popular than any champ outside of Joe Louis, this in a day when boxing was king.

Mr. Sussman, a boxing fan as much as a scholar, renders battles from 70 years ago with gripping immediacy, alternating between an apt midcentury sensibility (an errant punch “arrived like a man just missing a bus”) and deadpan humor (“Rocky’s mouthpiece flew from his mouth like a fleeing animal”).

And if the spraying droplets of blood put you in mind of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” about Jake LaMotta, so much the better, as LaMotta was a “reform school chum” of Graziano’s. The movies, in fact, are much to the point, as here was the original Rocky — before the undefeated Marciano, and long before the Sylvester Stallone film, in which, in fact, Graziano’s top cornerman, Al Silvani, portrayed, yes, a grizzled cornerman.

With his good looks and tousled jet-black Dean Martin hair, Graziano was effortlessly charismatic, attracting the attention of Hollywood as soon as he made a name for himself. Marlon Brando studied his walk and speech, with its “dees, dems, and dos,” for his role as the palooka Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront,” and even for Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Brando, Montgomery Clift, and, more improbably, James Dean were considered to play Rocky in “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” the 1956 film version of Graziano’s hit autobiography, a role that wound up going to Paul Newman. 

(During filming, the author notes with some amusement, Newman, though in top shape, was crumpled, curled up on the canvas, and sucking air after taking a right hand to the midsection from Tony Zale, for some reason brought in to play himself and coasting at maybe 60 percent as they sparred. He was dismissed from the set.)

After his boxing career was over, Graziano, the natural, eminently likable simply by being himself, went on to co-star with the comic Martha Raye on television and appeared in innumerable commercials. 

He’s probably remembered more for pitching Lee Myles transmissions and Raisin Bran or bantering with Johnny Carson than for what he did as a pugilist, and this is what Mr. Sussman set out to rectify. He has successfully reintroduced to boxing fans and the culturally curious this ring savage with the mold-breaking personality who punched his way out of miserable poverty. 

“To get in the ring with anybody to fight you got to be a little wacky,” Graziano once said. “The fight for survival is the fight. . . . It’s a tough business, man. It’s a tough business.”

Jeffrey Sussman lives part time in East Hampton. 

“The Initiation”

Chris Babu

Permuted Press, $21

Is it a dream or is it a nightmare? You have the run of the Manhattan subway system, from 72nd Street to the South Ferry station. No crowds. Save for that section carpeted with hundreds of thousands of rats you have to sprint through as they crunch underfoot, “screeching and squealing . . . a warm, jittery pile of fur and bones . . . like standing on a deflated basketball.”

That’s just one of a host of tests facing six teens foolish or desperate enough to enter the subterranean Initiation in Chris Babu’s debut novel for young adults, a dark vision of a New America, hardly a nation, really, rather a city-state sealed off from the disease-ravaged wastes beyond its walls, depleted in numbers, severely rationed, technologically primitive, plagued by blackouts, and constrained by a strict caste system broken down by job skills. Citizens are even confined to neighborhoods with their own kind — the Dorms, home of “the working stiffs,” the Lab, with scientists, doctors, those with technical expertise, the Precinct, for a security force, called the Guardians, out of all proportion to the population, and the Palace, where reside the ruling elites and their seconds.

Human civilization has been brought low by the events of the Confluence: a worldwide cyberterrorist attack, the Inequality Riots sparked by advancements in tech and automation and the attendant mass unemployment and surging corporate profits, a subsequently mishandled recession, and a superbug outbreak.

It’s not for everyone. But for many readers, those with childhood comic-book backgrounds, for instance, portrayals of the crippling of society are enjoyable, to say nothing of the useful reminder of how close we are to the cliff. Science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, dystopian fiction — there’s usually a tradeoff. Frank Herbert’s dialogue and characters may have ranged from wooden to particleboard, but that was one heck of a world he envisioned in “Dune.” (For one example.) The sheer imagination can be impressive.

“The Initiation” is indeed dystopian, mining a healthy if jaundiced tradition marked by Paul Theroux’s post-nuclear “O-Zone,” from 1986, on up to, of course, “The Hunger Games.” Here, for the young, namely 16-year-olds done with their schooling and facing a lifetime of drudgery in predetermined occupations, the way out is the Initiation, but the price of failure is exile, a sure death, outside New America’s walls. It’s been eight years since anyone survived the gauntlet.

The difference in this case is that the author has a degree in mathematics from M.I.T. He likes puzzles, brainteasers, questions of logic, tests of deductive reasoning, and these are thrown in the path of the tunnel-scurrying teens repeatedly. Drayden, the protagonist, and his fellow brainiac among the “pledges,” a quiet, inward-focused girl named Catrice, lead the way as mental gymnastics trump muscle. 

Catrice is every bit Drayden’s equal, and promptly solves the second question they come across, one sure to enrage or intrigue the Y.A. crowd, depending on past experience with those word problems from middle school math class: “The larger hourglass measures eleven minutes, while the smaller measures seven minutes. You must measure exactly fifteen minutes using only the two hourglasses.” 

Good luck.

True, the Bureau of New America, as the sadistic overlords are called, is selecting for intelligence first and foremost, but also for bravery, which, as Drayden’s favorite teacher had it, “while often dormant, existed in everyone.” This is tested by way of physical challenges probing a hit parade of fears — heights, claustrophobia, drowning, cockroaches. 

Mr. Babu may not be J.G. Ballard, but then who is? For teens he successfully puts into play all manner of concerns, from bullying to catty competition among girls to petty jealousies and insecurities to betrayal and resentment to who likes whom. 

And if there are life lessons along the way, so much the better. Here’s one: “We all start with an equal shot!” Drayden shouts in frustration at his acquisitive but unworthy former friend. “Like the kids in class who goofed off and failed without trying, and whined when they received crappy job assignments,” he thinks to himself. “At a minimum you had to exert yourself, to put in the work.”

Chris Babu lives part time in Southampton.

“Tombstone: 

(Not a Western)”

Francis Levy

Black Rose Writing, $17.95

To be buried or cremated, that is the question. “Tombstone: (Not a Western)” is an absurdist tour of one man’s neurotic approach to his own demise. Our mapless guide is the unlikable but very funny Robert Bernstein, a skirt-chasing, peep show-visiting, Bukowski-reading baby boomer with a serious case of male pattern self-absorption who is constantly trying to get a leg up in a world full of barriers to getting your obit in The New York Times. 

The novel begins in New York City with a shopping expedition: He’s out to buy a coffin. Maybe. But maybe not: “I know what I’m like and people are going to get over me pretty quickly. They won’t need a catered affair to realize they’re better off without me.”

Bernstein plumbs the depths of death-related duality: Does he wish to be cremated or to be buried along with his wife of 30 years? Cremation implies a rebellious turning away from the strictures of his wife and culture. He is, after all, claustrophobic. Burial, however, puts him in the fray of making “arrangements” — expensive funereal ins and outs laden with decisions that point to social class and family dynamics. Will his estranged kids even come to his funeral? 

Our dubious hero collects his wife, Marsha, and chases these matters west of New York to El Rancho de Campo in Arizona, an all-inclusive resort for death tourism, “the world’s only resort devoted to death which also happened to feature a 27-hole golf course, a dude ranch, multiple cemeteries whose gravesites all boasted long-term care contracts and a slaughterhouse for grain-fed beef, a gesture to Stendhal’s famous novel, called ‘The Slaughterhouse of Parma.’ ” For example, they pick you up from the airport in a hearse, ply you with “samples of a potent cocktail made from embalming fluid” in the hotel lobby, and offer such seminars as “Stiff as a Board: Tantric Sex in the Afterlife and Beyond.” 

Once at Rancho de Campo, the pacing of the book drags in a no-death-related-shtick-left-unturned litany, where joke setup and punch lines replace plotting for a portion of the narrative. But then again, maybe that’s life? And Mr. Levy is funny! His nimble facility with language contains the wry and the absurd. As parody, Rancho de Campo pokes at the commodification of death, and thus at the outer limits of commodification in general. Satire rounds up Mr. Levy’s theme, the human impulse to control the mystery of death rather than seek to come to terms with it.

In the era of the #MeToo movement, routine sexual objectification of women as the narrator moves from lust object to lust object might feel a bit gratuitous, since the ogling, albeit satirical, does little to deepen the author’s theme. But in the main relationship in the novel, between Bernstein and his wife, there is a surprising sense of tenderness hidden in Mr. Levy’s satire that emerges in spite of a kind of tacit enmity between them. 

“We had never been into outright sadomasochism. That would have been a commitment to some form of pleasure that both of us had always been unwilling to make. Instead we’d held to the kind of constant bickering that freed us from the burden of having to decide whether we had any feelings at all. You get used to lots of things and the constant criticizing and feeling put-upon was what we called home.” 

Once out of Rancho del Campo and onward to . . . spoiler alert . . . the afterlife, he has his wife constantly in his peripheral vision as they make their way to whatever comes next. For better or for worse, he is not in whatever it is alone. This forging ahead beyond the end defines the attitude of exploration that marks the novel. 

“While I hadn’t wanted to die when I was alive, I’d always thought that the one good thing about death was that you got to slow down and relax — which is why I was surprised that in the afterlife I still found my mind racing.”

Mr. Levy’s project is an earnest and driven seeking. All those jokes are mined as fuel to keep the inquiry moving forward.

Those who are there — facing down “arrangements” or starting to take a sidelong look at mortality — will enjoy the company of Mr. Levy’s wacky, all too mortal machinations on the vagaries of death. In the ironic words of his vehicle Robert Bernstein: “The desire to have a proper funeral made me want to live.”

Evan Harris is the author of “The Quit.” She lives in East Hampton.

Francis Levy, a Wainscott resident, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.”