New Books by Sadie Jones, Laurent Binet and More

THE UNINVITED GUESTS
By Sadie Jones
262 pages. Harper. $24.99.

For the Torrington family of Sterne, a house grand enough to merit a name, a train accident on the nearby line occurs at the most inopportune time. Hordes of unwashed passengers from — the horror! — third class now need a place to spend the night and are directed to this English manor just as Emerald Torrington is set to celebrate her 20th birthday. Ms. Jones’s comedy of manners, which takes place over the course of a single evening in 1912, gleefully exposes the family members’ snobbery despite, or because of, their own questionable pedigree and depleted funds. The author can’t resist harassing the Torringtons with the menace in the next room: “ ‘Let them rot,’ ” Charlotte, Emerald’s mother, thinks of the passengers she has sequestered in the study. “By the stench creeping under her door, it smelled as if they already were.” In the end, though, Ms. Jones isn’t as cruel as some of her characters; even Charlotte is not beyond redemption.

THE MASTER’S MUSE
By Varley O’Connor
248 pages. Scribner.  $25.

The principal ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq was both muse and wife to the legendary Russian choreographer George Balanchine when, at 27, she contracted polio. She never regained the use of her legs; her marriage to the womanizing Balanchine, however, defied the odds. Tanny, as she was called, was the fourth in a line of dancers he had married. And although he was eyeing the next one when her illness struck, Balanchine stayed for another 13 years. Tanny’s trials are a natural for a novel (think of “The Paris Wife” with dancers; the publisher wants you to), but Ms. O’Connor dwells a little too much on the mundane. “Life settled down,” she summarizes rather blandly in Tanny’s voice. The author is more successful capturing Balanchine’s charm, despite his cruelty. “He knew what you were capable of before you did,” Tanny says. “He believed in you and his belief was so flattering and motivating, you just couldn’t disappoint him.”

THE LOLA QUARTET
By Emily St. John Mandel
279 pages. Unbridled Books. $24.95.

Gavin Sasaki is a bit of a loser. He’s dismissed from his reporting job at a New York paper after making up quotations. Worse, he wears a fedora. What lights the fuse on his self-implosion is the discovery that he has a 10-year-old daughter.  He moves in with his sister in South Florida, where he readies foreclosed houses for resale. At night he reaches out to his old high school jazz band mates for clues about what happened to his ex-girlfriend, the mother of the child. The mystery surrounding the two percolates with suspense — the friends are hiding something — but the most interesting aspect of Ms. St. John Mandel’s novel, her third, is how aggressively unglamorous it is, starting with Gavin himself. But he’s hardly the only one with a “fallen-down life” in a world of weed-fringed cul-de-sacs, 7-Elevens and “Cinnabon-scented” mall air.

DAN GETS A MINIVAN
By Dan Zevin
217 pages. Scribner. $24.

Here is a book dangerously undermined by its subtitle, “Life at the Intersection of Dude and Dad,” which seems to promise a bundle of lame beer-cozy, dirty-diaper jokes. Because the thing about Mr. Zevin’s essays on being a stay-at-home dad is that he is actually funny. “Friends and family share special times in the collapsible third row of seats,” Mr. Zevin, the author of three previous humor books, writes in the title piece. “Seriously, it’s like a living room back there, only better because everyone gets their own air vent and cup holder.” At one point he takes up guitar so he can be as cool as the kid-rocker Dan Zanes. “If it weren’t for the police presence” at his concerts, Mr. Zevin writes, “they’d be rushing the stage and throwing their nursing bras up at him.” Mr. Zevin clearly deserves projectile undergarments too.

HHHH
By Laurent Binet
Translated by Sam Taylor
327 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

The true story that inspired this first novel is so fundamentally moving and dramatic that no amount of annoying tics in the telling — even the many demonstrated by Mr. Binet — can ruin it. During World War II a Czech and a Slovak, backed by the British secret service, parachuted in to their occupied country to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the so-called Butcher of Prague and an architect of the Final Solution; they knew they would most likely die but failed to predict the traitor ultimately responsible. Just as Mr. Binet is steaming through some terrific scene, he interrupts the action. “I’m fighting a losing battle,” he writes just after our heroes have touched down. “I can’t tell this story the way it should be told.” He’s the narrator equivalent of a buzz kill. But when he gets out of the way, he knows how to wrangle powerful moments from history.

PARIS, I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN
By Rosecrans Baldwin
286 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

The writerly path from America to Paris is so trampled at this point, what more could there be to say about the experience? Probably not much, but Mr. Baldwin’s snapshot of the 18 months he and his wife spent there while he worked at an ad agency and wrote his first novel (“You Lost Me There”) is at least taken with a high-quality, sharply focused lens. “Living in Paris while barely speaking French was like drinking coffee through a veil,” Mr. Baldwin writes. One sad expat is said to feel her loneliness “like stomach rolls, forming over who she’d been.” Mr. Baldwin also gives the pompous city he adores the ribbing it deserves. “Every Parisian man wore a scarf,” he observes. “Some even wore coats.” As with any deep connection, he recognizes Paris’s shortcomings, which makes him love it all the more.