“The Long Room” is uncannily reminiscent of “Jill,” by Philip Larkin, about a provincial boy who goes up to Oxford with high hopes, only to be overwhelmed by loneliness and longing, a sense that life is something that goes on elsewhere, in sparkling rooms he glimpses from the street. “Who told the long-limbed boys, the Greenwoods and the Bennet-Gilmours of this world, the Buckinghams, that asparagus is eaten with the fingers not a fork?” No nation has produced this kind of aching query with a hundredth of the frequency of England, whose great original sin is class, as America’s is slavery. Stephen’s ressentiment drives him to more and more desperate choices, less and less realistically, culminating in an absurd and anticlimactic trip across the country. But the grace of Kay’s voice is hypnotizing, and there are moments when her empathy for Stephen makes them seem barely divisible. Spies and writers are both paid to notice, after all.

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If there’s a golden mean between Child’s crisp technique and Kay’s melancholy, lovely one, the English novelist James Lasdun may have found it in his exceptionally entertaining new book, THE FALL GUY (Norton, $25.95). It’s a cross of literary fiction, thriller and mystery; as David Shields has said, and as good writers realize quickly, “genre is a minimum-security prison.” Maybe the title places it most accurately: Lasdun, after the pathogenic proliferation of Girls in crime fiction — gone ones, good ones, train ones, through glass ones — offers us two guys with enigmatic motives, in restrained competition over a woman to whom one of them is married. Which of them will be the fall guy?

Their names are Charlie and Matthew, and they are cousins whose friendship dates to their London school days, though both now live in New York. Charlie is rich and married, Matthew poor and at loose ends, obsessively reading his dead father’s copy of Pascal’s “Pensées,” trying to figure out where things went wrong, and so Charlie and his wife, Chloe, invite Matthew to stay for the summer in the guesthouse of their wooded mountainside retreat. From the start there’s a febrile mood to this ad hoc household, languorous poolside mornings, friends coming over to drink a bit too much. Matthew has a secret feeling of closeness with Chloe, not even precisely sexual, which makes her sacred to him, “an idealized composite in whom daughter, sister, cousin, mother, mistress, friend and mystical other half were all miraculously commingled.”

When he discovers that she’s being unfaithful, then, he’s bereft. Does he confront her? Charlie? Both of them? There’s something reptilian in Lasdun’s gaze, a coldblooded interest in furtiveness, in the lithe selfishness of the genteel. “The Fall Guy” reads like early Ian McEwan or late Patricia Highsmith, and while often novelists who write as finely as he does seem to feel above what Jonathan Franzen once called the “stoop work” of narrative, Lasdun is masterly in his story’s construction. His clues never seem like clues until they bind tightly around one of the three leads. This is exactly what a literary thriller should be: intelligent, careful, swift, unsettling. Its author deserves to find more readers on these shores.

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Pascal, who acts as Greek chorus to “The Fall Guy,” said that all of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room. That might also be the motto of Cenzo, an Italian fisherman waiting out the last days of World War II in Martin Cruz Smith’s novel THE GIRL FROM VENICE (Simon & Schuster, $27). “I’ve declared myself an official coward,” Cenzo says. “I intend to outlive this war and the next.” This seems like a sure sign that a lot of stuff is about to happen to him.