Easy, readers

A poet friend was on her way to Spain last month, and called the day before the flight to ask what novels I might recommend. Given that the criteria for international travel are different from those for, say, a trip to a Maine lake, we factored in the usual cross-cultural components: Must be lightweight enough, literally, to justify being hauled thousands of miles; must be substantial enough for the same reason; must be transcendent enough to yank one out of an existential crisis if one is found staggering on the streets of Cordoba alone. She wound up with two slender, eminently deserving novels: Philip Roth's "Everyman" and Ian McEwan's "Saturday" -- one by an American and one by a Brit, the first about the decline of life and the second about its advance . Altogether, I hoped , she would find them a lovely set of bookends for the mind. She called a week later to say her host had made off with both works, so she had returned to the primary source, and was writing poems instead.