I tried to read Jonathan Franzen’s latest story in the New Yorker, “Agreeable,” and I had to abandon it on the first page. I usually try to soldier through with the fiction, but he’s shameless in loading the deck for his protagonists, employing characterization that’s about as nuanced as a Snidely Whiplash appearance on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show.

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John Crowley’s “Little, Big” is a sprawling, lyrical fantasy epic. It is a work of high style, one Crowley executes with skill rare for the genre. He teases his sentences into precise, beautiful forms, situating them the page like typeface origami. Even if his phrases are occasionally overdone, they often succeed in shaping fresh metaphors, new views onto a created world.

Crowley’s fantasy setting strays far from common touchstones of elves and named swords. It is fixed in myths and prophecies, a fairy world at the edge of sight. The story revolves around Edgewood, a mysterious house designed by an older architect as a beacon for his younger wife—and perhaps the fairies she communes with. It is isolated, anchoring a pastoral community at some distance from a big city.

A family—a tribe, really—has grown there. They stand in uncertain commune with the spirits surrounding them, unsure, it seems, whether they exist at all. Some can see these visitors better than others—the women and children, mostly—but no one can explain their visions. It’s all part of a larger Tale, they assure the bewildered outsiders who come to follow love and father children. No one will know the deeper meaning until it’s over.

Crowley succeeds in building a familiar, but unknowable, society, especially at the outset. His family feels organic; his house, lived in. He sketches a mystery, leaving you eager to find a solution.

But the book falters later. Like its characters, it ends up re-treading beautiful, circular paths of the imagination. The characters’ confidence in what is written—the larger Tale—grounds them in a frustrating passivity. They are acted upon, by human and unknown forces, but they rarely seem to act themselves. Crowley’s male protagonists are especially inert, hapless wonderers content to lapdog along. Toward the end, when the characters arrange themselves on their pre-set paths, it’s increasingly uncertain why they choose to acquiesce. Rationalizations are offered, touching upon passion and duty, but these are spoken rather than felt.

Crowley is at his best with beginnings, notably the piercing passion of early love. He writes with a sure eroticism, luxuriating in reckless idleness, time spent unheeded in beds and bars. His willingness to leave “the Tale” here is energizing, and some of the book’s biggest disappointments come when we’re forced back into the larger narrative.

“Little, Big” is suffused with blunt mysticism, the heavy strivings of Crowley’s attempts to establish an unknowable world. The book is dense and beautiful, offering the delights of realized ambition. But it is also a chore, losing its way at times as it meanders within itself. If you accept it as a journey, you’ll find many rewards. As a destination, its value is less certain.

Lapham’s Quarterly has a fun infographic showing the day jobs of writers including Faulkner, Kafka and T.S. Eliot.

James Patterson’s “Witch and Wizard” could be summed up as Harry Potter meets 1984, except without any vision, effort or grace. The plot revolves around two teens dragged from their parents by the totalitarian “New World Order.” Prison, terror, ham-handed magic, and kewl “if teenagers ran the world” mythmaking follow before the book reverts to its opening cliffhanger, setting the way for the obligatory—and unnecessary—sequel.

What makes the book so objectionable? The first strike is the obvious lack of effort that went into its creation. Most chapters expire after two–four pages of rote plot progression. None of the characters are fleshed out; the lead voices narrate away in a kind of dashed-off “teen speak.”

Their powers are applied arbitrarily, without any notion of struggle or growth. The villains are single-note enough to be deemed unworthy of “24” fan fiction. The plot leans on tired “chosen one” tropes, the rules of this “New World” are never established, and the betrayals and retreats read like so much plot padding.

Most offensive, though, is the book’s cheap borrowing of totalitarian/eliminationist themes. The New World Order and its prisons knowingly evoke gulags and concentration camps, complete with torture and executions. But the book constantly undermines the weight of its references by failing to consistently apply their menace. The narrators shrug off torture and murder as another total bummer. Quislings are redeemed without the satisfaction of guilt, and the monstrous laws of the New World Order are equipped with a few booming loopholes to enable lazy writing.

“Witch and Wizard” plays out like a cash grab that was written and conceived in the same three-day weekend. The plot summary on Wikipedia offers as much style as the novel itself and is much less insulting to the reader’s intelligence.

My Wild Kingdom is the autobiography of former Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom host (and Lincoln Park Zoo director) Marlin Perkins. The narrative is linear, starting with his Missouri boyhood and moving on to far-flung expeditions scuba diving with sharks and snowmobiling alongside reindeer migrations.

The early parts are compelling, as Perkins remembers a pre-Depression childhood, conjuring an era and setting that still carry a whiff of the frontier. He works his way across the country, starting his career with animals by dropping out of college to take a job at the St. Louis Zoo.

As a narrator, Perkins is confident and straightforward, offering recollection without much reflection. His lifelong love of animals–particularly snakes–is tempered with a blunt collector’s approach that can seem exploitative today. While the book bogs down a bit at the close with details of filming Wild Kingdom, he remains intriguing and approachable throughout, particularly for fans of animals.