The diagnoses of the death of the novel one leaves to boors. You and I know that the form counts upon iridescence for its vitality,” John Cheever said in an open letter to Elizabeth Hardwick in The New York Review of Books a few years ago. “One never, of course, asks is it a novel? One asks is it interesting and interest connotes suspense, emotional involvement and a sustained claim on one’s attention.” I’m faced with three new novels that exasperated me. But interested me, yes—enough to make me question my prejudices and reread them. I wanted to like Barry Hannah’s The Tennis Handsome (Knopf) and Russell Hoban’s Pilgermann (Summit) because I’d admired books by them before. I believe Isabel Eberstadt published a first novel twenty years ago she seems to have disowned. I didn’t read it, and Natural Victims (Knopf) is the work of a writer new to me.

Barry Hannah’s The Tennis Handsome is 170 pages long, and its first 53 pages reprint two of the best stories from his 1978 collection, Airships. “Return to Return” was—and remains—a disturbing story about a tennis champion, brain-damaged by near drowning, who continues to win tournaments with the almost entire absence of a mind. French Edward is “a man who moved as if animal secrets were known to him.” In “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet,” Bobby Smith remembered as the happiest moment of his life seeing French Edward get out of a car with a woman on his arm.

Now, as a soldier in Vietnam: “The picture of French Edward about to hit that ball at Forest Hills was stuck in my head. There was such care in his eyes, and it was only a tennis ball, a goddamned piece of store-bought bounce. But it was wonderful and nobody was being killed. The tears were out on my jaws then. Here we shot each other up. It seemed to me my life had gone straight from teenage giggling to horror. I had never had time to be but two things, a giggler and a killer.”

One never asks is it a novel, Cheever said, and I don’t ask that as I watch Hannah invent supplementary episodes involving French Edward and Bobby Smith. We remeet the homosexual Dr. Word, who was French’s earliest tennis coach and fell in love with French’s mother; the manic Dr. Baby Levaster continues to manage French’s tennis career with ramshackle concern. But I do notice and worry about a repetition of effects. Hannah combines in a way entirely his own a fastidious verbal coolness and a taste for rambunctious physical slapstick. It’s the slapstick that’s getting forced and monotonous. It’s not enough that Dr. Word must stumble upon his beloved Olive Edward in bed with Dr. Levaster; he must then stagger out into the street and be attacked by dogs. Men keel over in a faint at least once too often at the sight of female pudenda. One of Hannah’s rude notions, though, makes me laugh: struck by lightning on the tennis court in mid-match, French Edward recovers his faculties sufficiently to begin composing terrible poems, which he reads on a disc-jockey program, to Dr. Levaster’s mortification.

Meanwhile Hannah quietly notices details with funny precision: the manageress of a sporting-goods store, for instance, “a big-breasted solemnity with frozen tall hydra curls, talented at being curt to poor white trash as only poor white trash itself can be.” He does a wonderful sketch of a failed southern politician, one Dardanell Emile: “a man who had run for every kind of city office and lost, though his campaign expenses were staggering. It was the age of video that had ruined him, he was such a slob and looked it. Also, his command of English was disturbing. He had a way of inventing verbs when difficult matters of perception arose. ‘These monies will be tabered out to greatier need persons, who must always evate in the priorities,’ he had offered during a debate for the office of something or other.”

There is an equally delicious wrestling match, pitting the Nuclear Physics Brothers against the Irish Channel Twins: “Three minutes into the brawl, the Nuclear Physics Brothers had isolated a single Twin and were blinding him with their thumbs. The other Twin, eaten up by distress, waited honorably outside the ring, untagged. The referee was rendered impotent by the deceptions of the Brothers. Finally, the sighted Twin, his honor exasperated totally, leapt into the ring with a chair in his hands and broke it—this balsa prop—over both heads of the Brothers, routing all their wicked science. The referee, himself fraudulently wounded, tried to restore order but could not. This was the thing most beloved. A profound and blissful howling of the crowd. This time the blinded law allowed the rage of the good to run wild. The Brothers were dismantled and at last were pitched out of the ring altogether, retreating with a craven petulance, citing the rules, smacked by a rain of peanuts and balled cups, hurling back their own weak, faggoty imprecations.” When Hannah gets going like this, there’s almost nobody I would rather read. But The Tennis Handsome is a spotty, disappointing book. Hannah is a virtuoso who’s most effective when he isn’t trying too hard for knee-slappers.

“The visible rich,” according to Isabel Eberstadt, “are natural victims.” This is not a view popularly held, but Eberstadt succeeds to a remarkable degree in interesting us in the tribulations of Sis Melmore, a woman no longer young but still very beautiful: “She had the indefinable stamp on her of one forever photographed and reported on; one who would always be met with a car, waited on first, given the best table, the room with a view.” Mrs. Melmore comes to Paris in search of her mentally disturbed daughter, Sarah. After a brief street encounter in which Sarah utters the word “Murderer!” and vanishes, her mother must depend on cryptic phone calls for news of her; and she undertakes an independent investigation without consulting the authorities. She fills in her waiting time by looking up her expatriate sister, and the first of several awkwardnesses in the novel is their sharing of family history since they last met. For far too long a time we seem to sit through the first act of a play in which characters tell each other things we feel they must surely have heard before, even if we haven’t: “I gather drama school didn’t work out in the end for Sarah? And she had—another nervous breakdown?”

Eberstadt has also arranged a dark family secret: a shooting in which the victim happened to suffer a heart attack at the moment the gun went off, thus enabling the family doctor to sign a death certificate leaving the gunshot wound unmentioned.The very rich are different from you and me, and who are we to say that such an event couldn’t happen and such a certificate couldn’t be arranged? But the convenience to the novelist—who obtains a Big Scene without the police coming in and muddying the carpets of the mansion—seems like abuse of fictional privilege. There’s a similar lack of consequence about the big explosion that ends the novel, blowing a major character sky-high, while the others are able to book seats on the Concorde and fly out of Paris before any investigation takes place.

Natural Victims is a romance about plausibly beautiful people instead of the serious novel it seems at times to be. Eberstadt efficiently keeps us in doubt about the motives of the people in whose care—or captivity—Sarah is held. She gives Mrs. Melmore a pleasing sentimental interlude with a handsome artist; and she is particularly sharp with two hysterical young men, one a scarred would-be movie actor, the other a pathetic hanger-on on the fringe of Paris high society: we listen to them avidly. She deftly takes Mrs. Melmore to a pretentious Paris party: “Oh, no! There was that fashion couple she loathed—Marina and Gregory. They were most noted for being the object of a wisecrack she couldn’t remember anymore. She never remembered jokes.” Eberstadt is a canny chronicler of high life; the deeper notes she tries to strike—of family anguish, of the miseries of the rich—aren’t profoundly affecting.

Of these three novels, Pilgermann is the severest trial. Russell Hoban is an American living in England who first made his reputation with children’s books. In Riddley Walker, one of the best novels of 1981, he sent a youth walking across the ruined landscape of Inland, after the “great barm”—a flash of light that had been followed by centuries of post-atomic ignorance. Riddley’s quest required the reader to learn a new language based on English: writing had only recently been relearned, and Riddley’s spelling was a rusty approximation of sounds handed down during the dark centuries, with only dim recollection of what the words signified in an earlier civilization. The effect was something like a Joycean recasting of Huckleberry Finn. The witty, adventurous book gave me great pleasure. But friends who told me they had to give up Riddley Walker after a few pages needn’t attempt Pilgermann, a more daring, demanding work. I almost gave it up myself on a first try.

As soon as Pilgermann announced, “What my name was when I was walking around in the shape of a man I don’t know, I simply can’t remember. What I am now is waves and particles, I don’t need to walk around, I just go. When I want to appear I turn up as an owl,” I knew I was in trouble. The disembodied voice continues: “I don’t know what I am now. A whispering out of the dust. Dried blood on a sword and the sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world, still I have something to say, how could it be otherwise, nothing comes to an end, the action never stops, it only changes, the ringing of the steel is sung in the stillness of the stone.... I am only the waves and particles of such as I was but I have a covenant with the Lord, the terms of it are simple: everything is required of me, forever.”

Eloquent as this rhetoric is, an alarm goes off in my head. A first-person narrative is hard enough to control; if time is abolished, as it just has been, then there will be no narrative and this voice will bombinate in a void. For how many pages will we be able to stand this?

Sure enough, Pilgermann tells us we are in for meditation, not story: “I can’t tell this as a story because it isn’t a story; a story is what remains when you leave out most of the action; a story is a coherent sequence of picture cards.” It was at this moment when Pilgermann more or less told me to go to hell, if a story was what I was looking for, that I decided to stick with Hoban’s novel. What action, as distinguished from story, could he mean?

Though we are balked in almost every conventional fictional expectation, there is a semblance of story. Pilgermann was a Jew, somewhere in Germanic Europe, in the eleventh century, who was castrated by Christian villagers and set off toward Jerusalem on the First Crusade. Despite warnings that “Jerusalem will be wherever I am when the end comes,” we incorrigibly expect him to reach his destination and are perplexed when the book ends at Antioch, during the 1098 siege by Christians under the command of Bohemond.

On Pilgermann’s journey toward Jerusalem, he meets Death, who gazes at him with “that peculiarly attentive sidelong look seen in self-portraits.” He meets his own death, seen as a young man growing to maturity during his travels and arousing in Pilgermann a paternal affection. With timeless access, Pilgermann is able to conjure up the future work of Hieronymus Bosch, “the master of what is seen out of the comer of the mind, the essential reality behind the agreed-on appearance of things. ” There is a Boschian grotesqueness in Pilgermann’s encounters with the village tax collector who witnessed his castration; with the village pig who ate his genitals; with children raped by death figures as they journey to the Holy Land— they will become pregnant with their own deaths, it’s explained to Pilgermann, and they will die on the road.

The action of the book, one gradually learns, is a wrangle with the God who permits this. Pilgermann speculates that God may be omnipresent but not omnipatient. He is compared with “some lowly mortal novelist” who keeps writing slaughter scenes: “The character gets out of hand; X, having been called the chosen, presumes too much, grows excessively familiar, requires too much of God, becomes like the relative who turns up uninvited on the doorstep to stay for a month.... He sometimes needs to make a little space around himself and Pfft! there go a few hundred or a few million X. ”

Yet: “What style God has!” Pilgermann exclaims about a deity in whom I can’t believe but with whom Hoban’s novel, at least temporarily, engaged me. “What a truly godlike extravagance, to burst out all at once with a universe in which everything is going at once and humankind is let run with nothing to stop it from doing anything at all.”

Arrived in Antioch, Pilgermann designs a patterned courtyard, of which a diagram is supplied, that becomes an emblem for the novel: “However one looked at the pattern there could be no doubt that the stillness had become motion.” There’s vibration of a peculiar kind in this still, odd book. Like it or not—and I came, rather reluctantly, to admire it—it is completely, seamlessly imagined.