Spent five years at school struggling to learn a foreign language, and still have trouble ordering five beers and a croque monsieur? Instant translators now available on the Net promise a way out of monolingual hell. Cleared of murder but denied access to his wife and daughter, Lawrence embarks on an ocean-liner cruise which makes Polanski's Bitter Moon look like The Love Boat. Seduced by a cabaret singer (possibly transsexual), Lawrence discovers obsessive love, only to lose the object of his passion when they disembark on the Virgin Islands due to a conveniently unpredictable tiger attack. Gale treads a thin line between the surreal and the just plain silly, but once we are firmly in the land of ludicrousness, the reader can sit back and enjoy the ride.There is still not nearly enough of the bitter wit and sharply driven language that made his earlier works so riotously enjoyable. Gale's fans - he numbers Stephen Fry and Armistead Maupin among them - may well enjoy this book, but newcomers to his work would be advised to start elsewhere..

Be wary of novelists whose characters say "would of" for "would have". As often as not, it's a condescending nudge to demonstrate how poor and ignorant the speaker is. Oddly, the narrator of Stewart O'Nan's The Speed Queen (Viking, pounds 9.99) begins by saying "would've" and "would have", but by the end of the novel she is reduced to "would of". A subtle register of growing alienation and despair, or inattention? There's more than a little condescension about the way O'Nan writes his character. On Death Row waiting to hear whether her final appeal is to be upheld, she spends her time answering questions posed by a novelist (one Stephen King) who has bought the rights to her life story. The text is presented as a transcript of her replies, spoken into a tape recorder. Although I doubt if King gave his blessing to this project, O'Nan's narrator is a connoisseur of his fiction, able to relate incidents in her own bloody life to this or that King novel. Her narrative voice is deadpan, only revealing passion as she runs through the various modes of capital punishment available around the world.

If she's going to die in prison, she wants a death that will make a good story.O'Nan's take on the desire for celebrity has the cold mortician's touch familiar from Warhol to Mapplethorpe, and his numbing lack of passion induces its own tension Yet it's hard not to feel his disdain for his narrator. No law says that authors have to like their characters, but it's not a good idea to sneer at their lumpen efforts to get by.By contrast, James Wilcox's Sort of Rich (Fourth Estate, pounds 6.99) seems quite cosy. In Tula Springs, deep in Louisiana, comfort and wealth lend life a distracted air Nothing much happens, slowly and agreeably. Frank Dambar has married Gretchen, a New York socialite who never manages to make sense of Louisiana Bemused, she tries to fill her days with meaningful events. When unexpected death intervenes, Gretchen briefly manages to focus but soon loses the thread in alcohol's pleasant blur. There's a matter here for savage anger, but Wilcox likes his characters too well.