This quiet, slim novel is painfully well written and also, I think, a testament to how, as modern readers, our brains are being altered by technology. In 2008 The Atlantic published an article called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that explored the cognitive effects the Internet has on our brains. One of the article’s arguments is that the wired-in network world makes us less contemplative.

On the other hand, neuroscientists more recently are demonstrating on the beneficial effects of reading fiction. As the NY Times reported, brain scans that measure what happens when we read “a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between character” suggest that reading literary fiction stimulates the brain and affects how we behave.

Enter Farmer. The entire project of this novel seems to be contemplation. Set in rural Michigan in the 1950s, the novel is about a 43-year-old farmer and schoolteacher named Joseph who has a bum leg and stands at a crossroads: His mother is dying, his school is closing, and everyone is urging him to marry his long-time girlfriend. He also has struck up a relationship with a 17-year-old student, which complicates things.

Despite the drama of the above synopsis, most of the novel’s prose is dedicated to quiet meditation and careful observations of the world on the farm. The first chapter opens, “Ground ivy, glecoma hedereceae, or called gill-over-the-ground: it spread from the pump shed attached to the kitchen out to the barnyard where it disappeared under cow and horse hooves and the frenetic scratching of chickens.”

Later in that same chapter, Joseph’s sisters grow nostalgic while looking at old photos. Joseph’s attitude is that the “dead were irresistible, another planet so near but invisible to earth, whose gravity turned and colored the steps of the living.” The novel is filled with precise descriptions and poignant observations.

Joseph’s story is engaging and moving, and Farmer is reminiscent of other contemplative novels in which not much happens, in particular John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain, Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Robinson’s fiction has won numerous prizes, so can’t argue readers don’t appreciate quiet fiction any longer, but when you read the newspaper headlines or consider the idle chatter on Facebook and Twitter, it does make you wonder what kind of a future there is for writers like Jim Harrison, whose interest seems to lie in looking at the world, describing what he sees and considering what it means.

Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil predict a looming technological singularity, where humans and machines will merge into god-like superhumans with direct mind-to-network access. Words like “contemplation” and “meditation” seem quaint when you consider what life will be like with a metaphorical Google-chip embedded in our brains, but for now, Farmer is a pleasant reminder of what serious fiction is capable of.

Tana French has written three novels—In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place—with a fourth on the way this summer. All of them are police procedurals set in and around Dublin, and each is told by a different member of the murder or undercover squads.

I read In the Woods in a single day, and immediately bought the next two and read them within the week. Each novel is about a different mystery, so there’s no reason to read them in order, though it is interesting to see how French develops as a writer and how each new narrator lives up to and defies the perspective from the previous narrator.

In the Woods is narrated by Rob, a murder squad detective, who as a child was one of three kids to go into the woods. He was the only one to make it out, with blood on his shoes and no memory of what happened, and the other two children disappeared. Now, Rob and his partner, Cassie, are sent in to investigate the murder of a child in those same woods.

This is a well-plotted mystery, and French keeps you turning the pages even when you think you know what happened. What separates French’s work from the average mystery is her attention to language and her verisimilitude. She evokes the characters and the setting with an attention to craft that reminded me of The Wire.

Her one weak spot, in this first novel, is that you occasionally can tell the author is a woman writing as a man. Rob is a self-destructive character, but French takes pains to explain away his purely Platonic interest in his partner—and that over-convincing borders on overcompensation.

That challenge is alleviated in The Likeness, overall a more confidently written novel told from Cassie’s point of view. In a Wicklow village outside Dublin, a young woman is murdered, and she’s the spitting image of Cassie. Since the police have no suspects and no motives, Cassie goes undercover into the woman’s life (the woman, herself living under an assumed name, roomed with four Trinity students in a spooky old house) to see what she can dig up.

As with In the Woods, The Likeness is a quick read and a well-written novel. The situation is completely unrealistic, but given the situation, French totally convinces you of everything that follows. What’s more, part of the intrigue is that you, like Cassie, are able to go undercover, to experience the dangers of being found out, and to see first-hand the menace of Ireland’s class tensions, which are rooted in the history of English rule and Protestant ascendancy.

Faithful Place leaves the murder squad for the life of Frank Mackey, who runs undercover operations. Frank grew up in a rough tenement neighborhood in Dublin, and he left home for good at nineteen when his girlfriend abandoned him for England—or so he thought. Twenty-two years later, he receives a call from his sister; they’ve found his girlfriend’s suitcase in an abandoned tenement, and he goes home to investigate, and in the process he must reckon with his crazy family and the childhood he thought he left years ago.

Frank might be French’s most intriguing narrator. He’s smart and cunning and has fewer moral scruples than her previous narrators. While this novel, ultimately, has the same combination of police investigation and psychological exploration as her first two, her prose is more confident still, and her attention to the nuances of place—treated obliquely in her first two—is fully realized.

This is a long, lyrical novel set in Istanbul. I read Snow a few years ago but didn’t blog about it. It’s a good place to start with Pamuk, because you get his lyricism but also a bigger, political vision of Turkey. The Black Book is more self-contained, more an homage to the city. The afterward says it’s set in 1980 during a politically charged time, though I don’t know the first thing about Turkish history, so the politics went right over my head.

The plot is set up like a detective novel: Galip’s wife writes a cursory note and then disappears. She may have run off with Galip’s cousin, Celal, a political newspaper columnist with a huge following. Galip goes around the city trying to find them, and he enters Celal’s life and begins writing his columns. He spends his nights in one of Celal’s many apartments, and begins fielding threats from an obsessed reader. The danger rises.

Unlike a detective novel, however, The Black Book is a dense, postmodern gambit about identity and the nature of storytelling. Every other chapter is one of Celal’s columns (which after a while, I began skimming and then skipping altogether when they got boring). And Galip finds himself ruminating over truth and fiction, and telling stories in bars, and considering Celal’s fame as a product of the story he’s told about being a native of Istanbul.

I say “gambit” because it reminds me of Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. I skimmed plenty through The Black Book, through places where I saw what he was up to but that I wasn’t getting much out of, but the ending is well worth the patience to reach. I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a kind of new layer added to everything, involving the narrator of the story, which is strange and interesting.

Mr. Bridge is a lovely companion to Mrs. Bridge (see below). Following the same years and many of the same events, Mr. Bridge gives us a new window on the Bridges’ lives, from a different perspective. I felt like I knew all of these characters already, but it was interesting to get the husband’s perspective. Early on, Mr. Bridge ruminates about his life at home with his wife and his life at work with his secretary:

My life is cut in half. The halves remain side by side in perfect equilibrium like halves of a melon. I suppose the same is true of most men. Or are they somehow unlike me? Are they able to share themselves?

In this novel we see some of Mr. Bridge’s other half. Whereas Mrs. Bridge’s perspective is one of confusion, and in the earlier novel Mr. Bridge is a shadow figure, here you get the other side of the man’s life. Still, we’re not let into his psyche as much as we are Mrs. Bridge’s. In one memorable scene here, a man tries to rob him, saying, “Stick ‘em up,” and Mr. Bridge walks on casually, saying, “Don’t be ridiculous.” Why? On the one hand, it’s clear to us what motivates Mr. Bridge and what he’s thinking; on the other hand, he’s an odd mixture, both astute about business and the ways of the world, and incredibly simpleminded and obtuse. Connell is aware of Mr. Bridge’s flaws, and because the novel, published in 1969, is set in the 1930s, we get that historical lens filtered with a layer of irony. For instance, Connell allows Mr. Bridge to think that while Hitler must be stopped, not all of his ideas are bad. What can you do with a man like that? Understand him, sympathize to a certain extent, but keep your distance.

By reading Mrs. Bridge, I feel like I’ve joined an elite club of writers who know about this novel. Maybe I’m wrong, but I rarely hear anyone discuss Connell, and I’ve never seen him on a course syllabus. But this is a stunning novel. I can’t speak highly enough about it: Mrs. Bridge is stunning, both for its artistry and for its technique.

The story is easy enough to summarize: Mrs. Bridge is a somewhat lonely and confused housewife and mother of three in Kansas City in the 1930s. Her husband is a lawyer who works long hours, and her children are basically decent kids who as they grow up grow emotionally distant from their mother. Over the course of 20 years or so, Mrs. Bridge gets married, goes to Auxiliary club meetings, badgers her children, and tries to deal with the boredom of not having enough to do (they have a housekeeper and cook who does most of the housework).

In short, not much actually happens here. But the novel is told in very short vignettes, and each scene builds a picture of who this character is. Connell employs a third-person, somewhat distant voice, which allows for an element of satire, though not so much that you don’t care for the characters. And the restrained voice perfectly suits the subject, for the milieu — the bored upper class suburbs — is one of restraint.

You’ll know within 10 pages if this is a novel you’d want to finish. But if you enjoy Jonathan Franzen or Charles Baxter, you’ll really enjoy Evan S. Connell, who paved the way for them.