Defeat Is Agonizing. In These 2 Books, It’s Also Thrilling.

Dear readers,

I am not an ideal viewer of major sporting events for many reasons, but one in particular is how terrible I inevitably feel, beyond all reason and actual personal investment, for the losing team. While confetti and Gatorade rain down on the champions of whatever Super Bowl/World Series/Grand Prix, my eyes always go to the runners-up.

Objectively, I know that the defeated ones are in almost every other regard already winners: fit gods with ropy quads, admired, adored and no doubt absurdly well compensated. And yet here they sit with slumped shoulders and wet eyes, like small boys left at a bus stop. Oh, cruel world!

Fiction, though, is another story. Give me your losers and laggards, your pokey puppies who limbo right under rock-bottom expectations and then have to go home and lie down. For a few hours at least, novels with protagonists like these allow me, one of so many busy bees in New York City’s go-go honeycomb, to flail vicariously, a smug literary tourist among the lonely-hearts and lost souls.

To be clear, that is in no way a synonym for storytelling that is inert or hopeless or dull. The main characters in this week’s selections may lead lives of quiet desperation or mere beige mediocrity, but their tales are told with sharpness and verve, real flair in the failure.

—Leah