For those, we need increasingly to turn to newspapers, or to non-fiction.In the latest case the author is Joyce Maynard, and the subject is her own nine-month unhappy love affair with the celebrated recluse J D Salinger. It used to be be that the novel was the forum for discussion of love - love won, love lost, love thwarted or thrown out of whack. There aren't many great novels in the world that do not have at least some roots in the simplest story of all: boy meets girl. Jack found time for an affair with Lee Bouvier, his wife's sister, while Bobby capped this with a tempestuous romance with his brother's widow in 1964.The po-faced may tut-tut over all the lubricious detail in Heymann's biography, but satyriasis is a central aspect of the truth about the Kennedys If ever there was sex addiction, here it is. According to Heymann, the Kennedys were prepared to play for the other side too, and he instances homosexual contacts between Jack and one Lem Billings and between Bobby and Rudolf Nureyev.

One cannot help feeling that if the Kennedy libido had somehow been crosswired with that of Warren Beatty and a handful of other satyrs and a way found to channel their urges into electrical energy, the USA would have had no need to build Three Mile Island. but now what?) And finally we began to hear rumbles from America of a fresh outbreak of memoiritis, a modern affliction in which an autobiographer is simultaneously vaunted and castigated for revealing more than some might have wished or deemed proper. There are several topsy-turvy aspects to this rash of literary news. Then came news of the lifting of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a tangible enough victory for free expression for anyone to be going on with, even if it did inspire many of the same nervous feelings we have when a hostage is released (great news ... It's hard to imagine Fred ever set foot in Gloucester's public library. What would he be doing there? Returning a Don DeLillo novel on Rose's behalf, perhaps?"People tend to bury bodies near their homes," says Burns, forgetting that people do no such thing because they seldom have any bodies to dispose of.

Fred and Rose were exceptional but that does not make them very interesting.. A week is a long time in literature. At the beginning we had the Starr Report, a classic drama of adultery in high places, if ever there was one. Then, in London, came the announcement of the Booker Prize shortlist, an annual ritual that inspires a routine burst of light-hearted acrimony about the relative loftiness or small-mindedness (take your pick) of the so-called judges appointed to decide such matters. For different reasons The Private Life of Fred West would not make up many pages.