Way back in June, you might recall, I announced vague intentions of a regular feature in this space, in which new and forthcoming books which had given the editorial staff some pleasure in our desultory page-flippery would be lauded for their particular beauties.

And then, of course, silence. While the four or five regular visitors to this space are likely to have been unsurprised by the slow pace of your reviewer's essays, all of us here nevertheless feel the jagged aluminum spurs of shame digging into our sides as we contemplate the pathetic output in the recommendation department.

A quick little ditty, then, in an attempt to cling to our self-appointed status as Praise-singer to the Worthy:

Arthur Phillips, The Egyptologist.

I never read the author's somewhat-ballyhooed first novel, a fact which I will have to remedy following the pleasant time I had with his second. Comparisons to Borges, Nabokov, and Pynchon -- my natural points of reference for a novel in which duelingly unreliable narrators unwind a mordantly hilarious shaggy-mummy story about a hidden tomb in 1920s Egypt, the legacy of a sexually obsessed Pharaoh, and an Australian boy with a monstrous drive for self-invention -- are misleading if for a reader like me inevitable. The Egyptologist reads like none of the above, and more to the point never makes the mistake of trying too hard to do so.

Instead, it's all breezily assured storytelling, mounting creepiness, and the kind of verbal style at play in the narrator's voice that forces me to use the word "droll." The eccentrically self-absorbed hero Ralph Trilipush has an instantly identifiable wrongness about him, and to tell you now that is to spoil nothing. By the time Phillips actually has us digging in the whereabouts of Howard Carter's famous uncovery of King Tut, the hieroglyphics on the wall are pretty recognizable pictures. But one is relentlessly driven to keep reading to the end, to lurch forward into the dark space uncovered in the sand, whatever one's suspicions are about what's inside. Utterly unsentimental and delightfully smart, and quite thoroughly unlike almost anything else that's come across my desk this year.

Next up: Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature