
Watch Your Manors
A new novel by Peter Cameron doesn’t do much to announce itself as a literary event. His books are short—only one, The City of Your Final Destination, is longer than three hundred pages—and are not consciously “brainy.” Their chief literary virtues are wit, charm, and lightness of touch, qualities infrequently found in contemporary American fiction except in ersatz form, as twee quirkiness. Cameron is above all a novelist of manners, building his effects from the drama and comedy of human relationships, working always on a small scale, so it has been tempting to treat his books as “