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\"In this comic novel, our hero, Midwesterner Louie Hake, tries to prop up the failing prospects of happiness in his career and marriage by setting out abroad on what he calls his Journey of a Lifetime. Louie is 43, teaches architecture at a third-rate college in Michigan, and faced with a collapsing second marriage and a potentially disastrous medical diagnosis, he decides to undertake a high-minded tour of the world's most spectacular architecture sites: Italy, Turkey, India, Japan. But Louie gets waylaid--ludicrously, spectacularly so. After a stab at a new romance with a jilted bride alone on her honeymoon in London, he somehow winds up in the high Arctic, where the architectural tradition seems sad and laughable. (Turf houses? Corrugated aluminum sheds?) But it turns out there's another sort of architecture at play here--ice bergs the size of cathedrals--bobbing beside a strange and wondrous landscape. As it slowly grows clear, Louie's Grand Journey is a trip through his much-bungled romantic past. Whether pursuing by email his estranged present wife (co-habiting with a sexy playwright in the Virgin Islands), or his first wife (newly engaged to someone else), or an older woman he kissed once a quarter-century ago, Louie is both ridiculous and touching. A novel that is both funny and moving, a serious look into the Midwestern soul in crisis\"-- Provided by publisher.

Where [Scott Turow] unmistakably shines is in his evocation and explanation of the legal process, in all its ever-ramifying moves and countermoves. Books of the sort that Turow writes are sometimes labeled courtroom thrillers, but surely few practitioners of the genre can invest the term, as he does, with an ancillary, literal reality: Here's an author clearly thrilled by the rarefied drama of the courtroom. The shelves of airport bookstores are chockablock with what purport to be courtroom thrillers, most of them composed by writers who patently lack the patience, intelligence and first- hand familiarity that Turow brings to the field.

The business of predicting chess outcomes is greatly facilitated by an international rating scheme called the FIDE system, based upon performance in sanctioned tournaments. Deep Thought's rating would be approximately 2450-2500, which places it among the top 30 players in the country. [Gary Kasparov]'s rating, recently elevated to about 2800, is the highest in the history of ratings - he has exceeded even Bobby Fischer in his prime. Uncertainties arise, however, when a machine rather than a person is being evaluated. Deep Thought has achieved some signal victories, including one over the Danish veteran Bent Larsen, once a contender for world champion. But how much were these the product of intrinsic prowess, and how much of human jitteriness before a radically unfamiliar opponent? Of course Kasparov is not immune to nerves, either. There is nothing to say he won't find himself rattled by a machine adversary and play far below strength - in which case, Deep Thought could finesse the odds and seize a victory. ''I'll tell you one thing,'' says a member of our party: ''If Deep Thought wins the first game, there won't be a second game. Gary will refuse to play.'' ''I am a man of many interests,'' he acknowledges. Last summer he gave an interview to Playboy in which he tossed out blistering condemnations of Soviet economic policy, social policy, the unreliability of the media and pre-glasnost mores (''Intellectual life was frozen, and sexual life, too''). Clearly proud of his openness, Kasparov relishes the chance to speak out broadly, and confesses that a future in politics ''may be inevitable.'' All the more curious, then, is his unwillingness to entertain hypothetical questions about his chess career. When I ask what he might have become if chess had never been invented, he counters with, ''But it was.'' What would have happened if he'd lost a sixth game to [Anatoly Karpov] in their first encounter? ''But I didn't.'' And if the computer had defeated him yesterday? ''Oh, it couldn't.'' Did the pressure ever get to him? Any trouble sleeping before a match? ''Andrew should answer that one,'' he replies, and calls across the table, ''Do I have trouble sleeping before a match?'' ''Oh, he has a problem sleeping all right,'' Andrew reports. ''Put him on a sofa for five minutes, or in a taxi, or in an armchair, and he falls asleep. It's a terrible problem.'' Both men laugh. They have every reason for feeling ebullient this morning. Yesterday's match has brought Kasparov more attention than any event since the last world championship. He's on the front page of every newspaper they've seen so far. He scans the articles with good-humored interest. One quotation, from [Murray Campbell], particularly delights him: ''Deep Thought didn't get a chance to show what it can do.'' Kasparov reads this aloud. ''But that's exactly the point!'' he exclaims. ''I didn't let it. The highest art of the chess player lies in not allowing your opponent to show you what he can do.''

Admittedly, lying is a complex business. One of the most enjoyable aspects of Mr. [Thomas Mallon]'s wide- ranging book is its illustration of some of the devious and often infinitely regressive games that sincerity and dishonesty play with each other when someone sits down to record ''the truth.'' In these pages one encounters complex contradictions and self-deceptions, as well as ruses meant to be uncovered and codes perversely intended to be cracked (as in the case of Pepys who recounts his carnal triumphs in a garbled Continentalese: ''Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genu . . . and toca su thigh''). Secrets in every age cry for release - though often only in embellished and self-promoting forms. Each chapter is devoted to a different sort of diary-keeper (''Chroniclers,'' ''Travelers,'' ''Creators,'' ''Confessors,'' among others), although these divisions are handled with an imaginative looseness. The chapter on ''Prisoners,'' for example, includes both the physically imprisoned and those ''jailed only by their own temperaments.'' Mr. Mallon lurches somewhat at the outset. In the first chapters, especially, he stumbles into a variety of unfortunate metaphors - risibly portentous (''the dark underbelly of our forefathers' probity''), crassly fatuous (''Boswell was a veritable American Express card; Johnson could never have left home without him'') or simply messy (America's ''national susceptibility to emotional hogwash in making up its political mind''). His depiction of Evelyn Waugh - whose journals reveal such a rich blend of angry spiritual probing and numbed bewilderment - contentedly recreates a wearisome, too familiar caricature. Here is Evelyn, the outrageous and red-faced drunk.

As Auden's examination of Burns and Byron suggests, ''light verse'' might profitably be viewed as a term embracing two strains of diction. In the first, epitomized by Burns, poetic language tends to be direct and earthy and linked to common - traditionally, indigent and pastoral - people. This is ''lightness'' that does not necessarily aspire to humor but only to lucidity and bright musicality. Burns's ''I Once Was a Maid'' or ''My Luve Is Like a Red Red Rose'' could serve as examples. Byron's verse, on the other hand, seeks an audience of greater sophistication and social standing, and addresses them in a humorous, dexterous and often patrician manner. (These audiences are of course prototypes only; to the ideal reader of light verse, who would feel at home with both strains, this disjunction would correspond merely to different sectors of his or her mind.) Although both sorts of light verse have languished in our time, it is verse of this latter, patrician sort - usually written with what Mr. [John Updike] calls ''metric neatness'' - that has suffered the graver decline. Where did light verse go? Has it only migrated temporarily, or is it gone for good? And if it is extinct, are we at least left with someone to blame, or will this prove another of those dismaying disappearances - so prevalent in modern life - for which no blame can ever be assigned, since the causes always turn out to be hopelessly complex and indeterminate? IN the late 1930's, W. H. Auden offered some theories about the decline of light verse, which he saw as the result of complex but not absolutely indeterminate causes. In his introduction to ''The Oxford Book of Light Verse,'' he contrasted the successes of Robert Burns and Lord Byron as a means of setting out the social conditions under which light verse might naturally prosper. According to Auden, Burns's success derived in part from his origins in a ''genuine community where the popular tradition in poetry had never been lost. In consequence Burns was able to write directly and easily about all aspects of life, the most serious as well as the most trivial.'' Byron, on the other hand, was ''the first writer of Light Verse in the modern sense. His success lasts as long as he takes nothing very seriously; the moment he tries to be profound and 'poetic' he fails.'' And yet, Auden argued, Byron no less than Burns drew strength from his social ties: ''However much they [ he and society ] tried to reject each other, he was a member of 'Society', and his poetry is the result of his membership. If he cannot be poetic, it is because smart society is not poetic.'' After hypothesizing that societies in the future ''will not grow of themselves,'' and ''will either be made consciously or decay,'' Auden concluded on one of those tolling, apocalyptic notes that shudder so often within the prose he wrote in the 30's: ''Poetry which is at the same time light and adult can only be written in a society which is both integrated and free.''

Here Randall Jarrell, that poet and critic who wrote with such witty, refreshing horror about the declining place of poetry in American society, proves edifying. In a 1953 essay entitled ''The Obscurity of the Poet,'' he points to the difficulties in identifying any single cause within ''that long-continued, world-overturning cultural and social revolution (seen at its most advanced stage here in the United States) which has made the poet difficult and the public unused to any poetry exactly as it has made poet and public divorce their wives, stay away from church, dislike bull-baiting, free the slaves, get insulin shots for diabetes, or do a hundred thousand other things, some bad, some good, and some indifferent. It is superficial to extract two parts from this world-high whole, and to say of them: 'This one, here, is the cause of that one, there; and that's all there is to it.' '' O NE shudders (as Jarrell in his grave must shudder) at that reference to the abandonment of bull-baiting. Since Jarrell's death in 1965, we've seen a return to voyeuristic pleasures in violence for its own sake, as epitomized in those madman-with-a-chain-saw films that have so endeared themselves to our youth. (Not long ago I went into a bar whose video recorder was showing a film of this sort - ''Friday the 13th, Part XXXVIII,'' I think it was - and I overheard one of the two men sitting nearby say to his companion, ''Let's get going,'' and the other reply, ''Let's stick around for two more killings.'' Of course one has met such talk in books, perhaps most unforgettably in Dickens's ''Tale of Two Cities'' - ''He would count as one head,'' says Jacques Three of someone bound for the guillotine. ''We really have not heads enough'' - but it's chilling, it's just horrifying, in real life.) I dwell on our society's appetite for casual violence because I suspect it too has played a part in the decline of the poetry-reading public. As levels of violence increase, what was once thought violent no longer seems so - a lesson that film makers of various persuasions have taken to heart. In a culture whose dances often take place within a storm of noise that is, over time, literally deafening, how hopeful can we be that our students will be able to hear the exquisite violence of, say, iambic pentameter? And the reader without a sense of poetry's violence - its nudges and shovings, its carefully formulated ruptures - will think he sees everywhere only limp, denatured verse that fully deserves the apathy it engenders. An appreciation of much, perhaps most, of the greatest English verse requires an ear to which the substitution of a trochee for an iamb seems a substantial, ''violent'' act. Is it implausible to suppose that exposure to ''louder'' art forms diminishes one's capability for hearing a poem's subtle music? Ours is a society that has ''turned the volume up'' in all sorts of ways, and the poet - grow raucous as he may -simply cannot outshout his competition.