1. "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust (1913-22).

Whether you translate it as "Remembrance of Things Past" or, more properly, as "In Search of Lost Time," Proust's great novel addresses just about every problem a person can face. Among its many concerns is the relativity of things. Otherwise put: instability, mutability, indeterminacy. People appear quite different to different observers or even to the same observer over a period of time. Complexity, contradiction, flux are everywhere, and only memory and art can give some solidity to all this evanescence. The only real sin here is vulgarity, which is both ridiculous and depressing--i.e., tragicomic and, as I see it, horribly lifelike. The old nobility is superseded by crude parvenus who usurp their very titles; and yet, horribly, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. It would be terrifying if it weren't so grotesque.

2. "The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford (1915).

This novel is about the fraught relationship of two friendly couples, one American, one British, as told by the American husband, who can be both keen observer and untrustworthy narrator and who worships the friend who cuckolds him. "The Good Solider" is a profoundly ironic novel, as comic as it is sad, with its characters caught in what is equally a funhouse of distorting mirrors and a maze of painful ambiguities--even absurdities--from which there is no satisfactory exit. The novel offers a sardonic view of romance and forces one to rethink whether ignorance is indeed bliss--and reach a funny-sad conclusion. Ford is one of the major neglected English writers, in need of rediscovery. From this short novel, one might well proceed to his monumental and epochal "Parade's End," four interrelated short novels in whose 1950 Knopf reprint I am proud to have been instrumental.

3. The Plays of Anton Chekhov (1896-1904).

Chekhov's plays--including "Uncle Vanya," "The Seagull" and "The Cherry Orchard"--are examples of life's ironies, of the shifting ground under the characters that can make them laughable or tragic. Chekhov considered his plays comedies; directors and audiences tend to see them as comedy-dramas, with the emphasis on drama. Unfulfillment is the human lot, with which the characters grapple sadly or laughably, but nobody really changes. The theatergoer or reader is similarly buffeted between laughter and tears, compelled to identify with such naked humanity. These plays are so warts-and-all human as to elicit the best of all déjà vus: "I myself have been there," one may well think. "If that's how it was then and is now, better grin and bear it and go on."

4. "The Journals of Malte Lourids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910).

Rilke's youthful novel is the story of a young poet eking out a precarious existence in turn-of-the-century Paris. It is based very remotely on the life of a young Norwegian poet but more on Rilke's own. Brief episodes merge present and past, evoke oddballs, buffoons, sensitive plants, touching losers, famous writers--all from the poet-protagonist's perspective, which turns reversals, memories of lost love, historical meditations and droll encounters into exquisite prose-poetry poised between zest and melancholy.

5. "Vile Bodies" by Evelyn Waugh (1930).

Waugh's second novel exudes what his biographer Christopher Sykes calls "the blackest of black humor." It is the story of Bright Young Things coming to confusion in sundry frivolous ways, abetted by a rogues' gallery of older creatures goading them on and lousing them up. It is a tale of charmingly, riotously squandered lives that Martin Stannard, another Waugh biographer, calls "a manifesto of disillusionment, hilariously funny but bitter." Chapter 11, in which lovers part in two brief, mostly monosyllabic, phone conversations, is one of the the most hilarious and most heartrending things I have ever read.

Mr. Simon's critical writings--on music, theater and film--have been recently collected in three volumes and published by Applause Books.