The time-honoured method for a woman writing in the first person as a member of

The time-honoured method, for a woman writing in the first person as a member of the opposite sex, of introducing a pipe, along with shaving gear, at the first possible opportunity, is replaced, as befits a cool and hip writer, by reference to the pudenda For pipe read penis. There's no mistaking the fact that Heller, in this confessional account, has transmogrified into a male.Willy (another hint?) Muller is a murderer, a man so second-rate - he's a ghost-writer of celebrity memoirs, a multiple-version scriptwriter of his own film-optioned life, a liar and a 55-year-old frump - that he calls out for the prose and imagination of Nabakov to rescue him from the banality into which his creator has so rashly plunged him These he is denied. "Depression and irritability are common symptoms among cardiac patients. My doctor told me so the other day after I had thrown a stale bagel at one of the Asian trolls who brings me my breakfast," confides Muller at the outset of this chronicle of bad behaviour and worse behaviour recalled. "Naturally I resented his banal diagnosis!" Not as much, the reader might put in here, as Muller's style of reminiscing about himself, a kind of Amis-man Chandlerised; a guy who pushed his wife against a fridge door and killed her - but hey! - who cares?Everything You Know makes its claim as a novel by taking Muller's life odyssey, from horribly neglectful father of two daughters (the younger has just committed suicide, miles away in London) and cheating low-grade writer, and attempting to give us what all studio heads demand on their mobile phones - Redemption. How can a man as debased as Muller - a man who has not only murdered his wife but can hardly bring himself to read his dead daughter's pathetic diary, her own confessions of an unloved life - be transformed into a caring, sharing member of society? Will Muller understand that his treatment of the woman he allows in his bed - ghastly Penny with her "seduction garments", poor freckled Fiona, who is like a "very pale person looking out through a scrim of ginger" - is totally unacceptable? The journey to recapture his soul will take him from Los Angeles to Mexico to London. Can we in turn care enough to follow him?The answer lies in the detail.

The inclusion of Muller's dead daughter Sadie's journal is mistaken, for it gives us yet another voice, in this case cringe-making in its bathos. The repeated and probably unintentional changes in Muller's voice fail to convince. Sometimes he's heavy and American- pedantic, on the occasion of his visit to London he is Dickensian, describing with 19th-century severity the council flats where his surviving daughter lives; in Mexico he's plain bitchy, etc. What remains - and persuades - is what Zoe Heller had all along, a sharp eye for soft furnishings, along with the manners and mores of the achingly hip. Everything You Know cannot pass the test as a novel, though it can amuse as it swings between the bagel and the banal.. The BFI's series of Modern Classics books, companions to the excellent Film Classics, are intended to "set the agenda for what matters in modern cinema". As some of the titles covered in the Modern series are older than some of those in the classic series, the distinction seems slightly contrived.

Until now, the only differences between the two series were that the Modern Classics have a more stylish cover, cost a pound more and tended to be on high-concept films such as Bladerunner, The Terminator and Independence Day. But with the latest four instalments - Richard Dyer on Seven, Iain Sinclair on Crash, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit on Caravaggio, and Raymond Durgnat on WR - Mysteries of the Organism - the price is back down to pounds 7.99 and there's a definite move back into the realm of art cinema, Seven being the only one of the four funded by Hollywood. So Richard Dyer has the most clearly defined goal: to convince us that Seven is a work of art. His argument has two main strands - the elegant brilliance of the plot's structure and the singularity of the film's vision.

He points out the way in which the plot is able to provide complete closure without the restoration of order that is conventional for the genre, and how the structure's seriality plays on the audience's desire to witness all seven murders. With close attention to the characterisations, lighting, editing and sound, Dyer demonstrates how David Fincher single- mindedly prevents any optimism creeping into his film, thereby creating "a landscape of despair, a symphony of sin". Only twice does Dyer's enthusiasm dull his critical faculties. Although, with its references to Dante, Shakespeare and Bach, "Seven addresses us as people familiar with high culture", such reflected glory cannot impart artistic merit to the film itself.

And Dyer is perhaps rather generous to compare the death of Gwyneth Paltrow's character with that of Cordelia in King Lear rather than, say, every other action film where the female character is little more than a cipher whose death provokes the vengeance of the male lead. Very early on in his book on Crash, Iain Sinclair states his position on the adaptation of books into films: "Any [novel] that succeeds as a film should have been a film in the first place ... Film and book are undeclared rivals, quarrelsome siblings." Which means he must spend the rest of the book reconciling what he insists on calling "Cronenberg's Crash" and "Ballard's Crash". The dynamics of this relationship are repeatedly reconfigured by Sinclair: "Crash, the future film, haunts the composition of Ballard's novel ... The novel would begin at the precise point where the film ends." Which is all quite interesting, but unfortunately it is misleadingly packaged as a study of Cronenberg's film. Sinclair's prose here is as lucid and inventive as in any of his fiction but he lacks either the vocabulary or the will to analyse the film in any depth. Instead he resorts to repeated, tautologous reconfigurations of Crash as a dislocated, pared-down version of the book Which is true, but critically underdeveloped. He betrays his sympathies with remarks like "the value of Crash the film is easy to overlook".