We have come to expect psychological lightning from the books we read on beaches and buses and trains. We want motives, symptoms, childhood traumas. We want years on the analyst's couch condensed into a single paragraph. We want the deep pleasure of what reviewers call "penetrating psychological insight," but we don't, it would appear, want to work too hard for it. Novels like Smiley's offer the perfect solution--the therapeutic thrill of delving into the past combined with the convenience of pre-packaged interpretation: one overarching explanation for everything that's gone wrong. Such books operate on the idea, borrowed from talk shows, that the complexity of human character must be presented, analyzed, and solved in the space of one hour, not including commercials.