Art Basel week in Miami, which ended on Sunday, brought the usual international crowds and galleries, satellite fairs, and installations everywhere. In addition to the galleries that did show, a number of East End dealers and artists participated even if they weren’t showing.

    The Miami Project, a new fair this year from the organizers of artMRKT Hamptons, attracted Halsey Mckay Gallery and Eric Firestone Gallery of East Hampton, Mark Borghi of Bridgehampton, and Boltax Gallery from Shelter Island.

    The open-plan fair, filled with light and space, was designed with a minimalist aesthetic that incorporated the sophisticated feeling of Miami’s design district. It was a foil and a respite from the rather crowded and overwhelming Art Miami fair next door. Mr. Borghi, who took art to both fairs, said last Thursday that business was good — even better in a follow-up phone call on Monday.

    At Art Miami, he sold 15 works, including two by Eric Fischl and a suite of three Robert Ryman paintings that went for $280,000. At the Miami Project, he sold four works — by Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell, Conrad Marca-Relli, and Sam Francis.

    “The market was extremely active,” Mr. Borghi said. “People came to those fairs to buy.” Other works he sold were by Anish Kapoor, George Condo, Takashi Murakami, and Cecily Brown. Two museums put works on reserve.

    Max Fishko, a managing partner of the Miami Project, said last Thursday that he was pleased with the fair’s design and its “Florida-like vibe,” as well as its overall reception. “We have some good energy, and I think we’re doing well with the customer base. Obviously we have a lot to learn. This is a complicated business, and it’s constantly changing, so we always find areas for improvement.”

    He said he was seeing many familiar faces from his other fairs in Texas, San Francisco, and on the South Fork, among them Beth Rudin DeWoody, a part-time Southampton resident, and a number of significant collectors. He called this the kind of synergy he was looking for across all of his fairs.

    Karen Boltax, of the gallery on Shelter Island, said last Thursday that she had sold some works, and Hilary Schaffner of Halsey Mckay said on Sunday that after a slow start for the gallery, foot traffic and sales picked up over the weekend.

    On Sunday, the Miami Project sent out a release summarizing some of the more significant sales, including two Andrew Schoultz gold flag paintings to Sean (Diddy) Combs at Marx and Zavatero Gallery. Mr. Schoultz’s paintings were seen at Eric Firestone’s gallery in East Hampton over the summer. Mr. Firestone’s gallery also did well, with more than $100,000 in sales for Tseng Kwong Chi’s photographs from the “Downtown New York” series.

    Art Miami has been in existence for 23 years, a decade more than the Art Basel Miami Beach fair that takes over the convention center. Art Miami seemed reinvigorated this year, with a separate section called Context that offered work by edgier and younger artists. The fair organizers announced last week that they were taking over the Aqua Art Miami fair, which takes place each year in the Aqua Motel in South Beach, with a gallery in each room showing pieces by emerging artists. Stephan Keszler was also at Art Miami, with the Banksy murals he showed at his Southampton gallery two years ago placed in the fair’s most prominent public spaces.

    With parts of the beach transformed into enormous sand craters, planes flying overhead with banners proclaiming “WE’RE RICH AND WE CAN DO WHAT WE WANT” by Jack Pierson and “BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH . . .” by Mel Bochner, an alligator sculpture in the bay, organized installations of mural art in Wynwood, and random bits of sculpture everywhere, it was difficult to go anywhere without seeing something related to the fairs. Everyday existence anywhere around the fairs became an immersive, surreal fantasy world where everything experienced was the product of someone else’s imagination.

    Other hotels such as the Deauville in North Beach and the Standard on an island in the bay off Miami Beach also showed art. Peter Dayton, who has shown previously at various Miami fairs, took up residence at the Standard during the week as the Rock ’n’ Roll Shrink, prescribing healing aural balms based on childhood memories for those in need of some musical therapy. It was part of the presentation by Kara Finnerty at the Paul Kasamin Pop-Up Shop in the hotel. Mr. Dayton’s artwork was also on display there.

    At the big fair, as Art Basel Miami Beach tends to be known in casual­speak, a number of East End artists both past and present had work on view. Mary Boone showed art by Barbara Kruger, Eric Fischl, and Ross Bleckner. Cheim and Read brought a Lynda Benglis piece. L & M Arts brought one of the more talked about pieces, “Greedy Schmuck,” a black-and-white piece by Ms. Kruger, who has a house in East Hampton. Gagosian showed works by Richard Prince. Some of the historical artists from the East End who had work on view included Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, and Roy Lichtenstein. Joan Washburn brought work by Nicolas Carone, Ray Parker, Jackson Pollock, and Jack Youngerman.

    Mr. Borghi said it was important to bring completely fresh work to the fair. “I begin to think about Miami in July and start to lay out the booths in my head. At Art Miami, I brought only a couple of things I have ever shown before. You need fresh material. There is very little point in taking the same inventory year to year.”

    He holds back special work and saves it for the fair. He said it is what makes his clients “zoom to the booth to see what you have,” and maybe walk away with a new purchase.

Mark Borghi at his Art Miami booth. 

Max Fishko, center, chatting with collectors at his Miami Project fair.

Art in the Air by Jack Pierson and Mel Bochner.

Two of Lynda Benglis's sculptures at Cheim & Reed.

Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone Gallery.

Ms. Kruger also turned up at L & M Arts's booth with a much discussed piece.

Peter Dayton wrote out a prescription as the RocknRoll Shrink at the Standard Hotel.

Several of Banksy's murals were shown by Stephan Keszler of Southampton at Art Miami.

Part of the scene in Wynwood on Saturday night of Art Basel week in Miami.

More Wynwood scenesters hanging out by the murals.

Richard Prince was on view at Gagosian in the convention center.

   Aside from the familiar (sometimes over-familiar) carols, nothing suits the Christmas season better than blazing choral music of the Baroque. The Choral Society of the Hamptons, under Mark Mangini, has made something of a specialty of music of the 17th and 18th centuries, with a recent focus on the English anthems and oratorios of George Frederick Handel. But Sunday’s concert — actually concerts; there were two of them back to back — at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church moved the musical scene across the channel from the sterling zone to the home of the euro.

    The ancient text of the Magnificat does not technically belong to the Christmas season, but its mixture of celebration and piety has attracted composers from Monteverdi to Bach to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and the musical results certainly suit the season.

    The program began and ended with two roughly contemporary Italian settings from the early 18th century, one typically misattributed to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, the other securely assigned to Antonio Vivaldi, a composer better known for his instrumental music.

    No composer has had more works misattributed to him than Pergolesi, who died young and then became internationally famous long after his death. Perhaps not surprisingly, we discover that what we know as Pergolesi’s Magnificat was actually by his teacher, Franceso Durante, a composer much admired in his day for his sober church music and then long forgotten, except by musicologists.

    No such musicological shenanigans surround the Vivaldi Magnificat or his “Beatus Vir,” both works that combine the composer’s more familiar concerto-like instrumental style with a considerable dramatic flair. Vivaldi wrote reams of everything, including more than 40 operas, so it shouldn’t surprise us that his religious music has more than a touch of theatricality.   

    The Choral Society under Mr. Mangini’s direction was very much at home in this late Italian Baroque music, capturing both its vigor and its sweetness as well as its solid lines and dramatic light-and-shade. The singing in the Durante Magnificat might be described as restrained, perhaps not surprising in a rather formal work that came early on.

    Things eased up later and the two Vivaldi works, in a more familiar style, were fluid and dramatic in the way that Italian religious painting from the Baroque to the Rococo can be theatrical. The Italian word for that light-and-dark contrast is chiaroscuro; the expression is commonly used for Baroque painting but is equally important in the music of the period. This concept was well understood and displayed in the dynamism and musical projection of a chorus that has been well and sensitively trained by its director.

    Another element of contrast was between the soprano soloists, Mary Hubbell and Emily Eagen, both with clear, angelic voices, and the more operatic mezzo, Suzanne Schwing. In fact, Vivaldi’s writing for the mezzo voice was clearly more in Baroque operatic style than his writing for the sopranos, so this turned out to be a bit of good casting.

    J. Andy McCullough, who doubled as tenor soloist and mainstay of the chorus tenors (necessitating a couple of athletic dashes from the tenor section in back to the solo lineup out front), and the baritone Mischa Bouvier were the excellent, fresh-voiced male soloists.

    This was not purely an Italian program. There was a charming Christmas cantata by the French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, set up as a kind of dialogue between the baritone and the chorus about the Nativity. The other work on the program was the curious “In Dulci Jubilo” by the German early-Baroque composer Dietrich Buxtehude, consisting of variations on an antique mishmash of German and Latin lyrics set to a tune that is better known nowadays as “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.” What an odd piece; a snapshot perhaps of an unformed Baroque style very much still in progress.

    Just before the turn to Vivaldi, the string ensemble performed Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerto Grosso No. 8, a work known as the Christmas concerto. Although the basic string ensemble was strong, there was a problem with the continuo keyboard part, here played on the church organ situated in the rear of the church. It was noticeable only a few places and, frankly, I missed the rhythmic edge of the harpsichord that usually provides the solid underpinning of the strings, particularly in support of the bass lines, here represented by only a single cello and double bass.

    In choral music, organ continuo is perfectly legitimate, but it needs to be used with more emphasis; in the Baroque period, it would often have been accompanied by a theorbo, or bass lute, to help with those rhythmic bass lines.

    None of this impacted the choral performance or the overall effectiveness of the program. I was told that the second performance of the day was even better than the first. Judging by the way things warmed up throughout the course of the afternoon, I would not have been the least bit surprised if that were the case. And if that second time through was better than the first, it must have been pretty good indeed.

    The program ended with — what else? — some familiar carols. At the 3 p.m. performance, chorus and orchestra were joined by the East Hampton High School Vocal Camerata, David Douglas, director, to help sing an elegant arrangement of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” that most Baroque of traditional Christmas carols.

    A series of recordings of Eric Salzman’s music-theater works are appearing on Labor/Naxos; already issued are “Civilization and its Discontents” (with Michael Sahl); “The Nude Paper Sermon,” and the four works that make up Wiretap (laborrecords.com/lab7089.html). For ordering information, laborrecords. com/lab7092.html. Mr. Salzman’s “Big Jim and the Small-time Investors,” workshopped last spring, is scheduled for production by the Center for Contemporary Opera in 2014.

   Created in a burger joint on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike in the spring of 2009, the Jazz Jam Session will celebrate its accomplishments and internationally renowned musical guests at its first CD release party at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor next Thursday. A success by all accounts, Claes Brondal and his core Thursday Night Live Band brought not only business to a roadhouse-style restaurant, but an experience that led to more live music throughout Sag Harbor.

    The Jam Session is a partnership between John Landes, an attorney, music lover, an owner of Bay Burger, and chairman of the board of Peconic Public Broadcasting, and Mr. Brondal, an accomplished Danish drummer with a dream of sharing the musical message of jazz diversity with a community of all ages and demographics.

    Mr. Brondal wanted to provide a creative venue where musicians could practice their craft before a live audience, network with other musicians, and showcase their talent. The jam became an important open venue for jazz musicians, Mr. Landes said, which “means a lot.” Mr. Landes has grabbed the microphone and sang himself a few times, and he also has a guitar and a dream.

    With its current house band including Bryan Campbell on guitar, Peter Martin Weiss on bass, and Mr. Brondal on drums, the Thursday Night Band’s jam has been recorded and broadcast weekly on WPPB. About 100 hours of live recorded material from their weekly two-hour shows has resulted in the CD “Live On Thursday Nights.”

    Aiming for a mix of special guests and regular performers whose styles varied from Latin jazz to funk, the task of choosing tracks was not a simple endeavor. Two of the tracks were recorded at a benefit concert for Bay Street Theatre that featured the All That Jazz All Star Super band, which was also born out of the Jam Sessions.

    Mr. Brondal is responsible for bringing in master musicians who join the core band’s guitar, bass, drums, and almost always a piano. As word spread, “jammers just walked in the door,” said Mr. Landes last Thursday. They included Bernard Purdie, who “stopped by this summer.” Mr. Landes said the unexpected performance from the man who played drums with Ringo Starr on the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club” is part of the excitement of the jam.

    Special guests also include Morris Goldberg, who played on Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album, Randy Brecker, a multi-Grammy Award-winning composer and musician, and Dick Behrke, who has arranged for Bobby Darin, known for playing with a white glove. Many other acclaimed musicians have graced the restaurant and are on the CD, too. Several are expected at the release party.

    Despite its esteemed guests and several calls for reservations, the Jam Session is not stuffy in the least. Performances must be family-friendly, because the “happiest moments are when kids dance,” Mr. Landes said. His grandson, Leo, has been coming for the two years since he was born, and Mr. Brondal’s son is in attendance weekly as well, soon to be joined by his new brother, who is just a few weeks old.

    With more of a casual, party atmosphere than the usual jazz concert, there  is food available from Bay Burger’s menu and “Nobody is stuck to a table,” Mr. Landes said. On warm days the crowd spills out onto an outdoor patio, with no complaints from the next-door neighbors, Dale Haubrich and Bette Lacina, owners of the Under the Willow Organics farm.

    Since Bay Burger closes down for four months in the winter, Mr. Landes happily supports the Jam Session’s move to other local venues during that time, which have included the Bay Street Theatre lobby and Page at 63 Main. “It’s good for the village,” he said.

    Before the Jam Session, Mr. Landes explained, Sag Harbor had essentially shut down live music. He contributed his legal expertise to the creation of a music ordinance a few years ago, he said, after it was demonstrated how live music could be done in an “elegant way” in a restaurant.

    The Jam Session’s success and vibe also inspired Kelly Connaughton to start up the Sag Harbor American Music Festival, Mr. Landes said, which is now held annually in the village at the end of September. The jam also fosters young musicians, he said, and gives them exposure.

    “Cool, hip tunes and good energy” can be expected from the CD, according to Mr. Brondal. It includes six cuts, each about 10 minutes long, taken from the live radio recordings. It is “well-produced,” Mr. Landes said, by himself, Mr. Brondal, and George Howard, the sound engineer and owner of Plus Nine Productions, who recorded the live sessions and then engineered the tracks at his Rockin’ Horse Studios.

    “Live music will never go away,” Mr. Brondal said. His favorite part of all of his music endeavors is the live performance and the emotional connection he feels with the audience and the other musicians. When not on stage, he teaches drumming clinics to high school students, among them a Roots and Rhythm workshop that focuses on music and drumming history, and Rhythmology, the study of life and rhythm. He says on his Web site that he seeks to encourage students to “pursue passions of their own, and experience the power of submerging oneself 100 percent.”

    Mr. Brondal also fronts the Groove Gumbo Super Band, an eclectic band rooted in Latin beats, Nordic folk songs, jazz, and world music. Called a musical playground, the band is a collaborative of musicians formed during the Jam Session that “cooks up a diverse gumbo of musical styles.” He also plays in the All That Jazz! Super Band.

    With no arrangements so far for a Jam Session this winter, Mr. Brondal said it may be the first winter since its inception that a suitable venue has not been found. “The math just didn’t add up,” he said. With no cover charge, the musicians have always played for donations only, dependent on listeners attending to support the restaurant, which pays the house band.

    Next Thursday’s party will go down in the lobby of the Bay Street Theatre from 7 to 9 p.m. There will be a cash bar and complimentary catered food. The CD will be sold with hopes of many giving the gift of music to their loved ones for the holidays. “Live on Thursday Nights” will also be available at Jam Session performances, local retail shops, and cdbaby.com.

Pollock-Krasner House

Receives Grant

    The Helen and Claus Hoie Charitable Foundation of East Hampton has given the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center a $14,700 grant, which the center will use for educational purposes.

    The grant will allow the center to purchase 20 mini digital audio units to offer tours in several languages to visitors to the house and site. The same system is used in museums and historic sites all over the globe.

    The center will also use the money for two interactive kiosks with a touch screen that will display paintings by Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner that were created on the Springs property, but are now in major museums and collections. The center expects to have these tools in place by the time it opens again in the spring.

The End of the World

As We Know It?

    Neoteric Fine Art is observing the possible apocalypse tomorrow with “Amagansett Armageddon,” a show devoted to artists’ renderings of the end of the world. Taking its cue from the Mayans, the theme of the show is also a possible rebirth and a new chapter for life here on Earth.

    The artists offering their visions of doom or prophesies include Scott Bluedorn, Rossa Williams Cole, Rory Evenson-Phair, Melissa Mapes, Virva Hinnemo, Nika Nesgoda, and Christine Sciulli.

    The reception tomorrow is from 7-11 p.m., but in a note of hope, the exhibition will remain on view through Jan. 15.

“The Women”

In Bridgehampton

    Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton will present “The Women, Part I,” the first in a series chosen thematically and dedicated to women artists on the South Fork. This first installation will feature artists who are figurative in their approach to subject matter such as Miriam Dougenis, Cornelia Foss, Gina Gilmour, Sue Ferguson Gussow, Janet Jennings, Jane Johnson, Anna Jurinich, Brooke Laughlin, Elizabeth Malunowicz, Mary McCormick, Michelle Murphy, Louise Peabody, Susan Lazarus Reimen, and Alexandra Strada. The second installation will examine the more abstract female artists among us.

    The exhibition will open Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and remain on view through Jan. 7. The second show will open on Jan. 12.

More East End Stories

    The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will hold one more edition of East End Stories on Screen this year, tomorrow at 6 p.m. The presentation will include selections from “14 Americans,” a film by Michael Blackwood Productions with six artists associated with the East End — Laurie Anderson, Alice Aycock, Peter Campus, Chuck Close, Dennis Oppenheim, and Dorothea Rockburne.

    Andrea Grover, the museum’s curator of special projects, has organized the screening. The films will be introduced by Terrie Sultan, the museum’s director, and Alicia Longwell, a curator of art and education, among others. Tickets cost $10, $8 for Parrish members.

Spelunking at Harper’s

    Harper’s Books has delved deep into its basement archive for a selection of prints, photographs, posters, and books for the picky aficionado to offer “Harper’s Books Bizarre” an evening of music, booze, and sales on Saturday.

    From 6 to 9 p.m., D.J. Mister Lama will work the boards with some “sexy vinyl.” Shopping, drinks, and snacks will also be available all day.

“May We Be Forgiven”

A.M. Homes

Viking, $27.95

   A.M. Homes, author of “Music for Torching,” “The End of Alice,” “In a Country of Mothers,” and others, has a new one out. It has lots of characters and it covers lots of ground. It has ambition, authority, and plenty of laughs. It has keen observation of contemporary culture in big enormous buckets; it’s nothing if not right now. Finally, and not incidentally, Ms. Homes’s new one is on the longer side for contemporary literary fiction. You get in and stay in for a while. Big.

   This is a category: the Big Book. Big Books are reviewed in The New York Times and placed on the front tables in bookstores. Big Books get attention, which is similar to buzz, but more literary. (If the Big Book doesn’t get quite enough attention, can it still be a Big Book? Does it go on the Big Book B list?) On the inside, a Big Book is like The Great American Novel — a reflection of the times in which it was written — only with less of a requirement for universality, the extra requirement of length, and the extra, extra requirement of investment. The writer invests her time, the publisher invests its power, the bookstore invests its shelf space, and the Big Book claims its corner with heft and authority.

   It’s not clear what might happen to the Big Book if literature goes irrevocably digital, because it’s harder to be impressed by the length of a book when you can’t see it as a physical object. Yet another 21st-century conundrum for the publishing industry! But anyway, A.M. Homes takes herself seriously; her publisher takes her seriously. And her readers take her seriously, too, even as, or because, she cracks us up with a weird confection of absurdity and reality, a hilarity that starts on page one of “May We Be Forgiven” and ends at the end, on page 480.

   The story of “May We Be Forgiven” takes place over the course of one year, Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving. It’s a blow-by-blow of the events in one man’s life, and there’s a lot involved. Betrayal, death, legal guardianship, sex in the suburbs, power of attorney. The protagonist of the book is Harold Silver, and it’s his book — his story, his year, his first-person narration, his transformation.

    At the opening of the book, Harold is a Nixon scholar, married with no children, living in New York City and inhabiting a thin and disconnected emotional life. Meanwhile, Harold’s brother, George, is a television network executive, married with two adolescent children, living in the suburbs and playing out his role as angry, aggressive golden boy.

   The book hits the ground wild and running: A car accident for which George is at fault kills two adults, orphaning a child. George is removed to the hospital. Harold is called in, stays with his sister-in-law by way of support, and the two begin an affair. When George emerges from the hospital and discovers the affair, he brutally and fatally attacks his wife with a bedside table lamp. All of this happens in the first 15 pages of the book. In the vacuum created by these events, Harold is left in charge of his brother’s life. Here is how Ms. Homes accomplishes this transfer of responsibility that gives way to the rest of the book:

    In the lobby of the hospital, the lawyer asks me to take a seat. He places his enormous bag on the small table next to me and proceeds to unpack a series of documents. “Due to the physical and mental conditions of both Jane and George, you are now legal guardian of the two minor children, Ashley and Nathaniel. Further, you are temporary guardian and the medical proxy for George. With these roles comes a responsibility that is both fiduciary and moral. Do you feel able to accept that responsibility?” He looks at me — waiting.

    “I do.”

    Harold’s wife gets wind of his affair with his sister-in-law and divorces him summarily, setting the stage for a delve into Internet-arranged sexual escapades that take place during the day in the suburbs. These escapades lead to an actual, though totally nonconventional, relationship full of honesty and funny dialogue, which develops alongside and in counterpoint to another romance, disjointed and mysterious and also non-conventional.

    Meanwhile, Harold adopts the child orphaned by the car accident that began the novel’s proceedings and takes in an elderly couple who began as incidental characters connected to the second nonconventional romance. Throughout, in the background that trades places with the foreground, Harold becomes increasingly bonded to Ashley and Nate, his niece and nephew, and increasingly tied to the life in the suburbs into which he’s stepped.

    The plotline is madcap and absurdist — at one point Harold’s brother is taken to an “alternate prison setting” where he’s left with a group of other prisoners to survive in the wilderness; at another point, Harold is held prisoner in a suburban home by the children of a woman he’s arranged a “lunch” meeting with over the Internet. That kind of absurd.

    In terms of plot, Ms. Homes replaces necessity with quantity: It is important in this book that many crazy things happen, but less important exactly what those crazy things are, as long as they provide opportunity to observe contemporary culture (e.g., hand sanitizer, ubiquitous medication, a party planner who believes she should “follow the aesthetic” of the writer Lynne Tillman).

    Yet the dialogue in “May We Be Forgiven” is realistic and naturalistic, specific, pitch-perfect, and extremely adroit. Also, it’s hilarious. Although entertaining almost the whole way through, the novel is most engaging when the absurd and the realistic meet and fuse. This happens most touchingly through Harold’s growing love and sense of responsibility for his niece and nephew.

    Along that line, a standout scene happens about a third of the way through the book: Harold is on the phone with his adolescent niece, who has called to talk with her mother, who at that point in the story is dead. The niece knows this, but she’s gotten her period for the first time and she’s desperate. “I tried to use the Tampax,” Ashley says, bursting into tears again. “I put it in the wrong hole.”

“You know how there are two holes down there?”

“I think so,” I say. “I put it in the wrong one.”

“How do you know?”

“It doesn’t feel right.”

“You put it in your tush?” I don’t know what else to call it — I don’t want to say “behind” because everything we’re talking about is behind. . . .

    Harold successfully talks his niece through the safe removal of the tampon. The conversation is both absurd and realistic, funny and crazy and full of love and trust and just the madness of what it means to love and take responsibility for a child. Ashley hangs up the phone, and Homes/Harold says, “I am shaken, but, oddly, I feel like a rock star, like I am a NASA engineer having given the directions that saved the space lab from an uncertain end.”

    The virtue in the length of “May We Be Forgiven” lies in the quasi “real time” experience of reading a long book in which the passage of time — that blow-by-blow — is an important factor. You’re in it, too. This is heightened by the absence of chapters or parts: The narrative unfolds in one long chunk, variegated only by line spaces to indicate transitions. These sections range from several pages to a single paragraph, and the arrangement is effective. It’s the sense of flow: You can stop and take a break, but it’s all one thing, and so is life.

    It’s worth noting that in spite of the events upon which the book is based — the affair and murder — “May We Be Forgiven” is not mainly a story about sibling comparison or conflict, or as we say in the Mama business, “brother stuff.” So what, then, is this Big Book about? One little word, my friends: change.

    Narrator/protagonist/hero Harold Silver begins lonely and disconnected and takes on a ragtag family cobbled together from the events of the novel. He goes from a stunted emotional life to a rich one. Ms. Homes plays with a certain expectation in literature that characters change, that this is what makes a story a story. Here, the transformation of Harold Silver is both absurd and realistic.

    And what is the mechanism behind his change? He accepts absurdity as opportunity: He’s willing. That active, that refreshing: Harold Silver is willing to try. He doesn’t know what he’s doing but he’s willing to try to do it anyway. Absurd and real and big.

    Evan Harris is the author of “The Art of Quitting.” She lives in East Hampton with her husband and two sons.

    A.M. Homes has a house in East Hampton.

“Paris: A Love Story”

Kati Marton

Simon & Schuster, $24

   In the age of too much information, a brief memoir looks like a welcome relief at first — a respite from the tell-all exposé. In her slender “Paris: A Love Story,” Kati Marton gives us the bones of a rousing tale, a portrait of love and loss, chock full of the political players who have shaped world events over the last 50 years. Yet her narrative restraint often dims the light on what has clearly been a rich and unusual life. We have the facts, but we’re still missing a lot of the soul.

    Ms. Marton was married to two very public men — the ABC News anchor Peter Jennings and the celebrated diplomat Richard Holbrooke, known chiefly for negotiating an end to the Bosnian war. Though Ms. Marton is formidably accomplished, it’s safe to say that the characters of these famously volatile men, both deceased, are the memoir’s draw.

    Jennings was Ms. Marton’s first great love, a man who played Pygmalion to her nascent career as a correspondent for ABC News, while insisting that her Ambition, with a capital “A,” compromised their relationship. Fifteen years and two children later, their marriage came to a grinding halt in an East Hampton driveway after a friend’s dinner party. Jennings’s hissy fit was not the first of such scenes, for sure, but it was the last Ms. Marton was willing to endure.

    In a charming conceit, Paris wraps itself around the story like a third romantic character. Ms. Marton studied at the Sorbonne as a young adult, and her letters home, excerpted at some length here, rhapsodize about the Paris of Montaigne, music, and sumptuous food. Later, while she was posted to Bonn with ABC, the agony and infrequent ecstasy of her relationship with Jennings, working in London, played out in swanky restaurants all over town.

    Ultimately, Paris became the springboard from which Ms. Marton leapt out of her troubled marriage into a new life. Mr. Holbrooke, as it happens, had been waiting patiently. Pulling up on his white horse (an armored Buick, actually) to the Hotel Petit Trianon, Mr. Holbrooke spirited a tearful Ms. Marton away for good. “Kati is more Kati in Paris,” Holbrooke later observed, “than anywhere else.” The apartment they bought in the Latin Quarter is where she still spends part of each year.

    Ms. Marton’s back story is surprising. As a girl, she and her family immigrated to New York from Budapest after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, around which her parents, also journalists, were seized and jailed for a time. Among the many languages Ms. Marton speaks is French, taught to her by a nanny — a Communist informant, as it turns out. In other words, though the details are bit sketchy, Ms. Marton comes from some measure of privilege, though her young life was harrowing in many respects.

    As a young correspondent, prized, she says, for her fearlessness, Ms. Marton covered everything from the neutron bomb crisis and Palestinian refugee camps to spies in Berlin, the civil war in Rhodesia, and the ascent of Pope John Paul II. Children and a demanding husband pushed her into a writing career she could do from home. “Paris: A Love Story” brings Ms. Marton’s book count up to seven, which includes “The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World,” “Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History,” and her notable biography of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swede who rescued hundreds of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. While researching Wallenberg, Ms. Marton discovered that she is Jewish herself — a revelation that takes up startlingly little emotional air time.

    Ms. Marton’s narrative is direct and clear. She has the reporter’s eye for the quotidian detail. Her descriptions of Paris often transport the reader to the scene with all its sights and sounds. For news junkies, there’s a political celebrity on virtually every page, as well as several funny stories that will make you wish for more. I laughed out loud at Ms. Marton’s account of taking a taxi from a Palestinian refugee camp to Jerusalem to surprise Jennings — the ultimate romantic gesture — only to learn a plane out of Paris was the only way back to Amman. Or a party that the man-eating Pamela Harriman, then ambassador to France, offered to throw for the newly engaged Holbrookes, to which Ms. Marton was not invited. (You had to be there.)

    As vivid as these stories are, the narrator is curiously elusive, even after 200 pages. I don’t know Ms. Marton much better today than I did at the start, even though I know a great deal more about her life. The private thoughts and feelings she records are often more dutiful than real. Sentences like “Really, it’s the simplest things in life that mean the most to me,” for instance, or “How enriched I am in every way” have a tinny and generic feel. In her writing, Ms. Marton is often more the informative observer than participant.

    As the gut-wrenching mourning memoir gains traction in the marketplace, Ms. Marton skims the surface of this emotional landscape. In a letter, excerpted here, Joan Didion writes, “I woke up this morning thinking of you, and all the mornings you will wake up without Richard.” Ms. Didion’s 2005 “The Year of Magical Thinking” shook the rafters of grief and, of course, took the National Book Award. “But I don’t want to be sad on all the mornings to come,” writes Ms. Marton, who in describing her feelings relies a little too heavily on platitudes. “I have just been made painfully aware of how fleeting life is and how unpredictable. In a sense, I have never wanted to hold life tighter, or to live more fully than now, reeling from loss.” Enough of that. Tell us how you really feel.

   Jennings comes off as a Dr. Jekyll — charming when it suited him; a nightmare when a shift in the wind threatened his shockingly fragile self-esteem. I wish we knew more about how he got that way. Holbrooke, by this account, was a pussycat — though newspaper reports credit his unpredictable rages as the reason he missed out on becoming secretary of state. Still, we can see he knew his way around a romantic negotiating table. He waited years for her marriage to Jennings to unravel, and then played the romantic lead with cinematic aplomb.

    “Paris: A Love Story” is a charming pastiche — and perhaps this is exactly what Ms. Marton intended it to be. But as a memoir, it comes up as a sketch in need of coloring. In a blurb on the book jacket, Barbara Walters claims to have stayed up all night to read “Paris: A Love Story” from cover to cover. Granted, the memoir is a diverting read. The drawback is that it doesn’t stick to your ribs.

    Ellen T. White, former managing editor of the New York Public Library, is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” a humorous how-to that culls the lessons of the great romantic women of history. She lives in Springs.

    Kati Marton has a house in Bridgehampton.

   Igor Lovchinsky will play at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday as part of the Rising Stars Piano series at 8 p.m.

    Mr. Lovchinsky was born in Russia and now lives in the United States. He last played with the series three years ago, and also at Pianofest and the Rogers Memorial Library. He will perform works by Chopin, Prokofiev, and Liszt-Horowitz.

    Tickets are $15 and free for students under age 21. They can be purchased at scc-arts.org or at the door 40 minutes prior to the performance.

   Anne Chaisson, a longtime adviser to the Hamptons International Film Festival, will take over as its executive director, the festival has announced.

    She will replace Karen Arikian, the director for the past five years, who is leaving to pursue new opportunities, according to a press release. Ms. Arikian will continue as a United States/East Coast delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival and a U.S. consultant for European film promotion.

    Ms. Chaisson founded Dirty Rice Films in 2002 and has served in a fund-raising and development capacity for a number of entertainment nonprofits, including the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Nantucket Film Festival. She was the producer of “Roger Dodger,” which won a Best First Feature award at the Venice and Tribeca Film Festivals and other honors in 2002, and also produced the films “P.S.” and  “Diggers,” as well as the Independent Spirits Awards show in 2010 and 2011. She runs a student film workshop each summer through the film festival and Guild Hall.    

    Ms. Chaisson has already begun her new role.

    David Nugent, who had been the director of programming for the film festival, will now take the position of artistic director. He has taught classes in documentary film history and American independent film at the New School since 2004.

   The five-year old Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Festival has fully come into its own. Each year, the festival has grown in size and prestige, and its main event at Bay Street Theatre Saturday night brought some of the most respected names in documentary filmmaking to Sag Harbor.

    Jacqui  Lofaro, the founder and director of the festival and a Bridgehampton resident, said Saturday that the films that began the day before had been well received and attended, particularly films about Shelter Island and the North Fork, which brought in residents from all over the East End.

    In fact, “Shelter Island: Art and Friendship and Discovery” by Mike Canzoniero won the Festival’s First ever audience award on Sunday.

    Susan Lacy, the creator of the “American Masters” series for public television and a resident of Sag Harbor, was the evening’s honoree. The night began with a crowded cocktail reception in Bay Street’s lobby and continued with a full-house screening of “Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note,” one of eight films Ms. Lacy directed out of the 185 or more she has produced for the series.

    Jamie Bernstein, one of Bernstein’s three children, introduced the documentary, which was first shown at the Hamptons Film Festival and aired on television in 1998, eight years after the conductor’s death. “The film keeps adding value over time,” she said.

    Ms. Bernstein also talked about Ms. Lacy’s career. They have been friends since the 1970s, she said, but it was Ms. Lacy’s approach to her subject that convinced the family she was the right person for the job. “We felt the love. We sensed that if she loved the subject, she would tell the story fair and true.” The director “steered away from the sentimental, sensational, and trite,” she added.

    The two-hour biography  follows the composer from his youth through his last concert with a thoroughness that never seems overdone. It also does not duck the more difficult aspects of Bernstein’s life, including his bisexuality, marital problems, and the challenges he faced as a composer of both popular and classical works while trying to balance his orchestral engagements both in New York and across the globe — Austria, Scotland, Japan, and elsewhere.

    His vitality and his action-figure approach to the baton, recorded in countless concerts, still look fresh even in black-and-white footage. The still photos chosen reveal the craggy contours of his face as well as his animated eyes and grin, which are on display in image after image. Bernstein does not seem to age or slow down until much later in life, but as he begins his decline, the documentary captures the dramatic difference in his body and face as he appears to fulfill his own prophecy of his demise at age 72.

    After the film, Ms. Lacy said she found seeing it again a highly emotional experience, especially sitting between Ms. Bernstein and Christopher Foss, the son of the composer and conductor Lukas Foss, one of the interviewees.

    A panel discussion followed with Ms. Lacy, Ms. Bernstein, and three of the directors who have contributed films to the “American Masters” series. Michael Epstein directed “Hitchcock,” “Selz­nick and the End of Hollywood,” “None Without Sin,” and “LENNO­NYC.” Anne Makepeace made the documentaries “I.M. Pei: Building China Modern,” “Robert Capa in Love and War,” and “Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light.” Roger Sherman made “Alexander Calder” and “Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds.” They discussed the challenges and rewards of their medium.

    Mr. Sherman observed that the Bernstein film was made in such a way that “in the first two-and-a-half minutes, the entire arc is laid out before you. [Ms. Lacy] is grabbing you by the ear and saying, ‘Stay here with me for this.’ This is not easy to do.”

    In his Calder film, he said, one of his biggest and most expensive mistakes was going through about 5,000 to 10,000 feet of film before realizing that the mobiles he was shooting were “dead” compared to earlier footage that showed the same pieces moving. The owners of the mobiles were reluctant to put the now extremely valuable pieces in motion, but Mr. Sherman realized he could not make the film without that movement and eventually convinced them.

    He also recalled that Ms. Lacy allowed him to expand his film on Rodgers first to 90 minutes and then to two hours, with the proviso of “no more interviews, no more talking — let the music flow.”

    According to Ms. Makepeace, Ms. Lacy allows directors to discover for themselves what the story is. “For me, I have to fall madly in love with the person who is at the center of my films.” Curtis was an easy subject to fall in love with, she said, but Capa was more challenging. “He was this hard-gambling, hard-drinking Hungarian, really just not my type.” It was only after she had seen the passion and humanity in Capa’s photography at the International Center of Photography, she said, that she realized she could make a film about him.

    Ms. Lacy said making a movie about a subject like Capa was not as easy as people might think. His life was a Hollywood movie. He was Ernest Hemingway’s friend; he was on the beach at Normandy capturing the action on D-Day, he had an affair with Ingrid Bergman during the war at the Ritz in Paris, and he covered five wars altogether until he stepped on a land mine and died. “You couldn’t invent a better story.”

    Cornell Capa, who founded I.C.P. to honor his brother, wanted the true story made first, not the Hollywood version. “I’ve never had that experience before,” Ms. Lacy said. “It still took a while to get that all figured out and get access to those images. That is the key to so much of our ability to bring artistry to this and bring our hearts and guts to it — to have the material to do that. It’s a huge element, and it doesn’t happen overnight, or not without a lot of expense.”

    Not everyone falls in love with their subjects, said Mr. Epstein. Steven Bach, a colleague who wrote a biography of Leni Riefenstahl, once told him never to choose a subject he loathed, because he would spend every waking hour with that person until the film was finished.

    Mr. Epstein agreed that access was essential but said it had to be paired with the freedom, both artistic and journalistic,  to make a film with integrity. “If you don’t have the freedom to say no to your subject, even if they are dead, you are completely screwed.”

    One of his trickier projects, he said, was working with Yoko Ono on the John Lennon piece. “Yoko didn’t say yes to me and didn’t say yes to the film. She said yes to American Masters, and even after that there was still a lot of struggle at times.” The time Lennon spent in Los Angeles after he left Ono, where he hit rock bottom with addiction, was not something she wanted explored too deeply. But Mr. Epstein argued that the audience needed to go on that journey with Lennon. 

    According to Ms. Lacy, “We explained to her that first of all, it happened. It was true, and we have to go to that bottom place so John can rise again, come home to you, have Sean, and have this life. And in the end, she loved the film and loved what Michael had done with it.”

    As a participant in her father’s documentary, Ms. Bernstein said the family realized that avoiding a topic or trying to gloss over it was only going to make it worse, and trusted that Ms. Lacy would handle the material appropriately. It was something Ms. Lacy admitted that she “sweated bullets over.”

    Although a contract always requires that subjects and their families give up editorial control to the director, and subjects are not shown the film until it is completed, Ms. Lacy said that “there is a huge trust factor that we honor, but not at the expense of telling the truth and the story.” In profiling an artist, she explained, it is essential to “connect the human being to the work in some way.”

    Once Ms. Lacy had received permission to use Robert Capa’s archive, said Ms. Makepeace, “It was on our shoulders to do it justice and give it the power it deserved.” Knowing how carefully his brother had guarded his legacy, she was nervous at the screening. After it ended, she said, Cornell Capa was silent for a bit and then said simply, “I can die now.”

   While every presentation of East End Stories on Film at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill offers compelling reasons to see it, last Thursday’s version was particularly rewarding, coming primarily from Genie Henderson and the LTV archive, which dates back to the station’s beginnings in 1984.

   Although there are many print documents and archives of the artists who worked and played here over the past century or so, the founding of LTV did as much for the artists as it did for the greater community in preserving a legacy that has only grown more vital and important with the passage of time. Members of the artistic community such as Elaine Benson, Priscilla Bowden, Howard Kanovitz, and Jeffrey Potter hosted shows where artists came on and discussed their lives and work.

   Ms. Henderson said the event was the first time the archives had been presented publicly in such a fashion. With 800 shows to choose from, it had to be done on a selective basis and primarily through excerpts.

   Connie Fox, who with her husband was one of the first of many artists who saw the value in such an enterprise, was also one of the first to take up a camera and go out and shoot video for the fledgling public access station. One of her early projects was a tour of the 1983 Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art with Elaine de Kooning. Frazer Dougherty, one of the founders of the station, operated the camera while de Kooning toured the show, “speaking totally extemporaneously about what she remembered. That’s what this video is. Just that, plain and simple.”

    De Kooning offered anecdotes about certain paintings, how long they took, who bought them, how her husband titled them, and what influenced them. Stopping at “Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louse Point,” she noted that 1963, when it was painted, “was the year that he really moved completely from New York City to East Hampton,” leading to a marked change in the work and a new appreciation for light and color. The paintings began incorporating “huge areas that just express light and much less of a stress on contours. The city paintings were much more congested, with closeness of forms and compacted areas. These paintings were unleashed. It was almost a gesture of light . . . in these sweeping strokes.”

    Included in the presentation was a trailer for the film “Castles in the Sand.” Produced by Max Scott and based on Helen Harrison’s book “Hamptons Bohemia,” it has archival footage and recent interviews with artists such as Jameson Ellis, John Alexander, Keith Sonnier, Donald Sultan, and Jane Martin in which they reflect on the meaning of the area’s historic legacy to those working in the present day.

    Ms. Harrison is the narrator of the film and introduced the trailer, which she said would be part of a much longer documentary. The clips showed artists such as Ibram Lassaw and Paul Brach speaking about the beach scene at Georgica and Peter Mattheissen recalling that it was once said, “If you dropped a bomb on a cocktail party in Sagaponack, you’d wipe out three-quarters of the American literary establishment.” Taking up the theme of drinking, Bill King said the whole South Fork artistic community, particularly the Abstract Expressionists, “floated on a sea of alcohol.”

    These clips were complemented by more footage from the LTV archives and a screening of a 1972 film by Howard Kanovitz that documents his painting of the picture “Hamptons Drive-In.” The work was recently acquired for the Parrish’s permanent collection and is on view in the new museum. The film follows a painstaking process involving photography, stencils, and airbrushes to create the illusion of what has become known as Photorealism. The old Hamptons Drive-In theater is depicted complete with an image of Joel Grey from “Cabaret” on the screen.

    The film is by turns serious and whimsical and embodies a free-spiritedness that seems to mark the best inclinations of the artists who were attracted to this area: all of them very serious people who still knew how to have fun.