“Dear Mr. Beckett”

Barney Rosset

Opus, $32.95

”Barney and I go to the tennis matches. . . . We play games, and we talk politics. We don’t talk literature. I don’t talk literature with nobody.” — Samuel Beckett

Years ago Barney Rosset’s wife, Astrid, telephoned to invite me to shoot pool with Barney in their East Hampton home. Me? Pool? I told Astrid I’d think about it and call her back.

I pondered the fact that I hadn’t played pool since I was a kid and I was no good at it then. Next I thought about Barney, the legend. And I got the quivers. Who was I to play pool badly with a legend? I called back and declined.

The legend? Rosset died in 2012, age 89. The New York Times front-page obit chronicled his life. And what a life. 

Rosset, the son of a Chicago banker, was a lifelong renegade. His one credit was a 1948 film he produced, a documentary called “Strange Victory,” about racism in post-World War II America — a noble flop. His previous publishing hit was a mimeographed newspaper, The Anti-Everything. But that adolescent effort predicted a future that would change America and indeed world culture.

One of Rosset’s first acquisitions for Grove Press, a modest reprint press he acquired in 1951 for $3,000, was with an unknown writer named Samuel Beckett, an Irishman who lived in France, wrote in French, and was rejected by French publishers. An initial letter to Beckett, included in “Dear Mr. Beckett,” a marvelous collection of interviews, telegrams, reviews, clippings, canceled checks, book covers, contracts, letters, photos, and scribbles, goes as follows: “Our catalogues have already been mailed to you so you can see what kind of a publisher you have latched onto . . . I hope you won’t be too disappointed. We will do what we can to make your work known in this country.”

Beckett responded in June 1953: “I hope you realize what you are letting yourself in for,” going on to explain that his novels were unsalable, his plays unperformable, and adding, “All are difficult in ways which I am not disposed to mitigate.”

After this unpromising start, Beckett and Rosset first met in Paris at the bar of the Pont Royal Hotel. Rosset recalls: “Beckett came in, tall, trench-coated and taciturn . . . ready to get rid of us.” They ended up near dawn drinking champagne at La Coupole. 

And so began one of the great literary and personal friendships of the 20th century. Rosset’s first letters to Beckett from New York begin with “Dear Mr. Beckett” (June 15, 1953), progressed to “Dear Samuel” years later, and finally, on March 23, 1957, “Dear Sam.” It is not too much to say that Rosset truly loved Beckett — even naming his son Beckett. This just doesn’t happen in today’s conglomerate culture. Love is bad for the bottom line.

Beginning with “Waiting for Godot,” which revolutionized world theater, Rosset was to publish almost all of Beckett’s work. Beckett went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1969. He was not pleased with the froth of his prize, but accepted it anyway.

Rosset’s other publishing triumphs included the works of Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Frank O’Hara, LeRoi Jones, David Mamet, John Rechy, and Marguerite Duras.

His legal campaigns against the censorship of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” were epic. United States censorship rules at the time were rooted in the 19th century. The government dictated what we could and could not read. To bring a banned book into the country was the equivalent of drug smuggling. Rosset, in a one-man war, changed all that. He fought more than 60 legal challenges for Miller’s book alone (which he had signed up over a game of table tennis with Miller). It sold 100,000 copies in hardcover and over a million in paperback. 

Rosset loved a good legal fight and eventually had the funds for those fights. He was our great postwar cultural impresario. As the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker said, “He knew what would last and what was dross. I think he was born knowing. Very few are. . . .”

Lois Oppenheim in her introduction to this wonderful literary scrapbook notes that what Beckett and Rosset “had in common was perseverance. ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on. . . .’ ”

Even after Rosset overreached and ended up with fancy offices, 120 employees, and mounting debts and was bought out by George Weidenfeld and Ann Getty in 1985, he kept on going with new presses named Blue Moon and Foxrock. Despite lifelong accusations of being a “smut peddler,” he ended up a true cultural hero.

No review can do justice to this comprehensive and detailed compilation about Beckett and Rosset and so much else. A big thank-you to Astrid for pulling this all together, presenting facsimile reproductions that, as one reviewer put it, exude “a wonderful period aroma.” “Dear Mr. Beckett” is an essential document of a revolutionary era in American letters and culture. He was our scrappy, daring, and unbowed neighbor.

I am sorry I didn’t go to play pool with him. In fact I never even met Barney. This is my eternal regret.

Bill Henderson is the publisher of the Pushcart Press in Springs.

“A Legacy of Valor”

Henry Osmers

Outskirts Press, $23.95

In “A Legacy of Valor: A History of Lifesaving and Shipwrecks at Montauk,” Henry Osmers begins his fascinating narrative by describing a time when Montauk was almost void of European settlers. First House, Second House, Third House, and the Montauk Lighthouse were all that was there when the first lifesaving stations appeared in Montauk. He explains that, given the remoteness of the area and its lack of population, it was difficult to offer assistance to any ship that fell victim to storm, fog, or other maritime peril. 

Mr. Osmers quotes an 1876 report that stated that “the Long Island and New Jersey coasts present the most ghastly record of disaster. . . . The broken skeletons of wrecked vessels with which the beaches are strewn . . . sorrowfully testify to the vastness of the sacrifice of life and property which these inexorable shores have claimed.”

It was these conditions, Mr. Osmers reports, that led the nation’s federal government to organize a growing network of lifesaving stations under the control of the Treasury Department. Mr. Osmers then offers a succinct account of the formation of the U.S. Life-Saving Service and its eventual arrival in Montauk. He also describes the two types of rescue strategies used by the lifesaving station crews. Rescues were attempted by boat or by a strong line that stretched from the shore to the troubled vessel. 

Mr. Osmers details several different surfboats used in the rescues, various pieces of equipment used in them, and how the lifeline attempts were implemented. He also goes into the lives and activities of some of the men who served on the lifesaving crews. 

After sharing accounts of the lifesaving stations at Montauk Point, Ditch Plain, and Hither Plain, Mr. Osmers offers descriptions of more than 100 shipwrecks that took place there over the past 300 years, divided by the time periods 1600s to 1877, 1878 to 1914, and 1915 to the 2000s. 

Besides the straightforward listing, by date, of these wrecks, the author incorporates numerous accounts of witnesses to these tragedies. For example, in the aftermath of the wreck of the clipper ship John Milton in 1858, one witness wrote, “It was a sad, sad sight that our eyes were called to witness as all those stark and frozen bodies were brought and laid side by side in ghastly rows awaiting, some, the recognition of friends who came to claim them, but most, for the rite of simple sepulture at the hands of kind strangers in that quiet village by the sea.”

Appropriately, Mr. Osmers concludes his book with a section on Montauk’s Lost at Sea Memorial, with lists of “Lost at Sea Memorial Inscriptions” and “Keepers and Officers in Charge of Montauk Life-Saving and Coast Guard Stations.”

Generously illustrated with 86 historical black-and-white photographs, Mr. Osmers’s work succinctly relates a general history of the U.S. Life-Saving Service and offers insight into valiant attempts to save lives and property in Montauk. It is a valuable account of an important piece of the history of Montauk.

The Ditch Plain Life-Saving Station, shown in 1885.

Montauk Point Lighthouse Museum Photo

John Eilertsen is the director of the Bridgehampton Museum.

Henry Osmers is the tour guide and historian at the Montauk Lighthouse.

Writing at the Parrish

Two single-session writing classes are coming to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill: The Art of Poetry on Friday, May 19, and The Art of Fiction on June 16, which is also a Friday. Both run from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and cost $40, or $30 for museum members. The instructor is Jennifer Senft, who teaches English and humanities at Suffolk Community College.

“As always, I will go over a poetic form or fiction topic (respectively) and share examples,” Ms. Senft said in a release. “Whenever possible, I’ll also share audio of the author reading his or her work. We’ll then have time to see the museum, write, then return to the studio to read and discuss. After a short break — some tea, a stretch, a chat — we’ll do the same for the next form or element,” from prose poetry to haiku. 

Participants in the fiction class will look to the museum’s exhibition “John Graham: Maverick Modernist” for inspiration. Registration is by phone with the Parrish or on its website.

A “Wish” of a Winning Poem

Caitlin Doyle, who grew up in East Hampton, has won this year’s Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry, the trustees of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, N.H., announced this week. The award comes with $1,000 and the publication of Ms. Doyle’s winning poem, “Wish,” in The Evansville Review. She will read at the farm on June 16 to start the three-day Frost Farm Poetry Conference. 

Ms. Doyle’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The Threepenny Review, among other publications. She is an Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.

“Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way”

Ryan White

Touchstone, $26.99

So I’m doing this gig a few months ago, a happy-hour thing, playing mostly to an indifferent crowd but not taking any offense because it’s not one of my regular joints and these people don’t know me and didn’t have any idea I was even going to be there. Out of nowhere this Lee Trevino-like fat drunken slob, who is sweating the outline of a bra into his green polo shirt and looks like he just got fished out of a water hazard at Augusta, staggers up to the bandstand, scowls at me for 10 seconds, and slurs, “What? No Buffett? How ’bout a little ‘Margaritaville’?”

Guess he didn’t care for that steady diet of Replacements, Stones, and Elvis Costello I’d been feeding him.

Now I’d love to tell you this was an isolated incident, but I do 250-odd gigs a year (emphasis on the “odd” sometimes), and when I’m playing a place that requires cover tunes this occurs a lot. The requester doesn’t always come in such an unlovely package or even demand that particular song. There are a couple of other songs with the same gestalt. Sometimes it’s “Brown Eyed Girl” or “Sweet Caroline” or, the latest catnip to morons, “Wagon Wheel,” released a few years ago by the band Old Crow Medicine Show and subsequently by Darius Rucker, formerly of Hootie and the Blowfish fame (or infamy, depending on where you fall on that). The song has been characterized as a “Dylan sketch” rescued and completed by the boys in the O.C.M.S. My theory is that ol’ Bob chose not to finish it in an attempt to spare us all.

Out of the great modern songbook, why are these the most requested songs in a pub on any given night? That cosmic question I cannot answer. What I can tell you is that I’ve seen the most wistful of people transformed into effervescent ambassadors of joy within an instant of hearing any of those tunes, but only one of them ever birthed a business empire. 

In Ryan White’s superb new biography, “Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way,” he explains exactly how that happened and why, but not before he takes you on a chronological quest through the singer’s life and wild ride of a career. 

It begins with an origin story about his sea captain grandfather, who instilled in the young Jimmy a nautical fascination and insatiable thirst for adventure that would go on to inform his whole life and work. (Hence the title of his 1978 album, “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”) Then, in the early 1970s, after rolling craps trying to get a music career going in Nashville, he took a trip to Key West for some gigs with the notorious and always colorful fellow folk hero Jerry Jeff Walker, and that led to him fall in love with the place and make it his base of operations for the launch of his career. 

From there Mr. White introduces us to a coterie of characters orbiting in and around the Chart Room Bar who became Mr. Buffett’s friends, collaborators, and co-conspirators, each more eccentric and lovable than the next. 

At the time the only people down there were misfits of the highest order: smugglers and pirates, barflies and beach bums, artists and dope dealers — everyone living off the grid when there wasn’t even that much of a grid to be on. These were the people who would become Mr. Buffett’s audience and go on to be the inspiration for many of his compositions. 

The author does a beautiful job of capturing the carefree nature of the time period through some rhapsodic passages and a number of interviews, with his subjects unfurling robust and ribald 2 a.m. tales of misbegotten mischief born of the bottle, thus giving us more insight into the Buffett world, the beginnings of the mariner-poet persona, and his method of controlled chaos.

Jimmy set about steadily building a fan base, playing every coffeehouse, canteen, college student union, and bucket of blood that would have him — an intrepid troubadour, perfecting his craft of storytelling, singing, and songwriting. He made records that didn’t do great business, but all the while through his persistent touring his career kept inclining, and along the way he put together his now-beloved Coral Reefer Band and had the breakthrough hit with “Margaritaville.” And that’s when things really ratcheted up into high gear.

They say in life you’re judged by the company you keep. Well, in Mr. Buffett’s case that would be people like the Eagles, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jack Nicholson, all of whom come into play here. It’s a veritable who’s who of the paradigm-shifters and ruling personalities of the period. 

His tours became a rolling bacchanal of excess and individual exploits (his and the Coral Reefers’), but the truly remarkable thing is that in most biographies like this, this is where our hero changes, becomes a megalomaniac, lonely at the top, paranoid — you know, an a-hole. But not Mr. Buffett. He stayed the same guy: egoless, out for a good time, concerned with putting on a good show for his fans, and caring deeply about the people who worked for him. And he never took himself all that seriously. I’ve read a lot of these books, and that is rare, my friend.

Things got even more interesting when the Mexican chain restaurant Chi-Chi’s tried to co-opt the name Margaritaville for its own revenue-generating purposes, and Mr. Buffett lawyered up and blocked the effort in court, proving he was synonymous with the term. He parlayed that into an entrepreneurial enterprise of staggering proportions through a chain of restaurants of his own by that name, coupled with a burgeoning lifestyle brand.

As with all of these biographies, I have a feeling it will be read mostly by Mr. Buffett’s fans, a treasured keepsake for the Parrot Head set (what his rabid fans call themselves), but I’m here to tell you that you don’t even have to be an admirer of his music to enjoy this book. 

He was constantly told by radio programmers throughout his career that he was “too country for New York and L.A. and not enough country for Nashville,” so he just kept going, built his own audience, and became his own genre. So his is a uniquely American story that carries with it the most important message, whether your pursuit is art or commerce, and that is to always be your authentic self and keep working. 

I just removed from my being all the resentment of having been asked to play “Margaritaville,” closed my eyes, and listened to it with fresh ears — really nice tune. 

Christopher John Campion, a regular visitor to Amagansett, is the author of “Escape From Bellevue: A Dive Bar Odyssey,” published by Penguin-Gotham.

Jimmy Buffett lives part time on North Haven. 

“Rembrandt’s Shadow”

Janet Lee Berg

Post Hill Press, $15

In the 72 years since it ended, World War II has provided us with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of stories, a global event that has kept on giving. Just when one thinks the stories have all been told, the emotions have all been felt, the survivors almost all now gone and buried, we are presented with another novel or movie or memoir. Perhaps the injunction to “never forget” has become unnecessary with new stories forever emerging to remind us.

Janet Lee Berg’s novel “Rembrandt’s Shadow” tells a story she describes as “loosely based” on wartime experiences of the wealthy bourgeois Katz family: Benjamin Katz was the grandfather of her husband, Bruce Berg. In many ways this is an all too familiar World War II story, containing as it does the iconic elements of loss, degradation, dislocation, resilience, but also, here, of suicide, the ultimate human failure of resilience. 

Because we have seen these elements in numerous movies and television productions, in photos, books, and museums, Ms. Berg’s words easily evoke the corresponding images from 1940s Europe, a period and a reality that she presumably knows only indirectly. In contrast, from her references to Long Island’s cultural life in the 1970s, one may presume from its lively details that she was a participant in that culture.

“Rembrandt’s Shadow” also transcends the familiar: Ms. Berg borrows from lesser-known, actual events that involved her husband’s family during the war, when the brothers Katz, art dealers renowned well beyond their hometown of Dieren in Holland for their expertise in the Dutch masters, negotiated with agents of the Nazi leadership to exchange these paintings for Jewish lives, a bargain with the Devil if ever there was one.

Hermann Goring, Hitler’s art expert, actually visited the family’s home in 1940, standing in their living room as one such negotiation took place. The imagination leaps to a scene where one such masterpiece is transferred from reluctant Jewish to grasping Nazi hands, as the silent family looks on. The most significant of these trades was the exchange of Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Man” for visas that permitted safe passage for 25 members of the Katz family, including the mother of Bruce Berg and his sister. 

In 2007, Katz heirs on Long Island filed a claim with the Dutch government for the return of more than 200 works of art now held in Dutch museums. The claim is under dispute until it is determined whether any or all of these works were sold forcibly or voluntarily, depending in part whether they were sold before, during, or after the war. The most recent available information about the disposition of the art comes from newspaper reports published in September 2007.

In Ms. Berg’s fictionalization, the Katz family becomes the Rosenbergs, with Sylvie, the second of four children, at the story’s heart. As in the real-life story, the family lives in Dieren, in a milieu of affluence and privilege that captures Jewish life in Holland from the 1930s to 1941, before and during the Nazi occupation. Sylvie’s father, whom she adores and who treats her as his favorite, is often absent, traveling to promote his art business as he generates the wealth that permits her mother to be a socialite, indulging herself in fashion and luxury while neglecting her children and relegating their care to the “waitstaff.”

Although the framework of art exchanged for Jewish lives provides “Rem­­brandt’s Shadow” with a dimension not found in other World War II memories, Ms. Berg also invokes what have become the familiar early signs of encroaching Nazism: playground bullying and ostracizing by German children of their Jewish classmates; the gradual dawning realization that neighboring families have disappeared; sights and sounds of uniforms and boots on quiet, cobbled streets; sudden airplanes in the quiet skies; buckling affluence and the decline of lavish parties, expensive clothes, cigars, and champagne; the leg of lamb replaced by spaetzle; the maid leaving because Germans are forbidden to work in Jewish households; closed doors behind which anxious adults whisper and confused children eavesdrop; yellow Jewish six-pointed stars sewn onto coat sleeves. And that final, dreadful day when the family closes the front door of their beautiful home behind them for the last time, standing silently with other Jewish men, women, and children on railway platforms as they leave the known and the precious behind for what turns out to be forever.

It is an old, familiar story of loss — of life, identity, and the predictable. However, with safe passage assured by the Rembrandt painting, the Rosenberg family is taken to Spain and then to an internment camp in the West Indian island of Jamaica, where they spend the war years. (Despite my own internment and refugee background, it was a surprise to learn that Jews were interned in the Caribbean.)

“Rembrandt’s Shadow” unfolds in chapters headed by time and place, from the 1940s to 1969 to 1972 and from Holland to Long Island — Massapequa and Queens — Las Vegas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Thailand, and (a tourist visit) Dachau. A note to the author: This back and forth is somewhat of a distraction that for this reader disrupted the story’s flow. Designating the chapters as, for example, Sylvie’s story or Helene’s (her mother), Michael’s (her son), and Angela’s (her son’s girlfriend) might anchor the story in human rather than geographical or temporal terms.

After the war, the family is dispersed — Sylvie and her mother to New York, the siblings to England. Sylvie’s story recedes from its central place, displaced by the next generation’s love story set against the Vietnam War, yet retaining the themes of separation and loss redolent of the years in Europe. 

Much of the book’s texture emerges from four of its themes: mothers, interfaith tension, the written word, and secrets. Since Sylvie is 16 when the Rosenberg family is forced to flee Holland, she will have struggled with her distant, distracted mother into her teenage years. When she herself becomes a mother, her son, Michael, leaves home, taking to the open road in his struggle to escape from his overly protective, demanding mother.

Sylvie is unable to accept Angela, Michael’s Catholic girlfriend, who escapes her loving but suffocating Italian mother. (Ironically, Ms. Berg has dedicated the book to “Mother.”)

Although the Rosenberg family is secular, Sylvie’s is hostile to Angela because she is not Jewish. While less hostile, Angela’s mother expresses her displeasure at her daughter’s love for a Jewish man. These interfaith tensions are enlivened by the travels of a golden Star of David necklace through the lives and generations of both families.

Secrets weave in and out of “Rembrandt’s Shadow”: an unknown, now dead sister, a rape leading to an abandoned brother, jewelry hidden from a mother, love letters never sent and then stolen.

Finally, the novel’s fourth and epistolary theme is manifest in love letters, family correspondence, and a diary, as well as in conversations with a cat. Although Michael is a writer, we don’t see his work, but we do know some of his thoughts. (Interrupting a story with an epistolary or journal entry break is a tried-and-true writer’s device, but another note to the author: Not all of the journal’s entries in this book appear to have been written by the same person.)

As this reading of “Rembrandt’s Shadow” by Janet Lee Berg demonstrates, there is always room in the Western literary tradition for one more story from World War II.

Hazel Kahan is a writer and programmer at WPKN radio. She lives in Mattituck.

Janet Lee Berg, a Star contributor for many years, will read from “Rembrandt’s Shadow” at BookHampton in East Hampton on Friday, May 12, at 5 p.m.

“Once We Were Sisters”

Sheila Kohler

Penguin, $16

Incandescent. Sheila Kohler’s “Once We Were Sisters” is a story of betrayals. Not a thousand pinpricks. A thousand sword thrusts. Yet how can a memoir about a sister’s death — most likely caused by her wife-beating husband, who may have been trying to engineer a car crash to kill himself as well and leave their five children orphans — be so luminous? Ms. Kohler’s patient storytelling. Analysis and reanalysis of the events. Beautiful language. Rancor under control.

The two sisters grew up on Crossways, the family estate outside apar­theid Johannesburg, tended to by legions of servants. When Sheila is 7 and her sister, Maxine, is 9, the parents leave on an 18-month around-the-world tour, ostensibly a business trip. Not so terribly long after this tour their father dies.

Their mother, vacillating between distant and far-too-invasive, sends them to boarding schools as well as a few suspect “finishing schools.” 

Above all, Mother sleeps. She grasps sleep greedily in her clenched fists, as though it were the most precious thing in the world. She sleeps all through the long hot afternoons in the green light of her high-ceilinged room with the shutters drawn down, one arm flung with abandon across her face, her dark curls clinging to her damp forehead.

And she drinks. She starts drinking at sundown on the glassed-in veranda, surrounded by her two sisters and younger brother, while the blue hills disappear in the dim light.

These maternal relatives will come back to play a major role after Ms. Kohler’s mother’s death. 

But first more about Ms. Kohler’s years of longing and self-discovery. She loves literature. She yearns to write. Her mother’s take? “When I tell Mother I would like to be independent, to find meaningful work, she stares at me blankly and says with genuine surprise, ‘What on earth would you want to work for, dear?’ Much of her life has been a successful struggle to avoid any work.”

Within close proximity Sheila and Maxine marry. Sheila has become pregnant upon losing her virginity, although the pregnancy does not come to term. Her husband, Michael, is a handsome American scholar. They live in Paris. But when the larger family travels through Europe, Michael chooses to remain apart. “In Rapallo Michael prefers to lie on his bed and read ‘Jane Eyre.’ My mother scoffs. ‘A man does not read in the morning,’ she says. Reading is considered an idle pastime, not to be indulged in too frequently. It therefore becomes an illicit source of pleasure.”

Maxine marries Carl, an extremely well-regarded Afrikaner heart-transplant surgeon. “Mother says my sister and I have both married vultures, bloodsuckers. Mother does not mince her words.” Both young women begin bearing children. But Maxine is often beaten “black and blue.” Her children are sometimes harmed as well. This by a man who saves people’s lives, who holds human hearts in his hands in the medical theater. 

Not long after, Sheila Kohler’s husband drinks a bottle of vodka and announces he’s having an affair. She turns to Nonna, her mother-in-law, for advice. “There are triangles within triangles in this complicated plot,” Ms. Kohler writes.

In my case [Nonna] counsels patience. (I am, you have to understand, paying the mortgage on her apartment in Switzerland and our entire household is mainly maintained by my money.) She tells me not to make her son feel guilty: “No one wants to feel guilty, do they dear?” she asks me.

“Indeed,” I, the guilty one, say.

“Pretend he has the measles,” she says. “Pretend to be asleep when he comes home late at night,” she says. “The family is sacred, don’t you think, darling? Do it for your girls,” she says, and advises taking a lover.

Throughout, the sisters remain close, visiting each other, often with their children, in France, Italy, skiing, living: “My sister and I are always flying long distances back and forth to meet in beautiful places.” But there is one day in Rome when the two sisters are to meet at the Hotel Hassler on the Spanish Steps. Maxine is late. Sheila grows increasingly concerned. She thinks about the moment when her brother-in-law, Carl, has told her of a time when Maxine was extremely ill: “. . . he imagined he would be accused of killing her.”

“ ‘Why on earth would they accuse you?’ I asked innocently at the time, though my words would come back to me with an ominous ring. As I write of them today, hindsight casts its dark wing and colors them. For who else but someone with murder in his heart would have that troubling thought? Was this something Carl had planned to do for a long time or at least considered? Was it a constant possibility in his mind? A way out of his unhappiness?”

In the extraordinary chapter just before these thoughts, Ms. Kohler writes of the time when Carl called the black female servants into the bedroom to help the “ ‘master,’ and they are forced to participate in a particularly South African form of wife-beating, holding my struggling sister down on the bed, while he beats her.” Maxine was 39 at the time their car crashed into a lamppost on a deserted road. 

Ms. Kohler delivers so many of these horrors to us ever so gently. She writes about her three great-aunts, who were spinsters. Why? Because their father’s will stipulated that if any of the them married, all their diamond-mine money would be taken away from all three of them to be distributed to their cousins. Those cousins? They kept sending suitors over, hoping to appropriate their fortune.

Ms. Kohler’s own mother? She left all of her money to her ne’er-do-well side of the family. Not a dime for Ms. Kohler, her only direct descendant.

Even today Ms. Kohler keeps a photo of Maxine in her presentation dress for the queen on the wall of her own bedroom. People mistake the young woman in the image for Ms. Kohler, “which makes my heart tilt with sorrow.”

Ms. Kohler writes about how hard she has looked for the truths of her life and of her sister’s, how she has used and sometimes misused the facts of their lives and the lives of people around them in her fiction — she has written 10 novels. This memoir comes across as remarkably, heartbreakingly true. This writer is not settling scores here. She is coming to grips with the overarching mysteries and extraordinary pains of her life. 

Yet even that Sisyphean task brings more heartbreak: Ms. Kohler dedicates this memoir to her sister’s five children. Who lost their mother at a very young age.

Laura Wells is a regular book reviewer for The Star. She lives in Sag Harbor.

Sheila Kohler lives part time in Amagansett.

“Pushcart Prize XLI”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $19.95

The poems in “Pushcart Prize XLI,” which anthologizes the year’s best fiction and essays, edited by Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize editors, reflect a wide range of voices in contemporary American poetry. The narrative mode dominates as each poet tells his or her tale. But it is a fragmented and interrupted narrative that reflects the disjuncture of American life. 

Suffering, for example, is shown through the surreal, as in Mathias Svalina’s “From Thank You Terror,” which describes being beyond death. The poem begins “I was dead / but they kept killing me / by the seaside” and is soon followed by questions: “But where is the sonnet of power? / Where is the sonnet of suffering?” Mr. Svalina’s almost-answer is “when the skin comes off / it comes off like a shower curtain.” Hardly sonnet-like, but the image packs power.

In “I Dream of Horses Eating Cops,” Joshua Jennifer Espinoza uses the sardonic metaphor of a rebellious carnivorous horse as escape from things as they are: “My dad was a demon but so was the white man in uniform / who harassed him for the crime of being brown.” 

Animals suffer, too. Robert Wrigley in “Elk” describes an elk falling through the ice, freezing to death, and being eaten by coyotes. The coyotes in Jane Springer’s “Walk” did not want the meat of an accidental kill that she encounters on a walk “in these woods.”

Themes of alienation and prejudice dominate the collection. For example, Sally Wen Mao in “Anna May Wong Blows Out Sixteen Candles” shows us how Asians were cast as stereotypes in movies through the voice of Wong, who was cast as a woman who pours someone’s tea and was held “at knifepoint, my neck in a chokehold.” Her role: “If they didn’t murder me, I died of an opium overdose.” The central image is of a boy in school who stuck needles in the speaker’s neck, asking, “Do Asians feel pain the way we do?”

Adrian Matejka addresses the issue of color in “The Antique Blacks.” His poem interrupts narrative, leaping from “In Richard Pryor’s origin myth of black / size, the two most magnanimous black men / in the world are peeing off the 30th Street Bridge” to the speaker’s personal experience: “It’s like back in Indiana, where my white / mother said, You are black because my black / father’s jurisdiction includes the skin heliotrope / I’m in.” Images of blackness like the first black man in outer space are juxtaposed against whiteness: “Him & his pack of white / friends — a flotilla.” The poem, long, dense, and angry, must be reread for full comprehension of the nuances of color.

Another poem that departs from conventional narrative using paragraphs and indented lines to show prejudice is James Kimbrell’s “Pluto’s Gate: Mississippi.” It is spoken in a colloquial voice and deploys unusual and strong similes; “my face stinging like a voodoo doll,” and “white as God’s white-ass golf balls.” He shows time and place — Starbucks, a Plymouth push-button Belvedere, a pool hall — to dramatize class and racial differences between blacks and whites in Oxford, Miss. 

Poems of a son’s relationship to a father include Martin Espada’s “The Beating Heart of the Wristwatch,” with its pessimistic ending, “We try to resurrect the father. / We listen to the heartbeat and hear the howling.” 

David Tomas Martinez uses the mythic father as king with absolute power to show the everyday experience of male power through the figure of Oedipus. The poem, “Consider Oedipus’ Father,” begins, “It could have been a car door / leaving that bruise, / as any mom knows, / almost anything could take an eye out.” It should also be noted that Mr. Martinez pays tribute in this poem to William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow. 

There are other family poems, like Kate Levin’s “Resting Place,” which merges the theme of the death of a bird with her fear for her son’s safety. Death is paramount in these poems, as in Jean Valentine’s “Hospice,” which begins with the poignant “I wore his hat / as if it was the rumpled coat / of his body, / like I could put it on.”

Tatiana Forero Puerta’s “Cleaning the Ghost Room” confronts the issue of how we face the dead through the trope of mother and daughter. The speaker’s mother makes her clean and dust “the ghost room” where Mr. Traynor died. When she objects, her mother tells her, “You want the dead on your side.” She recalls her fear and dislike of her mother: “I held the / can of Pledge, an old sock rag, and / antagonism for my mother.” The poem suggests the complex feelings she has for her mother and how to confront death. If as a girl she hadn’t dusted “the accruements / of the departed,” she might not be able to “polish the rust / off the roses — embossed in the bronze of Mami’s urn.”

The poems selected for “Pushcart Prize XLI” speak in bold and varied voices using imagery that ranges from movies to myth to capture life and death in contemporary America. They are a pleasure and an education to read.

Carole Stone, professor emerita of English at Montclair State University, is the author of poetry collections including “American Rhapsody” and “Hurt, the Shadow: The Josephine Hopper Poems.” She lives part time in Springs.

Bill Henderson lives in Springs.

“Nevertheless”

Alec Baldwin

Harper, $28.99

Of the many hats Alec Baldwin wears as a performer and public figure — film, stage, and television actor, writer, comedian, radio personality, political activist, etc. — there is also that of the combative provocateur (the “bloviator” to some), the man who can’t seem to avoid public confrontation. 

Part of the expectation in picking up Mr. Baldwin’s new memoir, “Nevertheless,” is that the author’s more pugnacious tendencies will be realized. Given the freedom of a memoir, you think, a warrior like Mr. Baldwin couldn’t resist the temptation to rekindle old battles, relitigate lost cases, refire missed punches. This is, after all, part of the appeal of writing a memoir: You get to have the last word.

As one would expect, there are moments of raw pugnacity in “Nevertheless”: Custody lawyers and celebrity photographers can still stir Mr. Baldwin’s ire. But the surprise for many readers will be just how thoughtful and measured a book this is. A successful second marriage, and perhaps a bit of age, seems to have mellowed the actor/author, and the overriding tone of “Nevertheless” is more rueful than contentious.

The memoir spends a good deal of time on Mr. Baldwin’s childhood, and these early chapters are evocative in bringing to life the author’s rough-hewn boyhood. Mr. Baldwin grew up lower middle class in Massapequa, in a cramped, ranch-style home overstuffed with siblings and overseen by unhappy parents trapped in a bad marriage. Money was forever in short supply. Their home, he writes, “was always receiving notices about the electricity or phone being turned off.” 

It is perhaps these early struggles that fueled his ambition. “If I wanted money,” Mr. Baldwin learned in those years, “I’d have to go out and get it.” His attempts to earn his own cash, however, were often short-circuited by his mother. After a day of mowing lawns, he’d come home to find her at the kitchen table, weeping about finances. “The 40 or 50 dollars she was short was, uncannily, the amount I had in my pocket at that moment. . . . And whoosh, out it came, she took it, no more tears.” 

He finds refuge in sports, but also reading; he devours all the major best sellers of the era. And of course there are movies, which he watches on television by the dozens with his father. Mr. Baldwin’s favorite actor of all time? William Holden, who, he writes, was “handsome, graceful, charming, and funny. . . . Holden could do it all.”

Of course William Holden was also notorious for his alcoholism, and, like his hero, Mr. Baldwin would eventually encounter his own challenges with addiction. “Nevertheless” is brutally frank about the writer’s drug and alcohol problems, which seemed to grow as swiftly as his charmed early career. 

After a truncated foray to George Washington University, Mr. Baldwin auditions for acting classes at N.Y.U. and is duly accepted. Shortly after, he lands a recurring role on the daytime soap “The Doctors,” and then in prime time on “Knots Landing.” He writes how during these years he begins to “steel” himself for stressful auditions with whiskey-and-sodas (drinking to relax was also an acting trick of William Holden’s). The partying grows in intensity, possibly buoyed by his father’s fatal bout with cancer. 

Finally there is a meltdown at a hotel in Oregon, where he is shooting “Knots.” In a viscerally harrowing narrative sequence, Mr. Baldwin recounts his descent into the abyss. We pick up one early morning after he has been snorting cocaine since 4 o’clock the previous afternoon. 

“When I call room service I fumbled for the words, saying something like ‘. . . I know how busy you can be and I was wondering if you might send over a bottle of champagne NOW!’ — punching certain words, as I am slightly deaf when high. ‘. . . I would appreciate that. One bottle of champagne. NOW!’ ”

Suffice it to say that the bottle is delivered and then consumed in under a minute, more lines are snorted, and a delirious Mr. Baldwin ends up asking for help from the TV image of Jane Pauley. Finally his heart stops beating and he ends up in the hospital. Luckily, this is the beginning of the end of it: Mr. Baldwin enters A.A. for both alcohol and cocaine. He has been substance-free for decades.

The career grows, but not without its stops and starts. After starring in “Beetlejuice” and “The Hunt for Red October,” he is offered a part in “The Marrying Man,” a project he knows is subpar but for which he will receive his first million-dollar payday. The movie is a flop, and there is a fallow period in Mr. Baldwin’s career that includes stinkers such as “The Shadow” and “Prelude to a Kiss.” He is oddly dismissive of his unforgettable turn in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” writing, “I’ve still never really understood audiences’ appetites for that kind of double-barreled acting.” Huh?

He credits his role in Broadway’s 1992 revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” for revitalizing his interest in his craft. When he does return to film, he finds nourishment in a series of prestigious character roles, in, for example, “State and Main,” “The Departed,” and “The Aviator.” 

Of course it’s not a Hollywood memoir without a certain amount of dish, and Mr. Baldwin doles out a decent helping. Of Harrison Ford, he writes, “Ford, in person, is a little man, short, scrawny, and wiry, whose soft voice sounds like it’s coming from behind a door.” The director Philip Noyce, he writes, is a “marginal talent.” And you can almost hear him biting his tongue as he gently chides his ex-wife, Kim Basinger. “I went to New York knowing that I needed a break from her and her self-absorption as well. Kim could be funny. She could be a mess. But most of all Kim was about Kim.” 

Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Meryl Streep all garner high praise. As does Tom Cruise, whom Mr. Baldwin admires for his work ethic. Never one to follow popular opinion, he even speculates that Scientology might be the key to Mr. Cruise’s success, rather than a distraction. “Does Scientology,” Mr. Baldwin asks, “function as some kind of coach that not only gives permission to its flock to unabashedly pursue their dreams, but demands that you go for it, without apology, keeping your focus on yourself and your goals?”

As fun as much of this is, the last third of “Nevertheless” feels schematic and rushed, with Mr. Baldwin offering quick anecdotes when more elaborate commentary would be welcome. How exactly do people like Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen work? What is the key to their genius? The writer seems too intent on the finish line to tell us. He does, however, spend an inordinate amount of time going over his MSNBC case, in which he was dismissed from his talk show after only a few episodes. 

And in an endless chapter titled “The Interests of the Great Mass,” he enumerates, in exhausting detail, his years of political activism. Even if you share the actor’s political perspective, it’s a momentum killer for the reader — though there is an amusing anecdote about Bill Clinton. At a political fund-raiser at East Hampton’s Turtle Crossing restaurant in 1997, Mr. Clinton spoke intimately with Mr. Baldwin and Kim Basinger about the then-ongoing Monica Lewinsky scandal. The author quotes, “ ‘Even if I did do it,’ ” he said, ‘don’t I deserve to be forgiven?’ . . . Kim spun toward me and squealed, ‘I think he just told us he did it!’ ”

By the end, you begin to notice the strange pyramidal shape of “Nevertheless,” broad at the bottom about Mr. Baldwin’s childhood and early days as an actor, then increasingly slender as you move toward the present day. I suspect the writer’s early ambitions for the book were curtailed by a deadline. Or maybe he just lost interest along the way. As a result, “Nevertheless” ends up being a book intermittently evocative and wise, hurried and superficial. 

It’s not until the very last chapter, where again he hearkens back to his childhood, that Mr. Baldwin’s writing reminds us of the book that might have been. 

“Those football games at dusk, the testosterone and ego galloping up and down the field we carved out within the golf course. I can feel that air around me now. We were so focused and present. No cell phones. No streaming TV. . . . What I wouldn’t give to go back and see us then. Just to look at us, at my young self, and say, ‘Do you realize that you have everything you could want right here?’ ”

Kurt Wenzel is a novelist and book and theater reviewer for The Star. He lives in Springs.

Alec Baldwin lives in Manhattan and Amagansett.­

“What You Break”

Reed Farrel Coleman

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $27

On the copyright page of Reed Farrel Coleman’s new novel, “What You Break,” the book’s genre is identified as “Mystery & Detective / Hard-Boiled.” But Gus Murphy, the book’s narrator and central character, is really closer to poached than hard-boiled. He has the right tough-guy pedigree (ex-cop, bouncer), but any resemblance to the steely shamuses created by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Robert B. Parker is only superficial.

True, Gus’s life is filled with violence, past and present. He tells us that his mentor Bill, an ex-priest, saved his life by killing a rogue cop “who needed killing” after Gus exposed him while on the job. Gus’s Russian friend Slava performed similar services on his behalf “at least twice,” and, he notes, “someone did try to shotgun me in my sleep last year. . . . But so many people had tried to kill me last December that I would have needed a scorecard to keep up.” Understandably, Gus never leaves home without a Glock strapped to his ankle.

Underneath his hard shell, though, he’s both obsessed and depressed. The defining event of his life is the death of his son some years earlier, which cost him his marriage, his job, his belief in God, and his mental equilibrium. “I knew all there was to know about emptiness,” he tells us. “John’s death had supplied me with all the hurt and anger a man could ever need.”

A lapsed Catholic, his catalog of disappointments is suffused with religion: “We were alone and here but once. There was no Heavenly Father waiting in judgment, to guide us, to watch over us, to pull this lever or that.” One of his many antagonists is “nipple deep in hell. I knew because I’d been there myself”; the same man is literally, he believes, the Devil. 

At the same time, his angst sometimes takes on an existentialist quality: “What does anything matter after you’re in a box in the ground, when who you are is only who you were and where you’re going is where you are. Forever.” Sam Spade, meet Jean-Paul Sartre. 

In addition to blaming the God in which he no longer believes, Gus takes his anger out on everyone he meets: “You’re sorry. I’m sorry. Everybody I know is sorry and he’s still dead,” he says to a woman he’s known for five minutes. He may not have intended this as a pickup line, but it starts her middle-aged juices flowing. “If I was about twenty years younger, there’s no way you’d be leaving here without bedding me,” she tells him, planting a kiss on his 50-year-old lips.

He ignores the hint, but there are two steamy scenes later on, one with his ex-wife and the other with his actress-girlfriend, who, he tells us, enjoys oral sex and “everything bagels with cream cheese.” He’s a much better lover than he is a fighter; three different guys beat him up during the course of the action, and he misses everybody he shoots at.

He isn’t the only one with a cross to bear or a secret to keep. Bill is “a prisoner of his past,” and Slava, because of his connection to a terrorist event decades before, is on the run from a K.G.B. assassin who himself has four identities: He turns up as Michael Smith, Mr. Gordon, Borovski, and Lagunov, which doesn’t make it easy for the reader to follow the convolutions of the story. The biggest secret of all is the horrific past of Micah Spear, a wealthy man of mystery who hires Gus to find out why his granddaughter was stabbed to death.

But even the most minor characters exhibit a reflexive need for privacy: Felix, who owns the motel where Gus lives, “had his secrets,” and Martina, the night clerk, “didn’t seem anxious for me or anyone else to get to know her.” 

The plot is Byzantine in its complexity, but the fixed point around which everything revolves is Gus’s need for answers. Some of his questions are factual: Why was the girl murdered, what exactly did Slava do in Chechnya 20 years ago, and what did Spear do in Cambodia two decades before that? Members of a gang called the Asesinos keep turning up (one is the granddaughter’s murderer, who is himself murdered in jail, and two more make an attempt on Gus’s life that is foiled by Lagunov), and everyone is somehow connected to the shadowy Gyron factory that secretly manufactures highly illegal products. 

But answering such questions as these is made more difficult by the spiritual colloquy running nonstop inside Gus’s head: “Who could I see about my son’s death? Where were my answers?”

The setting for this tale of multiple mysteries is a prosaic but familiar one: Suffolk County. Gus’s day job is driving a courtesy van for a seedy motel near MacArthur Airport, and the book is in some ways a travelogue of his turf: “Ronkonkoma, Middle Island, and Mastic Beach. Not awful places, just not anybody’s dream.” 

Mr. Coleman knows this area intimately and describes it effectively, but the farther east he goes, the less he gets right. Or is it just Gus who thinks that everyone in the Hamptons spends time at “polo matches or regattas”? Gus disapproves of “some huge, inappropriate houses” on Shelter Island, but at least “there weren’t stockade fences everywhere.” So though he is meant to embody the blue-collar cop-and-fireman ethos of central Suffolk, he’s also endowed with taste and discernment: Taking a sip of red wine, he pronounces it “rich with notes of berries and black pepper.” 

This is probably meant to introduce some variety into his character, and it points up his resemblance to Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, who knows food and wine and 16th-century English literature, and who, like Gus, is involved with a Jewish shrink — in Gus’s case professionally, in Spenser’s, romantically.

Mr. Coleman is, in fact, continuing the work begun by the late Mr. Parker, writing a series of books with almost indecipherable titles like “Robert B. Parker’s The Hangman’s Sonnet (A Jesse Stone Novel) by Reed Farrel Coleman.” Writing as Mr. Parker, Mr. Coleman’s prose is leaner, more ironic, and more convincingly hard-boiled than it is here. Occasionally, he demonstrates this Parkeresque style in “What You Break”; I wish Gus complained more in the ironic, understated vein of “I hated the way people could become important to me without asking my permission” and less in his usual self-dramatizing mode. 

The title, too, is admirably terse. It’s glossed in an unattributed epigraph, which reads, “What you break, you own . . . forever.” That has a nice ring, but what it refers to, in this novel about a man who is not a breaker of things but is himself broken, I have no idea.

Richard Horwich, who lives in East Hampton, taught literature at Brooklyn College and New York University.

Reed Farrel Coleman will read from “What You Break” at Southampton Books on April 8 at 6 p.m.

Poetry Readings, Two of ’Em

April arrives Saturday, and with it, as sure as the spring rain, will come the tired journalistic references to “the cruelest month.” But National Poetry Month also brings with it something else inevitable, but more welcome, the open-mike intonation of poems by Billy Collins, that infuser of humor, revitalizer of the form, and professorial rock star among poets, to the extent such is even possible.

Otherwise, poetry fans, go ahead and pick something of your choosing to read — new and original, old and favorite, you name it — at one or both of a couple of readings in Sag Harbor, on April Fools' Day, Saturday, at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books and on April 2 at 3 p.m. at the John Jermain Memorial Library. The former will be headlined by Susan Dingle and Maggie Bloomfield, the gals behind the popular Poetry Street monthly series of readings at the Blue Duck Bakery on East Main Street in Riverhead. The latter promises coffee.

L.I. Poet of the Year

Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan has been named the Long Island poet of the year by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in Huntington Station, where a ceremony will take place at 2 p.m. on April 23. The honoree will read at the free event.

Ms. Nuzzo-Morgan is a past poet laureate of Suffolk County, founder of the North Sea Poetry Scene, author of several collections of verse, and one of the editors of the anthology Long Island Sounds. She lives in North Sea and is resident poet for the Southampton Historical Museum, for which she will host a series of readings in July and August at the Thomas Halsey Homestead.