“The Kingdom of Speech”

Tom Wolfe

Little, Brown, $26

My problem with Tom Wolfe is that he has too much fun. Are we supposed to take him seriously when he hilariously skewers the greedy class in his “Bonfire of the Vanities,” or the art crowd in “The Painted Word”? Mr. Wolfe specializes in satire sure to offend everybody. We worry that he will be roundly attacked by the humorless. Does he know this? 

Does he know when he attacks mainline Christians in “The Kingdom of Speech” as moo-cows that he will arouse a bit of miff? Has he thought of the consequences of laughing at the godfathers of evolution theory (Wallace and Darwin) and the progenitor of language notions (Noam Chomsky)? One wants to race to our neighbor in Southampton and offer protection to this dapper spewer of raucous observations. 

That said, I’m glad he wrote “The Kingdom of Speech.” Somebody had to stand up and say this whole evolution business is worth a second look. Myself, I prefer the curious Eve with the apple, the dopey Adam who takes her bait. It seems to be true, as only fiction can be — and let’s face it, the Bible is 90 percent historical fiction that needs a good editor. But it is true in a way that nonfiction never can be.

So, what’s this “Kingdom of Speech” all about? Once upon a time there was a self-taught Englishman named Alfred Russel Wallace, the “flycatcher” who labored in distant jungles and came up with a theory of evolution, but Charles Darwin, a gentleman of the top drawer, beat him into print and got credit, or blame, for this most upsetting idea — that we were not created by God but journeyed from lower forms by a procesof natural selection.

Today that popularly means “every day in every way we are getting better and better,” which on the face of it should cancel the theory right off. Think about the natural selection process that delivered the atomic bomb, global warming, the babble of the internet, and Donald Trump.

Then consider my dog Sedgwick, an intelligent fellow who wishes nobody harm and enjoys fellowship at the Springs Dog Park, where every sort of canine — tiny, huge, black, white, brown, spotted, old, young — gets along just fine. Sedgwick is definitely of a higher order than me and my fellow clever baboons that strut around grasping for happiness, renown, and more stuff and consider themselves superior.

That should finish off the theory of natural selection rather quickly. 

But Tom Wolfe has another sharp angle in this evolution business — language, where does it come from? Alfred Wallace could not explain language and renounced natural selection. In the 20th century Noam Chomsky cooked up his idea of “a language organ” that accounts for the unique speech ability of all humans. Poor Chomsky — who is featured in half this slim volume — is obliterated by the howling Wolfe. 

Conclusion: The theory of evolution is “baggy, boggy, soggy, and leaking all over the place,” as Mr. Wolfe so brightly dismisses it. My theory that Sedgwick is better than most sapiens holds up much better. So does the Genesis tale in my church down the road in Springs.

Bill Henderson is the publisher of the Pushcart Press in Springs and author most recently of the memoir “Cathedral.”

“Awakening From

the Daydream”

David Nichtern

Wisdom Publications, $15.95

David Nichtern, a meditation teacher, has written a remarkably useful and succinct handbook of Buddhist practice and psychological concepts. In “Awakening From the Daydream” he brings an esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism into comfortable vernacular. As a practicing teacher, Mr. Nichtern has a nuts-and-bolts feel for communicating the subtleties of meditation. 

And meditation is indeed a practice, whether a sudden Zen encounter or an incremental change in point of view. The mind is a slippery country that Mr. Nichtern navigates with skill and aplomb. He teaches periodically in East Hampton between tours to Japan and around the U.S., producing online courses, and the musical endeavors that are the other side of his persona.

The Wheel of Life, on which the book is based, is a Tibetan diagram of karma and reincarnation. It reflects a many-layered vision of reality in which a human birth is one of many in a progression. It leads ultimately to a state of freedom not different from the Buddha’s nirvana. Practically speaking, the process is to see through the veil of our desires, impulses, and actions to the truth of the matter. While the wheel traditionally illustrates different heaven, hell, and human realms, it can also be interpreted as Mr. Nichtern does, as different mind states.

Beginning in 1970, Mr. Nichtern studied with the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. A Rinpoche is an honored teacher and Trungpa was considered a tulku, or reincarnation of a high lama. He was an early émigré to the U.K. from the Tibetan diaspora following the Communist Chinese invasion of that fabled Himalayan theocracy. Because of his monastic training and status, Trungpa was highly educated. He enrolled in Oxford, later moved to Scotland, and then the U.S., where he founded the Shambhala lineage with a teaching center in Barnet, Vt., and Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., accredited as one of the few Buddhist universities in this country. 

A skilled practitioner, spiritual teacher, and writer, Trungpa became widely known for his book “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.” He was also a man of excess, intoxication, and promiscuity, which somehow managed not to dilute his spirituality. In 1974, the first season of Naropa, I remember him giving a pellucid lecture on the intricacies of Buddhist doctrine, frequently sipping from a glass he refilled from a pitcher. It appeared to be water but was probably not. Trungpa’s combination of wry humor and deep wisdom was a potent attraction to Westerners eager for an authentic transmission of Buddhism, and enjoying life on the path.

Mr. Nichtern absorbed and permuted Trungpa’s teaching over many years. “Awakening From the Daydream” bridges the rifts of time and heritage between Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary America with clean lines and simple examples. He makes a strong case for Buddhism as a practical toolbox for dealing with the mind.

A primary tenet (or my interpretation thereof) is that reality reflects our mind-set and is a projection of our internal narrative, the thought-story we constantly tell ourselves about who we are and what we think is going on. It turns out who we think we are is not who we are — behind it all we are pure awareness, presence, we are. The mindstuff and the phenomena keep changing; change is the only constant — impermanence! By acknowledging our common situation, our sameness, we build a sense of interconnection with all human experience — compassion! Development of compassion, especially for oneself, is a central building block of this practice.

It’s not easy to see our true situation. As Mr. Nichtern says in “Awakening,” “The mindset of the human realm may be the most transparent and undetectable of all the realms. To become aware of our human realm perspective is like a fish trying to see the water in which it swims.” It takes practice, hence the need for meditation to gain insight into the mind and bring us into the present. He notes, “The awakened state is said to be none other than fully experiencing our life in this very moment.”

About understanding the Wheel of Life, he says, “The Wheel portrays the ways we get trapped in repetitive patterns and imprison ourselves emotionally, intellectually, and in relation to our external life circumstances. In addition to describing the form of our imprisonment, the Wheel also points to a pathway out, to freedom, liberation, true peace, and real happiness.” 

The Wheel of Life depicts the Buddhist view that the material reality we inhabit as individuals is underlaid by a subtler one in which our consciousness transmigrates from one incarnation (literally, “in the meat”) to another, dictated by the subtle traces left by our actions, thoughts, and feelings, our karma. The Wheel is a graphic allegory of how awareness interacts with karma, and the opportunity it presents for liberation and long-term fulfillment. 

Mr. Nichtern explores this dynamic in ways we can relate to in daily life: “Our minds influence the environment, and the environment influences our minds. Through this loop the realms develop tremendous power.” Later he notes, “Our daydream world, with the familiar stories we weave into it, actually keeps us one step removed from vividly experiencing the moment as it occurs.” And further, “Ultimately the Wheel teachings point toward a state of natural wakefulness that transcends the notion of karma altogether.”

Karma and reincarnation may seem a fantastical reality to us — that’s okay. I recall an account of an interviewer who asked a Zen roshi, an accomplished Buddhist teacher, his opinion about reincarnation. The roshi closed his eyes for a moment and said, “Reincarnation is not an opinion,” and he slammed his fist on the table. “It’s a fact!”

Although Mr. Nichtern writes well of Buddhist loving kindness meditation or metta practice, for me as a student who treads the devotional side of the spiritual path, I would like more about transcendent love as a catalyst for liberation. I find the relation between devotion and detachment fascinating, somewhere between falling in love and letting go, or as E.E. Cummings wrote, 

let all go.

so comes love.

“Awakening From the Daydream” is an excellent guidebook to “skillful means,” techniques both for starting out and for pursuing one’s spiritual development. There is deep wisdom here and a functional understanding that we are a point of view immersed in a mystery.

Rameshwar Das co-wrote “Polishing the Mirror” with Ram Dass. He lives in Springs.

David Nichtern, a composer and song­writer, has a house in East Hampton.

So How Beleaguered Is It?

The publishing business. How’s it faring in these constrained and digitized times? Well, a chance to ask someone in the know will present itself on Wednesday at 7 p.m., when John Knight, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, makes an appearance at Writers Speak on the Stony Brook Southampton campus for a chat, his interlocutor being Emily Smith Gilbert, the managing editor of The Southampton Review, the college’s literary journal. (And, lookee here, she’s The Star’s book reviewer this week.) 

Mr. Knight, formerly with McSweeney’s and The New York Times and who has written for New York magazine, will also address the craft of editing itself. The free talk happens in the Radio Lounge (once the studio of WLIU), upstairs in Chancellors Hall. A reception starts off the evening at 6:30. 

All Hallows’ Eve — the Readings

Long Island is haunted by many things — the vanished aeronautical manufacturing base and long-departed affordability come to mind. But what about the spectral kind of haunting, courtesy of the dead? 

Kerriann Flanagan Brosky is certainly a believer. You might even say she’s a documentarian of such phenomena — see her 2015 book on the subject, “Historic Haunts of Long Island: Ghosts and Legends From the Gold Coast to Montauk Point,” which she’ll talk about today at 11 a.m. at the Southampton Historical Museum’s Rogers Mansion. (Regarding her research, she conducted it with a medium and paranormal investigator by the name of Joe Giaquinto. Judge for yourselves, skeptics.)

Looking for a more fictional kind of ghost story? The lights will be dimmed and costumes donned at 5 on Saturday evening at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor for a reading of tales by that singularly spooked genius of American letters, Edgar Allan Poe, paired with a more contemporary strain by Val Schaffner, once a writer for The Star. The eight stories in his 2003 book, “The Astronomer’s House,” are in fact set in Sag Harbor, at least one involving a preservation-minded haunting of a historic structure — a specter we could cozy up to, for a change. 

“Wild Girls”

Erica Abeel

Texas Review Press, $24.95

Erica Abeel’s “Wild Girls” follows Brett, Audrey, and Julia, friends who meet at Foxleigh — an amalgam of Barnard and Smith — as they negotiate the changing landscape of a woman’s place in America from the 1950s through the early 2000s.

Ms. Abeel, a master of the sardonic voice, sets a scene in which coeds are clustered in a “dorm’s common room for a bull session on the meaning of life. . . . Someone produced, to a chorus of groans, a box of Sara Lee brownies, and discussion shifted to the nature of despair in Kierkegaard’s ‘The Sickness Unto Death.’ ”

Brett, Audrey, and Julia are disparaging of girls “with careful hair and careful bodies,” girls like Lyndy Darling, who viewed marriage as the ultimate goal:

“Brett sometimes thought of Lyndy’s crowd and her own trio as two distinct species peaceably co-habiting the same savannah. She and the friends were warriors pitted against everything the [Lyndys] wanted; everything the world insisted you want: marriage, three weeks after graduation to a fellow who worked at General Motors, end of story. [Brett’s] little band would not fall into line so fast, oh no; they’d flex their talent in some gleaming, if amorphous future almost certainly involving the arts.”

Of course, in the world of fiction, anyone who sets out with such good intentions is bound to veer off course.

Ms. Abeel’s prose is snappy, full of wit. The sentences, even when the characters aren’t speaking, read like the quick back-and-forth dialogue of movies such as “The Apartment” and “How to Marry a Millionaire.” The book is peppered with wry observations about the hypocrisies of men, of women, and of the consequences of attempting to carve out a career as a woman in a man’s world. Audrey, an aspiring author who’s just sold her first book, comes to the conclusion that “Men . . . used language as a kind of test drive to see how things might play out, but with no commitment to making them actually happen. That’s why there were no female Einsteins, Audrey thought irritably; women wasted their best years trying to decode male language. She knocked off an article for Mademoiselle called ‘Manspeak.’ ”

After the three graduate, Brett goes to Paris to ingratiate herself with the Beats. The intimate way Ms. Abeel writes about this time period speaks to the author’s personal experience: She was there. At first, Brett worships Allen Ginsberg — whose sexual fluidity gives Brett hope that he might, one day, worship her back — but gradually her reverence is tempered by reality. “Actually, Brett had more than once wondered how, exactly, a few writer friends — Allen, Gregory, Burroughs, Kerouac — comprised a ‘generation.’ They seemed more a group of loyal buddies than a literary movement. In fact, they seemed like each other’s wives. Allen came on like a den mother, hawking their manuscripts, tending to meals.”

In Ms. Abeel’s telling, the Beats are mortal: men who bungle their way through life like the rest of the population; men who, in Brett’s interpretation, treat women as nothing more than “footnotes . . . Gregory and Cassady screwed them, Burroughs shot them in the head. And Allen? In his roll call of all that was holy women hadn’t made the cut. Only by an act of concentration worthy of Rodin’s Thinker could Allen remember women existed at all.” Brett leaves Paris, loses touch with Allen, and moves on, as one does when one has tried something and found it not to her liking. 

The women enter their late 20s with a sense that they haven’t fulfilled the promise of their younger, idealistic selves. Brett says to her performance artist roommate, “Listen, I know you think I’ve, well, sold out — but not everyone has the guts to be an artist. I don’t have your vision, your drive, your . . . tenacity. Maybe I did once, but then it dissipates, like with most people. I no longer have dreams — I have a game plan. Get my Ph.D. and pay my way by living in books.” While not the most stirring proclamation, it’s a raw and true admission. People don’t want to give up on their dreams, but sometimes it’s necessary in order to survive.

Over the years there are jealousies and disagreements among the three friends, but through it all they stick together. “Wild Girls” is a realistic portrayal of the lives of women who don’t become trailblazers, who instead persevere, adapt, and remain whole. 

Late in life — following deaths, divorces, misguided affairs — they find themselves hard at work on their individual creative pursuits. They have the flat in Paris, the apartment in Manhattan, the summer house in the Hamptons complete with lunches at Bobby Van’s. Their rewards. In the 1990s, the trio find themselves living in a world that Allen Ginsberg “would scarcely have recognized when he set out, hungry-eyed and geeky and desperate to be loved. A world [Brett] and her friends now inhabit like immigrants lacking language skills, but gamely winging it.”

The novel is written in the close third person, but shifts perspectives among all the women. The book begins and ends with Brett’s point of view, but nearly equal time is given to Audrey and Julia. Ms. Abeel plays with the chronology when, in the later third of the novel, she skips ahead 18 years to find the women middle-aged. A smart choice — the technique livens the narrative as we meet the characters older, wiser, with more disappointments in their rearviews. 

Another jump comes at the very end. The women, now in their 70s, are gathered at Audrey’s cottage in the Hamptons. Summing up the moral, Brett says, “I’ll take humdrum happiness. . . . And the compromises, and petty self-seeking, and all that life that must go on. Audrey, what a luxury, d’you realize? To have to worry about fixing the roof. Isn’t it marvelous?”

Emily Smith Gilbert teaches creative writing at Stony Brook University. She lives in East Hampton.

Erica Abeel lives part time in East Hampton, where at BookHampton on Main Street she will read from “Wild Girls” on Nov. 5 at 5 p.m.  

With bright eyes

we look out from photos;

beautiful and strong

beloved mother, sister,

wife, friend.

Why do you cry? 

Were we really here?

You remember our warm breast

our soft lips.

The altar is laden

with sugar cakes

skulls with sequin eyes,

four-foot candles,

sentinels guarding

your memories —

the folly of attachment.

We leave behind

a whimsical smile,

a tender gaze. 

Like tea from a broken cup,

seeping into the carpet,

we are absorbed again

into the universe.

Carol Sherman has just come out with a new collection of poems, “Adios, San Miguel.” She lives in East Hampton.

(Keats Observes the Last World Series Game of the Year)

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

To Oriole and Cardinal

And Blue Jay

The Dame exclaims, “Fly home, fly home!

Fast as you may!

Tarry not at branch or base or grassy lie:

There will be NO GAME TODAY.”

Dan Marsh is a native Long Islander with roots in Springs. He lives in Garrett Park, Md.

“Supremely Partisan”

James D. Zirin

Rowman & Littlefield, $28

Election Day is right around the corner. Thank God. Most people I talk to can’t wait for it to be over. The bottomless pit of unprecedented rancor and nastiness playing out over 24/7, wall-to-wall news coverage is enough to drive even political junkies to despair. I’m counting the days until the ugliness ends. But will it? 

Not necessarily, according to James D. Zirin. In his latest book, “Supremely Partisan: How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court,” Mr. Zirin asserts “the irrefutable fact that, despite protestations to the contrary, the court has become a supremely partisan court, rapidly making policy choices right and left on ideological bases that have nothing to do with law or the Constitution.” What’s the culprit for this politicization? In Mr. Zirin’s view, personal ideologies are to blame. He finds the court rife with identity politics. 

And, Mr. Zirin predicts, the outcome will be dire. “The court’s dramatic polarization in recent years is a recipe for uncertainty, governmental dysfunction, and declining confidence in . . . the greatest of our institutions.” 

In his introductory comments, Mr. Zirin sets the stage with the drama of current events. He opens with the unexpected death of the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, followed by President Obama’s shrewd appointment of the highly qualified Judge Merrick Garland, which was met by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to begin the confirmation process. The court is now shorthanded, with only eight justices and the strong likelihood of many tie decisions. One can almost feel the founding fathers rolling over in their graves. 

“Whether Garland is approved or not, 2016 will be a defining year in the court’s history,” Mr. Zirin writes. Most every politician — on the left or the right — is making the same point in these final days of the presidential campaign. Our New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand agrees and is reported to have said, “Whenever anyone asks me why the 2016 election matters, I tell them the same thing: The future of the Supreme Court hangs in the balance.” The media is already pontificating on how a Clinton or Trump presidency would shape-shift the Supreme Court. The stakes are high.

In Chapter 1, Mr. Zirin explains how the court was intended to work, and then how it has faltered in recent years. Despite a soaring number of petitions, the number of cases actually heard and decided has declined significantly. “What explains the court’s dwindling docket?” he asks. Partisanship is his answer. In the following chapters, the author details the roots of his thesis, namely that “the Supreme Court is afflicted by identity politics.”

Mr. Zirin goes deep with chapters that detail the rise of “reserved seats” — for a Catholic, a Jew, a woman, and an African-American. “Modern presidents have flavored their appointments with justices representing ethnic and religious minorities as part of the particular president’s perceived need to accomplish ‘balance.’ It is a reflection of how politicians think about the world.”

In a chapter on the “female seat,” Mr. Zirin writes with admiration and affection for Justice Ginsburg. He acknowledges that “Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not the first female justice. That was Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed by Reagan in 1981. Nor was she the last. That was Elena Kagan, appointed by Obama in 2010.” Yet, one feels that Mr. Zirin sees Ms. Ginsburg as the female icon of the court, and it’s a bias I share. Her life and contributions to the court are chronicled beautifully and with relevance. 

“In Ginsburg’s view, her crowning achievement on the court has been in a case she lost, the Lilly Ledbetter case. . . .” Mr. Zirin continues, “In her dissent, Ginsburg invited Congress to rectify the decision as it has done in other instances of gender discrimination decisions by the Rehnquist court that were, in her view, wrongly decided. Congress acted quickly to reverse the decision. In 2009, just nine days after taking office, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.” 

Each justice has a distinct historical and political backdrop that could lead to stereotypical portrayals, but Mr. Zirin nuances his argument. “Many share the cynical belief that the Catholics or African-Americans or Jews or women on the court may vote too predictably on certain issues. The evidence, however, does not fully bear this out,” the author writes, providing numerous proof points, including Justice Clarence Thomas’s opposition to affirmative action. 

In the final chapters, Mr. Zirin reviews the impact of a partisan court on recent cases: Hobby Lobby, Obamacare, gay marriage, and the death penalty. Here Mr. Zirin brings the court to life with contemporary concerns. He speculates about Chief Justice Roberts’s motivation in salvaging the Affordable Care Act and quotes Justice Kennedy’s “eloquent and sentimental” opinion in support of gay marriage.

Unfortunately, “Supremely Partisan” has a frenetic pace, as if the author were talking too fast or, at times, yelling (lots of exclamation points). There is plenty of analysis and many details are deeply researched, but this reader often felt on a merry-go-round as storylines and examples weave back and forth across the pages. These are important matters: the history and future of the court, the giants who have served on it, and the society-shifting issues that have been heard. This reader longed for deeper reflection and a more focused narrative.

Books about the Supreme Court fall into several genres: bios like the highly acclaimed “Becoming Justice Blackmun” by Linda Greenhouse, memoirs such as the gorgeous “My Beloved World” by Justice Sotomayor, retrospectives on specific cases like “Gideon’s Trumpet” by Anthony Lewis, or classics for the modern lay readership including Bob Woodward’s “The Brethren” or Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Nine.” “Supremely Partisan” defies this taxonomy and does not quite fit on the same shelf with any of these.

Still, Mr. Zirin has put provocative ideas on the table in a timely way. He has rung the bell for citizens to consider the highest court in the land and choose carefully when they head into the voting booth on Tuesday. 

While reading “Supremely Partisan” I dreamt of a doomsday scenario: The current deadlocked Supreme Court being called to resolve a dispute in the current presidential election (similar to Bush v. Gore in 2000) and being hopelessly unable to do so. Let us hope that this is not the bloody outcome of this campaign’s bruising battle.

Sally Susman, a regular book reviewer for The Star, lives part time in Sag Harbor.

James D. Zirin is the author of “The Mother Court.” He has a house in East Hampton.

“The Summer  

Before the War”

Helen Simonson

Random House, $28

In high school American history class, we spent so much time on the American Revolution and the Civil War that as the school year drew to a close, World Wars I and II were hurriedly crammed in, a hodgepodge of battles and treaties. I only recently learned that the Veterans Day celebrated this week in the U.S. originated as Armistice Day, proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson to mark the end of World War I. So I’m grateful for novels that not only incorporate this era, but bring it to life on an intimate scale — history writ small. That’s what Helen Simonson has done masterfully in her novel “The Summer Before the War.”

Set in the English village of Rye, the novel’s action begins in 1914 with the arrival of the local school’s new Latin teacher, Beatrice Nash. She has been sponsored by one of the more illustrious citizens, Agatha Kent, who, upon learning that Beatrice is younger and prettier than she imagined, is a little anxious about the experiment of hiring a woman to teach such a serious subject (though apparently at a bargain price compared to a man).

Agatha has put her reputation on the line in hiring a female Latin teacher, but she is no suffragette, as she makes clear upon her first meeting with Beatrice:

“Mrs. Kent, am I to suppose that you support the cause of women?” said Beatrice. 

“Good heavens, no!” said Agatha. “Such hysteria in the streets is impossibly damaging. It is only through such sober activities as school boards and good works, done under the guidance of our most respected and educated gentlemen, that we will prove our worth in the eyes of God and our fellow man. Don’t you agree, Miss Nash?”

Beatrice was not at all sure she did agree. She rather thought she might like to vote and to have been admitted to a university degree at Oxford, her father’s alma mater.

Now throw into the mix at the Kent manor Agatha’s two attractive nephews: Hugh Grange, in training as a brain surgeon, and Daniel Bookham, a poet and gadabout. But where would a Jane Austen scenario be without the impediments to romance? Hugh is courting the daughter of the pre-eminent surgeon with whom he’s interning; Daniel refers quite frequently to his close male friend, Craigsmore, and following the recent death of her adored father, an academic with whom she traveled the world, Beatrice has declared herself a spinster. As she explains to the young maid at her rented lodgings:

“I think you’ll find most women in pursuit of a husband share an interest in appearing less educated than they really are,” said Beatrice. “It is why I have a low opinion of them.”

“Of women, miss?” said Abigail. 

“No, of husbands,” said Beatrice.

One of the delights of this novel is Beatrice’s wit and her complexity as an early-20th-century woman. She is caught between respectability and liberation, an independent woman (with a small trust), finally free of her father’s influence (but still hoping to tend his reputation by bringing forth a collection of his writings), determined not to marry (yet clearly falling for Hugh Grange), and mocking various proprieties (yet ultimately obedient to them).

The novel’s setting, however, is unchanging. The village of Rye as depicted in “The Summer Before the War” may be familiar to residents of the East End’s hamlets despite the remove of over 100 years and 3,000 miles. A coastal town with a fishing fleet, it’s also home to writers and artists attracted by the salt air and the salt of the earth. 

In reality, Rye’s famous residents included Henry James, E.F. Benson (whose “Mapp and Lucia” novels are set in the village), and Paul McCartney. Helen Simonson herself lived in Rye as a teenager, and now spends time on the South Fork. In fact, you might have run into her finishing the novel at the library in Southampton. “I believe the whole world can be explained in a small town,” Ms. Simonson said in an interview with BookPage. 

Fans of her first novel, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” (which, despite the title, had nothing to do with war, unless you count class war), will find in this one the same scenes of village life and skewering of the small-minded, balanced by compassionate portrayals. In Ms. Simonson’s depiction, Rye is aswirl with civic duty, committee meetings, and gossip. It is also enlivened by uncomfortable brushes between locals and newcomers — not only Beatrice, but also Alice Finch, a photographer recently moved from London to live with Minnie Buttles, the vicar’s daughter (an arrangement that no one comments on openly). Alice is criticized by Agatha under her breath for speaking at a town meeting — “. . . a little forward for such a newcomer,” Agatha whispers to Beatrice, who observes to herself: 

“The smaller the town, the more decades one was likely to be viewed as a newcomer; though in a town like Rye, newcomer was considered a step up from being a summer visitor and totally disregarded by all.”

After a few chapters, I could have been relaxing into the comforting rhythms of a BBC mini-series featuring cobbled lanes, a vicar, and tempests in a teapot were it not for the novel’s title. The heart of the book is Rye in the early months of the war, as the Germans invade Belgium and the British prepare to enter the conflict, but it follows a number of the main characters to the battlefields of Flanders, and then the survivors to 1920. “The Summer Before the War, the War, the Postwar” isn’t as catchy a title, nor would it capture the predominant spirit of the book, which is anticipation. This slowly anneals into dread as the realities of the war creep in, brought in part by a group of Belgian refugees that the village shelters.

Wars are like hem lengths in literature. These days World Wars I and II are in. Martha Hall Kelly’s “Lilac Girls,” a World War II book I edited, has been riding that fashion. But another author with whom I work whose book is set in 1970 was rejected by a prospective agent because, she said, the Vietnam War wasn’t selling well. 

But whatever the war, the tendency is to read these as parables of our own times, and any illumination is welcome in this era of constant nebulous warfare. “The Summer Before the War” includes other themes that still resonate a century later: The arrival of refugees trailing the horrors they’ve undergone; barriers faced by ambitious women; discrimination against minorities and gay people, including in the military. But this isn’t just a morality play. It’s leavened by humor and a satisfyingly tortuous love story, as well as three fascinating father-daughter relationships in which the fathers subsume their daughters (and with which Freud would have had a field day).

Ms. Simonson’s depictions of the preparations for war in this one small town are detailed, entertaining, and, ultimately, chilling. First there’s the general conviction that the saber-rattling in the wake of the archduke’s assassination in June will blow over “before everyone’s summer holiday,” as Aunt Agatha says, quoting her husband, John, who works in the Foreign Office. 

Then, once the inevitability sets in, the inhabitants of Rye respond with a mixture of innocent enthusiasm and purblind fervor. Among a certain set, the impending entry into the war is seen chiefly as an excuse for a patriotic extravaganza; for others, it’s a career opportunity.

Hugh is convinced by his surgeon boss to enlist to further his training thanks to “an unlimited supply of wounded offering us the opportunity to catalog every possible type and severity of brain injury!” Daniel enlists in a drunken stupor after being rebuffed by Craigsmore, joining the Artists Rifles, whose mission will be, as he puts it, “to limn new forms of bravery and construct, with sonnet and brush, a new brotherhood of artist-soldiers.”

One of the most endearing characters in the book, the half-Gypsy schoolboy Richard Sidley, is motivated to enlist by that ancient poet of war, Virgil. He has just overheard the school’s headmaster telling Beatrice that though he is her star Latin pupil, he can’t compete for a scholarship because “such a boy could never adequately represent our school.” He vows to prove them wrong: “He would turn soldier, and like the wandering Trojan warriors of the ‘Aeneid,’ he would seek his destiny on a grand adventure in foreign parts.”

The village organizes itself to support the war effort and host Belgian refugees following Germany’s invasion. In reality, Britain’s harboring of refugees is a largely forgotten chapter of World War I that Ms. Simonson has said she only discovered as she researched Henry James, who was involved in relief work. “Britain took in 250,000 Belgian refugees and hosted them, fed them, clothed them, and took care of them for four years, entirely through private charitable efforts in multiple cities and towns across the country. It was one of Britain’s finest hours,” she said in an interview on “The Diane Rehm Show.”

But her admiration doesn’t stop Ms. Simonson from gently lampooning the flurry of meetings and fund-raising activities, led largely by the women of Rye. Of the first planning meeting at Town Hall, Agatha comments: 

“I assume that the good burghers of small German towns are at this very moment holding similar hot and crowded meetings. . . . Apparently, we must attempt to create more committees and official titles than the enemy.”

The efforts of the Belgian Relief Committee to raise money culminate in a Grand Fete and Parade that “had grown into an undertaking not unlike a small war of its own.” It is only slightly marred when the mayor’s wife, playing Britannia attended by young women representing Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Belgium in the parade, unleashes a fake German horde to attack their float, which causes the actual Belgian refugee, Celeste, to become hysterical. As the tone of the novel turns darker, the atrocity that Celeste suffered during the German invasion is revealed and then compounded by the reactions of the villagers to the taint this has left on the teenage girl.

One other sobering note in the parade is the appearance of the local Colonel Wheaton’s clearly unprepared unit, a description that echoes an earlier one of boys in the schoolyard playing war with sticks for rifles:

The men straggled somewhat, some limping in boots that looked hastily gathered. They carried wooden models of rifles, as official ones had yet to arrive. 

“Don’t Daddy’s men look marvelous?” asked Eleanor Wheaton. “Quite the real soldiers.”

Meanwhile, Daniel and his fellow Artists Rifles soldiers have built a cozy model trench that is so far from what we now know they would encounter that the description alone is heartbreaking. It’s furnished with poetry books, a vase of wild poppies, and a Rifles officer smoking a pipe and painting on a watercolor pad.

Oddly, it’s the American living among them, Tillingham, the writer character based on Henry James, who has a premonition of what’s to come. When Beatrice encounters him on the promenade staring toward the sea, he recalls the Civil War, “the great American conflict of my youth”:

“Most of all I remember that what begins with drums and fife, flags and bunting, becomes too swiftly a long and gray winter of the spirit.”

“It is hard to imagine war on such a glorious day,” said Beatrice. 

“Yet it is ablaze just beyond the rim of the horizon there,” said Mr. Tillingham, gesturing with his stick.

Ms. Simonson, who took this observation from Henry James’s essays, has noted that “This war was taking place across the Channel, 12 miles from the shores of Sussex. And I think that proximity brought the war home to everybody.”

Toward the end, the novel moves to the battlefields of Flanders. You would think that amid the carnage and chaos of the war, the niceties of the British class system would fall away, but in Ms. Simonson’s depiction, they’re merely relocated. She intersects the lives of her Rye soldiers as Colonel Wheaton’s regiment, not far from the front lines, is preparing for the gala regimental dinner (which is to be followed by a firing squad), a macabre echo of the village fete. When the bomb falls, however, it makes no distinction between the earl and the Gypsy boy.

The book ends with the summer after the war. The surviving central characters, including Beatrice, Aunt Agatha, and Mr. Tillingham, have traveled to visit a cemetery on the Continent where the British war dead are buried. “It was all the rage to visit the dead. . . . In London, as in Rye, the talk was of new guidebooks and of finding just the perfect little pension, from which to tour the battlefields.”

In a way, the book ends on an apologetic note about itself, the limits of the enterprise of writing a novel exposing the toll inflicted by war. Beatrice observes the writer Mr. Tillingham as he watches Aunt Agatha’s grief: 

His face was as greedy as that of a glutton before the feast. She knew then he was thinking of how to use Agatha’s secret tragedy, imagining a famous story to gild his reputation and surround himself with a new aura of exquisite compassion. . . .

She walked away from him to stand and mourn alone, in a scene she knew no writer would ever capture well enough that men might cease to war. . . .

“The Summer Before the War” ends with Ms. Simonson’s potent mix of comedy, romance, and tragedy. Life begins anew with marriage and birth, and those symbolic red poppies “nodded again in fields of wheat.” If the happy ending is tarnished, it’s with the irony provided by a 21st-century reader’s hindsight. These fictional characters mistake what turns out to be the interwar period for an enduring peace following the war to end all wars — the same hope implied in President Wilson’s declaration of “Armistice Day,” as if it would be the last. 

Alexandra Shelley is an independent book editor and professor of fiction writing at the New School. She spends summers in Sag Harbor.

Helen Simonson has a house in Westhampton Beach.

Achievement Award for Caro

Robert Caro is the author of just five books in his 80 years, but what books — from 1974’s “The Power Broker,” about the urban planner Robert Moses, practically required reading for anyone interested in the history of New York City or the art of biography, to the monumental “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” series: “The Path to Power,” “Means of Ascent,” “Master of the Senate,” and “The Passage of Power.”

The part-time East Hampton resident has now added to his accolades a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, given for a “distinguished contribution to American letters,” it was announced last week. 

“Caro’s in-depth and long-term exploration of the lives of two prominent men makes a much larger contribution to American letters than it might seem at first glance,” Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, said in a release. “His life’s work, and his stunning prose, teaches us to better understand political influence, American democracy, and the true power of biography.”

He will receive the award on Nov. 16 at the National Book Awards ceremony, dinner, and benefit in Manhattan, at which awards in poetry, children’s literature, nonfiction, and fiction will be given out, the latter category including Colson Whitehead, of the Sag Harbor family, for his novel “The Underground Railroad.” 

Mr. Caro joins Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Ursula K. Le Guin in winning the lifetime achievement award. He is at work on the fifth installment in his L.B.J. series.

Boo! It’s “Ghost Hampton”

The title might recall a stroll down a South Fork Main Street post-Tumbleweed Tuesday, or a visit to one of our beaches just now — deserted despite waters still plenty warm for a dip — but in reality “Ghost Hampton” is what the title says it is, a ghost story set here. Bridgehampton, specifically, where a real estate lawyer is ethically challenged (no surprise there), down on his luck and alcoholic (adding to his sympathy quotient), and in possession of newfound paranormal abilities (the novelistic twist). 

The haunting comes by way of Jewel, a fetching but long-dead girl from Victorian times who tells the lawyer his daughter, a Southampton Town police detective, has four days to live. He is thus moved to save an old Victorian house on behalf of the specter. Enter a parasitical TV reporter and . . . 

Want more? The author, Ken McGorry, will appear at two local libraries to read from his debut tale of mystery, first in East Hampton on Saturday at 1 p.m., and then at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton on Tuesday night at 7. 

Flash Fiction at the Parrish

The idea is to prowl the polished floors of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill in search of inspiration from its permanent collection. You write a bit of short, very short, fiction based on what you see, and then gather in a studio to read it and talk. So whaddaya say?

One Jennifer Senft, who teaches in the English and humanities departments at Suffolk Community College, will lead such a class on Friday, Oct. 7, from 1:30 to 4 p.m. The cost for the single session is $40, or $30 for museum members, and registration is by phone with the Parrish. 

Ms. Senft, please note, will be back at the museum to lead a poetry class (villanelle, haiku, or free verse) on Nov. 18, which is also a Friday, also from 1:30 to 4, and also for $30 or $40, depending. This time the inspiration will come from the collection, yes, but additionally from the potato barn-like building itself and the wild-growing grounds surrounding it. 

But wait, looking to indulge an urge for ever-popular memoir? Look no further than the Hampton Library, because Eileen Obser, East Hamptoner and veteran writing instructor, will return there for a $75 six-week series starting Tuesday from 5 to 7 p.m. Registration is by phone with the library.

Look what wonders a change of scenery can bring. For her latest children’s book, Susan Verde of East Hampton has left behind art museums, yoga, leisurely bicycle rides, budding friendship among felines, and every other conceivable bourgeois nicety for the desert sands and dirt-floor huts of West Africa.

In “The Water Princess” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $17.99), she tells the story of the fashion model Georgie Badiel’s childhood, dominated by daily trips with her mother to a distant well for water for drinking, cooking, and washing. Gie Gie imagines herself a kind of sorceress with powers over the natural world — the swirling winds, the tall grass, the wild dogs. But not the water. That she cannot conjure or entice closer. Pot on head, she must walk.

Relayed simply, even beautifully, before sunrise every morning mother and daughter begin their trek, one not without its pleasures, what with the singing, a stop for a snack of shea nuts under the spread of a karite tree, a brief frolic with other children at the well. But still Gie Gie dreams nightly of a day when the water will not only be plentiful and readily at hand, but free of befouling mud.

All this is illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds in broad swaths of ochre and shades of rich purple for the evening sky. The watercolors fill every square inch of every page. Good luck finding a more eye-pleasing picture book this year.

The lessons for spoiled North American children are self-evident, but the book also gets across the idea of helping others in far-off places — through the Georgie Badiel Foundation, for instance, which works to bring clean water to the people of Burkina Faso.

“Attitude of Gratitude”

Back in the States, the stakes may be lower, to put it mildly, the hum of the earth distant and all but drowned out, and yet a girl can still make a difference and have a good time doing it. 

Gerry, the sprightly, tiara-wearing heroine of the “Very Fairy Princess” books by Julie Andrews and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton of Sag Harbor, and illustrated by Christine Davenier, is back in “Attitude of Gratitude” (Little, Brown, $17.99). Once again we see our schools gamely trying to stanch society’s disintegration by stepping in where distracted or economically beleaguered parents can’t or won’t. In this case, with a day designated for giving compliments and expressing thanks. 

Gerry is more than up for it, but then the challenges come — a friend out sick, a jar of sprinkles dumped, the disruption of a fire alarm, and, last but not least, the insult of seeing her artwork displayed sideways. In a wry comment on modern art, however, her cornucopia is deemed an improvement when seen as a clown face. 

Naturally each setback presents a chance to turn the proverbial lemons with their circling fruit flies into a cool, refreshing drink — sweet, not too bitter. Battle through the adversity, kid. Grab that single can of beans from the shelf and hand it over for the food pantry. It’s the least you can do.

“Naughty Mabel Sees It All”

A truncheon’s a bit much. Instead, another princess of sorts, of the canine variety that is, Naughty Mabel, makes me think of a tall glass carefully selected from a kitchen cabinet, slowly filled to the brim with tap water, carried just so to avoid spilling a single drop, and briskly dashed full in the face of this inane, unfunny creature. 

The actor Nathan Lane and his husband, Devlin Elliott, a Broadway producer, who are East Hampton part-timers, have just come out with the second in a series, “Naughty Mabel Sees It All” (Simon and Schuster, $17.99), with Dan Krall, a veteran of film and television animation, handling the artwork. In it, the mansion-dwelling doggie sickens herself by downing a bowl of potpourri and starts seeing double, going on to imagine all manner of monsters lurking in every corner, called forth by the shadows cast by overstuffed armchairs or a neighbor’s dinosaur bones — you name it, she destroys it. 

Turns out Mabel needs contacts.

My own sight fails when it comes to discerning the point of laying out the backstory of the retired paleontologist neighbor or introducing Mabel’s two friends, Smarty-Cat and Scaredy-Cat. Though I admit that may be absurd to say in the context of a children’s book. Because digressions, kids do seem to dig ’em.

“The Great Spruce”

It’s not even Halloween yet, but Christmas these days is on little kids’ minds practically the year round. Besides, as Loudon Wainwright III once put it in a mocking singsong, “Christmas comes but once a year . . . and goes on for two months.”

Coming out next week is a book that fully deserves to be a classic of the holiday. “The Great Spruce” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $17.99) by John Duvall, a native Long Islander who works with a tree farm in Jamesport, and Rebecca Gibbon, a British illustrator with a winning midcentury style, is a conservation story to warm the cockles.

“Alec loved to climb trees,” the opening sentence reads. But his favorite, “the most magical of all the trees, tall and strong and spreading ever upward,” stood in his own backyard, planted there by his grandfather.

Each Christmas the two decorate the giant spruce, one year drawing the attention of a man with a clipboard who convinces Alec’s parents to let him take it to the big city for display. Just before the chainsaw teeth start to bite, however, a little civic disobedience by Alec saves the day.

The result? The tree is taken, yes, but with its roots wrapped in a huge burlap ball for replanting whence it came. “We’re just visiting,” Alec tells a curious little girl.

An author’s note explains that such a practice is precisely what held sway in regard to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree during the Depression years. No better time than now to turn back the clock.