“Under the Harrow”

Flynn Berry

Penguin Books, $16

A thriller is supposed to thrill and this one does, right from the outset, but not with the usual car chases or shootouts or spooky, otherworldly phenomena. Instead, the reader is gripped by masterful plotting, tight, elegant prose, and assured psychological insight. 

Nora Lawrence, the narrator of “Under the Harrow,” has come by train from London to the small, bucolic suburb of Marlow to stay with her sister, Rachel, a visit she happily anticipates. The 30-something siblings, survivors of haphazard parenting, are especially close. Their conversations are intimate and sympathetic; they’ve rented a vacation house together in the past and plan to do so soon again. Nora, who’s recovering from a painful breakup, is looking forward to sharing some good news — she’s been awarded a residency at an artists’ retreat in France — and a celebratory drink. 

She’s not alarmed when Rachel isn’t at the station to greet her, and she sets out by foot to Rachel’s house. The bloody scene she encounters there is shocking — her sister dead of multiple stab wounds, and Fenno, Rachel’s large German shepherd, hanged from a banister and turning slowly on the noose of his lead. The details are certainly grisly, but not gratuitous. Nora’s shock is also ours, her grief palpably real, coming down “like a guillotine when the woman put her finger to Rachel’s neck.” 

At the police station, she thinks, “It’s strange to be so tired, and also so scared, as if my body is asleep but receiving electric jolts.” And much later, she wants to tell someone “about the moment between opening the door of the house and understanding what had happened, when what I felt was wonder. It was an incredible feeling, golden and drugged. . . . I wouldn’t mind living my whole life in that gap.” 

We learn that Rachel, a nurse, had endured another brutal physical attack — years earlier, when she was a teenager — for which no one was ever charged. Nora sustains guilt about that event because she chose to sleep in rather than accompany Rachel on the day it happened. 

Gradually and steadily, we become aware of other details of the sisters’ past and of their character. Rachel harbored obsessive vengeful thoughts about her first attacker, owned a blackjack, and had committed lesser acts of violence herself, like dropping beer bottles on a bartender’s feet and punching a man in the head at a party. When a detective remarks that Rachel could be unpleasant, Nora evokes a smile by saying, “I liked that about her.” Nora, who has a history of sleepwalking, keeps a carving knife under her bed and carries a straight razor and pepper spray by day. 

Despite Nora’s conviction that she and Rachel kept nothing from each other, she discovers that Rachel withheld some vital information. Her beloved dog, Fenno, was acquired as much for protection as for companionship. She had recently stayed for a week with her best friend, lying about a broken boiler at her own house. But even when Nora unearths a disturbing personal betrayal — a valid reason for ambivalence — she’s still irrevocably devoted to Rachel: “Bitch, I think, and the venom does nothing to how much I miss her.” And she’s no less determined to find her sister’s killer.

Several suspects present themselves, with Nora, not surprisingly, among them. Others include Stephen Bailey, the man Rachel almost married — “Close brush, she said” — and Keith Denton, a married plumber who seems to be fixated on her. He admits to having seen her on the morning of her final day. And Rachel had mentioned meeting with someone named Martin — from work, she said vaguely, but no one at the hospital can place him. 

Then there’s Andrew Healy, Lee Barton, and Paul Wheeler. All of them have served time for inflicting grievous bodily harm on women. Rachel seemed to think Healy was her initial assailant. She had even visited him recently in prison, another secret she’d kept from Nora. The lead detective asks questions about the sisters’ father, an alcoholic and a petty criminal with whom they’ve lost touch. The detective wants to know if he’s violent, and Nora isn’t sure. 

Is there any connection between Rachel’s murder and a woman from the sisters’ hometown who’s gone missing, or with a local, fatal car crash? Rachel knew the accident victim. Nora is convinced that her sister was being stalked; she shows the police a place in the woods with a clear view of Rachel’s house, a virtual hideout littered with beer cans and cigarettes. She pictures creepy Keith Denton as the voyeur, but the police suggest she might have set the site up herself.

“Under the Harrow” is written in the present tense, so that everything seems to be happening in the very moment it appears on the page, heightening its cinematic suspense. The novel offers many pleasures in addition to its driving narrative, especially the fresh and scrupulous descriptions of place and circumstance. At Rachel’s funeral, Nora observes, “The air in the church is restive and tortured, the result of two hundred people trying not to make a sound. I wish they would all talk.” She feels isolated in her mourning, but when the last of the guests leave, she “thought they would stay longer, and knowing that they didn’t is like watching it grow dark in the afternoon.” 

After an impulsive hookup with a man she met at a bar, she says, “He was handsome and the encounter was surreal, and jolly, as they can be sometimes, as though we had a snow day when everybody else had to work.” And when the detective with whom Nora becomes involved asks her what she hates about London, she tells him it’s the noise. “The noise is the best part,” he says, which really resonated with this big-city-loving reader. 

Best of all, though, are Nora’s thoughts about her sister — “Her face is so familiar it is like looking at myself” — whom she resurrects in moments of wishful amnesia before lapsing again into the horror of reality, where loneliness, as she puts it, has her by the throat. She thinks, “I don’t know how to survive the hours until I can sleep.”

But her misery is nothing compared to Rachel’s forfeiture of the living world, of the extraordinary and the mundane. “She had so much left to do . . . she has been taken away from everything, she lost everything. She likes red lipstick, and will never again stand in the aisle at a chemist’s, testing the shades on the back of her hand.”

Flynn Berry, an American writer, has chosen a British setting for her story, perhaps in homage to Ruth Rendell and P.D James, both virtuosos of character study, whose literary heir she might be. There’s never a sense of dislocation or fictional tourism in “Under the Harrow.” It’s a classic whodunit that is greatly enriched by the quality of the writing. I found myself marking up pages while fighting the urge to turn them. 

Even the book’s title seems inspired. Its source, revealed in the epigraph, is “A Grief Observed” by C.S. Lewis, an aching meditation on the death of his young wife. “Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can’t escape.” Love and loss, and their fateful link, are also at the heart of this debut novel by a first-rate storyteller. 

Hilma Wolitzer’s novels include “An Available Man” and “The Doctor’s Daughter.” She lives in New York City and spent many years in Springs.

Flynn Berry has spent summers in Amagansett since 1990.

“Rembrandt’s Shadow” by Janet Lee Berg tells the story of Sylvie Rosenberg, a teenage daughter of a successful but emotionally distant art dealer in Holland in the 1930s. When the Nazis occupy the country, her father trades a painting by Rembrandt for his daughter’s safety and that of 25 other Jews.

Sylvie finds herself standing on a train platform surrounded by Gestapo, guns, and attack dogs, wondering if the next train will take her to Spain or to a concentration camp. Across locations and decades, the book follows her experiences at a British internment facility in Jamaica and on to Long Island, where a new life with a door-to-door salesman ends up with her and her son being abandoned.

The debut novel, just published by Post Hill Press, is based on the experiences of the Katz family, of whom Ms. Berg’s husband is a descendant. Ms. Berg, the author of “Glitz of the Hamptons” and a contributor of essays to The Star for many years, will read from it on Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Quogue Library. She will also discuss restitution of art looted during World War II.

For those out and about farther up the Island tomorrow, Ms. Berg can be seen at 7 p.m. at the Book Revue in Huntington.

“Drive!”

Lawrence Goldstone

Ballantine, $28

Lawrence Goldstone has come down to earth. Following his 2014 book, “Birdmen,” a history of early aviation, he has now presented us with “Drive! Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age.” (Dare we speculate that his next topic will be submarines?)

“Drive!” is a highly readable melding of business history and cultural history, focusing on a brief period of time, around the turn of the last century, when the advent of the automobile changed the American scene forever.

Although the emphasis is clearly on America — and ultimately on Henry Ford and the company he founded in 1903 — Mr. Goldstone enriches the study of his subject by including chapters on the scientific development of the internal-combustion engine, dating back to the 17th century, and on the development of the automobile in Europe, which began slightly earlier than it did in the United States.

The parallels on both sides of the Atlantic are striking. They include a great deal of trial and error. At first, the horseless carriage was assumed to be a frivolous fad that would soon pass. The invention was initially a plaything of the wealthy. The notion of speed, however, engaged the popular imagination. Automobile races, in Europe and in America, were immensely popular events, despite their tendency to produce gruesome injuries and fatalities among participants and spectators alike. The attention-grabbing Vanderbilt Cup race, underwritten in 1904 by William K. Vanderbilt II, a racing enthusiast, was originally to cover a course from Sag Harbor to Brooklyn. 

“By June, Willie K. was finally resigned to the route he had chosen not being approved, so — reluctantly and with some irritation — he shortened the course to a 30-mile triangle, which would be traversed ten times. . . . The roads on the triangle were almost entirely within Nassau County, just east of the New York City line, but one corner spilled over into Queens. . . .”

The passion called “automobilism” swept across Europe and America, and it was not destined to be short-lived.

Though much about Henry Ford’s actual accomplishments is enshrouded in uncertainty — he is portrayed as perennially quick to take credit for things without acknowledging the contributions of others — it is indisputable that he was among the first Americans (possibly the very first) to see the widespread potential of the automobile across the wide swath of both urban and rural sections of the country. Thus, “while most of his competitors vied to make a more prestigious automobile, a more luxurious automobile, a more unique automobile, Henry Ford set about making an automobile that was plain, dull, and precisely the same as every other, right down to the color of the paint. But his car would also be supremely functional, simple to operate, and built not to impress but to get its passengers reliably from one place to another. . . .”

That is how Ford became the wealthiest man in America.

At the heart of Mr. Goldstone’s book (though I am not convinced that it is the best part of the story he has to tell) is an event that occupied newspaper headlines at the time but has been relegated to the footnotes of history books for probably a century now. In 1895, George B. Selden, a patent attorney from Rochester, obtained a United States patent on a gasoline-powered automobile, although he never produced a single working specimen of the invention. When others did begin to produce motorcars, in the early 1900s, Selden asserted his patent rights and demanded the payment of royalties. 

Several leading manufacturers — including Winton, Cadillac, Locomobile, Peerless, and Olds, among others — acquiesced, paid royalties to Selden, and formed the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers. Others, including the staunch individualist Henry Ford, did not. And not just because they didn’t want to. Ford and others disputed the relevance of the Selden patent on substantive grounds.

While it lasted, the conflict was intense. Selden placed advertisements threatening not only unlicensed manufacturers with lawsuits for patent infringement, but threatening also their dealers and the purchasers of their vehicles. (Ford was quick to indemnify his dealers and all purchasers of Ford automobiles.) Mr. Goldstone’s description of the simultaneous automobile shows in New York in 1906 — one sponsored by Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, the other by the competing Automobile Club of America — captures the ethos of the moment. “The dual — or dueling — auto shows were, to that point, the most significant public display of the rift among automakers.”

The Selden patent dispute amounted to a kind of American archetype playing out, pitting the inventor, the son of a prominent judge who was one of the founders of the Republican Party, against the plainspoken son of a farmer from Michigan. Ultimately, the matter went to trial. The decision was appealed. One can infer the outcome from the fact that George Selden’s name has been widely unknown until the publication of this volume.

While car buffs might revel in the plentiful detail provided by Mr. Goldstone, the greatest pleasure in this book is due to the colorful cast of characters, the amusing anecdotes, and what I can only describe as fun-to-know trivia. Consider the number of recognizable automobile names that receive first names here:

John and Horace Dodge (who worked with Ford until they left to begin their own auto company), Louis and Arthur Chevrolet, Ransom Olds, James Ward Packard, Armand Peugeot, Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz, Louis and Marcel Renault — we are well reminded that these were people (often quite interesting ones) before they were cars.

It makes sense that the automobile was originally marketed to doctors, as a time-saving (and thus a lifesaving) device. Personally, I was pleased to learn exactly how the name Mercedes-Benz was arrived at. And another longtime mystery was answered for me: Among my early childhood memories, in a Midwestern suburb, was that the family across the street, in the early 1950s, drove a Hudson. It’s the only one I ever saw or heard of. It seems that, in 1908, the Detroit department-store magnate Joseph L. Hudson (if you’re over a certain age, you will have heard of his emporium) bought a failing automobile manufacturer and began producing low-priced cars. “Never an immense success, Hudson was sufficiently profitable to remain in business until 1954.”

A last bit of good trivia: Ford’s first car was the Model A, in 1903. Each time changes were made or a new prototype developed (not all went into production), the letter changed. The Model T, the car that “made” the Ford Motor Company, was produced from 1909 until 1927. Counterintuitively, it was followed by another Model A, from 1927 until 1931.

Finally, Mr. Goldstone deserves credit for his handling of Henry Ford himself, a prickly subject, at best, for a historian to take on. The author’s treatment is balanced. He gives the automaker credit for his iconic accomplishments but does not shrink from describing his shortcomings. Ford was a misanthrope, a cruel player of practical jokes, and a terrible father (Mr. Goldstone’s contrasting descriptions of Henry and Edsel Ford, his only son, are particularly touching). 

Even though the elder Ford was not the sort of person you would invite to your next party, there is no denying the significant place he occupies in the annals of American business.

A weekend resident of East Hampton, James I. Lader periodically contributes book reviews to The Star. 

Lawrence Goldstone lives in Saga­ponack.

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.

“A School of Our Own”

Samuel Levin and Susan Engel

The New Press, $25.95

Confessions of a reviewer: A book with two authors? Approach with caution. A mother-son writing duo? Possible treacle alert. A teenager who started his own school? Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Back-patting danger. 

Sigh of relief: This book? No need for alarm. Not cloying. Not self-congratulatory. Instead — thoughtful, thought-provoking, moving.

Here’s the premise, and it’s unusual. Samuel Levin was a high school junior. His before and after-school job was tending cows on a dairy farm — a job he loved. He makes clear over and again how much he loved the heifers, the milking, the smells, the early mornings, even the cow dung. One exceptional young man. 

Who knew that what was happening in his high school was so incorrect? “. . . I’d sit through the first three periods of my day, mostly bored, occasionally annoyed. In the classes that were the least boring, I tried to think of ways to make them more interesting. I’d translate words to binary, think of alternative explanations for data that purported to support a theory, design math puzzles. In the most boring classes, I just thought about other things. I planned science experiments, wrote stories, or daydreamed.” This was not a disaffected young man: He revered his one-on-one math teacher, whom he termed “brilliant.”

Lunch was all right. But then there was the English class with the teacher who “seemed to not like books, or kids for that matter.” Here was a young man who was furious for good reason. 

Weave in his mother’s commentary. “Weave” is the perfect verb because her commentary is seamless. Sam is Susan Engel’s third child; the other two had already graduated from college by the time he was tackling his junior year. “I was painfully aware, like other parents, of the pitfalls of adolescence. After all, there are so many ways for kids between the ages of fourteen and eighteen to screw up. It would be hard not to quake at the potential disasters that lie in wait for the teen who goes astray.”

Ms. Engel goes on to cite the work of the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who noted “that many cultures lead their youngsters toward maturity by gradually giving them more autonomy and accountability. But our culture, she pointed out, did not. In fact, she argued, our society was notable for the disjuncture we create between childhood and adulthood. We baby them for a very long time and then fling them into a free fall toward adulthood.” And then, gulp, Ms. Engel tells us that Benedict was writing in 1934. How little has changed.

Then one day, not unlike any other, Sam made sure that so much did change. He worked intensely on creating “the Independent Project.” He figured out how to work with educators and fellow students to create a curriculum that would work for his fellow students, for himself, and for teachers. A high school that was a high school created by students, for students, about students. 

His mother’s comments? “At seventeen, Sam was naive. And he was brash. From the time he decided to do this, it never seemed to occur to him that he might not get past the first stage.” She knew the pitfalls that awaited him. She knew the possibilities of success.

And success came piling on. Fellow students loved IP. They were no longer bored, angry, disillusioned. They were connected to their studies.

Mr. Levin inherited the educational reform genes from both his grandmother and mother. His grandmother Tinka Topping and Ms. Engel have been education advocates on the East End for decades, playing pivotal roles in the founding of the Hampton Day School — back in the late 1960s — as well as the Hayground School. Ms. Engel, a psychology professor at Williams, is an expert in autobiographical memory and the development of curiosity. Her previous books include “Real Kids: Creating Meaning in Everyday Life.”

A proofreader this reviewer would have hoped for: a high school English teacher (different from the one referenced above) who might have caught noun-pronoun disagreement and a few other grammatical snafus. However, it is the heart, the passion of the underlying mission that carries this book.

One of the impressive aspects of this educational experiment is the willingness of Mr. Levin and Ms. Engel to discuss shortcomings. In “Appendix: Nuts and Bolts,” the authors admit that teachers are not as widely acknowledged in the text as they were in the beginning of the work. 

“We haven’t discussed teachers yet,” Ms. Engel writes, “because Sam originally envisioned one role for them and ended up contending with a very different one. The truth is, the school wasn’t able to allot the teacher hours the IP wanted. This is ironic, given that one of the faculty’s biggest fears was that teachers would become irrelevant or redundant in the IP. Part of it came down to the unions. The teachers couldn’t work with the IP without extra compensation, and the school didn’t have enough money for that. The upshot was that teachers had a surprisingly marginal role in the Independent Project, when they were intended to have a central role. . . . The teachers’ job in the Independent Project is nuanced and slippery. They have to guide without leading, help without pushing. They must use their judgment about when to step in and when to step back. They should use their passion for and mastery over their own subject to model how to work in that field.”

“A School of Our Own” is a mother-son love story. A love story regarding learning. One of the most touching love stories is one of the most unexpected: A young woman in the IP project was cutting class during IP. Problematic, right? Where was she? Sneaking out to memorize lines from “Macbeth.”

Susan Engel grew up in Sagaponack. She and Samuel Levin will speak about their book next Thursday at 5:30 p.m. at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton.

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

"The Underground Railroad"

Colson Whitehead

Doubleday, $26.95

In Colson Whitehead’s 2001 novel, “John Henry Days,” a black journalist known only as J. attends the annual John Henry festival. J. is a junketeer — that is, a journalist on assignment who enjoys sponging off publishers for free lodging and per diems in exchange for mediocre copy on frivolous subjects. The tension of the novel was in watching Mr. Whitehead juxtapose the journalist’s disaffection with scenes of the real-life exploits of the legendary John Henry. It was clear that Mr. Whitehead, a former journalist, was excoriating himself — for eating at the trough of junk publishing while other African-Americans did important work.

With his new novel, “The Underground Railroad,” Mr. Whitehead no longer needs to take himself to task. 

The novel tells the story of Cora, a teenage slave who flees for the North. Early in the novel, Mr. Whitehead depicts life on the plantation with a visceral authority that still has the ability to shock in our jaded era. 

“Not long after it became known that Cora’s womanhood had come into flower, Edward, Pot, and two hands from the southern half dragged her behind the smokehouse. If anyone heard or saw, they did not intervene. The Hob women sewed her up.”

But Mr. Whitehead is too smart a writer to make “The Underground Railroad” simply another litany of white atrocities and triumphant freedom. That story has been told countless times, and told well. In this novel, after 60 pages of plantation life scenes (which include a brilliant set piece about a tiny garden plot that Cora protects with brutal determination), the writer finds a completely new way to tell the story of the escaped slave. 

Mr. Whitehead, whose novels often brush against the barriers of postmodernism, invents a real — rather than metaphorical — underground railroad, complete with boxcars, tracks, and railway men. (It is interesting that many high school teachers have complained that they bought copies of Mr. Whitehead’s book based on the title and Oprah’s recommendation, only to find that the novel completely upended the historical facts.) And if the reader thinks that such a railway is a one-way ticket to safety, they will have to think again. Mr. Whitehead has a few more tricks up his sleeve. 

The author manipulates time and space so that when Cora gets off the railroad in South Carolina she sees a skyscraper, then meets a group of whites who seem accepting of fleeing slaves, but on whom they are in fact conducting genetic experiments. (This hearkens to the Tuskegee incident beginning in the 1930s in which African-American men with syphilis were led to believe they were receiving treatment but were in fact the subject of a medical experiment.) That the reader is not exactly sure what time period Cora is suddenly in only makes the encounter more disorienting and creepy. Stops in Indiana and Tennessee offer different, though equally imaginative, perils. 

Still, “The Underground Railroad” doesn’t always keep its momentum; sometimes Mr. Whitehead’s postmodern flourishes seem to get the best of him. Just when you are caught up in the suspense of Cora’s flight, for example, Mr. Whitehead interjects yet another character, taking us backward or forward in time and disrupting the novel’s trajectory. Some of these characters are worth the diversion, such as the brutal white slave hunter Ridgeway (“If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains”), while others are less interesting. Of course it may simply be that Cora is so compelling a character — and you are rooting so hard for her to find freedom — that any detour from her story can seem like a narrative misstep.

Nevertheless, there’s no denying that the book is a triumph. Mr. Whitehead has found a new way to tell the story of slavery that seems more real than if he had stuck to the facts. “All art is a lie that helps us see the truth more clearly,” Picasso once said. “The Underground Railroad” fulfills that edict, and is undoubtedly the most audacious and inventive novel of the year. 

Colson Whitehead is the author “Sag Harbor,” about his time growing up there.

Kurt Wenzel’s novels include “Lit Life.” A regular book reviewer for The Star, he lives in Springs.

A high tea in woodsy Sagaponack north of the highway on the property of a sculptor of some note might be enough of a draw. But add in the poetry of the recently departed as read by other poets, accented by a live performance of jazz and blues, the enticement of sandwiches and pastries, and what’s more, some potent fruit of the vine courtesy of a vineyard, Wolffer, just down the road, and now you’re talking an honest-to-goodness happening.

The day is Sunday, the time is 4 to 6 p.m., the place is 93 Merchants Path at the studio of Hans Van de Bovenkamp, the music is by OCDC (that would be Cynthia Daniels and Sarah Greene), and the poems to be read are the work of Robert Long, who was an editor and art critic at The Star, Antje Katcher, whose last, posthumous collection was “Catechism,” Diana Chang, and Siv Cedering, who was married to Mr. Van de Bovenkamp. 

The readers will be Fran Castan, a Long Island Poet of the Year not long ago, Canio Pavone, the founder of Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, Janice Bishop, and Carol Sherman of East Hampton, who just came out with a new book of poetry, “Adios, San Miguel.” 

The afternoon has been organized by Virginia Walker, who lives on Shelter Island and teaches English and humanities at Suffolk Community College. She and a fellow poet, the late Michael Walsh, wrote “Neuron Mirror” together, and copies will be given to those who attend. The collection raised money for the Lustgarten Foundation’s research into a cure for pancreatic cancer. Admission to the reading is $20, also to benefit the Lustgarten Foundation.

Seating is limited. R.S.V.P.s, due by tomorrow, are being taken at 631-749-2394 or by email at [email protected]. 

And now for a taste of the meat of the matter, “Poem for My Mother,” by Ms. Cedering:

Remember when I draped

the ruffled cotton cape

around your shoulders,

turned off the lights

and stood behind your chair,

brushing, brushing your hair.

The friction of the brush

in the dry air

of that small inland town

created stars that flew

as if God himself was there

in the small space 

between my hands and your hair.

Now we live on separate coasts

of a foreign country.

A continent stretches between us.

You write of your illness,

your fear of blindness.

You say you wake afraid

to open your eyes.

Mother, if some morning

you open your eyes to see

daylight as a dark room around you,

I will drape a ruffled cotton cape

around your shoulders

and stand behind your chair,

brushing the stars out of your hair.

Over the summer The New York Times ran a piece about a rush by publishers to reissue books about Donald Trump, given his ascendancy to the Republican nomination for president. When it came to Harry Hurt III’s 1993 “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” however, the original publisher, Norton, would have none of it.

This apparently led to a Kickstarter campaign to fund a self-publishing effort, but then it was Echo Point to the rescue, the results of which you can see for yourself on Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. at Page restaurant at 63 Main Street in Sag Harbor (Mr. Hurt’s home village, naturally), where the author will sign copies of his eyebrow-raising exposé of personal, financial, and real estate development shenanigans. Reservations are being taken at [email protected].

Mr. Hurt is a former correspondent (Newsweek), columnist (The Times), and editor (Travel + Leisure Golf). Given that background, one might wonder if he won’t feel a touch of disappointment at the electoral loss of four years of entertaining press conferences and bluster at the hands of a President Trump. 

But that’s a question for another time — or for the 30 seconds while he scrawls his name in front of you.

“Willie: The Life of 

Willie Morris”

Teresa Nicholas

University Press of Mississippi, $20

In the summer of 1979 I was introduced to Willie Morris at Bobby Van’s, then a wood-paneled chophouse that bore no resemblance to the chic local outpost it is today. I was an aspiring writer, newly arrived in New York and on my first visit to the East End. Willie, I learned, was the self-exiled former editor of Harper’s magazine and the author of the towering memoir “North Toward Home,” hailed as “the finest evocation of an American boyhood,” in one critic’s words, “since Mark Twain.” 

From that summer in Bridgehampton I remember Willie as witty, full of entertaining insights, and always disposed toward kindliness. Yet he impressed me also as a man down on his luck, old for his 44 years, and comfortable really only in the dark recesses of Bobby Van’s with friends — the writers William Styron, Joe Heller, and Irwin Shaw among them. At his round table toward the back he held court with stories of his Yazoo City youth, his dog Pete, and his bygone days in New York City. 

In my cameo role, I was the on-again-off-again girlfriend of a rising Southern novelist whom Willie had befriended — the only partaker without bona fide literary credentials. Yet, he always kept a seat warm for me and took my aspirations seriously.

Later that year, according to “Willie: The Life of Willie Morris,” a splendid new biography by Teresa Nicholas, Mississippi’s favorite son would return to his beloved South, where he would tumble into a life of late-stage productivity and happiness. What a pleasure it was to read that Willie found love with JoAnne Prichard, his University of Mississippi Press editor. An output at 16 books almost tripled that of his earlier life, including “My Dog Skip,” “The Courting of Marcus Dupree,” “New York Days,” and “Faulkner’s Mississippi.” He became a colossus at U. Miss, where he reigned as writer in residence. All his life Willie would be the “Pied Piper,” one admirer wrote, adored “absolutely and blindly.”

“He drew people to him whose spirits were heightened in his company,” confided his college sweetheart and first wife, Celia Ann Buchan, “so our lives felt more charged and delicious when he was around. . . . He was outrageous in an era when outrageousness was in short supply.” 

Among those Willie pulled into his orbit was Ms. Nicholas herself. As a high school student in Yazoo City, she first met Willie in the fall of 1969. “Aware of my interest in journalism,” she writes in her author’s note, “he encouraged me to get a good liberal arts education,” even stepping up to write her college recommendations. Years later she would return the favor with this book, a biography I suspect Willie would have greatly admired.

Ms. Nicholas faithfully chronicles Willie’s charmed Yazoo City youth, his controversial editorship of the student daily at the University of Texas at Austin, his Rhodes Scholar years in Oxford, and a stint at Texas Monthly, followed by the apotheosis — Harper’s, which he transformed into a “hot” publication with a new kind of journalism. 

Ms. Nicholas, however, has summoned up so much more than the facts. “The Life of Willie Morris” captures the essence of the man, so rare in a biography. Sifting through letters, more than 50 interviews with friends and family, and Willie’s own words, Ms. Nicholas has cherry-picked the details that paint a lonely but gregarious man, a generous spirit, and a life that was fueled by a passion for looking back and mythologizing. 

“No one at age thirty-two should write his memoirs,” maintained the economist John Kenneth Galbraith on the publication of “North Toward Home.” “Willie Morris is the only exception.” Even as he laid out the foibles of Yazoo City, his affection for his hometown stirred the hardest Yankee heart. “There was something in the very atmosphere of a small town in the Deep South, something spooked-up and romantic,” he wrote, “which did extravagant things to the imagination of its bright and resourceful boys.” 

He taught his dog Skip how to carry a football and survive a tackle. He played taps on trumpet at funerals. There were the usual schoolboy high jinks in school cemeteries — like his grandfather before him, Willie never missed an opportunity to pull a prank. 

Yet he took his future seriously. Though exercises in “intellection” in the Deep South were generally discouraged, young Willie surprised even himself, Ms. Nicholas reports, when he admitted to a friend that he wanted to write. As editor of the school newspaper he developed the chops as well as an ambition to “tell the truth” and to cast off “the tragic shroud of indifference.” A co-senior class president, Willie was voted “wittiest” and “most likely to succeed,” according to his 1952 yearbook entry.

Most striking in Ms. Nicholas’s retelling, young Willie evolves from a good old Delta boy — i.e., comfortable with the segregated status quo — into a man with a keen awareness of the inequities of the world at large. In “North Toward Home” Willie admitted to a “secret shame” from the age of 12. Approaching a small black boy, he “slapped him across the face, kicked him with my knee, and with a shove sent him sprawling on the concrete” for sport. But at the University of Texas, to the administration’s chagrin and ultimate censorship, he advocated social justice in the press — the ardent stance he would take for the rest of his life. The Delta boy –became a bleeding heart.

During his eight years at Harper’s, four as its editor, Willie banished “arid” editorializing and turned the publication into a “writers’ magazine.” Notably, he scored a coup by publishing an excerpt of “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Styron’s fictional account of a slave revolt in Virginia of 1831. Gay Talese’s profile of The New York Times in Harper’s would become the best-selling “The Kingdom and the Power,” shaking the public’s perception of the media to its core. The issue featuring Norman Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex,” a “combative analysis” of the women’s movement, sold more than any other in the history of the magazine. 

“From time to time,” writes Ms. Nicholas, “the magazine would publish an article that profoundly changed the way the nation thought about an important issue” — such was Seymour M. Hersh’s “May Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath” on Vietnam. Harper’s publisher balked at rising expenses and held the editor to the bottom line. When Willie resigned, most of his staff followed him out the door. 

Remarkably, Ms. Nicholas tells Willie’s compelling story in 127 pages, setting what I wish were a new standard for biography. She never strays far from Willie’s words, which summon up place and time with specificity. “I like the way they sell chicken and pit-barbecue and fried catfish in the little stores next to the service stations,” wrote Willie of his return to the South. “I like the unflagging courtesy of the young, the way they say ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am.’ I like the way the white and black people banter with each other, the old graying black men whiling away their time sitting on the brick wall in front of the jailhouse. . . .”

Willie died of heart failure at 64, having never become “the novelist he’d aspired to be.” His single novel, “Taps,” which he reworked over the decades, was published with his widow’s editorial help posthumously. 

But the imprint he left on nonfiction writing deserves to be celebrated anew. A place belongs most to the person who claims it the hardest and most obsessively, according to Joan Didion. “That was Willie and his Yazoo,” writes Ms. Nicholas in her inspired prose, an echo of her subject’s own, “claiming it, remembering it, wrenching it, shaping it, rendering it, and ultimately remaking it to fit the image in his prodigious memory.”

Ellen T. White is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” about the great romantic women of history. She lives in Springs.

Willie Morris lived in a house on Church Lane in Bridgehampton for seven years.

Lola the aging Chesapeake 

retriever turns to a pup again 

jumping in circles when I say 

beach so I often spell it if not 

intending to actually go there 

(with her). Now at 6 a.m. we 

are going and she knows it! 

I spread the synthetic red 

blanket over my car’s back 

seat tucking in the edges 

even though sand will still spill 

out when I shake it later and 

that’s okay. I prepare the bag 

of organic dog treats, remove 

her collar. She moan/grunts, hind 

legs dangling behind the rest 

of her bear-like middle as she 

heaves herself onto the seat 

of my banged up bumper-stickered 

green machine. I offer a gentle 

nudge with my knees for the last 

lift, unlike the rushed pushes 

of the past, try a downward 

(dog) hoping the ache in my 

calves will let go, then grab 

the tennis ball but she’s not 

enticed, only seems to want 

my company and to be exactly 

where we’ve arrived even as she 

lumbers, right hind buckling, 

even as she looks to one side 

then the other as if lost now and 

then, the brown jagged planet 

growing on the side of her eye 

dragging her lid like an emblem — 

the hideous in each of us that we 

want to cut off. She follows her 

nose and the salt air, half blind 

I’m sure, as if something farther 

away, beyond the paws, barks, 

and impediments in her life or 

mine, is calling. I don’t know if 

that’s true. No longer will she join 

me in the waves, scratching my skin 

exuberantly, long nails dialing 

the water. She wades in hip deep, 

waits for me as I dive, float and 

exclaim the glory of our circumstance. 

In the rolling quiet between blue, 

green and the finest ground stone 

caressing the bottoms of our different 

feet, I ask if this early morning 

intimacy in our ripening melts 

away the damage of past neglect. 

No one else is around. It’s just 

us, a woman and dog shaking 

off time and water. 

Kathy Engel has poems forthcoming in Women’s Voices for Change, Poet Lore, and “Ghost Fishing,” an anthology. She lives in Sagaponack.