“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.

Remember the Poetry Marathon? Held each summer at the Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett for years before it quietly left the scene? Well, it’s back, this time for one day only, but after that you can look for it again next summer, thanks largely to Dee Slavutin, a Springs poet seemingly struck by this inspiration earlier this summer as she stood in The Star’s front office. Part of the idea was to hold a tribute to the past organizers, Sylvia Chavkin and Bebe Antell. 

What that means in the short term is that a lineup of poets, including Ms. Slavutin, will read from their work on Sunday starting at 4 p.m. at the marathon’s traditional location. A reception with refreshments will follow. 

Among the readers: Carole Stone, known to review poetry books for this newspaper, Virginia Walker, the author of the recent “Neuron Mirror,” Rosalind Brenner, Michelle Murphy, Walter Donway, Jo Carney, and Pauline Yeats. Teri Kennedy will handle the introductions.

Below is “The Bird Clock” from Ms. Slavutin’s new collection, “Wingspan: Search for Food.”

“What are you doing with your life?”

I hear in their warble.

I reply only to the mourning dove,

dwelling in his continuum as on a

swell that never crests.

When this dove speaks my ribs sway.

I glimpse myself in shadow and form.

When I listen to this steadfast bird,

his beguiling cool control,

the patient syrup in his throat,

time stops from cresting;

in (t)his one note, I am.

Eleven birds make noise like garbage trucks,

removing the debris of hours.

Their chirps are empty pushcarts selling time.

Proof, there is less than plenty left.

“Cousin Joseph”

Jules Feiffer

Liveright, $25.95

Jules Feiffer, our brilliant East End neighbor, is acting badly again. And that’s great news.

“Cousin Joseph” is the second installment of Mr. Feiffer’s graphic novel trilogy, a lively (and decidedly deadly) film noir homage that follows on the hard-boiled gumshoe heels of his 2014 New York Times best seller, “Kill My Mother.”

This exciting prequel is filled again with Mr. Feiffer’s nostalgia for Depression-era tales, filled with detectives, dames, and sex. He also references violent union-busting, Red Scare tactics, media manipulators and sellouts, and Hollywood musicals. 

A key character is a mysterious “uncle,” an anti-immigrant 1-percenter whose wealth infects everything and everybody from movie moguls to alleged law enforcers. 

Sound familiar? 

In unfolding this dark and gripping 1930s story, Mr. Feiffer masterfully alludes to the origins of our current 21st-century crisis of undue corporate influence resulting in media manipulation and a stalemated political process.

Highly expressive character drawings, in a palette dominated by sepia and other muted colors, animate events in an imaginative series of sequential poses. Mr. Feiffer’s restless artwork never bores, and always illuminates feelings, both emotional and physical. 

The artist’s early experience in film animation (he won a 1961 Oscar for the short “Munro”) is evident in his lovingly staged balletic fistfights, which are seen from varied “camera” angles. His well-known graphic style — loose lines that coalesce into strong storytelling poses — are as evocative as ever. Rarely has gory bloodshed been so gracefully depicted.

The page layouts are consistently creative. A full page of two men conversing in an office becomes, in Mr. Feiffer’s hands, a cinematic traveling camera shot, with the men engaging in dialogue while moving in multiple phases of performance.

Sometimes the artist chooses to commit off-screen violence, as when a pro-union folk singer is roughly silenced. Thus, the imagination of the reader is stimulated, and becomes complicit in the act. 

More often, Mr. Feiffer makes the reader’s “complicity” boldly direct. In one brilliant bit of staging, by merely turning a page, the reader is witness to a surprise execution. 

Throughout the story, there are also numerous moments of warmth and subtlety to bind us to the characters and make us empathize with their dire situations. A single mother, Cissy Goldman (whose name evokes the anarchist Emma Goldman, and clearly establishes the character’s leftist bona fides), prepares a quick dinner for her preteen son, Archie, before she dashes off to participate in a dangerous strike at the local cannery. 

In this two-page scene, Mr. Feiffer opens a world using succinct dialogue and judicious staging. The brief scene ends in a full-page drawing of tall, ample Mrs. Goldman in an overcoat, standing and hugging her son goodbye. The staging and characters’ poses are perfect: Cissy’s “smotherly” love presses Archie tightly against her. 

Squirming uncomfortably, his worried expression is caused by her monologue as much as her bear-trap hug. For during this touching moment between mother and son, Cissy says these tender words: “If they leave me rotting in jail, you’ll be taken care of. The union has a strike fund. . . . Now give your momma a hug! They don’t give ya hugs in jail.” 

What a wonderful counterpoint of earthy dialogue and a tender drawing to reveal the two characters’ relationship.

I can’t wait for “The Ghost Script,” the third and final of Mr. Feiffer’s trilogy.

John Canemaker, who lives part time in Bridgehampton, is an Oscar-winning animation filmmaker, professor and head of the animation program at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the author of 12 books on animation history. He curated the exhibition “Wish Upon a Star: The Art of Pinocchio” at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, running through Jan. 9.

Jules Feiffer lives in East Hampton. He will talk about “Cousin Joseph” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Sept. 3 at 5 p.m.

“The Spectacle of Skill”

Robert Hughes

Knopf, $40

The chicanery that prevailed in the unregulated art market of the late 20th century provoked no harsher critic than Robert Hughes. This outspoken art critic left his native Australia for Italy in 1964, landed in London in 1965, and settled in New York in 1970, the year of the painter Mark Rothko’s suicide. 

In writing about the efforts of the Marlborough Gallery to “waste the assets” of Rothko’s estate through a conspiracy with the painter’s trustees, Mr. Hughes exclaimed, “the ethical level of the art world is no higher than that of the fashion industry. The problem is not that some dealers are crooks or that most are unabashed opportunists; the same could be said of lawyers. It is that the whole system of the sale, distribution, and promotion of works of art is a terrain vague.”

“Art dealing aspires to the status of a profession, without professional responsibilities,” he lamented. “The flight of speculative capital to the art market has done more to alter and distort the way we experience painting and sculpture in the last twenty years than any style, movement, or polemic.”

When Mr. Hughes, who died in 2012 at the age of 74, wrote in the late 1970s about the changing ground rules of museum-going, he predicted what was to come: “What was once a tomb becomes a bank vault, as every kind of art object is converted into actual or potential bullion.” He wrote about market manipulation, explaining how the Marlborough Gallery could buy a Rothko for $18,000 and two years later offer it to Mr. Hughes’s own acquaintance for $350,000. But Mr. Hughes died not long after the Knoedler Gallery closed, accused of selling for millions fake Rothko canvases that turned out to have been painted by a Chinese artist living in Queens. 

To review “The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings of Robert Hughes” is, for me, an exercise in nostalgia. For more than three decades, Mr. Hughes loomed large as the influential art critic of Time magazine, which Adam Gopnik, in his introduction to this volume, dismisses as “a bible of middlebrows, an ornament of the dentist’s office.” But that was the point. We, who labored as museum curators, hoped to win his approval since Mr. Hughes energized and enlarged the audiences for our shows and created readers for our catalogs.

I am lucky to have worked on projects and artists that Mr. Hughes liked — from exhibitions of Edward Hopper to the formative years of Abstract Expressionism. When researching my biography of Lee Krasner, whom Mr. Hughes had dubbed “the Mother Courage of Abstract Expressionism,” I spoke with him and found him lucid and approachable. Yet Mr. Hughes was notoriously opinionated and not afraid to appear or to be politically incorrect.

This recent book includes writing from Mr. Hughes’s unfinished second volume of memoirs as well as a selection of pieces from most of his 14 previously published books, starting with “The Shock of the New,” from 1980, and omitting his first two books, “The Art of Australia” (1966) and “Heaven and Hell in Western Art” (1969). There are excerpts from his two books on great cities, “Barcelona” and “Rome,” and from his biography of Goya, whom he labels one of the “seminal artists,” and even an essay on fishing.

There are accounts of his adventures in television, including a very brief stint as a co-anchor of ABC’s news program “20/20.” Mr. Hughes turned out not to be a good fit, but he tells how he earned more for doing one program than he did for years of writing about art. For a series of eight televised programs called “The Shock of the New,” which he made for the BBC, Mr. Hughes explained that the title was borrowed, at the BBC’s insistence, from Ian Dunlop’s earlier book on seven modernist exhibitions. Mr. Hughes admitted to having had many collaborators, but told how he “fleshed out” each of the scripts for the book version. He wrote with a kind of clarity and eloquence that made his writing memorable. 

In his essay on Edward Hopper from his 1997 book, “American Visions,” I find many of my own original interpretations, though without any acknowledgment. Just as in his other essays, Mr. Hughes repeats and distills the ideas of many other unacknowledged authors. I know that he read my early writings on Hopper, for he reviewed favorably my exhibition and its book-length catalog, “Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist,” and even reprinted that review in his book of collected essays “Nothing if Not Critical” of 1990, writing, “The Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective of Edward Hopper, curated by Gail Levin, may be the only incontestably great museum exhibition of work by an American artist in the last ten years.” 

I was thrilled at the time to have his approbation. I am happy to see that he has since recognized the essential role of Jo Nivison, Hopper’s wife and only model, though he brands her a “ ‘difficult’ woman, trapped between the role of supportive wife and her own creative ambitions.” Our respective observations on Hopper’s wife are all filtered through the lens of our gendered identities. In general, however, I find that Mr. Hughes was less an original thinker than he was adept at synthesizing the ideas of others, injecting his own strong opinions, and reflecting the cultural climate of his time.

Despite his own ability to borrow ideas from others and then shape these unacknowledged borrowings into powerful prose, Mr. Hughes was critical of similar practices by visual artists. He attacked the work of artists such as Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The latter essay, unfortunately subtitled “Requiem for a Featherweight,” has not been included in this volume of selected writings, though the Schnabel piece does appear. But elsewhere, from his unfinished memoir, we find: “ ‘The Eighties’ turned out to be very different indeed, a figurative ‘revival’ conducted by the worst generation of draftsmen in American history — Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Jean Michel-Basquiat: the all-too-familiar chorus line of spectacular mediocrity and even more spectacular price inflation.” 

Mr. Hughes’s skepticism toward what he called “recycled expressionism” was fierce: At the time, he accused Mr. Schnabel of using “Gaudi-derived plates and Beuys-derived antlers,” calling him “a most eclectic artist; what you see in his paintings is what he was looking at last.” He attributed Mr. Schnabel’s success to his ability to meet “the nostalgia for big macho art in the early eighties . . . only a culture as sodden with hype as America’s in the early eighties could possibly have underwritten his success.” Mr. Hughes did not anticipate Mr. Schnabel’s later success as a filmmaker, starting with “Basquiat” (1996), a poignant film about his friend and fellow art star’s short and tragic life in art. 

In his own published memoir, “Things I Didn’t Know,” which focuses on his childhood and youth in Sydney, Australia, as well as his formative time in Italy, Mr. Hughes was less judgmental. 

But then his unfinished memoir reveals Mr. Hughes behind the scenes during his New York years. He was indiscreet, telling about his affair with the art critic Barbara Rose, shortly after she was divorced from the artist Frank Stella. “Her affairs with other artists and writers were numerous and labyrinthine,” he writes, “she was, to put it mildly, attracted to talent (and vice versa), and she had a way of convincing herself that whatever talent her inamorati possessed was created, or at the very least improved, by her.” He credited “a good deal of what I discovered about New York art in the early seventies” to her. 

Mr. Hughes goes on to describe the artist Helen Frankenthaler, whose art he states was in Ms. Rose’s vast collection of artists whose work she had reviewed, as “The complete princesse juivre. What a pair she and Barbara Rose made, with their ironclad egos, their elaborate systems of dependency, their high style / low style fluctuations. . . .”

For their corruption — essentially for taking payments of art to write seemingly objective pieces published as “reviews,” or being paid off for choosing contemporary artists to be in museum shows — Mr. Hughes railed against many critics and curators, from Bernard Berenson to the critic Clement Greenberg, who he wrote rationalized “his practice of living on freebies.”

Mr. Hughes singled out with particular vehemence Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum, as “the short, cherubic son of a Manhattan diamond dealer . . . [whose] academic qualifications for the new post were slender at best.” 

But then Mr. Hughes himself admitted to selling a large unprimed Frank Stella canvas — that he had bought earlier — to purchase his loft in SoHo, as the building was going co-op. He expressed his chagrin that his Stella, unlike those in photographs in House and Garden of “whole white walls of crisp white interiors in the perfect Upper East Side townhouses of pristine, flawless, and white Jewish collectors,” had gotten soiled.

Mr. Hughes has sometimes been taken to task for being politically incorrect, for not paying adequate attention to women and minorities. But here, in his essay on James McNeill Whistler (previously collected in his 1990 volume), he labels the artist “a virulent racist . . . who did not confine his obloquies to blacks and Jews.”

I last encountered Mr. Hughes at a dinner party of mutual friends, Jewish art dealers. We spoke about Lee Krasner, whom we both knew and admired. What comes through in his last memoir, however, is Mr. Hughes’s particular sense that he was an outsider who happened to land well in the New York art world. This comes through most clearly in his report of the response made by Barbara Rose’s parents when they chanced upon him repairing his motorcycle while dating their daughter: “Who is that shegetz you have in the yard? The schmutzig one with the black jacket?”

Gail Levin is a distinguished professor of art history at the City University of New York and an exhibiting artist.

Robert Hughes lived on Shelter Island for many years.

“To the Bright Edge of the World”
Eowyn Ivey 
Little, Brown, $26

You know an author has successfully taken you on a vast journey when toward the end of 400-plus pages, through meager meals of moldy salmon, stringy rabbit, or bug-infested rice ingested by haggard explorers on foot in the Alaskan wilds, at last they are given a breakfast of fresh coffee and hardtack at a depleted trading post and you can almost taste it yourself. 

Two days later — as recorded in the journal of Lt. Col. Allen Forrester of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, leader of an expedition to map the territory’s interior and document the native tribes there — the nourishment comes by way of an abandoned wife of a missionary of the Moravian Church who serves Forrester and his ragtag crew “our first real meal in four months, including fried eggs, bread, potatoes, & turnips, all sprinkled with generous amounts of salt.” A return to civilization, you might say, along the western Yukon River in July of 1885.

Eowyn Ivey’s second novel, “To the Bright Edge of the World,” is at once an adventure tale shot through with a kind of magical realism involving tribal spirits of the dead resistant to the white man’s incursions and a black-hatted shaman who takes the form of a trickster raven, an epistolary love story, an ode to North America’s last wilderness, and an affectionate rendering of the bird life of the Great Northwest. In it, Forrester’s crew is Lt. Andrew Pruitt, intense and of a scientific bent, a reader of the poems of William Blake charged with recording weather conditions and taking photographs, Sgt. Bradley Tillman, in some ways Pruitt’s opposite, impulsive and well built, Nat’aaggi, a native woman who married a man she says could turn into an otter only to skin him and don the pelt after he mistreated her, and a half-wolf, half-dog Tillman names Boyo.

In the telling, Forrester’s journal is answered by that of his wife, Sophie, an inveterate birder left behind in the Vancouver Barracks of the Washington Territory, where she channels her loneliness and loss into the fledgling art of photography. What’s more, the reader gets to see at least one example of her work, as the book is a creative hodgepodge of photos both new and archival, color and black and white, along with 19th-century advertisements and lithographs; sketches of landscapes, artifacts, and animal tracks; faux newspaper articles that flesh out the story; passages and diagrams from vintage medical books; wall text for a historical society exhibit about the Forrester expedition, and contemporary letters between its curator and the Forrester descendant who supplies the items to go on display.

It’s such that you never know what might appear on the next page.

For the armchair traveler fascinated by Alaska, which, remote, “other,” and resource-rich, remains something like a colony even today, the letters of Josh, the curator, who is of mixed native and European descent, to Walt, Allen Forrester’s great-nephew, are particularly enlightening, capturing as they do some of the cultural realities of the place — the tribal members committed to their work with the exploration and extraction companies, for instance, or the elder who thought the old ways “backward and evil,” and so on to the sense that, as Josh puts it, “when we use terms like subjugation and loss and the desire to ‘preserve culture,’ it devalues and limits people in a way that I don’t think is accurate.”

It’s complicated, in other words. He also, by the way, in what is at times a rather meta running commentary on the fictional journal entries we read, offhandedly gets across a few of the indelible smaller charms of life in the interior, like the way those brainy ravens will rifle any grocery or garbage bag foolishly left in the bed of a pickup.

Eowyn Ivey will take part in the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night book signing, sale, and fund-raiser on Aug. 13 at 5 p.m. She lives in Alaska with her husband and two daughters.

Baylis Greene lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, from 1994 to 1999.

“Bright, Precious Days”

Jay McInerney

Knopf, $27.95

If you lived in New York City in the latter 1980s and early 1990s, as I did, chances are you had strong feelings regarding the writer Jay McInerney. Some of these feelings, maybe you can now admit, involved jealousy. You too came to the city to become a famous artist — of whatever sort — and things didn’t quite work out. Mr. McInerney, meanwhile, seemed to breeze in and hit the jackpot. It was irritating. 

I remember trying to defend Mr. McInerney to some of my friends at the time, arguing that he was a genuine writer — and being met with revolt. He was a poseur, they said, a faux-Fitzgerald who had gotten lucky with one book, “Bright Lights, Big City.” 

I wasn’t sure how they’d come to this conclusion, since most of them had read “Bright Lights” but not his other work. If they had, they would have come across a few books that confirmed their suspicions (“Last of the Savages” comes to mind). But they would also have encountered one that upset that narrative: 1992’s “Brightness Falls.” This remains Mr. McInerney’s best book and is, to my mind, one of the better chronicles of the 1980s and its ultimate burnout. 

And let no one say Mr. McInerney doesn’t know when he’s on to a good thing. His sequels to “Brightness Falls” are now into their second installment with the release this summer of the treacly titled but enjoyable “Bright, Precious Days.” 

Once again, “Bright, Precious Days” follows his protagonists Russell Calloway and his wife, Corrine, as they navigate marriage, money, and sex in the big city. Russell is an editor at a prestigious publishing house who, as the novel begins, is betting big on two authors: a hedonistic young short-story writer, and a memoirist who claims that he was kidnapped by the Taliban. Things with Corrine are strained: Raising two children, she is tired of living in a slightly dilapidated loft in TriBeCa with only one bathroom (oh, the horror!) and is contemplating a liaison with an old flame, the financial wizard Luke. 

The novel’s plot lies mostly in watching Russell’s prized authors flame out and Corrine reluctantly give in to an affair. As with all three of the Calloway novels (the middle child being 2006’s “The Good Life”), a mother lode of downtown glamour is mixed in with some genuine pain: Russell and Corrine are the two most wholly fleshed characters in Mr. McInerney’s canon. 

There is also Mr. McInerney’s trademark wit, which is on full display in the novel. This exchange about drugs, for example: 

 “That was Nancy Reagan’s big slogan in the ’80s. ‘Just say no.’ ”

“How’d that work out?”

“The drugs wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

And when Russell and a friend named Tom engage in a pretentious battle of wine knowledge at a restaurant, there is this comment from Tom as he tastes some of his combatant’s wine: 

“You guys are a bunch of pedophiles,” he called out. “This wine’s a baby.” 

At the same time, a recurring McInerney tic seems to have gotten worse in “Bright, Precious Days.” That is the author’s habit of never introducing a set piece that isn’t brand-named or personally vetted by New York magazine or the New York Times food section. There is no such thing as just a “restaurant” in this novel, for example — there are more specifically Bouley, Balthazar, the Spotted Pig (here called the Fatted Calf, for whatever reason), Bacchus (a stand-in for Per Se), and so on . . . and on. Fishing? That is to be done in the Florida Keys or Montauk, of course. Summer holiday? Sagaponack, as if you had to ask. The Calloway car? Brought to you by Land Rover.

Not only is all of this wearyingly precious, it isn’t very realistic. How the Calloways afford this lifestyle (he is a book editor, after all) is partly attributed to the noblesse oblige of their wealthy friends, but the rest is anybody’s guess. And when the Calloway family contemplates moving from TriBeCa to Harlem for more space, Russell acts as if he is being summoned to Hell itself. What’s next? Might Russell have to stay home one night and tuck into a turkey sandwich? 

And Corrine’s introduction as a screenwriter borders on the absurd. Mr. McInerney is not content to have Mrs. Calloway simply do honorable work in a foundation dedicated to feeding the homeless — she has to have also written a screenplay that was produced into a movie. This on her first crack at the craft, apparently, and for no less than Graham Greene’s “The Heart of the Matter”! This is especially odd for a woman who shows no particular literary or film interest the reader can detect. Then, by the novel’s end, she does it again. Two for two with screenplays? Bob Towne is asking for the secret. 

But never mind. “Bright, Precious Days” is not a novel you approach with tweezers and a microscope. It is a rollicking entertainment buoyed by a keen social eye — the author seems both accurate and genuinely aggrieved in his portrait of a contemporary Manhattan bereft of its bohemian heritage.

And if the characterizations in this novel are often skin-deep, Mr. McInerney’s two protagonists are well drawn. In fact, he has always done well with his female characters, and this newest installment of Corrine Calloway may be his most complete yet. It is a tribute to the author that her affair is somehow rendered sympathetic and even necessary, and the reader finds her no less likable for it. 

Will there be another Calloway novel in the next decade for Mr. McInerney? I suspect so. One day, we may even see an omnibus titled “The Calloway Novels.” If we do, it will go a long way toward telling us about the lives of a certain milieu in N.Y.C. at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. 

Who would begrudge Mr. McInerney the honor? Only the jealous. 

Kurt Wenzel’s novels include “Lit Life.” He lives in Springs.

Jay McInerney lives part time in Bridgehampton. 

Just seven months after he discussed and signed copies of “Bernie,” a graphic biography of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, at the Amagansett Library, Ted Rall, a political cartoonist, graphic novelist, and author known for his intensely critical view of the American government, offers “Trump,” a similar presentation of the Republican Party’s nominee for president. 

Mr. Rall will return to the library on Aug. 4 at 6 p.m. to discuss his latest work, in which he impartially presents Donald Trump’s life, leaving the reader to assess the man and his candidacy. As with all of its authors events, reservations have been recommended by calling the library. 

“I thought he was going to win the day he announced,” Mr. Rall, who lives in East Hampton, said of Mr. Trump last week. “He had so much name recognition, and came out in this massive field that kept growing. If you’re polling 30 percent in a field of 12, much less 18, you’re going to win. They threw me out of engineering school, and I could figure that out.” 

While both “Bernie” and “Trump” are similar in form, Mr. Rall was clearly a proponent of Mr. Sanders’s insurgent campaign. He is just as clearly disdainful of a Democratic Party he sees as having drifted far right and into the embrace of corporate interests. He remains a staunch opponent of Hillary Clinton, whom her party nominated for president last Thursday. “I can’t vote for Hillary,” he said, “because she is a reprehensible person, and, first and foremost, because of the blood of Iraqis and Libyans and Syrians whose deaths she is in part responsible for. That cries too loud for justice to ignore.” 

Mr. Rall, a former resident of New York City, is just as plainly opposed to Mr. Trump’s candidacy, yet writes of him with a certain detachment. “Trump’s rallies were very entertaining,” he writes. “They were also scary. The candidate’s sweeping, vague pronouncements and violent tone were reminiscent of Hitler’s rallies at Nuremberg, minus the awesome choreography.” And, “Trump’s supporters loved him. But they caught flak from their friends. When they heard themselves described as fascist or racist, they didn’t recognize themselves.” 

The book “will tell you everything you need to know,” Mr. Rall said, chiefly that Mr. Trump’s followers “are not all morons and rubes. They’re responding to something real. Also, there’s a tradition of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in this country and has been in the Republican Party for a long time.” Also, “One can find a lot about his character in the way he conducts his business.” 

This is presented in the retelling of the candidate’s career as a developer in New York City. Mr. Trump purchased the Barbizon Plaza on Central Park South in 1981. Intending to demolish it, he quickly set to work harassing and terrorizing its tenants in the hope that they would move out. The year before, he’d hired illegal immigrants to demolish the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue, paying them “slave wages,” Mr. Rall writes, if he paid them at all. “Trump was an equal-opportunity asshole. He screwed over banks at least as often as impoverished day laborers.” 

But Mr. Trump’s supporters apparently do not care. “Everyone in New York knew it,” Mr. Rall said of this history, “but it came and went because of the short attention span of Americans.” 

Mr. Rall cites his former professor at Columbia University, Robert Paxton, author of “The Anatomy of Fascism” and “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944,” to draw parallels between Mr. Trump and some of the 20th century’s most hated villains, but also to explain his appeal. Trump, said Mr. Paxton, “has an instinct for fears and anger out in the public and he matches up with them perfectly. . . . He’s very spontaneous and has a genius for sensing the mood of a crowd, and I think to some degree Hitler and Mussolini had those qualities also.” 

Despite the damning demonstration of Mr. Trump’s character, Mr. Rall allows the reader to decide. “This is about the failure of the two-party system,” he writes in an afterword. “There’s still lots of lingering pain from the 2007-2008 economic crisis.” If Mr. Trump wins the presidency, “we are about to embark on a remarkable experiment.”

“With him, anything is possible, including very bad alternatives,” Mr. Rall said. “People are certainly right to be concerned and worried. But my task was to present a biography that shed light on a subject, almost like a voter guide . . . you be the judge.”

This time it’s in the estate section. Authors Night, that is, the fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library, which this year will be held at 4 Maidstone Lane in the village, not far from the Maidstone Club, calling together 100-plus writers for a mass book signing and sale, gab fest, and meet-and-greet starting at 5 p.m. on Aug. 13, fed by circulating hors d’oeuvres and lubricated by flowing wine. 

The evening continues at 8 with dinners at various private homes around town, at which authors will speak and be feted. The thing about this year is that the number of them is up significantly — more than 30. A complete list is online at authorsnight.org, but the range is from the light (Jennifer Keishin and “Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything”) to the meaty (Douglas Brinkley and “Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America”), or for that matter Michael Weiss, whom you may have seen as a commentator on CNN, and “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.” 

Foodies can choose Eric Ripert with his “32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line,” while thriller fans might want to sign up for Mary Higgins Clark, who will appear with her latest, “As Time Goes By.” And the list goes on . . .

Tickets to the dinners cost $300, which includes entry to the big-tent reception beforehand. Tickets to just the reception cost $100 and can be purchased at the door or online. 

Just a sample of the writers who will be signing away: Steven Lee Myers, the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,” Dana Thomas with “Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano,” Erik Sherman and “Kings of Queens: Life Beyond Baseball With the ’86 Mets,” Roberta Kaplan with “Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA,” Erica Jong and “Fear of Dying,” and The Star’s Durell Godfrey with her coloring book for adults, “Color Me Cluttered.” 

Of note, the dinner with Ambassador Christopher Hill, at which he will discuss “Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy,” is sold out, but you can catch him at the reception.

The Other Puzzle Master

If you read The Star's book reviews, chances are you’ve taken a crack at the “Starwords” crossword puzzle, compiled with care every week by Sheridan Sansegundo, the paper’s ex-arts editor, now an expat who cashed in her East Hampton chips to kick it in an artists’ colony south of the border. The puzzle is fun, it’s challenging, it might impart a tidbit of culture or history, and untangling it each week just might ward off a few weeks of dementia at the end of your life.

Now another puzzle master, Stan Newman of Newsday, is offering a 90-minute program at the East Hampton Library on Monday starting at 1 p.m. While part of his talk will cover the expected, communicating strategies of attack in the face of those blank black-and-white-checkered grids, there is also the unexpected: “surprising ways to apply your puzzle experience to real-life challenges,” in the words of a faceless release. If life’s a confounding mess, maybe this brain-teasing activity will help you make sense of it.

And whether you’re a hapless beginner or a wily veteran, be sure to have some questions ready. Sign-up is no puzzle; it’s by phone with the library or at the reference desk.

BookHampton’s Bustling Summer

Reader, on the off chance you haven’t been paying attention to much beyond the clambakes and cheap chardonnay, it’s not only willful ignorance of driving etiquette that’s increased around East Hampton this summer. No, Main Street’s BookHampton shop has upped its game severalfold when it comes to author appearances — to the tune of five or so a week. Considerably more than other “venues,” that is.

There's variety, too. No use for the lighter fare of chick lit and beach reads? Tomorrow brings Andrew Solomon, a psychology professor at Columbia and a contributor to The New Yorker, reading from “Far & Away — Reporting From the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years.” His accounts range from Moscow circa 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union to a culturally resurgent Afghanistan post-Taliban. The reading starts at 7 p.m.

On Saturday, in contrast, in a stylish twofer of a 6 p.m. talk, Isaac Mizrahi, the fashion designer, will shed light on a biography about him as well as a book of fashion photos of him at work in New York City from 1989 to 1993; he will be joined by Maira Kalman, the illustrator of books including “My Favorite Things” and the canine volumes “Beloved Dog” and “What Pete Ate: From A-Z.”

More nonfiction follows on Tuesday at 7 p.m. with Moira Weigel and her history of sex and romance in latter-day America, “Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating,” before, on the fiction front, Jessie Burton alights on Friday, Aug. 5, also at 7 p.m., with her new one, “The Muse,” which follows two women, a Caribbean immigrant in London in the 1960s and a child of Viennese and English high society who arrives in Spain in time for its civil war.