It’s enough to take the cynic right out of you.

Even if you’re not a big fan of trends, fads, sweatpants, rolled mats tucked under the arm signaling hip and healthful purpose, gyms, alien Eastern religions, stretching-induced flatulence, cultural co-optation by whites, therapy of any kind, or sincerity generally, kids change everything, kids make it all right, kids doing yoga will bring a smile to your face, and so will “I Am Yoga” (Abrams, $14.95), a new children’s book about the practice by Susan Verde of East Hampton that hits all the right notes for today’s beleaguered young.

“I can say I’ve had enough for today,” a girl, the book’s heroine, as it were, says toward story’s end as she curls in a fetal position shoreside, her face to the sand. “I relax.” Then, splayed out on her back: “I can rest. I am calm.”

This comes hard on the heels of a depiction by Peter H. Reynolds, Ms. Verde’s artistic collaborator, of a maelstrom of activity enveloping our pigtailed protagonist — papers, books, homework, soccer, dogwalking, violin lessons, taking out the trash, maybe a little sleep thrown in, all punctuated by the looming face of a clock. (And the book doesn’t even address the black hole of so-called “screen time.”)

“When I feel small in a world so big . . . when the world is spinning so fast, I tell my wiggling body: be still. I tell my thinking mind: be quiet. I tell my racing breath: be slow.”

For God’s sake, kid, take a break.

Following “The Museum” and “You and Me,” this is this duo’s third picture book together, Mr. Reynolds’s charming and unadorned watercolors matching Ms. Verde’s careful storytelling in that they both simply do not overdo it. Ms. Verde, a children’s yoga instructor, has included an author’s note for adults and a three-page glossary of poses.

So it’s okay if you find “mindfulness” to be jargon and a bit vague, here’s some you can get behind. Breathe, you kids. Dream big. You think the difference-making work of the world is done by grade-conscious grinds?

“I’m Cool!”

In Jim and Kate McMullan’s popular series of bold and colorful picture books (“I’m Brave!” being the previous, “I Stink!” perhaps the most memorable), the former Sag Harborites seem to have saved the best for last. Or latest, anyway.

First of all, you can have your fire trucks and backhoes, the Zamboni machine is the most fascinating thing on four wheels, its mesmerizing ice-smoothing act the highlight of many a hockey game. Now, behold, the scraping, squirting box of ingenuity comes to you in a wisecracking personification in “I’m Cool!” (Balzer and Bray, $17.99).

“Crank up your X-ray vision,” the happy machine invites the reader, “and I’ll show ya how!” Blade, augurs, water pipes, paddle, towel. “Even if you know how a bumblebee flies or a spider spins her web, it’s still magic.”

This primer on engrossing work by neato equipment is accented by the interjections of an amusing, cavern-mouthed hockey announcer, his natty suitcoat and tie, widow’s peak, and tabletop microphone somehow connoting the middle of the last century. “Hey down there, Zamboni machine — go, go, go!” he hectors our hero during intermission. “The clock’s ticking! Hit the gas! Finish up so we can get back to the game!”

“Chill, big talker. I’ve got what it takes to do the job,” comes the response. “Coolest job in the world, right here, baby.”

And wall-to-wall fun.

“A Spooky, Sparkly Halloween”

Oh sure, why not, Saturday is Halloween, after all, the holiday on pace to knock Santa from his place atop popularity’s heap.

Sag Harbor’s mother-daughter team of Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamiton, in returning to their “Very Fairy Princess” endeavors, have put a welcome spin of good citizenship on the pumpkin-carving-and-candy festivities in their new one, “A Spooky, Sparkly Halloween” (Little, Brown, $18).

In it, Gerry, who’s so deep in her princessness she doesn’t even consider her wings and tiara a costume, helps out a friend, Delilah, whose pure white dentist getup gets splattered with ketchup, leading Delilah to wittily lament, “I can’t wear this in the parade! It sends totally the wrong message about dentists!”

This calls for quick thinking and a bit of sacrifice on the part of Gerry, who stays thematically consistent and cleverly transforms her friend into an oversized walking (and cavity-free) tooth.

All is thus well. Till next year, then.

With, as ever, illustrations in ink and color pencil by Christine Davenier.

Bernie Sanders, the Democratic-Socialist candidate for president who has a house on Lily Pond Lane here . . .

Let’s start over. There’s a book just out from Skyhorse Publishing, “Bernie Sanders: In His Own Words,” that not only compiles “250 Quotes From America’s Political Revolutionary,” in the words of its subheading, but also features the political cartooning of Walker Bragman of East Hampton, known in these parts and on these pages for his work with the advocacy group East End New Leaders. The illustrations are cute, they’re pen-and-ink, they get their point across.

The book is in essence a campaign document, and, to be frank, there’s a fair amount of boilerplate here: “We need to educate, organize, and mobilize the working families of our country to stand up for their rights.” That’s a July 29 Twitter post.

But you do get a sense of the man. On Nafta, for instance, a signature piece of legislation from the Clinton administration: “Unfettered free trade has been a disaster not only for Americans but for the working people of Mexico and Canada as well. Our difficult but important job now is to build a new coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists, small-business owners, and manufacturers who put the people in their communities ahead of corporate America’s reckless search for profits.” (From a 2004 article in The Nation.)

Fall is here and the roads are clear. Maybe it’s time to take a straight midweek shot down the highway to the graduate school ghost of Southampton College, the geographical mouthful Stony Brook Southampton, to give a listen to two important American novelists, Jane Hamilton and Ann Packer, as they open the off-season’s Writers Speak series.

Ms. Hamilton, in some ways the bard of the great state of Wisconsin, is the author of “A Map of the World,” one of a number of her books set there and populated by sympathetic characters. Her next one, “The Excellent Lombards,” is due out in the spring.

Ms. Packer, a Northern Californian, made a splash with her debut novel, “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier.” Her latest, from earlier this year, is “The Children’s Crusade.”

The two novelists will read on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall on campus. The free gathering will start with a reception at 6:30 and wrap up with questions for the authors and a book signing.

Coming down the pike, reader-wise, are Roger Rosenblatt, who has a novel coming out in January, in conversation with David Lynn, the editor of The Kenyon Review, on Oct. 14; the poet Bob Holman on Oct. 21; Arlene Alda and her new oral history, “Just Kids From the Bronx,” on Nov. 18, and Willie Perdomo, whose 2014 collection of poems, “The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon,” was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, on Dec. 2.

For those looking to enroll in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature, the Oct. 14 talk will be preceded by an open house at 5:30. Students now in the program will conclude the series on Dec. 9 with a reading of their own.

Books, Drinks, Authors

The John Jermain Memorial Library’s annual fund-raiser and capital campaign — there’s one heck of an ongoing expansion going on, if you haven’t noticed — is called One for the Books! This year’s will happen on Saturday and again on Oct. 17 at 15 residences across and around Sag Harbor in the form of 6 to 8 p.m. cocktail parties, each centered on a particular book with its author in attendance. Tickets cost $100.

If we might skip the inevitable laundry list, JohnJermain.org has the complete rundown, including a couple of sellouts — sold-out parties, that is. For what it’s worth, Katie Marton and “Paris: A Love Story” and Kate Betts and “My Paris Dream” are available for the 10th, and the 17th still offers Alan Furst and “Midnight in Europe” as well as Michael Shnayerson and “The Contender,” his biography of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Among, as they say, others.

Open House at the College

First up on Wednesday at Stony Brook Southampton is an open house for its M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at 5:30 p.m. In Chancellors Hall, Julie Sheehan, a poet and the director of the program, will join other faculty members in detailing the various workshops across genres, the possibility of combining Manhattan and Southampton programs, and the yearlong Children’s Lit Fellows program.

Can’t pry yourself from the keyboard? There’ll be an online information session on Oct. 20, for which you can pave the way by sending an email with “online info session” in the subject line to RSVP_MFA@ stonybrook.edu. A link and logging-on instructions will be sent back atcha.

And then later on Wednesday is the Writers Speak gab fest, also in Chancellors Hall, this week bringing the college’s Roger Rosenblatt, who has on the way a new novel, “Thomas Murphy,” about an aging poet. At 7 p.m. he’ll be in conversation with the editor of The Kenyon Review, David Lynn, a man who has edited Mr. Rosenblatt’s work before. (Which calls to mind Mary Norris’s experiences with John Updike’s prose at The New Yorker: It needn’t be touched.)

“Revealing the Past”

Edited by Tom Twomey

East End Press, $40

Did you know that the Wainscott railroad station had racially segregated waiting rooms in the 20th century? Or that the U.S.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides) was moored at Fort Pond Bay in Montauk in 1931? Or why the early anniversary celebrations of the founding of East Hampton were a year late? You can find this information in the East Hampton Library’s “Revealing the Past.”

This sixth book on East Hampton history edited by the late Tom Twomey is a worthy addition to a series that began with “Awakening the Past: The East Hampton 350th Anniversary Lecture Series, 1998.” Subsequent volumes reprinted writings by Henry Hedges and Jeannette Edwards Rattray, among others, with one book devoted to articles on Gardiner’s Island and Montauk. The six anthologies constitute an important part of Mr. Twomey’s significant legacy of preserving East Hampton history and making out-of-print accounts accessible.

“Revealing the Past” reprints a total of 118 pieces written in the last 25 years by four writers with deep roots in the area and considerable expertise in local history. In his introduction, Mr. Twomey provides biographical information on each of the authors. The late Sherrill Foster’s “Around the Green” articles and Hugh King’s “Past Presented” columns originally appeared in the local Independent newspaper. Ms. Foster’s contributions for this volume were edited by her daughter, Mary Foster Morgan, who appropriately combined her mother’s articles on the same topic and sometimes drew on her unpublished material.

Stories in newspapers, especially before digitization, can be ephemeral. Reprinting the historical newspaper columns makes them available in a more permanent form and for a new audience.

The nonagenarian Norton (Bucket) Daniels’s selections are from his two privately published books of personal reminiscences, “East Hampton Yesterdays” (2006) and “East Hampton Memories” (2007).

Mac Griswold’s single contribution, “Nathaniel Sylvester of Amsterdam and Shelter Island,” is the longest in the volume and has extensive endnotes. It is a previously unpublished 2011 conference paper that draws on the research for her widely known 2013 book, “The Manor.” Its inclusion is rather puzzling, since it does not deal with East Hampton history, but it does present a contrast, since the Sylvester experience is quite different from East Hampton’s, with Nathaniel’s Dutch connections and Sylvester Manor’s history as a provisioning plantation for holdings in the Barbados.

“Revealing the Past” is organized roughly chronologically in four parts by centuries. Some of the selections bridge the time periods or extend over several centuries. Inevitably, there is some overlap in the articles, and some of the entries in Part 1 more properly belong in Part 2 on the 1700s, including several on Montaukett Indians. Explicit cross-references to other articles in this book would have been helpful to readers.

With more than 600 pages, there is something here for everyone interested in East Hampton history. Readers will discover the origin of names of roads and places, including Sammy’s Beach, Stephen Hand’s Path, Lily Hill Road, Freetown, Russell’s Neck, Alewife Brook Neck, Amsterdam Beach, and Sandy Hook.

Several of the selections appropriately focus on windmills, since eastern Long Island has 11, the largest concentration surviving in the country. The Hook, Post, Amagansett, Gardiner, Wainscott, Gardiner’s Island, and Pantigo Mills are each the subject of different articles. The Dominy family and the furniture, clocks, and windmills they made are discussed, as is Clinton Academy. Other topics include families and genealogies, bunkers and fish factories, ministers and churches, the Civil War’s Sea Spray Guard and Camp Wikoff in the Spanish-American War, shipwrecks and rumrunning, Fireplace Lodge camps, the Devon Colony, and the Long Island Rail Road.

Among Hugh King’s many contributions are interesting items from town records (1639 to 1679) and trustee records (1926 to 1955), as well as several articles on women’s organizations. As might be expected from the director of the Home, Sweet Home museum, his account of John Howard Payne’s life is thorough and especially well done.

Sherrill Foster’s articles are particularly strong on architectural descriptions and genealogy. She indicates that some of East Hampton’s early precut box-frame houses may have been shipped from Massachusetts, which is an interesting hypothesis. Her “Slaves During the Revolution” includes not only statistics on those enslaved, but also the occupations of white men from 1776 and 1778 censuses, as well as other information on the war years and after. Ms. Foster’s description of farm work in the early 20th century and her family’s dairying in “Genesis of a Dairy” is especially valuable.

Both Mr. King and Ms. Foster confront a number of legends or myths, including Maidstone in England as the home of the first settlers, Lion Gardiner’s relations with the Indians, Captain Kidd, and Samuel (Fishhook) Mulford. In “Captain William Kidd Was Not a Pirate,” Mr. King maintains that he was a “substantial citizen,” but he does not sufficiently explore whether the letters of marque he received made Kidd a privateer. (Admittedly, the line between pirate and privateer was often quite indistinct.)

In one of his selections, Mr. King poses a number of intriguing questions about witches. Rather than referring in his final paragraph to the then upcoming 1998 lecture, however, it would have been better to cite his account of witchcraft written with his wife, Loretta Orion, and published in 1999. (That and the other 350th lectures are available on the East Hampton Library’s website.)

The selections by Norton Daniels focus on the middle third of the 20th century. His “On Shore Fishing,” “A Volunteer Fireman,” and “The Great Wind of 1938” are particularly good accounts of important aspects of East Hampton’s past. His descriptions of the landscape are perceptive, as is his explanation of “above-the-bridge [up-streeters] or below-the-bridge” as a “geographical and social boundary,” referring to the train trestle near the Hook Mill.

Ralph Carpentier’s 17 drawings enhance the text of “Revealing the Past.” His oil painting “The Barnyard, Springs” is reproduced in color on the attractive dust jacket.

Mr. Twomey in his introduction quotes an Oxford professor to the effect that local history “matters” because “it is the history of the ordinary, the everyday.” Readers will find much of the everyday in this anthology. In “revealing the past” this book achieves Mr. Twomey’s goal of its being “a portal to East Hampton’s past.”

This and other volumes in the series can be purchased at the East Hampton Library; all proceeds benefit the library’s excellent Long Island Collection.

Natalie A. Naylor is a professor emerita of history at Hofstra University and the author of “Women in Long Island’s Past.”

I just hit Jamie McElroy in the ribs.

I am rubbing the ball when my father

arrives at the mound, his frustration

with a son who can’t find home

apparent in his gait and gaze.

I walked three batters before I hit

Jamie McElroy and want to dig a hole

and disappear. What I get is a pep

talk that ends with You made this

mess, now you clean it up.

Thirty-five years later, I am standing

in line at the bank with paycheck in

hand, wondering what Jamie McElroy

is up to. You’re right, Dad. I made

this mess. But you didn’t help any.

Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur who lives in Bridgehampton.

Goldberger on Gehry

If you can name an architecture critic more eminent than Paul Goldberger, mail your entry to this paper’s venerable Main Street office and you could receive a Star baseball cap, depending on our whim.

In the meantime, Mr. Goldberger — once of The Times, an even longer “once” of The New Yorker, now of Vanity Fair, and all the while a part-time resident of this place — will swing by BookHampton’s shop in East Hampton to talk about his new one, “Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry,” on Oct. 3 at 5 p.m. That work famously involves the titanium-sheathed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the stainless steel-clad Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, among other revolutionary structures.

And a note about coffee, which, let’s face it, goes with books like People magazine goes with the john: BookHampton’s been serving the stuff while the Starbucks next door undergoes renovations.

Top Cop Talks “Vigilance”

You weekending city folk: Concerned about a perceived backsliding on law and order under Mayor Bill de Blasio? Ray Kelly — hard-nosed, pugnacious down to his street-urchin-meets-elf-you-wouldn’t-want-to-mess-with facial features — offers a trip down a Bloomberg-era memory lane in his brand-new book, “Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City.” It details his experiences as the city’s police commissioner from 2002 to 2013, fighting crime and thwarting terrorism in a post-9/11 world.

Stop and frisk? The long-delayed rebuilding of the World Trade Center? It’s all in there, and he’ll talk about it at Harbor Books in Sag Harbor on Oct. 4 at 11 a.m.

“Nobody Grew

but the Business”

Joseph Tabbi

Northwestern University Press, $35

Just imagine for a moment that you have the most useless job in the world: to set up a list of painful and impossible theses for literary critics to explore. The top of your torture list of prospective titles might read a lot like Joseph Tabbi’s new book, “Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis.”

Many readers, after all, find Gaddis’s work some of the most difficult in contemporary literature, and his life is certainly one of the more elusively lived and recorded among celebrated Ameri­can authors. To then try to conjoin these two unfeasible elements seems an almost masochistic undertaking.

Yet Mr. Tabbi, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has attempted just that. In most ways he has defied the odds; his “Nobody Grew but the Business” is a compact yet satisfying work and should be the final word (it won’t be) on a certifiable American genius.

One of the things that make a book like this so daunting is how little is known about the life of William Gaddis. This has less to do with the idea that the novelist was hiding, a la Thomas Pynchon, than the fact that for most of his life nobody was looking.

His first novel, “The Recognitions,” was published when Gaddis was 33. It was a book rife with ambition, rich with myth, and weighing in at a mammoth 956 pages; arguably, it was a masterpiece. But it was misunderstood by readers and critics alike, and soon fell out of print.

Gaddis then toiled in copywriting jobs for 20-odd years while compiling his next opus, “JR.” This second work captured the National Book Award, along with stronger reviews, but again mostly eluded the public’s imagination (as did Gaddis himself). It is really not until his slender but effective 1985 novel, “Carpenter’s Gothic,” that the public began to develop an interest in the author himself.

By then, however, he was 63, with much of his life past him. Gaddis was, until that time, a man little noticed and even less written about. To say the public record is thin is an understatement of grand proportions.

Furthermore, Gaddis was an intensely private man, as his collected letters, published in 2013, will attest. They are frustratingly reticent. And if all this weren’t enough, throw in this quote from “The Recognitions” concerning the artist, which also functioned as Gaddis’s lifelong credo: “What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? The human shambles that follows it around?”

So Mr. Tabbi has a dearth of material to work with, yet among the great pleasures of his book are the little biographical nuggets that he has managed to pan from the life of this most private of artists. One fascinating recollection is a quote from Alice Denham, a friend of Gaddis’s during his copy-writing years who recalls the author saying, “Pfizer’s not too bad. They let Dick [Dowling] and me write all morning on our own stuff and show us off to clients as ‘our novelists.’ ” This seems a rare glimpse into a different era of corporate culture, if not an astonishing divergence in the way America used to value the written word.

Mr. Tabbi also settles, once and for all, Gaddis’s expulsion from Harvard (an event that has engendered endless speculation). Late in his third year, Gaddis apparently “violated ‘parietal rules,’ ” Mr. Tabbi writes, “meaning he had a girl in his room.” This was aggravated by another incident later on involving a night of drinking where a friend injured his hand on a pane of glass. Gaddis went outside to a phone booth to call for help and was apparently interrupted by a nosy policeman whom Gaddis dismissed with an expletive. Though this is a long way from the legend — which sometimes included Gaddis taking a swing at the officer — it certainly solidifies his cantankerous and anti-authoritarian reputation.

And like most complex men, there lurked a surprising corollary to the crotchety persona. Mr. Tabbi includes remembrances from students of Gaddis’s during the late 1970s when he was teaching his long-running course at Bard titled “Failure in American Literature” (a quintessentially Gaddisian title). One student recalled how Gaddis smoked continuously through his lectures, but did so considerately, positioning himself near the windows so as not to annoy nonsmokers, and even “cadged” a cigarette or two from students.

Another recalled Gaddis’s helpfulness as a mentor during a senior thesis project, remembering him as “pleasant and patient with me during our weekly meetings, and generous with suggestions for editing and his time concerning students’ work and direction.” Gaddis the team player!

The enduring revelation of Mr. Tabbi’s book, however, is just how stridently autobiographical much of the novelist’s writing was. “The Recognitions” apparently contained long stretches of dialogue lifted entirely from Gaddis’s own coterie of friends, as if he were taking notes. “Carpenter’s Gothic” takes place in the same town, and even the very same house, that Gaddis inhabited in the late 1970s. The same for “A Frolic of His Own” — the action unfolding in the very same Wainscott home he shared with a girlfriend in the 1980s.

We learn that the play “Once at Antietam,” included in its entirety in “Frolic,” was something Gaddis himself wrote many years before in hopes of having it dramatized. Mr. Tabbi is also convincing in his assertion that many of Gaddis’s heroines correspond directly to women in the author’s life, and finally there is Mr. Tabbi’s overview of “JR”: “The more one reads, in letters and notes from the early period,” he writes, “the more autobiographical ‘JR’ seems, even as Gaddis’s life, like the life of his characters, becomes overwhelmed by the transformations within his world.”

Implicit in Mr. Tabbi’s research is that part of Gaddis’s lust for privacy might have a good deal to do with how much of himself he was revealing on the page. What is there left of him when he’s done his work?

Mr. Tabbi is notably strong on the enduring impact of “JR” (Gaddis’s 1975 takedown of capitalism), and is right to proclaim that the novelist was prescient about the increasingly ubiquitous corporatization of America and the world. And he’s especially good at linking America’s current movement toward populism with the novel’s early diagnosis of an encroaching greed. (I, for one, had no idea there was an Occupy Gaddis reading of “JR” during the height of the Occupy movement, which Mr. Tabbi cites here.) The biographer cleverly quotes Mitt Romney’s campaign statement that “corporations are people too, my friend,” which almost sounds more like Gaddis doing Romney than Romney himself.

Mr. Tabbi won’t make any friends, however, with his continued insistence that Gaddis’s books are not difficult. Gaddis’s novels are written almost entirely in dialogue without any designation of who is speaking, are rich in obscure symbolism, allusions to myth, and the history of classical music; and while it’s true that a continued immersion in his work results in an acquired fluidity for the reader, it seems nearly a provocation to hear Mr. Tabbi state so categorically that “there is no serious argumentative support for the ‘difficulty’ claim.” (Readers like John Gardner and Jonathan Franzen beg to differ, by the way.)

Mr. Tabbi tries to explain away the charge of Gaddis’s difficulty this way: “as a visceral reaction to a work that so elicits a reader’s participation to the point of becoming a collaborator, or co-creator.” A statement that, to most readers, sounds like the very definition of “difficult.”

I doubt if even Gaddis’s most earnest champions (like myself) would deny that the picking up of one of his novels is a demanding, and even an occasionally maddening, experience. No writer as ambitious, important, or richly rewarding could be anything less. We were lucky to have him, and the only shame of it is that with Gaddis’s death in 1998 we were robbed of his take on Internet culture (with which he would have undoubtedly had a field day).

No matter how he tries to mitigate it, Mr. Tabbi has taken on a difficult subject and mostly triumphed: His book is the best (so far) in understanding this underappreciated titan of American literature.

Kurt Wenzel is the author of the novels “Lit Life,” “Gotham Tragic,” and “Exposure.” He lives in Springs.

William Gaddis spent summers in Wainscott for many years and owned a house in East Hampton from 1995 until his death.

“The Anger Meridian”

Kaylie Jones

Akashic Books, $15.95

When the doorbell rings at 3:30 in the morning, Merryn, the beleaguered heroine of Kaylie Jones’s new novel, “The Anger Meridian,” thinks it is her husband, coming home too drunk to get the door open.

We are not told anything about him, but Ms. Jones paints a picture of a marriage in a few succinct sentences. On Merryn’s palm there is an inked message in French, “Don’t tell him he drinks too much.” By the front door, on a small strip of masking tape, “Don’t ask him where he was.” There are others around the house. “Don’t bore him with talk about the child.” “Don’t forget to put his vodka in the freezer.” No more than that, but we know all we need to know. It is not her husband at the door, however, but the police, there to tell her that he has been killed in a car crash, together with a young woman, while engaged in activity best avoided while driving at high speed and drunk.

Not only was her unlamented husband abusive but it gradually emerges that he was up to his crooked neck in financial shenanigans that are going to bring panicked business partners, vicious money launderers, and the F.B.I. down on Merryn’s neck like a ton of very angry bricks.

Her only concern is to protect her bright but physically fragile 9-year-old daughter, Tenney, from the ensuing scandal. The only safe place she can think of is her mother’s house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and within the hour they are on the road (and, yes, this is going to look suspicious to the F.B.I.) driving to Mexico.

All the thriller elements are in place as Merryn reaches their safe haven, a beautiful house high in the hills above the town, full of photos of her mother with famous people (though, oddly, not a single one of Merryn and Tenney). And here the fast-paced book really takes off, because the villain of the story is not going to be the drug dealers or the cops, it’s going to be Mom. And what a wonderful narcissistic, controlling, spiteful villain she is too, with her heavy drinking and her toy boy and her complete disregard for anyone but herself.

“I [Merryn] return to the Great Room to find Bibi storming around in a fury, a Bloody Mary in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She has changed out of her fancy suit and is wearing a lilac, terrycloth, Caribbean-cruise, one-piece pantsuit with a hoodie and crystal buttons.”

Oh dear. Rare indeed will be the reader prepared to give Bibi the benefit of the doubt after reading about that pantsuit. That she is indeed a villain is apparent to everyone else, including 9-year-old Tenney, but not to Merryn herself.

This is a hard one to pull off, because one is inclined to say, “Oh come on! You’d have to be blind not to see what a monster this woman is!” But I suspect anyone who has known emotional abuse as a child will recognize, with a sinking feeling, the willful denial and the it’s-all-my-fault syndrome. Someone needs to wake her up with the truth — but will it be in time?

Everything escalates, with all the separate threads coming together in what seems like a perfect storm of disaster for Merryn. A tale like this, where you have so many plotlines and characters, is a bit like skipping a stone across the surface of a pond. It must skip from event to event, character to character, without losing momentum. If it does, the stone sinks to the bottom of the pond and the reader dog-ears the page and decides to leave it for another day. No fear of that here. Ms. Jones has a masterly control of her story.

San Miguel is convincingly portrayed, and there are delightful subplots, one involving the rescue of a street dog and the other following Tenney’s prowess as a chess player and gradual return to health.

Ms. Jones, the daughter of the writer James Jones, is the author of a number of books, perhaps the best known of which, “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,” was made into a Merchant-Ivory film. This latest book also cries out to be a movie, with the role of Bibi being a plum any older actress would die for, and it would all be filmed in San Miguel, and this reviewer could be an extra.

Sheridan Sansegundo, a former arts editor of The East Hampton Star, lives in San Miguel de Allende.

Kaylie Jones, once of Sagaponack, teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton.

A Critic Most Eminent

The compiler of this column doesn’t expect anyone to remember a tossed-off challenge in the Oct. 1 paper in which, vis-a-vis a bookstore appearance, he suggested there isn’t an architecture critic more eminent than Paul Goldberger, but should a reader come up with one, put it in the U.S. Mail, and a prize could await.

Turns out Douglas E. Davidson noticed, one imagines with at least one eyebrow raised, and not only responded but politely fed crow to the column’s compiler in the form of the name Ada Louise Huxtable, recipient of the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism, architecture critic for The New York Times (ahead of Mr. Goldberger) as well as The Wall Street Journal, and, in Mr. Davidson’s words, “a main force behind the founding of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.” He pointed out that Mr. Goldberger himself once called her “the central planet around which every other critic revolved.”

And yes, Mr. Davidson got his East Hampton Star cap.

Spoken Word at ‘Speak’

Even if you prefer quiet time hearthside with the collected works of the Brits’ late great librarian-poet, the bald and bespectacled Philip Larkin, please consider this appropriate pairing: between the college’s Writers Speak series and a man largely responsible for the popularity of “spoken word” performances, making, as he helped to do, poetry cool again back in the early 1990s by way of the poetry slam.

Bob Holman presided over the competitions at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the East Village, where he was co-director. (The form arguably dates to the mid-1980s and the Green Mill jazz club in Chicago, but who’s counting.) Now, meaning Wednesday at 7 p.m., he’ll read, field questions, chew the fat, quaff drinks at a reception, what have you, in the Radio Lounge upstairs in Chancellors Hall at the Stony Brook Southampton campus.

Mr. Holman’s head-spinning résumé involves a multipart series called “The United States of Poetry” on PBS, hosting “Language Matters,” a recent PBS special, two Emmy Awards, publisher of numerous collections of poems and author of a few of his own, proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, and co-editor of “Aloud: Voices From the Nuyorican Poets Cafe,” which won a 1994 American Book Award. To say nothing of the New York media’s glib honorifics: “Poetry Czar,” “Ringmaster of the Spoken Word,” and so forth.