“Shirley: A Novel”

Susan Scarf Merrell

Blue Rider Press, $25.95

Susan Scarf Merrell’s new book, “Shirley: A Novel,” offers varied attractions: elements of the mystery, the period piece, and the psychological novel. Plus, true to title, the book conjures up Shirley Jackson, the captivating American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer known for her chilling works that combine the everyday with the supernatural. Jackson is cast as a central figure in Ms. Merrell’s novel, so those readers who like a brush with fame along with their fiction will find a hook and a footing.

“Shirley” is narrated from the point of view of young, pregnant Rose Nemser, who in the fall of 1964 accompanies her husband, Fred, a graduate student, to begin his teaching career at Bennington College under the mentorship of Stanley Hyman, noted literary critic and husband of Shirley Jackson. Fred and Rose move into Stanley and Shirley’s well-established home and the two couples occupy the big sprawling house over the course of the fall and winter.

The conversation is literary, the dinner parties are many, the cigarette smoke is thick, and the drinks are pouring. Shirley and Stanley have an intensely entwined relationship that runs on a high burn. Shirley is fierce but also psychologically fragile; Stanley is frontal, lusty, dependent on Shirley but also dependent on his appetites. The charged tension created by Stanley’s affairs with students from the college is an atmospheric condition of the marriage and consequently the household.

The specter of infidelity haunts the house, with an element of mystery introduced around the disappearance, in the past, of a Bennington student Shirley claims never to have met. This young woman is Paula Welden, an actual student at Bennington who did in fact disappear; Shirley Jackson’s second novel, “Hangsaman,” a study in dis-ease and the shifting role of reality — internally and in fiction — is widely understood to have been inspired by the case. In a tip of the hat to “Hangsaman,” and as an expression of the referenced weave of her story, Ms. Merrell has named Rose Nemser’s baby (born in the course of the novel) Natalie, the name of the 17-year-old Paula Welden-inspired protagonist of “Hangsaman.” Furthermore, fictional Rose identifies intensely with actual Paula Welden’s disappearance, her “absence from the world.” Watch out here for an intertwining of fantasy and reality that is emblematic of Shirley Jackson’s work, and a tribute to it.

The narrator of “Shirley” hails from a background of edgy loveless poverty, her father a thuggish paid arsonist and her mother a colorless drudge. Rose steps into the warmth and activity of Shirley’s house and is immediately mesmerized by the verve, intelligence, and witchy charm Jackson exudes and commands.

“Shirley’s was the smile of a woman like me, the abandoned and the never-loved; it was the smile of the arrogantly insecure. It was the smile of the mother-to-be who had never been mothered, the smile of the brilliant person in a woman’s body, the beautiful woman in an ugly shell. I loved her immediately, I wanted to be her and take care of her.”

A friendship between young, needy Rose Nemser and middle-aged, fiercely driven Shirley Jackson takes root. The building and collapse of this friendship form the arc of the plot of the novel. The suspense lies in the reader’s anticipation of what volatile Shirley might do to vulnerable Rose. At points in the novel, Ms. Merrell attempts a sort of dream-induced rendering of Shirley Jackson’s note-taking for a novel, as experienced trance-like through Rose.

Ho! This is an ambitious harkening to the reality-bending of Jackson’s “Hangsaman” as well as an expression, Jackson-like, of the slippery hold Rose has on her identity, especially in the face of her great need for recognition, for being “seen.”

“Shirley: A Novel” takes as an epigraph the opening paragraph of “The Haunting of Hill House,” Shirley Jackson’s masterwork of psychological horror, which could be said to share psychic shelf space with Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” champion of the psycho-emotional ghost story. In “The Haunting of Hill House,” Eleanor, a vulnerable and needy woman, joins a group led by an occult scholar who seeks to investigate the psychic phenomena of Hill House, an 80-year-old mansion with a checkered past. Hill House threatens to entrap its inhabitants, and Eleanor is uniquely called to its embrace. The seduction of submission to a sense of belonging, no matter the erasure of self, is defined in “The Haunting of Hill House.” It is a novel that largely defies paraphrase.

References to “Hill House” are liberal in Ms. Merrell’s novel, especially in the passages personifying Shirley and Stanley’s home, its awareness of its occupants, the way the doors stick shut — though in Hill House, the doors will not stay open. Hmm. Parallels between Eleanor of “Hill House” and Rose of “Shirley: A Novel” are apparent. Both are vulnerable, inexperienced, needy, and attractive but lacking self-confidence. Both Rose and Eleanor crave to be seen, crave security, and crave to belong. If Eleanor seeks her sanctuary in horrible Hill House, Rose seeks hers in crazy Shirley.

Meanwhile, in her acknowledgments, Ms. Merrell mentions making use of Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman for the purpose of her story, writing, “My hope is that Shirley and Stanley would be amused by this fictional exercise.” Between the many references, the borrowing, the evocation of Jackson’s vibe, and the drawing of Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman as characters, “Shirley: A Novel” becomes quite the buffet of literary homage.

Looking at the novel at hand, plumbing it for potential and value, a question — the selfish test-question of a gobbling reader — emerges: Does “Shirley: A Novel” inspire the reader to look for more from its author, or inspire the reader to read (or re-read) Shirley Jackson? Or neither? Or both? Both is not impossible, but a feat and a coup. Both is best for everyone, as in, for example, “The Master,” Colm Toibin’s virtuoso-level rendering of the great and complex novelist Henry James as a fictional character. There’s Henry James cropping up again! Wowza, talk about a writer who defies paraphrase.

While the aspect of literary homage is alluring in “Shirley: A Novel,” it also beckons comparison to the work of Shirley Jackson. Intentionally, naturally. And playfully, at times. Dangerously, too. If it were easy to do what Shirley Jackson did, there would be more than one Shirley Jackson, which there is not.

But Susan Scarf Merrell is not practicing fan fiction. Her work is considered, charted, balanced, detailed, and at times complex. If “Shirley: A Novel” is a literary exercise, it is one that flexes muscle well worth developing.

Evan Harris is the author of “The Art of Quitting.” She lives in East Hampton with her husband and two sons.

Susan Scarf Merrell teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She lives in Sag Harbor.

“Where Nobody

Knows Your Name”

John Feinstein

Doubleday, $26.95

“Managing at that level is the worst job there is in baseball,” Buck Showalter, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles, once said of Triple-A ball, where he led a team for four years after having played his entire career in the minor leagues. “Why? Because no one wants to be there.”

Whether it’s limbo for a major league pitcher sent down to rehab a blown-out shoulder, a stopover for a talented prospect on the rise, or purgatory for a demoted outfielder who has drunk the rarefied air of the big leagues and finds himself waiting for another player to be laid low by injury so he can return, “when you’re in Triple-A, you’re ‘this close,’ but you can also be a million miles away,” in the words of John Lindsey, who knows particularly well of what he speaks, having set a record — 16 years — for time spent in the minors before a call-up to the bigs, “the show,” “the life.”

As John Feinstein recounts in his latest book, “Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball,” Lindsey, at 33, was wrapping up a season with the Albuquerque Isotopes when he was called in to his manager’s office one September day in 2010 and stunned by the news that he would be joining the Los Angeles Dodgers. He went to bat 12 times, managing one precious hit, before a pitch broke his hand.

Lindsey, cleverly nicknamed “the Mayor” after the handsome 1960s New York City politician and Mets fan, despite the different spelling, is “a quiet and thoughtful man, very religious and extremely considerate of others’ feelings,” Mr. Feinstein writes, so much so that he was reluctant to tell his teammates that he’d been called up.

All the cliché-heavy “one game at a time” locker room interviews may have left you thinking of athletes as overgrown children, best seen and not heard, but the nine men Mr. Feinstein has chosen to focus on over the 2012 season — besides Lindsey, a designated hitter, there are three pitchers, two outfielders, two managers, and an umpire — are by and large likable and have something of substance to say. The two managers are even admirable in their fair, straightforward treatment of their players and fortitude in handling family tragedies. Charlie Montoyo of the Durham Bulls has a son who undergoes several heart surgeries by the time he is 4, and a daughter of the Norfolk Tides’ Ron Johnson is hit by a car while riding a horse. She survives, barely, but loses a leg.

Lindsey’s case may have been exceptional, but it was also typical, in that he heeded his father’s advice — “Don’t stop until you have to stop” — rather than hang up his cleats to continue online classes with the University of Phoenix, a dreary prospect out-dulled only by Johnson’s stint in his father-in-law’s carpet store in Florida. (This following a significant minor league career and 22 games in the majors.) An opening as a hitting coach with the Kansas City Royals’ Class A team saved him.

“I get paid to go to the ballpark and put on a uniform every day,” he says. “How can I possibly complain?” What’s more, “we’ve got a great bus,” he deadpans one night before a nine-hour trip into the steaming heart of north-central Georgia. “Nobody beats our bus.”

Despite the almost-made-it bitterness that can rival body odor in fouling Triple-A clubhouses, Johnson’s sentiment is echoed throughout the book — an “I’ve always understood that I’m lucky to still be playing” here, an “Anything to get between the white lines” there.

You don’t have to be a baseball nut to appreciate the enthusiasm. Take Doug Bernier, a Californian who went to Oral Roberts University for the top-notch facilities and the scholarship he was offered, not realizing the evangelical nature of the place: The campus’s giant golden hands freak him out upon his arrival; he is reprimanded for going to class in shorts and a T-shirt. “I went to Walmart and found a clip-on tie,” he tells Mr. Feinstein. “I wore it for the next two years.”

After graduation the Colorado Rockies came calling, in a way, offering to sign him as an undrafted free agent, the lowest of the low, for no bonus and $850 a month. “Where do I sign?” was his immediate response.

Although “Where Nobody Knows Your Name” touches on the goofiness we’ve come to expect in the minor leagues — the former Chicago Cubs star Mark Prior being overshadowed by a Lehigh Valley IronPigs “whack an intern” promotion, for instance — if you’re looking for a gritty description of a dying Midwestern city and accounts of struggling players miserably sleeping three futons to a one-bedroom apartment, there’s the recent “Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere” by Lucas Mann, a young professor of writing who very much puts himself in the story.

This, on the other hand, is serious reporting, and for Mr. Feinstein, the author of “A Season on the Brink: A Year With Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers,” one of the most influential sports books out there, it’s a return to form after “One on One: Behind the Scenes With the Greats in the Game,” which nearly read like a fulfillment of a book contract peppered with score-settling. That form is marked by extensive interviews, with follow-ups sometimes in triplicate, and dogged research. The result is gripping and fun.

Among the injury-hampered trajectories of the nine primary subjects are a few “name” players, too: Scott Podsednik, a hero of the 2005 World Series-champion Chicago White Sox, the 100-game-winner Brett Tomko, and the 6-foot-7 Scott Elarton, who won 17 games as a Houston Astro at age 24. (The book comes with a helpful “cast of characters” glossary.)

Outside of the nine, Mets fans will be interested to hear from Wally Backman, the “spark plug” second baseman for the indomitable 1986 team, who in 2012 was managing the Buffalo Bisons, “an ever-present pack of cigarettes on his desk.”

And then there’s John Maine, once the Mets’ number-three starting pitcher, a star of the 2006 National League Championship Series who five years later was pitching in a coed softball league. As he spoke to Mr. Feinstein, he was with the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees (now the RailRiders), and when they finished, he stood up and grabbed a bucket to go fetch baseballs from the outfield and return them for batting practice.

That’s life in the minor leagues.

John Feinstein had a house on Shelter Island for many years, and still visits family there in the summertime.

“Kill My Mother”

Jules Feiffer

Liveright Publishing, $27.95

As I eagerly devoured “Kill My Mother,” Jules Feiffer’s brilliantly funny, moving (both emotionally and visually), multilayered film noir homage, I kept thinking this graphic novel could easily transfer to the screen — as an animated film. Hell, it already is an animated film on paper.

Every page in “Kill My Mother” is alive with movement, or what animators call “extreme poses”; that is, storytelling facial and bodily expressions that visually communicate the narrative to an audience.

Mr. Feiffer’s well-known love of the elegant art of Fred Astaire shines throughout. His cartoon characters literally leap and dance off the page, as they continually run into and out of danger. Or a woman sings an improvised lullaby while lifting a boy into the air, twirling in multiple sequential poses reminiscent of the “modern dancer” often seen in Mr. Feiffer’s long-running Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice comic strip. Or a drunken over-the-hill private eye slugs a guy in the face with a pistol in a frozen apache dance moment.

The first appearance of a cocky boxer named Eddie Longo, also known as “The Dancing Master,” offers a veritable showcase of Feiffer “moves” — precise frame-by-frame fight poses resembling a beefcake pas de deux.

Mr. Feiffer knows the animation medium well; he won an Oscar in 1961 for the biting anti-authoritarian animated short “Munro.” In “Kill My Mother” he’s done all the hard groundwork for a future adaptation to a cartoon film. The story and dialogue (taut and gripping) are accompanied by expressionistic storyboards of sequential imagery filled with famed noir tropes and directorial touches.

The characters — all of them by turns menacing, seductive, driven, violent, vindictive, hard-boiled, pathetic — elicit from readers a sympathy or, at least, recognition of the human condition through Mr. Feiffer’s empathetic drawings. His loose draftsmanship may appear improvisational — and at one point in the creative process it no doubt was — but what ends up on the page is highly selective. Mr. Feiffer’s intelligent and artistic presentation hits all the emotional buttons of his characters. Mr. Feiffer obviously does thorough research and I assume creates many drawings in order to make the strongest graphic statements he can make, choices that are calculated to get an audience to respond emotionally.

The layout of the sepia-colored pages is extraordinarily cinematic in ways that Orson Welles might have approved (and maybe envied). The first chapter opening — two teens jitterbugging in a 1933 San Francisco apartment — is in the old square 1.33 screen aspect ratio, which Mr. Feiffer immediately breaks out of. Depending on the needs of the story, his geometric panels constantly change shape — stretching to Cinema­scope proportions, overlapping, blurring, and sometimes they disappear altogether, emulating spot-on uses of the close-up, camera pans, subjective shots, over-the-shoulder shots, subjective point of view, cross-dissolves, and so on.

The influence of Mr. Feiffer’s early mentor Will Eisner is surely felt (as is the lesser-known but brilliant innovator Harvey Kurtzman), but Mr. Feiffer goes further than any other graphic novelist in creatively melding his phenomenal success as a stage and screen writer and print and film artist.

The page layouts for a steamy jungle mise-en-scène on a war-torn Pacific island are particularly impressive. Five panel frames are placed within surrounding, suffocating dense vegetation — vines, roots, leaves, and palm fronds that spill over the panels and to the edge of the page. Mr. Feiffer’s visualization makes the reader feel as ensnared, claustrophobic, and panicked as the character desperately seeking escape from her tropical hell.

Animation is not a genre. It is a method of storytelling, as Brad Bird (director of “The Incredibles”) once said. It is a technique, a tool that can do western films, science fiction, horror, screwball comedies, and film noir and other genres. But in America, animated features are ghettoized in the children’s film category. Perhaps “Kill My Mother” will attract a brave producer who will use its sensibility, humor, sarcasm, murder, and sex to move U.S. animated features toward a new adult audience and a new entertainment level.

Meantime, buy Mr. Feiffer’s book. If you don’t, “. . . you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

John Canemaker is an Oscar-winning animation filmmaker, a tenured N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts professor of animation, and author of 12 books on animation history, including “The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheis and the Secrets of Walt Disney’s Movie Magic.” He lives in New York and Bridgehampton.

Jules Feiffer lives in East Hampton.

So you go about your life

but there’s a thread unraveling

Each year

the reading of the devastating list

each name hanging in the New York air,

the lips of their children,

their parents,

their wives,

dropping them into place

One woman

presses the back

of another

helping her go on

And still it goes

still only on the A’s

The bell rings

all of them the hardest

Strangers become relatives

The litany

develops its own rhythm

of thousands,

names carefully pronounced

back and forth

before the pause

on the ledge of sorrow

This one,

this one,

this one,

“and my love.”

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.

In her latest collection of poems, “Hurt, the Shadow,” Carole Stone gives voice to a historical figure almost never heard from, Josephine Hopper, the wife of the painter Edward Hopper. Ms. Hopper studied at the New York School of Art and was a painter in her own right, yet in marrying a man who would go on to become a giant on the American scene, she became known as his model. She was also a strong influence on his work.

Ms. Stone, a professor emerita of English at Montclair State University, lives part time in Springs. She’ll read selections from “Hurt, the Shadow,” published last year by Dos Madres Press, at the Amagansett Library on Sunday at 2 p.m., incorporating a slide show of paintings to illustrate how they led to particular poems.

This marks the beginning of a new series of Sunday afternoon readings, the next of which, on Sept. 21, will bring Scott Chaskey of Quail Hill Farm and his most recent book, “Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds.”

“The Mother Court”

James D. Zirin

American Bar Association, $29.95

What do bishops, celebrities, politicians, generals, professional athletes, Holocaust victims, drug addicts, and just plain folks have in common? All of them have chosen the memoir as the literary vehicle to lay bare their inner lives.

The craze began in 371 A.D., when St. Augustine, a Patristic Catholic and a bishop in his church, haunted by a boyhood misdeed — the theft of two pears from a neighbor’s tree — sought expiation by confessing that sin and others in a memoir aptly titled “Confessions.”

This summer, hundreds of East Hampton residents lined Main Street to gain admission to BookHampton, where on a hot Saturday afternoon, Hillary Clinton read from and signed her memoir “Hard Choices.” (The price of admission: the purchase of the book.)

A memoir bears certain similarities to an autobiography. In both, the narrators are the authors and the tale is told from their point of view. The two have an important difference, however. An autobiography is a documented chronicle of the author’s life; a memoir is a slice of life requiring no more documentation than a good memory. Because of the lesser demands on the memoirist, what started as a trickle 2,000 years ago has evolved into a tsunami.

The reaction of critics and readers to memoirs has not always been favorable. They have accused memoirists of having inflated egos, being afflicted with narcissism, and seeking to place a halo over their sinning heads. Sigmund Freud declined to write his, contending that to do so he would have to offend friends and enemies or shield them through acts of mendacity.

James Frey, in his memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” circumvented Freud’s dictum. Mr. Frey, a drug addict and alcoholic at age 23, wrote about his rehabilitation. In lieu of indiscretions and mendacity, he invented events and circumstances. His book soared to the top of The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. When the fraud was revealed, sales increased (and The Times, inexplicably, continued to list the book as nonfiction).

James D. Zirin’s “The Mother Court: Tales of Cases That Mattered in America’s Greatest Trial Court,” is a memoir that avoids ego-tooting, narcissism, and mendacity. Mr. Zirin, a top-notch trial lawyer, focuses on the litigation skills of his contemporaries, not on his own. In a chapter probably unprecedented in the annals of legal writing, he rates his favorite judges, not only by naming them, but by showing why they deserve commendation. In another stark departure, he excoriates other judges by describing their lapses in judicial temperament, intelligence, or both.

Like judges, there are good lawyers and bad ones. An effective lawyer will make his case attractive and understandable to the court or jury. Mr. Zirin is a good lawyer and a good writer. He guides us through a thicket of nine troublesome areas that, over the past 60 years, confronted the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which he calls “The Mother Court.” Hence the title.

He first discusses the espionage case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, presided over by Judge Irving Kaufman, criticizing Judge Kaufman’s conduct of the Rosenbergs’ trial and the death sentence he imposed upon them. Subsequently discovered evidence has revealed that Ethel was innocent, and that the information passed by Julius to the Soviets was innocuous. Mr. Zirin points out the obvious: Once the Rosenbergs were electrocuted, there was no way to correct the errors.

In discussing pornography, another of the troublesome issues, he turns a spotlight on the banning of James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses.” The story is told in a series of anecdotes and quotations from the decision upholding the right of the publisher to distribute the book.

(One small quibble: When Bloom peeps at Gerty’s bloomers, she is on Sandymount Beach, not, as Mr. Zirin says, on the “street.” A small distraction from a fine exposition of the serious issues surrounding censorship.)

The author provides an insider’s view of the epic battle between the Nixon administration and The New York Times over the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Zirin, a confidant of the trial judge, Murray Gurfein, calls his decision in favor of The Times an exemplar of the blindness of justice. Judge Gurfein was appointed to the federal bench by Nixon, and his first case was that of the Pentagon Papers. It was unlikely that a judge newly appointed by a sitting president would deny the injunction sought by the government. If that assessment were made, though, it was done without considering Judge Gurfein’s intellectual independence. He scrutinized the Pentagon Papers, concluded national security issues were not involved, and denied the injunction.

Mr. Zirin discusses four libel cases, two of which involved actions by generals against the media. By coincidence, both cases were tried at the same time in the Southern District.

My favorite chapter discusses the campaign against Roy Cohn, who was counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy in the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s. I knew Cohn had been prosecuted for federal crimes, but I did not know that during a brief period in the 1960s, he was indicted three times and acquitted three times. Mr. Zirin, an assistant U.S. attorney at the time, relates his office’s defeats and Cohn’s triumphs with disarming fairness, crediting Cohn for effective but devious legal stratagems.

Other cases covered include prosecutions against corrupt public officials, the Mafia, accountants, and terrorists.

Although the author purports to pay homage to his eponymous hero, the court, what emerges is his own passion for the law. The book is a love story; Mr. Zirin’s love of the law.

I was a trial lawyer for 43 years during most of the time covered in this book. I referred to the “Mother Court” as the Southern District. I heard the court’s other name for the first time when I picked up this book. Although we called the court by different names, all of the judges and most of the lawyers referred to by Mr. Zirin, I also knew. He got them right.

I have been retired for almost 15 years. For most of those years, I have not thought about the Southern District. Mr. Zirin escorted me back through time, for which I thank him. I enjoyed his book. So will lawyers and laymen, especially those who lived through the turbulent times of the latter half of the 20th century.

James D. Zirin has a house in East Hampton. He is the host of the cable TV show “Conversations in the Digital Age.” This is his first book.

Sidney B. Silverman, a resident of Amagansett, has written his own memoirs and four novels. The most recent, “The Wall, the Mount, and the Mystery of the Red Heifer,” will soon be published.

Don’t let the summertime eruption of author appearances put a crimp in your listening style, bibliophiles, just pull up a (preferably reserved) chair and take in the Amagansett Library’s answer to such a series, won’t you? It’s called Authors After Hours, coming to you free on Saturdays at the shingled Main Street edifice, this week at 6 p.m. with Jenny Offill and her second novel, “Dept. of Speculation,” billed as a portrait of a marriage.

The “Dept.” here refers to how a Brooklyn couple would mark their love letters, indicative of the difficulties and uncertainties of work, life, a baby with colic, and a long-term relationship. Ms. Offill’s previous novel was the well-received “Last Things.” She is also a children’s book author, most recently of a story about a sloth, “Sparky!”

The series continues on July 26 with Jessica Soffer reading from “Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots,” a tale of a family of Jewish and Iraqi heritage. Ms. Soffer teaches fiction at Connecticut College. Her father was the sculptor Sasson Soffer, once of Amagansett.

Aug. 2 brings Linda Coleman of Springs and “Radical Descent: The Cultivation of an American Revolutionary,” published by the Pushcart Press and described by the late Peter Matthiessen as a “rare firsthand account by an active participant in the radical underground movements . . . distinguished by the courage and painful honesty so critical in a memoir of this kind.”

Alan Furst will drop in on Aug. 16 to read from his latest World War II-era espionage novel, “Midnight in Europe,” and on Aug. 23 the legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer will wrap up the series when he talks about his forthcoming graphic novel, “Kill My Mother.”

Richard Ravitch, Johnny Carson, and Roger Ailes found importance by being useful. The authors of new books about them will be honored at Authors Night, the annual fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library, on Aug. 9.

Richard Ravitch, in his rich and beguiling memoir, “So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises” (PublicAffairs, $26.99), presents himself as an affable, capable, smart, and dedicated public servant and successful businessman. He was an expert on public financing and construction of low and middle-income housing — his firm HRH built Waterside Plaza and Manhattan Plaza — and was head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and lieutenant governor of the State of New York. (Full disclosure: We’ve met and have mutual friends.)

Mr. Ravitch has written an important memoir describing his many praiseworthy accomplishments in finance, business, and politics with candor, modesty, energy, and eloquence. He shows readers how he built trust and friendships amid conflict, strife, and disasters . . . and how his good will and faith in democracy and consensus-building led to practical solutions to virtually intractable public policy puzzles.

He was a grandson of Russian émigrés escaping pogroms, and his family founded a small contracting business making sidewalk gratings and manhole covers. HRH Construction built the famous Beresford and San Remo luxury apartment buildings on the Upper West Side, where Mr. Ravitch grew up and attended Columbia University. He fell under the spell of the noted intellectuals Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, Richard Hofstadter and Henry Steele Commager, scholars and exponents of Western liberal democracy who “inspired much of what I would do in my life.”

A call for help from then-Gov. Hugh Carey brought Mr. Ravitch into the thick of financial consulting on the impending bankruptcy of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, which involved very complex political and human-relations problem-solving. This led him into New York City’s fiscal crises over its bankruptcy.

“Amid the consensus that the city should be an agent for social change,” he writes, “almost no attention was paid to the cost of this change . . . reflected in the city’s rapidly growing annual deficits . . . that made some form of insolvency inevitable. . . .”

Wearing a 25-pound police-issue bulletproof vest, he spoke to Fordham Law School graduates in 1982 about why their legal education was the best possible training for public service, and why public service was the best possible use of their legal education. He had been named chairman of New York’s then-dysfunctional M.T.A. (thus the vest), a four-year job he later described as “the most exhilarating of my life. Once again, I had been able to address a major public problem . . . to draw on many of the friendships and relationships I had developed over the years.”

He tells these intricate stories with verve and cliffhangers galore, and he names the boldface pubic personalities involved.

Here’s the difference between how business executives as opposed to government officials do their jobs. In business, the essential takes precedence over the trivial, so a wise businessperson will divide all tasks into the 10 percent that must be done immediately and the 90 percent that is to be placed on the back burner. Once the critical 10 percent is accomplished, the remaining back-burner 90 percent is then divided between a new critical 10 percent to do right away and a new back-burner remainder.

But government people think differently: They assume that perhaps 1 percent of the general public is dishonest, and so they make a government regulation specifically aimed at that 1 percent. Mr. Ravitch succeeded in his demanding jobs because he clearly understood the importance of both approaches.

Henry Bushkin’s “Johnny Carson”

Johnny Carson was a durable, amusing late-night talk-show host — a popular entertainer whose private life included such embarrassments as alcohol abuse, offensive behavior, and multiple marriages and affairs (simultaneously). He was a real-life Peck’s Bad Boy.

Henry Bushkin, a lawyer and Carson’s sometime protector, fixer, confidant, and wingman, has written a delicious tell-all biography (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28) in which he reveals in amusing detail how he had to clean up “the mess” after all of Johnny’s naughty business and personal screw-ups.

Mr. Bushkin had become Johnny Carson’s best friend and lawyer for 18 years starting in 1970, when he was surprised to be tapped to be Johnny’s trusted right-hand man, although he was inexperienced in show business and merely 27 years old. He proved to Johnny that he could negotiate tough contracts with NBC, manipulate complex business deals with people who wished to invest in Johnny’s fame and name, bail Johnny out of difficult situations, and generally cover his misdeeds. Above all, he was loyal.

Mr. Bushkin says, “There are still . . . people around Los Angeles who had a business relationship with Carson that ended unhappily; they still love Johnny but hate the prick who was his attorney . . . just the way Johnny wanted it.” Although Johnny was endlessly witty and enormously fun to be with, he could also be the “nastiest son of a bitch on earth.”

Johnny’s bright side showed when he compared himself to the movie star Lassie: “We’re both lovable and we both come when we’re called.” Mr. Bushkin tells this story: Zsa Zsa Gabor brought her Persian cat to her guest appearance on “The Tonight Show,” and she asked Johnny if he would like to “pet my pussy.” He reportedly said, “I’d love to, if you’d just remove that damned cat.”

His darker side appeared when his producers thought a comedy writer for “The Tonight Show,” who was making $4,000 a week in the 1970s, deserved a raise, and Mr. Bushkin turned him down. He went directly to Johnny — who fired him on the spot. An example of Johnny’s pride involved a lawsuit he had Mr. Bushkin initiate against a company called Here’s Johnny Portable Toilets, whose slogan was “The World’s Foremost Commodian.” He was not amused. Mr. Bushkin says Johnny eventually spent $500,000 to win less than $40,000 in damages. (The case is often cited as an example of trademark protection.)

Citing the critic Kenneth Tynan in a New Yorker profile, Mr. Bushkin believed that Carson resembled the great Fitzgerald creation Jay Gatsby because both dreamed of self-made wealth and happiness, both had abundant energy, youth, and ambition despite humble origins . . . and both were profoundly lonely and empty of authenticity. (“If you can fake authenticity, you’ve got it made,” Sam Goldwyn reportedly said.)

Johnny did and had it made; he was crowned the “king of late night.” Not only that, five nights a week he essentially performed the equivalent of a somersault on a high wire: The jokes had to work, no rewrites, no retakes, and the high-powered guests (like Jack Lemmon, Gene Kelly, James Stewart, Joan Rivers, politicians) were without scripts, prepackaged lines, costumes, or directors . . . in effect he was naked before millions.

“The Loudest Voice in the Room”

Roger Ailes is a man with “unrivaled power to sway the national agenda,” a “brilliant, bombastic [guy] who built Fox News — and divided a country,” living a story worthy of “Citizen Kane,” according to Gabriel Sherman in his fascinating, unauthorized, courageous biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room” (Random House, $28). A unique genius of conservative values, Mr. Ailes inhabits a world of outsize personalities like himself: Bill O’Reilly, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, presidential aspirants, and Tea Party loyalists.

Although discouraged from writing this biography by Mr. Ailes himself (and by his loyal associates), nevertheless Gabriel Sherman has done a heroic job of research and scholarship by interviewing 614 people who worked with or observed Mr. Ailes during his five decades of public life. Mr. Sherman confirmed facts with a minimum of two sources, and had fact-checkers invest over 2,000 hours vetting his book for accuracy.

Mr. Ailes and his associates attempted to squelch his project and demean Mr. Sherman with a kind of disinformation campaign that described him as a “harasser” and “attack dog” and a “George Soros puppet.”

In 1996, Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to launch Fox News, and the liberal media establishment dismissed it as a joke. In 2012, under Mr. Ailes, Fox News was valued by a Wall Street analyst at $12.4 billion.

    Mr. Ailes has said he built the operation from a news channel into a national phenomenon using “my life experience.” That included being producer of “The Mike Douglas Show,” a chatty 1960s daytime talk show where he learned commercial and entertainment methods of catching and holding viewers’ attention. As a consultant to Richard Nixon, he “adopted a sense of political victimhood and a paranoia about enemies. . . .”

    Later he became an Off Broadway producer of “The Hot l Baltimore,” Lanford Wilson’s play about prostitutes, addicts, lesbians, lost souls, and losers, and created an artistic and commercial success: three Obies, a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best American play in 1973, and huge profits for its investors and famed producer, Kermit Bloomgarden.

    In the 1980s, Mr. Ailes learned the “dark art of attack politics as a mercenary campaign strategist,” which he would later apply to turning Fox News into a money-making political powerhouse.

    Mr. Sherman has done a fine job and a public service in bringing such a complex force of nature — warts and all — to life.

    Richard Ravitch, who has a house in East Hampton, Henry Bushkin, and Gabriel Sherman will sign books at the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night on Aug. 9. Afterward they will be guests of honor discussing their work at fund-raising private dinners.

    Stephen Rosen, a regular book reviewer and essayist for The Star, lives in New York and East Hampton.

Bergen, Clinton, BookHampton

When Candice Bergen’s memoir “Knock Wood” came out in 1984, being chased by a young Jack Nicholson in “Carnal Knowledge” may still have been relatively fresh in the actress’s mind, but her days starring in the television series “Murphy Brown,” and Dan Quayle’s elevation of the character to cultural touchstone status, were yet to come, so there’s surely ample material for a follow-up.

While she’s at work on it, “Knock Wood” has been reissued in paperback, and she’ll read from it at BookHampton in East Hampton on Saturday at 5 p.m.

And there’s still time to get your “Elizabeth Warren for President” placards ready for Hillary Clinton’s appearance at the bookshop on Aug. 16 at 5 p.m.

The New Review

The summer issue of The Southampton Review, just out, clocks in at 237 pages, offering memoir (an excerpt from Roger Rosenblatt’s forthcoming “The Book of Love”), fiction (“Provincetown” by Alice Mattison), cartoons by the likes of George Booth of The New Yorker, and art portfolios featuring the work of April Gornik and James McMullan, from his recent book about growing up abroad during World War II, “Leaving China.”

And from the Department of Common Experience, it must be pointed out that in the back of the book awaits a Billy Collins poem, “Traffic,” in which the speaker is very much stuck in it, watching a mother and stroller overtake him, followed by an elderly couple, before, “Why even Buddha has risen / from his habitual sitting / and is now walking serenely past my car . . .”

“In Praise of Intransigence”

The tension between stubbornness and integrity is explored in “In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility” by Richard Weisberg, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. From the Enlightenment to Vichy France, Mr. Weisberg studies how compromise has tended to turn into complicity. He will discuss the book, new from Oxford University Press, tomorrow at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

On Saturday at 5 p.m., Gwen Edelman, the author of “War Story,” will read from her new novel, “The Train to Warsaw,” in which a writer and his companion, who together escaped the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, return there 40 years later.

“Deadly Secrets”

Robert Boris Riskin

Black Opal Books, $12.49

If you haven’t already met him in one of Robert Boris Riskin’s previous novels, allow me to introduce you to Jake Wanderman. He is a retired teacher, a one-year widower, and a Shakespeare-quoting amateur sleuth. Though he is unlicensed, Jake is known locally as the Sam Spade of Sag Harbor, where he lives. Originally from Brooklyn, Jake is an avid biker, a terrific cook, and quite the Feinschmecker. One of the consistent pleasures of this novel is vicariously ingesting lots of good food and booze along with Jake.

In “Deadly Secrets,” Mr. Riskin’s third Jake Wanderman mystery, Jake’s childhood best friend, Morty Adler, rediscovers his estranged daughter, Sarajane Relda (Adler spelled backward), whom he hasn’t seen since she was 11 months old, only for her to immediately become a prime suspect in a murder.

The book begins at Sarajane’s art opening at the Valerie Venable gallery in East Hampton. It is typical of a Hamptons summer art opening: glitzy, glammy, and full of beautiful but often snarky people seeing and being seen. Mr. Riskin wastes little time getting to the murder, which happens almost immediately; however, he can’t help but stop to poke some fun at the Hamptons summer scene along the way.

The “art” (Jake’s quotes) is an installation consisting of a living room, bedroom, and kitchen, “uninteresting, the furnishings right out of a 1950 House Beautiful magazine.” Jake confides, “What made this a work of art, I didn’t know, but maybe that was the point.” As he is wondering, a young server offers him “tuna ceviche with edamame puree on a wonton chip,” along with a glass of champagne. The event is catered by a celebrity chef named Tony Oakhurst, who, aside from being the victim-to-be, is something of a bastard, a womanizer, and a coke addict.

Jake leaves the reception, goes home, has a drink (his preferred quaff, Luksusowa Polish vodka), and is awakened at 5 a.m. by a call from Morty telling him that Sarajane (known as SJ) and her girlfriend Margo have been picked up by the East Hampton police and are being held at the police station. Jake drives over to pick Morty up, and on the way to the station Morty tells him the story of this until-now-unknown daughter and her mother.

“We just couldn’t get along. Marybeth [Sarajane’s mother] was a kid who never had to do anything. She didn’t know how to cook or care for the baby.” Eventually Morty decided to leave, and though he continued to financially support the baby, the mother and her family never allowed him to see his daughter again.

When they arrive at the station, Jake sees the lovely redheaded Detective Sienna Nolan, a Suffolk County homicide cop whom he already knows from a previous investigation. They had a “one-time thing” in Mr. Riskin’s “Deadly Bones.” It left Jake wanting more, but despite Jake’s persistent advances, Sienna is standoffish and resistant to reigniting anything. Jake learns from Sienna that in the middle of the night, Tony Oakhurst, the celebrity chef, had been stabbed to death at the art installation with one of his own knives. “It seemed as if he were trying to crawl away from his attacker. The handle of a knife was clearly visible in his back.”

Because Sarajane and Margo are the ones who found the body, they have been brought in for questioning. They claim that they were there in the middle of the night just to see how the 24-hour exhibit was doing. What Sarajane does not tell the police, but does tell Jake and Morty, is that many years ago, when they were students together in Paris, Oakhurst had raped her. We find out that Sarajane’s fingerprints are on the knife and there are “fibers from the victim on Relda’s dress.” Things are not looking good for Morty’s daughter. Jake, of course, wants to help his friend out by clearing Sarajane.

Fearful that the rape story will come out and give the police a plausible motive, making her a prime suspect, Sarajane and Margo flee East Hampton and head back to Paris. The plot becomes increasingly complicated from this point. Turns out that Oakhurst was in possession of $150,000 worth of cocaine when he was stabbed. It got pinched. By Margo. The cops don’t know about it at all, but a very large man with a completely shaved head had apparently come to the Huntting Inn looking for it before SJ and Margo fled back to Europe.

And shortly there is a second victim. “A girl was found murdered last night. It seems this guy Oakhurst had been subletting a place on East Sixty-Seventh Street. Someone slugged the doorman, went up to his apartment, got in, and murdered the girl.” She was Tony’s current squeeze.

There is some lovely writing in “Deadly Secrets,” like this description of grief returning upon Jake’s return from London:

“The instant I walked into my house, [his dead wife] Rosalind’s presence enveloped me. I let my carry-on bag drop to the floor and stood there, immobilized. Tears came into my eyes. Rosalind’s death had turned me into stone for a long time. There were periods when memories of her were so powerful they consumed me. I couldn’t resist them. In fact I didn’t want to resist. With time and effort, I’d managed to return to a semblance of a human being. And I wanted to stay there. But there were ineluctable forces that continued to lurk. Depression was one. Like a cancer in remission, you believed it had been wiped out, that all the cells had been bombarded or chemo’ed and were cleaned out of your blood. And then one day you’re surprised to notice a little lump on your side that had never been there before, and you go to the doctor and learn that what you thought was gone had returned.”

For me, “Deadly Secrets” is not without its minor missteps. At one point, in Paris on a dark street, Jake is assaulted by a knife-wielding assailant clearly intent not on robbing him, but killing him. He manages to kick the baddie in the nuts, knock him to the ground, and even makes him drop the knife. But then, instead of pressing his advantage, interrogating the assailant, and finding out who sent him (or, for that matter, discovering if he is, in fact, the person who killed Oakhurst, also with a knife), Jake simply runs off.

At another point, Jake gets possession of Oakhurst’s valuable bag of cocaine, which he knows some very tough people are looking for. He decides to flush it all down the toilet instead of holding on to it for later. You just know that is going to cause trouble for Jake somewhere down the line.

Quibbles aside, however, for Hamptons readers, as was the case with Mr. Riskin’s previous two novels, “Deadly Secrets” is full of fun, and is as East End-local as a novel can be. Jake travels to Paris and London in hot pursuit of the killer or killers, but the many scenes set in the Hamptons are the greatest pleasure to read. It is a delight to recognize venues from the Palm, Goldberg’s Bagels, and Rowdy Hall to the duck pond, Newtown Lane, and Wiborg’s Beach. In his quest for the killer, and in his romantic pursuit of Sienna, Jake wanders to many places that will be happily familiar to readers of The Star.

I don’t want to give away the ending, but suffice it to say that Mr. Riskin does his very best not to violate Raymond Chandler’s dictum: “The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.”

Michael Z. Jody, a regular book reviewer for The Star, is a psychotherapist and couples counselor with offices in Amagansett and Manhattan.

Robert Boris Riskin lives in Sag Harbor.