“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.

Paul Goldberger, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, former architecture critic for The New Yorker, and an East Hamptoner for many years, will lead a panel discussion of the work of the partners of Robert A.M. Stern Architects on Saturday starting at 2 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

The talk will focus on 15 houses completed in the last 10 years by the firm’s partners — Gary L. Brewer, Grant F. Marani, Randy M. Correll, and Roger H. Seifter, all of whom are to attend. The houses and the theories behind them are featured in a new book, “Designs for Living,” from the Monacelli Press. They range from Shingle Style to Mediterranean, in locations as diverse as the South Fork and California’s Napa and Sonoma Valleys.

Dissatisfied with your commencement address? With the uninspiring words of the gray senator who sits on the obscure subcommittee? Or the earnestness of the heiress who funneled her wealth into some worthy but uninteresting nonprofit?

Then it’s the Seven Stories Press to the rescue, fresh from the printing plant with Kurt Vonnegut’s “If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?” The slim volume is subtitled “Advice to the Young,” which is further appended with “The Graduation Speeches,” chosen and with an introduction by an old Indianapolis friend, the writer Dan Wakefield.

The title is emblematic of Vonnegut’s repeated attempts, across the nine addresses herein, to take a step back, encourage a broader view, invoking as it does the words of his favorite uncle, Alex Vonnegut, who believed the secret to a good life was the sweet pause, the look around to appreciate the simplest of pleasures, like a glass of lemonade under a shade tree in summertime, followed by the utterance of that one, affirming question.

As for advice, Vonnegut was too sly and knowing to pretend to ladle it out, though attention must be paid when a writer as known for his atheism as for his chain-smoking calls down 12 words of Jesus of Nazareth (“what does it matter if he was God or not?”) as a cure for the violence plaguing the globe: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Furthermore, he told the graduating class of 1999 at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., “If Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.”

Two years later, at Rice University in Houston, our man in letters and wild curly locks is happily deflating the scourges of the age — celebrity worship, the economy’s enrichment of the few — and recalls a comment by his friend Joseph (“Catch-22”) Heller at a lavish party in the Hamptons: “I have something he can never have,” Heller said of the billionaire host. “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

When it comes to toiling through life in the absence of fame and riches, Vonnegut tells the graduates, “In time, this will prove to have been the destiny of most, but not all of you. You will find yourselves building or strengthening your communities. Please love that destiny, if it turns out to be yours — for communities are all that’s substantial about the world.”

“All the rest is hoop-la.”

“Welcome to the

Monkey House:

The Special Edition”

Kurt Vonnegut

Dial Press, $18

The female praying mantis bites off its partner’s head during copulation. In the title story of “Welcome to the Monkey House,” Kurt Vonnegut introduces a biological paradigm in which the female entices men not to sex and death, but only death. The collection has just been re-released in a “Special Edition” edited by Gregory D. Sumner.

In the story, J. Edgar Nation is “the Grand Rapids druggist who was the father of ethical birth control.” Sickened by the sight of monkeys playing with themselves in the zoo, Nation runs home and develops “a pill that would make monkeys in the springtime fit things for a Christian family to see.”

“The only sexual beauty that an ordinary human can see today is in the woman who will kill him,” says Vonnegut’s character Nancy McLuhan, a hostess at one of the Ethical Suicide Parlors, which are Nation’s legacy. Nancy has been spirited away by Billy the Poet, who is out to change or restore the world to its former imperfection. Vonnegut’s dystopia is one in which an entity called simply “the World Government” controls world population growth by suicide or the administering of pills that kill all pleasure. “All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.”

“Nothingheads” are the rebellious ones who refuse to commit suicide or take their pills, and it is they who spearhead the rebellion. Though the pain-pleasure principle may be manifested in different ways, the hyperbolically envisioned future is clearly a metaphor for the present. But no matter how outlandish the scenario, there is a frightful familiarity to Vonnegut’s creations.

“I’m not going to throw myself into your arms . . . and I’m not going to budge from here unless somebody makes me,” Nancy tells Billy as he prepares to initiate her into the world of pleasure. “So I think your idea of happiness is going to turn out to be eight people holding me down on that table, while you bravely hold a cocked pistol to my head — and do what you want.”

Even though Vonnegut’s character is a gargoyle, she’s complex and troubling and you believe her, just as you believe Herbert Foster, the central character of a story called “The Foster Portfolio.” Foster is a beneficiary of fortune who adheres to the notion that “every man, for his own self-respect, should earn what he lives on.” Vonnegut establishes his comic equation, as Foster works day and night to subsist while his fortune builds in his portfolio.

The comedy can hinge on something simple that catches the reader off guard because its nonsense makes so much sense, such as this about smoking, from Vonnegut’s preface to the collection: “The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.” Vonnegut employs the understated reversal of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”

In “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” about the title character’s paranormal ability to destroy weapons, the humor is stated thus: “But those who would make war if they could, in every country of the world, wait in sullen silence for what must come — the passing of Professor Barnhouse.”

Both the futurist and more quotidian stories share a prodigious believability. Vonnegut’s financial manager from “The Foster Portfolio” will startle readers because his outlook and strategies, conceived in 1951, when the story was published, remain on the mark even today. “My firm began managing Herbert’s portfolio, converting some of the slower-moving securities into more lucrative ones, investing the accumulated dividends, diversifying his holdings so he’d be in better shape to weather economic shifts — and in general making his fortune altogether shipshape. A sound portfolio is a thing of beauty in its way, aside from its cash value. Putting one together is a creative act, if done right, with solid major themes of industrials, rails, and utilities, and with the lighter, more exciting themes of electronics, frozen foods, magic drugs, oil and gas, aviation, and other more speculative items. Herbert’s portfolio was our masterpiece.”

Similarly, in “Deer in the Works,” Vonnegut shows a preternatural knowledge with his industrial juggernaut — the Ilium Works of the Federal Apparatus Corporation, “the second-largest industrial plant in America . . . increasing its staff by one third in order to meet armament contracts” — in which his central character, like the deer in the title, is momentarily trapped.

“The Lie” is a tale about the scion of a wealthy family who’s rejected from the elite prep school his forebears have attended. And it exudes a similar credibility in its picture of an upper-crust outsider.

Vonnegut was a satirist and fantasist who had one foot firmly planted on the ground — which is to say that while he may owe a great deal to futurists like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick, the sentiment, humanity, and complexity of his characters and the conflicts they endure also owe something to Balzac’s “Comedie Humaine” and Zola, in which complex individuals are the embodiment of equally complex social forces, like the close-to-home ones in the title fable.

And one of the most charming stories in the collection, “Long Walk to Forever,” is simply a beautifully written tale of Newt and Catharine, old friends who don’t realize they love each other until it’s almost too late. Newt is overly shy and “covered his shyness by speaking absently, as though what really concerned him were far away — as though he were a secret agent pausing briefly on a mission between beautiful, distant, and sinister points.” At a crucial moment, “Catharine burst into tears. She turned her back to Newt, looked into the infinite colonnade of the woods.”

Gone are the sardonicism, the ideology, and the global visions, but Vonnegut’s little sketch is a masterful study of human emotion, as is “Next Door,” a Cheeveresque tale about overly protective parents whose attempt to spare their child from a movie that “isn’t for children” ends up inadvertently exposing him to the homicidal rage of a jilted mistress.

How have these stories weathered the times? Are “Welcome to the Monkey House,” which first appeared in Playboy back in 1968, or “Harrison Bergeron,” a story about a society that crushes exceptional individuals, from 1961, timeless classics like Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report” or “The Man in the High Castle”? Certainly some of the territory is dated. The sexual revolution has long passed, and population control, another theme that’s prominent in the collection’s signature story, is a far less cut-and-dried issue, with China’s one-child-per-family policy and some countries, like the U.S., actually experiencing a decline in population growth.

Though “Unready to Wear” (1953) does offer the prospect of literal out-of-body experience, the satire of “More Stately Mansions” (1951), with its keynote line, “There’s more to life than decorating,” doesn’t really transcend its 1950s suburban setting. Indeed the satirizing of ’50s and ’60s suburban and exurban mores (Vonnegut was a resident of Barnstable, Mass., and later Sagaponack) also dates many of these tales.

And what’s “New Dictionary,” a catty review of the Random House dictionary dating from 1967, replete with a snipe at Bennett Cerf, doing in the collection, other than to provide unnecessary padding?

The denouement of “The Foster Portfolio,” published in 1951, is an almost textbook example of “compromise formation,” a precept that undoubtedly had great cachet during the heyday of American psychoanalysis, when the story was written. “He had the respectability his mother had hammered into him,” Vonnegut’s narrator reports. “But just as priceless as that was an income not quite big enough to go around. It left him no alternative but — in the holy names of wife, child, and home — to play piano in a dive, and breathe smoke, and drink gin, to be Firehouse Harris, his father’s son, three nights out of seven.”

However dated some of the themes, it is in the flashes of truly elegant writing like this that the genius and longevity of many of these pieces ultimately lie.

Mr. Sumner’s essay “Building the Monkey House,” which accompanies the volume, exhumes unpublished drafts that are then compared invidiously to the published text. One can understand the attempt to fathom the author’s process. However, it’s almost as if Mr. Sumner were capping off this “Special Edition” with a disclaimer when he says “to my mind the published version has always felt more mechanical, its vulgarities more forced, than what we find in Vonnegut’s best work.”

It’s hard to see how these disappointing fragments — several, for example, sport the turgid title of “Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar” — support this view.

    Francis Levy is a Wainscott resident and the author of the novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.” He blogs at TheScreamingPope.com and on The Huffington Post. His reviews, “Guestwords,” and stories have previously appeared in The Star.

    Gregory D. Sumner is the author of “Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels.” Vonnegut died in 2007.

“Eleven Days”

Lea Carpenter

Vintage Contemporaries, $15.95

Lea Carpenter’s novel, “Eleven Days,” is the story of a single mother, Sara, and her son, Jason, a member of this nation’s class of elite warriors. It’s about the 11 days of reflection and angst she suffers while waiting to find out what has happened to her only child, who went missing during a mission that coincided with the one that brought down Osama bin Laden.

Jason is a graduate of the Naval Academy who went on to endure the grinding physical and mental trials required to become a Navy SEAL. As we all know, it was a SEAL team that brought down Osama bin Laden, one of our Special Operations Forces that now participate in what the author terms the “military equivalent of grand master chess games” that the worldwide balance of power has become.

Jason’s father was/is a C.I.A. spook operating at the highest and most secret levels of government. If I told you any more about him it would ruin this fine book and I’d have to kill you.

Ms. Carpenter is an excellent storyteller, but there are quite a few of those. What places her apart is the depth of her research about Special Forces training and ops, and about the arcane workings of Washington, D.C., the mind-set and all-but-predestined, Ivy League career paths of policy makers whose white papers Sara is paid to edit.

Of course, the emotional heart of “Eleven Days” beats to the dispirited tempos of a mother’s love, pride, and fear for her son. On an intellectual level, the author muses on the difference between Aristotle’s “phronesis,” wisdom learned from action that allows one to make choices about what to do in a given situation, and “sophia,” wisdom gained from books.

“Phronesis was less for scholars than for soldiers. And what Sara learned over time was that each division of the military had its own, even if slight, variation on the larger code and culture of the overall enterprise. The [SEAL] Teams had very strict code. Part of it was from their training. Part of it is soldered in the fight. Her son had elected to join the military when there was a major fight on.”

It is this phronesis/sophia business that’s kept me cogitating for days after finishing the book. Ms. Carpenter explores in her son the anatomy of a warrior, the irony of the soldier-poet, the extreme training that builds the determination, skill, and bravery of the kind that inspired the story of the original Jason and his challenging search for the Golden Fleece with his Argonaut comrades in arms.

“The most interesting people are the people we don’t know,” Sara is told by the father of an Academy classmate of Jason’s. “And she thought: The bravest people are the people we do not know.”

This, of course, is as troubling as it is probably true. There can be no doubt that in this post-9/11 world an elite warrior class is necessary. The chronic warfare we are engaged in requires it.

But, in telling the story of a mother and her warrior son, the author exposes, like a dark shadow, the great spiritual risk of putting all of one’s eggs in the hidden phronesis basket.

When all that youth, skill, brilliant physical prowess, comradeship, patriotism, and bravery can be destroyed in an instant, as happens to members of Jason’s team, the circumstances that make up that instant raise the most important questions for scholars, policy makers, and for all of us. Or, it should.

    “If it be now, ’tis not to come;

    If it be not to come, it will be now.

    If it be not now, yet it will come:

    The readiness is all.”

The quote from “Hamlet” (the “it” being the “fall of a sparrow,” a k a death) is from a letter, the most important letter, Jason sends to his mother, along with his Trident, the SEAL team insignia.

Ms. Carpenter gives us a peek at the motivation that drives the people who are fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere in ways so much different from wars past. Her telling is inspiring, although this reviewer would have liked it if she had brought her subjects down off the frieze a little more often. This is by no means a fatal flaw in the total scope of this page-turner with a twist.

Lea Carpenter spends summers in Southampton. “Eleven Days” is now out in paperback.

“Updike”

Adam Begley

Harper, $29.99

John Updike was, undoubtedly, one of the most gifted American prose stylists of the 20th century. And also one of its most prolific. Along with over 20 novels, Updike published countless short-story collections, poems, essays, reviews, and assorted miscellanea, most of it appearing in The New Yorker, with which the author had a roughly 50-year relationship.

He has been attacked, variously, as a misogynist, a political hawk, and (most stingingly to the author) as superficial. But no one has ever adequately impugned Updike as a writer of sentences. Who would dare? His prose danced, pirouetted, scissored, and often threw off sparks of erotic lyricism. In the thousands of pages that he produced, it would be a fool’s task to look for a dull sentence. I imagine there’s probably one in there. Somewhere. But good luck with that.

Still, who was he? In his new biography, “Updike,” Adam Begley sets to find out. It is, at times, a yeoman’s task. John Updike’s life did not manifest the dramatic trajectories of many of his contemporaries. There was no military service, alcoholism, financial destitution, concealed homosexuality, or racial injustices. There are no overlooked masterpieces or debilitating depressions. This is good news for Updike and a dearth of nourishment for a prospective biographer. Five hundred pages with a subject who views his major vice as an abiding obsession with golf? “Even his neuroses were tame,” the biographer admits. Mr. Begley has his work cut out to keep us engaged.

We begin in Shillington, Pa., where an archetypal American boyhood has its painful interruptions. There was a stutter, developed at the age of 6, which Updike never completely dispelled. More traumatic were the persistent attacks of psoriasis that forever haunted him: “red spots, ripening into silvery scabs,” as Updike described. Not all is lost, however: In his memoir, “Self-Consciousness,” Updike directly credits the scourge for turning a mirror upon himself, for making him hyper-aware of the world and his place in it. In other words, for making him a writer.

Home life on a Pennsylvania farm was classic Americana, with complications. There is the author’s mother, who was apparently “prone to anger.” Though the ire was not aimed directly at John, the home front was occasionally tumultuous. As Mr. Begley writes, “There was quarreling, ‘smoldering remarks,’ and the slamming of doors, an atmosphere of barely suppressed rage.” John also felt isolated on the farm, spending an inordinate amount of time alone. Still, the young writer thrives, selling his first poem to a magazine at age 16 and graduating co-valedictorian.

Off to college he goes, though not without what Updike himself described as the “shock of Harvard.” He felt provincial and out of place in the Ivy League, though he thrived academically. He was Phi Beta Kappa by his junior year and wrote for the prestigious Lampoon, often putting the entire magazine together himself.

Socially, though, things were more challenging. “Almost everyone who knew Updike at the time stressed that he was different — a little odd, and certainly not a mainstream Harvard type.” Young John possessed neither money nor “class,” though once again he turned the negative to his creative advantage. His outsider status honed his powers of perception, and it can be argued that a lifetime connection to provincial America gave him access to his greatest invention: Rabbit Ang­strom.

Updike moves on to postgrad work at Oxford, after which he gets a meeting with the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, who is impressed with his work from the Lampoon. John is hired, of course, and so begins a relationship that lasted for the next half-century.

“It is worth pausing here to marvel,” writes Mr. Begley, “at the unrelieved smoothness of his professional path.” Marvel may be an understatement. Once in Manhattan, Updike even manages to find the perfect publisher for his fiction, Knopf, where the editors are gentle with him after the merely modest success of his first three novels, “Poorhouse Fair,” “The Centaur,” and “Rabbit, Run.” This was certainly a kinder era in publishing, but also a testament to the kind of patience Updike’s talent could exact. Knopf recognized the gift and its potential to ignite. And ignite it did, in 1968, with “Couples.”

As with Harvard, Updike felt out of place in Manhattan (the “New York smarties” he once called them), and by the end of the 1950s he had settled in Ipswich, Mass. It is there that the novelist met head-on the suburban version of the Swinging Sixties. The “Ipswich Gang,” as Mr. Begley calls them, were a group of young, attractive professionals living in what Updike famously named the “post-pill paradise” of the Kennedy era. It is probably the only period of real tumult in Updike’s life, and like a famished lion, Mr. Begley is all over it. He writes of Updike that he “threw himself into the tangle of Ipswich infidelities.”

Interestingly, the biographer hints that it may have been the author’s wife, Mary, who was the first to succumb. “In the early sixties she took a lover; asked whether her affair, which lasted several years, began before or after John’s first fling, she said she didn’t know.” In any event, these years gave Updike the milieu for “Couples,” which went on to sell over four million copies. It also provided the writer an endless trove of erotic material that he mined for the remainder of his life.

What follows is one of the most fecund periods in American literature, with Updike producing nearly a book a year for the next two decades. Included in this are three more in the Rabbit series (two of which won the Pulitzer Prize), “The Witches of Eastwick,” “Roger’s Version,” and a constant stream of estimable short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker.

Congruent to these years is the appearance of Martha Bernhard, an Ipswich neighbor whom Updike married in the late 1970s after his divorce from Mary. While it might be too much to call Martha the villain of “Updike,” John’s friends from Ipswich took a particularly toxic view of her. “A chorus of neighbors,” Mr. Begley writes, “. . . testified that Martha ‘went after’ John with a single-minded resolve readily apparent to all.” Soon after, the new couple moved away from Ipswich, cutting themselves off from the “old gang” with a stunning finality. And Martha’s rigid restrictions on visitations did not endear her to John’s children with Mary either.

Oddly, Mr. Begley takes great pains to defend Martha, reminding us of John and Mary’s role in the divorce, and John’s own willingness to dismiss his old friends. Ultimately, though, the biographer’s language begins to strain in her defense: “The tough and fearless Martha was conspicuously purposeful, unhesitatingly vocal, and perfectly willing to bully John for his own good.” Okay then.

As good as John Updike was, there can be no question that the final novels are not among his best. “Toward the End of Time,” “Gertrude and Claudius,” and “Villages” showed a diminution not so much of talent as material — having exhausted his exploration of suburban America and its strained relation to God, the author seemed incapable of finding a new anchor for his sentences.

The critics, who had been mostly kind to him, had the taste of blood in their teeth. “Of course it is ‘beautifully written,’ ” James Wood said of “Toward the End of Time,” “if by that one means a harmless puffy lyricism.” It is also, he wrote, “astonishingly misogynistic.” Reviewing the same book, David Foster Wallace accused Updike of being a parody of his former self, and finally even of “senescence,” a judgment that Mr. Begley rightly calls out as “sadistic.” After 50 years, they finally had Updike cornered. Some fun, I suppose, was had.

And yet, even with a mediocre final act, the literary career of John Updike was one of the greatest of the last century. Is it a little surprising, then, that the life of such a man can be covered in just 486 pages, and that even then “Updike” feels a little long? If so, one can hardly fault Mr. Begley; he is brave to take on such an essential, though ultimately static, subject. “Updike” is both convincing and well researched, and when the dramatic details of the life lag, as they often do, the biographer fills in with literary analysis that is genuinely illuminating.

I’m not sure how Mr. Begley could have done any better, though it might do well to call “Updike” the definitive biography and be done with it. There hardly seems need for another.

Kurt Wenzel’s novels include “Lit Life” and, most recently, “Exposure.” He lives in Springs.

Adam Begley, a former reporter for The Star, is a regular visitor to Saga­ponack, where his parents have a house.

John Updike died in 2009.

Fran Castan and Scott Chaskey will read from their work on Sunday afternoon as the Poetry Marathon opens its 20th season at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett.

Ms. Castan, who lives in Barnes Landing with her husband, the artist Lew Zacks, is the recent recipient of the Long Island Poet of the Year award from the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in Huntington. She and Mr. Zacks are the co-authors of “Venice: City That Paints Itself,” a book of poems and illustrations published by Canio’s Editions.

Mr. Chaskey, the farmer in charge of Amagansett’s Quail Hill Community Farm, is a former president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association and the author of several books of poetry, including “Seedtime” and “This Common Ground.” He lives in Sag Harbor.

The Poetry Marathon is directed by Sylvia Chavkin and sponsored by the East Hampton Historical Society. The weekly readings, which are free, will continue every Sunday at 5 p.m. through Aug. 17. Anne Sager and Dan Moran will read on July 20, Kathryn Levy and Geoffrey O’Brien on July 27, Greg Moglia and Rosalind Brenner on Aug. 3, Dick Lynn and Michael Walsh on Aug. 10, and Pamela Kallimanis and Pat Falk on Aug. 17.   

Alex Russo, who drew graphic accounts of combat firsthand during World War II, and who was a member of Navy intelligence involved in the Normandy invasion and other landings, will read from his memoir, “Combat Artist: A Journey of Love and War,” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor tomorrow at 5 p.m.

The book also explores the experiences of an artist making his way in postwar America. Mr. Russo went on to teach at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and remains professor emeritus at Hood College in Frederick, Md. Also a poet, he lives in East Hampton.

The Fridays at Five author talks — a South Fork summer staple — start up again tomorrow at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.

This year’s program begins with Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, both experienced journalists, speaking about their book “The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend.” The book tells the story of the man behind the famed Sioux victory over Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

On Friday, July 18, the series will continue with E.L. Doctorow discussing “Andrew’s Brain,” a story about the inner workings of the brain of a cognitive scientist. July 25 will bring Allen Salkin, author of “From Scratch: Inside the Food Network.” There will be five talks in August, beginning with Alexandra Styron’s “Reading My Father: A Memoir” on the 1st, followed by Roger Rosenblatt speaking about “The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood,” and Kim Stolz, author of “Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I’ll Never Do.” The month will close out with Jon Robin Baitz, the author of “Other Desert Cities,” and finally, Gail Sheehy’s “Daring: My Passages.”

For 31 years, the Friends of the Hampton Library have been hosting authors on Fridays during July and August. Hors d’oeuvres and wine always kick off the event, which takes place underneath a large shade tree. The talks are followed by a question-and-answer session with the authors. Copies of the books are available for purchase and signing.

Admission is $15 for each talk, though a book of five tickets can be purchased for $60. The gates open at 4:30 p.m. each Friday, and the author talk runs from 5 to 6 p.m.   

“I Pity the

Poor Immigrant”

Zachary Lazar

Little, Brown, $25

At the very beginning of this intricate and finely wrought novel, its narrator, an American journalist named Hannah Groff, reveals two key elements of the book we’re about to read. The first is that it’s a story of fathers and children. She’s dining with her own father, from whom she’s often estranged, when she makes this observation. And on the next page Hannah, who’s investigating the murder of an Israeli poet, tells us, “What we need is a memoir without a self.”

The reader has not been led astray. “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” is indeed a story of fathers (real and imagined) and their children, and despite the book’s success as a work of fiction, it seems also to reconfigure incidents from the author’s own life, suffused with reflections on Jewish identity and violence in the modern and biblical worlds — becoming a kind of “memoir without a self,” or at least with only a proxy. When Zachary Lazar was 6 years old, his father was gunned down by hit men before he could testify in a criminal trial, an event that Mr. Lazar compellingly addressed in “Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder.” That book — a memoir — reads, oddly enough, somewhat like a novel, with the grittiness of the truth rendered in lyrical prose. Mr. Lazar refers to this portrayal of a father he can barely remember as a “conjuration.”

In “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” he just as deftly conjures up the notorious mobster Meyer Lansky as he seeks refuge in Israel from American prosecution. Lansky’s story is presented in a collage of actual and fabricated “evidence”: photographs; replicas of official documents and newspaper headlines; direct quotes from other, biographical, books (including a bibliography); the impressions of Lansky’s (fictional) lover, Gila Konig, a death-camp survivor and another “displaced” person, and his own self-justifying rumination on his life in exile: “A Jew has a slim chance in the world.” Gila tries to give him some ordinary human dimension. Viewing Lansky on TV, she remarks that “He looked terrible, weak . . . an old man with a weak chin and a sunken mouth.” And after lovemaking, “His body was not unpleasant. It was a yearning body, and she held him closely in her arms.”

The various characters and events in this novel seem disparate — and even disorienting — at first, as the narrative skips around in time and format and place, and from one point of view to another, but gradually the many facets begin to connect and the central storyline takes shape. Hannah Groff has also known Gila Konig in what now seems like another lifetime, when Gila was Hannah’s Hebrew teacher and her father’s lover. The two women meet again years later after Gila reads an essay by Hannah about David Bellen, the slain Israeli poet.

Hannah tells us: “She introduced me to a Hebrew word then, yored. Its root means ‘to descend.’ It’s what Israelis are called when they leave and go to another country. They have ‘descended.’ They have gone down to the corrupt world outside, so to speak, abandoned the holy land that is their rightful home.” Gila also shows Hannah photographs of an apartment in Tel Aviv, a gift to her from Meyer Lansky that she’s converted into the currency she needed to migrate to the United States, to become yored. The abandoned apartment, too, becomes an integral part of the larger picture, a clue in the mysterious murder Hannah is investigating.

The promise that this will be a tale of fathers and children is more than fulfilled. Hannah’s precarious attachment to her father, Lawrence Groff, is complicated by his relationship with Gila, which may have begun before or after Hannah’s mother’s death, although he’s promised his daughter complete transparency. “I tell you everything. That’s the rule.” In David Bellen’s writings, he offers a moving appraisal of the frayed bond between himself and his addict son, who refuses to see him. “I don’t think my son Eliav even wants the power he has over me — he just has it.”

And Meyer Lansky is seen most vividly in his unfeeling treatment of his severely disabled son, Buddy. “I wanted you to have a good life,” Lansky tells him. “I’ve always wanted that more than anything else. But I can’t keep taking care of you like this. You’re too old for it,” while Buddy daydreams about being wheeled off a bridge or the roof of a motel. Even the biblical David is seen in a new light, vis-a-vis his parenthood. As Hannah puts it, “Before long, the beautiful Absalom will be leading a popular uprising against his father, who no longer looks like the boy with a slingshot but more like the monster Goliath.”

David Bellen’s mutilated body was found in a vacant lot in a village just outside Bethlehem, where there’d been a recent expansion of Jewish settlements, and some of Bellen’s poems in his collection “Kid Bethlehem” were critical of Israeli policy in the occupied territories. But the initial statement made by the Israeli Defense Forces was that the murder was “likely an act of terrorism,” and then the escalating war with Hamas distracted them from further inquiry.

In search of the truth about Bellen’s death, Hannah travels to Jerusalem to meet with an Israeli journalist named Oded Voss, who’d covered the murder until he ran out of information and public interest in the case. En route, she allows that she’s never cared much about Israel: “. . . my lack of interest was so longstanding that perhaps I should have wondered more about it. On a deeper level, I might have realized, I had never wanted to face too directly the idea of myself as a Jew.” The El Al people keep reminding her, though, wondering why someone with a Hebrew name has never been to Israel before. “They were smiling as they said it, but it was precisely this kind of righteous shaming that I had always taken pains to avoid.”

Voss accompanies Hannah on her quest, and in the process becomes her guide to Israeli politics and history as well as her lover. They visit Bellen’s son, Eliav, now a shopkeeper of kitschy, Jewish-themed art, who submits his own enigmatic take on the murder. “My father was attuned to the violence inside people.” In the working-class neighborhood where David Bellen grew up, a boyhood friend ventures that Bellen, at 65, was still “like a child.” “Writing nonsense about this world he knew nothing about. Only a child would do something like that.” Finally, Hannah receives an anonymous email that speculates Bellen may have killed himself, echoing something Voss had said and that she’d dismissed as “some kind of aburdist joke.”

In “Aspects of the Novel,” E.M. Forster brilliantly notes that “ ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” Zachary Lazar has given us both story and plot, the solution to a gangland-style killing and all of its far-reaching emotional ramifications. As he did for his memoir, Mr. Lazar borrows the title of this book from a Bob Dylan song. Everyone in the novel is an immigrant (or yored) of one sort or another, attempting to escape from global or personal history — as Hannah’s father says, “The past was what you were trying to get away from” — and they are all depicted with a measure of sympathy, if not outright pity.

A variety of crimes are recalled in “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” — from the white-collar offense of fraud, to grisly underworld slayings, to the ultimate atrocity of the Holocaust. Hannah concludes that “Perhaps the reason I have never wanted to face too directly the idea of myself as a Jew is that all roads seem to lead to the Holocaust Memorial, as if it is the Holocaust that makes one a Jew.”

Like his fictional female counterpart, Zachary Lazar is “a crime writer with a fractured style.” He’s also a true conjurer, a magical writer who offers fresh and disquieting insights into the world we thought we knew.

Hilma Wolitzer’s most recent novels are “An Available Man” and “Summer Reading.” She lived part time in Springs for many years.

Zachary Lazar, whose previous novels include “Sway,” teaches in the English department at Tulane University. He has a house in North Sea.