“Midnight in Europe”

Alan Furst

Random House, $27

Nearly 75 years later, there are no doubt people who imagine that Europe suddenly awoke on a Sept. 2 morning and found itself at war (again), Germany having invaded Poland the day before. Logic and historians tell us, however, that World War II did not ignite spontaneously. It came after a long, ominous buildup and with a great deal of foreshadowing in the form of various struggles between republicanism and fascism — most notably the Spanish Civil War, waged between July 1936 and March 1939.

Such is the background, and the essence, of Alan Furst’s brand-new novel, “Midnight in Europe.” This eminently readable book provides glimpses into the history of a particular moment, as well as into the lives of people living on the edge, as it were, of that history. The result is a story of political intrigue combined with elements of romance, pathos, and a bit of humor. All told, it makes for an appealing tale.

At the center of the novel is Cristian Ferrar, an expatriate Spaniard living and working in Paris in 1937. The back story is that the Ferrar family had fled their homeland because they were republicans who felt endangered by Generalissimo Franco and his fascists, and that Cristian, a highly regarded young attorney at the international law firm Coudert Freres, supports an extended family consisting of his parents, his siblings, and his wise and lovable abuela (grandmother).

Early on, Cristian is approached by diplomats from the Spanish embassy in Paris, which represents the republicans, the duly elected Spanish government at the time. They request his participation in a clandestine organization that seeks to purchase armaments for the beleaguered republican forces. (A web of diplomatic treaties, agreements, and maneuvers by Hitler and his allies and appeasers has essentially isolated the Spanish Republic on the world stage, placing it in desperate straits that will eventually lead to its defeat by the fascists.)

Cristian obtains permission from the head of the Coudert firm to assist his country’s government (as long as doing so doesn’t take too much of his time and energy away from the office and his clients). He enters a dusky underworld of assorted odd characters and sometimes-seamy places. Along with Max de Lyon, a pseudonymous Jewish arms dealer who is hunted by the Gestapo, a Macedonian named Stavros (who grew up “fighting Bulgarian bandits. After that, being a gangster was easy”), and others, Cristian embarks on a trans-European odyssey aimed at sourcing, purchasing, and shipping badly needed arms for the Spanish republican army.

Among their more chilling encounters is when Cristian and Max are pulled off a train by officious officers of the German Reich. They save themselves by convincing the Nazis that they are salesman for a “naturist” magazine and distract their potential captors by showing them sample copies.

One of the more memorable scenes involves commandeering an entire train, by dark of night, in order to move an arms shipment that has been impounded in northern Poland.

This is a world in which anyone could be a spy, and often is.

In addition to the primary cloak-and-dagger plotline, there are other narrative threads involving seduction by (or of) a gorgeous Spanish marquesa, an ultimately comical family feud among Hungarian aristocrats, and Cristian’s growing sense that he must relocate his entire family to New York, fearing, with prescience, that Paris will soon be an unsafe haven for them. (In anticipation of such a move being necessary, he rents a four-bedroom apartment in a West End Avenue building — “airy, with high ceilings” — for $68 a month.)

The various story angles help fill out an overall sense of the time. Mr. Furst, who resided in Paris for many years, has a nuanced appreciation of the French capital and its inhabitants. (“Parisians found themselves restless and vaguely melancholy for no evident reason, an annual malady accompanying the nameless season that fell between winter and spring.”)

Moreover, the author evidences good research into the period. A Berlin hausfrau looks at her watch and swears. “Time for a Hitler speech. Greta, turn on the radio, good and loud.” She explains to her French visitors, “It’s the law, you must listen to the Fuehrer’s speeches. So those little bastards from the Hitler Youth patrol the streets — sneak around and listen at your windows. If they don’t hear Adolf, they report you and the Gestapo comes around.”

“Midnight in Europe” takes its place among Mr. Furst’s several other novels, which, as he has said, “follow the clandestine war between European spy services from the years 1933 to 1942, and their geography follows the reality of actual events.”

The most curious effect of this melding of fact and fiction is that the ending of the novel, in 1938, isn’t really an ending at all. Cristian Ferrar and the other characters may not fully understand, but as we know all too well, it’s actually only the beginning.

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

Alan Furst lives in Sag Harbor. “Midnight in Europe” came out on Tuesday.

The Amazon vs. Hachette Book Group dispute, which is making headlines across the country as authors, bloggers, and angry customers speak out against the Internet giant, is also affecting the East End, which has a robust community of writers, many of them published by Hachette.

Emma Walton Hamilton, Melissa de la Cruz, Jimmy Buffett, Katie Brown, Kurt Wenzel — the list goes on and on. Even Joy Behar from the TV show “The View,” who has a house in East Hampton, has published with Hachette. Local authors, and authors everywhere, make their living from book sales, and not many of them are blockbuster best-selling writers who can rely on success and money without Amazon.

According to The Washington Post, the dispute came to light early last month after the two parties began renegotiating terms for the sale of e-books on Amazon’s popular Kindle platform and Amazon began pressuring the publisher for steeper discounts. Amazon wants to sell Hachette’s e-books for less, while Hachette, needless to say, wants to maintain control over price points — especially since most e-books are already sold for less than hardcovers. With the growing electronic book market, lower e-book prices are exactly what publishers do not want.

The conflict has been disastrous for both authors and consumers. The New York Times has reported that Amazon has not only driven up the prices of many Hachette books but has been actively suggesting that consumers buy “similar” books from other publishers instead. And, many Hachette books are taking three to five weeks to ship from Amazon, even though there is no lack of supply. This is unusual for Amazon, which boasts that it is dedicated to lower prices and faster shipping, and has led to Internet outrage and whispers of antitrust lawsuits. According to The Times, the dispute is not likely to end soon.

Amazon offers its Kindle books as a solution to the problem, and all Hachette Kindle books remain available for immediate purchase and download. But e-books are not the universal answer. Many readers don’t want e-books, and many authors cannot depend on electronic book sales.

Such is the case for Ms. Hamilton, the co-founder of the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor and the author, with her mother, Julie Andrews, of “The Very Fairy Princess” book series. Ms. Hamilton’s books are for young children and include full-color illustrations. Kindle books, she said last week, do not provide the “tactile experience, page-turning, and full-color art” that children want and need.

Kindle books also do not make a very good present, she said. Ms. Hamilton’s most recent book, “The Very Fairy Princess: Graduation Girl,” which came out in April, is published by Little, Brown Kids, a division of Hachette. Amazon is currently showing that the book “usually ships within 2 to 4 weeks.” This is a problem, she said, since “graduations are happening now across the country, for weeks now . . . and people have been planning for their graduation gifts.”

Pointing out that Amazon controls almost 50 percent of the book market, Ms. Hamilton said the dispute has been “dramatically hurting our book sales.” Making matters even worse, she said, it is a “pivotal point in the series. Right now, contract for any other titles depends on further sales. This may impact whether the series as a whole continues,” even though, she stressed, her experience with the publishing group “has been nothing but nurturing, supportive, and author-friendly.”

“Publishers have a lot more to lose” in the dispute than Amazon, she said. “Hachette makes its money from books. Period. Amazon is in the everything business.”

Mr. Wenzel, whose books include “Exposure” and “Gotham Tragic,” published with Hachette in the past and echoed Ms. Hamilton’s thoughts on the company, saying he always had a good relationship with Little, Brown and Company, part of the Hachette Book Group. When he published with Hachette, he said, “Nobody had problems getting books back then, and Amazon was a great tool for both the publishers and the consumers.”

He criticized Amazon, the largest retailer of books in America, for bringing consumers into the dispute. Amazon is “essentially discouraging or preventing people from access to books, and that’s a huge problem,” he said. He also worried that the conflict might discourage authors from signing up with Hachette when they could just as easily go to, say, Random House. Random House is currently on good terms with Amazon — or at least not at war with it.

Nelson DeMille, however, predicted that “this may backfire on [Amazon]. Certainly they’ve lost the good will of most authors in America.” Mr. DeMille, a New York Times best-selling author who lives on Long Island, has given many talks and readings on the East End. He publishes with Hachette as well.

“Amazon is engaged in some deception regarding the availability of books,” he said. “Amazon’s website is showing three to five weeks to ship, or ‘out of stock,’ when in reality these books are available to Amazon from the publishers in any quantity Amazon wants.”

The fact that Amazon controls nearly half the market has been detrimental to Mr. DeMille’s sales, as it has been to many hundreds of lesser-known authors who cannot afford to lose half their retail audience for weeks at a time.

So why will Hachette not budge?

Mr. DeMille suggested that Amazon was “looking for such deep discounts from the publishers that the profit starts to dwindle for both publishers and authors, which especially affects struggling new writers.” Hachette could give into Amazon’s bullying right now, he said, but the results would be disastrous for the publishing market as a whole. As for the local community of authors, its income would definitely take a turn for the worse.

Mr. Wenzel, summing up, said the entire publishing world was changing. “Bookstores are turning into showrooms,” he said; readers see books on the shelves and then go buy them from Amazon, where they will receive a steep discount. Ms. Hamilton, for her part, encouraged people in the community to go to BookHampton and buy or order books.

Alice McDermott Online

Why fight it? Let’s go deep digital: A “virtual author talk” with Alice McDermott will crackle to life onscreen at the East Hampton Library on Monday, when Tom Beer, the books editor at Newsday, leads a discussion about the author’s latest, “Someone.”

The novel, which was on the long list for a 2013 National Book Award for fiction, traces the highs and lows of an Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn before the Great Depression. The talk will happen from noon to 1 p.m., with time for questions and answers. Registration is with the reference desk.

Ms. McDermott has been a summertime visitor to East Hampton since she was a child.

A Return to Fiction

Alexis De Veaux, Harlem born and raised, is known for a couple of substantial, well-received nonfiction volumes, “Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde” and “Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday.” Now, however, she’s returning to an early love, fiction, with “Yabo,” just out from Redbone Press. She’ll read from it on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Ms. De Veaux’s work is said to be concerned with “making the racial and sexual experiences of black female characters central, and disrupting boundaries between forms” — the new book, for example, blends prose and poetry.

She is a partner with another poet and political activist, Kathy Engel of Sagaponack and N.Y.U., in Lyrical Democracies, a literary organization that offers projects in community-building and workshops on language and social action. The group is sponsoring Saturday’s reading.

In “The Best Emerging Poets”

Caitlin Doyle, who grew up in East Hampton, has work in a new anthology, “The Best Emerging Poets of 2013,” from Stay Thirsty Press. It features seven young poets of various nationalities.

Ms. Doyle was writer in residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Conn., not long ago and has wrapped up a term teaching poetry at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review and The Atlantic, among other publications, and she is working on her debut collection.

“Wetiquette”

Peter Spacek

Ditch Ink, $8.95

    You have purchased a brand-new surfboard. It’s set you back about $1,000, but for years you’ve wanted to learn how to surf. “It’s on my bucket list,” you’ve told your friends.

    So, here goes. You’ve successfully taken the board, enshrouded in its protective bag, down off the car rack. You begin taking the board out of the bag in the parking lot, but notice the look of annoyance on the face of the surfer waiting to pull into the spot next to you. The surf is good. He’s hot to get in the water.

    Okay, the board’s out of the bag. You’ve got it under your arm. You swing around toward the beach and almost take a kid’s head off. “Hey, watch it ya jerk,” instructs the father. You make it to the beach. The sand is hot.

    At home that morning you spent at least a half-hour applying the wax that will keep you from slipping off the board. At least you knew that much. You lay the board down on the sand, deck-down. Two 14-year-old girl surfers point and giggle. When you turn your board over, the waxed deck is embedded with sand. Your first paddle out will be on an emery board guaranteed to shred you and your wetsuit. You’ve been humiliated three times and haven’t gotten to the water yet.

    As Peter Spacek points out on the first page of “Wetiquette: How to Hang Ten Without Stepping on Anyone’s Toes,” “Surfing is an exhilarating and difficult sport. Learning the fundamentals is accomplished only through repetition — it takes hundreds of waves to turn a beginner into a skilled wave rider.”

    The learning curve is steep, the ocean is unforgiving, and so are many of the experienced surfers you will share the water with. In golf etiquette, one does not talk when another member of the foursome is teeing off. The golfer whose ball is farthest from the cup putts first. A faux pas may draw an angry look, but will not likely result in a club bent over your head.

    Breaking one of surfing’s many rules, on the other hand — some of them subtle and/or tied to a specific surf spot — can result in being thrashed (verbally or worse) by a fellow surfer, the waves, or both. For decades, beginning surfers have thought, “If only there were an Emily Post of surfing.” Now, there is.

    Mr. Spacek, a lifelong surfer and The Star’s gifted cartoonist, has created a 10-chapter handbook that clearly and concisely lays out the basics, from the various types of waves a beginning surfer will confront to what mariners call “the rules of the road,” the dos and don’ts to be followed for a safe and enjoyable “go-out.” Each chapter comes with drawings that clearly illustrate the rules in question.

    Chapters include: “New to the Sport,” “Situations,” “Paddling Out,” “Picking Your Spot,” “Wave Choice,” “Basic Right of Way,” “Your Wave,” “Unexpected Company,” as well as “Random Info and Suggestions.”

    From the “Picking Your Spot” chapter: “This can be tricky. You want to be in the best spot to catch a wave and so does everyone else. There’s a loosely established order in place, which your arrival has disturbed. This is the time to be on your best behavior. Sit off to the side of the main pack and assess the situation. Do not sit too close — or in front of anyone. It’s considered an affront, and can be hazardous because it doesn’t give the necessary elbow room to spring clear of an unexpected outside wave, or from hard-to-predict incoming surfers.”

    And, from the “Your Wave” chapter: “You’re stroking for a wave that you believe should be yours. You feel it picking you up and you’re about to hop to your feet. Now, look over your shoulder, away from the direction you are about to go. Is there anyone already on the wave? If so, abort. Pull back sharply so you don’t go ‘over the falls’ onto the rider. If you choose to drop in anyway, you will have committed surfing’s worst crime. You’ve cut someone off. Before there were leashes, boards were routinely ‘shot’ at perpetrators.”

    A surfer who makes a practice of cutting someone off, or “dropping in,” becomes a pariah in the lineup. There are a few in Montauk who will remain nameless, although locals know one of them by his style, which involves throwing both arms up in the air every time he drops down the face of a wave. And, he has a house in Hawaii where I guarantee he doesn’t cut anyone off. In Hawaii, the rules and manners that Mr. Spacek lays out in his pocket bible are strictly enforced. Ouch!

    “Wetiquette” will be in Lee’s (oops, I slipped) stocking next Christmas. All kidding aside, this little book is a must-read for all beginning surfers, and it wouldn’t hurt veteran wave riders to take a refresher course through its pages in the interest of awesome fun, safety, and good vibes to the max.

    Peter Spacek, who lives in Springs, is the author of “Surf and Mirth.” “Wetiquette” is now out in a second edition.

“In Paradise”

Peter Matthiessen

Riverhead Books, $27.95

Can one win multiple National Book Awards and still be an underappreciated writer? This may be the case for Peter Matthiessen, who won awards for “The Snow Leopard” and “Shadow Country.” When critics discuss what has been referred to as the greatest literary generation of the United States, those writers who began to emerge in the post-World War II years — Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow among them — Matthiessen’s name is rarely, if ever, included. Although certainly a recognized and admired writer, the appreciation of Matthiessen’s fiction seems relatively modest compared to that of many of his contemporaries given the scope and quality of work he has produced.

One may argue that this comparative neglect is because of the divided nature of his work as both a fiction writer and nonfiction writer and the fact that his best-known work is in the latter category. Or it may be that Matthiessen simply went about much of his life, traveling and writing, focused on the causes that moved him intellectually, morally, and spiritually without a great deal of self-promotion for his fiction. For many years, he maintained the charming notion that the work he produced should stand on its own without his having to provide interviews or go on book tours to sell it.

The overwhelming number of his more than 30 published works are nonfiction, and those works brought him his greatest public, if not critical, attention. Many of these books were written precisely with the idea of bringing public attention to issues and causes Matthiessen strongly believed in. In some cases, the work was polemical, as in the cause of Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement presented in “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” or the unionization of farm workers in “Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution.”

Other books emerged from his own personal involvement in particular issues and ideas, both local and transcendent, such as the plight of Long Island commercial fishermen in “Men’s Lives” or Zen Buddhism in “Nine-Headed Dragon River.” Still other nonfiction works resulted from Matthiessen’s environmental advocacy and worldwide traveling, as seen in such works as the seminal “Wildlife in America,” “The Tree Where Man Was Born,” “The Cloud Forest,” or “Tigers in the Snow.”

The works of fiction came far less often than the nonfiction works, and never lingered for too long on the best-seller lists, if at all. Nevertheless, fiction writing remained Matthiessen’s first love, and he resolutely proclaimed himself first and foremost a fiction writer who happened to also write nonfiction. But following his first three novels — “Race Rock,” “Partisans,” and “Raditzer” (published between 1954 and 1961) — Matthiessen published only six more novels over the next 53 years. His books of nonfiction for the same period are more than double that number — causing him to comment in his brief preface to his short-story collection, “On the River Styx,” that he wrote “a bit too much nonfiction.”

Each of those six novels, beginning with “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” in 1965, though, is outstanding, and at least three are singular and lasting achievements: “Far Tortuga,” “Killing Mr. Watson,” and “Shadow Country.” Fittingly, his final published work, appearing just days after his death from leukemia, is a novel, “In Paradise.”

The novel takes place in 1996 at a weeklong retreat for 140 pilgrims at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland. The participants represent a wide variety of nationalities, ages, and faiths. Their purpose over the course of the week is to commit themselves to “homage, prayer, and silent mediation in memory of this camp’s million and more victims” in order to bear witness to “man’s depthless capacity for evil.” (The inspiration for the novel was Matthiessen’s own participation in three meditation retreats at Auschwitz. Although he wanted to write about his experiences there, he did not feel qualified to write a nonfiction work about the camp and the Holocaust “as a non-Jewish American journalist.” Fiction, however, allowed him to examine “the great strangeness of what I had felt.”)

Matthiessen develops only a few of the participants as fully realized characters. Most serve more as stock characters or representatives of particular ideas and reactions concerning the Holocaust. Each evening the retreatants come together to discuss their day’s experiences and to express their individual and collective reactions. At times cruel, accusatory, and contemptuous, these evening discussions spare no individual or group. The Germans, Poles, Catholics, Christians, and even the Jews are at various times blamed for causing the Holocaust, perpetuating it, rationalizing it, or forgetting it.

One character in particular, Earwig, is the designated antagonist. He finds fault with almost anything anyone has to say. All are complicit, in his view, and he is openly disdainful of the other participants’ struggles to express their feelings and ideas.

As one might expect, this novel is more concerned with ideas than character development. Part history, part distillation of the memoirs of Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Tadeusz Borowski, and others — Matthiessen has constructed a meditation on the “incipient evil in human nature” and our capacity for forgiveness. He poses large, important questions: Whose cruelty, suffering, and guilt are the worst? What does one do to survive and what is the cost to themselves and to others in doing so? Are we able to forgive or be forgiven? Is redemption possible? Is transcendence?

Of course, these questions are, for the most part, unanswerable — or have as many answers as there are individuals at the retreat. In fact, Matthiessen raises the basic question of why even come to such a retreat. What can possibly be accomplished there? The participants are all on “painful missions incompletely understood, by themselves perhaps least of all.”

The central figure among the group is D. Clements Olin, a Polish-born American poet and a professor of 20th-century Slavic literature at a Massachusetts university. He has a special interest in the survivor texts, and is at the retreat ostensibly to do research for a book on Borowski, the Polish writer and concentration camp survivor. However, Olin is also searching for information about his unwed mother, whom he never knew. Abandoned by his father at the start of the war, she may have been killed along with her family at the camp.

Through the course of the week, Olin struggles not only with his experiences at the retreat but with his own identity and sense of belonging. A skeptic and non-joiner (he is not even an official participant at the retreat), he is a lonely and solitary figure without any meaningful and lasting relationships. He “hungers for clarification” of who he is and where and how he belongs.

During the week, a burgeoning relationship develops between Olin and Sister Catherine, a young, rebellious novitiate. While some readers may find the attraction between the two a curious plot development given the novel’s setting, it is indicative of Olin’s desperate need for some meaningful connection in his life. His search for belonging is to a certain extent each person’s search for human understanding and connection. And Olin’s tentative movement from outsider to personally invested participant is interwoven with the experiences of the retreat.

Matthiessen was always an ambitious writer who often experimented with narrative structure. The narrative of “In Paradise” is more fragmented than is usually seen in his work. He provides small vignettes or parts of the story, allowing them to linger with the reader and coalesce into the larger whole as the reader pulls back from the novel and lets the parts settle in the mind, much as the points of color merge into a picture as one steps back from a painting by Seurat.

In many ways, “In Paradise” is a typical Matthiessen novel — intelligent, graceful, precise, and contemplative. He maintains an authorial distance in telling the story, demonstrating a good deal of restraint and control, demanding the reader’s engagement in the story. He does not intrude or intercede on behalf of one position or another. With subtlety and thoughtfulness, each character is allowed his or her say. Like the retreatants, the reader too must meditate and decide.

“In Paradise” is not the equal of the very best of Matthiessen’s fiction, but it easily deserves a place among his novels. It is a testament that, even in his last years, he was capable of producing provocative and moving work filled with moral anguish and human sympathy. Within the American canon, few writers’ works taken as a whole are so beautifully crafted and written. To the last, he remains one of our most elegant and humane writers. His fiction needs no more honors; it simply needs more readers.

After teaching literature for 30 years at Southampton College, William Roberson now teaches at L.I.U. Post. He is the author of “Peter Matthiessen: An Annotated Bibliography,” published by McFarland.

Peter Matthiessen lived in Saga­ponack. He died on April 5 at the age of 86.

In recent years Michael Shnayerson has chronicled the most significant stories on the South Fork for Vanity Fair, from the neutron bombshell of the former Hummer magnate Ira Rennert’s 100,000-square-foot Fair Field estate landing in the Sagaponack dunes to the land-grab lawsuit against the centuries-old White farming family in that village.

Now he’s up to something quite different, a 23-page introduction to “The Big Book of the Hamptons” (Assouline, $75) that’s just that — an introduction to the life and culture of the place, its landscape, its monied residents, the artists and writers, and, above all, their houses.

“The Hamptons,” he writes, “offer the greatest concentration in America of homes and gardens that rise to the level of art.” And so must a book similarly rise, its heavy-stock, highly glossed, 10-by-13-inch pages redolent of printer’s ink by the tankerful. Houses as stacked geometric boxes are many, pools glitter, shingles overlap in multiplicity. Dazzling aerial photos by Doug Kuntz, long a Star contributing photographer, aren’t in short supply either.

To bring it back down to earth, Mr. Shnayerson will be signing copies at a book launch at the Elie Tahari shop on Main Street in East Hampton on June 7 between 5 and 7 p.m. Also of note? Champagne by Pommery.   

“Building the Uqbar Dinghy”

    The last time Redjeb Jordania spoke at the East Hampton Library, it had to do with his 2012 memoir, “All My Georgias.” The history there is that his father was the first president of that country, and his family fled to France in 1921 in the face of Soviet occupation.

    And now for something completely different from the Springs resident: On Saturday he’ll lead a discussion of his new book, “Building the Uqbar Dinghy,” which refers to a pram-nosed craft of his own design and construction. It starts at 1 p.m.

    Mr. Jordania once ran a community boat shop in East Hampton and was a boatbuilding instructor at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York. He has taught sailing at Club Med and maritime history for the old Southampton College Seamester program.

The Fiction Issue Cometh

    Freshly redolent of glossy paper and printer’s ink comes the spring issue of The Southampton Review. Dubbed the Special Fiction Issue, it features “A Trickster Tale” by Edwidge Danticat and the poet Robert Pinsky talking craft with a counterpart, Kathryn Levy of Sag Harbor. (Speaking of poetry, Ben Jonson weighs in across the centuries with “His Excuse for Loving.”)

    Writers ranging from Meg Wolitzer to Emma Walton Hamilton answer the question “What story influences you most?” And Barry Blitt of The New Yorker is among the illustrators and painters offering up the visuals. All courtesy, of course, of the Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.

30 Years of Fridays at Five

    Always a highlight of the summer season for those who enjoy quaffing chardonnay from plastic tumblers while listening to a top author read, the Fridays at Five series at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton is now ready to mark its 30th year.

    It will do so Saturday at 4:30 p.m. at the library with a gathering of heavyweight South Fork writers: Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker, Bill Henderson of the Pushcart Press and Prize, Linda Bird Francke, whose books include “On the Road With Francis of Assisi,” and Gail Sheehy, the author of “Passages.” Forming a panel moderated by Steven Gaines, they’ll discuss what the future holds for the publishing industry as well as how the Fridays at Five series has been a boon to the Bridgehampton and Sagaponack area.

    Tickets to attend cost $20 and are available at the library. A reception with wine and hors d’oeuvres will follow.

Shirley Jackson Reconsidered

    Here’s a treat for fans of the macabre: One of the genre’s masters, Shirley Jackson, will get a bit of the lit-crit treatment, courtesy of Susan Scarf Merrell, who teaches in the creative writing program at Stony Brook Southampton and is the fiction editor of the college’s journal, The Southampton Review.

    She is also, it so happens, the author of a book due out next month from Blue Rider Press, “Shirley: A Novel,” billed as a psychological thriller involving a young couple and their year with the writer in Bennington, Vt., in the early 1960s. Ms. Merrell will talk about Jackson’s influence on her own work.

    Called “Beyond ‘The Lottery,’ ” the talk will start at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor. Reference staff members have suggested you give one of them a heads-up if you plan on attending.

    And speaking of lotteries, straws or something similar will be drawn and two attendees will walk away with hardbound copies of Ms. Merrell’s new book.

“Remnants of a Life

on Paper”

Bea Tusiani, Pamela Tusiani,

and Paula Tusiani-Eng

Baroque Books, $28.95

    “Remnants of a Life on Paper” is a grueling book to read. It is a mother’s account of her daughter’s seemingly inevitable and harrowing slide toward destruction (self and otherwise) and eventually death. On the first page of the book we learn from an excerpt from court testimony that Bea Tusiani, the mother, is being deposed “in a lawsuit you and your husband have against [Road to Recovery] and others in connection with the death of your daughter, Pamela.”

    The pall of Pamela’s eventual demise hangs over the book always. Though we do not know of what Pamela will die, the fact of her death is, like an impending storm, darkly threatening, hard to ignore, and ever present.

    The book is narrated mostly by Bea looking back over the events of about three years from 1998 through 2001. There are briefer alternating sections by Pamela, in the form of material from her diaries and writings. Occasionally there are more transcript excerpts from various depositions of Bea and her husband, Mike. The Bea sections are matter-of-fact. She is trying mostly for a dispassionate look at the events as they transpired. The sections taken from Pamela’s diaries are sad and often pathetic. She ends many of them begging or thanking God.

    Pamela suffers from what comes to be diagnosed as a mix of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and severe depression. BPD is defined by the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as “a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity that begins by early adulthood. . . .” It is often accompanied by feelings of emptiness and abandonment, suicidal tendencies, self-mutilation, and impulsive use of drugs, sex, and alcohol.

    Pamela is an undergrad at Loyola College when she first suffers some kind of breakdown. Her mother finds her sobbing in her dorm room, but she is oddly disconnected and unresponsive. She is admitted to the psych unit at Johns Hopkins and initially diagnosed with an “affective mood disorder,” which, her mother is assured, may be “under control in as little as two weeks.” No such luck.

    At first, Pamela is optimistic. “Today was a better day. I just took my medications (all 7 of them!) and was more talkative and involved with activities and attended a group on antidepressant medications, which was very informative. I know I am on a long and difficult road to recovery but at least I am on that road.”

    And then a few days later she writes, “I believe I have chronic depression because I’ve always been sad and the medicine will not change that.” She ends this diary entry as she does most of her entries, speaking to God. “God, please help everyone on Meyer 4 [the psych ward] and all the others in the world conquer their depression. I am very scared about the future.”

    As a mental health professional, part of what was difficult and punishing for me about reading this book was observing how the medical, psychiatric, and psychotherapeutic professionals involved so often acted so confidently and assertively, and so often were so wrong, misguided, or worse. When Pamela entered the hospital she was on a single antidepressant medication. They immediately put her on “tranquilizers, a mood stabilizer, anti-psychotic and anti-seizure medications. . . .”

    The doctors at Johns Hopkins initially put her on nortriptyline, a “mild” antidepressant medication, and when that failed to work after 10 days (not nearly enough time to judge) they suggested electroconvulsive therapy, which is sometimes used to treat intractable major depressive disorder. The problem? No one really knows how that therapy works. It is a bit like smacking your old vacuum tube television to get a better picture. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.

    At this point, Pamela has entered the maw of the mental health dragon and she is in no shape to defend herself. She begins to deteriorate and to harm herself in various ways: self-cutting, drugging with crack, cocaine, and ecstasy, drinking to excess, and banging her head against the wall. She begins to have suicidal thoughts.

    Bea writes, “I’m exhausted. Taking care of Pamela is becoming a 24-hour marathon. Her cutting is so out of control. Yesterday she ‘accidentally’ nicked her arm with a knife in the kitchen, and this morning she slashed herself with a safety razor in the shower. Keeping her from harming herself has become the focus of my every waking moment.”

    The doctors soon tell Bea that they are going to try a new antidepressant. “ ‘Once the Effexor kicks in, Pamela will be happier than she’s been in years,’ Dr. Parker assures us.”

    Pamela writes, “I’m very confused. I don’t even know what my diagnosis is. So many doctors, so many opinions. Am I chronically depressed or is this just an isolated episode of major depression?” Pamela is now cutting herself frequently with broken shards of glass, plastic, scissors, and even a hair barrette.

    Pamela begins a back-and-forth among various psychiatric wards in Baltimore, New York, and Stockbridge, Mass., outpatient treatment programs, and her parents’ home. She becomes so self-destructive and suicidal, however, that Bea and Mike cannot adequately care for her. At one point she drinks a bottle of scouring cleanser.

    On top of all this she becomes anorexic and bulimic, too, starving herself or often forcing herself to vomit after eating. “Three months ago, it was drugs, now it’s an eating disorder. When Pamela manages to control one self-abusive behavior another surfaces to take its place.”

    After a while, one of the therapists offers Bea for the first time the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. The therapist tells her that it may take “years of intensive therapy to deconstruct [Pamela’s] personality and rebuild it.” And further that there is no medication “prescribed specifically for personality disorders.”

    That may be true, but it stops no one from throwing one medication after another at Pamela. Before long she is on a cocktail of medications that would stagger a buffalo: Klonopin, Ativan, Depakote, Prozac, Buspar, Trazodone, Zyprexa. A book that Bea reads on BPD indicates that it may take 10 years for her daughter to get better. “ ‘Ten years?’ Michael says, ‘I don’t think Pamela will make it ten years like this. She’s going crazy and we have to find someone who will help her now.’ ”

    And then Bea asks a very astute question: “Is it her brain or her will that is making this happen?” This is, in fact, something that mental health professionals don’t really know. Unlike medical conditions like heart disease or diabetes, there is no definitive test for a diagnosis like BPD. Such diagnoses are based on observation of behaviors, and generally if someone exhibits (as in the case of BPD) at least five out of nine listed behaviors, then they are said to have the disorder. But that is a bit tautological, as such a list is, itself, an artificial creation.

    They are told that Pamela needs to be placed in “a closed facility that treats dual diagnosis patients — those with mental illness and substance abuse.” They find Road to Recovery, in Malibu, Calif. It charges $22,000 a month, and once there, they put Pamela on her seventh antidepressant medication. And they add to her already massive medical cocktail Ritalin, Risperdal, Mellaril, Neurontin, Ambien, Restoril, Serzone, and even Thorazine.

    Apparently this goes under the strategy that if medications don’t work, try more medications. As if things are not dire enough, once there, she begins to have a frightening series of seizures that are eventually diagnosed as “psychogenic, caused by emotional trauma, not epilepsy.” In an eerie foreshadowing, it turns out that she is faking her seizures.

    She is put on Parnate, an early MAOI antidepressant that, Bea is warned, has some severe food interactions. Due to many patient deaths, Parnate had been withdrawn from clinical use in the 1960s and then later reintroduced, but with specific warnings regarding the ingestion of some things like cheeses, wine, and tofu. Apparently, while at the facility that is supposed to be caring for her, Pamela is given pizza (with cheese) and suffers a massive, and this time very real, seizure that leaves her brain-dead.

    As a mother’s account of her daughter’s trip through the awful territory of severe BPD, this book is disturbing and upsetting. Toward the end of it, one cannot help but notice a certain amount of ax-grinding regarding Pamela’s treatment at the Road to Recovery facility. It clearly sounds as though she received shoddy care (to be on Parnate and be given cheese pizza is close to manslaughter, to say the least). Further, she was perhaps even on the receiving end of some serious malpractice, but one cannot help but feel that this may be part of why Bea actually wrote the book: to plead her case.

    Nonetheless, as a portrait of one family’s and one young woman’s struggles with borderline personality disorder, this is a cautionary tale and perhaps, as Bea writes in her introduction, one that others in similar situations may profit from. “This book is meant to enlighten. The hole Pamela wrote about is still there, but through the telling of valiant struggle, she has extended a hand to help others climb out.”

     Michael Z. Jody is a psychotherapist and couples counselor with offices in Amagansett and Manhattan.

    Bea Tusiani is the author of a memoir, “Con Amore: A Daughter-in-Law’s Story of Growing Up Italian-American in Bushwick,” and a children’s book, “The Fig Cake Family.” She has contributed “Guestwords” to The Star for many years and lives part time in East Hampton.

The Artist in Wartime

    So how many former art school deans do you know who were present when the Allies stormed the beaches at Normandy? Here’s one in your backyard: Alex Russo, once of the Corcoran College of Art and Design in the nation’s capital, still professor emeritus at Hood College in Frederick, Md., and on Saturday alighting at Guild Hall to read from his new book, “Combat Artist: A Journal of Love and War.”

    It recounts his time in the Naval Reserve and with Navy intelligence, serving as a combat artist, among other capacities. His graphic accounts of the landings at Normandy and Sicily are part of that branch’s official records of the war. The book also goes into the life of an artist in postwar America.

    Admission is $7. The event starts at 1:30 p.m. with a reception with Mr. Russo, who will be signing copies, too. The reading follows at 2.

Long Island Reads Griswold

    That pan-county, library-centric, book club-friendly read-in, Long Island Reads, has this year chosen as its title “The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island,” the recent, heavily researched, and well-received history by Mac Griswold of Sag Harbor.

    In celebration, Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, dating from the 1650s and in the hands of the Sylvester family for 11 generations, will be the site of a free outdoor reading by Ms. Griswold on Saturday at 2 p.m., with time for questions. “The Manor” was chosen by a committee of Suffolk and Nassau librarians for its “readability and excellence.” A readers’ guide can be found at longislandreads.files.wordpress.com.

    Those who would like to tour the house, in groups of up to 15, have been asked to register beforehand by calling 749-0626 or emailing [email protected].

    And then from 4 to 6 p.m., the property, which continues as an organic farm and educational foundation, will have a free concert, “Back to the Roots: The Scattered Songsters of Sylvester Manor,” with ballads, blues, spirituals, and work songs of the days of yore.