“The Noble Hustle”

Colson Whitehead

Doubleday, $24.95

     Those searching for the latest how-to book on Texas hold ’em or a straightforward account of the World Series of Poker in Colson Whitehead’s new memoir, “The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death,” are in for a surprise. It isn’t written by the latest guru or moonlighting celebrity. The author will not be cluing us in on stratagem or mind-blowing philosophies. This is a tale told by an outsider, a creature of metaphor and simile set upon a unique subculture. He’ll report to the mother ship in his own distinct tongue, and we are welcome to observe.

     This is indeed a memoir about the World Series of Poker, yet be forewarned. Any college dropout who heads to Vegas with this book in tow will find himself trapped inside a vortex of his own doing.

    With a suicidal monarch on the cover and a bone-chilling first line, Mr. Whitehead’s journey begins. “I have a good poker face,” he says, “because I am half dead inside.” This is a statement we might expect from a no-name gunslinger riding into town, or perhaps something less than human. Zombies are big now. So is poker. Mr. Whitehead offers both.

    In an essay for The New Yorker in 2012, Mr. Whitehead made an assertion regarding his life’s work that lends a great deal of insight to this book. “An artist is a monster that thinks it is human,” he wrote. We learn that, as a child, the best-selling author of “Zone One” preferred to stay at home absorbing an array of bad cinema until he came upon a genre called psychotronic, a hurried, low-budget style of horror-science fiction that mesmerized him.

    “They were unaware of their utter freakishness,” he explained, “unaware that the world found them absurd. . . . If these movies existed then surely whatever measly story was bubbling in my brain was not so preposterous.”

    This breakthrough offered the young writer total freedom to develop a style of unique observation and lightning-quick prose packed with boundless pop culture references. When admitting a desire to establish a King Kong persona at the poker table, he confesses, “On the Simian Scale, I was more Bubbles the chimp, break-dancing for cigarette and gin money before Michael Jackson rescued him from the streets.” The author is just getting started, fine-tuning an engine of revved-up witticisms and one-liners.

    Mr. Whitehead freely admits to being no poker expert. He is a better-than-average player who enjoys a friendly game with writer friends. When a magazine editor offers to bankroll him the $10,000 entry fee for the World Series of Poker, he accepts. There will be no payment for his account of the experience. His payment is the entry fee.

    He decides upon Atlantic City, “Vegas’s little cousin,” as an excellent training ground for the big competition and goes searching for his people, the monsters and unrepentant losers who inspire him, before he even arrives. Unfortunately, New York’s Port Authority has cleaned up a bit, offering little to none of its former infamy. “I could be anywhere,” he laments, “starting a journey to anyplace, a new life or a funeral.” He climbs aboard a state-of-the-art Greyhound and ponders his chances as “one of the most unqualified players in the history of the Big Game.”

    Mr. Whitehead’s mind really starts to twitch once he arrives at the Tropicana Casino and Resort. “The contemporary casino is a more than a gambling destination; it’s a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the family unit.” Despite intense makeovers to the culture and atmosphere of legalized gambling, Mr. Whitehead knows that diehards never change. “I found my degradation,” he marvels. “I was among gamblers.”

    Here is where we find the author’s monsters, something akin to Kerouac’s “mad ones.” They’re the ones who’ve stopped pretending, a people of oblivious purity. They live life as they see fit, so incredibly uncool that it somehow makes them wondrous.

    Mr. Whitehead approaches the table and sums up the competition as though he were describing a legion of superheroes: “Big Mitch is a potbellied endomorph in fabric-softened khaki shorts and polo shirt. . . .”

    “Methy Mike, a harrowed man who had been tested in untold skirmishes, of which the poker table was only one.”

    “And then there was Robotron, wedged in there, lean and wiry . . . a young man with sunglasses and earbuds, his hoodie cinched tight around his face. . . .”

    He joins them representing his own tribe, a dystopia he inhabits called Anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure). “We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. . . . We have no national bird. All the birds are dead.”

    By the time he’s ready for the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Mr. Whitehead’s hired a personal coach to administer crash courses, pep talks, and numerous conference texts. The man is taking this seriously and becomes enthralled with the unlikely desert oasis. “I recognized myself here. Monster places for monster people.”

    Due to Mr. Whitehead’s unique powers of observation and assessment, the reader considers the possibilities should he step away from the table to wander the cartoonish landscape. What would he think of tourists clutching two-liter margaritas or men snapping escort cards on every corner? With this writer the possibilities are limitless. But this is a memoir about poker.

    The author eventually learns staying power at the table, a core value he compares to writing. “In novel-writing, biding is everything. . . . Waiting years for a scofflaw eleven-word sentence to shape up into an upstanding ten-word sentence: This is the essence of Patience.”

    In time we discover the role that beef jerky plays in all this, and the influence corporate sponsors have on Mr. Whitehead’s adventure. His odyssey concludes with an ending that film buffs may recognize from past decades. “But you know how ’70s sports movies end.”

    J.B. McGeever is a graduate of Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing. He is at work on a novel about the closing of a New York City high school.

    Colson Whitehead is the author of “Sag Harbor,” a 2009 book based on his experiences growing up there. “The Noble Hustle” comes out on Tuesday.

“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.

    I don’t know what a wipe warmer is, but it sounds like something I’d like to try.  

    Let me start over. Wipe warmer. The humor in those two words is as good an illustration as any of the winning brevity in Lizzy Ratner and Jen Nessel’s “Goodnight Nanny-Cam” (Plume, $14), a send-up of Margaret Wise Brown’s 1947 masterwork, “Goodnight Moon,” itself chillingly concise in its intimations of death. Sure, little bunny, go to sleep, but only after bidding adieu, one by one, to everything known to you in your dimming room, like the terminally ill renouncing the material possessions of the world.

    This “parody for modern parents” targets the helicoptering alphas among them, the oh so concerned and correct, who play Baby Mozart (to scientifically proven no effect), who eschew all toys with phthalates lest their boys become hermaphrodites (though that’d be okay too), who foist yoga poses upon their children (but weren’t they cynically based on the calisthenics of colonial British soldiers?), who love hemp and who chart bowel movements.

    You get the idea. Give up! Genetics is destiny. But what fun there is in the cartoonish illustrations by Sara Pinto, who packs almost as much visual wit into the background of her work as Bill Elder used to in the old issues of Mad — from the already-bricked fireplace gated off to pointlessness to every furniture edge carefully rubberized to the “Let’s Feel Our Feelings” flash cards to, yes, a passing helicopter out the window.

    Ms. Ratner, by the way, is a journalist whose writing can be found in the estimable Nation magazine and known around here, perhaps, as the daughter of Julie Ratner of the Ellen’s Run breast cancer fund-raiser. Ms. Nessel is the communications coordinator at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

    But to get back to the book, it gets even better: Those wipes are edible.

“Fog Island”

    Finn and Cara, the brother and little sister in Tomi Ungerer’s “Fog Island” (Phaidon, $16.95), live “by the sea in the back of beyond,” where their mother tends livestock and their father fishes and builds boats. And where the two kids do what kids do best — explore.

    But they’d best steer clear of Fog Island, they’re warned, from which the foolhardy and fearful don’t return. They naturally don’t listen, although they do approach the mysterious place with open minds and hearts, finding a gaunt old Fog Man, who produces prodigious amounts of the stuff with the turn of a boiler’s wheel, and whose hair and beard are long enough to cover him like a muumuu.

    Of their visit, we are told, “Finn and Cara had never had so much fun.” They survive the return trip to the mainland only by way of a rowboat rescue. Of course no one believes their story.

    Mr. Ungerer, formerly of East Hampton, formerly married to the late Miriam Ungerer, who was a food columnist for The Star, is the author of legendary children’s books — “Moon Man,” from 1967, to name just one. He’s won a Hans Christian Andersen award for illustration and has an entire museum in France devoted to his work.

    Here he’s conjured a shrouded faraway world in which a brother and sister can indulge their wildest imaginings, share secrets, and communicate in their own private language of love. Adults need not apply.

“The Good and Bad Dragon”

    In “The Good and Bad Dragon” (CreateSpace, $9.95), a new fairy tale by Edward Packard of East Hampton and the Choose Your Own Adventure series, with brightly colored art by Beth Ogden, the dragon is a force of nature unleashed upon a village in the Pyrenees after 200 years of slumber, unpredictably rolling in hillside wildflowers like a blissed-out dog one minute, arbitrarily dealing out Old Testament-style destruction the next.

    Jeanne Marie, an ostracized and overlooked old woman left behind when the villagers flee, turns out to be the only one brave enough to stand and confront the dragon. But God smiles on fools and innocents, as they say, and the two discover they’re both lonely, both even share a contemplative love of the landscape. The old woman is rewarded with a magically restorative blast of dragon’s breath.

    Here’s to the misunderstood.

From Hannibal to Steinbeck

    It’s a digital jungle out there, writers, and Ed Hannibal, who recently saw two of his novels, “Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks” and “A Trace of Red,” reissued as e-paperbacks through the Authors Guild BackinPrint program, will offer guidance for those seeking to find their way tomorrow at 6 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. Mr. Hannibal, who lives in Springs, is also heading up a workshop, the ABCs of Creative Writing, on Wednesdays at the Amagansett Library.

    John Steinbeck, once a man about Sag, and moreover the author of a timeless portrait of the place and of small-town life, “The Winter of Our Discontent,” is due for reconsideration, wouldn’t you say, what with the 75th anniversary of the publication of “The Grapes of Wrath” upon us. It’ll come courtesy of Susan Shillinglaw on Saturday at Canio’s at 5 p.m. A professor of English at San Jose State, she ran the Center for Steinbeck Studies there for 18 years and is the author of “A Journey Into Steinbeck’s California” and “Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage.”

Only Obser

    And so the teacher steps from behind the desk to put her own work out there for scrutiny. Eileen Obser of East Hampton, for a couple of decades a leader of writing workshops at Suffolk Community College and lately at the Hampton Library, is now out with a memoir of her own, “Only You,” from Oak Tree Press. It’ll be feted with bubbly, aired with a reading, and serenaded with old-time rock ’n’ roll on Sunday at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor at 2 p.m. (The two women met 38 years ago when Ms. Obser did public relations work for the then-fledgling gallery.)

    The tunes, to be performed by Jim Turner, relate to the subject of the book, which, according to a release, is “set in the late 1950s and early 1960s” and relates Ms. Obser’s “personal experience growing up in Queens,” including “her doomed-to-fail marriage at 18 to a 19-year-old boy from their candy store crowd.”

Gabrielle Selz’s “Unstill Life”

    Quite a legacy: Gabrielle Selz’s father, Peter Selz, was chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art from 1958 to 1965, during the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, which meant the likes of de Kooning and Rothko unwinding in the family living room.

    Her father went on to a number of other marriages and a career at the University of California at Berkeley. Ms. Selz went on to write about her family life in a book to be released by W.W. Norton on May 5, “Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction.” Now of Southampton, she’ll read from it at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Friday, May 2, at 6 p.m. The evening involves a screening of a short film by Ms. Selz and a question-and-answer session with her father. The cost is $10, free for museum members.

“Fire Island: Past, Present,

and Future”

Robert F. Sayre

Oystercatcher Books, $24.95

     Robert F. Sayre, a retired English professor from Iowa, had the pleasure of spending his summers from childhood onward at the family house in Point O’ Woods on Fire Island. From this long-term, personal experience, he gained a valuable perspective about this roadless island that is accessed by pedestrian ferry boats from the mainland of Long Island.

     I must confess to being jealous of Mr. Sayre, as I grew up too far from the water’s edge and only migrated to the coast in later years as a coastal geomorphologist. I have had the privilege of conducting scientific studies along the South Shore of Long Island since 1977, with my most recent work being in the Hamptons. I devoted six years of my life to intensive studies of the area from Fire Island Inlet to Montauk Point, which culminated in the production of historical shoreline change maps that quantitatively display five or more shore positions during the past 100 years as well as a 350-page National Park Service monograph, “Geomorphic Analysis of the South Shore of Long Island, New York.”

    I know the area well, having lived at National Park Service quarters at Watch Hill and the lighthouse in Kismet while conducting beach surveys of off-road vehicle impacts and driving vibracores through the sedimentary layers of the barrier island to determine its past changes.

    The front cover of the book shows a new inlet cut by Superstorm Sandy through the eastern section of Fire Island, which has persisted to date. This wilderness area within Fire Island National Seashore is called Old Inlet because of previous inlet breaching in this same locality. Superstorm Sandy certainly heightened the interest of people “living on the edge” as well as mainlanders who fear this new inlet will increase storm tides during future hurricanes. The National Seashore has been under pressure to close the inlet, as was the case for the other two cuts, but wilderness areas are special places (e.g., this is the only one in the State of New York) where nature can take its own course without interference from humankind.

    This slender, oblong book is organized chronologically, with many color and historical black-and-white photos that serve well to illustrate the text. I applaud the author for taking his posters and converting them into such a handsome booklet.

    Most people will enjoy reading this book, but there are many mistakes from the perspective of a coastal scientist, starting with the caption for the frontispiece, where overwash deposits are attributed to Hurricane Sandy. Sandy was not a hurricane on Long Island, as the sustained winds reached only 50 to 60 miles per hour (i.e., far short of the required 74 m.p.h. wind field), and it was responsible for a snowstorm in the Appalachian Mountains — hardly the hallmark of a hurricane.

    Second, there needs to be a map as the first figure with sufficient detail to show the 17 communities on Fire Island as well as other island features. What is finally presented on page 60 is a reproduction and reduction in scale of the National Park Service brochure, making nearly everything illegible without a magnifying glass — something that few take to the beach or carry on airplanes.

    Many of the photos are from Point O’ Woods, which is understandable, but the iconic Fire Island Lighthouse is only briefly mentioned, and one small photo of it is presented on the last page in the reference section. This sentinel was constructed near the western terminus of the island in 1825, and since that time, the island has built westward by longshore currents at the astonishing rate of around 150 feet per year. It was only the construction of the Democrat Point jetty and regular dredging of Fire Island Inlet to keep it navigable that have prevented this downdrift growth of the island as a sand spit.

    In fact, the whole barrier chain along the South Shore of Long Island was doubtless formed over thousands of years as a sand spit emanating from the morainal cliffs in East Hampton. Historical studies have shown that the Montauk Point Lighthouse was constructed more than 200 feet from the cliff edge. The surveyor in charge was George Washington — he wanted to make sure that the lighthouse lasted for several centuries. Our first president and brilliant general during the Revolutionary War was also an astute observer of coastal change.

    Throughout this book there are statements such as armoring the bay shore with bulkheads “tends to increase erosion at other points” along the barrier island. Although localized erosion can occur, there is no generalized increase in bayside erosion rates. The real problem with wooden bulkheads is the poisons used to preserve the wood that leach out and contaminate the adjacent bay bottom. In addition, bulkheads form a sterile interface, rather than the highly productive environment of a salt marsh.

    On page 67, the author repeats a long-disproven theory that the Westhampton Beach groins and Moriches Inlet jetty are responsible for erosion problems on the western end of Fire Island, where the 17 communities are located. The Fire Island Association has been lobbying for decades to make the federal government responsible for their erosion problems so that they can obtain beach nourishment via the Army Corps of Engineers at 100-percent public expense. While it would have been far cheaper for the federal government to buy out the few hundred residents in the area now known as the Village of Westhampton Dunes rather than guarantee them a wide and stable beach for 50 years, there was no denying that the updrift (eastward location of the 15 long federal groins) had greatly accelerated the erosion rate, causing severe losses during the 1992 northeaster. The same case cannot be made for the 17 communities on Fire Island. (My colleague Francis Galgano and I wrote about this in “Beach Erosion, Tidal Inlets, and Politics: The Fire Island Story,” an article in a 1999 issue of the journal Shore and Beach.)

    The Fire Island Association also played a key role in re-electing U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato in his very tight race in 1992. Known as the “pothole” senator for bringing the money home to Long Island, he paid back the Fire Island Association for its raising millions of dollars in the final days of this close election — he stopped a Senate vote on a bill, already passed by the House of Representatives, to mandate that the Federal Emergency Management Agency could use erosion rates in their National Flood Insurance Program.

    I certainly agree with the author that deer are a major problem on Fire Island. In addition to impacting the natural environment by eating native plants and exposing the sandy, mobile substrate, they are responsible for Lyme disease, which is a serious illness. The National Park Service should eliminate every deer on the island for the sake of the natural environment because there are no natural predators and deer overpopulation is a continuing problem. During especially cold winters as just experienced, Great South Bay can freeze solid, and the deer can walk from the mainland to the island, but these newcomers can be quickly weeded out by experienced hunters using bows and arrows.

    Over all, this book will probably have a good reception from the general public, especially Fire Island residents. To his credit, the author did consult some of the U.S. Geological Survey reports, but it appears that this occurred in the final stages of writing because the science is not well explained or referenced, whereas the history, especially for Point O’Woods, is quite strong.

    Stephen P. Leatherman, known as Dr. Beach, is the director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University and the author of “Dr. Beach’s Survival Guide,” among other books. In 2013 he ranked East Hampton’s Main Beach as the best in the nation in his popular annual top 10 list.

    Robert F. Sayre, a descendant of one of the first settlers of the South Fork, is the author of “Thoreau and the American Indians” and the editor of “Recovering the Prairie” and “Take the Next Exit: New Views of the Iowa Landscape.”

    Here’s a date to thumb into your e-calendar. Friday, April 25, will mark the first of what is planned as an annual benefit and reading, the Poetry Affair, at LTV Studios in Wainscott to mark, in turn, National Poetry Month.

    The readings, from 7 to 9 p.m., will be filmed for later airing. Participants include a couple of writers with long associations with Springs, Grace Schulman, one of the country’s more admired poets and the author, most recently, of “Without a Claim,” and Fran Castan, named as Long Island’s poet of the year in 2013 by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association.

    Julie Sheehan of East Quogue and the Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature, a Whiting Writers’ Award winner and the author of a wild, in-character concept album of a collection, “Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise,” will also read, joined by others ranging from Lucas Hunt to Michelle Murphy to The Star’s Joanne Pilgrim. A meet-and-greet starts at 6:30 p.m.

    Rosalind Brenner, a visual artist and a poet in her own right, is the organizer. Admission is $5 or a food donation for the East Hampton Food Pantry, the evening’s beneficiary.

    Whiskers, a triangle of pink, a couple of floppy ears: Nosing into your periphery in time for Easter, yet incongruously attuned to an altogether different ancient teacher, comes “Bunny Buddhism: Hopping Along the Path to Enlightenment” (Perigee, $14), Krista Lester’s book of snippets of wisdom to help get you through your day.

    Snippets: Is it naive to be surprised at a book made up entirely of 140-character-at-a-time tweets? Probably. But then again, it isn’t quite “entirely,” the aphorisms broken up and enhanced as they are by illustrations by Durell Godfrey, The Star’s fashion-attuned photog, an inveterate seeker of any and all things of visual interest.

    Neither is cuteness all there is to it. Consider the bracing opening sentence of Ms. Lester’s introduction: “A few years ago, I found myself facing the familiar feeling that life was pointless and I would always be miserable.”

    Depression and anxiety may be the conditions of the age, but at least she did something about it, racking her brain for what made her smile and coming up with bunnies and the contented face of Buddha, which led her to record her thoughts on a Twitter account, and to this book.

    “There are only two mistakes one can make along the path,” one passage reads, “not hopping all the way, and never beginning to hop.”

    There’s wisdom at the root of the adorable conceit. Can’t get out of your own head? Like the song says, you got to move somethin’.

“Andrew’s Brain”

E.L. Doctorow

Random House, $26

    The casual reader may be a bit surprised coming to E.L. Doctorow’s latest novel, “Andrew’s Brain,” not to find a story imbued with historical detail. The general perception of Mr. Doctorow is as a writer of historical fiction — even if this is a misleading delimitation — thanks to the sweeping historical canvases found in such works as “The Book of Daniel,” “Ragtime,” or “The March.”

    More often than not, Mr. Doctorow’s primary concern is with his characters’ intersections (a word Mr. Doctorow himself has used) with history, the truer emphasis being on individual struggles for equilibrium within the American experience rather than simply the historical framework per se. We see this in “Homer & Langley,” in which he constructs a story of human frailty, compulsion, and alienation against the evolving milieu of early and middle-20th-century New York City. That struggle for equilibrium, less the overt historical context, is again at the forefront of his most recent work.

    “Andrew’s Brain” has one of Mr. Doctorow’s simpler plotlines. Andrew, who describes himself as a “freakishly depressive cognitive scientist klutz,” is having a rambling conversation, almost a monologue, with another person. This person may be his therapist or a doctor of another sort or, possibly, neither. Perhaps Andrew is really only talking to himself. In any case, locked away at an undisclosed location (whether asylum, within his own head, or still elsewhere) he relates the story of the tragic effects he seems to precipitate upon others as well as himself — divorce, the death of his first child, the death of his second wife, the abandonment of their child.

    Rather than emphasizing the outward struggle with the external world that the historical framework facilitates, “Andrew’s Brain” is more concerned with mapping an intense inward struggle concerned with loss, memory, and identity. As a cognitive scientist, Andrew knows, to a degree better than most, the science of how the brain works. He struggles to understand how his brain reacts to what has happened around him and to him in terms of that science. His own life becomes the subject of his analysis as a cognitive scientist. What is the relationship between what he knows objectively as a scientist about how the brain functions and his own individual experiences?

    His very knowledge of the brain is a burden to him, however, as he tries to come to terms with what he has done and experienced and to find meaning within the resulting chaos. Despite all that has happened to him, Andrew is battered more by the limitations and perplexity of his own mind than the outside world. While trying to understand his relationship to the events surrounding him, he is constantly attempting to accept how his own mind works. How does the brain become the mind? When does it become the me? What is the difference, if any, between the brain, the mind, and the soul?

    His brain is something he cannot escape: “It’s a kind of jail, the brain’s mind. We’ve got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us. . . . I’m in solitary. . . .” If he can simply understand and apply the science of it, he believes he can better endure the pains of his life and find some solace.

    The narrative structure reflects his struggle and confusion as Mr. Doctorow places the reader into Andrew’s tormented and self-loathing mind. Andrew spews out whatever is within his head at the time, creating a mixture of memories, visions, and thoughts, so the story jumps from point to point, event to event, and back again. Occasionally, Andrew even shifts to the third person in telling his story, emphasizing the distance he tries to achieve from himself as he examines his own life.

    At one point, he asks his listener if he is a computer, but he knows the brain is more a dynamical system than a computational one. Grappling with the processes that are a part of that dynamic system — memory (and forgetting), perception, reasoning, and understanding — creates a tension within his brain that becomes the story. But that very tension and struggle make everything that Andrew says questionable. What actually has happened and what is real only within Andrew’s brain? Whomever he is speaking to continually asks: “This was not a dream?” “Did this really happen?” “Do you think . . . you may sometimes overreact?”

    History does intrude in the last third of the book — the least successful part of the story — with the 9/11 attacks and, more pointedly, a slightly comic introduction of an unnamed President George W. Bush as Andrew’s former Yale dorm roommate, and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, here named Chaingang and Rumbum. Andrew is appointed head of the Office of Neurological Research in the White House basement in order to have him sign a confidentiality agreement ensuring that there will be no politically embarrassing stories of the president as a Yale frat boy.

    Mr. Doctorow’s prose is lean and honed to the essential, and there are more than a few pleasures found in the writing itself. His description of traveling north on I-95 is evocative and depressing at the same time (as well as somewhat apocalyptic). “I remember coming up the Jersey Turnpike, past the oil refinery burn-offs, and with the growling of the convoying semis in our ears, and away off to the left the planes dropping to the runways of Newark Airport and then the fields of burned grass irrigated by rivulets of muck and with what looked like a buzzard floating over the turnpike risen now on concrete pillars that in their tonnage were holding up the furious intentions of traffic, the white lights coming toward us, the red lights beckoning. . . .”

    And he provides a poignant description of Mark Twain in his later years as he “rages at the imperial monster he has helped create.” “I see his frail grasp of life at those moments of his prose, his after-dinner guard let down and his upwardly mobile decency become vulnerable to his self-creation. And the woman he loved, gone, and a child he loved, gone, and he looks in the mirror and hates the pretense of his white hair and mustache and suit, all gathered in the rocking-chair wisdom that resides in his bleary eyes.”

    There are also a number of small, neat comic touches, such as a scene of Andrew’s former wife’s husband, an opera singer, referred to by Andrew simply as Martha’s “large husband,” drunk in his living room and dressed as the titular hero of “Boris Godunov.”

    Despite these fine moments, “Andrew’s Brain” is not major Doctorow; ultimately, the sum is less than its parts. However, even lesser Doctorow is worth more than the best of many other writers. Andrew’s philosophical, psychological, and scientific ruminations raise challenging questions about the process of knowing and the creation of the self, even if neither he, Mr. Doctorow, nor anyone else can provide satisfying answers.

    After teaching literature at Southampton College for 30 years, William Roberson now works at L.I.U. Post.

    E.L. Doctorow lives in Sag Harbor and New York.

    Now that spring is here, Maryann Calendrille, your friendly neighborhood bookseller, is calling all scribes to consider planting seeds of writerly creativity in a six-week workshop. It starts next Thursday at 10 a.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

    Dubbed Spring Ink, “the small-group workshop will focus on narrative prose. Readings, writing assignments, and constructive critique are part of the course work,” says a related mass email.

    Ms. Calendrille has run Canio’s with the photographer Kathryn Szoka for the past 15 years and has taught nonfiction writing for longer still. She has an M.F.A. from Vermont College, where she studied with, among others, Mark Doty, the Springs poet who won a National Book Award in 2008.

    The bookshop can be called to register. The cost is $125.

“Leaving China”

James McMullan

Algonquin, $19.95

    Before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and so entered World War II, war had been raging between China and Japan for four years. In 1937, long-simmering tensions burst into warfare, as the Japanese rapidly occupied large swaths of China. One family’s life in that time and place is revealed to beautiful effect in James McMullan’s graphic memoir, “Leaving China.”

    In full-page watercolor paintings, each matched with a brief elucidation of some moment of the author’s childhood, frequently placed in historical context, that world is brought to life in lovely, poetic detail. Though the book is aimed at young readers, one wonders if it won’t appeal even more to adults interested in this period of history and in the emotional development of a young artist.

    Mr. McMullan’s family began its Chinese sojourn as missionaries. His Irish grandfather and British grandmother met in Yangchow in 1887, when both had come to work with the China Inland Mission, a Protestant missionary group. They settled in Cheefoo, a northern port city, where they encountered dire poverty and widespread female infanticide. Devoting themselves to the cause of saving the babies regularly abandoned in a cemetery tower nearby, they eventually founded an orphanage.

    As the fortunes of Cheefoo improved, fewer babies were abandoned, and the McMullans turned their attention to establishing an embroidery school, where the girls learned to make lace and embroider the local silk and cotton. Their efforts were so successful that these girls — English-speaking, Christian, and trained in a craft — became more valued in the marriage market than girls who had been raised by their own families. The James McMullan Company exported the lace and embroidery made by the girls.

    Alongside this business venture, the McMullans founded their own missionary organization, the Cheefoo Industrial Mission. The pair’s four children — among them the author’s father — would continue both the evangelical and the business strains of their parents’ accomplishments, making a comfortable life for their own families in Cheefoo.

    Mr. McMullan offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into expatriate life in the prewar China of his earliest childhood. Describing his musician father playing songs from “Anything Goes,” he tells his reader, “Those popular songs and movies influenced much of what my father and mother wore, what they drank, and how they arranged their social life. It was for them a special connection (and a style tutorial) to that fabulous world very far away from Cheefoo.”

    This stylish expatriate life is pictured in gorgeous watercolors, where purple shadows fall from majestic porches, his young mother selects flowers from the garden in a pink gown, and his father stages musicals at the community theater, chorus girls lined up beneath the stage.

    The McMullans held luncheons in a cottage overlooking the ocean, took part in endless balls, dressed up for costume parties. This social whirl stood in contrast to the austere missionary life Mr. McMullan’s grandparents had come to Cheefoo to lead, and he tells us, “Occasionally, I would overhear my father proclaiming that they must stop all this partygoing and lead more Christian lives.”

    It was, of course, not their moral rigor but the war that ended the partygoing and set the author’s life on a new path. When the British Consulate instructed British citizens to leave in 1941, the family quickly lost its wealth and James and his mother embarked on a peripatetic life, while his father joined the British Army to fight for the Chinese. Moving from Shanghai to San Francisco to Seattle to Vancouver to a family home in the Gulf Islands off the western coast of Canada, as Mr. McMullan tells it, “My mother and I were now wanderers, not yet attached to any particular place and without any clear destination.”

    The story is captivating enough, but Mr. McMullan brings to it the dreamlike sheen of childhood memory, infusing these long-past events with the glow of lost time and the bittersweet taste of a long-ago family pulled apart by war, but also by the emotional push and pull that animates all families. James and his mother both are haunted by the fear that they will disappoint his father, a war hero. Sadly, their fears seem justified. The young McMullan is nervous, not masculine enough to please a father who barks, “Oh, for God’s sakes, be a man!” at his 10-year-old son, who cries as his parents leave him at his new boarding school in India.

    The emotional divide between father and son, and the artistic son’s anxiety as he realizes that he will not be the kind of man his father wants him to be, is beautifully illustrated in the watercolors. In the early years in Cheefoo, we see the father playing piano while his son plays with toys on the floor. They occupy opposite ends of the room, separated by stark lines of rug and light, and they don’t look at each other, each absorbed in his own activity.

    This distance would never be crossed; Mr. McMullan’s father was killed in a plane crash a month after the end of the war. Some of the most evocative writing describes Mr. McMullan’s complicated feelings in the wake of his father’s death.

    The loveliest moments of the narrative — both verbal and visual — are those where we step away from the historical framework and enter the pure sensorial memory of childhood. We might glimpse the young artist’s perceptions as he describes “that moment when the sun coming through the tall windows would be carved into clear rectangles on the carpet into which I could steer my trucks and cars as if they were entering a city of light.”

    Or we might hear of darker times in Cheefoo under Japanese control, in which the young McMullan hears Japanese soldiers running outside at night — again we get the dreamlike consciousness of the child: “I lay in bed listening to this ominous percussion and imagining many of the bad things my parents had assured me were never going to happen.”

    Or, at another moment his enchantment with his aunt’s beautiful house on Salt Spring Island, as he recognizes “how much comfort I found in the intelligence of my visual surroundings.” There are many moments of such simple beauty, and a reader can spend hours exploring the watercolors that so powerfully convey these childhood fears and early glimmerings of artistic leanings.

    Those leanings would eventually take the shape of a very successful career, one in which Mr. McMullan, a Sag Harbor resident, has illustrated posters for Lincoln Center musicals (including “Anything Goes,” which his parents so loved in Cheefoo), a New York magazine piece on 1970s discos in Brooklyn that would inspire the movie “Saturday Night Fever,” book jackets that continue to turn up on bookstore shelves, and popular picture books written by his wife, Kate McMullan.

    Mr. McMullan has said that it was only recently, in his 70s, that “I began to recognize and accept how much my boyhood self is a large part of who I am today, and how much his anxieties and enthusiasms are the underground river always bubbling up in the tone of what I draw and paint.”

    Readers should be glad that he did come to this realization, and that he chose to share it in the breathtaking form of “Leaving China.”

    Sasha Watson is the author of “Vidalia in Paris,” a young-adult novel. A onetime reporter at The Star, she lives in Los Angeles and has a family house on North Haven.