"Reports"

Kathryn Levy

New Rivers Press, $14.95

       If writing is indeed therapeutic, then Kathryn Levy, having written “Reports,” a collection of poems published this year by New Rivers Press, must be feeling fine. This collection looks unflinchingly at aging and mortality, consumerism and conformity, but, like any good work of art, may leave readers feeling as uncomfortable and anxious as the speaker Ms. Levy creates for her poems. Reading this collection seems a lot like talking about life insurance and final arrangements, disconcerting but absolutely necessary.

       Ms. Levy creates this effect artfully. The poems of “Reports” are, for the most part, identically structured. Because Ms. Levy eschews punctuation — excepting the Dickinsonian dash — the short lines, comprising four to seven syllables, speed down the page. Ms. Levy rarely end-stops a line, and her syntactical units seamlessly elide one into another, creating a hurried, hectic pace perfectly suited to the psyche of the poems’ voice, a feminine consciousness perplexed by the future inevitability of her own demise and by the expectations placed upon her while she’s alive.

       In fact, “Reports” is an edgy book bristling with anxiety. Ms. Levy’s speaker is at times frightened, disenchanted, angry, cynical, and unhappily resigned: “I look at my face / lined and falling — where / will it go?” (“The Bill Collector”); “— don’t let them break in / the doctors with the tests / or the years and the years still / waiting to harm —” (“Bed Time”); “I / stare in the mirror at one more death, just / waiting to happen” (“Goodbye”); “we are the birds / poised always one / second from plunging / away from all” (“We”).

       One could continue to quote such lines from throughout the book, and they all combine to lend this collection its discontented, somber tone.

       Despite the volume’s negative tone — or maybe because of it — Ms. Levy’s poetic skills shine. She’s best, it seems, at the art of closure. Poem after poem in “Reports” ends memorably, the final lines resonating long after the poems conclude. In “Precarios,” Ms. Levy writes about a child who learns that he too will one day die, and she finishes with:

hold on to your wrist

to feel the blood

pounding through —

wave after wave of that

precarious ocean that

unlike the ocean

must stop

       And in “The Middle Way” the speaker says:

— instead of returning

in a trance to the mirror

where nothing

but death stared back — the worst

kind of death

the kind that goes on

and on

       Of course, wrenching these conclusions from the context of the rest of the poems is unfair. But take my word for it: These endings are often surprising, stunning, and powerful.

       “Reports” is made up of four sections: “Driving All Night,” “The Lovers,” “The Middle Way,” and “Bedtime Stories.” The last two appear the strongest. As a title, for instance, “The Middle Way” suggests ease and conformity, but the poems ask at what price to one’s soul do we achieve this complacency and blend in. The speaker in this section is wounded by “the middle way,” confused, and feels keenly the effects of compromise, the effects of consumerism.

       In “A Wonderful Life,” the speaker indicts our participation in capitalism as consumers:

. . . And the men with the gold

bars in their pockets? They are

laughing at a dinner, mumbling at the bedside

of another friend who is dying — and

gripping the bars as tightly as they can: In

this world you have to survive.

-- For what? pleads the night air -- For

what?

       In “Birthday Time” the speaker refuses to conform to societal expectations. Several stanzas begin with italicized demands — “Time to come in,” “Time for school,” “But it’s birthday time,” and “This is marriage time” — all of which Ms. Levy follows with negative imagery, suggesting the speaker’s disdain for parental authority or the social markers denoting the passages in one’s life, and the poem ends with the speaker’s defiance, “I just won’t.”

       The section “Bedtime Stories” offers poems metaphorically concerned with the dead and dying. In “Got to Get Back,” the speaker expresses a wish to return to her youth, perhaps to undo her own birth. But in the book’s final poem, “Reports,” we get Ms. Levy’s only optimistic note, and it is strategically placed. The speaker declares in the poem’s final lines that all she has (and all that we have) is one choice, “Begin.”

       With this one-word paradigm of hope and the wish to persevere, Ms. Levy avoids the wallow of despair, lifting both speaker and reader above the existential crisis. “Begin” suggests action, and Ms. Levy allows her readers to believe that her speaker, troubled by mortality and the apparent senselessness of living, will finally stop staring with incredulity at the “cracks” in her face and once again try to live.

       It is a note of grace that confirms what readers will feel throughout the reading of “Reports” — that we have been all along in the company of an articulate and sensitive voice who speaks honestly and without reserve about one of the central mysteries of existence.

—

       Dan Giancola is a professor of English at Suffolk Community College. He lives in Mastic.

       Kathryn Levy’s previous collection of poems was “Losing the Moon,” from Canio’s Editions. She lives in Sag Harbor and New York City.

Bulova Unbound

    “In 2013, a decrepit, abandoned former watchcase factory in a small, seaside town is undergoing an extreme renovation, to be re-imagined as a luxury apartment building.”

    Sound familiar? That’s right, you’re far from alone in wondering what the heck is going on at Bulova — and why. One Sag Harborite, Erica-Lynn Huberty, has gone so far as to self-publish a 42-page story with the imposing brick pile at its center. “Watchwork: A Tale in Time,” to continue the description above, tells of “Ben, an out-of-work local,” who is “only too happy to be hired for the partial demolition, never imagining how much of the past the building still holds.” The past referred to here is 1896 and exemplified by Jenny, a young factory worker enduring the daily grind to help her family.

    To find out how the stories and time periods interweave, you can stop by Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor tomorrow at 6 p.m. for Ms. Huberty’s reading.

Poems of Montauk

    The windswept landscape of that rocky promontory known as Montauk dominates the poems of one city transplant, Audrey Morgan, in her recent collection, “The Heron,” which also features her sketches. She’ll read from her work on Sunday at 10 a.m. for Sunday Mornings at 56, a bookish new series at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton. (The 56 being the address of the building where the series is held, next to the center’s main one.) Each week a member of the congregation discusses her or his experiences with writing and publishing.

    Ms. Morgan has taught art in a public school and worked in interior design. Bagels and lox will be served.

“& Sons”

David Gilbert

Random House, $27

     Add David Gilbert’s “& Sons” to the short list of this year’s best novels. Mr. Gilbert’s foot is on the gas from the very beginning of this ambitious, chance-taking novel and he never lets it up. He brilliantly balances a multilayered story of familial relationships and lifelong friendships and breathes new and exciting life into what can be the too familiar stories of father-son relationships and of writers and the tribulations of the writing life.

    At the forefront of a large assortment of characters is A.N. Dyer, a frail, reclusive 79-year-old legendary writer best known for his first novel, “Ampersand,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 28. In ill health, he asks his two older, estranged sons, Richard and Jamie, to return to New York City in order to know their much younger half-brother, Andy, better. Only 17, Andy’s birth was the result of an affair Dyer had with a young woman who “shined her youth against my darkening age.” Her unexpected death brought their infant son to the father to be raised, resulting in his wife, Isabel, divorcing him.

    The novel opens at the funeral of Dyer’s lifelong best friend, Charles Henry Topping. Topping’s youngest son, Philip, a failed writer, is the story’s curious narrator. Recently separated from his wife and children because of an extramarital affair, he has also lost his teaching position at a private school (where he once was Andy’s teacher). He has an “infatuation” with Dyer, “the great man.”

    Philip ingratiates himself into the Dyer orbit, although Richard and Jamie barely tolerate him at best. He is both an outlier and interloper. He feels an emotional attachment to Dyer and longs for even the most contemptuous recognition from him. He thinks he would be a better son to him than Dyer’s own are: “I knew I could be a good son, the right son, the proper son to this great man, certainly better than his real sons.”

    While thinking of how little he actually knew about his own father, a man he once told his mother he did not love, Philip observes that “fathers start as gods and end as myths and in between whatever human form they take can be calamitous for their sons.” The in-between period certainly causes problems for the Dyers.

    Dyer believes his choosing to be a writer was a detriment to his being a real father to his sons. It gave him an excuse to withdraw from family life and indulge himself. His removal from their lives made him a mystery to them while growing up. Jamie thinks he knows his father better through reading his novels than through his own personal relationship with him, but he recognizes that “being a good and attentive father was neither in his nature nor in his nurture.” Dyer’s stated goal as a father was Hippocratic, to do no harm, but he tells his sons they should sue for malpractice.

    While Dyer may not be father of the year, his sons have not won any prizes either. When his own son, Emmett, asks him why he hates his father, Richard honestly replies that “neither one of us was suited to the relationship” and admits that he would have hated any father. Richard and his father share the certainty that death would resolve many of their problems. Richard says that only when Dyer is dead will he be able to love him without complication, while Dyer thinks that he can “only be a good father to a dead son.”

    Dyer’s considerable fame is borne not only by him but also by his sons, for both good and ill. Studio heads, headmasters, sycophants, and honest admirers all use the sons as a means of attempting to reach their reclusive father. However, his fame can also reflect upon them advantageously: “Maybe A. N. Dyer was a cold and distant light but he gave them a shine they parlayed into a swagger.”

    Dyer hopes to mitigate his mistakes with his older sons through his relationship with Andy. He sees Andy as a means to rewrite the errors in his own life, just as he is rewriting the draft of his famous first novel and improving it as he does. (It is part of a scheme to secure a better price from the Morgan Library, which wants to buy his papers. Unbeknownst to anyone, he burned the original draft of “Ampersand” long ago.) He calls rewriting the draft a “reconstruction project,” and Andy is quite literally his own personal reconstruction project, especially if we are to believe a bizarre midnovel plot twist.

    The father refers to his youngest son as “my best days ahead.” He tells his oldest sons that he wants his last words to be: “Be kind. Rewind.” Evoking the ubiquitous video store slogan, Dyer yearns to return to the beginning and be granted a do-over.

    Despite his fame, or perhaps because of it, writing made Dyer a miserable person. He claims that imagining the stories is the best part of the writing process. The actual writing, however, is like Chernobyl. He finds no joy in the work, just relief that the disappointment is manageable. He proclaims the process a parody of living.

    Despite their efforts to distance themselves from their father, Richard, a former drug addict, now drug counselor and screenwriter, and Jamie, a film documentarian, find themselves in the family business. They all struggle to create substitute worlds that call into doubt the gaps between life and art, fiction and reality, and that raise the question in what ways are our lives true.

    This question is central for Philip, the ersatz writer and erratic narrator, as well as displaced son and father. Through his discovery of some old correspondence between his father and Dyer (which is reproduced throughout the book), he comes to a realization about his father that fuels a desire for revenge upon the Dyers for his father and himself.

    Philip is telling his story through a prism of 12 years, looking back at the time of his father’s death and the return of the elder Dyer sons. Philip is not only a vengeance-minded narrator but apparently an omniscient one as well, imagining much of what he could not possibly know. He tries to “refashion his father” from the correspondence and “all the bits of information, both in fact and in fiction,” he uncovers or divines.

    Philip’s version of the story of A.N. Dyer and his sons is his own opportunity to rewind and reimagine what happened. How much can the reader accept as true, especially once Philip acknowledges, “I’m not sure what really happened”? But even if it is fiction, does it tell the truth?

    Mr. Gilbert stakes out large topics — family, friendship, literature, creativity, and death among them. He brings the kitchen sink to the novel, almost as if he believes “& Sons” may be his one and only chance so he might as well crank up the novelistic machinery to overdrive and use all of the tricks he can. Yet he integrates all of the elements into an intricate and coherent whole.

    There might be some complaint about an excessive number of characters or too many plotlines, rambling digressions, or simply too many pages, but Mr. Gilbert weaves the threads together masterfully. Any complaint seems minor compared to what he achieves. Mr. Gilbert is a gifted writer of exceptional insight, imagination, and control. “& Sons” is a beautifully written virtuoso work — both tragic and comic — from beginning to end.

    William Roberson taught literature at Southampton College for many years and now works at L.I.U. Post.

    David Gilbert lives in Southampton and New York.

“The Most of

Nora Ephron”

Alfred A. Knopf, $35

     When Nora Ephron died last year at the age of 71, there was an outpouring of personal and public grief greater than any I can recall for a contemporary American writer or film director. I knew her only as an acquaintance, an always charming and gracious presence, but her close friends still speak of other, more compelling qualities, especially her extraordinary generosity to those younger women — neophytes in her own professions — whom she mentored and encouraged.

    Many elegiac essays about her life and work appeared not long after her death, including those by her son Jacob Bernstein in The New York Times Magazine, her sister and collaborator, Delia Ephron, in her collection “Sister Mother Husband Dog (etc.),” and the actress Meg Ryan in The Hollywood Reporter. And now there is this hefty, posthumous compendium of Nora Ephron’s writing, with a telling and affectionate introduction by Robert Gottlieb.

    One of the many pleasures of “The Most of Nora Ephron” is its variety: a novel, a screenplay, a theatrical script, numerous essays, and a scattering of recipes, all gathered between two covers that bear the same appealing photograph of the author. Another bonus for the reader is the common thread that binds these seemingly disparate works — Ephron’s constant, distinctive voice. It reflects what her family, friends, and colleagues have all said about her — that she was original, hilarious, brave, disciplined, sarcastic, confident, modest, and honest.

    In “The Art of Fiction” Henry James instructed, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” And when Ephron’s mother was dying, she said, “You’re a reporter, Nora. Take notes.” Nora Ephron seems to have taken both of these directives strongly to heart. A keen observer of everything from Washington politics to sexual politics, she was outspoken about all of it.

    She wrote directly and indirectly about her own life, lamenting her small breasts in a famous Esquire essay (with a killer last line) and the traumatic end of her second marriage in the novel “Heartburn.” The fictional Rachel, like the real Nora, is seven months pregnant with her second child when she learns that her husband is in love with someone else. “The most unfair thing about this whole business,” Rachel remarks, “is that I can’t even date.”

    Ephron has been criticized for this kind of levity, for putting a cheerful gloss on serious matters. But in a piece called “The D Word,” she says of this second divorce, “I wrote about all this in a novel called ‘Heartburn,’ and it’s a very funny book, but it wasn’t funny at the time. I was insane with grief. My heart was broken. I was terrified about what was going to happen to my children and me. I felt gas-lighted, and idiotic, and completely mortified.”

    Later on she writes, “Now I think, Of course. I think, Who can be faithful when they’re young. I think, Stuff happens. . . . My religion is Get Over It.” Of course a lot of time had passed by then and she had (sort of) gotten over it. (And her third marriage, to the screenwriter Nick Pileggi, was deeply happy.)

    But her metamorphosis also seems to have been a way of coping, of using what she did best to come to terms with what hurt the most. Of course you could also simply call it denial, as she did herself, about turning 60, in her book “I Feel Bad About My Neck.” “Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial. It seemed to me that the only way to deal with a birthday of this sort was to do everything possible to push it from my mind.”

    Nora Ephron felt bad about more than just her neck, or about numerous other negative aspects of aging. In brief, succinct pieces, she shares her displeasure with, among myriad offenders, exercise (“I would rather be in Philadelphia (although not in labor)”), e-mail (“Call me”), egg whites (“As for egg salad, here’s our recipe: boil eighteen eggs, peel them, and send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way”), and George W. Bush (“I kept America safe, except for this one time”).

    The most disturbing and moving references in “The Most of Nora Ephron” are to the writer’s mother, for whom she felt understandable ambivalence. Both of her parents — the screenwriting team of Phoebe and Henry Ephron — drank heavily, but Phoebe was “a crazy drunk” who “would come flying out of her bedroom, banging and screaming and terrorizing us all,” and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 57.

    The Ephron household can be seen, from a considerable distance, as enviably privileged and glamorous: Beverly Hills, the cook and maid and laundress, that plethora of famous Hollywood pals. Up close, though, it must have often been a nightmare.

    Phoebe Ephron gets a lot of quote space in her daughter Nora’s account. That deathbed edict to “take notes” is frequently counterpointed by “Everything is copy” — invaluable advice, no doubt, for budding journalists. But she doesn’t come across as particularly maternal in these pages, or in the published recollections of her other daughters. Ephron writes: “For a long time before she died, I wished my mother were dead. And then she died, and it wasn’t one of those things where I thought, Why did I think that? What was wrong with me? What kind of person would wish her mother dead?”

    Yet she struggles with her feelings. “Alcoholic parents are so confusing. They’re your parents, so you love them; but they’re drunks, so you hate them. But you love them. But you hate them.” Only a convoluted incident involving Phoebe Ephron and the writer Lillian Ross, related in this same essay, manages to mitigate Nora’s rage and restore her early, innocent filial love. “I got her back; I got back the mother I’d idolized before it had all gone to hell.” This passage reads like that coping mechanism at work again, rather than mere whitewashing or denial.

    Less than two years before Nora Ephron’s death — from pneumonia, a complication of acute myeloid leukemia — which had been foretold by her doctors, but kept from everyone but her immediate family and a few friends, she wrote, “Sometimes . . . we go to Los Angeles, where there are hummingbirds, and I love to watch them because they’re so busy getting the most out of life.” Keeping her dire illness a secret doesn’t appear to have been just a matter of preserving her privacy. Ephron clearly knew that the inevitable spate of sympathy following such news would get in the way of her work, of her ongoing plan to get the most out of life.

    With mortality in mind she made two lists. The one headed “What I Will Miss” is topped by her kids and her husband, followed by a catalog of pleasures like Shakespeare in the park, reading in bed, and taking a bath. Dry skin, bar mitzvahs, the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and Clarence Thomas all made it on to the second list, “What I Won’t Miss.”

    She even organized her own memorial service, down to the timing for each speaker. But she also continued writing after her diagnosis, completing, most notably, the play “Lucky Guy” — about the tabloid reporter and columnist Mike McAlary — although she didn’t live to see its Broadway production, starring Tom Hanks.

    One can only wonder, wistfully, what Ephron would have made of some of the newsworthy events that have occurred since she’s been gone. She’d surely have had much of interest to say about the recent government shutdown, the outbreak of gun violence in this country, and the Cheney family falling-out over gay marriage. It’s too bad that we won’t get to read any of it. But at least we have the consolation of this big, enlightening, and thoroughly enjoyable volume.

    And all those recipes to try, besides. I’m going to start with the succotash.

    Hilma Wolitzer, formerly of Springs, lives in Manhattan. Her most recent novel is “An Available Man.”

    Nora Ephron had a house in East Hampton for many years.

“Death of the Black-Haired Girl”

By Robert Stone

    Even B+ Robert Stone is better than almost everybody else. The setup is conventional: an affair between a student and professor at a university bearing more than a passing resemblance to Yale. But the way it unravels is wholly unpredictable, as is every line of Mr. Stone’s dialogue — especially his New Yawk police talk — which remains (the author is 76) utterly realistic and yet somehow never clichéd.

    Here is a novel beyond good and evil. There are no heroes, no one to “root” for — the student’s spoiled recklessness is as irritating as the professor’s pomposity — and in the end nearly everyone loses. “Feel good” fiction? Not exactly, but indispensable for those unafraid of a hard look at America’s new narcissism. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25)

“Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick”

    Sometimes fans of P.K.D.’s work will go so far as to tell you that their hero was an American version of Jorge Luis Borges. That’s probably the herb talking, but even hyperbole cannot diminish the fact that the author’s futuristic visions have grown more popular (and perhaps more relevant) 30 years now after his death. There have been at least 12 movies made from his novels and stories, including “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” and the immortal “Blade Runner.”

    The blight on P.K.D.’s career has always been overproductivity — the copious hack work done to stave off creditors, drug dealers, alimony, etc. This new collection solves that, whittling things down to 20 of his most essential stories. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28)

“All That Is”

By James Salter

    The life of Patrick Bowman, a soldier and book editor, reads like the quintessential arc of the postwar American male, and an elegy for a lost world. James Salter, whose lyrical flourishes have solidified his reputation as one of our greatest living writers — and simultaneously one of our most under-read — turns down the heat in his prose just enough to make this the most approachable fiction of his career.

    And just when you thought novels had lost the ability to shock, “All That Is” also boasts one of the few bombshell moments in recent literary memory: a scene of sexual betrayal between a man and a young woman. It earned Mr. Salter the tired moniker of “misogynist” in a Slate review earlier this year. But no matter. The carping of sexual politicians is for today; the work of James Salter is forever. (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95)

“Going Clear: Scientology,

Hollywood,

and the Prison of Belief”

By Lawrence Wright

    It’s even creepier than you thought. Lawrence Wright chronicles the enigmatic religion from its inception to its most recent incarnation, getting unprecedented access and testimony from those who were inside. We meet its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, as never before, lying about his military record and birthing a religion directly from his megalomaniac, science-fiction obsessed imagination.

    But it’s Scientology’s most recent chapter that may be its most disturbing. Its new leader, David Miscavige, seems to be running an internment camp where members put in 15-hour days while Hollywood stars are flown in for a sanitized weekend tour before dropping a hefty donation. And Mr. Miscavige doesn’t do Jesus, by the way; displease him and the unhinged, bodybuilding pontiff will beat you to a bloody pulp right on the spot. If only it were a novel, it would easily be one of the scariest of the year. (Alfred A. Knopf, $28.95)

“MaddAddam”

By Margaret Atwood

    The volumes of Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” trilogy have been described either as a satire or an alarm, depending on one’s perspective. Most likely they are both. The story is set in a dystopian nightmare of humanity’s own making, and Ms. Atwood takes our contemporary obsessions — genetic modification, consumerism, environmental ignorance, corporate greed — and drives them to their logical conclusions. The results are not pretty, with huge, man-eating swine turning out to be the least of our problems.

    As ever, the trick of great science fiction is characters, not just ideas, so luckily “MaddAddam” has the humane and mordantly witty Toby as its narrator and central character. And, you’ll be relieved to know, there’s even a little romance to be had at the end of the world, when Toby is reunited with a love interest from volume two. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $27.95)

“The Flamethrowers”

By Rachel Kushner

    There’s no question that Rachel Kushner’s second novel was fiction writers’ favorite of the year. It wasn’t so much the storytelling, which chronicles a young artist named Reno and her adventures in 1970s New York and Rome. Rather it was the electrifying sentences, which at their best can give off sparks and earned the author comparisons to no less than Don DeLillo. There is at least one astonishing image on almost every page of this nearly 400-page novel.

    True, Reno’s nouvelle vague romance with Sandro Valera, the scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle company, was a little too cool for school for some readers, and the book’s narrative is too fractious to be entirely satisfying. But sentence by sentence there is probably no better example this year of what 21st-century fiction is going to look like. (Scribner, $26.99)

“The Circle”

By Dave Eggers

    You could say that Dave Eggers was lucky that the N.S.A. surveillance scandal broke almost simultaneously with the publication of his newest fiction, a skeptical look at an Internet company not so loosely based on Google; or you could say that prescience is the reward for the instincts of a good novelist. Either way, “The Circle” touched a major nerve.

    The heroine, Mae Holland, appears to have landed the contemporary version of the dream job at the Circle, the kind of Internet company where workers lounge around on beanbag chairs and famous musicians serenade their organically prepared lunch on sprawling campus lawns. Too good to be true? You betcha. Just when you thought they were ready to make Steve Jobs’s birthday a national holiday, thankfully there are novelists like Mr. Eggers ready to challenge the hagiography of social media and technology. (Alfred A. Knopf/ McSweeney’s, $27.95)

“The Bully Pulpit”

By Doris Kearns Goodwin

    Luckily “The Bully Pulpit” is not another addition to the exhausted genre of Theodore Roosevelt biographies. Rather it is the story of the friendship between Roosevelt and Howard Taft, and the severing of that relationship when both men decide to run for president in 1912. Their fight stultifies the Republican Party and paves the way to the presidency for the hapless Woodrow Wilson.

    Doris Kearns Goodwin once again displays her storytelling gifts and her instinct for contemporary relevance: While her book on Lincoln showed a president overcoming a deeply divided Congress for the public good, “The Bully Pulpit” addresses the issues of income inequality, corporate mergers, and the lust for deregulation. (Simon & Schuster, $40)

“The Goldfinch”

By Donna Tartt

    This year’s literary blockbuster has all the can’t-miss elements, moving effortlessly from classic bildungsroman to social novel to conventional thriller — all of it topped off with a tasty dollop of culture. “The Goldfinch” is in fact a Dutch Master painting that accidentally comes into the possession of Theo, the novel’s orphan protagonist.

    Yes, there is more than a touch of Dickens in Donna Tartt’s story, and not every moment of this nearly 800-page novel thrills (the painting itself can disappear from focus for so many hundreds of pages you wonder if the center can still hold). But great novels inspire quibbling. In the end, this is an irresistible literary page-turner of remarkable breadth and feeling, and unquestionably the read of the year. (Little, Brown, $30)

“I’m Your Man: The Life

of Leonard Cohen”

By Sylvie Simmons

    The most satisfying biography so far of one of the most elusive and enigmatic figures in modern popular music. Leonard Cohen’s unusual arc takes him from a Canadian country band to literary novelist to the “second coming of Bob Dylan” to Buddhist monk.

    There are plenty of colorful stories, most of them, not surprisingly, of women, given Mr. Cohen’s “ladies’ man” reputation. There are the Js: Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, and of course Janis Joplin, who inspired the notorious “Chelsea Hotel #2.” A recording session with Phil Spector disintegrates into the usual gunplay. And finally we get some insight into “Famous Blue Raincoat,” one of the most discussed and disputed songs anyone has ever written (“going clear” turns out to be a reference to Scientology, not drugs).

    Like all great artists, Mr. Cohen is a complicated figure who usually wriggles out of biographers’ hands, but Sylvie Simmons does a yeoman’s job of keeping control. (Ecco, $27.99; released in hardcover late 2012, paperback 2013)

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

“Still Writing”

Dani Shapiro

Atlantic Monthly Press, $24

    The novelist who taught my writing workshop liked to tell us that people who have had happy childhoods start hedge funds or run for Congress — but they don’t become writers. While I wouldn’t put money on that equation, Dani Shapiro, in “Still Writing,” her elegant, inspiring, and practical guide to living the writer’s life, is a vivid illustration of his point.

    The traumatic events that jump-started her writing career were the culmination of a lonely childhood as the only offspring of older parents — an obsessive mother and a sad but loving father who found comfort in his Orthodox Jewish faith. Their dysfunctional marriage aroused Ms. Shapiro’s curiosity. What were they talking about behind closed doors? As an adolescent and teenager she began writing to find out.

     What might have been a straightforward journey to a literary life was derailed, however. While a student at Sarah Lawrence College she began an affair with the wealthy, seductive (and, she discovered later, criminal) stepfather of her best friend and left school, ostensibly to become an actress but in fact to be his mistress. One night, four years after she’d left college, her father, with her mother alongside him, lost control of the car he was driving. The accident was brutal. Ms. Shapiro’s father lay for several weeks in a coma, regained consciousness briefly, and ultimately died. Her mother suffered innumerable broken bones, particularly in her legs. It took several years before she was back on her feet.

    The accident shocked Ms. Shapiro to her core and catapulted her out of the life she’d been living. She wanted to do something to make her beloved father proud. She ended the affair, went back to school, wrote a novel, and graduated from a master’s program in writing at Sarah Lawrence. Her first stop after the ceremony was her father’s grave. She has been writing ever since. Her commitment to a creative life is absolute.

    Among the many books that inspire writers with tips on craft and emotional support (“Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg, “Bird by Bird” by Ann LaMott), what distinguished “Still Writing” for me was its generosity. Along with dozens of tactics and mind tricks designed to get a writer writing and keep him or her writing (day by day, week by week, year by year), Ms. Shapiro offers a piece of intimate memoir, a meditation, or sometimes an illustrative episode from another writer’s life.

    She understands that advice is always useful — but stories are what we remember. I read “Still Writing” as if it were a novel, its voice soft and insistent in my ear. I wanted to know what I was going to find out about Ms. Shapiro and how she kept going.

    Not only was she candid about all the obvious ways she has had of preventing herself from writing (road blocks all writers, experienced and novice, will recognize: the internalized voice of the censor, the phone, e-mail, the Internet, wanting a cigarette) and how she overcomes them, but she was equally revelatory about the tough stuff, the facts it’s harder to back away from. Six months into his life her infant son was diagnosed with a rare disease with a small probability of survival. She knew, she tells us, “that if he wasn’t okay . . . my life would be over. I believed that the loss of a child would be the only pain from which it would be impossible to recover.”

    The ways she normally had of detaching from an experience in order to write about it wouldn’t work here. How could writing save her son? She quotes John Banville — a quote that has stayed with me. In writing about Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights,” a book about the loss of her only daughter, he says, “Against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art, especially not art.”

    Ms. Shapiro’s son does survive. She catalogs his illness, along with her parents’ accident, as one of the markers that divided her life into a before and after, a place on a continuum that left her irrevocably altered. “It was written on my body. My instrument had changed.” It took a year and a half of staring at the wall of her studio, she tells us, but eventually she began writing again, a book about maternal anxiety.

    Though Ms. Shapiro’s childhood was not a happy one, it was a structured one. Her family observed the Sabbath. She practiced the piano. And because of her mother’s obsessiveness she grew up in a spotless house with color-coordinated drawers. In many of the methods she recommends for overcoming writer’s inertia, self-loathing, bad days, blank pages, Monday mornings, beginnings, middles, ends, there is a powerful streak of stick-to-itiveness, a determination not to be defeated that I found bracing and which I suspect harks back to discipline early learned. (Before writing she makes her bed.)

    She recommends yoga and meditation for focus. She tells us she works five days a week, regularly, entering her studio right after her son leaves for school. When she is working on a book she routinely writes three pages every weekday morning and revisits them in the afternoon. She believes in rhythm and habit, in making a promise to herself and keeping it.

    She understands, however, that no matter how firm your commitment, life will find a way of distracting you. “A school play.” “A friend in crisis.” What William Styron called “the fleas of life,” she tells us. She warns that once interrupted it will be hard to return to your pattern, but with determination, you can.

    She commiserates about uncertainty and risk — creative and financial. No one will like what we’re writing. No one will buy it. “We [Ms. Shapiro and her husband, also a writer] are always one potential disaster away from . . . well, potential disaster. A health crisis. A tree falling on the roof. A disability. What then?” But, she tells us, she and her husband have as recompense the fact that they are doing what they love, doing what they must. “This life chooses us.”

    “Still Writing” is a wise book, illuminated by honesty and the passion Ms. Shapiro obviously feels for her subject and the life she’s chosen. I left it feeling in the mood to write and promising myself that I’d follow her ardent ruling to stay away from the Internet. The novelist who taught my workshop never assigned books about writing but advised that writers learned to write by writing, a conundrum with which, Ms. Shapiro tells us in the pages of her inspiring book, she agrees.

    Phyllis Raphael, the author of “Off the King’s Road,” has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, New York University, the New School, and a longstanding private workshop that she founded in Manhattan. She lives in New York and Amagansett.

    Dani Shapiro is a former Sag Harbor resident.

“Mary Coin”

Marisa Silver

Blue Rider Press, $26.95

    If, as the popular wisdom holds, a single picture is worth a thousand words, then it is not entirely surprising when an iconic photograph inspires a novel of some 325 pages. Neither is it surprising when, in the hands of a gifted writer, the resulting novel is a small masterpiece.

    Employing as her jumping-off point Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photo “Migrant Mother” — a commonplace in American culture, as well as in the annals of photographic history — Marisa Silver creates not one but three fictional back stories and deftly brings them to intersect at moments of maximum impact. In the process, Ms. Silver impels her reader to consider what it means to look, what it means to see, and what it means to know about life in the deepest, most essential way we call truth.

    The primary story in this book is that of the woman in the photograph, Mary Coin herself. We follow the arc of her life from girlhood in a poor Oklahoma town (before the dust storms came) to old age and impending death in north-central California many years later. It is a mean life, particularly as the Great Depression’s noose of poverty and scarcity tightens around Mary and her seven children, her first husband having died not long after the Coins made their way to the elusive paradise of the Golden State. (“Mary sustained the weight of sorrow that would descend on her freshly each morning and had to remind herself all over again that her husband was gone.”)

    It is during the long period of struggle as an itinerant picker of produce in the Central Valley that Mary encounters another female itinerant — the photographer Vera Dare, who, under the auspices of a (New Deal) government program, travels the country, collecting documentary images of how people are suffering under the dire economic circumstances of the period. With a little coaxing, Mary agrees to be photographed by Dare, neither woman imagining the implications over time of that short-lived encounter. (Vera doesn’t even ask her subject’s name before or after she takes her picture.) Nor does either of them glimpse that their lives have anything in common — which, over the course of the novel, we come to understand they do.

    The third narrative thread of this novel is that of Walker Dodge, a present-day professor of social history whose expertise is in combing through the records and tangible ephemera of the everyday lives of people in bygone eras, in order to gain an authentic understanding of what those lives, and those periods, were like. When Walker applies his professional skills to questions about his own family’s history, the hitherto disparate tales of the three primary characters begin to form a skein of connectivity.

    One of the overarching themes of this novel is how complex relationships can be between parents and their children. In all three of her central characters, Ms. Silver illustrates that an absence of conventional sentimentality is in no way indicative of a weak bond between a mother or father and her or his sons and daughters.

    Among the great strengths of Ms. Silver’s writing is how astutely she observes and describes so many aspects of life. Of the hardscrabble poverty and escalating ill fortune of the Coin family, she writes, “They had never had anything but now they had nothing.” Of Vera Dare’s work as a society portrait photographer in San Francisco before the Depression, she tells us that Vera’s clients often referred to her as “my photographer . . . as if Vera were part of a retinue . . . my driver, my girl at Gump’s.” And of so much of America in the 1930s, she says, “The whole world had been abandoned.”

    The missions of the photographer and the historian are close to the core of this moving story; each in his or her own way seeks truth. As soon as Vera takes the photo of Mary that would make her famous, she “felt in her gut as though there had been a sudden synchronizing of all the heartbeats in the world. . . .”

    Of his particular work, Walker believes, “The present provides neither the gentling amber light of nostalgia nor the bright possibility of hope.” Moreover, “Everyone wants to be known. Perhaps the ones who conceal themselves most of all. The question is: Who is foolhardy enough to go in search of them?”

    The implicit answer, of course, is academics such as himself. By extension, however, it feels as though Ms. Silver is also responding, novelists such as herself and the readers they bring along on the search.

    When, toward the end of the book, Walker grasps the truth that causes everything to fall into place, he “knew that life was a set of extravagantly enacted delusions to mask the fact that all the relied-upon verities were meaningless.”

    Nevertheless — or perhaps for that very reason — we, as thinking human beings, continue to seek understanding.

    If one wished, it is possible to discover, in the stories of Mary and Vera, reflections of the lives of Lange and Florence Owens Thompson, the actual subject of the photographer’s celebrated photo for the Farm Security Administration. To do so would be beside the point, though. However meticulous her research, Ms. Silver has chosen to use “Migrant Mother” as merely a trigger to the imagination, creating a fictional universe, a made-up series of events, and imaginary lives that are most meaningfully appreciated in their own light.

    Filled with humanity, this novel takes its place beside the likes of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and James Agee and Walker Evans’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Like those works — indeed, like the Great Depression itself — it touches us deeply and leaves us with a haunting sense of being changed forever. In the final analysis, isn’t that what successful literary fiction does best?

    To conclude on a personal note: As many times as I have seen the Lange photograph and as well as I thought I knew it, Ms. Silver’s novel demonstrated to me that an essential element of the picture, critical to her story, is something I had never before noticed. That is why we revisit classic pieces of art (and that includes literature): There is always something more to learn.

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

    Marisa Silver, who lives in Los Angeles, has been a regular visitor to East Hampton, where her parents had a house for many years.

    The number of young people in today’s information-overloaded America who are managing to make a living writing poetry probably exceeds the nation’s current population of ivory-billed woodpeckers, but both birds and poets are indisputably endangered.

    If the woodpecker can be found at all it will only be in a Southeastern swamp, but look for the up-and-coming poet here, there, and everywhere as she flits across the country from one writer-in-residence position to another. Landing these prized grants, which provide just enough money to keep body and soul together as well as living and working space for a period of weeks or months, is no job for the uninspired or the unpublished; the competition is fierce and the fellowships are few.

    But Caitlin Doyle, who grew up in East Hampton, has never let long odds deter her. As an East Hampton Middle School student she won her first literary contest in a Suffolk County competition for writing on an environmental theme. The prize was a tree planted at the school in her honor, which she is pretty sure is still there today.

   She received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Scholarship in creative writing — a full four-year ride to Chapel Hill — for a series of satirical poems about waitressing at the old Star Room in Wainscott, and since then the awards have accumulated almost nonstop. She was in Stonington, Conn., in September, working on poems and giving readings as writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House there; last year she taught creative writing at Penn State in State College, Pa., and the year before she spent a sunny winter in Orlando, Fla., on a fellowship at the Jack Kerouac House. Her latest grant, which she learned of just this month, will take her out to Michigan to spend a spring semester as writer-in-residence and lecturer at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy.

    Ms. Doyle comes from a family of storytellers. Her father, originally from Dublin, was the bartender at Sag Harbor’s American Hotel when she was a child, and his tales of the eccentric characters who convened there, many of them writers, “stirred my curiosity,” she said, “and planted in me an early fascination with the literary life.” Interviewed by The Irish Examiner newspaper this summer about a prose piece in the Cork Literary Review subtitled “Coming of Age as an Irish American Poet,” she recalled her father’s stories about the “hooleys” he had attended in Dublin, where poets and writers came together in a shared love of language.

    “I wondered how the love of words that defined the hooley tradition could exist in tandem with the fear of words that drove the country’s prohibitive attitude to so many books,” she told the interviewer.

    Critics have remarked upon that same dichotomy in her work, which has been described as full of “the unease that stalks our comfort.”

    A review of her poem “Thirteen,” which was anthologized in “Best New Poems 2009” (Samovar Press), describes it as “such a remarkable combination of ideas and word-play around the transformations to a girl in her thirteenth year, that it is like a socks-on-carpet spark to the brain.”

Thirteen

There are as many years in you as witches in a coven,

devil’s dozen, number of steps to the noose, no use

to rub a rabbit’s foot or knock on wood,

you’ve had one too many birthdays than you should

twelve years they served Chedorlaomer

and the thirteenth they rebelled

so you learned to read from the book your father

held before the fire but the thirteenth psalm proved him a liar

and in your heart you said the multiplication tables

must go higher and then you began to bleed. Old dress filling with new need!

. . .

    (The Cities of the Plain rebelled against Chedorlaomer, a king of Elam, after 12 years of bondage, according to the Book of Genesis. The full text of “Thirteen” can be found at caitlindoylepoetry.com.)

    Although Ms. Doyle’s poems have appeared in book anthologies, literary journals, and such widely read magazines as The Atlantic and Boston Review, she has yet to publish her first poetry collection. It exists, though, in manuscript, with the working title “Tea in Eden.”

    Asked by “The Next Big Thing,” a series of interviews with emerging poets, to give a short synopsis of the book, she answered: “I hope to reconnect readers with the primal ear-delight of their early years, bringing them back to their first pleasure in hearing nursery rhymes, lullabies, commercial jingles, and playground songs, while also feeding their grown-up appetites for intellectual depth, sonic complexity, and emotional resonance.”

    Quite a tall order. But judging by her résumé to date, if anyone can fill it, it will be Caitlin Doyle.

Return of the Lit Lunch

    Chris Knopf and Christina Haag will pull up chairs and clink silverware at this year’s benefit authors lunch at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor on Dec. 8. The noon to 2:30 p.m. meal comes courtesy of the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library.

    That library, of course, isn’t alone in undergoing a renovation and expansion, it’s just that in this case it’s been nigh unto interminable, perhaps making a celebratory lunch all the more so.

    Mr. Knopf, a Southampton part-timer, is the author of the quick, witty, and engaging “Hamptons Mysteries” starring Sam Acquillo. His latest thriller, “Cries of the Lost,” is a follow-up story to last year’s “Dead Anyway,” in which the protagonist, thought dead but only in a coma for a year, adopts a new persona and hunts for his own “killer.”

    Christina Haag, an actress and longtime South Fork visitor, recently came out with a New York Times best seller, “Come to the Edge,” about her years-long relationship with John Kennedy Jr.

    Tickets to the lunch cost $50. Reservations are by phone with Chris Tice of Overlook Lane, Noyac, or by e-mailing her at [email protected]. Monday is the deadline for checks sent by mail, the Friends said.

A Cultural Quartet

    Here’s a culturally loaded book signing for you. At Sylvester & Co., the Amagansett furniture and accessories shop that also displays art, an editor, an artist, a designer, and a photographer, all with various and sundry connections to this area, will gather with their books and offer a chance to chat on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

    Pamela Fiori, former editor of Town & Country, will be on hand with copies of “A Table at Le Cirque” and “Stolen Moments,” Jack Ceglic will sign “Jack: Drawings and Paintings by Jack Ceglic, 2009-2012,” Scott Sanders will be there with “Picture Perfect: Designing the New American Home,” and Priscilla Rattazzi will have with her two of her photo books, “Georgica Pond” and “Luna & Lola,” about her dogs.

Kathryn Levy, There and Here

    Perusing this page on a westbound Hampton Jitney? Valued reader, much thanks. But your time in the city doesn’t mean you can’t get a dose of South Fork-style culture. Tomorrow night at 7, Kathryn Levy, a Sag Harbor poet, will be bending the paperback covers of her new collection, “Reports,” for a reading at Poets House, the archive and cultural center at 10 River Terrace in Manhattan.

    The gathering is a celebration of the book’s October release from New Rivers Press. Joining Ms. Levy in reading and quaffing the de rigueur “refreshments” will be two other poets, Maya Pindyck and Purvi Shah.

    Looking to stay closer to home, poetry fans? Ms. Levy can be caught at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Nov. 16 at 5 p.m.

Of Prophets and Tygers

    Speaking of poetry, perhaps the most mystical of its practitioners, William Blake, is the subject of a new historical novel self-published by Barry Raebeck, a native East Hamptoner who teaches English at Southampton High. He’ll read from “Tyger on the Crooked Road,” which “blends fact with fiction in a reimagining of the life of the celebrated 18th-century visionary,” on Saturday at 5 p.m. at the Nature Conservancy on Route 114 in East Hampton.

    The book aims for an “authentic portrayal of historic London” and to “spark readers’ imaginations,” Mr. Raebeck said in a release. “Blake’s life is a testament to the eternal power of creative thought,” he said. “He remains an extraordinary inspiration to artists, writers, and all those who believe that ‘What is now prov’d was once only imagin’d.’ ”