“Memories

of a Marriage”

Louis Begley

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.95

     I live in Springs. I have no idea how they live South of the Highway.  

    Rock stars, movie divinities, hedge fund wizards, white-collar bandits — the world lifts its wondering eyes to the oceanside Hamptons. TVs and tabloids, commercial books and magazines, they all feed on fame and fortune.

    But what if the truth got out?

    What if a spy revealed it all to be somewhat of a fraud, much like the fraud that placed many of our plastic heroes on their pedestals in the first place?

    Well, thank goodness for Louis Begley.

    In “Memories of a Marriage,” he takes us inside the marriage and the “culture” of one miserable couple, Lucy and Thomas Snow — he, a rags to Wall Street fella, she the progeny of an old Rhode Island family coasting through life on booze, promiscuity, and shrinks.

    Along the way we meet their friends, not a bad lot really. They live in Paris, Geneva, London, Park Avenue (West Side is best), Water Mill, Southampton, and East Hampton, all the swell spots. They invest in the correct clothes, wine, and sunglasses. Their problem is money — too much of it. Money corrupts and absolute money corrupts usually. Symptoms: boredom, a sense of being of no use to anyone except those who want to use you, and did I mention boredom?

    Details of the problem: Our first-person novelist narrator (modeled on Mr. Begley himself) meets Lucy De Bourgh at the ballet in New York. She is the ex-wife of Thomas Snow, Harvard graduate, Wall Street superhero, now dead — run over by a speedboat while vacationing. Lucy, reaching back many years, reveals to our narrator, “I couldn’t have gone on living with that monster.”

    Lucy is now, in her advancing age, a humorless harridan. Our narrator remembers her as a happy hellion. A Miss Porter’s and Radcliffe grad drifting from bed to bed ready for any adventure, and shockingly beautiful. He also recalls husband Thomas as a dignified, if quiet, gent of enormous financial renown. He advises the president of France, for gosh sake, even though his parents ran a garage outside of Newport, R.I. That’s where he met Lucy. Lucy considers him to have been a mere “townie,” a climber who used her social status and family trust fund to rise.

    Throughout this slim novel, Mr. Begley investigates their horrid marriage by constantly questioning Lucy and Tom’s friends, and their only child, a son, to piece together this raw portrait of a sad coupling — think  Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” Yates’s “Revolutionary Road,” and Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

    Over five decades, right up to the present time, Mr. Begley affords us a fascinating glimpse into the doings of the rich and notorious. The Persian cat is out of the bag and it ain’t so great.

    Louis Begley has been in this territory before, most notably in “About Schmidt,” that hilarious sketch of a used-up executive and widower brought to film by Jack Nicholson. Mr. Begley’s story is just as fascinating as his 10 novels. He was a lawyer with the distinguished firm of Debevoise & Plimpton when he surprised his fellows by publishing a first novel, “Wartime Lies,” about a young Polish Jew caught up in the Holocaust. That novel appeared in 1991 when Mr. Begley was 57 and won several prizes. In the decades since, Mr. Begley has published many novels, among them “The Man Who Was Late” (1992), “As Max Saw It” (1994), “About Schmidt” (1996), and “Schmidt Delivered” (2000).

    Born in Poland in 1933, Mr. Begley — then Ludwik Begleiter — survived the Holocaust through circumstances that parallel the trials of the protagonist in “Wartime Lies.” Separated from his father, he and his mother managed to survive the war by passing as Aryan. Reunited after the war, the Begleys migrated to New York, where they adopted a new life and a new language. In 1954 Mr. Begley graduated from Harvard, where he was a member of the Harvard Advocate literary magazine.

    I had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Begley years ago at a New York party. Urbane, soft-spoken, impeccably attired in a dark suit, he presented a lawyerly calm. Only the barest trace of an accent suggested that he hadn’t just come from the pages of a Louis Auchincloss novel.

    But there is nothing Auchinclossian about Mr. Begley’s work. Its outwardly civilized world is often a stage for corruption and, in his first book, barbarity. His novels demonstrate knowledge of the world as it is. The mechanics of high-level finance (stock options, trusts, sharing of proceeds agreements) remind us of Mr. Begley’s long experience as a working lawyer.

    He makes an able spy for we the 99 percent as we consider the sins and powers of the 1 percent. As Mr. Begley’s narrator concludes, “I wasn’t sure I understood Thomas and Lucy better, and I wasn’t sure that I cared. A great impatience had overcome me.” I concur.

    I think I’ll stay in Springs.

    Bill Henderson is founder and publisher of the Pushcart Press. His latest book is “All My Dogs: A Life,” from David R. Godine.

    Louis Begley lives in New York and Sagaponack.

The Fall of the College

    So what do you think went wrong at Southampton College: mere mismanagement? Perpetually insufficient funding for the redheaded stepchild of the Long Island University system? Deep-pocketed trustees failing to pony up as promised? Or was it doomed from its misguided Vietnam War-era conception as a safe haven for academically uninspired rich kids seeking to avoid the draft . . .

    John A. Strong, who taught history at the campus for 33 years, has weighed in on the subject in “Running on Empty: The Rise and Fall of Southampton College, 1963-2005,” out from Excelsior Editions of the SUNY Press earlier this year. He’ll speak about the book, an extensive institutional history, on Nov. 14 at 2 p.m. at the Southampton Historical Society’s Rogers Mansion, on Meeting House Lane in Southampton Village.

    Reservations with the historical society and donations at the door have been suggested. Light refreshments will be served, perhaps countervailing the weighty matters at hand. Jobs were lost. Lives were significantly altered. Just think, reader, how many people you know who came to the South Fork and didn’t leave simply because the college existed.

Hannibal’s “A Trace of Red” Reissued

    Ed Hannibal, your friendly neighborhood novelist and Star contributor, now has two books reissued as paperbacks and on the shelves at BookHampton’s various locations. “Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks” has been joined by “A Trace of Red” thanks to the Authors Guild BackinPrint program, which publishes e-paperbacks that stand out from the crowd of self-published books of dubious quality.

    Well-received by The New York Times upon its 1982 release, “A Trace of Red” is a “cold war espionage thriller set in the Manhattan ad world (with key scenes set on the East End),” Mr. Hannibal, a former ad man himself, wrote in an e-mail that went on to mention timely plot elements involving “surveillance of civilians, ‘black ops’ assassinations of ‘assets’ gone bad,” and more.

    And on the timely front, the Springs novelist is also a teacher, and it’s not too late to sign up for his six-part course on the “ABCs of creative writing” starting Nov. 13 at 6 p.m. at the Amagansett Library. The cost is $25.

“Hunting Season” at Canio’s

    Mirta Ojito, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will speak at Canio’s in Sag Harbor about her new book, “Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town,” on Nov. 9 at 5 p.m. The book examines the murder of Marcelo Lucero, a 37-year-old undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, who was attacked by a group of Patchogue teenagers on Nov. 8, 2008.

    Ms. Ojito investigates the events surrounding the crime, beginning with the victim’s life in Ecuador and leading up to the murder, the arrests, the trial, and the aftermath. The book also profiles the teenagers, Mr. Lucero’s family in the United States and Ecuador, and members of the community. She places the crime within the larger context of the changing nature of immigration in the United States and the attitudes and stereotypes that can lead to such tragic outcomes.

    A newspaper reporter since 1987, Ms. Ojito has worked for The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and, from 1966 to 2002, The New York Times, where she was awarded a Pulitzer for a series of articles on race in America.

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.’ ”

“Confessions of

Joan the Tall”

Joan Cusack Handler

CavanKerry Press, $21

    Ah, growing up — there’s no escaping it. In Joan Cusack Handler’s quasi-anthropological memoir, “Confessions of Joan the Tall,” the author relives the indignity of classroom students everywhere who have been subjected to a public weighing and measuring. In milliseconds, these students are banished to the Land of the Less Than Perfect — too slight, too heavy, too short, too tall. While the average height for an 11-year-old girl is around 5-foot-2, Joan towered in at 5 feet 11 and one half inches, on the outer edge of the normal scale. Giant, freak, beanstalk, nicknames all, she vows she will never be a circus freak, no matter what.

    In parochial schools, students, girls, for the most part, plugging for a better grade would write JMJ on their papers, homework, and exams, usually in the upper-right-hand corner. The nun-pleasing abbreviation stood for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, which is centered on the top of each page of “Confessions of Joan the Tall.” A good student, Joan is summoned to her older brother’s class where his nun, a member, ironically, of the order of the Sisters of Divine Compassion, grills her on the multiplication tables, which she aces, an exercise that can only serve to humiliate her brother Sonny in his struggles to master “rithmetic.”

    Beset by “nerves” and the “freakishness” of her height, Joan, in spite of her litany of impassioned prayers, “pees” often — in her sixth-grade classroom, on her mother’s bed — and is a nightly bed wetter. Mary Cusack, the oft-angry yet commercially perfect housewife, insists Joan, by now a seventh grader, wash the sheets in the bathtub each morning, hoping this malodorous chore might put an end to the nightly bed-wetting. When they turn to a specialist with, according to Joan, a body shaped like a Humpty Dumpty, tiny feet and all, he tells her mother who tells her father that the doctor has called her a “dirty pig.” So much for a professional opinion. (The author mentions pee so often in her memoir it seems as if she should have considered the title “Confessions of Joan the Wet and Tall.”)

    Self-identifying as her mother’s favorite, Joan alone avoids her mother’s belt-strapping tirades because Joan’s bodily shaking — nerves again — so confounds her mother. When her mother, pushed to the edge, does beat her, overcoming her fear of her daughter’s suffering a nervous breakdown, Joan is relieved that her siblings may no longer think of her as the favorite. But Joan and her mother’s shopping trips, on which the sales help and her mother compare “tall Joan” to runway fashion models, and Joan’s shopping bag of purchases, can only serve to confirm her “favorite child” status. (The $22 dollar bathing suit, purchased for her by her mother in the mid-’50s, would run around $188 in today’s dollars, a stretch for not only this working-class family but also most others.)

    The Catholic religion, or, at least, Joan’s scrupulous interpretation of its principles, has to contribute to her nervous condition. She wrestles with her every thought, every judgment, weighing whether behaviors of her own and the Cusack family members merit a venial or mortal sin. Berating herself for her unwillingness to enter a “regular” religious order, much less the cloistered order of the Poor Clares, she drags the reader through the blacks and whites of her thought processes. The endless repetitions of her moral judgments, always through the veil of Catholic theology, become wearisome.

    “I would be so happy if they were Americans,” Ms. Handler, a poet, writes, confessing her shame of her Irish immigrant parents. The way that they and she pronounce the letter H (haytch), her mother’s penmanship and spelling on school notes, and, especially, her mother’s unwillingness to participate in the Rosary Sodality, the church’s women’s social group, embarrass her.

    Her father, a hard-working, take-any-job-he-can-get plumber, is the far more religious and social of her parents, although she would prefer he carried a briefcase to work; her admiration of him, bordering on worship, coupled with her need to please him may help explain her near religious fanaticism. Her mother’s self-imposed isolation sparks Joan and her younger brother, Jerry, to fantasize what it would be like if their mother had friends and ventured out of the house.

    While the Cusack family may be a stereotype, with their nightly rosaries and their frequent attendance at Masses — “the family that prays together stays together” — they do gratefully break that implacable Irish hard-drinking stereotype. Since drunkenness is considered almost a mortal sin by the Cusack family, Eugene’s one-time slip at an after-work Christmas party infuriates his understandably shrewish wife, who threatens to “not have Christmas.” Worse yet, he drank during the holy season of Advent, as his daughter recounts.

    Sonny, who revels in punching out his younger siblings, defends his father’s drinking and tells Joan that their dad used to steal pocket change from his older brother in the old country. Rather than accept her father’s flaws, Joan concludes that Sonny, with his penchant for violence, is also a “big, fat liar.” Her fear of Sonny’s retributions and unexpected outbursts adds to Joan’s already recognizable case of nerves.

    The chronological skipping, coupled with the brevity of the chapters — four pages would be a long chapter — along with the roughly hundred or so chapters in the memoir, makes following what stage Joan is in difficult. To a reader, it may cramp any forward-motion narrative drive. And since the pre-adolescent/adolescent voice is carried throughout the memoir, I found myself asking how old is Joan now, grateful for any indication of her age and/or grade, and admit that often I didn’t care enough to go back and reread.

    Edgewater Park, on the southeastern edge of the Bronx, borders Long Island Sound, whose waters appeal to tall Joan, who could safely disguise her height in the forgiving Sound. Jerry, the youngest Cusack, with his beautiful voice sings “Danny Boy” or that fun staple “Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?” at get-togethers in the neighborhood. The Edgewater Fife and Drum Corps, or a variation thereof, of which Joan was a proud member, still performs; idyllic holidays with a swim in the Sound were and are still a revered part of this community.

    When, at last, Joan struts down the Edgewater bulkhead in her expensive white bathing suit with its padded bra, she notices that the older men in the neighborhood turn to ogle her. And their interest makes her begin to believe that her adulthood and her height, her tallness, will bring her a different life, a happy life.

    Carole O’Malley Gaunt is the author of “Hungry Hill,” a memoir of growing up in an Irish-Catholic family in Springfield, Mass. She lives part time in Sag Harbor.

    Joan Cusack Handler is the author of the poetry collections “Glorious” and “The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making.” She lives in Fort Lee, N.J., and East Hampton.

    This is not a Holocaust story. So says Marilyn Gottlieb of her new book, “Life With an Accent,” which she’ll talk about at the East Hampton Library on Saturday.

    That life belongs to her husband, Frank Levy, who as a 3-year-old in 1936 fled Nazi Germany for Tel Aviv with his parents. Later, when he was 12,  with almost no notice, they again left everything behind, down to the beloved family dog, this time for America, his parents’ mix of perspicacity and luck once more keeping the family one step ahead of war and trouble, Palestine at the time being a cauldron of British rule and Arab and Zionist insurgency.

    The members of Mr. Levy’s extended family who stayed in Germany died in a concentration camp. That story and the life left behind in the town of Crivitz, near Berlin, make up a significant portion of “Life With an Accent,” but in discussing it, Ms. Gottlieb chooses to emphasize Mr. Levy’s “Immigrant’s Quest to Belong,” in the words of the self-published book’s subtitle.

    “There’s such polarization around immigration,” she said Friday over brunch at a bakery in Westhampton Beach (she and her husband live in Quogue). “You never hear good news about it. This is a reminder about how immigrants do good.”

    Beyond doing well for himself and his family in the textile machinery business, Mr. Levy, an engineer by training, went on to win an Energy Globe world award for his landfill-sparing, resources-saving work in the recycling of carpets, done in conjunction with an Italian manufacturer.

    The book is dominated as much by Mr. Levy’s internationalism as by a sense of the doggedness of the past (return trips to both places where he grew up are recounted). “I’m half from Germany, half from the British Mandate of Palestine, and half from America,” Ms. Gottlieb quotes him as saying. He went from being known as Mucki in Germany to Yaakov in Palestine to Frank in the U.S.

    In this country, “Everything was different,” she writes. “Instead of handles, the doors were adorned with round doorknobs. The windows opened up and down instead of outward. Screens prevented flies from entering. There was no sand anywhere. The floors were wood, not stone.” American staples like white bread and peanut butter held zero appeal.

    “It’s a tale of adjustment,” she said Friday, “and that’s what makes it interesting to people outside the family.”

    It is also instructive on the subject of American isolationism, if not superficiality. In high school in the Bronx, against a backdrop of efforts to establish the new state of Israel, Frank sees the pointlessness of organized sports and the frivolity of preoccupation with movies and popular music.

    Assimilation takes time, years, but when it comes, and he starts to think of his home in Larchmont, N.Y., as his “forever place to plant [his] feet,” it brings with it a profound kind of patriotism, in which he recognizes the shortsightedness of sending practically the entire American textile manufacturing industry to China, and still other production to Mexico. “It takes away jobs from our people,” he laments at one point, a capitalist with concern for working stiffs.

    “We need to restart manufacturing right here in the U.S.A. We need our young people to become engineers. Maybe if there were fancy award shows for innovative engineering instead of just for acting or singing, young people would gravitate to engineering. Maybe they’d use their creative spark to solve this problem.”

    The book was four enlightening years in the making, helped along as Ms. Gottlieb earned an M.F.A. at Stony Brook Southampton after a career as a publicist in advertising. “We’d been married for 22 years and I didn’t know him,” she said.

    Her talk, with slides and plenty of time for discussion, starts at 1 p.m. Saturday, and she’ll follow up with another on Nov. 15 at 6 p.m. at Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor.

    “Everybody’s past matters,” she said. “His life was impacted by outside events that had nothing to do with him.”

    The two traveled to Germany together after their marriage, Ms. Gottlieb skeptically, guardedly, her husband relentlessly outgoing and curious, befriending an Aryan German veterinarian from Crivitz and hearing stories of the Nazi years from the point of view of regular citizens and bystanders.

    “I always felt that one can’t blame all Germans, especially those who were not old enough to participate in the military during the Hitler era,” Mr. Levy says.

    As he puts it more than once in the book on this and other topics, “You have to understand, it’s not so simple.”

“Hurt, the Shadow”

Carole Stone

Dos Madres Press, $16

    The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda famously wrote, “I sang for those who had no voice.” Carole Stone echoes the declaration in her new collection of poems, all of which are written in the imagined voice of Josephine Hopper. Ms. Hopper studied at the New York School of Art and was a painter her entire life, yet, as Lee Krasner did Jackson Pollock, she married a painter, Edward Hopper.

    The preface to “Hurt, the Shadow” explains how a poetic persona serves in the collection as a mouthpiece for Josephine Hopper to talk about her own paintings, yet the majority of the poems play with a fascinating bit of history. After their marriage, Ms. Hopper became her husband’s sole artist model and had a strong influence on his work as a whole. “The Josephine Hopper Poems,” as the book’s subtitle calls them, are tantalizingly written in the voice of the woman behind, and inside, Edward Hopper’s most famous paintings.

    It gets even better. Whatever your familiarity with either of the Hoppers’ work, it suffices to know that husband and wife regularly invented female characters to appear in his paintings. Josephine, as model, would dress and act out the roles, while Edward brought them to life on the canvas. This loads the written page with more meaning than meets the eye and accounts for a humorous form of unwritten dialogue. Take the opening poem, “Campground in the Battle of Washington Square, 1947”:

Ed’s the great artist.

Look again, you see a life,

(I almost said wife) needing a touch

of sentiment. He thinks

I can only do flowers?

I’ll give him flowers,

gentians, poppies,

I fill my studio with them.

    Josephine Hopper speaks about one of her own paintings, lending the poem its title, and deftly unpacks the thematic subtext of the collection. Why has the work of great women in history been overshadowed by the work of great men in proximity? (Clara and Robert Schumann, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Mary and Percy Shelley come to mind as other examples, though they are countless.) The poem plays with the ambivalent dynamic between partners in life and work, yet remains focused on flowers as symbols of defiance, nicely paralleled with a lyrical edge.

    Ms. Stone animates the tension and vitality of her subject matter with nuanced precision. The poet carefully puts finishing touches on the lives of husband and wife, artist and model, woman and self. The latter dichotomy shines in a deceptively simple tone.

He lets on to be humble,

he is not.

I never wanted

to emulate him.

My sheer white curtains

undulate.

    “Edward Hopper Reading Robert Frost, 1955” says it all about being in a loving relationship. There is the other, whom we often place above ourselves, until the towering colossus eventually falls, and we must claim our own “curtains that undulate.” It’s a doubly potent image, distinguishing the work of Josephine Hopper from that of her husband, who did not paint undulations, but stark-lit facades. And it reveals the poet’s gift for economical lines, remarkable for their metaphoric conclusions.

    Part of the joy in reading “Hurt, the Shadow” is feeling how each poem naturally forms an exquisite view. Ms. Stone imparts wisdom quickly and effortlessly, saying more in less. “Sun in an Empty Room, 1963” correlates the subject to things with searing truth:

My loneliness reduced

to this empty room,

its sorrowful walls filled

with light.

The vacancy of my heart.

Hurt, the shadow.

    The poems take their titles from actual paintings by either Josephine Hopper or her husband. If you find it is difficult to place your phone aside or power down devices while reading, leave them on for this. It is enriching, if not appropriate, to search and find online, or in a book, images of the paintings that inspired the poems. “Hurt, the Shadow” is an interactive dream come true, where what excites the imagination can be favorably compared to the original.

    Lucas Hunt is the author of the poetry collections “Lives” and “Light on the Concrete.” He is the founder and director of Hunt & Light, a new poetry publisher, and lives in Springs.

    Carole Stone’s previous collection of poems was “American Rhapsody.” A professor emerita of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, she lives part time in Springs.

    Each year since 2006, the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor has held One for the Books, a literary-themed fund-raiser. Up until this year, the idea was that various hosts would serve dinner and a book chosen by the event committee would be discussed (between tidbits of local gossip). To add a smidgen of intrigue, guests chose the book they wanted to discuss first, and only then was the host’s identity revealed. The books could be any kind: old, new, obscure, whatever.

    This year that formula changed. On the two nights of this year’s event, last Saturday and again this Saturday, only the books of local Sag Harbor writers were chosen, and the authors themselves showed up to mingle with guests. Instead of a sit-down dinner, the format has switched to a cocktail party, the better to meet and greet both old and new acquaintances, as well as the authors.

    E.L. Doctorow, whose “Homer & Langley” was published in 2010, was the star attraction at the home of Ann Sutphen and David Rhoades. Their house — built by Charles Payne, a sea captain whose portrait, along with his wife’s, still hangs in the living room — has been in Ms. Sutphen’s family for six generations. When her daughter, now 9, takes possession, that number will rise to seven. Ms. Sutphen and family spent the last three years cruising from Seattle to Sag Harbor by way of the Panama Canal, arriving here, where they plan to stay, in September.

    Asked why he supported the library, Mr. Doctorow replied, “The library is part of the national defense system, as important as missiles and F-35s.” His latest book, “Andrew’s Brain,” will be published in January. The filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, one of the guests, also feels strongly about the library. “If you can’t get to a film,” he said, “read a book.”

    At the village house of Bob Weinstein and Eric Henley, a branding professional and flight attendant respectively, David Margolick, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, read from his biography, “Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns,” published in June. Mr. Margolick explained that he’d had the idea to write about his subject, a tragic figure who drank himself to death in Florence in 1953, for many years. Mr. Burns, Irish Catholic and a closeted homosexual, was turned down to teach at many prep schools including Andover and Choate.

    Mr. Margolick, who attended the Loomis School, was “quite proud” that his alma mater had hired the writer, many years before Mr. Margolick’s tenure there. Alas, the ungrateful Mr. Burns wrote a book trashing Loomis, which was enormously successful, at least among critics and his fellow authors. Mr. Margolick read an excerpt from “Dreadful” describing how Mr. Burns had slipped away from the school in the dark of night after his novel was published.

    After the reading, Mr. Margolick signed copies of his book. He was gratified, he said, to be able to “give back to Sag Harbor. . . . these guys are doing me a favor. I’ve only been able to take.” After the assembled clapped for his reading, he remarked, “I felt like applauding everyone here.”

    Suzanne McNear, who last December published her first novel, “Knock Knock: A Life,” was celebrated at the house of her daughter and son-in-law, Alex McNear and Robby Stein. Eric Fischl, who will be the guest of honor at his own event on Saturday at the home of Susan Mead, was there to support Ms. McNear. Mr. Fischl declared that he is “an absolute fan of Suzanne. I love her book . . . it’s magical. Her sense of evil in the world is profound.”

    Ms. McNear, who described “Knock Knock” as a “fictional memoir,” said she would “never have written it as a memoir.” That would have been “uninteresting,” she said, though she admitted that much of the material was sourced from her life. Writing in the third person, she said, gave her a “lot more freedom.”

“Someone”

Alice McDermott

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25

    The first time I became enthralled with Alice McDermott’s fiction was when I read her second novel, “That Night,” a beautiful and haunting novel about an all-consuming first love set in the 1960s on Long Island. Through a 10-year-old narrator, a neighbor next door, Ms. McDermott brilliantly and sensuously evokes a world of dangerous love, loss, fear, and desperation through the prism of a single summer night.

    In “Someone,” through the lens of one woman, she broadens the range of experience to chart the tragedies and milestones of one Irish Catholic family and a neighborhood in pre-Depression Brooklyn.

    Marie, the novel’s central character, looks back and pieces together snapshots of her life, from her childhood in prewar Brooklyn as the daughter of Irish immigrants, through the years of her coming of age, her marriage on Long Island raising four children of her own, to her final days in a nursing home.

    Feisty, strong-willed, and a keen observer, Marie at a young age is called a “bold piece,” by her mother. On Marie’s wedding night, Tom says, “there’s not much to you, is there.”

    “Take it or leave it,” Marie says. And indeed it is her tenacity and compassionate voice that seduce the reader as she reflects upon the joys, dreams, heartbreaks, and sorrows of a life.

    What makes this novel timeless and singular is the way in which it slips in and out of time, illuminating a range of pivotal moments in Marie’s life, from a childhood raised by immigrant parents where she witnesses the grief of her best friend’s mother, who dies in childbirth; an account of her own mother’s death; her first encounters with love and heartbreak; her wedding day; the near-death experience of giving birth; to the marvelous and poignant end piece of the book where her older brother, handsome Gabe, early in life bound for the priesthood and to an extent the spiritual center of the novel even after he gives up his ambition, comes to stay with her family on Long Island after being released from a mental hospital, as if plot itself were the way in which our memories live inside us, without regard to coherence or chronology. The incidents of love, loss, and joy reflect off one another like the prisms in a diamond illustrating the many dimensions of a single life.

    What on the surface appears to be an unremarkable existence, a life of someone, anyone, Ms. McDermott renders extraordinary through exacting quotidian detail and the poignancy of ordinary relationships. The drama and tension come, as she explained on NPR, “in the most unlikely places,” in the durable relationships between mother and daughter, father and daughter, sister and brother, husband and wife.

    While some writers are masters of the broad stroke, Ms. McDermott’s poetic mastery lies in how she boldly renders, illuminates, and elevates small and quiet moments to the quintessential. Who are we, if not defined through the experiences we’ve lived, the novel asks.

    In one memorable scene, Marie sits across the booth from her first love, Walter Harnett, who half looks at her and half looks above her head to others coming into the restaurant, and it is transformed into a universal experience — that thrill and dread of falling in love. “In the first throes of my first foray into love’s irrational joys,” Ms. McDermott writes, “I felt both the thrill of his acknowledgement and the hot black rush of shame.”

    Or the powerful epiphany she has at the end about her brother:

    “My brother was a mystery to me, but a mystery I had always associated with the sacred darkness of the bedroom we had shared in Brooklyn, or the hushed groves of the seminary, or the spice of the incense in the cavernous church, even with his lifelong, silent communion with the words he found in his books. Incomprehensible, yes, but in the same way that much that was holy was incomprehensible to me, little pagan.”

    It is in these flashes of intimacy where the magic of Ms. McDermott’s art is on full display: The reader forgets that the indelible lives on the page are fictional creations.

    While it succeeds in painting a convincing portrait of one woman’s ordinary life, “Someone” is finally a novel about love. “Who is going to love me,” Marie says to Gabe, who tries to comfort his 18-year-old sister after Walter Hartnett — afflicted with one leg shorter than the other — tells her he won’t marry her because she isn’t beautiful enough for him. “Someone,” he said. “Someone will.” The scene’s poignancy derives from the fact that we witness our own terror and desire for love in its pages.

    While in “Someone” Ms. McDermott skillfully delineates the course of love between husband and wife, and parent and child, if there is a central story of love it is the deep and abiding love between a brother and a sister, “different as night and day,” that is evoked most poignantly. From the beginning, when Gabe opens his blanket for his sleepless younger sister after a bad dream, “the way he did everything: quietly, methodically, with a good-natured but stoic acquiescence to duty,” and tells her to say a prayer to keep the nightmares away; when Gabe leads her down the aisle and pulls her into a firm embrace; or at the end of the novel when Marie takes scissors and clips off her brother’s blue hospital band after he is newly released from a psych hospital, their emotional bond is palpable. Though Marie’s brother remains to her an enigma, it is her uncompromising acceptance of him, and his of her, that is most touching. Love is not glamorous or star-crossed in “Someone,” it’s down to earth and necessary.

    It is often the quietest of novels, those that allow us to construct a clear structure for examining and framing our own existences, that in the end pierce and endure. “Someone” embodies within its pages the inexplicable dreams and mysteries of all of us.

    Jill Bialosky is a poet and novelist. Her memoir, “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life,” was a New York Times best seller. She divides her time between New York City and Bridgehampton.

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

“Alterations”

Rita Plush

Penumbra, $9.99

    Rita Plush, the author of a group of stories published under the title “Alterations,” tells us in her introduction that these are stories that have lived in her memory and “hark back more than fifty years.” Perhaps that’s the problem. We’ve heard and read similar stories of early immigrant Jewish life many times before. They are moving but well-worn territory.

    The first eight stories are told from a child’s perspective, which imparts a close-up, eye-level view of events. While fictional, these stories are sharply observed vignettes with telling details of occasionally delightful but often painful childhood memories.

    I was struck that the first two short pieces, “Brooklyn Brisket” and “Soup,” were fond recollections of Jewish cooking, a source of sustenance that remains often for a lifetime. Another key story, “Love, Mona,” tells of a little girl’s initial angry rejection of her childless Aunt Mona’s attempts to comfort her after the death of her mother. The interactions between Mona and the child are delicately nuanced.

    “Halter Tops and Pedal Pushers” is an interesting story and my favorite title, a child’s view of a complex adult marriage. How is she to make sense of this abusive, needy, yet sexually satisfying relationship?

    A story from an adult perspective, “Keria,” centers on a family sitting shiva after the mother’s funeral. It has well-drawn, insightful portraits of various family members and a painful one of the father, who is incapable of expressing feelings of love or pride in his sons and daughter. He has made well-crafted women’s dresses for over half a century, his most successful creation being the Barbara Bush dress, a knockoff of the outfit Mrs. Bush wore to her husband’s inauguration. He is either angry or unresponsive with his family, but when asked a question about his business, he comes alive and is infused with enthusiasm and authority.

    The accumulation of intimate family traumas, of death, illness, and loss, is well observed but left me feeling a little claustrophobic. Then suddenly with “Odette” there is fresh air. Out of nowhere, this story takes a plunge into gun-toting, backwoods redneck country. For good measure it has an off-stage rape and murder and onstage a character with a magical brass hand that can grant Odette three wishes. Need I say more?

    This kind of fantasy is not at all in Ms. Plush’s comfort zone, which is probably why in the following stories she reverts to recognizable human beings. But somehow the spell has been broken and they seem contrived. Perhaps she has run out of the relatives on whom her earlier realistic stories were based?

    The last third of “Alterations” concerns the life Jack Paul Scanlon, a working-class man who is beginning to tire of his job as a blackjack dealer and feels the need to move on. Jack Paul is a wanderer, a man for whom “change had become a lifestyle.” Years earlier he had deserted his young wife, Nadine, and their 6-year-old daughter, Isabelle, and from then on he has avoided any long-term commitments.

    Now, however, getting close to 40 years old, he has become increasingly aware of the emptiness in his life. He has worked on many construction crews over the years and dreams of having a house of his own to fix up and perhaps even tracking down his now grown-up daughter. In the meantime, we see what has happened in the lives of Nadine and the daughter, renamed Rusty. Both are survivors, and Rusty has become a successful businesswoman, but her emotional life is in turmoil.

    This part of the book consists of six stories and many secondary characters. It has some good sections but they feel oddly disjointed. Jack Paul Scanlon never meets up with his daughter, and the final story about her ends abruptly and without resolution. The impression I got is that the whole group of stories was tacked on as filler, with the intention of expanding it into a novel at a later date. The haphazard presentation of the collection as a whole is a pity, because the early stories show genuine talent.

    Jennifer Hartig is a regular book reviewer for The Star. She lives in Noyac.

    Rita Plush is the author of “Lily Steps Out,” a novel. She lives in Queens and East Hampton, and has had fiction in The Star previously.

Bookish Dinners

    Where renovations and expansions continue apace, as at Sag Harbor’s venerable John Jermain Memorial Library, can a fund drive be far behind?

    The library’s capital campaign will be bolstered once more by One for the Books, a raft of benefit dinners held at various residences and attended by Sag Harbor authors ready to be chatted up or peppered with questions. This year the dates are Oct. 12 and 19 — yes, two Saturdays, for you weekenders out there — from 6 to 8 p.m., though who really knows once the booze starts flowing. Tickets cost $100.

    The choices for the 12th: E.L. Doctorow (“Homer & Langley”), David Margolick (“Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns”), Suzanne Mc­Near (“Knock Knock: A Life”), David Scott Kastan (“Shakespeare and the Book”), and Tom Clavin (“The DiMaggios”).

    For the 19th: Joe Pintauro (“Nunc et Semper”), Eric Fischl (“Bad Boy”), Mac Griswold (“The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island”), and Alan Furst (“Mission to Paris”).

    Questions can be directed by e-mail to [email protected], or there’s always the phone.

Only Obser

    Eileen Obser, East Hamptoner and veteran writing coach, is back at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton with a five-week workshop, Memoir and Personal Essay Writing. It meets on Tuesdays from 5 to 7 p.m., from Oct. 8 through Nov. 15 but skipping Oct. 29. The focus, as the title suggests, is on autobiographical expression, help coming in the form of readings and group discussions, research tips, and marketing suggestions. The cost is $65. Registration is with the library. And scribes and readers take note: Ms. Obser has a memoir of her own, “Only You,” coming out in January by way of Oak Tree Press.

From Open House to House Envy

    The Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature may exist on a largely deserted campus, but who says its teachers and administrators can’t still be homey? They’re inviting all comers, for instance, to an open house on Wednesday at 6 p.m. in the intriguingly named Radio Lounge of the more comprehensible Chancellors Hall. Students, too, will be on hand, primed to be pumped for news.

    “Information will be available on combining course work in Manhattan and Southampton,” a release said, “or, for those interested in writing for younger readers, the new one-year Children’s Lit Fellows program,” which is now accepting applications for 2014. “Tailored to accommodate and facilitate distance learning,” the program was put together by Emma Walton Hamilton, who heads up the Children’s Literature Conference, and Julie Sheehan, the director of the M.F.A. in creative writing, “to offer children’s book writers a more affordable and flexible option than matriculation in a two or three-year M.F.A. program.” The deadline is Dec. 1 and the Web site is childrenslitfellows.org. R.S.V.P.s for the open house can be directed by e-mail to [email protected].

    But wait, there’s more: At 7 that night, Meghan Daum, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times, will put in an appearance for the Writers Speak series. She is the author of an essay collection, “My Misspent Youth,” a novel, “The Quality of Life Report,” and, most recently, “Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House,” a humorous quest for better real estate and something grounded in a rootless existence — er, a 900-square-foot fixer-upper? Don’t forget the wine and cheese afterward.