“Caught”

Jeff Nichols

CreateSpace, $9.99

   About two chapters into this book I was poised to dislike it, but like a “Trainwreck,” the title of Jeff Nichols’s memoir published in 2009 and turned into a movie two years later, I found it impossible to avert my eyes.

    “Caught” is an autobiographical account of a fish-a-holic. No kidding, there is such a thing and Mr. Nichols proves it. He was born into a blue-blooded family, prep-schooled, tennis-camped, and, before he lost it because he went fishing instead of attending a meeting with the family attorney, he was the prodigal inheritor of a rent-controlled Park Avenue apartment.

    The author is self-deprecating, and to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s zinger, he has lots to be self-deprecating about. He writes that he suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, he’s been an alcohol and drug abuser, a stand-up comic who stole jokes from other funnymen, and, worst of all by far, to his way of thinking, a dealer of striped bass on the black market.

    Mr. Nichols plays loose with a few facts, but hey, A.D.H.D. is a bitch. For the most part, the tale unfolds in Montauk. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty and their pursuers. Readers might recognize a certain conservation officer despite a name change that rhymes with Billotto nonetheless. And, despite his obvious respect for commercial fishermen (he worked for a time on a dragger), he parrots the sportfishing industry’s revisionist babble about how our local baymen deserved to have their haulseine fishery taken away from them because their nets caught too many fish.

   For the record, when it comes to striped bass, sportfishermen have always outharvested netters in this state, by far. The East End’s haulseine fishery and a centuries-old way of life were flat-out stolen by the UpIsland sportfishing industry in league with the state’s conservation department. The author states that the government compensated baymen for their lost fishery. Of course, that did not happen.

    But to his credit, Mr. Nichols does not hold back in revealing the dark underbelly of the sportfishing industry, one that reputable charter and party boat captains abhor. The flouting of quotas and the unlicensed sale of fish damage the effectiveness of conservation plans and undermine the law of supply and demand that honest commercial fishermen depend upon. The author knows how the black market works because he was part of it: the all-night fishing trips, the iced coolers, the trips to Chinatown in the city, the cash that served to fuel his striped bass fishing habit and little else.

    The book is a mea culpa. In two of the more humorously sad sections, Mr. Nichols tells of how his fishing addiction drove him to sell the family’s first-edition set of Rudyard Kipling works, and later to leave his girlfriend on a romantic vacation in Greece, where the moonlight — its ability to stir the appetites of big bass rather than his own — caused him to fly back to New York and hop on the L.I.R.R. to Montauk in order to catch the full-moon bite.

    But “Caught” is also a paean to Morone saxatilis, the striped bass. He loves the fish, especially the very big ones, the 40 and 50-pounders as well as the 60-pound stripers that elude him like Moby. Nothing in life has given him more pleasure than the pursuit. He was able to conquer his attention deficiencies long enough to actually learn how the veterans did it, to evolve from fishing dilettante to sought-after charter captain with the help (and angry hindrance) of some of Montauk’s more colorful characters. The chapter on Capt. Jimmy George is especially revealing.

    The pursuit leads him to the realization that he’s become schizophrenic about striped bass. He was addicted to catching and illegally selling the very big ones, but the “cows,” the big breeding females, are the future of the species he is addicted to pursuing. In the chapter “Big Fish Little Dick: The Last of the Trophy Hunters,” Mr. Nichols comes to see that the trophy fish, the dead “slob” hanging from the scale, and sportfishing’s ancient raison d’etre, should be released to breed again.

    “Caught” is maddening in parts, and has its flaws. It is not literature, although I’ve come to the conclusion the definition of lit should be expanded to include any book that keeps the reader from closing it. Mr. Nichols keeps the pages turning, and there’s charm in his storytelling. It’s sure to piss off some fishermen, and I like that too.

David Margolick on “Dreadful”

    Here’s a title to prick up your ears: “Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns.” Burns, a conflicted man of no small measure of inner turmoil and anger, came out with “The Gallery” in 1947, a debut collection of related stories praised for its descriptions of wartime Italy. It contained an early depiction of what it was like to be gay in the military and sold 500,000 copies.

    And then came a sophomore slump that would last the rest of Burns’s life. (His second book was based on his experiences teaching at the Loomis School in Connecticut.) He drank, sank into depression, returned to Italy, and died of a brain hemorrhage in 1953 at the age of 36.

    The author of “Dreadful,” David Margolick, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair who lives in Sag Harbor, will read from it at Canio’s Books in that village on Saturday starting at 5 p.m. Mr. Margolick’s previous book was a tale of the civil rights era, “Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock.”

Reading and Party at Barnes Landing

    Fans of prose, poetry, art, and the lush greenery and twinkling waters of the hamlet of Springs, take heed: It’s time once again for the Barnes Landing Writers and Artists Showcase, happening Saturday at 2:30 p.m. at the Barnes Landing Association meetinghouse at Barnes Hole and Water’s Edge Roads.

    Lisa Dickler Awano, who put the happening together, is doing double duty as one of the readers, to be joined by Fran Castan, Elaine Marinoff, Dee Slavutin, Susan Bell, and Hiroo Dickler Awano. What’s more, Lewis Zacks, Michelle Murphy, and Dave Bennett will display and talk about their artwork. A neighborhood cocktail party follows.

About the DiMaggios

    Tom Clavin of Sag Harbor, perhaps the most prolific sports biographer around, will read from his new one, “The DiMaggios,” on Saturday at 2 p.m. at BookHampton in East Hampton.

    Coming hard on the heels of books about two other baseball greats, Roger Maris and Gil Hodges, this one attempts to answer, among other questions, why Joltin’ Joe wasn’t happier, as he seemingly had everything — looks, stratospheric talent, endorsement deals, and, for a time, Marilyn Monroe. His brother Dom, on the other hand, lived something more of an American Dream life, with a loving family and a successful business career when his baseball days were over.

Claire Reed Toughs It Out

    Claire Reed left behind a privileged life of country clubs and golf outings to wade hip deep into the feminist fights, civil rights struggles, and disarmament movement of the latter part of the last century. She would become a tireless organizer and activist for a number of progressive nonprofits, and the right-hand woman of Bella Abzug leading up to and during Abzug’s Congressional career.

    All of which Ms. Reed documents in “Toughing It Out: From Silver Slippers to Combat Boots,” out recently from the Feminist Press. Ms. Reed, a former East Hampton resident and still a visitor here, will read from the book on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Ashawagh Alights

    There are writers workshops and then there are writers workshops. One of the particularly well-liked and better-thought-of groups in these parts, Marijane Meaker’s Ashawagh Hall Writers Workshop, every year arranges readings for its members at the East Hampton Library on the first Monday and Tuesday of the months of June, July, and August.

    On Monday and Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., writers will be in the library’s Bendheim Room to share what they’ve been working on, from fiction to creative nonfiction, and to field questions.

“Bad Boy”

Eric Fischl

Crown, $26

   One of the lasting impressions I have of Eric Fischl was a night at the Parrish Art Museum, where he was in discussion with an adjunct curator about Fairfield Porter’s influences. The curator, who is no longer with the museum, had developed an elaborate theory regarding Diego Velasquez’s influence on Porter, an idea at which Mr. Fischl scoffed.

   As the talk went on, it seemed that Mr. Fischl was increasingly annoyed by the curator, who, in turn, became more uncomfortable and uncertain. It could have been the moment, the artist’s mood, or the curator’s assumption that he understood painting in a way that gave him the agency to speak for artists and their intentions that riled him, but I walked away with the conclusion that Mr. Fischl was an artist who felt passionately about his work and his understanding of painting and that he did not suffer fools gladly.

   In interviews before and after that talk, he was always engaging and apparently sincere. There was no agenda, even when discussing his huge personal project “America: Now and Here,” a mobile multimedia cultural fair that the artist envisioned being set up in temporary locations throughout the country for the exchange of art and ideas in areas that were too remote for them to be engaged in easily. It has yet to be financed.

    So, I went into reading “Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas,” an engrossing and well-written autobiography by Mr. Fischl and Michael Stone, with some mixed impressions of the subject, and now I know why.

    Mr. Fischl had a complicated, angry, and sometimes tragic childhood. He grew up with an alcoholic mother, who died after intentionally crashing a Volks­wagen minibus into a tree during his college years. Although his mother had some artistic talent, his own was never encouraged. When he found it on his own at a community college in Arizona, his mother was threatened and his father discouraged, concerned that his son needed to find a “real” way to make a living.

    Art was always a struggle for him. Although painting came naturally once he discovered his talent, he came of age in a time when at first painting had little value in the art world, and then later his realist style seemed retrograde. His search for subject and style was full of disappointments and challenges, but when he found catharsis in his work by plumbing the depths of his dysfunctional upbringing, he remained true to himself and found success.

    He was fortunate to live through one of the more interesting times in American cultural history. He found his way to Haight-Ashbury during the summer of love in 1968 and ended up in the first class at the legendary art school CalArts in Valencia, Calif. It was there that he made two lifelong friends, David Salle and Ross Bleckner. Through the years, Mr. Salle and Julian Schnabel became Mr. Fischl’s main competition, in his eyes, and his ambitions for his work appear to have been shaped by their successes.

    What is different and effective in this book is that Mr. Fischl, who is as candid as can be about his own issues and hangups, lets others who played significant roles in his life have their say, even those whom he considered rivals, sometimes bitterly so. Such is the case with Mr. Schnabel, who made it clear he did not want Mr. Fischl to be represented by Mary Boone, Mr. Schnabel’s dealer at the time. When she took him on anyway, he changed galleries, but only after publicly mocking a canvas of Mr. Fischl’s hanging in the gallery.

   That was the youthful exuberance of the 1980s. Mr. Schnabel recalls in an essay he wrote for the book that he called Mr. Fischl’s paintings “anemic representations of memories” in a 1987 memoir, but he now says it was unfair. He contrasted his upbringing in tough areas of Brooklyn and Texas with the apparent suburban ennui reflected in Mr. Fischl’s paintings, noting they “didn’t address the violence in my life.” He says he has grown more appreciative of what Mr. Fischl was trying to accomplish. “I was so passionate back then. I took everything personally — the things I loved I stood up for, the things I didn’t, I didn’t.”

    Mr. Fischl says in the book that Mr. Salle and Mr. Schnabel were “reintroducing imagery into their paintings, but they were also making art about art. I was trying to make a more direct connection with the viewer. . . . He’d be thinking he shouldn’t look at the stuff I was painting — scenes of masturbation, incest, voyeurism — but he wouldn’t be able to help himself. The only way to get out of the painting was by dealing with it.”

    Mr. Fischl and his contemporaries came to maturity in New York, a city that defined success through gallery representation and supercharged sales that catapulted artists from obscurity to fame and wealth in the course of a single show. As a beneficiary of that same attention, Mr. Fischl saw his lifestyle, which included a day job as an art shipper — at one point he needed only $1,000 a month to support himself — change quickly to meals at four-star restaurants that cost about that much.

    This monumental shift in the perception of artistic value, so that it correlated with the actual price fetched, changed the art world profoundly in ways we now take for granted.

    What remains with the reader after finishing the book is that, despite Mr. Fischl’s high-octane multinational life­style and star-studded friendships, he remains supremely humble. After years of learning what it means to paint, studying art history, and then teaching what he has learned to others, beginning in his 20s in Nova Scotia, he has strong opinions about art and states them with great assurance, much like that night at the Parrish. But they are hard won and arrived at through experience and serious soul-searching that bring his self-doubts and insecurities into the mix.

    His marriage to April Gornik is also a marvel, as he states himself, as it has survived his drug and alcohol abuse and his art superstardom and then fall. Although that last part, the fall, is hard to reconcile with the continual shows and repeat appearances of his past and current paintings and sculptures in multiple gallery booths at contemporary art fairs throughout the country. He explains that he and Ms. Gornik are the products of similarly difficult childhoods and know how to support each other and give each other distance when necessary.

    What I realized in reading “Bad Boy” was that I had my own preconceived notions about what Mr. Fischl was attempting to accomplish in his paintings, but they fell away the more I came to know him through his words. There is a natural distancing that goes on in most art of the past few decades. It is difficult to come to terms in an honest way with someone baring himself figuratively or others literally.

    I always assumed a certain ironic detachment and projection in his images of naked men and women in comfortable surroundings. Discovering that his parents lolled about naked at home in front of their four children and his household’s continual exchange of roles between parent and child was like experiencing a painting that at first looks abstract, but is instead an extreme close-up of something very real.

   Eric Fischl lives on North Haven.

Mac Griswold on “The Manor”

    A trip into Shelter Island’s deep past — to say nothing of down “the slave staircase” at the island’s storied Sylvester Manor — awaits the historically curious on Saturday at 3 p.m., when Mac Griswold discusses the particulars of her new book, “The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island.” The talk, part of the Sag Harbor Historical Society’s annual meeting, will take place at the Annie Cooper Boyd House on Main Street in that village.

    Ms. Griswold, a landscape historian, first took note of the manor when from a rowboat she spied huge, and thus hundreds of years old, boxwoods on the 243-acre property, which dates to a mid-1600s charter. Held by 11 generations of one family, it once encompassed the entire island.

    The book is due out from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux on July 2. Ms. Griswold will next talk about it at the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack on June 15, before appearances at the East Hampton Library on Aug. 10 and at Sylvester Manor itself, with an accompanying tour, on Aug. 17.

Shakespeare’s Philosophical Pearls

    Whereas lesser men might wonder at how such a surfeit of genius, from fluency of language to psychological insight, could cohere in a single person, Farhang Zabeeh plunges into the Bard’s timeless oeuvre in search of “Philosophical Pearls of the Shakespearean Deep,” the title of his new book (Humanity Books, $39).

    Mr. Zabeeh, a former philosophy professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago and a regular visitor to East Hampton, acknowledges previous philosophical analyses of Shakespeare’s works, back at least to 1774, but differentiates his own book’s intent to reveal the Bard’s “use of the heritage of rich thoughts he acquired and expanded upon” and his “conceptual inventions” as they relate to the “philosophical issues that have preoccupied Western philosophy since ancient times. . . .”

    That is, he reveals Shakespeare’s influences and education when it came to writers and thinkers from Socrates and Plato to Machiavelli and Montaigne — not through sprinkled-in quotations, but comprehensively.

    Mr. Zabeeh’s introduction to the works of Shakespeare came by reading a translation of “Macbeth” as a 16-year-old student in his native Tehran in 1934, he writes in an author’s note. Next came America and the University of California at Berkeley. His five previous books include “Hume: Precursor of Modern Empiricism.”

“Indiscretion”

Charles Dubow

William Morrow, $25.99

   There are no perfect lives. Even people who seem to have it all, whose births appear to have set them on a course that ensures success and happiness, even those fortunate few encounter trouble along the way. And does having it all invite being taken down a peg? Moreover, what if you have it all and still desire more? What then?

    That is the object lesson and these are the questions one takes away from Charles Dubow’s debut novel, “Indiscretion.” Drawing heavily on the Georgica section of East Hampton for its setting provides an added dimension of reality for readers familiar with the East End of Long Island.

    Harry and Madeleine Winslow would seem the ideal couple, leading charmed lives. They are bright, attractive, and accomplished. Harry is a National Book Award-winning author who was a star athlete at Yale, where he met and wooed the beautiful Maddy. Thanks to her family’s “old” money, the Winslows and their young son, Johnny, divide their time between a house on Georgica Pond and a brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (code, I believe, for “having it all”). They are the center of an adoring circle of friends, moving through life with relative ease and comfort.

    Into this circle enters Claire, a young, ambitious woman whom we first encounter as the weekend date of a boorish hedge fund executive. Is there a reader alive who will be surprised that Claire sets her sights on the heroic Harry, or that a torrid affair between the two ensues on two continents? (Is the novel’s title not enough of a clue?)

   Despite the utter predictability of events, the story is — somewhat unaccountably — compelling and unforgettable. Although the copy on the inside flap of the book jacket advertises it as an “irresistibly sensual page-turner,” such is not really the case. The build-up to the extramarital affair, and its consummation, take up slightly less than half of the novel. What follows is the real meat of the work — i.e., the aftermath of Harry’s “indiscretion.” Although the reviewer’s need to steer clear of “spoilers” prevents me from describing much of the content of the second half of the book, I will say that it is far less formulaic (and therefore far more interesting) than the first.

    This is no “Is this just a summer thing, or will you call me in the city?” novel for the beach. It is not the germ of a TV mini-series titled “Privileged Rich People Behaving Badly.” It is, in fact, a genuine morality tale of our time and place.

    The story’s narrator is Maddy’s lifelong friend, Walter Gervais, reminiscent of Nick Carraway in Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Unlike Nick, however, this particular narrator proves troublesome in a number of ways. For starters, he describes events that it is unlikely he knew about, even after the fact, as he claims. Moreover, until the latter part of the novel, Walter is far from likable. His glib tendency to drop references to the lifestyle of the rich and famous makes him smarmy and, somehow, not quite the real thing.

    Although the story of the Winslows’ marriage, Walter’s affair with Claire, and the affair’s aftermath all maintain the reader’s interest consistently, the manner of its telling raises concerns. An author can either tell or show. This novel would have been stronger if there had been more showing. Too much of what we read is simply reported. There is far too little language of imagery. In a story that takes us to East Hampton, Manhattan, Rome, and Paris, we are left hungering for descriptions that appeal to the senses.

    In the book’s final pages, the narrator describes a solitary visit to the back lawn of his Georgica home on an April evening, as strains of Verdi’s “La Traviata” pour out of the open windows: “The shadowy shapes of the trees rise up like old friends, rustling in the breeze. I love this somber fugue of colors, all the purples and silvers and blacks. The tree nearest me, maybe fifteen feet away, is well lit by the lights from the house. . . . I am struck by how tangled the boughs are yet at the same time how beautiful, the filigree impossible to follow. . . . How tall, how graceful, how noble are these trees, how long they took to grow so high and yet how easily they can fall.”

    That is a succinct, thoughtful meta­phor for what has filled the preceding pages. More such writing could only strengthen a solid story.

    In a similar vein, Mr. Dubow appears to hold back when it comes to analysis or insight. Yet here too we know this is something he is capable of. Writing of Madeleine Winslow’s personal back story, he observes, “Like those born without money, those born without love want it all the more. It becomes the great solution, the answer to all problems.” That’s good stuff, reminiscent, in my view, of Fitzgerald’s iconic line, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

    Let us hope that in his next novel, Mr. Dubow will feel free to flex his writer’s muscles even as he exercises his evident storytelling skills.

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

    Charles Dubow spent many summers at his family’s house on Georgica Pond.

Kids’ Reviewers Impaneled

    Reviewing children’s books: all delicacy and tact, or a merciless weeding out? At the Amagansett Library on Saturday, a panel of reviewers will discuss what makes a good children’s book, what criteria goes into an evaluation, and even what might make one “literary.”

    The panelists are Renee McGrath, a reviewer for School Library Journal and a former member of the Newbery Award committee, the library’s Jeanne McDermott, a reviewer for Kirkus and Booklist, Kaylee Davis, the author of “The Barnes & Noble Guide to Children’s Books,” and Todd Jackson, who serves on the Bank Street Children’s Book Award committee. The start time is 6 p.m.

On Warlike Montauk

    You don’t have to be Douglas MacArthur to know that a rocky promontory like Montauk would make a fine defensive position for the unleashing of a cannonade. In 2011, Henry Osmers, the tour guide at the Montauk Point Lighthouse, came out with a book on the subject, broadly speaking: “American Gibraltar: Montauk and the Wars of America,” which covers the time from the Montauketts to Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders on up to the height of the cold war.

    Mr. Osmers will talk about it on Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Amagansett Library.

Writers Reading New Work

    Here’s a reading of a different sort — new works by members of a new group, the Montauk Writers Group. They’ll be staying close to home for an appearance at the Montauk Library on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.

    Fiction to be read includes a Stephanie Krusa story of Abigail, who’s gone about haunting the Montauk Point Lighthouse since 1811. On the nonfiction front, Patria Baradi Pacis has a piece about Music for Montauk’s final concert. There’s poetry in the mix, too, by Audrey Morgan. And Gert Murphy (self-described as “the fastest Catholic girl in Manhattan back in the ’50s”) will share some stories.

    Other writers to read are Dave Krusa, Patti Leber, and Ed Johann. Potential members, in particular, have been invited to listen in.

And Now, “Violets,” Part Four

    Lynne Heffner Ferrante doesn’t stint on detail. The first three volumes of her self-published memoir of growing up in the Bronx, and much more, “An Untenable Fragrance of Violets,” range from close to 400 pages to close to 500. She’ll have a launch party for the fourth installment, subtitled “The Sequel” and set out this way, on Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. at her studio on Chatfield’s Lane in East Hampton.

    Ms. Heffner Ferrante is also an artist in a number of mediums, and the book party will double as an “art event,” a release said. Refreshments will be served and all have been invited. She can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. Her Web site is lynneheffnerferrante.com.

“Sally Ride”

Lynn Sherr

Simon & Schuster, $28

I’m going to come clean. The last time space flight held my attention was on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. In the decades since, I have been more aware of NASA’s failings: the aborted Challenger launch in 1986 that killed, among others, a social studies teacher. Or the terrible re-entry of the Columbia in 2003 that took the lives of seven astronauts. If we’re not finding intelligent life on Mars, I thought, who cares?

Yet, I couldn’t put down “Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space.” In her new biography, Lynn Sherr had me gripped and, I’ll confess, feeling like I’d lost an old friend by the final chapters.

“Who was Sally Ride?” Ms. Sherr, a former ABC journalist, reports asking a classroom of kids in the book’s introduction. That she was the first American woman in space — third in the world, if anyone’s counting — is just part of the story. Ms. Ride was a scholar, an educator, physicist, championship tennis player, and a feminist first. Nonetheless, if Ms. Ride were to have left her own autobiography behind, it would have been whippet thin, claims Ms. Sherr. Words were always Sally’s last resort. Seizing the day was all that mattered; explaining how she felt about it only ruined the fun.

Ms. Sherr struck up an instant friendship with Ms. Ride on being sent by ABC News to cover NASA in 1981. Their association ebbed and flowed until Ms. Ride’s early death from cancer in 2012 at 61 years old. It was Ms. Ride’s long-kept secret that in large part drove Ms. Sherr’s narrative quest — that was her 27-year love relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy, her business partner. Only in her obituary did Ms. Ride “come out” to the world at large. If she couldn’t tell me she was gay, Ms. Sherr asks herself, what kind of friend was I? Yet, no biographer is more equal to the task of cracking the code of Sally Ride than Ms. Sherr, who wonders, somewhat painfully, if she knew her friend at all.

Ms. Sherr had unfettered access to myriad sources — Ms. Ride’s mother, sister, childhood friends, ex-husband, former lovers, teachers, and many of the surviving astronauts of her NASA class, who dubbed themselves the Thirty-Five New Guys (TFNG). The absence of Ms. Ride’s input — she left little trace of her take on much of anything beyond interview quotes — doesn’t mar its perspective. The book succeeds in showing Ms. Ride, to borrow from Tom Wolfe, as a woman in full, in addition to being an astronaut with “the right stuff.”

The author puts to rest the myth that Ms. Ride had “rocket dreams” since childhood. She traces Ms. Ride’s early trajectory as a California girl who won scholarships to the prestigious Westlake School for Girls and later Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania as a ranked tennis player. “Tennis balls don’t bounce in the snow,” said her mother, Joyce. Ms. Ride ended up back under the California sun at Stanford University as a junior transfer student, and she ultimately pursued a Ph.D. there in astrophysics. Her body, she felt, wasn’t up to the physical punishment of a tennis career, even as she was Stanford’s number-one player.

Ms. Sherr sets the story in the context of the women’s movement, repeatedly touching down on milestones that made up the groundswell for equality of which Ms. Ride was a part — among them, Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Title IX, and Sandra Day O’Connor’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Growing up, Sally and her sister, Bear, were singularly unaware of a glass ceiling.

“The Rides raised their daughters without preconceptions or gender constraints,” reports Ms. Sherr, with a characteristically wry quote from Ms. Ride’s mother: “I guess I was oblivious to the fact that men were in any way superior.” At NASA, which was slow to change, Ms. Ride ultimately benefited from a growing unease at the exclusion of minorities and women.

“Sally wanted to be famous,” recalled a friend. “But she wanted to win the Nobel Prize.” Ms. Ride never had any doubt that she would achieve her goals, recasting any derailment ultimately as her own decision. But space travel didn’t occur to her until at age 26 she read an article on the front page of The Stanford Daily with the headline: “NASA to Recruit Women.” Ms. Sherr included a reproduction of that article, as well as Ms. Ride’s quaint handwritten note requesting application materials.

Out of 25,000 requests, 8,079 would-be astronauts applied. A field of 5,680 was narrowed to 1,251 women, of which 659 qualified. Six women were chosen as members of the TFNG’s team. Ms. Ride’s brilliance, calm, and ability to work effectively in a team would put her first to go up in the Challenger in 1983.

What emerges out of Ms. Sherr’s reporting is a woman of contradictions — “an introvert who spent much of her life on the public stage . . . a physicist who loved Shakespeare, a world-renounced space traveler who saw herself as an educator.”

What seems to plague Ms. Sherr unnecessarily is Ms. Ride’s reluctance to come out, even as friends like Billy Jean King were taking the risk. There is even the suggestion, though Ms. Sherr never says so directly, that Ms. Ride married her teammate Steve Hawley to blend more seamlessly into NASA’s culture. They divorced after Ms. Ride left NASA, though her presence on subsequent investigative and strategic planning panels would lend the agency credibility in difficult times.

Ms. Ride was someone who didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. But she was savvy enough to know that what people think makes a difference to the opportunities that come your way. “She knew what she wanted,” said Mr. Hawley. She was going fly with NASA. Later, as C.E.O. of Sally Ride Science — an enterprise that encourages girls to pursue math and science careers — she wasn’t going to let a parent’s regressive views of her sexuality spoil a child’s chance at pursuing her bliss. “I think the gay thing is very secondary to who Sally was,” said her mother, closing the discussion.

No doubt Ms. Ride would have cringed at Ms. O’Shaughnessy’s characterization of her as “just a loving little puppy dog” behind closed doors. Nonetheless, it’s important to know that Ms. Ride, so careful in public, had her softer side, along with a wicked sense of humor. Still, for all the personal revelations, I think she would have been glad for a biography that makes her journey so accessible.

Readers will come away knowing what a O-ring is without getting mired in tech speak and will understand exactly what’s so cool about weightlessness. They’ll also recognize that Ms. Ride was decades ahead of her time. “It’s remarkable how beautiful our planet is, and how fragile it looks,” she told a reporter who wanted to cast her flight in “sexy” spiritual terms. Ms. Ride saw space flight as a way of looking back on ourselves from a broader perspective.

Like her subject, a born educator, Ms. Sherr strives above all to be understood. She’s not going for pyrotechnics in her prose or, for that matter, hagiography. Plain and simple, she aimed to do justice to the legacy of her friend, a true American heroine. She has achieved her goal in this tribute, a thoroughly readable biography.

Ellen T. White, former managing editor of the New York Public Library, is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” an anthology of romantic women of power. She lives in Springs.

Lynn Sherr lives in New York and East Hampton.

Children’s Books Powwow

    Children’s books: So many think they can write them; so few actually do so with skill. Now, for Children’s Book Week, the Amagansett Library has rounded up some top practitioners for panel discussions starting at 6 p.m. this Saturday and continuing next Saturday, May 18.

    First up is “Curiouser & Curiouser,” in which authors and illustrators will reveal where they find inspiration and how they approach their work. Among the participants are Kate and Jim McMullan, the team behind the popular and colorful “I Stink!” line of books, who will discuss “distilling facts for the very youngest.” Melvin and Gilda Berger of Scholastic’s Question and Answer series will speak of nonfiction, and the view from the fiction side will be given by Maureen Sherry, the author of “Walls Within Walls,” a young-adult novel. Erica (“Fish Finelli”) Farber will address how fiction and nonfiction can be blended.

    On the 18th at the library, also at 6 p.m., children’s books reviewers will gather to shed light on what they do and why they sometimes disagree.

Interactive Writing

    At work on a writing project? For 60 bucks, why not take it to a writing coach for a session “overlooking the potato fields” in Southampton on Monday? Debra Scott’s the name, and from 6 to 9 p.m. she’ll welcome newbies as well as the experienced. The focus will be on “creating memorable characters, powerful dialogue, and the all-important beat sheet,” according to a release. Pointers and feedback have been promised.

    Registration, more information, and private sessions are at 237-1040 or [email protected].

“The Interestings”

Meg Wolitzer

Riverhead Books, $27.95

   In the summer of 1974 Julie Jacobson, a 15-year-old self-proclaimed outsider, arrives at Spirit-in-the-Woods, a summer art camp in Belknap, Mass. A “shy, suburban nonentity” from Long Island, where she lives with her recently widowed mother and older sister, Julie longs for something other than the anonymity and world of freaks that she believes she is doomed to inhabit. When she is unexpectedly drawn into a group of five New York City teenagers at the camp, she finds with them a “small packet of happiness.”

   The group consists of the beautiful and sensitive Ash Wolf and her arrogant and handsome older brother, Goodman; the ugly creative genius Ethan Fig; Cathy, who lives to dance, and Jonah, the strikingly handsome son of a successful folk singer who possesses his own musical gift. The six name their group the Interestings, a name meant to carry a good deal of ironic weight, but for Julie the name has the utmost meaning.

    Her new friends and the lives they live (or the lives she imagines they live or will live) enthrall her. They are her best chance of escape from the geographical and intellectual wasteland of suburbia. Because of her friendship with them, she believes she is a different person when she leaves camp at the end of the summer. Her transformation is validated in her name change to Jules, which Ash bestows on her.

    So begins a lifetime of friendships and messy entanglements that Meg Wolitzer traces for the next 30 years of their lives in “The Interestings,” her rewarding new novel about love, marriage, friendship, family, and talent.

    At Spirit-in-the-Woods the six friends seduce themselves and are seduced by the promise of greatness or “greatness-in-waiting.” They all see themselves as artists of one kind or another. However, it is Ethan alone who stays true to his early promise and develops a cartoon concept into the small media empire of “Figland,” an animated television show that he creates, writes, and does voices for. Ash remains artistically involved as a theater director, although how much her success is due to her talent and how much to her social and financial situation is uncertain.

    Jonah abandons his musical talent and denies himself when a fading folksinger takes advantage of the young boy’s gift and imagination. Cathy’s dreams of being a dancer are betrayed by her body type. Goodman wants to be an architect, but he shows no aptitude for it. (He and Cathy become the most removed from the initial group — and from much of the story — because of a tragic scandal and its aftermath that links them.) Jules, who moves to New York City after college, briefly struggles to be a comedic actor but reluctantly accepts that she does not have the necessary talent. This failure, or sense of entitlement denied, haunts her for much of her life.

    Ms. Wolitzer thoughtfully explores the notion of talent and creativity, of how some embrace it and are defined by it while others abdicate their talent because it is too much of a burden, and still others yearn for a creativity that will never be theirs while ignoring that which is theirs to nurture and develop.

    Jules is the primary axis around which the story is told. She sees herself as the perennial outsider looking in. Her position on the periphery of Ash and Goodman’s family is the closest she ever expects to experience “a cultured, lively family that celebrated everything.” She thinks them vivid, alive, and desirable, while her mother and sister are perceived to live small and quiet lives in the suburbs, jealous of her tentative attachment to the Wolfs’ cosmos. Unable to escape her “craving for a big life,” Jules experiences a persistent sense of loneliness, of not belonging, even after her marriage to Dennis and the birth of their daughter, Aurora.

    Ash and Ethan unexpectedly marry and become the “big-deal couple” by which Jules measures her own disappointment and envy. She sees in them, as she saw in the Wolf family, the life she believes she desires if not deserves. She is seduced (and deceived) by what she sees their lives to be — never seeming to recognize Ash and Ethan’s own problems and disappointments, both individually and as a couple, not the least of which is Ethan’s lifelong desire for Jules, his true soul mate.

    Constantly comparing her life — her husband, their apartment, their jobs, their bank account — with that of Ash and Ethan, Jules finds the difference between her life and that of her friends “humiliating” because of Ethan’s artistic and commercial success. In her eyes the Wolf family and then Ash and Ethan “could do no wrong.” And she continues to see much of her life with Dennis as small and sad compared to that of Ash and Ethan. Even Aurora suffers in comparison to Larkin, Ash and Ethan’s daughter. In her mother’s eyes, she is “not stellar like Larkin,” who is also easier to love.

    Jules, however, is lucky in having Dennis as her husband. Although he suffers his own heavy burden (and Jules, to give her credit, never truly wavers in her support of him), he freely accepts his averageness and clearly sees their friends as flawed, ordinary people rather than the near demigods that Jules continually sees. Dennis recognizes his wife’s faults, even indulges them, as he waits for her to “get over herself.” They are both even luckier in their daughter, who may be the most well adjusted character in the story.

    Against the backdrop of many of the social and historical touchstones of the last quarter of the 20th century — AIDS, Watergate, autism, the Unification Church and the Moonies, child labor exploitation, 9/11 — Ms. Wolitzer deftly and subtly weaves a rich tapestry from and through her characters’ lives as she explores the complications of love, family, and friendship. There is tremendous depth and emotional richness to all of the characters, making them extremely believable. They are handled with intelligence, warmth, and wisdom — the reader is drawn into their stories.

    Ms. Wolitzer could have easily held almost any one of them up to satire and cruel humor, but she refuses to do so. She provides instead thoughtful and compassionate portraits of human characters with all their faults and disappointments allowing them to come alive as touchingly real. They are not always likable, especially Jules, but there are no simple heroes or villains here. The characters are fully formed with a complex and nuanced reality.

    In a fairer world Meg Wolitzer — a writer of consistent clarity, grace, wisdom, and wit — would enjoy greater recognition as being among the best writers of her generation. Here is hoping that this wonderfully accomplished novel, which reads much shorter than its nearly 500 pages, will help bring to her the larger audience and wider acclaim she deserves.

   William Roberson taught literature at Southampton College for 30 years. He now works at L.I.U. Post and lives in Mastic.

    Meg Wolitzer is a frequent visitor to her family’s house in Springs. She teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton.