Poets Laureate, Ho!

    National Poetry Month: Get it while you can, versification fans. At Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, to name one outlet, a couple of county poets laureate, Ed Stever of Suffolk and Linda Opyr of Nassau, will step to a lectern or its approximation to read starting at 5 p.m. on Saturday.

    Mr. Stever, an adjunct professor of English at Suffolk Community College, is a past Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of an Emerging Writers Award from the SoHo Arts Festival. His collections include “Propulsion” and “Transparency,” from Writers Ink Press. Ms. Opyr’s work has appeared in The New York Times and The Hudson Review. Her latest volume of poems is “The Ragged Cedar.”

    What’s more, you may want to take heed of Canio’s Earth Day celebration on April 20 at 5 p.m., as a call has gone out for readers of “short selections of poetry or prose that express concern for the Earth” — your own work or someone else’s. Details of an essay contest (theme: environmental awareness) will be announced then, too.

Shades of the Green Mill

    The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill is doing something a bit different for the officially sanctioned National Poetry Month: a Sub 30 Poetry Slam that starts at 6 p.m. tomorrow in the Lichtenstein Theater. The “Sub 30” part refers to age, and the poets in this competition, from 21 to 29 years old, have submitted work on the theme of “my generation.” The 12 finalists will read, and the audience will judge. The winner gets $100.

    Tickets cost $10, and are free for museum members, children, and students. Reservations can be made in advance online at parrishart.org.

Life Without The New Yorker: Worth It?

    In case you’ve missed it, writers and editors of some consequence have lately been schlepping up a flight of stairs to the Radio Lounge in Chancellors Hall on the (yes, still active) campus of Stony Brook Southampton. This week, for the M.F.A. program’s Writers Speak series, on Wednesday at 7 p.m., it’s Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, interviewed by someone who once held that position, the college’s own Daniel Menaker. Ms. Treisman won the 2012 Maxwell Perkins Award for achievement in the field of fiction, and has been an editor at Harper’s and The New York Review of Books.

    But wait, we can’t leave without one more nod to the poets: Monday is the early acceptance deadline for the July 10 to July 28 Southampton Writers Conference, which offers classes with top-shelf poets such as Grace Schulman and Billy Collins. More information is on the college’s Web site, stonybrook.edu/sb/southampton.

“Monsieur Proust’s

Library”

Anka Muhlstein

Other Press, $19.95

   Anthropologists have suggested that societies without writing have a linear sense of time, while in literate societies the sense of time is cumulative. It stands to reason, then, that the great novel of the last century, with its accumulative thrust and ruminations on the past, was also a book about, well, books.

   Perhaps nowhere more than in “In Search of Lost Time” are literary tastes so paramount to defining character. Next to art, childhood, homosexuality, love, memory, and society, the central themes of Proust’s novel are manners and aesthetics. Throughout the novel, characters reveal themselves by what and how they read. The bookish Bloch falls in the narrator’s estimation when he hastily dismisses the work of Racine and Ruskin, while the Duchesse de Guermantes bares her genius by using literature as “a wonderfully subtle social instrument of domination,” invoking Darwin to dazzle her dinner guests and reciting Victor Hugo’s poetry to best her husband’s poorly read mistress.

    Like “Balzac’s Omelette,” her lighthearted study of the impact of gourmandizing on Balzac’s oeuvre, Anka Muhlstein’s latest work of literary investigation, “Monsieur Proust’s Library,” is a concise, accessible affair — part biography, part criticism — that examines “In Search of Lost Time” through the lens of its author’s reading mores. Despite the book’s brevity (it runs to 129 pages), Ms. Muhlstein covers a large canvas, drawing a portrait of the artist as a young reader and disclosing some of the ways Proust absorbed literature into his final masterpiece.

    Arguably the most interesting sections of “Monsieur Proust’s Library” are devoted to those immediate predecessors Proust admired with reservations: Balzac and Ruskin. Ms. Muhlstein points out several lightly veiled Ruskin appearances in the novel: How his theory that beauty resides in “the simplest objects” is parroted in Proust’s novel by the painter Elstir; how the book the narrator falls asleep to in the novel’s opening may be Ruskin’s “The Bible of Amiens”; how “sesame,” the password to gain entrance to the male brothel, is a comical allusion to the fastidious art critic’s book “Sesame and Lilies.”

    More important, Ms. Muhlstein convincingly argues that Ruskin provided the young novelist with a sense of architectural design. Proust spent nine years translating — or polishing his mother’s translations of — Ruskin’s works, and, although his enthusiasm for the English critic waned over time, what he learned in the process was profound. Proust’s introduction to Ruskin’s “Sesame and Lilies,” which Ms. Muhlstein quotes from, speaks volumes about the construction of “In Search of Lost Time”:

    “Ruskin arranges side by side, mingles, maneuvers, and makes shine together all the main ideas — or images — which appeared with some disorder in the course of his lecture. . . . But in reality the fancy that leads him follows his profound affinities which in spite of himself impose on him a superior logic. So that in the end he happens to have obeyed a kind of secret plan which, unveiled at the end, imposes retrospectively on the whole a sort of order and makes it appear magnificently arranged up to this final apotheosis.”

    As for Balzac, Ms. Muhlstein illustrates how, despite Proust’s reservations about the French author’s inelegant style and excessive explanations of his characters’ feelings, Balzac’s work may have paved the way for the more cautious Proust to write openly about homosexuality. Proust, Ms. Muhlstein writes, “reveled in Balzac’s boldness” and morally neutral exploration of homosexual themes. One of Balzac’s inventions, the escaped convict Vautrin of “The Human Comedy,” gave Proust a model for his own mature homosexual character, the Baron de Charlus.

    “Monsieur Proust’s Library” is an agreeable addition to the growing list of original books about “In Search of Lost Time,” such as Alain de Botton’s “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” Eric Karpeles’s “Paintings in Proust,” and Phyllis Rose’s “The Year of Reading Proust.” Like Mr. de Botton’s charming, irreverent book, which draws a convincing portrait of Proust in the guise of a self-help book, “Monsieur Proust’s Library” pursues serious scholarship while remaining genial to the lay reader.

    Yet the risk of such books is that one reader may want for more academic rigor where another wants for more levity. Ms. Muhlstein’s suggestions about Proust’s methods and motives, about the books that shaped his characters, are thought-provoking. They are also, occasionally, mundane. Strangely enough, for a book this short, one wishes that an editor had actually excised a few of the sentences, especially those attesting to the obvious: that books mattered a lot to Proust.

   Will Schutt won the 2012 Yale Younger Poets Prize. His poems and translations have appeared in The Southern Review and A Public Space, among other journals, and he has a collection, “Westerly,” due out in April. He lives in Wainscott.

    Anka Muhlstein lives part time in Sagaponack.

“Saul Steinberg:

A Biography”

Deirdre Bair

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $40

   Saul Steinberg’s sharply ironic drawings became so well known in the 20th century that the term “Steinbergian” was readily understood as a reference to a perceptive and piercing wit that stemmed from some slightly off-kilter way of looking at the world.

   Probing the mind behind this art, in the format of a biography, would seem to be an inevitable endeavor. There is much to suggest that Steinberg thought so too, for he saved every souvenir of his life and arranged for his archive to be deposited with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. This and other archival accumulations plus recollections gleaned from many interviews provide content for an insightful narrative that can seem edgy at those moments when aspects of his personal relationships are pushing norms of social behavior, or when Steinberg’s myths about himself come into play, or when the reader confronts excessive amounts of the artist’s own documentation of the churning neuroses in his life.

    Deirdre Bair has previously proven her talent for examining a life and making details yield meaning. Her biography of Samuel Beckett won a National Book Award and her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Carl Jung, and Anais Nin also received prestigious honors. In choosing to write about Steinberg (1914-1999), whose drawings (especially those appearing in The New Yorker and on its covers) she had long collected in printed form, Ms. Bair once again took on the challenge of chronicling a deeply introspective achiever possessing very unusual creative sensibilities.

    Ms. Bair weaves her research and wealth of material adroitly — although at times exhaustingly — as she recounts Steinberg’s roots in Romania; the anti-Semitic experiences of his boyhood, which he forever blamed for his haunted persona; the swift recognition of his talent in Italy and then America; the difficult escape from Europe in 1941; wartime service in an information unit of the United States Navy; the income generated by the reception to his art; every type of personal or business interaction; the marriage to Hedda Sterne; the attachment to his house in Springs; the tortuous 35-year relationship with Sigrid Spaeth; therapeutic travels; sexual escapades; anxieties, obsessions, and depressions.

    Many will appreciate the author’s alertness to sources for specific imagery Steinberg repeated often, even as he processed new observations about new regions. There were experiences during his early years in Europe, for example, that influenced the artificial diplomas, false certificates, seemingly official government seals, tiny rubber-stamp figures, fanciful maps, pseudo-paper currency, postage stamps, marching soldiers, people fashioned from fingerprints, and elegant but undecipherable script.

    Always penetrating, Ms. Bair suggests that a certain frequently used stylized female aligns with the artist’s domineering, hypochondriac mother, Rosa. His father, Moritz Steinberg, collected wooden type and reproductions of famous paintings for his ornamented box and decorative arts factory in Bucharest, and takes a ­significant role among the formative sources for his son’s pictorial quotations.

    There is also rewarding background relating to the way Steinberg’s drawings can make buildings yield particularly strong messages. His use of Art Deco characteristics stems, tellingly, from his impressions of Miami, where he first entered the United States as an immigrant in 1942. More hints of the role buildings had in shaping his special sensibilities are found in his energizing years enrolled in the architecture program at Regio Politecnico in Milan. He made the effort to take final exams and complete his degree requirements only when Italy’s new restrictions on Jewish students became a threat to graduation.

   He credited the launch of his unusual skill with a pencil, then pen, to a Politecnico drawing professor who instructed him to “show something more than what the eye can see.” In interviews for an autobiographical manuscript, Steinberg further explained that he found himself “retaining the attitude of a child, looking at the external world as if for the first time.” (As one of her sources, Ms. Bair uses this manuscript, prepared by the artist’s lifelong friend from the Regio Politecnico years, Aldo Buzzi. Selected excerpts were published by Buzzi as “Reflections and Shadows” in 2002.)

    At least one famous New Yorker cover featured a mystical, watery horizon that Steinberg often repeated, and Ms. Bair emphasizes his use of Louse Point in Springs as the basic source. The site is a short bicycle ride from the home on Old Stone Highway that he purchased in 1959 and left to his niece and nephew at his death. Occasional alterations to the property form part of the narrative, especially Steinberg’s addition of a larger studio.

    The artist’s commercial commissions are discussed with considerable detail, providing information about his handling of copyright, contracts, reproduction rights, publishing agents, and legal counsel. The range of these business endeavors shows projects as grand as stage sets and murals, as well as other undertakings more broadly targeted as profitable: mass production arrangements for fabrics, wallpaper, greeting cards, posters, and advertising campaigns. Ms. Bair’s intention is to underscore Steinberg’s popularity as well as his income, and she notes, “By the late ’50s he was on the verge of becoming a very wealthy man who had the luxury of doing exactly what he wanted to do.”

    There were books of artworks too, some requested by publishers and others self-initiated. Ms. Bair uses this aspect of Steinberg’s career to portray him as deeply philosophical and sensitive to every nuance of interpretation as he pondered various combinations of drawings produced over decades. Creating work that could transcend a specific time or situation and achieve universality pleased him enormously. Book and catalog essays often came from literary figures, including Harold Rosenberg, John Updike, Arthur Danto, John Hollander, Italo Calvino, Michel Butor, and Roland Barthes. Many writers were also friends, to some degree. At times Ms. Bair’s efforts to show intellectual rapport between Steinberg and renowned men and women of letters raise more questions than they satisfy, for the text can seem like inventories of dinner party attendees.

    A tendency to be overly generous in listing celebrity names is one of the problems with this extensively detailed book. Another is the way the author gives the impression that she has not formed an attitude toward her subject. She seems in awe of Steinberg’s talent, praising every small and large accomplishment and suggesting that he be defined as a social historian and cultural anthropologist, yet at the same time she shapes and selects documentation for his emotional thoughts and actions as if inviting the reader to form negative judgments. In still another vein, she seems to offer childhood experiences and inherited angst as excuses for behavioral extremes. In offering citations, she references interviews and the vast breadth of the Steinberg archival material, especially the correspondence. Letters addressed to Buzzi confide most every private passion over more than 60 years, for example.

    The book’s two paths, the career and the personal relationships, both have the ingredients to propel the narrative with much momentum, yet they also produce a disharmony that can feel irritating. Discussions about the art achievements occasionally seem recitative in Ms. Bair’s handling, while the exposure of Steinberg’s psyche might seem overwhelming in its thoroughness. Yet both avenues are compelling, and certainly they help the book to more than adequately deliver the complexity that characterized Steinberg’s life.

   Phyllis Braff is an art critic, curator, and former museum administrator who lives in East Hampton.

Caro Does It Again — and Again

    Robert A. Caro won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography last Thursday for “The Passage of Power,” the latest installment in his magisterial, multipart assessment, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” Two earlier books in the series have won the same award. This year’s ceremony was held at the New School in New York City.

    Also late last month, Mr. Caro, who lives in East Hampton part of the year, was awarded the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize. It means he is now “American historian laureate,” and in April he can pick up a medal and a $50,000 prize at a black-tie dinner that’s part of the historical society’s Weekend With History symposium.

Long Island’s Other Railroad

    Forget the Confederate flag that once flew over Sagaponack. Consider instead our fair Island’s role in helping slaves find freedom by way of the Underground Railroad. Kathleen Gaffney Velsor has done just that, and has written a book about her research, “The Underground Railroad on Long Island: Friends in Freedom,” out last month from the History Press. As the subtitle suggests, the book emphasizes involvement by the Quakers, but it also covers the first free black communities on the Island and the efforts of people like the Post family in Old Westbury. Old Westbury, in fact, is where Ms. Velsor is now an associate professor in the School of Education at the campus of the State University of New York. She’ll talk about her book on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

“The Richest Woman

in America”

Janet Wallach

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $27.95

    “If a man had lived as did Mrs. Hetty Green, devoting the greater part of his time and mind to the increasing of an inherited fortune,” reported a New York Times obituary in 1916, “. . . nobody would have seen him as very peculiar — as notably out of the common.” Had Hetty Green been a man, even today her name might be more often mentioned among the great financiers of the Gilded Age. In her time, as the biographer Janet Wallach notes, Hetty was acknowledged as “Queen of Wall Street,” New York City’s leading lender, a woman who would have ranked on the current Forbes 400 list with holdings that would be valued at an equivalent of $2 billion.

    “I buy when things are low and nobody wants them,” was Hetty’s frequently iterated ideology. “I keep them until they go up and people are crazy to get them.” Brokers scrambled over one another to watch Hetty’s every move; her utterances were of as much interest to the press as those of Warren Buffett today.

    What a delight it is to find Hetty Green! Ms. Wallach’s “The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age,” published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, is one of a handful of biographies written on this subject. The research findings are slim, the author notes. There were no diaries, journals, or correspondence to pick over — only thousands of articles of varying reliability from newspapers and magazines from around the world.

    As such, Ms. Wallach calls her work more of “an impressionistic painting” than a traditional biography. As she did with her best-selling “Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell,” the author nonetheless succeeds in bringing her subject vividly to life. Hetty comes off as a kind of shrewd, eccentric aunt who might dominate your holiday table. Through her, the excesses and hypocrisies of the Gilded Age come into sharp focus. “I am glad Miss Gladys Vanderbilt is not my daughter,” said Hetty, footnoting a trend toward marrying the daughters of great industrial fortunes to titled nobility. “Girls who go to Europe to get their husbands deserve what they get and more.”

    Hetty Howland Robinson was born in 1834 in New Bedford, Mass., into a Quaker home. Her overbearing father, Edward Robinson, was no doubt drawn to Abby Howland’s whaling fortune. Nonetheless, he was sorely disappointed by his wife’s inability to bear a son. Hetty, their only child, was intermittently farmed out to her grandfather’s care; the women of the house — a step-grandmother and a maiden aunt — cared for Hetty haphazardly. In defense she developed fiery temper tantrums. As her father’s eyesight dimmed, Hetty found salvation. She filled the breach by reading stock market reports aloud to her father and accompanied him on his business rounds. “There is nothing better than this sort of training,” she said. Money became the hearth of Hetty’s unhappy home.

    Early on, Hetty developed an interest in the effect of compound interest on a dollar saved. Edward Robinson sent his daughter, a budding debutante, to New York with $1,200 to buy the clothes needed to find her way in high society there. She used $200 for gowns and invested the rest in bonds, which, she proudly reported to her father, had grown in value. Thus was born Hetty’s legendary reputation for frugality bordering on the miserly. It wasn’t what money could buy that mattered to her, but the accumulation of wealth itself, which she did chiefly through railroads stocks, mortgage bonds, and foreclosed real estate. While others flocked to make an overnight fortune, Hetty bided her time and did her homework. When the bubble burst, she took the spoils.

    Even when she was in command of many millions, Hetty — a handsome woman, dressed perennially in Quaker black — often looked like a charity case. “This eccentric woman,” wrote The Boston Evening Transcript, “certainly proves that the possession of money and its use for personal adornment are not inseparable in the makeup of womankind.” While other Gilded Age financiers built Fifth Avenue palaces, Hetty lived in modest boarding houses all over the city and in Hoboken, N.J., frequently moving to avoid the taxes that came with a permanent residence. When the city assessed her for $1.5 million in back taxes, Hetty produced the documentation in court to prove them wrong. She thrilled to the din of litigation almost as much as the ka-ching of money piling up in her bank account. Hetty was endlessly suspicious of being taken for her money and feared being poisoned. She loved her pets because “they don’t care how rich I am.”

    It would be so easy to reduce Hetty to a caricature; indeed, the press did at the time. But Ms. Wallach has created a woman in full. Hetty married Edward Henry Green, a financier, at the advanced age of 34 and had two adored children. They lived quite happily in London and New York on Edward’s fortune, as stipulated in her prenuptial agreement — though, as Ms. Wallach notes, business was still business. Hetty booted Edward when he used her funds as collateral against his sinking enterprise. Nevertheless, they remained tender friends until the end of his life.

   Hetty doted on her son, Ned, and fretted over her retiring daughter, Sylvia, for whom she sought a husband whose ardor wasn’t colored by dollar signs. In the absence of concrete evidence of Hetty’s thoughts, Ms. Wallach draws from Dr. Sloper of Henry James’s 1880 short story “Washington Square”: “My daughter is a wealthy woman with a large fortune. She is about as intelligent as a bundle of shawls.” If Ms. Wallach uses smoke and mirrors on occasion to tell her story, she does so with flair, calling on period luminaries such as Edith Wharton and Mark Twain for an assist.

    Disappointingly, Hetty was no feminist, engaging in a practice of personal exceptionalism. She herself preferred to “have a part of the great movements of the world . . . and to deal with big things and big men.” But for women in general, she allowed that “the chief sphere of woman is home; her most important duties are that of wife and mother.” She believed in business education for women to understand a man’s pressures, but she advised that the best way to be a good wife was to make yourself “pretty as a wax doll” for his homecoming at the end of the day. “I don’t believe in suffrage,” Hetty said, “and I haven’t any respect for women who dabble in such trash.”

    Part of why “The Richest Woman in America” is such an entertaining read is that Ms. Wallach places the character of Hetty firmly in her time and against her social class, of which she was its antithesis in most ways. The crisp narrative moves smoothly between the New York drawing rooms and Newport cottages of the Astors and the Vanderbilts to the antics of Hetty, who thought nothing of entering into a shoving match with a disagreeable maid. Ms. Wallach notes a lavish dinner party at the Knickerbocker that featured a duck pond with live ducks, and another for the Duchess of Devonshire in which rosebushes ran down the center of the dining table. The fabulously wealthy played at living like royalty in displays that rivaled the court of Louis XIV.

    Cut to Hetty, whose salty style of speech, hilariously, throws cold water on all pretense of nobility. “He wants me to stop talking, and I want him to stop snoring,” said Hetty of a judge in one of her numerous court cases. “He makes his noise with his nose, and I make mine with my mouth. It’s nearly the same, ain’t it?”

    Hetty Howland Robinson Green was what we all aspire to be: unabashedly ourselves and a success in spite of it. That she was a businesswoman on an epic scale in the age of corsets and crinolines makes her nothing short of a phenomenon — inspiring a hundred years later, in our “liberated” time, when women still walk on eggshells in high-finance spheres. “She had enough courage to live as she chose . . . and she observed such of the world’s conventions as seemed to her right and useful,” wrote The New York Times at her death.

    Ms. Wallach has accomplished a feat in her portrait of Hetty — a worthy biography that’s also a page-turner.

   Ellen T. White, former managing editor of the New York Public Library, is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” a humorous how-to that culls the lessons of the great romantic women of history. She lives in Springs.

    Janet Wallach lives in Amagansett.

    Ever feel that modernity has gotten so strange you must be living on another planet? In “The Twinning Project” (Clarion Books, $16.99), Robert Lipsyte of Shelter Island posits a second Earth created by alien scientists to study evolution. But humans, as humans will, have made a mess of things (our stock-in-trade: war, starvation, genocide, environmental degradation), and the project is being abandoned — no more Earths.

    It’s 1957 on the second Earth, however, and in case you haven’t been paying attention, what a difference a few decades can make. The author uses the contrast to continue the fine sci-fi tradition of laying out a social critique in the midst of a ripping good yarn.

    Mr. Lipsyte has written young-adult novels before — “One Fat Summer,” for one — but this is his first foray into fiction for the middle grades, according to the jacket copy. Thus the setting of twin middle schools in New Jersey, attended by the book’s twin heroes, Tom and Eddie Canty — 2011 kid, 1950s kid; antisocial techie hacker and well-adjusted star athlete. They keep in touch through “thought beams.”

    Nostalgia may be easy, but facts is facts, as they say, and the adult reader can be forgiven for getting swept up in a wistfulness for the leisurely pace and sensible mores of the Eisenhower-era seventh grade — no teaching-to-the-test rush, no gym teachers attending to their iPhones at the expense of instruction, no teachers dressing like teenagers and giving fist-bumps, no awful “teachable moment” jargon.

    The story, in fact, hinges on a schoolwide Tech Off! Day effort in 2011 led by Eddie, who, having time-traveled to trade places with his twin, offers, “I think all these gadgets get in the way.” He answers the question “Besides, what would we do without the Internet?” with, “Talk to each other? Try to get along better?”

    He does just that with a pimpled hulk of a bully, Britzky, diplomatically averting a showdown, calling him by his first name for a change, soliciting his help in the cause of circumventing the aliens. The big guy’s even got a brain and an interest in extraterrestrials and government cover-ups. It’s just one of a number of worthwhile lessons in the book. (Maybe you’ve had a similar experience: The murderous-looking hick you sit next to at the truck stop counter turns out to be a birder with a heck of a life list.)

    Those two join forces with Tom and a couple of likable outcasts — Alessa (heavy, too smart and skeptical to be popular) and Ronnie (shrimpy and chronically underfed, disheveled and essentially homeless) — to try to save the Earths. A warning: There’s no war of the worlds here, but rather a sly sensibility and a slow reveal of an absorbing plot leading to an end point at a hospital for the criminally insane — and to a welcome future sequel.

“1, 2, 3 . . . by the Sea”

    If the profusion of beaches is the primary reason for living here, then surely the best way to introduce a kid on the East End to reading and counting is with a picture book charmingly illustrating all manner of sandy fun to be had down by the water.

    “1, 2, 3 . . . by the Sea,” out this month from Kane Miller, is by Dianne Moritz with illustrations by Hazel Mitchell. It stars a boy, his mom, and his dog, Max, whose adventures progress in rhyme from “Striped umbrellas in the sun . . . flapping, snapping. We rent one” on up to “Plovers hide in beach-grass glen . . . peeping, sleeping. We spot ten.” They don’t head home till the moon comes up.

    This is a slim little book of 30-some pages retailing for only $6.99, and yet you parental bibliophiles out there might find yourselves wishing for a biographical note or two, maybe a sentence on the mediums used by the illustrator. But until then: Dianne Moritz lives in North Sea. Her previous children’s book, also from Kane Miller, was the summery “Hush, Little Beachcomber.”

“On My Way to the Bath”

    Speaking of watery counting, the prolific painter, cartoonist, and puppeteer Michael Paraskevas of Southampton is back with another kids’ book, this time joining Sarah Maizes, a Los Angeles humorist and former animation exec.

    “On My Way to the Bath” (Walker & Company, $15.99) takes on a perennial struggle for parents — bath time. And those are the first two words here, uttered by a harried mom to little Livi, who’d frankly prefer to let her imagination run wild, which she does as long as possible and in every possible way, in every room, to put off her “boring” soak.

     In his colorful, seemingly quick-sketched style, Mr. Paraskevas depicts Livi as a snake terrifying her baby brother, a builder of a monstrous sculpture made of blocks, a rock star cutting a rug to her older sister’s iPod, and so on until she becomes a pouncing cat attacking her poor mother. Paraskevas fans will find happily familiar touches throughout — what looks like the Tangerine Bear, a jungle straight out of the Green Monkeys, even Livi’s impishness, which echoes that of Junior Kroll.

    The numbers, though, have to do with Mom’s annoyed counting to 10, at the end of which Livi better be in the tub, or else.

    Of course then she doesn’t want to get out.

Two Awards, Two Very Different Writers

    From hard-earned merit to simple reminders that the stuff’s out there to prompts to pry your eyes from the wrecked lives on “World’s Worst Tenants,” there can never be too many literary awards. Agreed? James Salter of Bridgehampton, one of the country’s most admired fiction writers, bagged another earlier this month, and it’s new. The Windham Campbell Prizes “recognize emerging and established writers for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama,” according to the Web site, which goes on to describe the awards as “the MacArthur Genius Grants just for writing.”

    It means $150,000 for Mr. Salter. His books — always masculine, often sensual, in clear, unadorned prose — date from “The Hunters,” a 1956 novel based on his experiences as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, to the legendary “A Sport and a Pastime,” from 1967, to “Last Night,” a collection of stories published in 2005. Next month, at the age of 87, he’ll be coming out with “All That Is,” a novel. An awards ceremony will be held on Sept. 10 at Yale University.

    Also just announced were the finalists for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, among them one Davida Singer for her collection “Port of Call,” from Plain View Press. She’s the author of “Shelter Island Poems,” published by Canio’s Editions in 1995. Ms. Singer, who teaches writing and literature at Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts, has divided her time between New York City and the East End for 20 years or so. In addition to explorations of her relationship with her aging parents and peregrinations to Vermont, Montreal, and Florida, “Port of Call” features a “Long Island: East End” section of nighttime walks in the countryside and encounters with swallows, raccoons, and imagined parents “posed like frozen deer / among the trees.”

    The award is part of the Publishing Triangle Awards, “honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in 2012.” They will be given out on April 25 at 7 p.m. at the New School in New York.

Trip to Zebratown

    The story goes that Greg Donaldson’s 1994 book, “The Ville,” used a photo of Kevin Davis on the cover, which, it just so happens, resulted in his subsequent identification and incarceration. But no hard feelings. The two later got together, made amends, and started a project that led to another book by Mr. Donaldson, “Zebratown,” which came out in 2010. It chronicles life after close to a decade of lockup for Mr. Davis, a boxer, welder, and former resident of the Brownsville section of Brooklyn who tries to start over in Elmira, N.Y., where he becomes involved in an interracial relationship with a single mother of a 6-year-old girl.

    Mr. Donaldson, a professor at John Jay College who has a house in East Hampton, will talk about his work and sign copies of his books at the East Hampton Library on Saturday starting at 3 p.m.

“In the Land

of the Living”

Austin Ratner

Reagan Arthur Books, $25.99

   The follow-up to his award-winning debut, Austin Ratner’s second novel, “In the Land of the Living,” is the story of fathers and sons, stepfathers and surrogate fathers, brothers-in-arms and brothers estranged. It may be read as multiple bildungsromans; or as a tragic family saga of ambitious, fatherless men looking for acceptance in genteel — a k a gentile — America; or as a satire of manboys with congenital hemorrhoids.

   The first section of the novel follows Isidore, the son of Jewish immigrants, as he comes of age in Cleveland. The family’s last name, Auberon, is a corruption of their Polish name, Abramowicz. Before long, Isidore’s mother dies of stomach cancer, and his father, Ezer, an abusive jack-of-all-trades, abandons his children to the care of foster homes and orphanages. By the “force of his personality,” Isidore gains access to the ivory tower, excels in medical school, and marries into a well-heeled family. Life’s a dream. Until, that is, Isidore dies abruptly, leaving behind two little boys of his own.

    Isidore’s eldest son, Leo, is the protagonist of the second half of the novel. Like his father, he is ambitious, angry at the world, and hesitant to get a leg-up from his forebears. A straight-A student, he chooses to attend Yale over his father’s alma mater, Harvard, because: “To repair a legacy that lay in ruins was no easier or harder, he reasoned, than to start one from scratch. . . .” Or else, Mr. Ratner writes just a few lines later, “To use his legacy at Harvard would be to cheat and to lie to himself and leave the question open of just how strong he was.”

   Mr. Ratner frequently attests to his characters’ brilliance, but little of their brilliance is ever on display. Despite the abundance of doctors in the novel, there’s seldom any mention of medicine. When not dropping demotic nothings (“There’s a huge painting of [Oliver Hazard] Perry in the capitol . . . It’s crazy-looking”), Isidore’s father-in-law, Dr. Neuwalder, the man supposedly responsible for curing sickle-cell anemia and inventing gene therapy, concocts implausible platitudes (“People say you live every day as if it’s your last — and maybe that works for people who have no idea what a last day on earth is like. I say, you live every day like you’re gonna live forever”) and Buddhist bromides (“It seems to me since then that a person’s a homunculus, and the child is the greater part of the self, and everything that comes after in life is in comparison a veneer”).

   Medicine appears to be the least of anyone’s concerns, particularly Leo’s, who is more interested in shtupping Melody, the vegan from Portland, than in caring for the sick.

    Melodys, Danielles, Dustys, Mi­chelles: The women in “In the Land of the Living” live up to their bling name badges. Bailey from Brown is described as having “a French beauty about her, which is to say a dignified beauty cultivated like a crop by hundreds of years of genetic snobbery. . . . And mixed with her easy, stainless, French beauty was an American ruggedness and openness.”

    As for Melody: “It seemed odd that [she] was single, since she was sexy with dark hair and a clear gentile face and had such a nice-smelling bathroom . . . Melody was very motherly in a certain way.”

    Then there is Leo’s overblown love scene with busty Michelle from the University of Michigan: “[T]hey fit right together like two puzzle pieces meant for perfect apposition. He felt on his own chest the soft successive rise of hers against him, like the susurrant camber and retreat of waves on the sand. Her eyes were so alert and open and he was so close to them he could see splinters of topaz shining in her green irises.”

    That this is a novel about fathers and sons does not excuse Mr. Ratner from plopping every woman under neon light; it is troubling to watch an author treat characters with so much uninspired fantasy. Many are described with the same blithe, generic observations Mr. Ratner makes about the cities Leo and his younger brother, Mack, drive through at the novel’s end: L.A. suffers smog, San Francisco steep hills, and Portland earnest vegans (vide Melody above).

    Cleveland, Mr. Ratner’s hometown, is more convincingly drawn, and his portraits of children are genuinely funny and endearing. Yet the book is, ultimately, scattershot; there is too much Sturm und Drang for the story to be comic and too much cheap humor to call it tragic. Part of the trouble with defining “In the Land of the Living” stems from the novel’s radically inconsistent style. A reader is served Bruno Schulz for starters, James Joyce for an entree, and a slice of Judd Apatow to finish. Unfortunately, the perceptions of Leo and Isidore pale in comparison to “Portrait of the Artist,” and their Lost Boys attitude has less heart than “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

    Will Schutt, who lives in Wainscott, won the 2012 Yale Younger Poets Prize. “Westerly,” a collection of his poems, will be published by Yale University Press next month.

    Austin Ratner, the author of “The Jump Artist,” is a regular visitor to East Hampton, where he has family. He is clinical assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine.

    Yes, spring seems far off. And yes, Major Jackson sounds like an important figure in the Battle of Antietam. Neither is the case, however, and both will converge Wednesday for the start of that season’s months-long series of readings and talks at Stony Brook Southampton. Writers Speak happens weekly at 7 p.m. upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

    Mr. Jackson, the poetry editor of The Harvard Review, is a poet in his own right, and he’ll read from his work. His several volumes include “Leaving Saturn,” which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at the University of Vermont.

     The free series continues on Feb. 20 with Robin Desser, a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, discussing the book biz with the college’s Dan Menaker, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker. Another talk the following week will involve Bill Collage, a screenwriter, and Annette Handley Chandler, the director of the screenwriting conference on campus. Readings by the authors Alexandra Styron, Benjamin Anastas, and Alice Mattison take place in the succeeding weeks.

    On April 10, Maryrose Wood, who writes young-adult books, will be in conversation with the children’s book author Emma Walton Hamilton. Mr. Menaker will be back after that to talk to Deborah Treisman, a New Yorker fiction editor, and the series concludes on May 1 with a reading by students in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.

“Dead Anyway”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $28

    Meet Arthur Cathcart, a 42-year-old, 40-pounds-overweight freelance market researcher. He is the protagonist of Chris Knopf’s 10th novel, “Dead Anyway.” He describes himself as a “vigorous schlump” and “a Samurai of the Information Age,” though when we first encounter him, he seems more a samurai of snacking, noshing his way through several meals in the first few pages.

   Arthur is married to a lovely woman named Florencia and lives contentedly in Stamford, Conn. Florencia owns a successful insurance agency. In the first chapter, Arthur heads out to do some errands (and gobble some ice cream). When he returns he finds his wife in the living room with a man with a gun. The man wants Florencia to answer a few questions he has written down. To demonstrate his urgent intent, he shoots Arthur in the thigh.

    “He handed the envelope and a pen to Florencia, who picked the items gingerly out of his hand with her long, elegant fingers. ‘You read it and fill in the blanks. Or I shoot you. I already know one of the answers, so if you like risking your life on one in five odds, go for it.’ ”

    Despite the fact that she does precisely as he asks, the man shoots her in the forehead. Then he shoots Arthur in the head as well. Florencia dies, but Arthur somehow survives. Arthur is unconscious for “part of a year.” His sister, Evelyn, realizing that Arthur can identify the killer, puts out for general consumption the disinformation that he is in — and is likely to remain in — a persistent vegetative state. This is not true, but since she realizes that if he regains consciousness he can identify the killer, she thinks it wise to pretend otherwise.

    When Arthur returns to consciousness, he is a changed man. He cannot walk very well, he has lost his 40 excess pounds, his “eyes aren’t working as well,” and apparently he has lost his ability to do math, at which he used to be terrific. He falls a lot, misjudges the location of common objects, and has diminished social affect.

    “The psychiatrist told me and my sister that my cognitive acuity was remarkably intact, but my social affect, empathy and equanimity factors were nearly immeasurable.”

    Arthur decides that the coma story is going to work only temporarily, and a more permanent solution is actually to pretend that he has died. To that end, he uses his computer skills to acquire a new identity. Arthur Cathcart dies and Alex Rimes is born, or at least created. For some reason, though Arthur/Alex is flush with cash from the proceeds of his and his wife’s estate, he decides that the money should be used to purchase a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of rare guitars from a friend of his, which he can use as “a ready source of entirely non-traceable cash” whenever he needs it.

    The newly created Alex is now ready to commence a hunt for the killer of his wife, the destroyer of his health and happiness, and, essentially, his own murderer. He packs up some money and decamps from his home. The first thing he does is to locate, online, a retired F.B.I. special agent named Shelly Gross, who was involved in fighting racketeering in Connecticut. He also discovers the name of a reporter for The Connecticut Post named Henry Eichenbach. Both reporter and agent had, at one time, investigated a thug by the name of Sebbie (The Eyeball) Frondutti. Alex sends an e-mail to Eichenbach, “Looking for the Eyeball?”

    He meets the reporter and now makes a deal with him: “If you decide to help me [locate Frondutti] . . . your agenda will be advanced in ways that might prove the salvation of your book project. . . . Your knowledge of the world will expand exponentially.” The reporter gives Alex a lead to locate Frondutti and they part ways.

    Things start to get pretty complicated from here. On the home front, Bruce, the comptroller of Arthur’s wife’s insurance agency, has told Evelyn that “Damien Brandt’s father, Elliot,” a billionaire investor out of Westport, wants to purchase his wife’s business. He wants to keep all the staff and carry on the business as is in order to buy Damien his job permanently.

    Alex tracks down and contacts Frondutti.

     “I need information from you,” I said in my Clint Eastwood voice.

     “That’s unlikely to happen. I don’t give myself information if I don’t have to.”

     “You have to, or suffer terrible consequences.”

    Frondutti tells him to fuck off, so Alex begins surveillance on him and his family. Eventually he breaks into Frondutti’s home and, as a tacit threat, leaves a photo he has taken of the man’s daughter on his bed, with the phone number of a disposable cellphone written on the other side. The picture turns out to be of Frondutti’s wife, but it does the trick anyway, and Frondutti calls the number and provides Alex with contact information for five local captains of thuggery, one of whom Alex seems to have reason to believe is the person responsible for his wife’s murder and his ruination.

    The trail leads him to a casino where Alex meets, and eventually hooks up with, Natsumi Fitzgerald, a card dealer. She becomes his love interest and his partner in uncovering the culprit, who may be a professional killer who goes by the name of Austin Ott III, or Jason Three Sticks. In order to flush out his killer, Alex must become yet another person, this one a fabulously wealthy precious-metals trader. And to be convincing, he must throw a party and invite the cream of Greenwich society to a party that costs $250,000.

    I must admit that I often found the writing in “Dead Anyway” careless. Mr. Knopf writes, “My heart was spinning hard in my chest.” (Really? His heart was “spinning”?) And then a few pages later, “I felt my heart descend into a snarling wall of irredeemable anguish.” (A “snarling wall”?) A character watches someone “with a face that exuded either grudging respect or uncontainable contempt.” A moment later, “in less time than you can think a thought,” a gun is pointed at him, and then, just as he dies, he says, “I hate gettin’ shot.”

    Still, the sloppy writing shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. Mr. Knopf tells a good story, with a lot of narrative thrust, and the in-depth details of Arthur/Alex’s scams and Internet researching are well done and often interesting. One definitely wants to get to the end of the novel to find out what happens.

    Michael Z. Jody, a regular book reviewer for The Star, is a psychotherapist and couples counselor with offices in Amagansett and New York City.

    Chris Knopf has a house in Southampton.