Short takes

Making use of sources from Sophocles and Virgil to Shakespeare and Shaw, the Mexican fabulist Carmen Boullosa reinvents Cleopatra as a character for modern feminism to conjure with.

The multilayered narrative begins in the voice of an anonymous assistant to Diomedes, Cleopatra's personal scribe. The Cleopatra he depicts, in scenes as static and stylized as a hieroglyphic frieze, is the familiar vanquished queen, declaiming over the body of her lover and co-conspirator, Marc Antony. Suddenly, Diomedes himself interrupts, disclaiming the portrait as the work of Cleopatra's Roman enemies. The tale takes a turn for the fantastic, as Diomedes relates the adventures of a daring young Cleopatra as mythic heroine, a Greek princess escaping from Rome with the aid of gladiators and pirates, and borne off by a magical bull to the land of the Amazons, who instruct her in the martial and erotic arts that will serve her well as ruler of Egypt.

An intriguing notion. Yet the shifts and swirls of the plot are ill served by a ranting narrative that buries character, incident, everything under an avalanche of obscure classical allusions. The message, too, is far from original: History is written by the winners, and "herstory" somehow always becomes "his."

Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson
By Gore Vidal
Yale University, 189 pp., $22

Trust Gore Vidal to teach us things we never learned in school. In "Inventing a Nation," his quick wit flickers over the canonical tale of our republic's founding, turning it into a dark and deliciously nuanced comedy of men, manners, and ideas.

Vidal reads our originary documents and the more private writings of their authors with a novelist's eye for the juicy personal rivalries and ambitions lurking beneath their principled surfaces. Ever the iconoclast, he pries our national gods, Washington and Jefferson and the querulous Yankee Adams, off the sanitized, Rushmore-ized monument we call American history, paradoxically enlarging them by making them human. He entertains a particular fondness for Founding Fathers with a touch of the rascal: the eloquent troublemaker Paine; Hamilton, the "subtle intriguer" (in Abigail Adams's shrewd judgment); and the Falstaffian Franklin, who foresaw a debased future for his country.

This perspicacious account is punctuated by frequent peppery outbursts of vintage Vidal scorn for a present-day America that thoroughly vindicates the worst of Franklin's prophetic pessimism. An affecting epilogue reveals the source of the author's inspiration for undertaking this history and his righteous indignation over more current events.

Serious Girls
By Maxine Swann
Picador, 229 pp. $23

In this ethereal first novel, two teenage misfits meet at boarding school and immediately become best friends. Roe is a scholarship student from the South, while Maya, the book's central character, is the beneficiary of a wealthy Long Island grandmother's largesse. Despite their different backgrounds, the girls agree, with passionate yet naive conviction, that what they want most is to experience life, which reduces, predictably, to experiencing sex.

Roe takes up with a resentful townie, a boy with a violent streak that frightens yet attracts her. Maya, meanwhile, on an illicit trip to New York, picks up an older man, pursues him with surprising determination, and finds herself swept into a grown-up love affair for which she is by no means emotionally ready, and which proves as damaging as Roe's abusive relationship.

Maxine Swann relates these parallel adolescent dramas in graceful prose, but they fall short of a fully inhabited novel. She offers no glimpse of the school life from which these girls feel so alienated, no insight into Roe's angry young man. Maya's older lover is also too superficially imagined; Swann seems not to realize that she has some explaining to do about the "Lolita" problem, which is left standing unmentioned like the proverbial elephant in the parlor.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.