Breaking Away
For your summer idyll, at home or away, here's some recommended reading that you won't see on every other beach blanket
We know what you're thinking: ''Here's another of those surveys of summer reading, laden with trashy page turners and naughty delicacies." Yes, this is a survey of a dozen or so books to enjoy on summer vacation, where the sunshine is so bright on the page that you need your shades, where you might only want to read for an hour before napping or getting up to refill your lemonade or to plunge into the lake or sea.
Be warned, however, that this is an eccentric list. We very much doubt that anyone nearby will say to you, ''Oh, my reading group loved that one." She might, however, be curious and ask if ''that book" is good, and if the answer is yes, your reputation for original reading will be enhanced. Here they are, listed as randomly as they are piled on the side table.
The Irish journalist/novelist Colm Toibin (pronounced Column to-BEAN) has gathered a growing audience with four novels since his first, ''The South." His newest, ''The Master" (Scribner, $25), is an amazing performance: a novel about Henry James, with James as the main character, told by an omniscient narrator, from inside James's mind.
Set in the years 1895-99, the novel also ranges back in memory to James's childhood and across the world from Boston to Rome, with London, Paris, and Dublin in between. Peopled by Henry James Sr., the novelist's brother William and sister Alice, and such other luminaries as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Edmund Gosse, as well as numerous other minor characters, the book has as its underlying tension James's sexual longings, not explicitly acknowledged by him. Indeed it seems that the only character opaque to the master is James himself. Toibin uses a style that is convincingly Jamesian, though not at its most impenetrable.
''Status Anxiety," by Alain de Botton (Pantheon, $24), is a smart and amusing inquiry from the author of three well-liked and equally improbable books, ''The Art of Travel," ''The Consolations of Philosophy," and, most famous, ''How Proust Can Change Your Life." This one explores the curious human need to be envied and admired, to let people know, for example, that we summered at Menemsha, not Humarock. Botton divides the book into two parts, ''Causes" and ''Solutions," and his 10 delightfully illustrated chapters are thick with social history and as funny as they are acute. (Review, Page L8.)
''Our 'ego' or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon," Botton writes, ''forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated. . . . Our mood may blacken because a colleague greets us distractedly or telephone calls go unreturned. And we are capable of thinking life worth living because someone remembers our name or sends us a fruit basket."
Utterly different from ''The Master," but equally moving and controlled, is Kent Haruf's ''Eventide" (Knopf, $24.95). If Toibin as Henry James is all subtlety and implication, Haruf is all plain speech, plain people, plain problems, vices, and virtues. Come to think of it, the book takes place on the Colorado plains, and is a sequel of sorts to Haruf's previous book, the bestselling ''Plainsong." Two taciturn bachelor brothers, a dim-bulb couple living in a trailer, a quiet preteen boy living with his grandfather, a social worker, and a young mother abandoned by her husband live and speak directly in the present and become increasingly intertwined. The plain truth is that you can't stop reading or caring about them.
The great Edmund S. Morgan, Sterling professor of history emeritus at Yale and editor of the collected papers of Benjamin Franklin, two years ago published a short biography/appreciation titled ''Benjamin Franklin," which was much admired but somewhat overtaken by last year's best-selling Franklin biography by journalist Walter Isaacson. Now comes ''The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America" (Norton, $26.95), collecting 24 book essay/reviews first published in the New York Review of Books.
The virgule above is apt because these pieces are far more than critical comments on others' writings. Morgan has published 15 previous books, the first in 1944, all appointed with the erudition, transparent style, and shrewd reflection displayed here. His four parts include ''New Englanders," ''Southerners," ''Revolutionaries," and ''Questions of Culture." We read about John Winthrop, Puritan sexuality, and the Salem witchcraft trials, and later about those in -- or opposing -- the group formerly known as Founding Fathers. American slavery and Southern life appear in ''The Big American Crime," ''Plantation Blues," and ''The Price of Honor." In 300 pages, arranged in digestible pieces, you can traverse the first 250 years of American life.
OK, OK -- more fiction: a beguiling book of short stories by Joan Silber, ''Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories" (Norton, $23.95). Silber has a transparent style (yes, we used that word above. Well, think of lakes, Cape Cod light, the summer sea), and one believes in these people, their actions and feelings. ''Right," the reader says, ''I see that, it makes sense," as one follows the life of Alice (''My Shape"), a would-be dancer, from cruise ships to New York to Paris. One has much the same reaction to the story of ''Gaspara Stampa," the 16th-century Venetian poet and singer, and her passionate loves. The collection ends with ''The Same Ground," in which a middle-aged French Buddhist falls in love with Alice, the heroine of ''My Shape." The ring encircles a tapestry of love, sex, and religion, altogether sad and hilarious.
Martha Tod Dudman of Northeast Harbor, Maine, has written a second fine memoir. ''Augusta, Gone: A True Story" (HarperPerennial, $12.95), published two years ago, related Dudman's titanic struggle with her dangerously rebellious teenage daughter. There was a hint in that book that Dudman's own girlhood was pretty wild -- Augusta taunted her about it -- and we learn just how wild in ''Expecting to Fly: A Sixties Reckoning" (Simon & Schuster, $23).
These two books are best read as a pair. Despite the difference of time and situation, both are about the same person: uneasily sure that the life she has now has gone wrong, always trying to make things better but uncertain how, never making excuses for her mistakes. In ''Expecting to Fly," the affluent teenage Martha, in the late 1960s, is kicked out of Virginia's fashionable Madeira School for smoking pot, then goes off to college and descends into a spiral of drugs and sexual misery. Young Martha's choices are not much more intelligible to the reader than to her older self, and no more so than her daughter's craziness was to middle-aged Martha decades later. The most poignant section is the imagined confrontation between 50-plus Martha and the wild child she was:
''I don't want to be you," a disdainful flower-child Martha says to Martha the grandmother, ''with all your disappointments! I don't want to be you dyeing your hair to hide the gray. I don't want gray! I don't want your wrinkles and your back that hurts and the surgery scar on your belly . . . and your dull straight boring life." The older Martha furiously replies, ''What do you mean? You're lucky I've got even this to show you, after what you did to me. Wrinkles? Of course I've got wrinkles. You laid me out in the sun for hours and hours to wrinkle me up like this. . . . You're lucky I'm still alive with all you did to me -- you and your hundred bits of acid." There's summertime Maine in both books, and each is probably a day's read.
One new/old tale of doomed romance and regal court is all true, in ''Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House," by Sally Bedell Smith (Random House, $29.95). The background is the thousand days of the Kennedy administration, and the big events are here. But the narrative tension is in the tight circle around Jack and Jackie Kennedy, who clearly love one another -- he an insatiable rake in almost constant physical pain, and she rocketing about like a pinball between duty, luxurious living, grief, and quiet desperation. If we did not already know the ending, one might say this book reads like a novel.
Now jump back about 150 years to another royal court, in ''The Rose of Martinique: A Life of Napoleon's Josephine," by Andrea Stuart (Grove Press, $27.50). Napoleon and Josephine were both outsiders, in a sense -- he of Italian descent from the island of Corsica, she born in the West Indies -- and their alliance was a powerful thing while it lasted. Both were vain and unscrupulous, yet somehow their relationship was humanly appealing, and Josephine was a shrewd political operator with excellent taste. Though he cast her aside, her name was said to have been the dying Napoleon's last word.
Jean Fagan Yellin's ''Harriet Jacobs: A Life" (Basic Civitas, $27.50) is a fine biography of an unsung American heroine. With dogged research, Yellin uncovered Jacobs, the true author of the 1861 ''Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself," long thought to have been fiction by the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Here she tells Jacobs's life, too amazing to be fiction. Born in slavery, Jacobs was taught to read by her mistress and, after her escape from North Carolina, became an activist for the cause of abolition and, later, education for former slaves. She is buried in Cambridge.
Now to nature: We may be grumpy at the Canada geese pooping all over the Public Garden (the goose-chasing dogs can be seen dashing about there regularly), but University of Vermont biologist Bernd Heinrich's latest book, ''The Geese of Beaver Bog" (Ecco, $24.95), may at least revive the birds' dignity. Heinrich's fascinating previous books concern silviculture (''The Trees in My Forest"), owls and ravens (''One Man's Owl" and ''Mind of the Raven"), entomology (''Bumblebee Economics") and animal survival strategies (''Winter World"). Here he reports on the goose family living near his Vermont home, and by the end of the book, these highly individual honkers seem like our own family. The excellent photographs and drawings are also by Heinrich.
Despite having grown up in a lobstering community, I have never had a taste for the crustacean's bland, rubbery flesh. But here is the chance for those who do to get their doctorate in lobsterology, with two fine books out at the same time: ''The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean," by Trevor Corson (HarperCollins, $24.95), and ''The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier," by Colin Woodard (Viking, $24.95).
Both books follow the days and livings of certain Maine lobstermen, Corson's crew on Little Cranberry Island, off Mount Desert Island, and Woodard's on Monhegan Island. Corson's book is focused on Homarus americanus itself, and the contemporary men and women who study and catch the coveted beast. Woodard's book, while it too tells much about the prey and the current economy, delves deeply and reflectively into the history of coastal Maine and its people. Corson is a bit more rollicking. He tries to answer that age-old question: Does a lobster feel pain when dropped in boiling water? More pensive overall, Woodard worries about what is happening to Downeast culture as the pressures of development and second-home building make it harder for the native Maine folks, such as the lobstermen, to stay on and survive.
Admittedly, elephants are more like us than lobsters or Canada geese, and there is much that is magical and fascinating in Stephen Alter's ''Elephas
Finally, a beautiful book of poetry: ''Snow Water," by the fine Irish poet Michael Longley (Wake Forest University Press, signed cloth edition, $50; $10.95 paperback). It's a strange and wonderful publishing curiosity that Wake Forest Press, based in Winston-Salem, N.C., specializes in contemporary Irish poetry. Born in 1939 in Belfast, Longley has written or edited 16 books, including 12 collections of poetry. Though he is described on the book jacket as ''one of the best nature poets in English," nature is only the context of these thoroughly human poems.
We end this survey with Longley's poem ''Arrival," about the return of migratory birds, as certain as your return, duly refreshed and fortified for autumn, from the idylls of summer:
It is as though David had whitewashed the cottageAnd the gatepost in the distance for this moment,The whooper swans' arrival, with you wide awakeIn your white nightdress at the erratic boulderCounting through binoculars. Oh, what day is itThis October? And how many of them are there?
