Lamentations of the Father: Essays
By Ian Frazier
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 194 pp., $22
Ian Frazier is an antidote for the blues, whether riffing ironically on a news item that would dump the rest of us into a funk or pricking what is left of our suburban pieties. A prime example of the latter in this collection of humorous meditations is "The Cursing Mommy Cookbook," in which Mom, on a short fuse and having a bad day, spits out through gritted teeth her recipe for last-minute chili. (As a bonus, the volume also contains "A Cursing Mommy Christmas.")
Frazier's particular genius is for inspired incongruity, in which he gets two startlingly disparate modes to shake hands, to merry effect. Thus, in "Kisses All Around," Martin Luther receives an oleaginous rejection letter from the Vatican for his "Ninety-five Theses." "The New Poetry" deconstructs Pound, Auden, and other modernist deities who seem to have suffered a midair collision with gangsta rap. Houseguests are issued an emergency warning, in baleful detail, on the use of the shower curtain.
The title piece brings Frazier's literate drollery to its apogee as he lays down the (domestic) law in plummy Old Testament tones: "Of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room."
The World Before Her
By Deborah Weisgall
Houghton Mifflin,278 pp., $25
This elegant novel opens in Venice in 1880 as the aging Marian Evans, better known by her pen name, George Eliot, is observed strolling across Piazza San Marco with a tall young man. Although she has come to Venice on her honeymoon - the man is her neurotic and much younger new husband, John Cross - her thoughts turn constantly to George Henry Lewes, the lover with whom she lived defiantly for 25 years, a marriage of true minds ended only by Lewes's death. We then jump forward a hundred years to the arrival in Venice of a restive trophy wife, Caroline Spingold, on a combined anniversary and business trip with her financier husband. Her thoughts turn to art (she is a sculptor), lost love, and an intriguing-looking man spotted on the banks of the Grand Canal.
Must a strong-minded woman surrender self-possession when convention permits a husband to demand ownership? From opposite ends of a feminist century, two skillfully evoked exceptional women struggle with this conundrum as Weisgall explores themes of passion, creativity, and material temptation in the magical city that exemplifies them all. "The World Before Her" presents a difficult doubling act, which Weisgall performs with grace and delicacy.
Comfort: A Journey Through Grief
By Ann Hood
Norton, 188 pp., $19.95
"Comfort" is a horror story, though not in the usual sense. In April 2002 Ann Hood's 5-year-old daughter, Grace, died of a sudden, catastrophic infection. Doctors struggled frantically to pull her back from the precipice, but in hours she was gone, a kindergartner who had loved cucumber slices and sparkly shoes.
In her novel "The Knitting Circle," Hood told the fictionalized story of how knitting helped her through her grief by giving her a less crucial challenge to overcome. In this memoir she writes about the things that didn't help: the abysmally inadequate platitudes foisted on her by well-meaning others; the church to which her husband turned for solace, though she found only reason for anger there. In adopting a baby from China three years after Grace's death, the author regained a measure of happiness, though her gain issues from another mother's loss half a world away.
To withstand such a tragedy takes unimaginable courage. Summoning an even greater measure of courage, Hood writes about that tragedy with harrowing candor, as a loving memorial, as a tribute to the family that did what it had to and pulled through, as the sound of a voice crying in the wilderness.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
