Short Takes
The Romantics
By Galt Niederhoffer
St. Martin's, 277 pp., $23.95
Galt Niederhoffer hangs her well-worn romantic tale on the contemporary obsessions with WASP wedding etiquette and post-collegiate Ivy League competitiveness. The group of friends at the center of this three-day wedding romp attended Yale together. Except for Laura, the complicated dark Jew, and Tom, the artistic Catholic, the rest belong to the WASP elite. (They have names like Weesie and Chip.) They are reunited for the marriage of Tom and Lila, taking place at Northern Gardens, Lila's family's grand estate in northern Maine.
Over the course of the three days, the couples will reveal themselves to each other, relive and resort old loves and grudges, briefly reshuffle and recouple, and eventually arrange themselves appropriately. Laura and Lila, the two most favored with brains and beauty, were best friends in college, where Tom first dated Laura, who remains deeply in love with him. Later in college, sacrificing integrity for status, Tom swapped Laura for Lila, to whom he is now to be married. But is he? This question forms what little suspense there is in the novel. For added tension, Niederhoffer sends a drunken Tom, a champion swimmer, off the private dock into the cold, dark Maine waters. Where, when, and in what state of mind he will finally surface seem obvious and beside the point. The point, very nicely honed, is the author's inside take on WASP wedding culture and Ivy League one-upmanship.
Breath
By Tim Winton
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 224 pp., $23
In this novel, the desire to escape the ordinary leads Pikelet (a diminutive of Pike) into waters deeper and darker than he could imagine. Wanting to feel "the tingly-electric rush . . . alive, completely awake and in your body . . . like you've felt the hand of God," he follows his daredevil pal Loonie and their surfing hippie guru Sando into treacherous acts of adolescent bravado.
Less than 13 when he first meets Sando, Pikelet apprentices himself to the charismatic older man to learn the art of surfing, the complicated matching of risk with nerve. Off the coast of western Australia, he comes to appreciate the useless beauty and grace of riding the crest of a monster wave. Along with these physical skills, and spiritual aesthetics, Pikelet is taught some tough emotional lessons about friendship, betrayal, sex, and love. By 16, he understands that extreme sport requires a very narrow focus on goals that are essentially pointless and stupid. And he recognizes his own limits for exploring the dangerous and the perverse in sex as well as sport. If those limits make him ordinary, he is willing, by the end of his education, to accept the label as a rare and, for him, unattainable gift.
Tim Winton's descriptions again and again take your breath away: "The staccato chat of water against the board. A momentary illusion of being at the same level as the distant cliffs. The angelic relief of gliding out onto the shoulder of the wave in a mist of spray and adrenaline. Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water."
The Man Who Forgot How to Read
By Howard Engel
St. Martin's, 176 pp., $19.95
Howard Engel woke one day, picked up his morning newspaper at the door, and discovered to his surprise that it was written in a script he did not know and could not decipher. Almost immediately, he understood that he had suffered a stroke. A minor one, it left him with a rare and paradoxical infirmity, alexia sine agraphia, the inability to read but not the inability to write.
For Engel, a lifelong lover of print and a successful writer of detective novels, this was a cruelly ironic blow. He also lost part of his vision and much of his memory, leaving him puzzled by familiar faces and unable to recognize well-known places. Despite these devastating deficits, Engel remained oddly free from fear and anxiety. Protected by a preternatural calm and determined to regain his abilities, he set about leaning to read, eventually succeeding sufficiently to write another in his mystery series and this memoir.
What was obviously a trial is recalled with little emotional interest or insight. Learning to read without being able to recognize letters or patterns, sounding out the same words over and over again, must have been exhausting and dispiriting, but Engel is unfailingly upbeat. His own optimism is echoed back to him by his doctors, therapists, teachers, and mentors (including Oliver Sacks), who are fulsome in their admiration and praise. Still, a little less self-congratulation and little more self-scrutiny would have made Engel a more appealing person and a more sympathetic patient.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York. 