Short Takes

By Chance
By Martin Corrick
Random House, 229 pp., $25

"One principle governs all these things, a perfectly understandable principle, and the name of the principle is chance." Bolsover, the ordinary Englishman who narrates this odd and compelling novel, makes this pronouncement late in his perhaps probable, perhaps improbable story. His tale unfolds at a gentle pace, in a bemused tone, as Bolsover accepts his middling lot as an awkward, thoughtful fellow who obsesses over his work as a technical writer and lives alone in his deceased parents' modest house. Unexpectedly and undeservedly, he is granted a lovely, fragile wife whose delicacy conceals a wildly passionate nature. She becomes ill and dies. He mourns her, sells the house, finds a more satisfying job, and muddles along.

Then a tragic accident occurs, and he is forced to change his life. He is sent to a remote island, where he must protect himself and reinvent himself - as Bolsover. He engages with the new and unusual assortment of people on the island, including a hearty woman; reevaluates his writing career, exchanging rigid technical guides for adventurous travel books; and expands his possibilities. At the end of the novel, he stands alone, facing an uncertain future, awaiting whatever chance, which has brought him to this place, has arranged for him. Playful and philosophical, Martin Corrick's novel engages the mind and the heart.

Conscience Point
By Erica Abeel
Unbridled, 272 pp., $24.95

The glamorous and careless Ashcrofts - sister and brother Violet and Nick - invite Maddy to enter their enchanted world. She is the talented, beautiful commoner who is seduced, exploited, and abandoned by them. As an East Coast college girl, she falls first for the sister, later for the brother, but her chief attachment is to the place - Conscience Point. Self-consciously contrived as a Yankee "Brideshead Revisited," Erica Abeel's novel has as its center a Gothic fairytale castle, "an assemblage of greystone peaks and towers, an actual crenellated tower with four upthrust parapets."

Playing Violet and Nick's grand piano, drinking their wine, prancing on their lawn and swimming naked in their surf, Maddy succumbs to the impossible beauty of it. Adolescent idealism, sensual satisfaction, and sexual awakening are a powerful mix, and, under their influence, Maddy swears her fidelity to art and love and Violet. Keeping faith with Violet, she adopts a cinnamon-skinned child and raises her as her own. Disregarding Violet's and Nick's warnings and dismissing her own doubts, she later takes up with Nick. Both sister and brother hurt her, then attempt to reclaim her love and trust. They are careless rich people, used to letting others clean up their mess. Maddy accepts that it is her job to restore the castle, transforming the facts of family chaos into possibility for artistic creation. And Abeel, providing the neat closure that Evelyn Waugh rejects, rewards Maddy, the true and feeling artist, by choosing her as the rightful heir to Conscience Point.

The Inner History of Devices
Edited by Sherry Turkle
MIT, 208 pp., $24.95

The essays in this thought-provoking volume attempt to answer, from the points of view of memoirists, therapists, and ethnographers, the question of how technologies affect our relationships, sensibilities, and sense of self.

It's easy to empathize with a young woman's attachment to her cellphone when she is far from home, to share her reluctance to delete a former lover's ring tone, to identify with her sense of rebirth as she programs a shiny new phone. More challenging is relating to people dependent on life-saving devices - internal cardiac defibrillators, which shock the heart back into regular rhythms; dialysis, which does the work of poorly functioning kidneys. Living under the influence of machines, people experience a range of often-puzzling responses: Some feel like robots, some not fully human, others extra-human, godlike, divorced from god, their friends, relations, and themselves.

Another essay reveals electronic technology being skillfully exploited by a child psychiatrist, who instead of discouraging computer fantasy games used them to help troubled adolescent boys develop feelings appropriate to masculinity. His depressed and uncommunicative boys created virtual hyper-males, heroic fantasy figures through which they projected their inner preoccupations. He was able to gain access and insight into the boys through their play. A compulsive video poker player, who zoned into her screen and thus erased her sense of time, money, her body, and her self, offered clues for an MIT professor to understand "the forms of self-loss that people seek today and the forms of selfhood they seek to relieve."

Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.