Short Takes

SEVEN DAYS IN THE ART WORLD
By Sarah Thornton
Norton, 256 pp., $24.95

READ MY HEART: A Love Story in England's Age of Revolution
By Jane Dunn
Knopf, 448 pp., $30

THE SCHOOL ON HEART'S CONTENT ROAD
By Carolyn Chute
Atlantic Monthly, 384 pp., $24

How does the product of one person's imagination move from a studio, to a gallery, a museum, an auction house, a private collection, and emerge as a multimillion-dollar global commodity? In this highly informative and entertaining book, Sarah Thornton answers this question.

At California Institute of the Arts, a prestigious art school in Los Angeles, she sits in on "crits," soul-searching sessions where students publicly defend their work. She learns the way Christie's carefully orchestrates an important auction of contemporary art. She visits the Basel Art Fair, in Switzerland, and the Biennale in Venice. She interviews self-important dealers and disingenuous collectors. And she visits one of Takashi Murakami's three studios in Japan. Murakami, whose work is unabashedly commercial, glories in his affiliation with Louis Vuitton, for whose company he has designed signature LV handbags. "The contemporary art world is a loose network of overlapping subcultures held together by a belief in art," writes Thornton, and we are fortunate that she was able to penetrate all of these opaque, protected, and often secretive groups.

We are back in Egypt, Maine, the town familiar to readers of Carolyn Chute's bestseller about the Bean family. The families here are the same - poor, struggling, disenfranchised, and fragmented. The strays from these families make their way to the Settlement, also known as the True Maine Militia, or the school of the title. The Settlement's leader, Gordon St. Onge, is revered as the Prophet. His settlement raises farm animals and crops, produces furniture, electric cars, and windmills. He rallies people to "shut off the TV! . . . Rescue your kids from the schools! . . . Let's build our own cooperatives, local sane agri-culture, energy co-ops, trade co-ops, slower , more intelligent travel . . . stalwart citizens' militias and more."

Into his settlement wander 15-year-old Mickey Gammon and 6-year-old Jane Meserve. Mickey from his treehouse reports on the doings of the militia, and Jane from behind her heart-shaped secret-agent glasses gathers evidence for her highly classified interpretation of people and events. Chute vividly creates the individual voices and through them the larger culture that shaped them and the counterculture they offer as a substitute and a salvation.

In 1648, when William Temple and Dorothy Osborne were 20 years old, they spent a month in each other's company and fell in love. His family were Parliamentarians and hers Royalists, but both supported conventional arranged marriage based on fortune, not compatibility. Despite the prevailing attitudes of their families and society, the two made a private commitment to each other. For the next 6 1/2 years, "through personal tragedy, family blackmail, enforced separation, misunderstanding, ridicule and despair, Dorothy and William clung against all the odds to a sometimes faltering faith in each other and in the triumph of romantic love." Seeing each other only rarely, they wrote constantly.

Financially unstable but secure in their love, they married quietly in 1654. Dorothy, a happy, busy, often pregnant wife, no longer had the time or the need to write down her leisurely descriptions, keen character sketches, and philosophical arguments. She supported William's bumpy career as an ambassador, diplomat, negotiator, landowner, and gardener but was consumed by domestic chores and social obligations. As much a history of an exceptionally unstable period in English politics as a love story of uncommon longevity and resilience, Jane Dunn's account skillfully situates a personal drama in its political context.

This is the correct capsule review of "Read My Heart." Because of a production error, the wrong type ran under a title box for the book in the Nov. 9 "Short Takes."

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