Short takes

At 25, and naïve for her age, Catherine Madison is on the lam from a failed marriage as the novel opens, fleeing west from her snowbound hometown in Nebraska with a suitcase full of loot. Catherine has been rejected by her husband, the high school sweetheart she married too young, who is angry because she makes him feel like a sexual failure. In retribution she cashes in their savings, and when she reaches Las Vegas in a bit of a daze, she checks into a fancy hotel and commences spending the money at the urging of Valka, a flashy woman from California whom she meets in a casino.

Valka encourages her young friend to confront the truth about her toxic upbringing and her resultant sexual neuroses. We expect this tale, with its mismatched characters and farfetched plot elements, to crumble under its own slender weight, but oddly and heartwarmingly, Jami Attenberg makes it work. .

In 1978 Hugues de Montalembert returned to his New York apartment one night to find two burglars ransacking the place. One had a knife, the other a weapon that proved much more dangerous - a vial of paint thinner, which he hurled at Montalembert’s face. Montalembert entered the hospital an artist and filmmaker and emerged a blind man.

This compact volume, which follows his autobiography, “Eclipse: A Nightmare’’ (1985), is a dialogue across time between the older Montalembert and the journals kept by his younger, newly sightless self. What friends saw as a kind of death - some even asked why he didn’t commit suicide - he perceived as a rebirth into a world he would have to experience differently in order to remain himself.

The French-born Montalembert was a world traveler and adventurer. As soon as he could get around with a cane he journeyed to Bali, Greenland, the Himalayas, often finding strangers kinder and more accepting than acquaintances who defined his situation in terms of what he - and to their minds they - had lost.

This vibrant meditation introduces us to a fascinating man whose thirst for living leaves us pondering how we might behave should the same fate befall us.

After a storm off the Canadian coast destroys the oil rig on which her husband was working, Helen O’Mara, the protagonist of this novel, soldiered on. As the widowed mother of three children with a fourth on the way, she had no choice.

Helen never speaks aloud of her grief. No one does in her stoic working-class community in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with its long history of men lost at sea. But as Helen’s private torment still reveals a quarter-century after the tragedy, a part of her died with her husband.

Life as a single parent, we learn, was a struggle. Helen’s two older daughters eventually outgrew their teenage wildness. But prodigal son John is a different story. His mother’s pain taught him to fear one thing above all: a love that can be lost. John’s wanderings guarantee him emotional protection - or so he thinks.

Lisa Moore’s artfully fragmented narrative movingly reflects Helen’s shattered psyche. But like a ray of wintry sunshine piercing the ocean fog, the novel’s conclusion holds out hope that frozen hearts can thaw and even made-up minds can be changed.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.