On the surface the novel tells the story of a young black painter trying to find his way back to his art who meets and hooks up with a white ex-seminarian who is struggling with a different loss of faith. The story takes place over the course of a summer. Wyeth (this choice of name, recalling Andrew Wyeth, is no accident) lives alone but shares a studio space with several others. Wyeth has jobs both at a gallery and for an art restorer, so the story centers on the art world and is set primarily in Manhattan. The characters are diverse in terms of gender, race, and sexual identity; Wyeth is gay and is also wrestling with being his authentic self with others as well as with the notion of “black subjectivity.”

None of that tells you about the quality of the book. It moves briskly but with little if any plot. There are no conventional stakes, although there are a few questions that propel the action: whether Wyeth will or won’t end up in a committed relationship and, near the end of the book, whether he will/won’t accept an offer to have a piece in a group show of artists whose work he despises. Mostly the book is full of shimmering details – I can’t think of a book that gave me the feel of being in Manhattan the way this one does. It’s also steeped in philosophical questions and tart dialogue, and the way he describes the minutia of art restoration and of the act of painting is breathtaking.

And speaking of details, as a writer, I absolutely loved a scene where Wyeth meets a friend at Kinokuniya, a wonderful Japanese bookstore I have frequented (thank you, Jane). There are pages of description, of the ledger-style notebooks Wyeth’s friend favors, a particular chalk that is “buttery smooth and resistant to breaking,” the qualities of certain papers, and whole paragraphs devoted to a discussion of my favorite pencils, Blackwing. I’m sure all writers, as well as artists, are fetishistic about pens, paper, and notebooks and will recognize themselves in this scene.

There’s something very Jamesian in Taylor’s writing, especially the character interiority and a focus on social interactions and the power dynamics in closed social circles. I should also mention that there is a lot of very graphic, honest, and direct gay sex. I found something of Proust in Taylor as well, in the way he stretches time and is always thinking thinking thinking.

Brandon Taylor deserves a wide audience. I’m betting he’s going to get one.

A Walk in the Park is a work of nonfiction should join the ranks of the best stories of outside adventure, and so much much more. The overarching story is of two friends who, over the course of several trips and with a lot of help, succeed at a risky end-to-end traverse the Grand Canyon, one of the toughest hikes in the world. The book tells of the duo’s hubris and folly in attempting this initially without proper preparation and how, after mishaps and guidance, they come to complete the project.

There are many reasons to read this book: for one, as a story of adventure and excitement, which will truly keep you on the edge of your seat and turning pages; but even more for the fascinating lore: history, geology, and the stories of the original peoples and tribes who have inhabited the Park from the earliest times to the present. There is also a very touching story about Fedarko and his father that runs throughout. And for those of us who will never hike the Canyon, this book is the closest you will get.

Even more compelling is the sheer gorgeousness of the writing:“The light spilling down the limestone turned the face of each cliff into forked rivers of fire. There were pink pools and riffles, eddies where the rose-tinted currents coiled and spun, and whirlpools the color or a freshly opened cantaloupe. This was light made liquid, as if someone had melted down the stained-glass windows of every cathedral in France and poured the emulsion over the stone.”

Fedarko concludes the book with a plea against commercialization of the Park. “The longer we spent and the farther we ventured, the more deeply we understood that in the months and years to come, it might no longer be possible to complete a walk such as this without colliding against changes so profound that the land would never again be the same.…Haunted—that’s how we walked. Haunted by what we saw and heard, and by the knowledge that the future that was bearing down on the canyon was…already transforming the place.”

Although there’s an argument to be made that helicopters and trams can bring the experience of the Canyon to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access it, A Walk in the Park speaks most eloquently for the value of leaving some magnificent and rare places completely alone.

McConaghy sets up the novel as a thriller, and the story is an intriguing one: For years, widower Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in this natural paradise. But due to climate change, sea level rise is happening so fast the island will soon disappear. A boat is going to be picking the family up in seven weeks, the timeline of the novel, and the family is packing up what they can of the precious seeds that have been kept in a vault in case the world’s food supply needs to be regrown after environmental catastrophe. All the researchers have left, and the family is alone on the island.

Into this tense situation a woman, Rowan, washes up on shore, just when Dom discovers the island’s communications equipment has been sabotaged, cutting them off entirely from the outside world. McConaghy slides between all five characters’ points of view, alluding to but not explaining various mysteries that pile up and keep the suspense high. I found some of the plot aspects strained plausibility, but what’s undeniable, and makes the book a must read, is how McConaghy’s plunges you into this evocative setting and her truly endearing characters, most especially the youngest boy, Orly.

McConaghy writes as hauntingly of their emotional and inner lives as she does the captivating penguins, birds, and seals they live among. Thematically the book is equally rich, weighing questions like, if the world is coming to an end, do you embrace love What do you save, the practical or the beautiful Besides an elegy for nature, Wild Dark Shore is about families, and parenting, and choosing hope despite grief and loss. This is a gorgeous, heart-pumping, heart-wrenching and mesmerizing read.

This is a novel that is as leisurely as it’s possible to get. As if to emphasize how slowly time moves in a “forgotten elsewhere,” Wlliams never rushes his plot or his prose. Faha comes alive in his hands with lovingly detailed descriptions of both the place and the social and cultural intricacies: “In the fields the cattle, made slow-witted by the rain, lifted their rapt and empty faces, heavy loops of spittle hanging, as though they ate watery light.”

What I found most extraordinary, though, is how he plumbs the depths of single moments, somehow conveying the quality of existence and, for lack of a better word, transcendence, in a way few writers can (Proust being one). Here’s an example of what I mean, plucked out of several pages of a description of a humble man singing a song in a pub: “He sang. After the first few lines I couldn’t look at him. Nobody could look at him. It felt like an intimacy you weren’t entitled to, but knew it privileged you and you didn’t dare move in case you broke whatever had made it happen. He sang the love song in a way that made you realise a reality that existed not outside but alongside and even inside the one you were accustomed to.”

It’s not all heightened rumination, though. Williams has a few strategies that give energy and tension to the novel. A stranger, Christy, boards with Noe’s grandparents and befriends him. Christy is ostensibly in town to work on the electrification project but is really there to right a romantic wrong, a situation that keeps us guessing until the very end. There’s also is the tender awakening of Noe’s romantic desires: He develops crushes on first one, then another, and yet a third daughter of the local doctor. This story line enhances the comic sensibility that is subtly present throughout the book, tempering its elegiac tone.

This Is Happiness is wise, witty, wonderful and just perfect for chilly autumn afternoons beside a fire.

The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, by best-selling science journalist Susan Casey, is shockingly fascinating. Much of it is so unlikely as to seem completely fictional.

Just about everything in this book was unknown to me, from the depth of the ocean (in its deepest part, close to 36,000 feet deep) to the range of organisms and creatures to the geological features to the submersibles and robots used in ocean exploration. Ever heard of black smokers These are chimney-like structures that pump sooty fluid “like a manic locomotive…a vortex of black clouds, lined with metal crystals,” or the Lost City, whose chemistry makes it “a frontrunner in the search for life’s origins” Casey also focuses on the fascinating cast of characters who are driven to discover this underground world, the technical challenges, and the overarching reason that learning about the deep ocean is so important—the very future of the planet depends upon it. There is an extraordinary number and diversity of marine organisms invisible to the eye that have an enormous role in keeping the planet alive. Since 1970 the ocean has absorbed 93% of the excess heat and 30% of the carbon dioxide we’ve generated from burning fossil fuels. The ocean is now becoming warmer, more acidic, and less oxygen rich, and our ecological balance is in peril. There is also the enormous risk of destroying the seafloor from indiscriminate deep-sea mining by commercial interests. Although the book is a call to action and a justification of the time, expense, and risk in exploring the deepest of the deep, Casey’s descriptive writing is exuberant and joyful. “A spectral figure materialized from the darkness, gliding toward the bait. … It was an apparition, a phantom, a psilocybin vision…it resembled a gelatinous dog’s head trailing a white tendril. The head was luminous and as crystalline as a bubble. It glimmered in pale shades of violet and topaz, with twinkles of aquamarine and white, and there were glowing orbs suspended inside it, like the electrodes of a cyborg brain dreamed up by Ridley Scott.” Wow!

The book is a tribute to deep sea exploration for affording us a way to understand our role in the universe as well as a meditation on the ecstasy one feels when being “in the middle of the life force itself.” On one journey into the deep that Casey is able to take, she reflects, “In the abyss, you don’t glimpse the mystery—you enter it—and your consciousness is the only fixed point.” Pretty powerful stuff.

The Sea House by Esther Freud

Once in a while you come upon a novel you fall so deeply in love with that it becomes a lifetime favorites. This novel became that for me. I’d never heard of Esther Freud, and was shocked I hadn’t. For one thing, she wrote the novel that became one of my favorite movies, Hideous Kinky. For another, she’s the daughter of artist Lucien Freud and great-granddaughter of that other Freud—yes, that one.

I came upon this novel while browsing randomly in the library, and the cover and title drew me in (no surprise there—“beach houses”! “sea”!). It was written in 2004 and feels somehow older. The writing style is leisurely with a kind of old-fashioned charm. The story is set on the coast in Suffolk, England, in a tiny town, and has two timelines. In one, an artist comes to do a painting and meets a women who fascinates him; in the later timeline, a young woman comes to the same village to research the life of an architect whose love letters to his wife fascinate her, as does the village itself. The two stories are related—the wife of the architect is the woman who fascinates the artist of the earlier era—but they only overlap at one tiny point at the very end of the novel.  I was myself fascinated to learn that Esther Freud based the novel on the letters of her own grandfather, Ernst Freud. 

There are secrets, romantic passions, sad endings, and adorable children, but what most captivated me is the way Freud depicts the natural world surrounding this small town. The prose is stunning. I can’t resist giving you a taste of it. “[Lily] walked slowly, lulled by the swish and rustle of the sedge, past a hollow hill of hawthorn, its flowers scattered into the pool below it, leaving white petal pebbles on the surface like a witch’s stew.”

I’m a glutton for such language, such landscapes.  Feel free to reach out and suggest some of your favorites!

In recommending books, I focus primarily on novels that relate in some way to social issues, particularly the environment, and have a strong sense of place. Mary Camarillo’s novel touches on all three. It’s a joy to read—astute, wry, propulsive—and has much to say about our modern social and political lives. The novel is set in a fictional California “anywhere” town and focuses on a group of residents who know, or know of, each other. We see each from their own interiority as well as from the outside as others see them. As she brings this neighborhood to life Camarillo slyly skewers our prejudices and petty egos and desires, but with great empathy and good nature. It’s a skillful writer who can make one care most about the characters who are the least sympathetic. I cared so much I had to put the book down a few times when I was afraid of where the narrative was going. Never predictable, the novel also made me laugh out loud. Those People Behind Us is a fun page-turner that is also an important novel of our times—no mean feat!

In the past decade as I worked on a novel set in Montauk I’ve turned to novels by
master writers who know how to bring a specific world alive – books by Richard Russo
and John Casey and Alice McDermott and Elizabeth Strout and Edward J. Delaney.
More specifically, because my novel deals with environmental issues, and as climate
change has become ever more problematic, I’ve been thinking a lot about nature and
our relationship to it. I’ve been drawn to novels that delve deeper into our relationship
with nature itself.

For those considerations, and for the sheer pleasure of experiencing other worlds, here
is a roundup of some recent books I’ve enjoyed. They’ll take you from Alaska to
Antarctica, and from Ireland to the deep blue ocean.

Heroes of the Frontier, by Dave Eggers, is deeply philosophical, deeply felt, and deeply funny. The novel centers on a woman who escapes to Alaska with her two children and makes her way across the state in a beat-up rented recreational vehicle they call the Chateau. If you’ve ever gone camping, you’ll adore all the details of life in this wreck on wheels.

Eggers is one of those graceful fluid writers whose prose is so effortless it masks its skill. His characters – the fantastically flawed and appealing Josie and her two children – are wonderfully drawn. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever been as enthralled by any children in adult fiction as I was with Paul and Ana. The delights of the family’s travels throughout Alaska, their near misses/calamities, kept me up reading. Many parts – mostly because of his turns of phrase – are laugh-out-loud funny.

What Eggers is ruminating on in this novel, though, goes beyond the story of a woman on the run from a bad relationship and on the road with her family. It’s a kind of spiritual coming-of-age tale, a meditation on the grandeur of Alaska, and an investigation of environmental catastrophe. Forest fires are sweeping up from the south, roaring through the country’s late-summer forests, threatening this last frontier of pristine territory. Many readers will be aware of the current threat of opening the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling that the Trump administration is currently pushing. But the novel was written earlier and doesn’t reference it. Eggers, in giving Josie a way to reawaken to herself and give her children precious freedom and responsibility, is saying something about how crucial true wilderness is for humankind and what’s at stake if we lose touch with our wild spaces.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Long Island juts out into the Atlantic and splits into two prongs for the last 30 miles or so of its 120 mile length. The North Fork, because it faces Connecticut and is surrounded by a sound and not the ocean, is less famous than the South Fork, home to the well-known “Hamptons,” with their ocean, rather than bay, beaches.

Orient has a bit of mystery to it, and Bollen exploits this for all its worth. He presents it as a land out of time, but with time catching up. In the world of the novel Orient is attracting those who a decade or two earlier would have gone to the South Fork but are priced out and looking for a more “authentic” scene.

Bollen tells the story of various locals, artists, and in particular, a sort of wayward orphan, Mills Chever, who is given a summer job and taken in by an older, single man for the summer. Beth, an Orient native and returnee from Manhattan, befriends Mills, especially when he comes under suspicion when a dead body is found. After deaths pile up and fear grips the town, the two attempt to solve the murders.

Bollen effectively creates a mounting sense of dread even as he slows the pace of the novel to give us the interiority of the characters and many scenes unrelated to solving the mystery. He’s a masterful writer, highlighting beauty, desolation, and conflicts at the intersection of money and property really effectively.

The story is gripping, the setting entrancing, but above all, read this for the prose.