By Ellen Ullman

Parul Sehgal, New York Times Book Review, Feb. 24, 2012

Pythagoras said the world was made of numbers; Democritus insisted upon atoms; Empedocles, four primordial elements — fire, air, water, earth. But Plato loved triangles. In his schema, matter was made up of triangles in kaleidoscopic configurations, triangles themselves divisible into tinier triangles. Triangles begat triangles. They were the essential unit.

Literature, I’d hazard, would agree.

The triangle has been the essential scaffolding for the novel; from its wobbliness emerges such productive instability. Take away the triangle, and Adam and Eve would still be simple-mindedly tending to their garden; Oedipus would leave mom alone; Vronsky wouldn’t stand a chance; and Freud would be out of a job. And literature would be bereft without the love triangle in all its variations — one party dead (“Rebecca”), oblivious (“Othello”), mad (“Jane Eyre”) or a pile of old letters (“The Aspern Papers”).

Despite this abundance of triangles, some still have the power to surprise. Such is the case with Ellen Ullman’s smart, slippery “By Blood,” which features a triangle so odd and improbable, it’s almost a riddle. Explain how a man can become fixated on two women without (a) seeing them, or (b) being seen by them.

Here’s how: It’s the summer of 1974. San Francisco is at its seamiest, stinking of sexual license, sexual menace and rotting garbage. Stagflation holds steady; a “defeated army” of homeless Vietnam vets occupy the city’s empty lots; the Zodiac killer is at large.

Into these insalubrious surroundings enters a nameless and magnificently weird protagonist, a disgraced professor and classic unreliably unreliable narrator, the spawn of Kafka and Krafft-Ebing, squirrelly and vaguely deviant. Ullman, skirting dangerously close to Gothic camp, pushes him just shy of caricature. He’s forever lugubriously alluding to “the terrible darkness within me” and his “morbid and afflicted” imagination — without showing us much evidence of anything other than low-grade prurience and torpor. While under investigation by the university for some unspecified infraction, he’s installed himself in a rented office, where he intends to prepare lectures on “The Eumenides,” the third part of the “Oresteia” (yet another story built on the back of a love triangle).

But lo — he finds, first to his consternation and then to his vast delight, another drama unfolding, one as wild and fanged as Aeschylus’. In the office next door, Dr. Dora Schussler, psychotherapist, sees her patients. And our man can hear every word.

He is taken with one patient: a young lesbian, also left nameless. It’s love at first listen, and not just because of the patient’s “creamy alto.” It’s her predicament. She is adopted and just beginning to pluck at the skein of secrets obscuring her origins. Our narrator comes from dreadful suicide-smitten stock — “My aunt Selma once said I had the temperament of Uncle Harry: Did this include whatever bad thing he had done with his gun?” — and this patient fills him with admiration. “Why,” he asks, “could I not learn the art of being parentless from these adoptees: these very models of self-creation?”

As the patient begins turning up clues (her birth mother was a Holocaust survivor) and her inquiries begin taking her to history’s painful places (where she discovers — what else? — triangles), it becomes clear to our diligent eavesdropper that Dr. Schussler may have a few secrets of her own. Her family too is twisted at the root. She too envies the patient, saying into a recorder: “She could shed her family and I could not. Her attachment to them was not ‘real,’ they were not blut, she had inherited nothing from them but experience, which can be discussed, analyzed, understood, changed. But I carried in me — what? . . . A stain.”

Ullman arranges her players efficiently, expertly. But what astounds is how she binds them to one another. Keith Richards said, “The eyes are the whores of the senses.” “By Blood” takes place on a whole other realm of the senses, an ignored, insulted realm. How does our eavesdropper fall in thrall to the women next door? He listens to them. He learns their sounds. The “suggestive, teasing” noise of a single tissue being pulled from its box. The scrape — followed by the acrid smell of phosphorous — that indicates Dr. Schussler has lighted another cigarette. The “cicada-like slip-slip” that puzzles him at first and then becomes clear: the doctor is crossing and recrossing her legs; it’s “the slide of nylon upon nylon.”

How beautifully this book restores to us the uses, the sensuality of sound — our awareness of how much information we are passively gleaning and unconsciously filing away. The narrator wonders why he automatically assumes the psychiatrist is an older woman. And then it comes to him. It’s the “slip-slip.” It’s 1974; young women don’t wear nylons anymore.

He pulls whole histories from the voices of the two women: age, race, geography, class. When he first hears the patient speak, he senses an inner censor, a “little watchful person who stood guard over her speech, . . . carefully ushering her confused A’s and R’s into the proper halls of culture.” He studies the effect the voice has on his limbic system, becomes a scientist of sound: the “profound interior configuration of the body, the subtle crenelations of lung and diaphragm and sinuses, the delicate architecture of the airways; all of which combine to produce that aspect which is last noted but finally most determinant of one’s overall feelings about a person: . . . the voice.”

But this book, which leans so heavily on dialogue, isn’t merely about voices; it’s about speech, about how we use language to conceal what we mean, as all language is code.

And code is, of course, Ullman’s great theme. In the 1970s she was a computer programmer, and her books “The Bug” (2003) and “Close to the Machine” (1997) were early dispatches from this mysterious world. She wrote of its rituals, pleasures, isolation, of how her body seemed to vanish during her marathon coding sessions, of how patiently and pain­stakingly meaning was coaxed. “Our physical selves have been battered away,” she said in “Close to the Machine.” “Now we know each other in one way and one way only: the code.”

All these elements run through “By Blood.” Our narrator, hanging on every word of his beloved patient’s story, is rendered bodiless, only a pair of ears in a dark room. In the next office, the psychotherapist wheedles admissions from the patient. The patient wrests secrets from her mother. It is as Irvin Yalom (himself a psychotherapist) said: we are compulsive “meaning-seeking creatures.”

The novel itself is an information technology, one that withholds information strategically for the sake of our pleasure. It’s a narrative striptease. And Ullman has such fun with it. What a cast of master prevaricators she gives us, how far she makes them travel. And in the end, after their journey, she asks: “Does it matter? Does it matter who your father is? Your mother? Who are the exact people who dropped their blood into the container that is you?”

In an Op-Ed in The New York Times last year, Ullman, herself adopted, argued forcefully in favor of mystery. She wrote of giving “not-knowing its due,” of “the sense of uniqueness that comes from having unknown origins.” But she’s also written elsewhere that where essays explain, literature enacts. In her Op-Ed, she said birth origins don’t matter; in “By Blood,” she shows us that they matter, intensely — if only because we cannot keep from seeking them out, whatever the risk, whatever we may find. And how could we not? The triangle is lodged deep in our narrative and literal DNA. We are each of us born of two. We each of us have created the first triangle we know, the original, ­irreconcilable equation.

Parul Sehgal, NPR.org, Feb. 13, 2012

Novels are stately creatures. Stay awhile, they say. Learn about these characters. Learn to love them. Be with them; watch them change. But the short-story collection makes no such invitation. It’s an inherently transgressive art form, the predecessor to Rear Window and Chatroulette. We peer into lit rooms, spy on characters in the throes of crises. We burgle and blunder our way in, only to find the body cold; the marriage shattered — and suddenly — we’re onto the next story, the next unraveling.

Nathan Englander made his name with his prize-winning 1999 collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. He returns to the form with What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, eight stories on Jewishness — and not Jewishness as a metaphor — but the local, lived experiences of Jews in America and Israel. Englander is interested in how faith is understood, rejected and defended, and in the tension between the needs of the individual and the demands of the community.

If the themes are familiar — this is terrain well-mined by Malamud, Bellow and Roth — Englander refreshes them with narrative experimentation and a cast of appealingly crazy characters. Every time the curtain rises, we’re thrust into another odd consciousness: the manager of a Jewish summer camp for retirees, a settler on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, a hapless husband at a peep show featuring an all-rabbi lineup.

These consciousnesses are almost exclusively male; Englander’s interest is in male subjectivity. Female characters are caricatures of moms, strippers, nagging wives and girlfriends. It’s a flaw that doesn’t quite develop into a failing because Englander’s men are so irresistible. They’re good, guilty men fumbling for perfection. Lazy pilgrims.

Where Englander’s previous novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, was explicitly political, here, he treads lightly. (Whether he’s being subtle or mincing depends on your tastes.) This restraint isn’t always welcome, and even neuters some stories. Take “How We Avenged the Blums,” about a group of Jewish kids facing down their bully: It’s a beautifully written, entirely predictable piece that would have been left on the cutting room floor of Goodbye, Columbus.

But at his best, Englander tells us something fresh about Jewish identity today — and in the case of the title story, he does so while riffing on the art of storytelling itself.

A homage to the Raymond Carver classic What We Talk About When We Talk about Love, Englander’s story begins (in fine Carver fashion) with two couples sitting together at a table, getting drunk and mean. But in the case of Englander’s story, the couples happen to be a Hasidic Israeli pair and their hosts, assimilated Florida Jews. Things get very weird, very quickly.

The Israelis can’t understand why the Americans are so hung up on the Holocaust. “Our concern,” the Hasidic husband says, “is not the past Holocaust … our concern is intermarriage. It is the Holocaust that’s happening now.” The couples later play a grim game called Righteous Gentile, in which they try to decide, in the case of another Holocaust, which of their non-Jewish friends would hide them.

It’s one of the strongest, strangest American stories in years. The other pieces in the collection don’t rise to its level (some, like the affected “The Reader,” flail), but this book, for its inconsistencies, deserves to be read and reread for its heart and technical proficiency.

Even if it revisits terrain exhaustively explored by other American Jewish writers, Englander unwittingly makes us wonder: If a writer takes Jewishness as his subject, is he obligated to tell us something new about Jewishness? Or is he only obligated to describe Jewish characters in the most precise language he can, putting them in the most psychologically revealing situations he can imagine? Such questions — irresolvable, hairsplitting, Talmudic — prove more satisfying than the answers posed by a more perfect book.

By Sarah Manguso

Parul Sehgal, Plain Dealer, February 2012

On July 23, 2008, a young man leapt to his death in front of a Metro-North train in New York City. He was identified later as Harris Wulfson, a beloved Brooklyn, N.Y., musician who had suffered from intermittent psychotic episodes.

He is eulogized in a new book, “The Guardians,” by Sarah Manguso, author of “Two Kinds of Decay.” Theirs was a platonic friendship, a twinship tinged by Eros.

Manguso had just returned to New York after a year abroad when she heard that Harris had escaped from a psychiatric institution and committed suicide. Her book is as much a memoir of mourning, of piecing together the puzzle of Harris’ final hours, as it is a struggle to find a vessel to contain her pain, the search for the right kind of book to write.

“If I were a journalist I’d have spoken to everyone and written everything down right away,” she writes. But she’s afraid, she says, afraid to talk to his parents, his last lover or the man that drove the train. She retreats, skipping the memorial, refusing the family’s invitation to visit Harris’ apartment to choose something of his to keep.

“I wasn’t going to continue without Harris,” she writes. “Everyone else could mourn, obedient, but I would not participate.”

She surrenders to her grief. “I don’t try to hide it. I let it get all over everything.”

And yet her book is unfailingly controlled, even coy. How little we learn about Harris; Manguso gives us only staccato summaries: He made music. He liked whitefish and Manhattans and girls. He’d forget to flush the toilet — but abruptly, she veers off: “He timed his jump in front of the train, and that’s the story.”

Out of pain or delicacy, she returns obsessively to trace the contours of her wound, but there, too, she flails. “I can’t measure my grief and I can’t show anyone what color it is,” she protests.

Manguso is a deliberate and exact stylist; the only elements inscrutable in this book are inscrutable by design — a fact that does little to mitigate the reader’s frustration. Harris remains hazy, as does Manguso herself. She keeps the reader at arm’s length, making the stray tantalizing statement (“I’ve taken antipsychotics every day for more than a decade and don’t plan to stop”) and referencing her own time spent in a mental institution without elaboration.

It’s a pity. The book’s most fluent moments are when Manguso writes freely and frankly (in her elliptical fashion). She describes sharing a loft with Harris and a few friends, sleeping in a corner cordoned off by hand-sewn, red-velvet curtains. (The hand-sewn curtains, of course, recall that most famous evocation of youth and regret in New York: Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That,” and, at her best, Manguso has some of Didion’s rhythms, her watchfulness and remove, her way of drawing attention to her own fragility.)

This is finally a fiercely personal book — not an intimate book. Manguso has written it in a fragmentary, private language for the friend she loved in life, and whom, in death, she protects from our gaze. We cannot know him. We cannot measure her loss.

Manguso writes that the readers’ expectations of her book will be colored by their own experiences with death. “A man whose lover died slowly wants this book to be about love. A man whose brother died quickly wants this book to be about rage.”

She’s wrong. We want this book to be about her and Harris. We want particulars. We want reason — perversely, perhaps — to mourn him, too.

By Jeanette Winterson

Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Magazine, February 2012

Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. But I wonder if there isn’t a third type, too, mysterious and misunderstood: the individual who knows a great deal about one thing—and that thing is herself. Narcissism has nothing to do with it. This is a specialty that usually signals deprivation: In the absence of other people, the self was all there was to study.

Such is the lot and genius of Jeanette Winterson. Her novels—mongrels of autobiography, myth, fantasy, and formal experimentation—evince a colossal stamina for self-scrutiny. In her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, she returns to the source, her grim girlhood in a sooty English industrial town in the 1960s, to tell her story more forthrightly than she has before. But because this is Winterson, naturally she begins by taking a truncheon to the standard memoir form.

From the first page, it’s clear that this isn’t mere memoir. It’s too stylish and stylized. Horror and camp commingle. Here’s our introduction to Winterson’s Gorgon of an adoptive mother: “She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father.”

Winterson is as concerned with aesthetics as authenticity. Style is king when you’re trying to wrest control of the narrative. And narrative, in the Winterson household, was contested territory. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t setting my story against [my mother’s],” she writes. “Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives.”

And the artist abhors a vacuum. Winterson aligns her stories with those of Oedipus, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Harry Potter. She, too, is a member of that most magical fraternity: orphans cruelly used but marked for greatness. Hers is a classic quest story—the kind deep in her storyteller’s DNA that she has riffed on her entire career. In this memoir, she seeks her biological mother and, above all, love. “How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss.”

Winterson is the best kind of hero, deeply flawed, all swagger and pluck, and matched against an excellent villain. Mrs. Winterson (as the author refers to her parent) can confidently take her place among the demon mothers of life and literature, the Medeas and Mommie Dearests. She had adopted Jeanette “because she wanted a friend”—an enthusiasm that curdled quickly on the actual baby’s arrival. She stuffed the child in the coalhole, locked her out overnight in bitter winters. When she discovered Jeanette was having a love affair with a female friend, Mrs. Winterson arranged for an exorcism.

“Unhappy families are conspiracies of silence,” Winterson writes, and the thrill she feels in breaking the contract gives these scenes a terrific energy. The pride of the survivor pumps into each sentence as Winterson hauls her old ogre of a mother into the light and ticks off every offense.

“The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole,” she writes, “is that it prompts reflection.” The bleak house became the crucible in which she brewed her own brawling instinct for self-preservation. She found sanctuary in the public library, reading through the collection alphabetically (“Thank God her last name was Austen . . .”), and her affection and attention to her surroundings pungently evoke life in Accrington, its squalor and dignity. The hungry children idling outside the dog-biscuit factory, hoping for scraps. The furry and mustachioed women—it simply didn’t occur to them to shave anything. The laborers who would end their days with a class on Shakespeare for self-improvement. It’s as proud and vivid a portrait of working-class life as any.

If Winterson disappoints, it’s in her curious insistence on ascribing the development of her style to actual incidents in her life. To wit: She traces her preference for the fragment to when her mother found and burned Jeanette’s secret stash of paperbacks. The next morning Winterson was left to sift through the “burnt jigsaws” from her books. She writes, “It is probably why I write as I do—collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative.” Aiming for narrative tidiness tends to dilute this memoir’s delightfully unorthodox quality.

But for the most part, this bullet of a book is charged with risk, dark mirth, hard-won self-knowledge. When Winterson writes, “I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked,” she’s right. You’re in the hands of a master builder who has remixed the memoir into a work of terror and beauty.

By Katherine Boo

Parul Sehgal, O Magazine, January 25, 2011

Annawandi, “a sumpy plug of slum,” is tucked between the Mumbai airport and a fleet of luxury hotels, a rejoinder to the story of the “new,” prospering India. Here on reclaimed bog land, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo spent a little over three years among 3,000 squatters packed into 355 shanties to produce Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

This is a stunning piece of narrative nonfiction; it not only reports on some of the world’s poorest people and their dizzying resourcefulness and criminality but portrays them in all their humanity. There’s a brothel owner and goat keeper who can’t keep either of his quarries in line; an ambitious woman named Asha who’s trying to jump-start her career in corruption; and, most memorably, “One Leg,” a Mumbai mother with, yes, one leg, who’s notorious for a “sexual need as blatant as her lipstick” and who’s not above setting herself on fire and framing her neighbors for the crime.

Boo’s prose is electric as she illustrates, with affection, the contradictions of this Annawandian community—the enviable kinship, the casual backstabbing, the drive to survive; in one heartbreaking scene, a boy steals the sandals off his sleeping father’s feet and sells them for food. Even more impressive is how Boo explores the most difficult question of all: In a country booming with development, what keeps these slumdwellers so poor?

By Jesmyn Ward

Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 30 2011

Job has nothing on 15-year-old Esch. She’s poor and pregnant and plain unlucky. Mama’s dead, Daddy’s a drunk and dinner is Top Ramen every night. Sex is the only thing that has ever come easily to her. When the boys used to take her down in the dirt or in the back seats of stripped cars in her front yard, she could escape briefly, pretend to be Psyche, Eurydice, Daphne, her favorite nymphs and goddesses from the Greek myths. But Manny, the boy who put the baby inside her, won’t look at her anymore. Esch can’t lie down in the dirt and pretend to be someone else or anywhere else. She’s stuck in shabby Bois Sauvage, a predominantly black Mississippi bayou town in the direct path of a hurricane they’re calling Katrina.

“Salvage the Bones,” the 2011 National Book Award winner for fiction, is a taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written. It feels fresh and urgent, but it’s an ancient, archetypal tale. Think of Noah or Gilgamesh or any soggy group of humans and dogs huddled together, waiting out an apocalyptic act of God or weather. It’s an old story — of family honor, revenge, disaster — and it’s a good one. As Arnold Schoenberg said, “There is still much good music that can be written in C major.” And Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader’s expectations: where we expect violence, she gives us sweetness. When we brace for beauty, she gives us blood.

Best of all, she gives us a singular heroine who breaks the mold of the typical teenage female protagonist. Esch isn’t plucky or tomboyish. She’s squat, sulky and sexual. But she is beloved — her brothers Randall, Skeetah and Junior are fine and strong; they brawl and sacrifice and steal for her and each other. And Esch is in bloom. Her love for Manny and her love for literature have animated the world; everything is suddenly swollen and significant. “He makes my heart beat like that, I want to say, and point at the squirrel dying in red spurts.” The headiness of the language is the book’s major strength and flaw. Ward can get carried away. She never uses one metaphor when she can use three, and too many sentences grow waterlogged and buckle.

Set in the 12 days leading up to and just after Hurricane Katrina, the novel presents each day as a distinct vignette with the punch of a story. The book opens with China, Skeetah’s pit bull, splitting open in the shed, birthing her first litter while the family watches and Skeetah massages her hips. And every ensuing scene riffs on these themes: the tenderness of men, the blessings that are brothers, the nearness of death. As a through-line, Ward weaves in the classics. Esch’s love of the Greek myths has inoculated her not from horror but from surprise. When Manny spurns her, she is ready: “In every one of the Greeks’ mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in a ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it.” She already knows that nature is protean and mischievous, that the gods tumble to earth to chase mortal women, girls can turn into trees, a hurricane can laugh, and the creek will rise out of its bed and wend its way into her house “to eat and play.”

For all its fantastical underpinnings, “Salvage the Bones” is never wrong when it comes to suffering. Sorrow and pain aren’t presented as especially ennobling. They exist to be endured — until the next Katrina arrives to “cut us to the bone.” And like every good myth, at its heart, the book is salvific; it wants to teach you how to wait out the storm and swim to safety.

There were many books I admired this year, books I read and reread and recommended. Salvage the Bones is every bit as good as they say it is. And there were groundbreaking narrative nonfiction books about India: Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (out in Feb. 2012) are works of profound witness, kinship, artistic achievement, and moral necessity.

But only one book left me breathless.

I didn’t read — I succumbed – to The Journals of John Cheever. I picked it up one evening after the guests had gone, after the ashtrays had been emptied and the dog walked. I was lightly drunk and working on getting more seriously drunk (the Cheevering hour?); I idly opened the book — and let it have its way with me all weekend in the spare room.

It’s a disheveling, debauching book. Even a dangerous book: it invites you to contemplate — even embrace — your corruption. These journals, posthumously edited by Cheever’s longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, are a 40-year chronicle of wanting health but plotting, ardently, self-destruction. Of struggling with alcoholism and bisexuality. Of wanting very much to love one’s wife and only one’s wife — but falling gratefully into the arms of any stranger who will have you. Of the soul as irredeemably “venereal, forlorn, and uprooted.”

Cheever had a brain and body so responsive — “touchy like a triggered rattrap” — everything he sees turns him on, makes him cry, turns him rhapsodic. Desire stains everything. And it isn’t airy, “Chopinesque longing,” no — it’s itchy and inconvenient, “as coarse and real as the hair on my belly,” he writes. “In the public urinal I am solicited by the man on my right. I do not dare turn my head. But I wonder what he looks like. No better or no worse, I guess than the rest of us in such throes.”

I love this Cheever, so lust-worn, fatigued, wise. The Cheever who observes, “I prayed for some degree of sexual continence, although the very nature of sexuality is incontinence.” But I love him more when he’s cross, crass, and ornery. When he’s querulous and moaning for “a more muscular vocabulary,” his face on a postage stamp, a more reliable erection. When he carps about his contemporaries (Calvino: “cute,” Nabokov: “all those sugared violets”). But Cheever the ecstatic, who merges with the mountain air and streams, who finds in writing and sex a bridge between the sacred and the profane and is as spontaneous and easy as a child — he is indispensable.

“Today gloomy and humid. I walk the dogs in a heavy rain. Water lilies grow at the edge of the pond. I want to pick some and take them home to Mary. I decide that this is foolish. I am a substantial man of fifty-eight, and I will walk past the lilies in a dignified manner. Having made this decision, I strip off my clothes, dive into the pond and pick a lily. I will be dignified tomorrow.”

The days are short and few. Stay up late with John Cheever. Contemplate your corruption with cheer. Be dignified tomorrow. Remember: “The morning light is gold as money and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting.”

By Alan Hollinghurst

Parul Sehgal, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 1, 2011

“The Stranger’s Child,” Alan Hollinghurst’s first book since “The Line of Beauty,” the 2004 Man Booker Prize winner, is a sly and ravishing masterpiece. The novel skips with indecent ease through 100 years of British political and literary history, concealing its mighty ambition in charm and louche wit.

It’s a devastating history of gay love, erasure and resilience. It’s also a ripping yarn, a simple love (or rather, lust — Hollinghurst’s characters are too arch, too Wildean for love) story as literary whodunit: “Brideshead Revisited” crossed with “Possession.”

The book begins in 1913, on the eve of World War I. Cecil Valance (modeled on Rupert Brooke) is a young poet and guest at the home of his lover and Cambridge classmate, George Sawle.

Rich, reckless, coming into fame, Cecil glamours the family — from the valet to George’s 16-year-old sister, Daphne. He presents her with a poem-in-progress, “Two Acres,” which, in actuality, is a covert love poem to George. Cecil goes to the front and makes his name on his ecstatic poems from the trenches. He dies, still young and beautiful, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and thus begin the Sawle and Valance family troubles.

They’re forever “shackled to old Cecil.” Daphne and Cecil had exchanged some grim love letters –”Tell me, Daphne, will you be my widow?” She becomes widely regarded as Cecil’s great love and the inspiration for “Two Acres,” the most famous (and most misconstrued) poem in England.

Misreadings mushroom until the book arrives at the present: The two families have fallen into declining fortunes and a clenched-jaw peace in Cecil’s shadow, when a biographer, Paul Bryant, certain that the “Two Acres” was addressed to Daphne’s brother, begins interviewing the surviving Valances and Sawles. For “smut essentially,” sniffs Daphne, now shabby and withered and a bit mad. He turns up a raft of secrets.

Around this central story ripple countless others: shadowy affairs and abortive seductions among gay minor characters. Behind the bloom of Hollinghurst’s prose, another project quietly unfurls.

As much as “The Stranger’s Child” is about England and Englishness, about war, about the impulse toward biography, it’s profoundly and unmistakably a secret literary history. It’s the tapestry of British literature turned around to reveal its seams, to reveal that the history of the British novel has been the history of gay people in Britain.

It’s Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and the entire Bloomsbury set (name checked extensively in the book), a history — as Cecil’s is — of invisibility, secrecy and scandal, bowdlerization, censure and frenetic posthumous outing. This pr cis might be stuffy; trust that the book never is.

“The Stranger’s Child” restores gay life and love to the vibrant center of the British novel without a hint of solemnity or righteousness, only supple prose and a sodden, fun bunch of obviously, gloriously gay characters. Seldom has literary restitution proved so pleasurable.

By Parul Sehgal, Publishers Weekly Sept. 30, 2011

In Walking with the Comrades, novelist and activist Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) travels into the forest with India’s Maoist indigenous communities at war with the government.

How did you earn the guerrillas’ trust?

When the Indian government declared war against the Maoists, Indian liberals, for the most part, took a very safe, neutral position: “The government is bad, the Maoists are bad, the poor people are sandwiched in the middle.” I am no Maoist, but I thought that was a profoundly dishonest position. It elided the fact that the government had secretly sold lands belonging to indigenous tribes to mining and infrastructure companies. This is illegal and unconstitutional, and yet it was being done brazenly. Hundreds of thousands of paramilitary police were closing in on forest villages to clear the land for the corporations. About 600 villages had been emptied; some 300,000 people had fled their homes and had either moved to police camps or were hiding, terrified, in the forest. Many had joined the guerrilla army and were fighting back. The government and the media, campaigning for corporations, labeled them terrorists and called for them to practice Gandhian nonviolence. I wrote that Gandhian nonviolence was political theater that could be effective provided it had a sympathetic and empowered audience; how could people in remote forest villages, far from the gaze of the media or a hostile middle class be Gandhian while they were being raped and murdered? How could the starving go on hunger strike? How could those with no money boycott goods? My writings made their way into the forest, and one day a note was slipped under my door, inviting me to walk with the comrades.

What surprised you most about them?

I believed that when people take up arms, the violence would inevitably turn against the women in the community. In the forest I was disabused of this notion—45% of the Peoples Liberation Guerrilla Army is made up of women. Many of them joined after watching the brutal attacks of the police and the government sponsored vigilante groups on their villages. Others joined to escape the patriarchal practices of their own tribal society. The Maoist party has been a very patriarchal organization; the women within it still have major battles to fight (like women everywhere), but in the forest, I was in complete awe of the women I met. There was a lovely moment when I went down to a river with some women guerillas to bathe, while others kept guard. I remember thinking to myself, “Look at the women in this river—writers, guerrillas, farmers—how very wonderful.”

You write about India’s poor and disenfranchised, but you do so in English (and with a fairly sophisticated style, to boot)? Who do you write for?

Language is such a volatile and political issue in India. We have hundreds of languages and each has its own history of oppression and exclusion. So whatever language you write in, you’re excluding the majority of people in the country. Yes, I write in English, but my writing is immediately translated into Hindi, Bengali, Odiya, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam. Still, it is a huge irony to be a writer, in any language, in a country where so many are illiterate. Who do I write for? For everybody and nobody. I write when my body cannot accommodate my silence any more. I do what I can to use language and not let it use me.

One of the pleasures of reading your writing is your irreverence and exuberance—a tone not commonly found in analyses of this sort. Is this a voice that you’ve had to hone?

I don’t spend a moment thinking about my style. But I do spend a fair amount of time structuring the argument and narrative. It takes a few drafts for me to moderate the fury I feel. As for irreverence, I’ve always found so much laughter, so much cutting humor amongst people even in the most deadly moments. When I think back on my time in the forest, more than anything else I remember laughing till tears were streaming down my face.

You invite our admiration for how “the poorest people in the world have managed to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks.” How can readers support these communities?

The Maoists are only the militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements in India—all of them are posing a radical challenge to accepted ideas of what constitute progress, “development,” and civilization itself. The main thing readers can do is to not think of this conversation as a conversation about others, but to look at their own “civilizations” and ask: “What can we do to help ourselves, to open our imaginations to another way of thinking?”

By Paul Hendrickson

Parul Sehgal, The Plain Dealer, September 18, 2011

Papa can’t rest in peace.

Has there been an American author more relentlessly mythologized, psychoanalyzed, and plain pilloried than Ernest Hemingway?

He’s been labeled a brute, a bully and a bore. A heartless seducer of women and a closeted homosexual. An absurd cartoon of hypermasculinity and a transvestite. His critics and rivals, his children and grandchildren have had their say in memoirs. His fiction has been combed for clues. His bones have been picked clean. But one little mystery remains. And her name is Pilar.

She’s a sturdy, 38-foot motor yacht, hewn from Canadian fir and Honduran mahogany, “sea kindly” as the old fishermen used to say, steadfast in any waters. And steadfast she proved — outlasting Hemingway’s three wives, the dissolution of almost every one of his friendships, and the slow unraveling of his confidence and his sanity.

She’s the heroine of a glorious new biography, “Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961,” from Paul Hendrickson, who won the National Book Critics Circle award in 2004 for “Sons of Mississippi.”

The craft proves that there just might be one more way of telling Papa’s story.

By focusing on Pilar — and the period Hemingway possessed her, his final 27 years — Hendrickson anchors his account in the material, not the speculative. Thus this book, full of pilgrimages — first to Pilar herself, who Hendrickson finds in Cuba, beached “on concrete blocks, like some old and gasping browned-out whale.”

The author handles her like the relic she is, and makes of her a cunning, capable metaphor for Hemingway’s contradictory drives. Pilar was instrumental to the creation of the Hemingway myth and where he fled to escape it. Hendrickson aligns the “dry-docked, parts-plundered” boat hollowed out by termites and her erstwhile owner “who let his own insides get eaten out by the diseases of fame.”

In coming at his subject through this love letter to a boat, Hendrickson achieves a copious, mystical portrait of “this most riddlesome of men.” If conventional Hemingway biographies follow a familiar trajectory — pinning the posturing and the depression on some early trauma (his mother’s propensity for dressing him as a girl, his war wound, his father’s own suicide) — in coming at his subject at a slant, Hendrickson complicates and humanizes Hemingway.

Which is not to say he reveals the man. Papa still proves maddeningly elusive. This is, after all, a book about a boat, and we learn far more about the fish Hemingway lands than any of his wives. What we do get is context. Hendrickson fills in the negative space exuberantly. He imagines each scene completely, and then imagines himself into it. The book becomes a participatory biography — the details are rendered with a hallucinatory intensity.

We’re in the scene, merging with Hendrickson and Hemingway’s consciousness, scouting the Michigan rivers Hemingway fished as a boy, wiggling our toes into the riverbeds — some pebbled, some “soft as birdshot,” wading deeper into waters “icy cold, clean as silver, riffling over stones, alive with fat, pulpy rainbows.”

Contouring not Hemingway but his environment and the weight of his presence equips Hendrickson to take on his second, subtler task: to consider the “destructive influence of a man’s unconscious on those whom he deeply loved” — namely, his sons.

There were three Hemingway boys, all unhappy in their own way — but none so tragic as the youngest: Gregory, nicknamed Gigi. He struggled to be the son his father wanted, miserably concealing his compulsion to wear women’s clothing, and even exiling himself to Africa for a season of “therapeutic” elephant shooting. He underwent gender reassignment surgery, but by then the effects of substance abuse and bipolarism had begun. He died, raving, in a women’s prison in 2001.

Gigi’s life reads like one long scream. It’s depicted with sensitivity (although it’s curious that Hendrickson never refers to Gigi by his chosen name, Gloria, nor does he use the female pronoun) and squeamishness. Chary of “daffy” psychological explanations, Hendrickson makes his own clumsily: “I’ll whoof this straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt.”

The author’s primness keeps him from exploring the implications of this startling claim, even as Hendrickson identifies Hemingway’s agonized attraction to the feminine “which is why his work endures, why his best work will always have its tuning-fork ‘tremulousness.’ “

Still, it’s the unimpeachably masculine Hemingway who dominates the book. All his ambiguities and darkness — the months in the “bunker-like house” in landlocked Idaho, where he rotted, tormented by bipolarism and his inability to write — fly by in summary.

It’s as though Hendrickson’s eye is trained to find splendor, to seek the light. “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty,” he writes. And so this bighearted book leaves us with a litany of sorrows, but also images of grace: of heroism in Gigi’s muddled final moments; of tenderness and lucidity in Hemingway’s paranoid last days; and of Pilar and her promise of escape, renewal, and the open sea.

Parul Sehgal is a senior editor at Publishers Weekly.