Summer Reading.

Jeffrey Meyers, distinguished biographer of Ernest Hemingway and many others, has written about the authors of the other works discussed here in his latest book, Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers.

This year is Ernest Hemingway's centenary, and his Complete Short Stories (Scribners, $29.95, 650 pp.) contains some of his best work. Those who think Hemingway doesn't understand women ought to read "Hills like White Elephants." The imaginative woman in the story is moved by the landscape while the literal-minded man refuses to sympathize with her point of view. As they wait in a train station between Barcelona and Madrid, the egoistic man, unaware of her feelings, tries to bully her into having an abortion (which is never actually mentioned). But the woman is frightened. Everything he says is false; everything she says is ironic. He forces her to consent in order to keep his love, but the very fact of his asking her means she can never love him again. She walks away from him and finds comfort in nature: in the fields of grain, the trees, the river, and the hills beyond. Her peaceful contemplation recalls Psalm 121 as she lifts up her eyes to the hills for help. But her mood is shattered by his persistent argument, which drives her to the edge of a breakdown, and she frantically begs: "Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking?" Their anguished encounter signifies the end of something.

Francis King, who has a major reputation in England, deserves to be better known in America. His masterpiece, Act of Darkness (Little, Brown, 332 pp.), is a murder novel with philosophical ideas and moral implications. King tells an intriguing story, based on an actual unsolved crime-the murder of a child-and offers his own fictional solution. He writes with considerable style and wit and provides the best description of the atmosphere as well as the landscape of India since his friend E.M. Forster wrote of the subcontinent seventy-five years ago. Most important, King has sharp insight into the moods and motivations of a wide range of disparate and desperate people. A disturbing undercurrent swirls through the book and sucks most of the characters into an almost self-willed destruction. This novel concerns the connection between murderer and victim, the obsession with death and concealment, the nature of evil.

Paul Theroux's greatly underrated Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin, $25, 358 pp.) is about a thirty-year friendship that finally, for complex reasons, went wrong. Though he criticizes V.S. Naipaul and reveals the dark side of his character at the end of the book, Theroux is, in fact, sympathetic, generous, and full of admiration for his old mentor. Despite all his achievements, Naipaul, as an Indian from Trinidad, has never ceased to feel defensive, insecure, under siege. Theroux's book explains how Naipaul constructed a harsh and apparently invulnerable persona to counter his own sense of inferiority and, by running down all his competitors, to stake his claim to literary greatness. Theroux has written a riveting story of two writers' lives: how they wrote books and won prizes, advanced their careers and achieved fame. He describes their acute sensitivity to criticism, their financial struggles, illnesses, and mental problems, their difficult marriages and tormented love affairs.

After all the darkness and shadows, John Bayley's tender Elegy for Iris (St. Martin's, $22.95, 275 pp.) illuminates some obscure aspects of love, fate, and illness. Bayley, a noted critic and professor, met Iris Murdoch at Oxford in 1954 and was happily married to her (they were called "the most intelligent couple in England") for more than forty years. He looks back on their life together through the prism of her Alzheimer's disease, diagnosed in 1994. Their love story has tragic overtones. But he vividly describes their intensified intimacy during her final years (she died, just after the book appeared, in February), when he single-handedly cared for her as she lapsed into a sad but still charming second childhood. His labors are rewarded as he finally, totally, captures as his sole possession the always elusive and sometimes promiscuous Iris. Bayley appeals to readers by suggesting that Alzheimer's can be jolly good fun, and he manages to make senescent love both pleasing and poignant.

Chet Raymo

Chet Raymo teaches at Stonehill College in Massachusetts and is science columnist for the Boston Globe. His newest book is Natural Prayers (Hungry Mind Press).

Summer is the time when we promise once again to read Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Of course, what usually happens is we get halfway through Swann's Way and then throw Proust over for a ripping John Grisham or Stephen King. But occasionally our literary good intentions find a book upon which they can comfortably rest, something with the literary merit of Proust but wrapped in a more digestible August-sized package.

Such a book is Andrei Makine's autobiographical novel Dreams of My Russian Summers (Scribner, $12, 241 pp.). In 1995, the book exploded into prominence by winning both of France's highest literary awards, the Prix Medicis and the Prix Goncourt. The story tells of a young boy growing up in Soviet Siberia with his French-born grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier. She regales him with tales of late-nineteenth-century Paris, and introduces him to the literary heritage of Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Maupassant. In her bedroom is a suitcase filled with papers-letters, newspaper clippings, photographs. These tattered documents become a magic carpet that carries the boy's imagination to a dreamlike France of cultural elegance and sensual pleasure. Against this idealized world on the Seine are posited rumors of Lavrenti Beria, the chief of the Soviet secret police, cruising the shabby streets of Moscow, trolling for pretty women who are pulled into his dark limousine, perhaps never to be seen again.

The boy's summers on the Russian steppe are richly realized; seldom has a coming-of-age story been told with such exquisite refinement. Caught between two languages-French and Russian-the boy imagines a kind of universal language, a "language of amazement," which might capture the longing, the love, the inexpressible ache of memory and desire. In 1987, in the springtime of perestroika, Makine, the boy grown up, left Russia for Paris. This memoir of his Russian summers was written in his grandmother's French, but even in English translation it is clear that he has found his "language of amazement." I intend this summer to read Makine's new novel, Once upon the River Love (Arcade, $24.95, 256 pp.).

I have also set aside the newest book from another author who has mastered the language of amazement, the American poet Mary Oliver. Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (Houghton Mifflin, $22, 144 pp.) is a bit of a grab bag of items that have been published elsewhere, but those of us who are addicted to everything Oliver writes appreciate having it brought together every year or so. I haven't been able to resist dipping into the first essay, which recounts Oliver's encounters with carpentry. "I wanted to build, in the other way," she writes, "with the teeth of the saw, and the explosions of the hammer, and the little shrieks of the screws winding down into their perfect nests." That last phase captures the reason we love Mary Oliver-her ability to be astonished by the commonplace. As I read her newest book I will also have at my side my well-thumbed New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, $16, 272 pp.), the indispensable introduction to this most amazed and amazing of American poets.

If in spite of everything you are still resolved to embark upon a summer's reading of Proustian scale, I recommend Robert Latham's The Shorter Pepys (University of California Press, $50, 1,152 pp.). I don't know if high school kids today read Samuel Pepys's Diary. Back in the 1950s even kids in parochial schools were exposed to bits and pieces- mostly accounts of the Great London Fire of 1666 and the plague. What we saw then was severely edited, as I discovered this past winter when I plowed through the diary, edited and abridged by Latham, with almost ten years' worth of entries and what seemed even in abridgment a zillion words. The fire and the plague are there, but what makes the diary such compelling reading is its combination of private and public history. Pepys was a man about town who hobnobbed with royalty, nobility, intellectuals, artists, actors and actresses, military men, clergymen and bishops, as well as tarts, boatmen, hackney drivers, and tavern keepers. He might move directly from an audience with the king at Whitehall Palace to a saucy performance by Nell Gwyn at the Duke's theater, from a demonstration at the Royal Society of one of the first blood transfusions to the spectacle of a public execution at Charing Cross. The diary is a portrait of Pepys's age in all of its nuances.

What we read is relevant to any age. Pepys is a man torn between marital fidelity and promiscuity, public integrity and private greed, religious tolerance and self-righteous faith, science and superstition, duty and pleasure. In short, he is Everyman, struggling with universal problems. By about page 800, I was having Pepysian dreams, without being altogether certain whether they were his or my own.

Gabrielle Steinfels

Gabrielle Steinfels lives in Manhattan. What ever possessed your niece to pierce her navel? Is there a meal to be found on the front lawn? Are you commuting on the military's most extensive weapon? All this and more are revealed by Emily Jenkins while exploring the very exotic everyday worlds around us. Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture (Henry Holt, $14.95, 224 pp.) contemplates the abstract, the semantics of men's underwear, and the physical-say, how do you go about picking a tattoo? Jenkins is concerned with experiences of the physical and how they define us. (Why that tattoo there?) Admittedly, much of the book's appeal is voyeuristic-I don't want to shave my head, be rolfed, or go without sleep for a week-but watching another walk on the wild side makes for excellent summer reading. The author also explores more mainstream experiences: cosmetic counters, sensory deprivation, nude beaches, and the ultimate physical experience, aging, with enough humor and insight to justify peeping.

Within John McPhee's endless output I recently discovered a collection of biographical essays, A Roomful of Hovings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $11, 250 pp.), written in the late 1960s. (I was preliterate at the time, so it's all new to me!) His subjects-Thomas P. F. Hoving, then director of the Metropolitan Museum and former clothing-store floorwalker in men's suits; Euell Theophilus Gibbons, roadside gourmand and author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus; Robert Twynam, the man responsible for the lawns at Wimbledon; and Temple Hornaday Fielding of Fielding's Guides-are all experts in their respective fields (grass or other). The adventure is in how they got that way.

McPhee's one group biography in the volume, "Fifty-two People on a Continent," focuses on a collection of bright young things sent off to Africa to work as midlevel bureaucrats. Their experiences are epitomized by one Carroll W. Brewster who at age twenty-eight traveled the Sudan collecting records of court and tribal law to compile the first of several issues of Sudan Law Journal and Reports, a public, national source of legal precedent for the Sudan. Aside from the pleasure found in these real-life "boy's adventures," the optimistic tone of McPhee regarding Africa's political future is a thought-provoking reminder of how much has been lost in thirty years.

Finally, John R. Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (Walker and Company, $10.95, 187 pp.) will tempt, urge, and incite you to get out of that chair, hop on a bicycle, and take a good look at your own world. Outside Lies Magic leads the reader, the "explorer," behind gas stations, under bypasses, and along small-town main streets, all the while pointing out a fascinating range of cultural artifacts: What political and social forces were behind the development of the Military and Interstate Highway System? How is the appeal of the suburban lawn rooted in our country's agrarian past? What is the relationship between fire insurance policies and the classic small-town Main Street?

Now that you are tired of reading about other people's adventures, take a look around, pick an element of your own universe, and wonder out loud how this came to be.

Elizabeth Bartelme

Elizabeth Bartelme, a long-time contributor, lives in New York. With poetry on the subway and poetry on the buses, poetry is evidently apropos any time, anywhere, and for this astonishing revelation we must give thanks. Nevertheless, reading poetry seems particularly enjoyable in a leisurely summer setting, for it sharpens the mind, exalts the spirit, and leads to a joyous heart. Nowhere is this more evident than in Marie Ponsot's The Bird Catcher (Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 96 pp.), a magnificent collection, witty and strong, as in: "This up-slope opens like Adam, and in giant Eden, the mountain's rib lies bare, its arch gashed white...We city people laugh to shrug off awe...pupils awkward with these vast geographies."

"These vast geographies..." opens to us W.S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs (Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 356 pp.), a long narrative poem relating the tragic history of nineteenth-century Hawaii. Merwin's tale is mesmerizing, and he brings three-dimensional characters to life as a people and as individuals, betrayed by the American and European colonizers and almost destroyed by leprosy, the "separation sickness." Families were torn apart, lovers separated, even children taken away to the leper colony on Molokai. It is a sad tale without a happy ending, but the poem itself is cast in a heroic mold that places it in the company of the great epics. It is truly a brilliant work of art.

To move from Merwin's soaring cliffs and the tropical beauty of the Hawaiian Islands to the teeming streets and back alleys of present-day Jerusalem is a leap well worth taking, if you are taking it with Robert Stone in Damascus Gate (Houghton Mifflin, $26, 512 pp.). On the surface this is a novel of suspense, but Stone's literary skill and polished prose make it a great deal more. Most interesting, however, is the moral ambiguity that underlies the story, and that is characteristic of most of the rest of his work as well. A fine novel by a distinguished writer.

No one presents the Irish-American community as well as Alice McDermott. Her latest book, Charming Billy (Dell, $12.95, 280 pp.), is the melancholy story of an alcoholic dreamer whose life is ruined as much by his refusal to accept his betrayal by the woman he loved and hoped to marry as by his steady drinking. Everyone loves Billy and talks of his charm and kindness, but he remains attached to his dream and to the fantasy that gave it birth. McDermott handles the tangled relationships and the character of Billy Lynch in a masterly manner, and the book is a fitting addition to her steadily growing canon. Charming Billy won the l999 National Book Award for fiction.

Jonathan Raban has become our Tocqueville, our Crevecoeur, as he has roamed South and West, riding a Mississippi raft, following railroad lines, and bucketing across the prairie and the plains in his old car. Taking in the United States from an English point of view, he has exerted his considerable curiosity and his appetite for travel to great good effect and has presented his findings to the public in three quite wonderful books: Bad Land (Pantheon, $25, 324 pp.), Hunting Mr. Heartbreak (Vintage, $13, 375 pp.), and Old Glory (Simon & Schuster, $16.95, 420 pp.). The territory Raban has covered allows for plenty of stops and he takes advantage at each to get to know the people who live, for example, on the river banks. In a great imaginative leap he recreates the lives of those intrepid homesteaders who pushed their way through the West, only to lose everything when their crops failed. These books are so delightful, witty, and warm that the stay-at-home traveler can't miss with them.

And, finally, for those who are heading to Europe, Bed and Breakfasts of Character and Charm in France (Fodor, $19) is just the ticket. There are color photos of each of the 663 B&Bs, adequate descriptions, an index, and great maps. Bon voyage!

Susan McWilliams

Susan McWilliams, a recent graduate of Amherst College, works as a consultant in New York City.

The turn of the millennium, if nothing else, serves as a marker for social reflection, a time to examine how far we have come, where we are, and where we might be going. Perhaps William Leach did not intend to write a call to arms, but Country of Exiles (Pantheon, $24, 273 pp.) resounds like nothing else. Leach argues that America's brilliance has always rested on one equilibrium: the "centrifugal" desire to move on (to the Gold Rush, to the highways) balancing the "centripetal" urge to root (in a profession, in a hometown). In the last three decades, however, that scale has tipped and thrown the country dangerously out of kilter. Businessmen and the vanguard of economic globalization, indifferent to location, have displaced local, regional, and even broader identities. Meanwhile, the nation convinces itself that America, instead of being both an idea and a place, can be simply an idea. This cosmopolitan notion, disdaining provinciality and localism, has obscured more permanent human needs for community, boundaries, home, a resting place. Focusing his inquiry in three telling arenas-transportation, gambling and tourism, and the research university-Leach warns that in losing our sense of place we are losing the things that bind us together. With that, we stand to lose ourselves.

While it trumpets present-day miracles of the marketplace, conventional wisdom holds that Americans are turning from God to Gucci, from church on Sundays to weekends at the mall. Rampant consumerism has indeed weighed on religion but not dissolved it, as Richard Cimino and Don Lattin explore in Shopping for Faith (Jossey-Bass, $25, 240 pp.). According to polls, 95 percent of Americans believe in God; they just believe in private. They seek the divine as they search for bargain wardrobes, using eclectic bits and pieces to furnish a personal spiritual style. Cimino and Lattin examine these and other facets of the nation's changing religious sense, offering predictions that do not, in fact, sound so unfamiliar. Baby boomers and Gen X-ers, searching for community, will rediscover traditional faith. Others will make sense of reason and revelation by mixing them in an "experiential spirituality" reminiscent of Thoreau, devoting themselves to nature and personal reflection. New types of religious organizations will emerge in the form of megachurches on one end and "grassroots" spiritual gatherings on the other. Cimino and Lattin's book, although at times too self-conscious by including main ideas in bold print and a companion CD-ROM, presents an engaging overview of where, when, and how Americans believe today, and what that implies for the coming years.

And, as always, foreign voices, speaking of foreign places, can tell us something about our own homestead. In Monika Fagerholm's Wonderful Women by the Sea (New Press, $15.95, 330 pp.), translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate, two families drift toward tomorrow from their neighboring summer cottages. Angels come to the summer paradise, carrying the future in a Chevrolet Chevelle. Angels depart, and the shine of the beach dulls. The intricate intersection of the lives here paces the intersection of cultures, of a relaxing past and a restless future. As Tupperware mothers make way for space children, and humans ascend to the moon, even beautiful women imagine more promised lands than Eden. Some will stay, some will go, some will come back, and some will be left behind. With a stunning ability to find meaning in the everyday, Fagerholm manages the complicated emotional relationships of a small community over the course of ten years. The scenario is further distorted by the demands of swift change: Every member of every family, pressed in a dwindling sanctuary, fights to come to terms with the encroaching outside world. Most impressive are the children, Thomas and Renee, through whose eyes Fagerholm watches a turbulent decade drench the most untouchable shores.

James J. Uebbing

James J. Uebbing, editor of Robert Lax's Love Had a Compass: Journals & Poetry (Grove Press), reviews books for Kirkus.

A classmate of mine from graduate school has recently published a novel- which, I hasten to point out, I have not yet read-describing the life of an elderly Manhattan fop who goes to parties for a living. Reviewing novels is a similar enterprise in many ways, and not just because both activities are usually intended and pursued as recreations rather than careers. The novel is an intensely personal literary form, after all; even more so than poetry, novels operate through the gradual revelation of personality, and they usually succeed or fail precisely to the degree that they compel a sense of fascination-rather than agreement or awe-in the reader.

A hundred novels read at random, therefore, will usually be remembered like a hundred people met at a large party: a few will be quite offensive, many will be boring, the great majority will be decent but utterly forgettable, and several will be quite nice. But, of necessity, the most interesting ones will usually be the oddest. These will not often become friends, but they will stay in your mind and will go the furthest toward convincing you that the evening was not entirely a waste of time.

While most people look forward to holidays as a time to catch up on their reading, I look forward to doing a little rereading. As a book reviewer, I read two-hundred-odd novels a year. On vacation I usually take five or six for a second reading. This year I have four. I have already described in these pages [April 9] Hwee Hwee Tan's Foreign Bodies (Persea, $24, 284 pp.), so I will simply mention it here as a perfect example of the sort of book I am speaking of. Tan's account of deceit and salvation within the orderly hell of Singapore is remarkable not so much for its story as for its telling, which is arresting largely because of the narrator's sure and certain-and, I believe, quite credible-conviction that she is describing the literal enactment of God's will as it is played out at the bar of a criminal court.

The voice of God also figures prominently in Lawrence Cosse's witty thriller, A Corner of the Veil (Scribner, $23, 272 pp.), which became a best seller when it was first published in France two years ago. Cosse questions both the meaning and the ramifications of religious faith by envisioning its demise-not through gradual apostasy, but as a result of the sudden discovery of an irrefutable proof of God's existence. As the proof (discovered by a latitudinarian Jesuit editor) quickly spreads, the government becomes alarmed at the loss of fear (and ambition) among its citizens-including the prime minister, who abandons politics and takes up gardening-and works out an uneasy alliance with the church (which finds itself equally alarmed at the prospect of its own irrelevance in a converted world) to halt the swelling tide of belief.

The quieter dramas of family life are at the heart of James Purdy's Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (Morrow, $19.95, 144 pp.) and Julie Myerson's Me and the Fat Man (Ecco, $23.95, 224 pp.). But neither family is exactly sedate, and both of them are haunted across the span of many years by a dead woman: in Purdy's work the rebellious daughter of an eccentric and staid Chicago couple, and in Myerson's story the hippie mother of an emotionally unhinged Englishwoman. Purdy's mother and Myerson's daughter both leave their husbands to uncover the mysteries behind their griefs, which has, of course, as much to do with themselves as with the dead.

The real disappointment with contemporary fiction is that most of its practitioners seem to have lost their nerve. The writing programs come in for a good deal of criticism in this regard, and it is true that the workshops tend to prize a peculiar style-simultaneously overwrought and bloodless-as proof of a "literary" sensibility, but much of the blame rests with the publishers, editors, and (alas!) the critics themselves, who seem to have worked out their peace with the status quo and prefer more of the same. Originality is brash and often somewhat deranged. The original author, like the tipsy guest who seems to have crashed the party and has no one to talk to, will tend to grab your arm and try not to let go until he has finished his story. Usually you can get away in a minute or two if you ask where the bathroom is or shake the ice cubes in the bottom of your glass. But sometimes you will have to hear him out to the end, when you will discover that you were interested after all.