DISCOVERIES

HUNDRED DOLLAR HOLIDAY; By Bill McKibben ; (Simon and Schuster: 95 pp., $12)

You’re a mean one, Mr. McKibben. In your recent book, “Maybe One,” you floated a one-child policy, now you want us to spend only $100 this holiday season. It’s a fine idea that will play 1650816116district in Tokyo. I like the gift ideas very much (handmade wooden blocks for kids, dried apple dolls, soap and McKibben’s favorite present, which his wife gives him every year, a picture on a circle of white paper that she mails to a Texas company where, for $15, it is turned into a plate. Unless, however, I wake up Kafka-style as Martha Stewart, these presents are not going to happen (besides, my son would hurl if I gave him a dried apple doll, it being dead fruit and all). My three children do not want fruit of any kind killed on their account. I will draw a picture on a circle of paper depicting the life in Vermont I wish we could lead and mail it to Texas to be made into a plate for my husband. He will hurl. The plate. At me.

THE OYSTERS OF LOCMARIAQUER; By Eleanor Clark ; (The Ecco Press: 203 pp., $14)

Here is one of those rare cases when reading about something may actually be better than eating it, though I hesitate to say that. What an elegant book this is, starting with that most elegant of creatures, the Belon oyster, ostrea edulis, les plates, grown best by the chantiers, or oystermen, on Locmariaquer in the Gulf of Morbihan in Brittany, an area, says Clark (the wife of Robert Penn Warren), “so undefaced by our standards . . . the sudden freedom from strain is bewildering. You are so used to ugliness . . . brain-smashing ugliness, it takes a while to realize what has stopped hitting you. You can feel, you can think, you can enjoy food.”

Clark neatly helps us do all these things in this mix of fact and conjecture. We feel a great deal for Yvette-Marie, lovely product of an illicit union between an oyster woman and a restaurateur who never recognizes his daughter, and for Yann, the boy who loved her and whom she left behind when she killed herself at 18. Clark’s writing is so clear and plain and beautiful: “the exuberant Mesozoic” (birth era of the oyster); Breton furniture made of oak that is “dar1797259265as the original forests and the intentions of dwarves”; a young oysterman with “blond hair and a muscularity somehow furious, as though some process like the gnashing of teeth went into building up all that strength”; the strange dragons of Brittany, so mild that “the saint merely asks them to leave and they go shambling obediently off into the sea.” Her fantastic blending of science and art, history and journalism, brings the appetite back, for life and literature both. “Tout de me^me,” as the oystermen say, “c’est un beau metier” (All the same, it’s a good profession).

HECTIC ETHICS; By Francisco Hinojosa ; (City Lights: 106 pp., $9.95)

Let us be grateful to Francisco Hinojosa for shaking up entrenched expectations of Mexican fiction. We lazily expect the female characters to be earnest campan~eras breaking sexual taboos and the male characters to be rebel artists breaking political taboos with a violent passion. Hinojosa was born in 1954, so he’s not too young to remember Octavio Paz and not too old to admire Carlos Fuentes. The tone of these stories is irony: some smug, like the story about the self-involved artist, “An Example of Beauty,” and some painful, like “Damn Kids,” which begins: “I’m a damn kid. I know it because everyone tells me so. Stop that you damn kid. Leave that alone you damn kid. . . . I get this everyday, from just about everyone.” Well, you know where that will go: right down the drain. His images are not entirely Dada, but they’re pretty unhinged, like the grandfather and grandson in “People Are Strange” who wait to die as they lose body parts daily (one day an arms drops off, the next a leg). Just about every kind of relationship--husband-wife, artist-creation, parent-child, generation to generation, neighbor to neighbor--is stripped down to its most venal motivations in this collection. Smoking rubble at the end and not a savior in sight. Not even a myth. Hinojosa must be brave.

WRONG INFORMATION IS BEING GIVEN OUT AT PRINCETON; By J.P. Donleavy ; (St. Martin’s Press: 323 pp., $11.95)

In Donleavy’s day, just after World War II when this novel is set, if you had the right shoes and joined the right clubs and went to the right schools and, oh yes, it helped if there was something about the Mayflower in there too, you could have a good time in New York in your 20s and even 30s (pasta was not on the menu) and believe with all of your soul that you had the right information. After that, your choices narrowed to alcoholic or bureaucratic, either one morose and myopic.

Donleavy never spells out what the wrong information is exactly it’s just something a prophetic stranger says to his main character, Stephen O’Kelly, a handsome out-of-work-out-of-pocket Irish composer, just before he notices a beautiful girl who, minutes later, gets shot in the train station in barbaric, mean, cold-hearted New York in winter. Donleavy’s heirloom style is a combination of P.G. Wodehouse and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in both of whose novels, as in this one, things mattered a great deal. But there is also the Irishman’s constant awareness of the working man, the janitor, the conductor, the doorman. Not to mention the bawdiness, the randiness and the effort to bob through life like a cork on the water thumbing the currents.