DISCOVERIES

We’ve become used to such a high level of complaint from the Irish, what with the brothers McCourt and all, that this quiet memoir inside a novel takes a reader by surprise. A young man, sent by his mother to care for his ailing grandfather when he was only 7, sent from sprawling Dublin out to a remote spit of land called the Inish, is forced to grow, like a tree around a rock, around a loneliness he cannot shake. He has but one friend growing up, a wild girl named Christina, and he dearly loves his granda, but the weight of responsibility and the fact of being left form his character. When he leaves, as an adult, to join his American girlfriend in Boston, the loneliness overtakes him, making it impossible to be in love, even though he is in love. “A riddle of stars,” his grandfather tells him, is a “riddle only God can answer, boyeen.” Matt’s memories of an Irish childhood lived wholly outdoors are wild and cinematic, like a scene from “The Secret of Roan Inish.” Pierce Butler’s novel trudges in parts, but it’s an immigrant’s song and a young man’s effort to kill the numbness, like fog, in his heart.

GREEN ALASKA; Dreams From the Far Coast; By Nancy Lord; Counterpoint: 192 pp., $23

In 1899, Edward H. Harriman, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, was told by his doctor that he needed a vacation. “The Bill Gates of a century ago,” as Nancy Lord calls him, fitted an ocean liner for an expedition to Alaska and invited some of the big minds of the century, including John Muir and John Burroughs (“the most venerated nature writer in the country”), William Dall (the first naturalist to study Alaska), George Grinnell (founder of the Audubon Society), Edward Curtis (photographer) and others, including his 8-year-old son, Averell Harriman. Lord, a writer and sometime salmon fisherman, and her husband, also a fisherman, take the same journey as that ship, the George W. Elder, starting in Kachemak Bay and heading down the Aleutian chain. She shadows Burroughs, the historian of the trip, trying to see Alaska through his eyes, watching his embarrassment at the blinders Harriman sometimes wears because of his wealth, preventing him from seeing threats to already endangered species like the bald eagle or from understanding the way of life of the native people. She watches Burrough’s with his East Coast eyes trying to absorb the ferocity and scale of Alaska. “My concern is not with results,” she admits. “It was enough for me that it happened, that Harriman, Burroughs, Muir, Grinnell and Curtis and the rest went off together and took a look at the far side of the nation at the far end of an era.”

ONE NATION, TWO CULTURES; A Moral Divide; By Gertrude Himmelfarb; Alfred A. Knopf: 192 pp., $23

Hypocrisy is a slippery target, but Gertrude Himmelfarb goes gunning and the rifle recoils. In the first few chapters, she tracks down the counterculture, a “disease of democracy,” “intended to liberate everyone from the stultifying influence of ‘bourgeois values,’ also liberated a good many people from those values--virtues, as they were once called.” Nostalgia is the order of the day in this book. Hippies are guilty of commercializing (making money from) their politics. “Child abuse is over-reported.” The effects of divorce are greater than those of abuse. “Battered woman syndrome has been much publicized.” Civil society (“emasculated” and “deprived of its social authority,” made “an adjunct of the welfare state”), the nuclear family, the family as the “seedbed of virtue”--these are a few of her favorite things. Himmelfarb, like so many polemicists, is at her best on the subject of patriotism: It is “not merely the character of a people,” she claims concern for, “but its very identity, the sense of nationality and high purpose that engenders a worthy patriotism.”

MY GARDEN (BOOK); By Jamaica Kincaid; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 222 pp., $23

She’s vexed; she’s irritated; she’s agitated; she’s undone. These are not the emotional states we associate with gardening. Based on this description of Jamaica Kincaid’s gardening life, we can imagine the Antigua-born writer at home in Vermont, hands on her hips, scowling at Asiatic lilies, which she hates. In these strong opinions she resembles that British mother of garden writing, Gertrude Jeckyll. In her fascination with seeds and varieties and her cabin-fever musings during the winter months on what to plant, she resembles Jeckyll’s American counterpart, Katherine White. But Kincaid’s inspirations, motivations and disappointments in the garden are entirely her own. She will trace a variety of flower that looks like hollyhock to its cotton species, racist roots, acknowledging all the while that it is only a flower, but still (can you hold a flower accountable?). She has a curious disregard for her reader, however, that can be unpleasant. “I know where,” she says of the exact location of Carl Linnaeus’ birthplace in Sweden, “but I like the high-handedness of not saying so.” Kincaid throws a good temper tantrum, as she herself describes in a section on a seed-gathering trip to China, but this, combined with an annoying lack of specificity or even finished thoughts, makes her sound a bit spoiled. Rambling is more charming when the writer’s arm is linked in the reader’s.