Discoveries

A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA

A Novel

By Richard Hughes

New York Review Books:

280 pp., $12.95

“A High Wind in Jamaica,” written in 1929 and reissued as the second in a series published by the New York Review of Books, is a grand fantasy--with a level of insight--into the minds of children of the same magnitude on the literary Richter scale as “Lord of the Flies,” “Peter Pan” and, to a lesser extent, “The Chronicles of Narnia.” These are books for and about children that reverberate throughout our understanding of human psychology.

The Bas-Thorntons live on an old estate in the spinachy verdancy of Jamaica, where the father has some business. Four children, in order of unspecified age: John, Emily (10 when the novel opens and its spiritual spine), Rachel and Laura are growing up slightly wild, their emotional development at the mercy of distant parents and strange forces: “[V]eiled in the pinpoint-scintillation of a thousand fire-flies sat the old black saint among the branches, talking loudly, drunkenly, and confidentially with God.” They are, like all children, complicated, uncertain which part is a game and which part is real life; suffering that lack of proportion that affects children; ennui and murder are noted equally, pets dying are more upsetting to them than the deaths of most humans. After a hurricane, the Bas-Thorntons put the children on a ship bound for England. The ship is hijacked by pirates, which makes little difference, as Richard Hughes writes, “most children, on a railway journey, prefer to change at as many stations as possible.” Hughes drinks deeply of each of these children (John dies early in the journey), even the youngest: “Laura, where the child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind, like a Fascist in Rome.” Emily develops an unsettling relationship with the pirate captain. In the end, Emily, Rachel and Laura see terrible things and place those terrible things in unique containers within their memories. Fascinating. In the end, when Emily is close to puberty, Hughes admits that he can no longer read her deeperthoughts, as though he must leave them all at that brink and fly back to Neverland like Peter Pan.

*

A WEAKNESS FOR ALMOST EVERYTHING

Notes on Life, Gastronomy and Travel

By Aldo Buzzi

Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Steerforth: 96 pp., $9.50 paper

Aldo Buzzi reminds a reader, in his taste (and that is what this book is about) more than in his writing, of that roving New Yorker food writer A.J. Liebling: style without pretense; the pleasures of discovering delicious things in unlikely settings; a sort of freedom of judgment, free of the constraints of money (having it or not) but fussy nonetheless. His writing takes the shape of a conversation with himself, sometimes in actual interview form. Buzzi grew up in Lombardy but has lived also in Tuscany and Piedmont. His father was a chemist and his German mother a painter. He has two of the essential qualities for a critic: joy in his subject matter, and the ability to shake himself up, best exemplified by what he calls a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde syndrome in which his palate, after too much good food, craves the craven ordinary: a pasta cooked all wrong served on a cold plate. This brings him ‘round, and he is again able to appreciate the elegant and simple: a veal cutlet with sage and a salad of Boston lettuce, olive oil and salt. (Always leave some water on the lettuce, he advises, it enhances the flavor of the oil.) Buzzi is best on specific delights: olla podrida, “a dish that originates in the obsessions of the starving”; a pair of old brown shoes he must throw away, “I have to throw you in the garbage. So the rules of this damned world require. Forgive me.” The small things reveal Buzzi’s highly evolved and sophisticated tenderness: His good taste only makes him more vulnerable to the world.

*

THE RUSSIAN TEA ROOM

A Love Story

By Faith Stewart-Gordon

Scribner: 240 pp., $25

Madonna began her career as a hat check girl in the Russian Tea Room. She was fired, the story goes, because her costume was too daring.

Faith Stewart-Gordon grew up in South Carolina; in her childhood peanuts boiled in salted water were a culinary treat. In 1955, at 23, after a few years as a Broadway actress, she married Sidney Kaye, owner of the Russian Tea Room. When Elia Kazan offered her a part as an understudy for the actress playing Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Gordon said no, fearing divorce. This must have been hard for a woman who fearlessly seized every other opportunity God ever gave her. In 1960, Sidney died of cancer. One chapter ends. Another begins with a string of suitors and the dauntingly glamorous life as owner of the Russian Tea Room, whose personality dwarfs, in sheer bulk of anecdote, that of its biographer. Gordon often felt when she met people that “they were looking at me as if I were a big, delicious mound of blini,” which is probably correct. From its home at 150 W. 57th St., the Russian Tea Room served “2,647 pounds of caviar in an average year and 5,884 liter bottles of vodka. Also 8,000 pounds of beets, 15,867 pounds of sour cream, and 43,860 pounds of lamb,” and it wasn’t all for Rudolph Nureyev (a regular). Usually, biographies written by people who are not close to their subject are better, and “The Russian Tea Room” is no exception. Still, here it is, an important addition to the annals of the American good life.