DISCOVERIES

Academia is a parallel planet that can be delightful to read about. Once inside the gates, the characters seem pre-selected for such attributes as average beauty, intellectual curiosity and disdain for the greedy world. Regular concerns like how to pay the rent often do not figure in novels set in this firm bosom, and sometimes the dissimilarity between the characters’ concerns and those of people outside the gates makes it hard to take them seriously. But they can suffocate just like the rest of us. Sex seems the only available vice, and single people are like cannon fodder for the institution. Single at 40, Lucy, who teaches at an unnamed East Coast university, has suffered in love with a married professor, is dating a self-absorbed 58-year-old professor (sounds redundant, I know) and is sleeping with yet another handsome professor whose wife is dying in the next room. Kind of makes Los Angeles look like a Puritan theme park, doesn’t it? Lucy misses Michael (the married one), and she wants to have children, although for three-fourths of the book she won’t admit this to herself. She’s a carefully drawn character, an object of affection with a genius for affection--no small feat for a writer. It’s easier to describe the tragic act of loving than it is to describe the act of being loved, which requires receptivity, attention and response. It is not passive, and Marilyn Sides’ novel reminds us of that forgotten detail.

BOOKSTORE By Lynne Tillman; Harcourt Brace: 352 pp., $25

Books & Co. was a small, tony, independent bookstore that lived on Madison Avenue and 75th Street (the same block as the Whitney Museum) from 1978 to 1997. It was started by Jeanette Watson, a believer in books and a lover of bookstores who was also the daughter of IBM’s famously intellectual CEO, Tom Watson. At the outset, in 1978, Watson took on a partner, Burt Britton, longtime book buyer at the Strand Bookstore (on Manhattan’s Lower East Side). The partnership did not work out for several reasons (Britton did not want to talk to Lynne Tillman about them for the book), the fondest of which is that Britton suddenly had money to buy books and he just went hog wild. Tillman’s story is chock full of affection--for books, writers, readers, sales reps and, mostly, for independent bookstores. It is about one-half narrative and one-half quotes from the many people who supported Books & Co.: Brendan Gill, Woody Allen, Jonathan Galassi, Fran Lebowitz and many others. In this way, it reads more like a guest book than a work of nonfiction, but never mind. It shows, as it set out to, what a wonderful thing a neighborhood bookstore can be and the void it leaves when it is gone. “To be passionately caught up in conversation about literature,” writes Barbara Lazear Ascher, longtime patron of Books & Co., “do you know what a rare treat that is in this day and age? I always left feeling exhilarated.” *

IN THE FAMILY WAY A Novel By Lynne Sharon Schwartz; William Morrow: 352 pp., $24

New Yorkers sure like to write about themselves. Lynne Schwartz, the author of “Leaving Brooklyn” and “The Fatigue Artist,” has written a novel that would make a marvelous play, set almost entirely in a single building owned by Anna, the matriarch of vastly extended family, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “Intimate relations in New York,” says Roy, therapist and husband to Bea, who is Anna’s daughter, “are governed by real estate.” Roy leaves Bea for a patient, Serena, who then leaves Roy for May, a lesbian in the penthouse apartment. Simultaneously, Bea leaves Roy for Dimitri, the Russian English professor who is the building’s superintendent. Tony and Jane are Roy’s Korean American children from the Korean War, Danny is their own son and Tony’s son is Timmy, whom Bea takes care of. Three generations in one building make it a pressure cooker threatening to explode over Central Park. Somehow, Schwartz draws her reader into this family. You care about Danny’s shyness and Bea’s catering business. You forgive Roy his incredible lack of control in matters of sex. Each liaison has its plausibility and its plausible deniability, its reasons for staying and for leaving. When an author has this much fun, it’s contagious.

A WALK TO REMEMBER A Novel By Nicholas Sparks; Warner Books: 240 pp., $19.95

There is a subspecies of fiction the sole aim of which is to make its readers cry. This is not a good quality in humans, and it’s not a good quality in books. “First, you will smile, and then you will cry,” writes Nicholas Sparks in the prologue. “Don’t say you haven’t been warned.” And Sparks moves predictably toward this goal in “A Walk to Remember.” A 57-year-old man remembers the time 40 years ago when he fell in love with the minister’s daughter in his home town. When he found she is dying of leukemia, he decided to marry her. By now, this is more of a formula than a plot. An older person looks back in regret at love lost or stolen. This poignant feeling figures in many novels and short stories. But when it is used like a bludgeon for the sole purpose of making readers cry, it becomes chintzy. These novels make for quick and easy movies because the form is so empty it’s simple to fill with a director’s vision. Warner should have had the guts to just publish the screenplay.