DISCOVERIES

THE BOY HE LEFT BEHIND

A Man’s Search for His Lost Father

By Mark Matousek

Riverhead Books: 262 pp., $23.95

“A fatherless home is a dangerous place,” Mark Matousek writes in one of those moments that makes a reader gasp. “Without protection, you can’t quite be children.” At 36, Matousek hires a private detective to find the father who left when he was 4. He tells the story of the last night he saw his father (who tried, unsuccessfully, to kidnap him), and the story of growing up in a house with his sexy mother and his two sisters. In the process of writing this book, he remembers a harrowing childhood, learns that he has rapidly accelerating AIDS and struggles through a difficult relationship with his partner, Louis. He tries to sort through his mother’s parentally inflicted lack of self-esteem and her rebellion against her parents, using a voluptuous body and a hard exterior. Mark also uses sex and bravado to survive growing up--a lot of sex with men and women and unabashed flight from introspection. This is Matousek’s journey on the dharma trail, and you can just about hear his skin ripping as he undoes the scars of a lifetime. It’s powerful stuff, repulsive, courageous and grave. “Maybe it’s grief that makes a man,” he writes in the end, “leads him to the truth of his life, becomes his blessing in the end.” *

DATING BIG BIRD

By Laura Zigman

Dial Press: 248 pp., $22.95

*

“Animal Husbandry,” Laura Zigman’s first novel, revealed and explored the “old cow, new cow” theory of male behavior, which, I believe, needs little explanation. In that novel, she collected enough fictional data to quarantine the entire gender until the end of time. “Dating Big Bird,” in the same rollicking way, describes new varieties of pain foisted on women by well-meaning but seriously under-evolved men with an inability to commit that sets off the alarm on the biological clocks of career women in the New York City of Zigman’s novel. Ellen Franck, the novel’s narrator, is a successful 35-year-old marketing director for KLNY, an haute fashion label. The love of her life is her sister’s little girl, Nicole, alias “the Pickle.” When Nicole gives her lonely visiting aunt Big Bird to sleep with, Ellen begins to feel the panic known as baby lust. Ellen’s boyfriend is mired in an indefinite healing process after the death of his 7-year-old son, making it impossible for him to have sex, much less a baby. Zigman’s Starbucks-drinking, DKNY-outfitted, apartment-owning women are buffered by friends and careers. They don’t shed real tears and could use a few extra interests. But they do find solutions. *

WANDERLUST

A History of Walking

By Rebecca Solnit

Viking: 318 pp., $24.95

*

“Happy in this,” Rebecca Solnit quotes the romantic poet Wordsworth, the patron saint of walkers, “that I with nature walked / Not having a too early intercourse / With the deformities of crowded life. . . .” In this history of walking, Solnit dips into anthropology, sociology, politics and literature to describe the many forms that walking can take: transportation, inspiration, meditation; trespassing, insurrection, rebellion. Walking “subverts the ideals of entirely privatized space and controlled crowds, and it provides entertainment in which nothing is spent or consumed.” Rural or urban, walking is a calm and virtuous endeavor, but Solnit, who has written for years in her quirky, multifaceted way about environmental issues and public space, sets her sights on the radical, the most political aspects of any action, even one as ostensibly simple as putting one foot in front of the other. *

THE CABAL

And Other Stories

By Ellen Gilchrist

Little, Brown: 304 pp., $24.95

*

It’s all in the details, they tell you in creative writing 101. What they might forget to tell you is that writing effectively sometimes means relinquishing control. Like characters and plot, details rebel if they are too tightly manipulated by the writer. For extremely talented and experienced writers like Ellen Gilchrist, the dance with detail--background or foreground, minor or plot-shaking, descriptive or context providing--is perilous. In “The Cabal” and the stories that follow this short novel, a psychiatrist, who holds all the gruesome secrets of the elite citizens in a small Mississippi town, goes crazy, threatening to pull his patients with him. Caroline Jones, a poet and professor, is invited to teach at the university by a close friend, a professor and confidant of the town’s high society and is hurled into the center of this unraveling universe. A wonderful plot, but Gilchrist white-knuckles the details: what they wear, what they read, what they possess. It competes with the deeper psychological portraits these stories could create, offering, in the end, intoxication without insight. *