DISCOVERIES

Why is it that kitsch is even funnier in print than in person? Perhaps it’s the solemnity of the black and white pages, the elegance of print underscoring the brassy, colorful absurdity of kitsch. Sarah Vowell is a madonna of Americana, applying the same ironic evil eye to Disney World as, say, Joan Didion applied to El Salvador or Miami. “ ‘Disney World,’ ” she quotes her traveling companion, David, “ ‘is like the liver of the country where the blood of America gets filtered.’ ” Vowell grew up “white trash” in Oklahoma. Hers is the voice of a 9-year-old American citizen (chock-full of Cherokee blood), inventing her quirky opinions as she unravels them, veering away from the pat, the P.C. and troping to the complicated--for example, the much-abused American Indians who dragged their slaves along the Trail of Tears, a stop on Vowell’s tour of American hot spots (from the Michigan Avenue Bridge in Chicago to Disney World). “I am,” she writes by way of explaining why she prefers “The Great Gatsby” to “On the Road,” “just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.” In many ways, “Take the Cannoli” reads like an escape from radio (Vowell’s day job)--that most sincere of all media. “When I think about my relationship with America,” she admits, in a phrase that would be bleeped into unrecognizability on most radio stations, “I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.”

READING & WRITING, A Personal Account By V.S. Naipaul; New York Review of Books: 64 pp., $16.95

“I wished to be a writer,” V.S. Naipaul realized at age 11, “but together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own.” That’s the Naipaul we know and love or hate, the eternal expatriate, and that’s why we read this little essay, one of maybe three per year by well-known writers late in their careers about why they read and, if we’re lucky, why they write. The best are not indulgent or dramatic (this is neither) but reveal the kernel of insight that kept them going through bad reviews and minimum wages and emotional bone-picking on one’s own warm carcass. Naipaul’s early childhood in rural Trinidad filled him with the images of his parents’ native country, India. But when the family moved to the capital city, where they lived for 12 years, Naipaul found a no man’s land, a colonial world that looked to some other place (England or America) for everything from medicine to literature. Naipaul worked hard to become a writer; his imaginative life grew from the cinema, not from books. Finally, in the year after graduating from Oxford, he found his material: “the city street from whose mixed life we had held aloof, and the country life before that, with the ways and manners of a remembered India.” He writes of the limits of fiction as a vessel to hold his memories of India, and as a form that, in India, delivers only a partial truth, “a dim lighted window in a general darkness.” Stepping back again, Naipaul writes of the future of literature: “If every creative talent is always burning itself out, every literary form is always getting to the end of what it can do.”

SHADOW BABY By Alison McGhee; Harmony Books: 228 pp., $23

“A girl of eleven,” writes Alison McGhee in this novel about the sources of wisdom and the power of beauty, “is more than the sum of her age.” “Shadow Baby” is set in the Adirondacks and narrated by an 11-year-old girl who befriends an 80-year-old metalworker, a recluse, a maker of tin lanterns. “I had a feeling,” she thinks, “that the old man knew the power of winter.” Her visits to his trailer light a lamp in his winter darkness. “Somewhere, someone who doesn’t know he’s gone might still be looking for the old man.” Clara Winter is full of questions that her mother, Tamar, will not answer; about her own birth, about a twin sister who died during that birth in a blizzard, in a truck by the side of the road, the father nameless. The novel is a lullaby for her sister in every sense of the word, the melodic assertion of a simple truth, designed to lull the child to safety. McGhee’s style is something like that of children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown; sentences that begin by repeating the latter words of the previous sentence, with a lulling effect. And Clara is a word scholar; fascinated by their sound and the meanings that reverberate from those sounds, she chews on words as she chews on the questions of her birth. This is one of those novels in which the quality of the writing lulls a reader away from heaviness, the drama of the plot, the way beauty does in real life. “The old man,” thinks Clara, “taught me to see the possibility of beauty.”