Discoveries

We all wear big chains every day, and we’re all shackled together. You have to work your way down the line until you find the lock. Then you have to find out who is holding the key. It takes grand theory on the order of Plato or Marx to explain the human condition. It takes perspective. And you have to be able, unlike Marx, to write well, simply and clearly, so that everyone can understand and respond to what you have written. Never once does Walter Mosley make the reader feel that he is writing only about black people in this clear-sighted manifesto. He locates the sources of racism in the tyranny of the market that makes slaves of all of us. “Mass oppression,” he writes, “for mass production is part of the Western psyche. Therefore the problems experienced by blacks in America have to be seen as part of that larger malady.” Mosley offers chain-breaking ideas: using the black experience in America as a “torch in the darkness”; using the “truth as a commodity and barometer for our own commitment to growth.” He suggests that we make a list of the things that we deserve for a lifetime of labor, that we carry it around, tinker with it, vote by it. Reach for what is missing from your life, he writes. “Define it.” “Demand it.”

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S.

By Slavenka Drakulic

Viking: 216 pp., $23.95

Slavenka Drakulic is the very voice of pain. She is dripping with pain. Her novel “Marble Skin” housed the pain of a girl’s sexual competition with her mother. “The Taste of Man” contained all the pain a woman could feel from a man. All her books contain the political pain of being born in Croatia in 1949 and living for the last 50 years in the Balkans. “S.” is about the pain of rape in concentration camps created by the Serbs in the early 1990s. It is told in the voice of a woman who in 1992 is taken from her village and placed in a camp. Shortly thereafter, she is chosen with eight others to live in “the woman’s room,” from which Serb soldiers choose each night whom they will rape. The novel is about what she sees: the 13-year-old girls who are raped, the fathers who are forced to rape their sons, the mothers who kill their newborn infants born from rape. Reading these things is nothing like living through them but conveys some of the same gut reactions: shame for being human, for being safe and warm, for knowing about these things and doing nothing.

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EQUAL LOVE

By Peter Ho Davies

Houghton Mifflin:

192 pp., $12 paper

We infect our children with ideas about love. Peter Ho Davies hammers it home in these 13 stories, which show, in no uncertain terms, exactly how. Our explanations for divorce are inadequate (“We love you, but we don’t love each other anymore”; therefore, the 6-year-old discovers, love is impermanent); the reasons we marry are inadequate and infinite; and our ideas about faithfulness are so various as to be equally inadequate. Children in Davies’ stories climb to adulthood and parenthood with unusable scaffolding. One of my favorites is “The Hull Case,” about a mixed-race couple abducted by aliens. As they report the incident to an army colonel, subtle questions of trust and credibility bubble up between the colonel, the black husband and the white wife. She is convinced that if she reveals everything about the abduction, she will be believed. He feels it is hopeless to expect that anyone will believe them; he isn’t sure he believes it himself. How it feels to be doubted and denied trust is described with the same dignified precision Davies uses to describe the inner architecture of all his characters.

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THE ESSENTIAL LEWIS AND CLARK

Edited by Landon Y. Jones

Ecco Press/HarperCollins:

204 pp., $24

Read “The Essential Lewis and Clark” and go wandering. Here are the most mercifully edited journal entries of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis (the original journals were almost a million words) on their magnificent journey in search of a water route across the American continent. Clark was 29 when they began their journey in the fall of 1803, Lewis was 31. Clark is more colorful and specific; Lewis is poetic and better on the expedition’s inner life. Both exude leadership qualities that would make this an excellent book for management: optimism, inventiveness, prudence and restraint. Behind every rock, every chokecherry, every buffalo lie the good-naturedness, the wholesomeness, the excitement of discovery, the levity of heading out for the territory. Both Lewis and Clark write eloquently about the Indians, their dress and medicines and rituals. The journals lack the histrionics of modern-day travel adventure writing but none of the drama.