DISCOVERIES

ALWAYS BEGINNING Essays On a Life in Poetry By Maxine Kumin; Copper Canyon Press: 226 pp., $17 paper

It’s good to read the life of a successful poet who has settled down on nice old farms in New England. Sex, commerce and chai-lattes do not a vision of the future make. Maxine Kumin struggled, she repeats: struggled, to become a poet in Boston in the ‘50s and ‘60s. She and Anne Sexton, both suburban housewives, elbowed their way into a fancy poetry workshop and soon found themselves published in Harpers and The New Yorker. They became best friends, sisters; Sexton weaving in and out of depression, Kumin trying to explain what it was like to be Jewish in a Christian culture. They drank and smoked a lot. They raised children they sometimes had to ignore to get their work done. Sexton killed herself; Kumin stuck it out, stayed married, raised horses in New Hampshire, gardened her way through it all.

The same elbow she used to become a poet slows her writing sometimes: an all-too-present impulse or need for self-promotion, but her devotion to form in poetry and to Sexton are the most charming aspects of this memoir.

BEAUTIFUL WASPS HAVING SEX By Dori Carter; William Morrow: 336 pp., $24

Bad news. WASPS do have sex, and often it is very good. They seem to have a well-deserved reputation for denial, which is frustrating and funny, but it sure has cleared a lot of time for empire building and picnicking on Martha’s Vineyard and sailing in the Long Island Sound that might otherwise have been used for navel-gazing or art. Trade-offs, such a bore.

The recurring sight-gag in Dori Carter’s Hollywood novel--WASPS as a creation of envious Jews--is pure black-face vaudeville. “Why was I so fascinated by some polite-looking WASPS with nice hair holding champagne flutes?” Frankie Jordan, out-of-work Hollywood screenplay writer (Carter’s hyper-redundancy makes me dizzy) wonders, flipping through Town and Country, waiting for her agent to take her to lunch. But Frankie! Why? Why? Why are you and your author so fascinated by them and what does it all mean? Frankie and her acquaintances talk about almost nothing else besides being Jewish, and that’s OK. They can use words like “Jewveau riche” and that’s OK too. It’s just not that interesting. Look, if a writer wants to write cartoons, she should do that. Using the novel to ply us with more cardboard cutouts, Latina cha cha girls, two-dimensional WASPs or self-obsessed Jews is insulting. Life is short. Hollywood is hard enough to describe with any depth (even Fitzgerald had a deuce of a time in his Pat Hobby stories), so could somebody please give the effort some dignity?

THE SLEEP-OVER ARTIST by Thomas Beller; W.W. Norton: 256 pp., $23.95

Alex Fader, disingenuous child-man and the star of not one but two of Thomas Beller’s novels, “Seduction Theory” and “The Sleep-Over Artist,” is like Tom Cruise before he got into guns, back when he wore his baseball caps backward. Alex grows up in New York City but has an inner Midwest as deep as the Ogallala Aquifer and as dry as the Dust Bowl. His goals are naive (sex and fame), but his methods of achieving them are precariously and sometimes dangerously calculated. Alex is an anxious boy whose father died when he was 7. These stories describe his life from that point on into his 30s. In search of a nuclear family, Alex becomes proficient at the art of the sleepover, which proves useful in his film-making adulthood as a seduction tool. Beller has perfected his own writer’s tricks over the years: He is the master of the profound and fatal flaw; his characters’ self-sabotage creates much of the arc in these stories. He also has a nice ear for endearing words not often seen in literature, like “muff” and “cubby.” Poetry is everywhere.

IN THE NAME OF SALOME by Julia Alvarez; Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: 368 pp., $23.95

Here is a song, sung in Julia Alvarez’s novel, by her main character’s mother, Salome, as a little girl in the Dominican Republic in the middle of the 19th century: “I was born Spanish, / by the afternoon I was French, / at night I was African. / What will become of me?” Salome grows up to be a poet, a national icon in the Dominican Republic. Her daughter, Camila, the novel’s narrator, however, fancies herself apolitical. She moves to America and teaches Spanish at Vassar. At 65, after retiring from teaching, she undertakes to write her mother’s life and in the process discovers the glowing embers of her mother’s passion and political commitment in her own soul. Alvarez has chosen historical figures to write her novel around, but even so, she is a teacher, not a preacher; a delicate writer whose respect for the force of human love gives this novel its exquisite tension.