DISCOVERIES

SYLVIA AND TEDA Novel By Emma TennantHenry Holt: 192 pp., $22

Sylvia Plath is our literary Marilyn Monroe. Crazy? Or was she driven crazy by a philandering husband? In her suicide, was she the victim of herself or others? She lived in the shadow of Ted Hughes, the genius poet, even typed his poems for him. His friends all hated her, calling her paranoid in response to her instincts regarding his affairs, which are much debated. New papers, new clues are generated every few years. “Events described in the book are based on fact,” Emma Tennant writes in her author’s note; “many of the facts were previously concealed or unknown.” She refers to Assia Wevill, a real woman who, with her husband, rented Sylvia and Ted’s London flat when they moved to the country. In Tennant’s novel, Assia, unappealing and calculating and self-assured, sets out to seduce Ted and is successful. Sylvia has already lived through students and even a 15-year-old baby-sitter falling prey to Ted’s genius. Plath is not a pleasant figure in the novel, debased and humiliated from the moment she married Hughes. She is witch-like and suspicious but still sympathetic. “Sylvia knows she is pulled by a stronger tide than most women ....[S]he tosses like flotsam with the moods, the changes, and the tantrums of pools and hidden reefs.” If you know their story, this fictional rendering will not add to your understanding. It is a pro-Sylvia story with a soft touch on Ted. All he did was succumb to attraction. But the ending is the same, in real life and in fiction.

THE COURTSHIP OF SEA CREATURES By Jean-Pierre Otte Translated from the French By Marjolijn De JagerGeorge Braziller: 128 pp., $20

“Any experience with the sea is useless if it does not miraculously take us back to the universe of women,” writes Jean-Pierre Otte in this stunning little gem of a nonfiction meditation, one man’s commune with nature. The narrator is world-weary. His friends banish him to an empty house by the sea, where he watches sea creatures court and reproduce. Sea urchins casting gametes into the tide, cuttlefish and their voluptuous dance, crabs beating songs with their shells, lobsters in the missionary position, bivalves, gastropods and even seaweed. It’s a lyrical description; tidal in its loud then soft, violent then tender descriptions; fierce in its portrait of the impulse to couple. His language, deceptively scientific, then romantic, then philosophical, is reminiscent of Rachel Carson and Terry Tempest Williams. There are species-to-species observations. In the end we are treated to a vision of Otte’s own courtship on the rocks: “[I]n the vacillating brightness of the candles, our bodies bent forward ... but swaying and supple like seaweed inside ourselves.” You feel, at the end, as though you’d been swimming in a warm bay and drawn yourself up on the beach to rest. “The sea gives us back a life of motion, the sea brings us back to the dance, playing with us, entwining us, and raising us up in a choreography of undulations and swaying.”

ONLY HUMANA Divine Comedy By Jenny Diski Picador: 256 pp., $23

The idea that God made mistakes gives Jenny Diski the kind of precarious footing she needs to begin her novels. But “Only Human” is the story of a love triangle, that most stable of all fictional structures, formed by God, Abraham and Sarah. After the flood, God, disgusted with his human creation, searching for a human that can stand on his own but still serve God, falls in love with Abraham, “this lost and longing man. This one I can make my own,” he thinks. But there is Sarah, who has loved Abraham since childhood, as a half-sister, as a wife and, once they accept their childlessness, as a friend. God, in his effort to make Abraham prove his love for God, fires Sarah’s love into a hard and powerful steel forged in self-sacrifice. Tested and tested again, this distance creeps into Abraham’s love for God as well, a love that becomes hard and separate after God brings him to the brink of sacrificing his beloved son. His son (with Hagar), Ishmael, lives but all Abraham’s other relationships grow more distant and distrustful, moving outward in concentric circles from the trust of Eden into perpetuity. “Only a story without an ending,” writes Diski, “sustains the notion that the dreams and struggles of its protagonists account for more than the workings of chance and necessity.” The strength of God’s creations to separate from their maker, like the strength of a writer’s characters to behave independently and surprise their narrators, renders that narrator, in effect, useless. Diski has rewritten the Book of Genesis. And talked herself out of a job in the bargain.