Discoveries

TRESPASS

By Grace Dane Mazur

Graywolf Press: 300 pp., $14.95

I am reminded that the novel was originally a racy diversion for ladies, based invariably on the many entanglements of love. “Trespass” is a story of a stranger who wanders into a town and captures the hearts of many of its women. He has walked away from his marriage to find himself. He has become homeless, relying on the kindness of strangers to feed and shelter him. He has wandered into the home of Maggie and Hugh. Hugh is off sailing; Maggie is expecting her cousin Jake for dinner. Jake has been in love with Maggie since they were children but makes do with Sally. In his frustration over his own unspoken love for Maggie, Jake sleeps with Maggie’s grown daughter, Gillian. Sally finds them. Maggie falls in love with the stranger (who sleeps with all of the aforementioned women). With each character, there is a back story, something that is impossible to portray in a painting or a play or even a poem. There are depth, description, context and landscape.

The novel may be the only form that can do justice to the many complexities of love as conundrum. Grace Dane Mazur picks her way through the thicket of her own making with a remarkable lack of superficiality or sentimentality. One would almost be tempted, if the characters were not quite so unhinged, to take it all seriously.

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PLAIN STYLE

A Guide to Written English

By Christopher Lasch

University of Pennsylvania Press:

152 pp., $14.95

The title alone--”Plain Style”--is intimidating. Puritanical but also populist; simple but elegant. Christopher Lasch, who died in 1994 at 62, wrote this little guide in 1985 for his graduate students at the University of Rochester in New York. The author of “The Culture of Narcissism” and “The New Radicalism in America” could hardly be expected to check his politics at the door. When a rule is broken or a convolution renders meaning unintelligible, he insults the writer, calls the error “bureaucratic,” as if it were used by bureaucrats to enhance their self-importance and therefore is unfit for print. “In accordance with the principle that good writing must always oppose the bureaucratic debasement of language, it is a good idea, wherever possible, to refer to the names of governmental agencies, voluntary associations, and other organizations by their full names, not by their initials.” Other criminal offenses in Lasch’s view are academic writing and the use of jargon: a “‘mischievous impulse’ among eggheads,” he writes, quoting Russell Baker. But the real sins in Lasch’s congregation are ambiguous antecedents, split infinitives and dangling modifiers, as well as such misused words as “affect,” “an,” “complement” and “enthuse.” Most helpful is the section on how to write an essay: dive right into your subject in the very first paragraph. Explain what you mean in the second. Avoid the “poverty of verbs” and the use of too many adjectives and nouns. Respect the serial comma. “Try to arrange sentences so that the most important words or ideas come at the end.” Avoid the passive voice: Its anonymity “endears it to bureaucrats, who wish to avoid responsibility for their decisions.”

Lack of clarity, obfuscation, tangled syntax are political; this is the subtext of “Plain Style.” And Lasch’s derision makes “Plain Style” a pleasure to read, the true test of good grammar.

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OUT THERE

Mavericks of Black Literature

By Darryl Pinckney

Basic Civitas Books: 176 pp., $24

“Out There” is a collection of three lectures given by Darryl Pinckney at Harvard and covers three works of nonfiction by black men: J.A. Rogers’ “Sex and Race,” Vincent O. Carter’s “The Bern Book” and Caryl Phillips’ “The Atlantic Sound.” They were chosen more for the heft and vision of their ideas than for their writing. In his three-volume work, “Sex and Race,” Rogers writes that there is no such thing as a pure white race; the West, he writes, is “all mongrel societies.” The book is, Pinckney says, “a survey of retribution, a study in trying to beat the white man at his own ideological game.” Carter’s “The Bern Book” is the “diary of an isolated soul,” a personal story of Carter’s dream of cultural assimilation in Europe. “The Atlantic Sound” by Phillips takes on what Pinckney calls “the pieties of spiritual return to Africa.” “Africa is not a cure,” he paraphrases Phillips. “Africa is not a psychiatrist.”

Taken together these three books do seem to form a triptych of mirrors in black literature. The lectures make graceful essays, and Pinckney’s observant, elegant writing places Rogers’, Carter’s and Phillips’ works indelibly in the canon.