DISCOVERIES

Beloved Boy

Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen,

1899-1915

Henry James, edited by

Rosella Mamoli Zorzi

University of Virginia Press:

224 pp., $24.95

In 1899, Henry James, 56, met 27-year-old sculptor Hendrik C. Andersen at the home of mutual friends in Rome. Though James’ two major biographers have insisted that James was a lifelong celibate, the letters James wrote to Andersen are passionate and amorous. The 78 letters in “Beloved Boy” (22 published for the first time in English) are at times mournful and plead for Hendrik, for human contact. James is keenly aware that the world in which he once traveled so elegantly is getting meaner by the minute: “For alas, my traveling days are over now; the trains, the hotels, the American & German crowds that infest Italy, are, with the fatigues & expenses & wastes of time by the way, all finally prohibitive to me.”

The letters reveal much about James’ views on art that endures. Andersen created sculptures that were large, even colossal. James repeatedly begs him to scale back in favor of the “interesting, the charming, the vendible, the placeable small thing.” He worries that Andersen suffers from “megalomania (look it up in the dictionary;) in French la folie des grandeurs, the infatuated & disproportionate love & pursuit of, & attempt at, the Big, the Bigger, the Biggest, the Immensest Immensity.”

Today there are 10,424 of James’ letters in publication. This collection, which brings us through 1915, a year before his death, reveals James at his smallest and largest -- the petty and the grand, the needy and the generous, the visionary and the desperate man. “Send me ten affectionate words,” he writes in 1903. “All I want is some news -- a scrap.”

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A Seahorse Year

A Novel

Stacey D’Erasmo

Houghton Mifflin: 360 pp., $24

“When did the city of free love become the city of cash?” wonders Nan as she waits in line for her coffee in a San Francisco cafe. It’s not Starbucks, but almost, and the failure of the New Age dream, as in so many San Francisco novels, hangs like a damp fog over the lives of Stacey D’Erasmo’s characters in “A Seahorse Year.” Nan left her middle-class childhood to forge a gay life, a new version of family. Hal came from Idaho to be in a rock band and ended up as an accountant. Marina, the gay painter, secretly goes into debt buying an Armani dress.

Nan’s son, Christopher, is 16 when the novel opens. In the first of several schizophrenic episodes, Christopher runs away from home, is missing for 10 days and ends up in a trucker’s house in Phoenix. The second episode is bloodier; in the third, he poses a danger to himself; in the fourth, to others. Yet he is the pure thing at the book’s heart, the human sacrifice, the true visionary. The other characters put one foot in front of the other.

Christopher has no idea which way to go. Where Nan’s generation had rock ‘n’ roll, Christopher has only the atonal, witchy, watery voice of P.J. Harvey. For a novel with so few precipices, the characters drop like flies, hoisted with their own petards.

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Waiting for

Teddy Williams

A Novel

Howard Frank Mosher

Houghton Mifflin: 280 pp., $24

Feet first, roots firmly planted in New England, Howard Frank Mosher describes the world in “Waiting for Teddy Williams” through the eyes of Ethan Allen, an 8-year-old Red Sox fan from Kingdom Common, Vt. Jarringly close to the surface of this Norman Rockwell universe is a boy who asks advice from the statue in the town center, a boy whose mother, Gypsy Lee, is beautiful and fun but slightly unpredictable. Ethan is up against a dark family secret and Devil Dan, the next-door neighbor who threatens to bulldoze the house the boy lives in with his mother and grandmother. All he has to pull him through is baseball, as if by studying it long enough and hard enough he might learn how to live.

Ethan is a classic, even if the world that Mosher builds around him is littered with vernacular. You almost have to love baseball to enjoy the novel.