DISCOVERIES

Unformed Landscape

Peter Stamm

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

Handsel Books: 162 pp., $18

So much fiction is overblown, amplified. You feel that it takes place on a parallel planet, where people take oversized risks, have oversized revelations and speak in unrecognizably witty, confident voices. The antidote? A good Scandinavian novel in which next to nothing happens or changes, almost no one speaks and sex is performed without remorse, regret or drama. “It was fall, then winter,” reads the antepenultimate line in this simply told story. “It was summer. It got dark, and then it got light again.” (Trust me, I’ve given nothing away.) Kathrine is a 28-year-old customs agent in northern Norway. She has never been below the Arctic Circle. She has a 7-year-old son whose father she divorced. One day she simply steps “out of her life.” She boards a ship and travels from Bergen to Oslo to Aarhus and finally Paris in search of a man she met once. She travels in an acute state of shame and disorientation. After three weeks, she turns and goes home. A few things change in her life. But not the weather. “Unformed Landscape” has a refreshing purity, a lack of delusion, a lack of hype. Brings down the blood pressure.

*

The Harvard Black Rock Forest

George W.S. Trow

University of Iowa Press: 110 pp., $14.95 paper

This remarkable essay, first published in the New Yorker of June 11, 1984, is about nothing less than the forces that drive America’s history. How did we get to the point where, with our trademark enthusiasm, we began destroying our own habitat? The Black Rock Forest, 3,800 acres of demonstration forest in upstate New York, was left to Harvard University by one Ernest Stillman in 1949, along with an endowment of $1 million to maintain it while experimenting with methods of sustainable forestry. It was an act of faith in the future and in the willingness of institutions like Harvard to protect that future. But by the 1970s the “asset” was not “performing.” Selling it appealed to trustees, faculty and accountants.

Trow’s essay begins with the image of two men: Gifford Pinchot, America’s first professional forester and a visionary in the fledgling conservation movement of the late 1800s, and George W. Vanderbilt, owner of Biltmore, a limestone castle on 7,000 acres, half of them wooded, in North Carolina. Pinchot advised Vanderbilt on managing his forest and encouraged Stillman to create the demonstration forest at Black Rock. But the world of profit margins and the dream of sustainable forests and sustaining landscapes had already begun their ruinous competition. “This is what American history is like,” Trow writes, “but it is hard for us to accept: that a vigorous and splendid country could have been built by really guilty people.” Trow uses a layered approach, not just to make an argument but to rewire the way a reader looks at the world. He’s willing to trade timing, grace, transitions, everything in a dogged re-creation of the context in which fatal decisions are made. “The large impersonal forces that rule the world now were set in motion by persons-at-work,” he reminds. “But it is ... as though at a certain point records ceased to be kept.”

*

Confessions of

a Slacker Wife

Muffy Mead-Ferro

Perseus Books: 210 pp., $12.95 paper

“I think our biggest problem is that just being a wife itself is now subject to standards of perfection and levels of performance that are unrealistic and unnecessary. This just doesn’t seem like progress, really, for our gender,” writes Muffy Mead-Ferro, the slacker queen, advocate of eliminating symptoms of yuppie fever, such as acute overprotectiveness of our children, overcleanliness, overentertaining (onion dip and chips work fine) and the destructive myth of the perfect body (though she admits to breast implants, which years later feel like “a pair of oranges in a pair of socks”). “We’re dangerously close,” she warns, “to becoming an entire nation of Howard Hugheses.” Readers may well find this sort of thing vaguely liberating.