DISCOVERIES

The House

in Good Taste

Elsie De Wolfe

Rizzoli: 236 pp., $26

“I believe most firmly in the magic power of inanimate objects!” the queen of style, our nation’s first female interior decorator-for-hire, wrote in 1913, when “The House in Good Taste” was first published. “Suitability, suitability, suitability!” she admonished sternly, in an effort to rid the world of Victorian bric-a-brac.

Born in 1865 in New York, Elsie De Wolfe traveled in the rarified social circles of the arts and the well-to-do, and some of her best-known commissions were for the Frick residence (now the Frick Collection) and the Colony Club. She had a fierce hatred of lace curtains (“I hope it is not necessary for me to go into the matter of lace curtains here,” she fairly snorts in one passage), rocking chairs and brass beds, what she called the three most glaring errors in American decorating.

De Wolfe considered herself a practical girl in an age of frivolity and excess, though today many of her suggestions seem downright sumptuous given the costs of labor. Copying Chippendale chairs, creating indoor fountains and trellises, elegant molding in oak on dining room walls, fireplaces in every room, well, sigh. She gives good advice on color schemes (rose, yellow, grays and creams) and light exposure (sunnier rooms need more subdued colors, darker rooms can use brighter colors) and furniture arrangement (writing desks and chaises longues are two of her favorites). Her style is quite feminine: “Man made the house,” she writes, “woman went him one better and made it a home.” The ghost of Elsie De Wolfe still haunts many Upper East Side apartments with their anachronistic vestibules and foyers, their drawing rooms and dusty friezes.

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Milk

A Novel

Darcey Steinke

Bloomsbury: 132 pp., $17.95

If the novel had an essence (eau de roman), a pithy core, Darcey Steinke would be its genius. This ain’t no novella, mind you, it’s just the smallest atom of a novel: “Milk.” The main character, Mary, is a new mother. She loves that baby and she is a good mother. When her slacker husband leaves, she goes to live in her local rectory, where she is friends with the minister, a lost boy named Walter, who frequents gay bars and is in mourning for his young lover, Carlos. The novel is set in a New York full of metal and ice and snow, where even nightgowns seem depressing and ominous in the city’s harsh glare.

The book opens at Christmas with Mary trying to please the husband and care for the new baby in that strange, lonely new-mother cocoon. The tension Steinke sets up with so little raw material -- a few characters, a few words -- is almost unbearable. Something must give, and it looks like it will be Mary’s sanity: “Her lucidity was terrifying; she wanted her consciousness to break down into softer parts.” She meets an ex-monk named John, a kind and decent man who loves her and the baby, and the novel’s horizon glimmers with the possibility of new life.

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The Jewel Tree

of Tibet

The Enlightenment Engine

of Tibetan Buddhism

Robert Thurman

Free Press: 262 pp., $25

Now, here’s a man who can actually describe enlightenment, or at least very deep meditation. In spite of all his worldly and otherworldy credentials, Robert Thurman is a scholar of Buddhism who can really let go; he really wants his readers to get a taste of the pleasure he’s found over the last 40 years. “The Jewel Tree of Tibet” elucidates the Buddhist text “The Devotion to the Mentor,” in which a glorious wish-fulfilling gem tree is used to focus our minds.

Thurman takes us line by line through that text, interpreting and encouraging visualizations of its radiant, colorful images. He explains the 11 steps to becoming “a fountain of cheerfulness,” from mind reform to the bodhisattva’s vow to “save all beings from suffering.” But it is Thurman’s almost childlike voice, his pure happiness, his delight in this text, that truly beguiles the reader.