Discoveries

Chasing Matisse

A Year in France Living My Dream

James Morgan

Free Press: 288 pp., $25

Isn’t it fabulous, one sneers, trapped in the ides of March, rabbit-eyed before tax season. Following his dream to live in France, how simply fabulous for James Morgan. Maybe the “Chasing Matisse” author could join Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes and all those other happy expatriates on the travel shelf. But wait. There’s another message in the best of these books: Check the path you’re on. Check it frequently. Measure it against your dreams. Factor in the risk of not following your dreams the way you might any financial risk.

“The creative life is a wonderful life, which is why it pays so poorly,” writes Morgan, who, at age 45, with a new wife and two daughters at college, decided to sell the family home in Little Rock, Ark., and follow the trail of his favorite painter. “Coming of age in middle age,” he calls it, and the whole process, uprooting relationships and shedding possessions, takes a level of courage that many other books in this genre gloss over. Morgan and his wife travel to Matisse’s native Picardy region, to Collioure at the foot of the Pyrenees, to Nice and Vence, and to Morocco.

From the gray December skies of northern France to the brilliant sunsets of the French Riviera, Morgan is clearly refreshed and inspired by the colors Matisse made famous: “I dreamed that night of a marvelous green,” he writes from Morocco. “The sky was green, the sea was green, the mystery of life was tinted a deep and disturbing shade of sea foam.”

*

Among Wolves

A Story

Scott O’Connor

The Swannigan & Wright Literary Matter: 96 pp., $8 paper

At the tender age of 9, our laconic narrator’s parents and his sister Margot (who is three years older) are replaced by impostors. The whole average American family thing is scary to begin with, but it’s even scarier in Scott O’Connor’s ghoulish tale, “Among Wolves.” There are signs leading up to the switcheroo: Dad is getting a bit snappish about his son’s distinct lack of machismo. Margot spends hours in her room. Mom is distracted and distraught. One day, he figures it out. His “Dad” uses a phrase that he would never ordinarily use. His smile is too wide. The face of his “Mom” is suddenly “expressionless.” He lives for several months in a state of acute watchfulness.

At the impostors’ strong encouragement, he goes out one night with the neighbors and comes back to find the house empty and the family gone. The neighbors adopt him, but when he is 16, he runs away and finds work in a Florida theme park dressed as Diggity Dawg.

“Among Wolves” reminds a reader of that classic of unhappy family lit: “Monkeys” by Susan Minot. O’Connor has Minot’s crisp, take-no-prisoners style, which makes his readers extra grateful for his more lyrical moments: “Autumn came, crisp and smoky.” O’Connor is one to watch.

*

Childhood at Oriol

Michael Burn

Turtle Point Press:

354 pp., $16.95 paper

Novels set between the world wars often have a magical, secret-garden quality, as does “Childhood at Oriol,” Michael Burn’s delightful story about two children growing up in a villa on the northern coast of France. “Between the forest and the Channel straggled a soft wilderness of dunes ... out of which the sand emerged in smooth curves, like flesh from rags, white and silken to the touch.”

When Arthur Friedmann’s son is killed in World War I at 22, the middle-aged entrepreneur in a gray homburg decides to follow his son’s dreams of developing the land between the pines and the dunes into a world class resort. His vision, Le Toquet, becomes a watering hole for kings and maharajahs.

In this paradise, Merrick and Sarah, whose mother works for the resort, grow up spying on guests, joking with waiters and watching the wealthy at leisure.

Judith Friedmann, the “spinster” daughter of the resort founder, befriends the children, who fill the great empty space left by her disappointment in love. The threesome, in their contagious joy, right wrongs, heal relationships and bring a kind of renewal to everyone they encounter.