Discoveries

Without Roots

The West, Relativism,

Christianity, Islam

Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and Marcello Pera, translated from the Italian by Michael F. Moore

Perseus Books: 208 pp., $22

HERE are two lectures, the first delivered by Marcello Pera, president of the Italian Senate, the second by Cardinal Joseph Razinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI, followed by letters between them. Brought together in “Without Roots,” they form a conversation about what’s wrong with the West, what’s missing in modern life and how the church might fill the void. The problem, as statesman and cleric see it, is what Pera calls “the epidemic of relativism”: the politically correct willingness to say that one religion (Islam) is as good as any other. Pera feels that we should be willing and ready to go to war to stop the jihad.

Ratzinger’s lecture focuses more on the sources of hollowness in Western life -- the self-hatred of Christians and their “strange lack of desire for the future.” He sees genetic engineering, abortion and the erosion of marriage and family as evidence of a general malaise. Both agree on the need for a rapprochement between church and state, to bring God out of hiding in private life and into public life.

“Today it is a matter of the greatest urgency,” Ratzinger writes, “to show a Christian model of life that offers a liveable alternative to the increasingly vacuous entertainments of leisure-time society, a society forced to make increasing recourse to drugs because it is sated by the usual shabby pleasures.”

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Look at the Dark

A Novel

Nicholas Mosley

Dalkey Archive: 214 pp., $13.95 paper

“IF humans can see how awful they are, there might be a chance of their making things better.” This is the beautiful logic of the slightly muddled, annoyingly helpless, endearing, irresistibly attractive main character in Nicholas Mosley’s latest novel, “Look at the Dark.” (Mosley, a sort of British Nicholson Baker, has also written several works of nonfiction, most recently a fiendish collection of essays titled “The Uses of Slime Mould.”) His current protagonist is retired from academia, where he taught anthropology and dabbled in linguistics; apparently he has not been completely conscious or present for much of his life, and he hopes, through rigorous self-analysis, to know exactly what happened -- at least the important parts, those involving women.

Two marriages: Valerie, then Valentina. A son, Adam, with Valerie; then a stepdaughter, Cathy. On his first honeymoon, his wife suffers an attack of appendicitis, and while she’s in the hospital he sleeps with a woman who had a leg blown off by a landmine when she was 13. (She’s grateful for the attention.) Somewhere toward the end of the first marriage, during a trip to Iran with a colleague, he is infatuated with a young woman (16 or so, he isn’t sure). Her family persuades him to take her to London to be educated; he does. This is a man who generously feeds us reasons to hate him, and yet, he’s a kind of angel. Children are attracted to him. Relationships spring up around him. He has experienced deep intimacy without language. He has tried to face the darkness in his soul. Mosley captures all the hesitation and humor of daily life with one eye on that other level of existence -- the world of intuition, ghosts; the tentative fabric of life and all its fraying ends.

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Letters to a Young Artist

Anna Deveare Smith

Anchor Books: 228 pp., $13 paper

AS if she weren’t busy enough teaching, writing, performing plays and acting on TV and in the movies, Anna Deveare Smith has written “Letters to a Young Artist.” She advises the fictional BZ on everything from creating a presence to selling your art and talking to the Man. Self-esteem, discipline, jealousy, mentors, signing contracts -- it’s all here. Smith writes the letters from the road: working on the set of “The West Wing,” teaching at Yale medical school, going to auditions. She is particularly eloquent on the subject of “the death of cool.” Urgency is what matters, she writes. “Be hot.”