DISCOVERIES

The Place You

Love Is Gone

Progress Hits Home

Melissa Holbrook Pierson

W.W. Norton: 206 pp., $24.95

NOSTALGIA, Melissa Holbrook Pierson is happy to announce, is making a comeback. She wants you to take stock of the loss in your life, beginning with your childhood home and neighborhood. In so many of our lives, she writes, a vital artery has been cut, affecting our senses, our willingness to trust and our cognitive maps of the world. The deed was done (and continues to be done) in the name of progress, and you should be angry about it. Pierson indulges her “hunger to revisit the sensuous experiences of childhood” as she remembers the Akron, Ohio, she grew up in. “Our generation is the first in history to have witnessed a doubling of the world population in a single lifetime,” she writes. There is an unprecedented “acceleration of loss.”

Pierson does not mince words: New Jersey “sold its soul to the devil”; the world has been “steamrolled” by “monster corporations.” Meddling with rivers and breaking countless treaties with Native Americans in upstate New York changed that landscape “irrevocably: physically and spiritually.” The book ends with a review of classic back-to-the-land books, including Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House in the Big Woods,” Helen and Scott Nearing’s “Living the Good Life” and Louise Dickinson Rich’s “We Took to the Woods,” my own favorite.

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Floating Clouds

A Novel

Fumiko Hayashi, translated from the Japanese by Lane Dunlop

Columbia University Press: 304 pp., $27.50

FUMIKO HAYASHI was born in Moji, Japan, in 1903. Her first book, “Diary of a Vagabond” (1928), sold more than 600,000 copies in its first two years in print and established the author as a quiet chronicler of the lives of ordinary Japanese. “Floating Clouds,” first serialized in 1949-51, captures their postwar suffering, their broken spirit and the desperate attempts of a young Japanese couple to let love conquer despair. It is a kind of Japanese “Unbearable Lightness of Being.” As in Kundera’s classic, this is not to be: They flail through life, destroying those around them, and in the end, when love can finally flourish, death takes over.

Yukiko, 22 years old, travels to a small village in French Indochina to work as a typist. Here she meets Tomioka, a married man, also from Japan. When they try to bring their affair home to a “squalid and defeated” Tokyo, their lives spiral into failure. The effect of the war on the Japanese people is shown in the smallest details: the endless rain seen through a sooty bathhouse window, a dirty overcoat, a grimy quilt. “Floating Clouds” reminds a reader that the human spirit is hardly a bottomless resource. It is not ever-indomitable. It does not always triumph.

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What’s for Dinner?

A Novel

James Schuyler

New York Review Books: 212 pp., $14 paper

JAMES SCHUYLER, a poet of the New York School, wrote only three novels, including “A Nest of Ninnies,” written with John Ashbery. They are all rather cheerful books on the outside, with dark, bubbling activity below the surface -- the darker side of P.G. Wodehouse, or James Thurber on a bender. In the almost mean-spirited “What’s for Dinner?,” a suburban comedy of manners, a reader is continually amazed that the characters do not evaporate from sheer vapidness.

Lottie and Norris are happily married. Their house is very clean. Maureen and Bryan, their friends and neighbors, are also very upright people (although, most nights, their twin teenage boys have sex with each other or smoke pot and steal money from their mother’s purse). When Lottie is packed off to a loony bin to dry out (although she seems to drink no more than any other character in the book), Norris begins an affair with the town widow. The wonderful twist, as James McCourt points out in his Afterword, is that the dark, lurking urges turn out to be the most benevolent human behavior in this familiar universe. The book reads like a play by a modern-day Oscar Wilde. There’s no way out, thinks one of the characters. Indeed, no way out but in -- and deep!