Discoveries

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The Border of Truth

A Novel

Victoria Redel

Counterpoint: 304 pp., $24.95

WHOSE story is this, anyway? Could it be Victoria Redel’s? (A principal character’s surname is Lejdel.) Could it belong to 17-year-old Itzak Lejdel, fleeing Europe in 1940, who is denied entry both to the U.S. and Mexico? Or the dapper Itzak in New York several decades later, his name changed to Richard Leader? Perhaps it’s his daughter’s story. At 41, Sara Leader, a professor translating the work of Walter Benjamin, loves her father but is frustrated by his refusal to reveal his background. Certainly it will one day be the story of the little girl, another refugee in many ways, whom Sara adopts, though she barely appears (waiting, curled up in our reading of this multilayered novel).

“The Border of Truth” is such a good novel that it could also be any American’s story. It begins in 1940 with a letter from Itzak to Eleanor Roosevelt, who he believes can help him and his mother, passengers on the Quanza, obtain visas to disembark. Itzak invests this and subsequent letters with all his estimable talents as writer, charmer and child-citizen of the world. The novel alternates between his letters and Sara’s thoughts as she wanders the streets of New York, much like Clarissa Dalloway preparing for her party. Sara visits her father’s apartment; the New York Society Library, where she’s pursuing research on Benjamin; and a furniture-repair shop run by a hippie named Ethan.

As if the war were not enough darkness to run from, Richard Leader has another secret, one he most wants to spare his daughter. Redel circles this life-changing moment, casts in its general direction, croons to it gently and reels it in, presenting it to Sara with a kindly reluctance. This from a writer who can be ferocious, unflinching, when it comes to the many kinds of pain that love causes. In her first novel, “Loverboy,” she sank her teeth into the pure pain of filial love; in this one, she watches from a dispassionate distance as that pain spreads out through generations.

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Necessary Sins

A Memoir

Lynn Darling

The Dial Press: 240 pp., $24

I have great admiration for memoirists who refrain from making themselves the heroes of their stories. In fact, Lynn Darling makes so many enormously bad decisions (including all possible forms of career suicide, most of which involve sleeping with people she shouldn’t) that you wonder if “Necessary Sins” isn’t meant to be some kind of cautionary tale. Also admirable, she won’t blame her bad decisions on her childhood or even the culture in which she came of age.

Darling grew up in northern Virginia, went to Harvard and then to work, at 23 in 1975, for the Washington Post, first as a Metro reporter, then in the legendary Style section. (Feature writers everywhere are tired of hearing about the Champagne, the fabulous trips, the amazing writers, the constant sex with colleagues that distinguished the Post’s Style section in the ‘70s and ‘80s.) “A study in the triumph of personality over character,” Darling writes, “the section nurtured neuroses that would have driven Freud to drink, tolerated egos the size of Cleveland, fetishized obsession, vanity, and genius, and produced some of the best writing I have ever read.” She extols the talent and physical beauty of her editors, Ben Bradlee and then-Style managing editor Shelby Coffey (who left in 1985, eventually becoming editor of The Times). But she reserves her unmitigated lust for White House correspondent Lee Lescaze, a paragon of glamour who speaks Mandarin, plays squash and collects first editions of Beckett and Pound. They meet for lunch, they meet for drinks. The sex is world-shaking. He leaves his wife and children, ages 4, 10 and 13. Her career, at least for a time, is over (she’s banished to the Sunday magazine). Soon he too is banished but lands on his feet at the Wall Street Journal. They marry. Some years later, his beloved son Adrien dies. Every moral imperative in the history of infidelity works against their romance. But it survives. And so when Lescaze dies you feel (strangely, and even though you weren’t rooting for them) that their love has triumphed. Against all odds.