DISCOVERIES

American Cream

A Novel

Catherine Tudish

Scribner: 306 pp., $24

TRANSITIONS are difficult for a novelist to take on: So much must be explained about the past; so little is known of the future. Characters wobble, actions are unreliable, morality uncertain. The elements of fiction that normally provide a reliable backdrop for the plot (history, culture, ancestors, landscape) can succumb to a character’s shifting perspective. It can be a bit of a free-for-all, but Catherine Tudish is undaunted.

Virginia, a woman with a teenage son and a weakening marriage, returns to the farm her family has worked for two centuries. Her mother has been dead for several years; her father, Nathan, has remarried a woman Virginia doesn’t like. When Nathan falls from a tractor and can’t do the farm chores, Virginia and her son arrive to fill in. She finds her old life waiting: the best friend crippled in a car accident, the old boyfriend unhappily married, her mother’s presence everywhere. When Nathan considers selling the farm, Virginia buys a pair of draft horses, a breed called American Cream. It was something her father had long dreamed of, and Virginia hopes it will renew his interest in the farm. “What he needs is something to get his blood stirring again, something to make him stop feeling like a tired old dairy farmer,” Virginia tells her friend Henny.

Tudish lets her characters speak for themselves. Like the horses, certain characters (the old boyfriend and Henny in particular) act as lodestars -- the place in the sky one might look if one felt lost. Tudish lets go just enough to make these people real instead of treating them like children, or worse, paper figures.

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BookMarks

Reading in Black and White

Karla FC Holloway

Rutgers University Press: 224 pp., $24.95

KARLA HOLLOWAY, a “fifty-something English professor,” sets out to tell “a story about black folk and reading that hasn’t yet made it to our library shelves.” Reading, carrying books, disclosing the books one has read are all public acts. Because “there are still too many whites ready to formulate a judgment based on color rather than character,” she writes, “the potential for a book in a person’s hands to pronounce some message about the one who carries it is worthy of attention. ‘BookMarks’ explains how African Americans have noticed this potential . . . and historically have had good reason to make their marks with a list of the books they have read.” Books such as Frederick Douglass’ “Narrative” and Toni Morrison’s “Jazz” “personify a story of race” and also encourage reading, taking it back from the province of educated whites. She notes the importance of libraries as places where black children can read and that provide them with reading lists and a sense of identity.

Holloway grew up reciting the literature of black America. “We learned to enunciate with Langston Hughes’s ‘The Negro Mother’ and to linger with just-so-subtle shifts in emphasis over the repetitions in his ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’ ”

In this wise, generous and subtle book, Holloway writes that whereas the “specific cultural literacy” of African Americans matters a great deal, black and white Americans alike have “a common corpus of what would compose a literate reader.” Of her own bookshelves, she says her favorites are “those that feel most familiar . . . : blue greens fading to spare shades of azure and then to . . . turquoise, sapphire, cerulean.”

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com