DISCOVERIES

Payback

Debt and the Shadow Side

of Wealth

Margaret Atwood

Anansi: 232 pp., $15.95 paper

When you get really, really famous, you are allowed to cogitate on paper, which is what Margaret Atwood allows herself to do in this odd little book: “The subject of payback is one of the most worrisome and puzzling things I know: that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersects, often with explosive force.”

Though she never quite puts her finger on why debt (and not just the financial kind) is such an integral part of the human condition, Atwood careens around it, bouncing between PhD dissertation and daydream. “The answer I hear quite often,” she offers, “ ‘greed’ -- may be accurate enough, but it doesn’t go very far toward unveiling the deeper mysteries of the process. What is this ‘debt’ by which we’re so bedeviled?”

Atwood dances back and forth between psychic and monetary debt. She had her first paying job when she was 8. Between that and the tooth fairy, she managed to save a bit. She wanders through literature a while, pausing to consider the role of debt as plot, settling in an almost obsessive way on Ebenezer Scrooge. Atwood ends with a character of her own creation, Nouveau Scrooge, a thoroughly unlikable guy. “Maybe it’s time for us to think about it differently,” she concludes. “ . . . Maybe we need to calculate the real costs of how we’ve been living.”

To the Life of the

Silver Harbor

Edmund Wilson and

Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod

Reuel K. Wilson

University Press of New England: 200 pp., $26.95

This is the understated New England version of the Hollywood childhood memoir, with a beautiful twist. Reuel K. Wilson is the son of writers Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson, both almost as famous for their scandalously bohemian lifestyle as for their work. While the marriage lasted only seven years (from 1938, the year Reuel was born, to 1945), Reuel’s parents left him with an abiding love for Wellfleet, a small community just 14 miles south of Provincetown on Cape Cod, where the couple lived for several years.

Reuel shared his father’s distaste for the “richification” of the Cape -- Edmund first began visiting there in the 1920s, when it was truly a haven for artists and writers -- but he clearly loves the houses and the landscape that remain the most stable part of what seems a pretty unstable upbringing. It’s quite a cast of characters -- Eugene O’Neill (whose house slid quietly into the ocean), John Dos Passos (who called the Cape “New England’s Riviera”), e.e. cummings and many others. The chapters “Edmund Wilson’s Cape Cod Poetry” (“Where daylight whitens to the west,” Wilson wrote in a poem called “Provincetown”) and “Remembering My Parents and Cape Cod” are by far the warmest and most memorable in this delightful memoir.

Scarred Hearts

A Novel

Max Blecher, translated from the Romanian by

Henry Howard

Old Street Publishing: 227 pp., $24.95

Thomas Mann set the standard for novels set against a backdrop of death and decay with “The Magic Mountain” and “Death in Venice.” “Scarred Hearts,” in which a 21-year-old Romanian student living in Paris spends a year at a French sanitarium, is, like “The Magic Mountain,” about the decay of body and soul.

The novel is populated with the strange, beautiful patients of the sanitarium: “What sort of director had staged this ordered, hallucinatory spectacle? Lined up along the walls, the patients lay on their stretcher-beds, two to a table. It might have resembled a banquet from antiquity, with the guests lounging supine at their tables, if the drained, pallid faces of the worst sufferers hadn’t shattered any illusions of jovial guests or cheery festivities.”

Emanuel, the Romanian student, has tuberculosis of the spine; his body is wrapped in a plaster cast for the entire year. Blecher was diagnosed at 19 with tuberculosis of the spine and spent most of his life in hospitals. He died in 1937 at 29.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com