Hello Smarty, It's Your BookWag!

Dear Wags,

It’s September, and as far as I’m concerned, that means apple cider donuts from Hepworth Farms in Milton, New York. I now live in Virginia, but I reject sugary knockoffs made in southerly parts. Only Hepworth donuts will do. For me, they are a Proustian delight. I don’t get back to the Hudson Valley much, but tasting the real deal sends me there.

Fortunately, the Red Truck Bakery in Marshall, Virginia makes a mean Shenandoah apple cake, and, closer to home, Arlington’s Livin’ the Pie Life whips up a mouth-watering Apple Caramel Crumb pie. They aren’t quite the dough bombs I crave, but they are evocative harbingers of fall.

We all collect little madeleines of memory—sensory pleasures that return us to better days. Extensive fieldwork suggests there’s something about the aroma, texture, and taste of baked goods that goes straight to the amygdala. Salt-rising bread transports my spouse to childhood summers in Indiana. Italian cream cake reminds an old friend of a beloved aunt. For another, whoopie pies are an eternal postcard from Maine.

Books, films, and television shows are also comfort food. When my grown daughter comes home for the holidays, she dives onto our family room sectional for her annual binge of Harry Potter movies. My pal who is a total Janeite has no time for reinventions of Jane Austen. She finds contentment reading the original novels, over and over again.

Mess with a sentimental favorite, and we get fussy. Sony is scheduled to release an animated version of one of my favorite childhood stories, Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon in August 2024. That wordless picture book captured my budding imagination and influenced my creative life. Like a lot of people, I grew up in a family that valued conventional success. Harold’s aimless, joyful, purple path thrilled me. He colored outside the lines. Those squiggles jumped from page to page, as gleeful a metaphor for outside-the-box thinking as there ever was. If a purple crayon could go anywhere, why couldn’t I?

When I learned the character and his crayon were jumping onto a movie screen, I winced. Oh Harold, go anywhere but there! I get that Animated Harold will probably charm new generations of children. But when you taste something wonderful at an early age, modifications to the recipe are rarely appreciated.

A little girl I know recently had a birthday party. Her favorite color is purple. In fact, she came to her celebration wearing a violet tutu with matching gossamer wings. When she opened my gift of Harold and the Purple Crayon in humble book form, I thought she might flap those wings and levitate with joy. Accept no substitutes. Books, as they say, are magic.

Yours ever,

BKP

Move Like Water by Hannah Stowe

Stowe’s book is subtitled “My Story of the Sea,” and it is nothing if not a love letter. The author was drawn to saltwater in her Welsh childhood and became a globe-trotting marine biologist and sailor. Rather than producing another book about how the oceans are threatened by climate change, she writes movingly about why we ought to love the sea and the diversity of life it nourishes. Stowe profiles six marine creatures—among them the fire crow, humpback whale, and the barnacle—and details their many wonders. Her prose is never dry (pun intended). It pulses with the enthusiasm of someone passionate about a vast and mysterious subject. If you loved Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist or Annie Dillard’s classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Stowe should be at the top of your list.

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

Years ago, I read an unusual novel, Machine Dreams, by Phillips. It was a family saga with the scope of a chunky mass-market paperback, infused with the literary elegance of Russell Banks or even Virginia Woolf. That remarkable tale followed the Hampson family from the Depression through the Vietnam War, charting enormous technological change along the way. Phillips’s latest book is just as ambitious and brilliant. Set in post-Civil War West Virginia, it begins with 12-year-old ConaLee arriving at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum with her mother Eliza, who has been mute for a year. We learn the pair and other sanitarium residents have experienced epic horrors during the war. Through their stories, the novel movingly examines wounds left by a national trauma.

The Pole by J. M. Coetzee

In Britain, this volume was marketed as a collection of stories. In the United States, it’s been rebranded as a novel. At just 176 pages, it might best be described as a spare novella. Coetzee, 83, still untangles knotty emotional conflicts with virtuosity. Here, the protagonists are aged concert pianist Wittold Walccyzkiecz and his married lover Beatriz, who cross paths in Barcelona. Is their meeting a coup de foudre that will blossom into lasting love, or a momentary folly that will wreck their lives? Growing older has blessed Coetzee with insight and economy. He’s channeled those gifts into a sharp tale where not a word is wasted.

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

Ah, the Irish poets. Name any of them. Did you choose a woman? I’ll wager not. Enright, who should be an Irish national treasure for her novel The Gathering, understands. Her new novel charts the life of Phil McDaragh, a Great Man of Irish Poetry, and how it affects the women in his family. Have they inherited his genius, as his granddaughter Nell hopes, or are they plagued by his perfidy, as her mother Carmel knows? Phil walked out on his wife, Terry, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The younger women must confront the cruelty inflicted for the sake of his writing. Is such awful selfishness necessary to make great art? Great Men of Letters seem to think so. Enright’s rejoinder, as clear as birdsong, is no.

Wellness by Nathan Hill

American narratives are consumed by the agonies of wedded life. Hill’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut The Nix is another connubial tale, one that reminded me a bit of Thirtysomething, which featured bougie Boomers Hope and Michael, trying to live virtuous lives in 1990s Philadelphia. Hill’s marrieds are Jack and Elizabeth, who fall for one another during the same era as arty college students. They meet cute enough, but 20 years on, they’ve arrived at a place neither one of them likes very much. The writing and plot are swamped by our weird modern business-speak and self-actualization argot (the title is the name of Elizabeth’s startup). It makes for an apt satire of modern manners and marriage.