DISCOVERIES

Meritocracy

A Love Story

Jeffrey Lewis

Other Press: 168 pp., $18

A fall weekend in Maine in 1966 -- five friends meet to say goodbye to Harry, who will go to Vietnam the following week. There’s a Big Chill feel to the group, fresh out of Yale and drawn together by the charismatic figures of Harry and Sacha, his wife. Louie, the novel’s narrator, a screenwriter, looks back across decades at the weekend, remembering each slight, each prophetic remark. “I was eager to be liked and they weren’t,” he says of his preppy confreres. “I was the guy who had to be there so there’d be somebody someday to tell [Harry’s] story.” Harry’s enlistment is motivated by his desire for a political career like that of his U.S. senator father. In the novel’s outer orbit are figures like John F. Kerry, George W. Bush, John Ashcroft and other privileged Yalies on the first rung of the ladder to their political futures.

Lewis catches the thrill of proximity to America’s Eastern WASP aristocracy to an uncomfortable degree: their studied vagueness, their heartiness, the aloofness that cannot be copied. Himself a screenwriter, he writes in scenes -- which is fine, but it means that his characters take a long time explaining themselves; it’s not until Harry is dealt an extreme blow that he becomes remotely human. Lewis also uses terms like “flashback” and “interior ... exterior” that are unnecessarily self-conscious. But the novel takes us back to that pivotal weekend when everything seemed possible, before so many hopes were dashed.

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The Artist’s Reality

Philosophies of Art

Mark Rothko, edited by

Christopher Rothko

Yale University Press:

176 pp., $25

Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, refers to his father simply as Rothko, reverently recounting how this manuscript, written in 1940-41, lay hidden for 30 years after the painter’s death in 1970, as storms raged over his estate. Rothko wrote it before he took his abstract turn; it is not about his own work and only indirectly about his life. He was separated from his first wife, who did not support his painting and suffered from depression, which may explain the bitterness and distrust of the public pervading the book. He reserves his most eloquent scorn for illustrators and designers and those painters who rely on “skill.” But for every drop of venom there is an equal exuberance at the “spectacular journey of the modern artist.” Chapters on plasticity, space, beauty and the use of light to create a sense of myth and sensuality are full of joy. “The function of art is to express and to move,” Rothko writes. “The Artist’s Reality” is not nearly as vivid or mysterious as his paintings. How could it be?

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Ariel

The Restored Edition

Sylvia Plath, with a foreword

by Frieda Hughes

HarperCollins: 240 pp., $24.95

In her foreword to this edition of “Ariel,” the poet’s daughter tells how her father, Ted Hughes, edited the version published in 1965 in Britain and here in 1966. “Ariel” was left on Sylvia Plath’s desk when she killed herself in February 1963. Hughes removed 12 poems for the British edition and 13 for the U.S. one (all later included in the “Collected Poems”). Frieda Hughes writes that her father was “vilified” for his decisions. She feels that her mother’s suicide was celebrated more than her life and that her status as feminist icon obscured her poetic legacy.

In May 1962, Plath stopped showing her poems to her estranged husband; in June, Hughes began an affair and was thrown out of their house in Devon. Frieda describes “the Ariel voice” of the poems and her mother’s effort to dig up “everything that must be shed in order to move on.” This version catches Plath “in the act of revenge.” It’s hard to read the original manuscript without trying to understand what Hughes was thinking when he left out certain poems and included others. She loved him. He hurt her. All of us who love her work are caught like children in that crossfire forever. “This is the smell of years burning, here in the kitchen,” Plath wrote in “The Detective,” one of the poems her husband deleted. “And this is a man, look at his smile.”