What do I want of summer books? In general, I want affirmative books: books that affirm genre conventions, books that affirm common sense, books that affirm my instincts about how to live. There are also practical considerations to keep in mind. I want books that I won’t feel guilty about dripping ice cream on or dirtying with sand and saltwater (or grimy subway hands). This doesn’t mean I’m not giddy to discover a book that upsets my criteria, as is the case with Vendela Vida’s novel The Lovers, a challenging and taut piece of work that, with its exotic setting and cover image of rippling seawater, comes in the guise of a beach read but delivers something much heartier. The magic of The Lovers, in fact, is that it satisfies the requirements of beach readers and non-beach readers alike. I studied and savored it but made sure to keep my copy free of sand.

The novel’s narrator, Yvonne, is a history teacher and the mother of grown twins who returns alone, twenty-eight years later, to the site of her honeymoon after her husband Peter’s sudden death. Renting a posh house on the coast of Turkey, she uncovers remnants of her landlord’s vigorous sex life and meets his spurned wife, a model named Özlem who has her own erotic conundrums to share. Feeling cocooned “in a mood, both wooly and ethereal, that had separated her from her kids, her students, from the rest of the world,” Yvonne eagerly absorbs the company of others, befriending a child named Ahmet who makes extra cash selling seashells to tourists on the beach. When Ahmet vanishes—with Yvonne partly to blame—she finds herself terrified and adrift in a foreign country, determined to make a pilgrimage to Ahmet’s family in order to explain her role in the young boy’s disappearance. This debacle, the rental home booby-trapped with sex toys, the widowed solitude: it’s sinister stuff, and to compound it Vida has a keen eye for the disappointments of travel that frustrate even the staunchest will not to be disappointed: the cabdriver that overcharges, the suspicious local, the offer of friendship that turns out to be a sales pitch.

But The Lovers is hardly a slog. Its mysteries accumulate with a gentle persistence, like waves lapping at the shore: the mystery of Peter’s death, the mystery of her perplexing relationship with her children, the mystery of Ahmet and the riddle of Yvonne herself, whose elusive character manifests as a shape-shifting quality in her own looks. Facing the mirror, Yvonne never sees the same person twice. Sometimes she is “old, old, old,” and sometimes “astounded at how young she looked.” When she receives correspondence from her daughter, she reads “with one eye turned away, in fear of what she might learn.” It’s not easy to get a handle on her, and the key to Yvonne’s character turns out to lie unexpectedly in her profession as a teacher, where she’s grown accustomed to the circumstance of nurturing students who disappear from her supervision in subsequent, inevitable waves. Yvonne’s love contains its own sort of elegy, then; she prepares for the departure of her companion— whether its her own daughter or Özlem— while that companion is still with her, and so places herself at a remove that both parties can’t help but sense. It’s an adaptive trait but not a beneficent one, and in her narrator Vida questions the moral implications of apportioning love in such a way.

In its pared, melancholy prose and plot structured around memories, the book may remind readers of W.G. Sebald or of John Cheever’s great short story, “The Swimmer.” But The Lovers is suspenseful, too, and never indulgently wistful. If the author has chosen to challenge rather than affirm a reader’s expectations, so much the better for us. Yvonne’s voyage to the missing Ahmet’s home is dark but decisive— “She had traveled to Turkey to regain something of what she had had with Peter decades earlier—and failing that, she had befriended a boy. A Turkish boy who spoke nothing of her language. And now he was gone, and she was again searching for some remnant of someone she had lost. Had she ever been so lost herself?” Francine Prose wrote in a blurb for the book that she’d read Vida’s novel “over two days and dreamed about it the second night,” and the thought feels like more than just a blurb-y exaggeration. A novel like the The Lovers— with its subjects of solitude, beauty, and loss—can be just what a reader desires during the summer months. It’s an escape in so many senses.

Maile Chapman’s Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto contains all the ingredients for a splendid gothic mystery. It features a cast of strange and secretive characters, a setting of chilly natural beauty (the story takes place in rural Finland) and an air of implicit violence. It is too bad, then, that the book snuffs out every whiff of suspense hinted at in its premise, offering instead a plodding narrative punctuated by missed opportunities.

The novel takes place in the early twentieth century at a women’s sanatorium called “Suvanto,” a facility that is “part hospital, part hotel” and home to a number of patients with medical and emotional afflictions of varying intensity. A warm afternoon in August marks the arrival of a patient named Julia Dey, a Danish dancer with a chronic venereal disease that has transformed her into a defensive and wary soul. Despite Julia’s loathing of her condition, the problems are not untreatable, and upon her arrival she is speedily diagnosed and attended to by an American nurse named Sunny Taylor. Like her patient, Sunny is a withholding specimen with an unhappy past. She struggles to abide by the Scandinavian ethos of sacrificing personal feelings for the greater good. She curbs her social instincts for friendly interruption and physical contact, both of which are frowned upon in her adopted country. She also takes to biking and attempts to learn Finnish, a language with fifteen noun cases.

The unpredictable Julia, however, proves a challenge to Sunny, who wonders “why there seems to be no structure in Julia’s bad behavior, why it seems that Julia makes up ideas for trouble out of whatever materials come to hand.” When signs appear that someone has been entering the hospital kitchen at night to stoke the fire and steal bits of meat, Sunny finds herself unnerved and suspicious of her patient. “Departures and arrivals are normal, rotations don’t trouble,” she thinks, “but it is a real wrinkle in the fabric when something out of order repeats itself.”

Despite the economy of the Greek play upon which it is based — Euripides’ The Bacchae— Chapman’s novel not exactly a lean one. There are numberless sections to which an editor’s pen might productively have been taken: sections overloaded with minute descriptions of activity and atmosphere. The contingencies of illness are tirelessly accounted for, as are the sights and smells of the hospital. Because Chapman’s attention feels indiscriminate, a reader’s focus flags. A novel like this relies for its power on the crucial detail buried among peripheral details, but Suvanto drowns in the latter kind. There is a great deal of talk about objects and medicines, and also about the weather, which is just as boring in Finland as it is elsewhere.

One wants to draw Chapman’s attention to the old writing workshop maxim of “Show don’t tell.” At one point, for example, it is mentioned that Sunny lingers upon the memory of a bumbling maid’s misdeed. The lingering alone would have been sufficient, but Chapman goes on to add that the behavior “is evidence that Sunny, though she takes pains to appear impartial, can hold a grudge.” There’s no need to tell a reader what she already knows. Similarly irksome is Chapman’s habit of quashing opportunities for suspense at their outset, as when Sunny accidentally leaves a confidential case file unlocked and vulnerable to snooping. The file is indeed snooped, but the information revealed is, again, information that the reader already knows. What might have galvanized the plot is hastily resolved with a disappointing thud. At another point a patient goes missing, prompting Sunny to search the grounds at night. But the patient is soon located uneventfully, sleeping in a common room beneath a fur coat. Again, that thud. A reader wants tension or beauty in a novel like this; ideally both in a balance. Suvanto feels not so much like a failure as it does a miscalculation.

On a happier note, there are things to savor about Chapman’s prose. She describes Finland beautifully as a land of lakes and inlets, berries and mosquitoes, and a place where “self-control and silence are the bywords of comfort.” The Finnish words sprinkled among the text (laakrits for licorice and sukulaa for chocolate) are interesting, in autodidactic moods, to encounter. But overall the book is plodding where it might have been meditative, failing to deliver on an unusually intriguing premise. A visitor articulates the matter perfectly upon visiting Suvanto: “This is a life without surprises,” he thinks. “This is torpor.” One might say the same about Chapman’s novel.

Sloane Crosley’s debut essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, earned her the sort of accolades that pave the way for disappointment and backlash at the very murmur of a second book. There were blurbs from Jonathan Lethem and A.M. Homes, raves in every magazine that covered the book, and comparisons to Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, and King Midas. It was a lot to live up to on the second go-around. Crosley, however, is that rare kind of young writer for whom no one wishes failure, and her second offering is an affirmative giggle in the face of anyone who doubted the author’s talent for humorous non-fiction.

The nine essays collected in How Did You Get This Number depart from the New York-centric universe of Crosley’s first book. Here we find her roaming around Alaska, Paris, and Lisbon — the last of which finds Crosley in a hotel room with “a broken radiator and a lone bath towel that could tear the skin off a baby.” She’s a loopy and agreeable explorer, getting lost, being threatened, meeting clowns and watching a lot of television wherever she goes. (“There are ten zillion channels in Portugal. Half of them are QVC. Almost half of them are porn. And everything in between is both.”) We might call Crosley a “plucky” heroine — except that “plucky” is often a quality designated as exceptional, whereas Crosley’s verve feels native and exuberant.

And what a pleasure it is to wander with her. An astute observer of bloopers and loopholes, Crosley reflects, in her first essay, on the differences between American and Portuguese utilities: “All of our public structures are self-explanatory. When you press the PH button, you’re going to the penthouse. Not the stairs that lead to the lookout above the penthouse. Our basements are conveniently located at the base. No cellars that lead tosubfloors that lead to catacombs of ruins. The Goonies was just that one time, and it was a movie.”

The stories all have a Seinfeldian quality, in the best sense of that adjective. The humor is observational, the plots are subtly intricate, and each piece is populated by monsters masquerading as regular people. An anorexic and kleptomaniac roommate prompts Crosley to consider moving into a former brothel populated by the ghosts of dead hookers. A chapter on the severe temporal-spatial deficit with which the author is diagnosed explores the possibility that the world is populated by people with disabilities of one form or another, a bunch of “anti-X-Men with disadvantageous powers.”

Interview: Sloane Crosley

Crosley isn’t a complainer, though. Far from it: she embodies, in fact, the great and rare quality of being game. Of her early living arrangements in New York she describes, “Showers in kitchens, toilets in living rooms, sinks in bedrooms. It was as if Picasso were born a slumlord instead of a painter.” A trip to Alaska finds the author wondering why Americans don’t make American pilgrimages like they used to, driving across the country to visit the former home of a president or tour a house made entirely out of corn. “American appreciation vacations,” she writes, “have become the purview of the very local or the very foreign. Which is a shame. The song doesn’t go, ‘If you can’t be with the one you love, leave the country.’” Crosley’s Alaska voyage, made in honor of a friend’s wedding, is centered around fun things like granola and high ponytails until the wedding party happens to witness a drunk driver in a pick-up truck strike a baby bear. That essay, “Light Pollution”, is thoughtful and vivid, funny and sad. It is followed by a story that centers on grade-school popularity and urination habits. The transition, it’s worth mentioning, does not jar a reader. It all feels natural.

Crucially — especially for short humorous nonfiction — there’s no point at which a reader tires of Crosley; no point at which suspicion grows that the author is in fact a “wacky” type who courts anecdotes. She’s likable, but weirdly so. And thank god for this. Likability in itself isn’t an ideal quality for writers of first-person comic essays. There’s got to be a modifier in there to add friction and novelty to the proceedings. David Sedaris, for example, is finicky; Steve Martin is absurd; Woody Allen neurotic, and so forth. Like those three masters of the genre, Crosley is an expert technician. Each essay zooms from the universal observation to a series of entertaining particulars and back out again. It’s a formula, sure, but a useful one, giving Crosley license to play fast and loose with language while keeping everything safely within her control. How Did You Get This Number is, it must be said, pretty much a flawless book. This isn’t to say that it’s perfect — just, quite literally, without flaws. Hell,Crosley even deploys the second-person verb tense successfully. And that’s never been an easy thing to do.

It is startling to hear the voice of a person whose words you’ve read in books or whose face you’ve seen on billboards and in magazines. This used to be more the case, before the internet before the internet padded out our sensory experience of celebrities.

If nature doesn’t distribute talents evenly across the population, it would appear that culture tries to correct this by regulating the number of models (zero!) allowed to moonlight successfully as musicians. Yes, it’s difficult to concede that a person with a steep allotment of physical beauty might also, on top of it, wield separate talents. And also: models have a poor track record of transitioning from one field to the other, both in terms of merit and commercial success. Athlete-musicians are an analogous phenomenon. Actually, athlete-musicians probably have it worse.

Knowing this, it’s worth paying attention when Vogue designates column inches and the likes of writer Jonathan Van Meter (who has profiled Hillary Clinton and many others for the magazine) to Karen Elson, a supermodel who emerged in the late nineties with a bob and shaved eyebrows, married Jack White in 2005 and has released, this year, an album of songs called The Ghost Who Walks. Tellingly, it is not Elson’s modeling or lifestyle that Van Meter focuses on in the piece, but rather—really!—her music. Van Meter calls the album “a canny, beautifully produced mix of spooky alt-country, English folk music, and lullaby” that “somehow manages to evoke the Robert Plant-Alison Krauss vibe on Raising Sand, Courtney Love circa “Doll Parts,” and the sixties English folk-rock group Fairport Convention.” The piece is not only a sidebar to a fourteen-page spread of gauzy Annie Leibovitz photos, but one of very few times a model-turned-musician has received serious consideration in a magazine like Vogue. In light of this, we’d like to offer a consideration of the top five model-musician moments in recent history. Remember: it’s all relative.

The antihero of Ian McEwan’s Solar is Michael Beard: a cuckold, a lazy bum, and a Nobel prizewinning physicist who has been out of ideas for twenty years. Beard is a snob who harps on the rural accents and mismanners of his peers, dislikes cheerfulness, and pities himself while eating cookies. He sucks, in a word. And although fiction is full of characters who suck, it’s hard to recall a character whose lameness is as artfully wrought as Michael Beard’s. Over the course of the novel Beard accidentally kills his wife’s lover, frames another man for the crime, steals the dead man’s ideas and leverages those plans into a fine career. He is every professional’s worst-case scenario: successful by a fluke and doomed to a life of fakery. Oy!

McEwan lays it on thick for Michael Beard, to good and bad effect. The physicist’s talent is a “children’s tricycle” that has “hitched a ride behind the juggernaut of a world-historical genius.” Nice. But his past is “a mess, resembling a ripe, odorous cheese oozing into or over his present,” sometimes congealing “into the appearances of something manageably firm, more Parmesan than Époisses.” Gross. McEwan is great at describing borderline states like insomnia and nausea, and he’s great at describing professional anxiety. He’s even good at writing about sex, which is impossible. But Solar isn’t a judicious arrangement of these talents.

Beard roams the globe, funded by various stipends and getting into scrapes. On a luxury voyage to the Arctic he stops to pee on a stretch of icy terrain and finds his penis frozen to the zipper of his snowmobile suit. Too proud to request help, he performs some amateur corrective measures and gets back on his motorbike, groin stinging. Disaster strikes: Beard’s penis falls off and lodges itself above the kneecap of his snowsuit. (“The hideous object, less than two inches long, was stiff like a bone. It did not feel, or it no longer felt, like a part of himself.”) In a panic, still aboard the motorbike, he contemplates the possibility of microsurgery for reattachment. Back at base camp, the detached penis turns out to be a tube of frozen lip salve that came loose and slid down his pants. Beard remains intact. The whole episode is neither funny nor bathetic, just squeamish. It is a pretty characteristic anecdote.

Buy Solar at Amazon.com

Things get worse for the physicist. He descends into squalor and unwillingly fathers a child. The man whom he has framed for murder is released from prison and comes a-hunting for revenge. He develops a cancerous mole which promises to metastasize, and he continues to grow fatter. McEwan’s descriptions of the man’s billowing girth are exhaustive:

Only ten years ago, when he had still thought he could rescue himself with exercise, he would have been shocked by his own pneumatic form, by his concertina of chins, and by the ribbed contours of the woman he was stroking, and by the sweaty scent of newly cut grass that arose from armpits, groins, and crooks of knees, heavily enfolded regions that rarely saw air or light.

Food gets graphic treatment, too:

His starters arrived: lozenges of orange-colored cheese dipped in batter, rolled in bread crumbs and salt, and deep-fried, with a creamy dip of pale green. Perfection, and in such quantity.

It’s like a John Waters film without the camp. Which is another way of saying that Solar is boring. Amazingly boring. Michael Beard is a weakling, and not a compelling one. A reader’s urge to skim grows by the page. There are few bad sentences—on the contrary, McEwan’s sentences are seamless. But seamless to what end? The painstaking quality of the prose is annoying; it’s like performing sums on an abacus when a calculator would be the obvious choice. Reviewing Solar in the New York Times Book Review, Walter Kirn found the novel “impeccable yet numbing” and “impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read.” This sounds about right. Beard is a walking bad vibe, and Solar a well-written bummer.

The chief qualification of an advice columnist has always been experience, no more and no less. An early advice columnist, or agony aunt, wrote in a 1789 issue of The New Lady’s Magazine that her qualifications were founded in “having been deeply engaged in numberless scenes,vareigated and opposite, serious and comic, cheerful and afflicting.” Pauline Phillips, the original Dear Abby, had a happy marriage and no professional writing experience to recommend her to the job, while her twin sister Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers in print) had worked only on a gossip column for the Morningside College’s Collegian Reporter. Dr. Laura’s doctorate is in physiology, not psychology. In short, the job of professional advice-giver has never required accreditation.

In “A Magazine of Her Own?” Margaret Beetham describes the early advice columnist as “a female figure who was mature but not ‘old’, and who treated her correspondents’ problems with the attention due to equals.” The agony aunt’s authority was as firm as it was delicate—like the female relation for whom she was named, the columnist offered moral guidance from a familiar but removed perspective. Readers could trust her. She gave them the straight dope.

Which words bring us to Ashley Dupre, Eliot Spitzer’s former ladypal and author of “Ask Ashley”, an advice column published in the New York Post. The column launched on December 13th with a debut set of correspondence and a promo video of Dupre wearing a skirt suit and glasses. “Take it from me,” she says over a pulsing hip-hop beat. “There’s nothing better than learning from someone else’s experiences.”

Courtesy of the New York Post.

Except, possibly, learning from your own. Born Ashley Youmans, Dupre grew up in an upper middle-class family on the Jersey Shore. By most accounts she led a happy-ish childhood and moved to New York at 19 hoping to develop a singing career. She did not plan on becoming an escort, nor was she aware that Client 9 was the governor of New York (Spitzer used the pseudonym “George Fox” to book hotel rooms.)

From the moment she was outed Dupre has come across as well as she possibly could in the circumstances. The Times described her as soft-spoken and good-humored; she is articulate and likable in television appearances. She also turned down $1 million to appear in Hustler magazine. These are all demonstrable virtues. The question of who Dupre is and how she wound up a prostitute does not, in the end, seem difficult to answer: She was a resourceful babe who wanted money and was capable of making cruddy decisions. This describes a lot of people.

The outrage at Dupre’s reinvention seems to stem from disgust at the fact that a former escort is being granted any kind of public forum beyond MySpace blogs. (Let us not forget that Spitzer kicked off his post-governor career by signing on to write a column for Slate.)   And when we talk about an advice column we are talking about the persona of its author, and in Dupre’s case, the persona is weirdly likable.  The tone of her advice is positive and sensible, she occasionally dishes out tough love (“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Katie, but he’s not going to choose you”) and her decrees—size doesn’t matter, wine is romantic, don’t fix what isn’t broken—are as sound as they are trite, as is appropriate to the format.  Specificity — the idea of doling out real help to flailing individuals—is only the nominal concern of an advice column; the imperative has always been to maintain alevel of universality that allows every reader to take home something from each question (and its response). In their insistent vagueness, advice columns are not unlike horoscopes.

The content of Dupre’s advice is less important than its provenance. One is banal, the other fascinating. When Brian N., 39, asks Dupre to name a no-fail gift he can purchase for his wife,she responds that there is no such thing. “Women are really not as complicated as men think. If we love you, it doesn’t take much.” To Meredith, 40, who worries that her daughter may be getting into trouble, Dupre advises good communication. To a guy whose girlfriend thinks he’s cheating, Dupre notes that “Trust is earned.” If her advice is solid, it’s also boring. But Dupre herself is not.

Are there haters? There are always haters. “There is NOTHING in life this a$$ can teach me,”wrote commenter didn’tneedtoseethat on Perez Hilton, while mteach23 asked “Who in the world would give this slut the opportunity to write for the NY post? are you guys seriously??” Both pundits miss the point. There’s nothing anyone can teach anyone in the context of an advice column. The appeal of Dupre lies in the implied scope and salacity of her wisdom. Readers will see in her suggestions mostly what they want to see, along with a pinch of what stings. This has always been the agony aunt formula. “Esteem alone will not make a happy marriage,” advised a”Letter of Advice to a Lady” in a November 1770 issue of The Ladies Magazine. “Passion must also be kept alive…”

As Dupre reframes it for the twenty-first century, “Sometimes it’s good to be a bad girl.”

Some things we read or watch to better ourselves. You know what these are. Others we consume in order to visit imaginative realms beyond the normal purview: Jersey Shore, Avatar, The Lost Symbol or Dominick Dunne’s new (and posthumous) novel Too Much Money.

As in Dunne’s previous novels People Like Us and Another City Not My Own, Gus Bailey is the author’s stand-in, a writer for Park Avenue magazine who is undergoing a strenuous lawsuit for slander committed against politician Kyle Cramden. In part to cover the legal bills he’s racked up, Bailey has signed a seven-figure deal to write a damning novel, titled “Infamous Lady”, about one Perla Zacharias suspected to be involved in her rich husband’s mysterious death. Meanwhile, disgraced businessman Elias Renthal is biding his time at a prison in Las Vegas waiting to wriggle back into the caste that ejected him as soon as his sentence (for financial malfeasance) is up. Too Much Money covers the return of the Renthals to society and Gus’s attempts to get the real facts of the case down for his novel. The book’s suspense rides dually on whether the Renthals will recapture the respect of their peers and whether Gus will write his book or not. As suspense goes, it is not gripping. But suspense is not Dunne’s game.

A roman à clef refers to a novel wherein nominally fictitious characters provide thinly-veiled accounts of real people; in French the phrase translates into “novel with a key”. In keeping with the genre, “Too Much Money” offers a disguised account of Dunne’s own legal tribulations relating to the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy case, as well as stand-ins for Brooke Astor (“Adele Harcourt”) Larry King (“Harry Sovereign”) Si Newhouse (“Hy Vietor”) and others.

Now. There are two ways to read a roman à clef. One is to comb it, as intended, for inside jokes and hidden truths. The other is to read it as a novel in its own right, with a language and a narrative not contingent for its pleasures on gossip. A successful roman à clef will satisfy on both accounts, and in an era free of discretion, it is more important than ever that it please the latter type of reader. Roman à clef doesn’t make quite as much sense as a form now that we have Gawker and Perez Hilton to provide us with the real names and humiliations of anyone involved in a scandal. A novel written in the whispering old roman à clef genre is hard-pressed to be salacious instead of quaint.

Too Much Money fits in somewhere between the two, as Dunne probably intended. As with Wharton novels it helps to keep a running list of the characters (with their relationships delineated) on whatever you’re using as a bookmark. There are characters named Bratsie Bleeker, Binkie Bosworth and Chiquita Chatfield. There are twenty-eight room apartments on Fifth Avenue. Characters say things like “I love giving orders to the help” and “Better nouveau than never” and “Winkie Williams told me the most hilarious story about the Duchess of Windsor being a hermaphrodite.” There are thousand-dollar orchids and bedrooms lacquered in seventeen coats of persimmon paint. It’s a novel packed with details—tangerine roses, Turnbull & Asser striped ties, Spode china—but adding up to something less satisfying than Bonfire of the Vanities or The Devil Wears Prada, both of which had their share of proper nouns. Dunne doesn’t have to give us meaty conclusions, just astute observations and a couple of laughs. Too Much Money is slightly shy of both.

Still, there’s a wit and an effortlessness that make the book delightful in small doses. Dunne is a master of dense social detail and outrageousness, and he’s at his best when he combines the two––as when introducing readers to the concept of the “walker”, an attractive young gay man employed as a companion to partnerless rich women at balls and dinners, or revealing that certain Manhattan mortuaries are more prestigious than others. With its episodic structure and New York-iness and likable if forgettable characters, Too Much Money reminded me most, and weirdly, of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children; both are expertly-constructed and entertaining books that fade from memory as soon as the last page is turned. I’m not convinced, in the end, that this is a fault. It might just be a sign that a book’s aims and achievements are perfectly aligned.