SEASON’S READINGS

Around the world with Truman Capote, Bunny Mellon, Orhan Pamuk, and Cormac McCarthy—twice

NIGHTS OF PLAGUE By Orhan Pamuk (Knopf)

Unless Orhan Pamuk is clairvoyant—which, given his expressive gifts and imaginative powers, seems somehow plausible—the timing of his new, 704-page opus, chronicling a 1901 plague outbreak on the fictional island of Mingheria (“the pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea”), must be chalked up to coincidence. (He began working on this freakishly relevant historical novel in 2016.) In any case, Nights of Plague feels strangely oracular. As the population of Mingheria—split almost perfectly down the middle between Orthodox Greeks and Muslims—is assailed by a sweeping illness that causes agonizing “buboes” to sprout across the bodies of the afflicted, the small nation descends into factionalism and paranoia. The horror not only begins to feel familiar, but like a valuable case study.

“Nobody ever wants a quarantine,” says the island’s pharmacist, Nikiforos, in conversation with two recent arrivals. Nobody wants “any evidence that disrupts their usual ways, they will deny any deaths, and even resent the dead.” He is addressing this foreboding, darkly prescient observation to Doctor Nuri, a renowned Ottoman quarantine specialist, and Princess Pakize, the doctor’s new bride and daughter of the deposed sultan, Murad V. The couple have traveled to the island at the directive of Murad V’s brother and successor, the iron-fisted Abdul Hamid II, with a dual mandate: to prevent the pathogen from spreading beyond Mingheria’s borders, and to investigate the grisly assassination of yet another Ottoman doctor. Both objectives are quickly derailed. The plague proves too slippery to contain: every day, the island’s corpse wagon rumbles through the streets, its pile of bodies mounting, while firefighters are dispatched across the island with tanks of Lysol to hose down infected neighborhoods. Revolutionaries find footing in the chaos, and Mingheria’s health crisis is compounded by a political one.

Over the course of Pamuk’s decades-long career—the beloved Turkish novelist was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature— certain threads have united his work. His plots are devilishly intricate, airtight, and thorough. His prose is graceful, yet sturdy. Nights of Plague is no different. It is narrated by a modern-day historian, Mîna Mingher, tasked with annotating 113 letters between Princess Pakize and her sister, an arrangement that gives the tale a quasi-academic, yet oddly rich, flavor. She faithfully weaves the princess’s correspondence into a story, all the while lingering luxuriously over images—including various paintings inspired by critical moments in the island’s plague-battle—or digressing into asides about Mingheria’s topography (mountainous) or signature exports (stone and roses).

This narrative contrivance also allows a dash of literary criticism to sneak in. In the best of such moments, Nights of Plague falls into dialogue with itself, its pet subject being the limitation of recorded history. “Only a poet— not a novelist, and certainly not a historian—would be able to describe the despair that began to seep through the city toward the middle of June,” the narrator writes. In other words, facts and timelines may be vital in grasping the scope of a calamity, but they obscure the true engines of history: the personalities of shot-callers, the shifting moods that permeate a population. Luckily, Pamuk, the clairvoyant, is attuned to all. —Daniel Karel

THE PASSENGER, STELLA MARIS

By Cormac McCarthy (Knopf)

Guilt and grief walk hand in hand in Cormac McCarthy’s longawaited new novel, The Passenger, and in its companion, Stella Maris, the first published in October, the second in December. The entwined emotions are almost as tightly bound as the two siblings at the frantically, forebodingly beating heart of the story that the two books tell. The brother and sister are Bobby and Alicia Western, and they usher McCarthy back to the top of his game.

Like many McCarthy characters, these two do get around geographically. Death and its sorrows hang over them like Spanish moss in the gothic, Faulknerian South that McCarthy occasionally hefts onstage to underscore corrupted innocence and its aftermath. They both embark on road trips in search of truths that elude them. They expose themselves to cold in wilderness states. History is McCarthy’s reason here. The Westerns’ childhoods were spread all over the map by their physicist father’s scorched-earth affiliation with the Manhattan Project. Its massive, bomb-building compound in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, produced his marriage to a local pageant queen, her extraordinary beauty settling on their genius-IQ daughter like a curse. Alicia’s physical allure is irresistible to many, her brother included. Though, to be fair, he’s obsessed with the entire package, namely an intelligence on the level of the notorious nuclear physicists and world-famous mathematicians whose accomplishments roll off her tongue in Stella Maris, which is her book and the far shorter of the two, while The Passenger is more Bobby’s.

McCarthy has made Stella Maris nothing but Alicia conversing: with a psychiatrist fascinated by her brilliance and concerned about her obvious death wish. Needless to say, she talks circles around the very good doctor with scientific conundrums, higher math, moral brainteasers, and music theory (she is also a violin prodigy). McCarthy, who has strong ties to the Santa Fe Institute near his home base in New Mexico and regularly expresses a preference for scientists over fiction writers, suffuses the lovers’ saga with the theoretical and scientific. Then boils it down to love as allconsuming.

Alicia is equally, and more destructively, hung up on her brother. Stella Maris is a place—a mental institution in backwoods Wisconsin where she is a repeat patient. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, she is visited throughout by hallucinated buddies she calls her “hort”—as in short for cohort—prominent among them the demanding and lethally critical “The Kid,” as in short for “Thalidomide Kid.” His “flapper” arms are McCarthy at his most grotesque and poignant, shooing Alice away from her brother and precipitously toward a final suicide attempt.

As their world turns, these novels have deep, cloudy, clandestinely raging waters to navigate, and not just because Bobby is by his latest profession a salvage diver. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s government-sanctioned deluge in the 1930s buried the area of Tennessee once farmed by their ancestors. Their grandmother, still puttering around in small-town exile, won’t let them forget what she remembers as a bucolic Arcadia that, in McCarthy’s sparingly lyrical

descriptions, harks back to Charles Sheeler’s Precisionist paintings of country Americana. “The chairs had come out of the mountains and were made of ash, the spindles and rails turned on a treadle lathe in a world no longer even imaginable. The seats were woven rush much worn and mended back in places with heavy rough twine.” McCarthy picks his titles as carefully as his stunningly arranged words. Stella maris is Latin for “star of the sea,” or, in the symbol-toting Catholicism McCarthy threads throughout both novels, an ancient name for the Virgin Mary as a female protector or guiding spirit at sea. Bobby traces routes across oceans as he evolves from failed academic-in-training to brawn-forhire to international race car driver whose record speeds can never outpace the spell his sister casts on him.

In that sense, she’s the passenger, ineluctably a ghost presence by his side. But McCarthy won’t let the larger picture be forgotten. In The Passenger, Bobby is operating out of New Orleans, his latest job as a diver to recover a plane wreck that had been carrying ten people and possibly a mysterious cargo. In archetypal McCarthy fashion—No Country for Old Men, The Crossing—the plane’s black box is missing, and so is the tenth passenger. Violence, another McCarthy staple, has likely been committed. It follows Bobby back onto dryish land, where New Orleans is a moody welter of dive bars and overstuffed famous restaurants. One of Bobby’s best pals soon goes missing, and scary questions pile up, not the least where hoary Cubans command mobster tables in dusky corners, and the 20th-century history McCarthy is writing as a backdrop for his star-crossed love story somersaults into an intricate, alternate reality concerning the JFK assassination. This time McCarthy escorts science onstage for a grim ballistics analysis akin in its complexity to the theoretical physics and advanced mathematics that have been Bobby and Alicia’s playthings, casting one more cloak of darkness over public events that take place in and around their lifetimes. The darkest dark still resides within them, though, and only one of them will survive it. The other will mourn—and take the blame. —CeLia MCGee

I’LL BUILD A STAIRWAY TO PARADISE: A LIFE OF BUNNY MELLON

By Mac Griswold (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In this impressive portrait of Bunny Mellon, Mac Griswold, who knew the landscape architect and designer personally, makes the argument that Mellon aspired to create an “American pastoral” for the 20th century, rooted in the promise of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Although she grew up in a world where horses were thoroughbreds, society was glittering, and marriage was eventually to Paul Mellon, as fellow decorator Bunny Williams put it, she “was no Brooke Astor, entertaining 24 for dinner three nights a week.” Rather, Mellon was a “sculptor, sculpting space… She created an American vision of English country house style.”

From Tuxedo Park to Virginia to the White House, Griswold escorts us through Mellon’s life as we meet icons of culture, fashion, and politics: Queen Elizabeth and Jackie Kennedy, Givenchy and Balenciaga, JFK and I.M. Pei, Audrey Hepburn, Richard Diebenkorn, Katharine Graham. Daughter of the president of the Gillette Safety Razor Co. and granddaughter of the inventor of Listerine, Rachel (“Bunny”) Lambert was born into money and groomed for social success. Her appetite for prestige, although ever discreet, only increased with her second marriage, to Mellon, in 1948.

At debutante balls, fundraisers, and art openings, I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise shows how Mellon became a tastemaker. Her social climbing didn’t always follow an easy path. With only a high school education, she frequently had to play catch-up in the sophisticated circles in which she moved, often cultivating powerful men to achieve her goals. This could also lead her astray: late in life, hoping to try her hand at politics, she bet on the wrong horse with handsome John Edwards, only to find herself entangled in an unsavory state of affairs.

Griswold has mined Bunny Mellon’s personal archives for journal entries, poems, and photographs. These resources reveal how many of her designs were derived from fairy tales. She wanted visitors—to her own gardens and the gardens she designed for others—to feel transported to another world. But there was more to the story: her gardens were an escape. According to Griswold, Paul Mellon’s very public affair with Dorcas Hardin, for one, caused his wife such pain she distracted herself with increasingly bigger and bolder projects—the expansion of the National Gallery of Art, the flourish of the Kennedy’s White House Rose Garden. Then her daughter was fatally hit in a car accident, and she threw herself even deeper into her career.

I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise spans the full 103 years of Bunny Mellon’s life. Some may find the pacing too leisurely, and the book is at its best when Mellon’s curious personality comes out in full. A giver of parties and designer of landscapes brimming with “imagination and magic,” she herself tended to the “expressionless and forbidding,” a “society figure with an almost pathological dislike for publicity,” who loved coming home from galas to water the plants at night. —LiLy Lopate

DELIBERATE CRUELTY: TRUMAN CAPOTE, THE MILLIONAIRE’S WIFE, AND THE MURDER OF THE CENTURY

by Roseanne Montillo (Simon & Schuster)

Roseanne Montillo is known for historical narrative nonfiction. In her previous four books, Fire on the Track, The Wilderness of Ruin, Atomic Women, and The Lady and Her Monsters, she dove headfirst into distinctive lives from the past. Likewise, her latest, Deliberate Cruelty, uses straightforward language to get at an enticing plot and colorful characters.

Alternating between the lives of self-made New York socialite Ann Woodward and so-called “literary bad boy” Truman Capote, the book explores each separately while linking them as potential rivals for fame, and notoriety. Like the betterknown Capote’s, Woodward’s journey wound its way from a rough childhood and an absent mother to creating a high-profile new life in New York City, a small-town nobody dreaming big enough to propel her first into showgirl success and then, in 1943, marriage to William Woodward Jr., heir to the Hanover National Bank fortune and one of the wealthiest men in America.

By shooting him to death at their home in Oyster Bay 12 years later, allegedly by accident but under murky circumstances, she earned herself a different spotlight, in what Life magazine dubbed “The Shooting of the Century.” Sagas like this were catnip for Capote, whose unfinished novel Answered Prayers accused Woodward of murder. Just before it was scheduled for excerpt in Esquire in 1975, Woodward killed herself by cyanide poisoning.

The arc of Capote’s own rise to, and fall from, fame was pretty much just as spectacular. Reporting and writing In Cold Blood, he grew close to two killers, only to later watch as they were executed for their crime. Montillo outlines with careful clarity Capote’s steady emotional and mental decline as a result, and his fall from the graces of New York high society.

To call Capote’s and Woodward’s lives intertwined, as Montillo does, though, sometimes seems a stretch. If Capote was interested in the Woodward shooting, it was hardly the focal point of Answered Prayers. He had many stories to tell, and no one was off-limits, not even his closest friends. Ann was one of the many caught by his pen. Still, Montillo scores one interesting point, categorizing both her subjects as murderers—Woodward for physically offing her husband, Capote for deep-sixing those he cared about by writing about them the way he did. “Some people kill with swords,” is how Capote put it, “and some people kill with words.” —Carissa Chesanek

Gold Rush, White Russians, retro recipes, and swell stories for the holidays.

BY CELIA MCGEE

Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley teams up with Edgar Allan Poe for an enthralling stab at a Gold Rush mystery. When a string of women start turning up dead in pre-Civil War Monterey, two newly minted sleuths–both prostitutes, and each a finely drawn character–turn to Poe’s “train of logic” from his “Murders in the Rue Morgue” for help. There’s a bit of Deadwood to this thrillingly told tale, too, but in the end it’s pure Smiley, and a topdrawer performance.

THE MIDCOAST

by Adam White (Hogarth) The coast of Maine, a shocking murder, and a winsome debut—in his first novel, the screenwriter and Damariscotta native Adam White sets up an edge-of-your-seat mystery awash in the tricky murk of class, privilege, and merciless corruption. His rugged evocation of wave-tossed seasons and a secrethoarding community perched nervously on the continent’s edge heralds a bracing new talent, and will have you dreaming of lobster boats with surprises in their nets.

THE ENGLISH UNDERSTAND WOOL

by Helen DeWitt (New Directions) To read Helen DeWitt is to encounter one of England’s most dazzling fiction writers. In The English Understand Wool, she takes the temperature of publishing itself. Glamour and scandal have landed Marguerite, a half-French 17-year-old born in Morocco, with a seven-figure book contract to write a memoir about her late mother, who schooled her in the finest points of luxury living before disappearing in a blaze of gossip. Marguerite’s editor wants her to go for the sensational, and lay bare to a curious world a rumored trauma she suffered at her mother’s tutoring hands. Her resistance is a psychological tour de force.

DIAGHILEV’S EMPIRE: HOW THE BALLETS RUSSES ENTHRALLED THE WORLD

by Rupert Christiansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Rupert Christiansen, the eminent arts correspondent and dance critic for The Spectator, marks the 150th anniversary of Serge Diaghilev’s birth with this stunning history of his Ballets Russes and the trail it blazed through the early 20th century. With appearances by Matisse, Stravinsky, Picasso, Anna Pavlova, and the fiery Vaslav Nijinsky, the book showcases Diaghilev the impresario and choreographer with an imperious, outsize personality, as he revolutionized the world of dance, changing the role of art, artists, and artmaking, for better and worse, through a pivotal era.

WOMEN HOLDING THINGS

by Maira Kalman (Harper Design) In the spring of 2021, when the artist and illustrator Maira Kalman issued the limited-edition booklet Women Holding Things to help support such hunger-combating organizations as No Kid Hungry, it quickly sold out. An absolute charmer (33 paintings, and a red balloon reading “Hold On”), it’s now available in a hardcover version. The bestselling author of The Principles of Uncertainty, has added 67 new paintings, with Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, Sally Hemings, and other real-life people all making an appearance holding things, but also holding on, holding up, and holding forth.

THE UNFOLDING

by A.M. Homes (Viking) A.M. Homes’s first novel in a decade is a portrait in politics that returns us to a slice of American life among a group of powerful, distraught Republicans in the unspooling weeks between Barack Obama’s presidential election night in 2008 and his inauguration. Homes’s darkly appraising eye zeroes in not just on professional meltdowns, but personal freak-outs within a disbelieving cadre led by a certain pointedly named Hitchens. Known mostly as “the Big Guy,” he mulls an assortment of dirty tricks while confronting a formerly doting daughter suddenly denouncing her family’s vision of the American dream. Under such circumstances, January 6, 2021, seems just a jaundiced heartbeat away.

THE PAPER DOLLS OF ZELDA FITZGERALD

by Eleanor Lanahan (Scribner)

Eleanor Lanahan first connected to her grandmother, Zelda Fitzgerald, when, age 10, “I discovered she had painted these vibrant paper dolls…. These secret treasures were like Christmas cookies…slightly tangled, and tantalizing.” Never without her paints and paper, Zelda originally produced them for her daughter, with a debut that sees a fuming 17-year-old Avery Anderson forced out of her senior year in Washington, D.C., and plopped down in a small Southern town to tend to her dying grandmother. Whether she can help reconcile her mother and Mama Letty in the process depends on unburying the past. Her friendship with a pretty next-door neighbor intensifies, and the shadow of an unsolved murder perilously close to home. Hammonds probes vicious racism and the smiles that try to hide it, imprinting every page with suspense.

Scottie, adding to them over her years traversing the Jazz Age’s transatlantic map. Fashionable figures of the French Court and childhood fairytales; prelates and queens; King Arthur and his circle; and all three musketeers became portable amusements often able to keep the clouds of sadness and madness at bay. Cinderella’s pumpkin coach closes the book, with midnight still several dances away.

COCKTAILS WITH A CURATOR

by Xavier F. Salomon, with Aimee Ng and Giulio Dalvit, foreword by Simon Schama, illustrated by Luis Serrano (Rizzoli)

Raise a glass, and rejoice! The Frick Collection's elegant, effervescent “Cocktails with a Curator” video series, begun during lockdown, is now a book, with essays for each masterpiece—paintings, sculpture, furniture and porcelain—by the series’ erudite and fabulous hosts, Xavier F. Salomon and Aimee Ng. Pour yourself a Jaded Countess to toast Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville, a Pimm’s Cup for Gainsborough’s Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliott, or a Bloody Mary for Holbein’s likeness of Sir Thomas More, and enjoy.

SHY: THE ALARMINGLY OUTSPOKEN MEMOIRS OF MARY RODGERS

by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Thanks to this candid, dishy, acerbic memoir, Mary Rodgers no longer need worry about her “bologna sandwich” status as the daughter of Broadway’s legendary composer Richard Rodgers and mother of Tony Award-winning composer Adam Guettel. As Rodgers and her coauthor, New York Times theater critic Jesse Green, make clear, coming into her own wasn’t easy (because there was also a controlling mother). But she listened, she observed, and she wrote—the music to Once Upon a Mattress and the 1972 young adult classic Freaky Friday—later chairing the board of Juilliard and continuing to carry a torch for her dear friend Stephen Sondheim. There isn’t a dull line in the book.

WE DESERVE MONUMENTS

by Jas Hammonds (Roaring Brook Press) Jas Hammonds describes herself as “raised in many cities and in-between the pages of many books.” Grown up into a writer, she has ventured into YA fiction

THE DELMONICO WAY: SUBLIME ENTERTAINING AND LEGENDARY RECIPES FROM THE RESTAURANT THAT MADE NEW YORK

by Max Tucci (Rizzoli)

Craving some flaming Baked Alaska cupcakes? Some vodka truffles? Pasta primavera á la Sirio Maccioni? Count Camillo’s Negroni: irresistible. From the Gilded Age forward, Delmonico’s restaurant was famous New Yorkers’ watering hole of choice, and the go-to for what was considered cosmopolitan cuisine. Oscar Tucci assumed ownership in 1926, and the place where the power lunch was invented stayed in business for Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Kennedys, Windsors, and multiple mayors until the 1980s. Oscar “Max” Tucci is Oscar’s grandson, and has entrusted to Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich vintage photographs, autographed napkin sketches, menus, Delmonico “money,” party invitations, and sultry print ads as illustrations—the come-on for the restaurant’s Hunt Room bar winking that “you can always take a later train.”

LUNCH FROM HOME

by Joshua David Stein, illustrated by Jing Li (Rise x Penguin Workshop)

A certain 3-year-old of our acquaintance is already tirelessly devoted to this beguiling book by Avenue’s restaurant critic, and well he should be. What’s not to like about a book that sings the praises—and the back stories—of a wealth of delicious, culturallyspecific fare that comes to school in the form of “lunch from home”? Not so fast—class bullies and their narrow-minded insults must first be vanquished. They should know better than to mess with Joshua David Stein’s lunch box heroes.