Redefining the summer beach book

Take a letter
The epistolary novel “Which Brings Me To You” (Algonquin Books, $24) is one of those books that is so enjoyable to consume that you start thinking about which of your friends to send it to first — and then you resent every interruption that makes you put it down.

In the opening pages, John and Jane meet at a wedding, fool around in a coat closet, and in a fit of senseless romanticism decide to write letters to each other. What follows is six months of “confessions,” in which they share their painful romantic histories in letters of escalating importance.

Anyone who has experienced this kind of strangely immediate intimacy will recognize it, and co-authors Steve Almond (“Candyfreak”) and Julianna Baggott (“Girl Talk”) expertly capture the swooning optimism hiding in letters that are often arch or even glib. But as deftly knowing as the story is about emotional complexity, it is the bright and funny writing, even in the telling of sad stories, that makes the book great reading.

The only identifiable weakness is the ending, which feels abrupt and is the only moment in which complicated feelings are treated in a simplistic way. But the book as a whole is enormously satisfying.    —Linda Holmes

Pod people

Bloomsbury USA

Douglas Coupland's "JPod" (Bloomsbury, $25) has been called "Microserfs 2.0." It's not quite a sequel to Coupland's 1995 book about a group of goofball Microsoft employees, but anyone who delighted in that classic will relish the similarities. Both books focus on a group of Pacific Northwest techies — the JPodders work for a video-game company in Vancouver, and sit together in a pod where everyone's last name begins with "J". The narrator of "JPod," Ethan, has a self-deprecating, witty voice that's at first almost interchangeable with that of Daniel in "Microserfs," and his goofy pals feel familiar, too.

Coupland remains king of the perfectly placed pop-culture detail. He describes humidity as feeling "like hundreds of strangers touching me," and notes that Kodak as a company is so outdated its mere name "makes me feel like I'm at a garage sale." Readers will savor some of his sentences and laugh out loud at others. Anyone who's had a clueless boss can relate to the JPodders' frustration as they're forced to add a hip turtle (based on "Survivor" host Jeff Probst — don't ask) into their otherwise realistic skateboarding game.

But for all its juicy pop-culture detail and crazy techie antics, almost every word of "Microserfs" rang true. "JPod" goes off the realism rails almost instantly, when Ethan's pot-growing mother electrocutes a biker and his brother starts stashing illegal Chinese immigrants in Ethan's apartment. It gets even weirder when Coupland himself becomes a character. The switch from simply silly to absolutely unbelievable is jolting. Coupland fans may tolerate his idiosyncrasies (15 pages of prime numbers with one non-prime hidden within, the first 100,000 digits of pi with one error), but they still want characters and happenings they can, somehow, relate to. "JPod" is an enjoyable read for the most part, but readers must be forgiven if they find themselves giving up on following the plot about two-thirds of the way through.    —G.F.C.

Family affairs
The exposition in Elinor Lipman’s “My Latest Grievance” (Houghton Mifflin, $24) is not the smoothest; Lipman tends to put overly thoughtful speeches in the mouths of her precociously intellectual characters — the narrator, “prematurely sardonic” sixteen-year-old Frederica Hatch, and her professor parents.

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The plot is soap-operatic: David Hatch’s flighty first wife, Laura Lee French, re-inserts herself into the Hatches’ lives and begins a scandalous affair with a college president, whose wife tries to kill herself. The book is oddly paced as well: bursts of events, followed by stretches where nothing much happens.

But readers won’t find themselves bothered by the structural lapses; Lipman’s prose is brisk and funny, and the Hatch family is hilariously real, warm and loving but with convincing flaws.  The Hatches all live in a dormitory at a women’s college, where the senior Hatches serve as dorm parents, and Frederica’s narration is spot-on in its renditions of the college president’s spoiled daughter, faculty-union meetings, and the details of single-sex dorm life in 1976.  It’s not credible, for example, that the family would invite the troublesome Laura Lee to spend the holidays — but the quarreling that results is witty and genuine.  The story itself isn’t great, but Lipman’s prose is.     —Sarah D. Bunting

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Books Editor. Brian Bellmont is a writer in Minneapolis. Linda Holmes is a writer in Bloomington, Minn. Sarah D. Bunting is a writer in Brooklyn.

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