Novels range from poignant to hilarious

Saving ‘Grace’
Tom Bailey’s “The Grace That Keeps This World” (Shaye Areheart Books, $24) is a tale tailor-made for a cold winter's night. Bailey tells the story of the Hazens, an Adirondack family living in Lost Lake, N.Y., who must hunt to sustain themselves through long, punishing winters.

We begin the story knowing that an unexplained tragedy has occurred, and events slowly build to the horrible occurrence. Even before the crisis, Hazen’s sons, Gary David and Kevin, find themselves each stuck at a crossroads. Kevin’s drawn to college, Gary David to a romance with the local conservation officer. Neither of these fit into their father’s plans, which consist primarily of making sure they have enough meat and firewood for winter.

Bailey doesn’t play it safe in this, his first novel. He tells the story using multiple narrators — some are members of the family and others more tangential. This relieves the story of the claustrophobia that might come with staying with patriarch Gary's rather black-and-white point of view. Different narrators open up the shades of gray.

Where Bailey falters is in some of the action sequences. In the climax, for example, he makes it difficult to figure out what exactly has occurred. Readers don't quite grasp the details until we hear another character talk about it in the next chapter. The action sequences would have been stronger had he simply stayed in the moment.

Still, it’s hard not to be drawn into the life of this hardscrabble town and its inhabitants. Perhaps Bailey will tell some of the other residents’ stories. He’s definitely given himself the material to do so.     —Paige Newman

Brontë undaunting
Only a Victorian scholar could claim zero apprehension toward Jennifer Vandever’s debut novel about a New York professor who studies the Brontë sisters. Fortunately for non-English majors, Vandever's “The Brontë Project” (Shaye Areheart Books, $21) converts potentially staid literary references into accessible fare.

Sara Frost has stagnated in her thesis quest for the lost letters of Charlotte Brontë, until heartbreak and a flamboyant Princess Diana scholar jolt her into reconsidering her lifestyle. Sara's forced to resurface from the musty Brontës and join the real world: "How had she missed, all these years, the undiscovered emotional powerhouse that was REO Speedwagon?" A French libertine, millionaire eccentric, and Hollywood producer all cross her path as she reconsiders her professional muse.

Vandever moves with authentic-sounding ease from the halls of academia to Hollywood’s lacquer, and her pop culture allusions are a treat. It's a bit difficult to buy that a quiet, wan Suzy Scholar can become a glamorous jetsetter in just a few months, but the author at least offers Sara’s guarded discomfort along the way. Charlotte Brontë might have disapproved, in favor of more brooding introspection and less caprice — but “Jane Eyre” never had to contend with a script in pre-production, an interview with Courtney Love or Armani retail therapy, either.      —Tracy Edmondson

A master returns
In his first work of fiction in over a decade, the legendary Gabriel Garcia Marquez returns with “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” (Knopf, $20). The novella tells of an offbeat love story between a 90-year-old self-proclaimed hack writer, who’s never been with a woman he hasn’t paid, and a 14-year-old virgin and would-be prostitute. What surprising about the book is how quickly you move from the eye-rolling that comes with reading the line, “The year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin” to accepting this brief but shining story about the flowering of a man’s heart in the final years of his life. 

Knopf

The unnamed narrator is brought together with the virgin by his friend Rosa Cabaracas, the local madam.  At first, he can barely even bring himself to touch the girl, let alone consummate the relationship. He prefers to lie with her, to watch her sleep, to read to her. But slowly, even as the physical relationship remains relatively innocent, his love for her grows. “I felt so happy that I would kiss her eyelids with very gentle kisses,” he tells us, “and one night it happened like a light in the sky: she smiled for the first time.” The 90-year-old man is awakening as an adolescent would to the meaning of love, lending poignancy to the novella's brief life.

With “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in the author's oeuvre, it’s hard to judge a Garcia Marquez novel completely on its own. Yes, this is a lesser work for the 78-year-old author, but he still manages to dazzle, if only for a short 115 pages.    —P.N.

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