Book Review

There are the rich and there are the very rich, and while the very rich exhibit varied demographic characteristics, the family at the center of Jenny Jackson’s sparkling debut novel, “Pineapple Street,” is of a highly specific sort: the pedigreed, never-touch-the-trust-fund-principal, tennis-playing, old-money-Brooklyn WASP. This is not your bubbie’s Brooklyn, not your hipster Brooklyn, not your hour-long-bus-ride-from-JFK-and-crash-on-your-third-cousin’s-sofa Brooklyn. The Stockton family — large-scale real estate investors — live in the historically preserved, quaint, leafy “fruit streets” section of Brooklyn Heights: “Three little blocks of Pineapple, Orange and Cranberry streets situated on the bluff over the waterfront.”

The sweet spot in the title of Amy Poeppel’s fourth novel refers to a grungy Greenwich Village bar, a beloved neighborhood fixture with battered wood floors, rickety tables and a pungent smell of beer. Its handsome owner is Dan, “a laid-back, decent, extremely chill” single dad who helpfully steers customers clear of the house wine. It’s a good name for a bar but an even better name for a warm and charming comedy of manners that hits every note just right.

In an oft-told story from Japanese folklore, an enchanted bird marries a man. There are many variations of the tale, but the one CJ Hauser relates in the title essay of her new collection, “The Crane Wife,” involves a creature who plucks her feathers out each night to preserve her marriage, to trick her husband into believing she is human. It’s a love of self-erasure, one that is painful to contemplate.

“Let’s Not Do That Again” is a political comedy of manners that reads like the love child of Page Six and a long episode of “Veep.” I mean this in the best possible way. If you like your humor dark and take guilty pleasure in imagining the messy lives of others, you will enjoy Grant Ginder’s fifth novel.

The opening scene is perfection. We meet the eponymous heroine of Diane Johnson’s latest novel, “Lorna Mott Comes Home,” as she rides in the back of a taxi, en route to the train station in Lyon. Lorna, an American woman “of a certain age,” asks the driver to stop so she can observe the aftermath of a mudslide that has unearthed coffins, bursting them open and exposing corpses, bones and “a huge, sticky hillock of treacherous clay” in the village of Pont-les-Puits, where she has lived with her French husband for 20 years.

“Tell me,” Kurt Vonnegut asks Jane Marie Cox, his future wife, “would you enjoy living with me, sleeping with me, leading a carnival life?” He writes from Camp Atterbury in 1944, where he is an enlisted 22-year-old intelligence trainee in the 106th infantry division. “My new job is to cover my face and hands with soot and crawl into enemy lines to see what in the hell they’ve got,” he explains.

Every movie I watch now is a movie about an entire cast of people who seem to not have cancer, or at least this is, to me, its plot,” Anne Boyer observes in The Undying, her recent Pulitzer Prize-winning inquiry into cancer. The 25 stories in Truthtelling have nothing, or at least very little, to do with cancer. And yet I found myself thinking about Boyer’s line while I followed Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s charming, eccentric and occasionally cranky characters as they race around New York City, riding buses and subway trains, popping into the apartments of sick neighbors, going to movie theaters and live performances, wandering in leisurely fashion through grocery stores. The plot, to me, is the opposite of illness. The plot is pre-pandemic life. That we tend to read myopically, or at least through a lens informed by individual circumstance, is fairly obvious, but that makes it all the more surprising, midway through this collection, to discover one particular pre-pandemic gem. “A Few Days Off,” first published in the literary journal Agni in 2018, features a woman who wakes up one morning feeling burnt out, “as if the flame of energy had waned and finally succumbed to the ambient air currents.” She calls in sick and holes up in bed with magazines and tea, which she finds so enjoyable that she calls in sick again. And again. The more she withdraws, the more she wonders why she had been so determined over the years to go about her business. “Everyone dashed here and there, but was there any good reason for so much activity?” It doesn’t take a global health crisis to learn to find solace in retreat, yet it’s difficult to read this as anything but prophetic. In fact, many of the stories in this collection read a bit like allegory, as the title, and particularly the subtitle, imply: Stories, Fables, Glimpses. These stories may skew to traditional narrative form, but many are best read as musings, ruminations or parables.

Everything changes for 12-year-old Samantha McGinty in the summer of 1969. Her father, Brick, stops fussing over his Chevy each weekend, no longer spritzing the windows with water and vinegar and wiping them clean with old pages of the Erietown Times. This small change to the routine flags a more painful development set in motion four years earlier, when Brick made a wrong turn and headed into “the biggest regret of his life.”

They sell frocks at F. G. Goode’s, these women in black, and when they arrive for work they don rayon crepe dresses that smell of frequent dry cleaning, cheap talcum powder and sweat. Do not confuse the Ladies’ Cocktail Frocks Department, where some of them work, with Day Frocks or Evening Frocks or exclusive Model Gowns. The last carries one-of-a-kind dresses, which means you won’t run into someone wearing the same thing unless she bought it in Melbourne. But “who goes to Melbourne?” Department store particulars are part of the charm of Madeleine St. John’s “The Women in Black,” a deceptively smart comic gem that tracks four women through the pandemonium of one holiday season in 1950s Sydney. St. John, who died in 2006, was the first Australian woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for a later novel, “The Essence of the Thing”), and though the plotlines here are somewhat reductive — marriage, dating and dresses are the characters’ central preoccupations — the book is laced with a fierce intelligence that captures the limited options for women and postwar xenophobic views. It’s also a love letter to department stores of yore, and to the operatic flow of trade. “It was a wonderful spectacle,” Mr. Ryder, the floor manager, observes, looking out onto the Goode’s sales floor. “All of human life is here.”

Language is failing Beryl Dusinbery. She is 99 years old and having trouble retrieving words. “One minute she has a word, then she hasn’t. Where does it go?” Conversely, Shimi Carmelli, 91, can’t forget. “Selective morbid hyperthymesia,” he calls it. One burdensome memory in particular refuses to recede. Live a Little, Howard Jacobson’s 16th novel, is ostensibly a love story about these two nonagenarians, who live across from one another on North London’s Finchley Road. But its themes have less to do with romance than with humiliation and regret, privilege and bad parenting, a temperamental prostate and, above all, words. Those themes have run through Jacobson’s novels (and his columns for the British newspaper The Independent) from retellings of Genesis and the Shylock story to the contemporary The Finkler Question. This new book is classic Jacobson: smart and quippy, full of literary allusions and mined with barbs.  The cover art features skeins of hearts and skulls, and the latter ought to serve as a trigger warning. Beryl is no sweet old lady; she’s self-absorbed, nasty, racist and verbally abusive to the two long-suffering caregivers who dutifully tolerate her offensive behavior. She refers to one as a “Russian whore” and hypothesizes that the other has bad posture because she’s from Africa and “It’s what comes of eating lizards and carrying baskets of bananas on their heads.” Sometimes Beryl falls down just to give them something to do. “I see it as a favor,” she says. “It increases their job satisfaction.”