• Bitter Lake
  by Anne Harleman *72
• Short Takes
• Books Received

Ann Harleman *72, who received a doctorate in linguistics from Princeton and teaches at both Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, won the 1993 John Simmons Short Fiction Award for her first book, a quiet, thoughtful collection of stories called Happiness. A subdued but by no means depressing tale, Bitter Lake, her first novel, has the same hushed, somewhat melancholic tone. Once again, Harleman's characters-who appeared in several of her early stories in slightly different incarnations-have an intense, complex, interior life detailed with great verbal acuity by the author, although they articulate precious little to each other. The result is a tension between their outward muteness and their internal turmoil that helps propel the book forward.
Bitter Lake is told by two alternating narrators, an initially passive, resigned mother and her rebellious, troubled 14-year-old daughter. Both are trying to come to terms with the disappearance of one man, Gort Hutchins, who is Judith's first cousin and husband, and Lil's father.
Gort, whose father committed suicide when Gort was 14, has a history of disappearing from his "aggressively simple" life in the shadows of the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Trained as an engineer, he is more of an astronomer at heart. Gort was "always out of reach, somehow," Judith observes. "You never got enough of him." Lil comments: "I thought of how he'd trained us not to ask for anything. How nothing we said seemed big enough to get his attention-seemed worthy." Gort enjoyed what his wife describes as "the comfort of being disconnected." Generally, he would escape up north to pitch his tent on a wooded, lakeside tract of land-the Bitter Lake of the title-purchased by his and Judith's grandfather in the 1920s, and he would return home within two weeks.
When the novel opens, however, two weeks have already passed and there is no sign of Gort. Judith has been fired from her grim job changing diapers at a nursing home and doesn't know how she will manage to provide for Lil and her younger daughter, Susie, who at eight spends her time gathering odd information from The National Enquirer. Lil blames her mother for her father's disappearance. In her anger she moves across town to live with her Great Aunt Clesta, who stopped talking to Judith, once her favorite niece, when she married her favorite nephew, Gort, 16 years ago. Judith observes, "Lil and Gort gone, Susie and me staying-our family divided in fact the way it must have always been divided underneath, like a fault line opening."
Clesta, an eccentric invalid, lives in an overstuffed old house with a black man named Doc whose role in her life is somewhat ambiguous-part caretaker, part pal. Childless herself, she has a history of taking in her siblings' offspring, including Gort and Judith when they were teenagers, and now Lil and her cousin, Daniel. Some of the parallels between generations are a bit too tidy here, but with Harleman's understated style, they more or less work.
It is hard to know whether Judith is patience-or passivity-personified, or just plain cowardly, but she takes the same tack with her daughter that she did with Gort-silence-and it isn't the right one. Lil, after all, is a 14year-old testing her limits, provoking her mother for a response. Judith speculates, "Maybe it was better to watch and wait, let her have her head, the way I'd always done with her father. Who was I to say what either of them needed?" She misses her daughter, "missed the backbeat of her stereo through the floorboards, as if the house's heart had stopped," yet at first makes only the feeblest effort to win her back.
In part this is misjudgment and insecurity, but it is also because she is too preoccupied coping with Gort's absence. Her phobias and shortcomings are numerous-crossing the bridge into town, driving a car, reading a map, making demands-and it is satisfying to watch her overcome them one by one. It is as gratifying to the reader as it is to Judith to see her job as an unlikely carpenter's assistant change from a stopgap measure to a genuine career possibility.
Bitter Lake evokes E. Annie Proulx's prizewinning The Shipping News, also about a losertype who in his quiet way triumphs. Like The Shipping News, Harleman's novel has a timelessness as well as a strong sense of place and weather. (The sun rarely shines in this book.) But there is also something almost southern in feel about Bitter Lake-a family saga about an ingrown clan with secrets aplenty, including an unspoken history of suicide, "the one gesture of perfection available to anyone. Perfect, complete, irreversible refusal." This is heavy stuff-Walker Percy territory-yet Harleman leavens it with sharp details and dry humor. Suicide is an unenviable legacy that leaves the survivors struggling to fathom their relationships with the ultimate deserters and in need of finding a way "to survive surviving." Judith comments, "We would fit our Gorts together, Lil's and mine and Susie's, over and over, like the pieces of a puzzle, and there'd be some missing."
Harleman has assembled her puzzle carefully, and it's a moving, if not altogether jolly, picture.
-Heller McAlpin '77
Heller McAlpin reviews frequently for The Los Angeles Times and Newsday.

Short Takes

The Devil Problem
and Other True Stories
David Remnick '81
Random House, $25.95

Reading The Devil Problem and Other True Stories is like opening up The New Yorker and finding all your favorite articles. David Remnick '81's in-depth and probing profiles, previously published in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, are collected into three parts: forms of exile, artists and scholars (including Elaine Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion), and the news business. In these essays, Remnick renders each individual real and multidimensional. A critical look at politician Gary Hart includes the mention of President Clinton's political debt to Hart for demonstrating how not to publicly deal with marital infidelity. His portrayal of basketball superstar Michael Jordan on the court is breathless and joyful, and of Jordan's teammate Dennis Rodman, he is respectful, calling him "an embodiment of the times: a gender-bender filled with racial anxiety." Remnick has to be relished for writing such lines as this one about USA Today: "It asks to be loved for its good looks and sunny personality. It is a bimbo." He can be serious, too, as when he skewers American affection for Irish revolutionary Gerry Adams, whose "talent is his ability to be the appealing face of a repellent organization." Remnick, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, makes every page turn.

How to Care for
Aging Parents
Virginia Morris '81
Workman Publishing, $15.95

It was only a matter of time before a how-to book for caregivers of the aging in the vein of What To Expect When You're Expecting would be created. Virginia Morris '81's How to Care for Aging Parents provides answers, guidance, resources, and comfort in an easy-to-read format with plenty of boxes, bullets, sidebars, and personal testimonies. Her book covers everything from dealing with doctors and managing care for a bedridden parent, to going to a hospital, finding a nursing home, facing legal and financial issues, and mourning. In some fascinating chapters, Morris discusses all the ways the human body fails with age-incontinence, poor eyesight, hearing loss, and skin problems. How to identify Alzheimer's disease in contrast to benign memory loss is explained. In dementia, memory disappears, Morris writes: "He doesn't just lose his glasses, he forgets that he wears glasses."
The subtext of Morris's work is simple-she hopes to steer those who have become caretakers for their parents to realize hidden rewards. Parents love children in a special way, she says, and "helping him [or her] now is a chance to reciprocate some of that love and attention."

The Adolescent Journey:
Development, Identity, Formation,
and Psychotherapy
Marsha Levy-Warren '73
Jason Aronson, $40

Remember struggling to belong to a certain crowd in high school? Dr. Marsha Levy-Warren '73's book, The Adolescent Journey, although essentially an academic work, helps make sense of those years for adults, teenagers, and parents of teenagers. She divides adolescence, which roughly ranges from age 10 to 25, into three phases: early adolescents are concerned with physical changes and leaving childhood behind; middle adolescents are concerned with now, establishing a sexual identity, and fitting in with their peers; and late adolescents are looking to the future, refining their identities and returning to more normal relationships with family and friends.
Menstruation, masturbation, eating disorders, and the necessary narcissism of teenagers are all explored. She also discusses how disturbances like death, divorce, and physical disabilities can derail adolescent development.
Levy-Warren, associate director of the Institute for Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies and a clinical associate professor of psychology at New York University, often uses Freudian terminology, but that language is balanced with the voices of teenagers woven throughout. Case studies illustrate how problems in a particular phase of adolescence can have differing impacts on a teenager's ability to become a happy adult.
-Jennifer Gennari Shepherd
Jennifer Gennari Shepherd is a freelance writer living in Natick, Massachusetts.

Books Received
The Power of One:
The History of The American College
John Baird '40
The American College, $35

Unavoidable Germans: Art vs. Politics, and the Consequences
John Mosher '56
University Press of America, $49.50

From Blue Ridge to Barrier Islands: An Audubon Naturalist Reader
J. Kent Minichiello and Anthony W.
White '58
Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, $29.95

From Hitler's Doorstep: The Wartime Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles, 1942-1945
Neal H. Petersen '60, ed.
Pennsylvania State University Press, $85

Evil and the Demonic: A New Theory of Monstrous Behavior
Paul Oppenheimer '61
New York University Press, $29.95

Sailors' Secrets: Advice From the Masters
Michael Badham and Robby Robinson '65
International Marine, $29.95

The ABC's of the UCC:
Article 2A, Leases
Amelia H. Boss and Stephen T.
Whelan, Jr. '68
American Bar Association, $29.95

Storm Over Mono: The Mono
Lake Battle and the California
Water Future
John Hart '70
University of California, $26.96 paper

Headline Diplomacy: How News
Coverage Affects Foreign Policy
Philip Seib '70
Praeger Publishers/Greenwood,
$59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper

Use of Force: The Practice of States Since World War II
A. Mark Weisburd '70
Penn State Press, $65 cloth, $25 paper

Inquiry at the Window: Pursuing the Wonders of Learners
Phyllis Whitin and David J. Whitin '70
Heinemann, $21 paper

Critical Race Feminism: A Reader
Adrien Katherine Wing '71, ed.
New York University Press, $24.95 paper

Younger at Last: The New World of Vitality Medicine
Steven Lamm M.D. and Gerald Secor Couzens '72
Simon & Schuster, $23

Living Your Dreams (revised ed.)
Gayle Delaney '72
HarperSanFrancisco/HarperCollins,
$14 paper

Hermeneutics as Theological Prolegomena: A Cannonical Approach
Charles J. Scalise '72
Mercer University Press, $16.99 paper

From Scripture to Theology: A Canonical Journey into Hermeneutics
Charles J. Scalise '72
InterVarsity Press, $12.99 paper

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Princeton Years, Selected Writings, 1914-1920
Chip Deffaa '73, ed.
Cypress House, 155 Cypress St., Fort Bragg, CA 95437. $19.95 paper

The Inward Eye: Psychoanalysts
Reflect on Their Lives and Work
Laurie W. Raymond '73 and Susan
Rosbrow-Reich, eds.
The Analytic Press, $55

My Sergei: A Love Story
Ekaterina Gordeeva with E. M. Swift '73
Warner Books, $18.95

Skeletal Radiology: The Bare Bones (2nd ed.)
Felix S. Chew '75, M.D.
Williams & Wilkins, $89

Manual of Nuclear Medicine Imaging
Christopher C. Kuni and René P.
duCret '77, M.D.
Thieme Medical Publishers, $35

A Cancer Survivor's Almanac:
Charting Your Journey
Barbara Hoffman '80, ed.
Chronimed Publishing, $16.95 paper

Who Were the Founding Fathers?
Two Hundred Years of Reinventing American History (young adult)
Steven H. Jaffe '81
Henry Holt, $16.95

Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England
Naomi Miller '81
University Press of Kentucky, $34.95

Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz
Robert Faggen '82, ed.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $21

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin
Robert Faggen '82
University of Michigan Press, $35

First Principles of Cosmology
Eric V. Linder '82
Addison-Wesley, $29

First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (revised ed.)
Richard Preston *83
Random House, $24

The Privatization Challenge: A
Strategic, Legal and Institutional Analysis of International Experience
Pierre Guislain *83
The World Bank, $40

The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates-A Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present
Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther '83
Citadel Press, $25.95

The Male Survivor: The Impact of Sexual Abuse
Matthew P. Mendel '84
Sage Publications,
$45 cloth, $19.50 paper

Killing the Victim before the Victim Kills You: Establishing Responsible Relationships Through Making and Keeping Promises
Derek M. Watson '84, et al., eds.
Mashiyach Press, 1055 W. College Ave. #286, Santa Rosa, CA. 95401.
$13.95 paper

Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story
Charles Evers and Andrew Szanton '86
John Wiley & Sons, $24.95

English Women's Poetry,
1649-1714:
Politics, Community, and
Linguistic Authority
Carol Barash *89
Oxford University Press, $55

Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787-1799
Laura Mason *90
Cornell University Press, $39.95

The Political Economy of Special Interest Government
Kathryn A. Foster *93
Georgetown University Press, $55

Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel
Jane Eldridge Miller *93
University of Chicago Press,
$15.95 paper

Russia's Constitutional Revolution: Legal Consciousness and the Transition to Democracy,
1985-1996
Robert B. Ahdieh '94
Penn State Press, $30 cloth,
$14.95 paper

The Battle Against Intervention, 1939-1941
Justus D. Doenecke *96
Krieger, $13.50 paper

Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past
Patricia Fortini Brown (art and archaeology professor)
Yale University Press, $60

Wilde's Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism
Lawrence Danson (English professor)
Clarendon/Oxford University Press, $49.95

High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939
Maria DiBattista (English and
comparative literature professor) and
Lucy McDiarmid, eds.
Oxford University Press, $49.95

Color Conscious: The Political
Morality of Race
K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann (politics professor)
Princeton University Press, $21.95

Irons in the Fire
John McPhee '53 (humanities lecturer
and journalism professor)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22

Idolatry and its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640-1750
Kenneth Mills (assistant professor
of history)
Princeton University Press, $55

Scribbling Women: Short Stories
by 19th-Century American Women
Elaine Showalter (humanities
professor), comp.
Rutgers University Press, $50 cloth,
$17.95 paper

Race Versus Class: The New
Affirmative Action Debate
Carol M. Swain (associate professor of politics and public affairs), ed.
University Press of America, $29 paper

Christianity and Civil Society:
The Contemporary Debate
Robert Wuthnow (social sciences and
sociology professor)
Trinity Press International, $15

The Mirror of Justice: Literary
Reflections of Legal Crises
Theodore Ziolkowski (professor of German and comparative literature)
Princeton University Press, $47.50