The Inn at Lake Devine is a looming anachronism, a New England WASP character all its own. It reveals itself in pristine white clapboards, rolling mint green lawns reflected in a mountain lake, and porches filled with Adirondack chairs, sat in by the right sort. And at this inn, a remnant of the old order, Elinor Lipman sets her latest gentle social satire/romance. The story is a yellowed snapshot of the social upheaval of the Ô60s and early Ô70s , a coming of age portrait in a land of plenty and prejudice. Natalie Marx is a sharp, sensitive teenager growing up in a tight-knit Jewish family. One year her mother receives correspondence from a Vermont inn that she had queried about summer rates. The note concludes: “Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles.” Natalie’s parents renounce but ignore this blatant anti-Semitism, but Natalie becomes fixated on the affront. She asks her father, “Do you think they’ve seen the The Diary of Anne Frank?” The family decides instead to rent a cabin across from the Inn on Lake Devine for the next few summers. On one of these vacations, at the instigation of Natalie and her father, the family adopts another name and travels to the other side of the lake to inquire in person about vacancies. The Inn seems an ideal place for a healing experiment; they need to prove to themselves that people are generally decent, if only to one’s face. The following summer, Natalie discovers that her camp mate is going with her family to the Inn, and she manipulates her way into an invitation. Now she will infiltrate the Inn’s halls as herself, and encounter the monster. Lipman uses an oblique, subtle wit that pins emotions down with a glob of Blu-Tak instead of a nail. Natalie’s search for answers to unanswerable questions moves along with an elegant dignity; as she grows up, her fate seems bound to a place and issues that she rearranges with grace and compassion, finally finding peace in their patterns. At the end, the story surprises that it has finished, that there isn’t more to say. Leaving the reader wistful for eternal justice and a conquering love is perhaps the subtlest move of all.

Reviewed by Deanna Larson.

Philip Shumway is only 13 years old when his older brother disappears. Stepping out to explore Baker’s Bottoms Pond near his rural Massachusetts home, the child prodigy vanishes without a trace. Frederick Reiken’s The Odd Sea chronicles the decade following the disappearance, examining how the event affects an already dysfunctional family. The heroic father throws himself into the chisels of timber framing. The angry mother loses herself for months in a psychiatric hospital and Victorian novels. Amy, the oldest sister, screams at the family to move on and steals Ethan’s diary to keep them from trying to hang on to what doesn’t exist. All the while, Philip, the narrator of this touching story, wanders the woods "not-finding" Ethan.

Reiken remarkably captures the unresolved nature of a disappearance, the world of questions, false leads, and dashed hopes. At times various family members convince themselves that Ethan has been brutally murdered or has run away to Arles, France, to follow in the footsteps of Van Gogh. While everyone crafts their own personal grief crutches, it is Philip who creatively employs his desire to remember his brother with his own budding artistry. Philip walks the woods and backroads scribbling vignettes in bulging notebooks, attempting to "remember everything" about Ethan. He grows to realize these stories won’t bring his brother back, but they will bring him out of the nothingness he is so rightly afraid of.

In the hands of a lesser novelist, the story could easily dissolve into emotional schlock, but Reiken’s voice is pitch-perfect fragile, yet resolute, sad, but celebratory. He renders the family’s torment in all its contradictory complexity, depicting grieving not as a linear process that can be broken into 12 simple steps, but rather disparate mixture of melancholy, sureness, and confusion that defies timelines and the cliched words of experts. Much like Ordinary People, The Odd Sea strikes with its understated lyricism, surprises with its maturity and awes with its complexity. Reiken is only in his twenties, but writes with the confidence of an author three times his age; someone this young isn’t supposed to write something this good.

1 loaf of wry 2 cups of longing 3 cups of detailed observation 2 flank steaks of conviction Dash of critique of carnivorous colonialism Stir the wry, longing, and observation in a large mixing bowl. Pour atop flanks and cook for 364 pages. Garnish with critique. Beautifully serves one. Such a literary recipe takes the utmost care, patience, and preparation. Many first-time novel chefs manage to overcook, but Cynthia Ozeki is the rare cook she creates a sumptuous 12-chapter meal in her debut My Year of Meats.

Jane Little-Takagi reluctantly takes a job with My American Wife!, a TV show that brings the values and meats of the American heartland into the homes of Japanese wives. Jane considers herself a “cultural pimp” for hawking beef for a national lobby association, but as a sometimes brash, sometimes tender fledgling documentarian, she wants the experience and she needs the money. Across the Pacific Akiko Ueno watches My American Wife! and dutifully makes the dishes for her husband John, one of the producers of the show. But Akiko’s inability to conceive causes John shame, which he takes out by beating his quiet wife. However, the strength of Jane’s programs, which invariably veer from what the producers are looking for (one of her shows features vegetarian lesbians), gives Akiko hope to remove herself from an increasingly hellish existence. From the Wal-Martification of America to the hormone-fueled production of meats, Ozeki balances humor with horror, sardonic cultural comment with passionate evocations of the political, personal, and chemical politics of childbearing.

Conceptually the novel falters a bit in the last few chapters, but not enough to derail the surprisingly funny and surprisingly disturbing picture of cross-cultural clashes and the high stakes of meat production in the United States. Ozeki masterfully brings her skills as an accomplished documentarian, which provides unbelievable details, especially to the American sections of the book. She nails regional quirks in behavior and speech from the delta soul of Mississippi to the funkified East Village. Smart, sensitive, slick, and sizzling, My Year of Meats (Viking, $23.95. 0670879045), possesses an edgy hipness informed by maturing convictions, and Ozeki’s recipe simmers equal parts attitude and talent. As they say down South, “Them’s good eats.” Reviewed by Mark Luce.

The lyrical power of Delia Facloner’s The Service of Clouds can only be described as stunningly poetic. Her story rains passion, landscape, love and loss on readers, and Falconer writes with a grace not normally associated with first novels. Sensuous metaphors, historical complexity and swirling spirituality form the airy clouds of this absolutely gorgeous novel. Reviewed by Mark Luce.

Mo Lehrnman is a prototypical rock climber: fearless, wildly spontaneous, and filled with marvelous stories of triumph and near misses. His best friend, Ray Connelly, is everything Mo’s not. But when Ray “borrows” Mo’s tales for a book, the pair take their struggle to the beauty of Yosemite’s El Capitan, the crown jewel of rock climbing. An amusing look at the high-altitude world of twentysomething climbers, Daniel Duane’s Looking for Mo delights readers with its majestic description of Yosemite and a friendship saved by carabiners and ropes. Reviewed by Mark Luce.

Bruce Springsteen’s album “Nebraska” evokes the spare spirit of the Midwest perhaps better than anything in American music. Terence Malik’s haunting Badlands does the same thing in American cinema. Now, Goodnight Nebraska, a phenomenal debut novel by Tom McNeal, accomplishes in literature what The Boss and Malik did for the Great Plains in other forms. Randall Hunsacker didn’t want to come to the hamlet of Goodnight, Nebraska. The arrival of the 17-year old was forced after his involvement in a shooting, a car theft, and the twisted steel carnage of a subsequent crash in Utah. Randall is an outsider in a town where whispers, a stubborn resistance to change, and something dangerous simmers beneath rigid appearances. Randall falls for Marcy Lockhardt, the high-school’s most pristine and promising student, and she falls for Randall’s mysterious past and quiet introspection. Despite their desire to escape the drudgery of Goodnight, they are sucked even deeper into the strange town by marriage and lost ambition. If you have ever spent time in a small plains town, you know the feel the invisible pull that keeps people in a depressing place with their secrets, lies, and unrealized hopes. Randall and Marcy are no different. Their tumultuous marriage is punctuated by silence and indifference. Much in the manner of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, McNeal seamlessly weaves their story with intense, sometimes graphic tales of the other townspeople. These interlocking stories chronicle the unknowingly unhappy, and the vulgar that underpins what for all appearances is simple, bucolic. Further, McNeal’s incredibly cinematic descriptions tellingly dramatize the slow, dull aches of hearts stuck in muddy, rutted roads of emotion. McNeal writes with a quiet intensity, and his scenes of domestic heartbreak and terror happen in the middle of paragraphs. While frightening, the scenes work to underscore that life, especially on the hardscrabble plains, and are not broken neatly into chapters. Affairs happen, friendships fail, marriages fray, and people die in strange, violent ways. This is a day in the life. All this simply occurs. Without warning. Without headlines.

Like the later stories of Raymond Carver, Goodnight Nebraska demonstrates that under the callused hands and hearts lie a soft-beating hope the chance for reconciliation and acceptance. McNeal has written an uncommonly human novel; he describes a landscape where, however briefly, the numbness disappears and things as insignificant as interlocked hands, a simple statement, or even a drive on dirt roads means something larger, the promise of something better.

Reviewed by Mark Luce.

From the perspective of a nine-year-old girl, The Everlasting Story of Nory celebrates the splendor of childhood curiosity. Nicholson Baker, whose writing revels in the oft-ignored nuances of everyday life, is at ease imitating the style and manner of a child. Baker, whose book was inspired by his daughter Alice, explains its title in the words of Nory: “The idea of everlasting life came partly from the kinds of things you say in Cathedral, and partly from a movie called The Neverending Story, which was an extremely good movie in many ways, one of which was that it was unusually rare to have a two-part movie and have the second part be just as interesting as the first, basically.” Although the arc of the story does not include a standard exposition or development, by the end of the book a subtle picture of Nory has been drawn. In 54 brief chapters, Baker reveals her world in a collage of independent episodes. Many of the scenes take place in the Threll Junior School, where Nory ponders everything from the fate of Achilles to the intricacies of a compass. “Really the compass is called a Ôset of compasses,’ and the things that stick out are called the Ôarms of the compass.'” Having moved with her family from the United States to England, Nory learns to cope with the peculiarities of her new British classmates, who use words like “bin” and “false palate” to describe garbage cans and retainers. Baker’s love for quirky speech shines through here, as he conveys the conversations of children in school. But there is more to this story than witty depictions of child-like language. In portraying the kindness with which Nory befriends the bullied Pamela, Baker illustrates a child’s potential for goodness. In Nory’s world, kids are not simply sidekicks complementing the adults who surround them. They are the main characters here, puzzling over curiosities and acting out their dreams. It may seem odd that The Everlasting Story of Nory was written by the same man who dreamed up Vox and The Fermata, the sexy novels for which Baker is widely known. But like this one, those earlier books were essentially about fantasy, imagination, and the importance of affection. With fine descriptive skill, Baker has once again created a poignant portrait of emotional intimacy, this time through the eyes of a child. Reviewed by Jeremy Caplan.