Discoveries

Ordinary Wolves: A Novel

Seth Kantner

Milkweed Editions: 328 pp., $22

Here is a rare thing of beauty, a novel alive with detail about a life most of us would never experience. In “Ordinary Wolves,” Seth Kantner writes from the mind of a young white boy named Cutuk, whose artist father has taken his wife and three children to live in almost complete isolation in an igloo in northern Alaska. “Our family lived out on the tundra,” Cutuk says, “and built our igloo out of logs and poles, before I even grew a memory. Eskimos wouldn’t live that way anymore, but for some reason we did.” When he is 5, his mother takes her 12-string guitar and flies away. Soon his brother and sister (10 and 8) yearn for civilization. Cutuk longs to be a hunter, hates going to town and is happiest in the mountains. He chooses an old Eskimo as a mentor and role model. When one of his textbooks describes their part of Alaska as “a barren icy desert,” he protests. To him, it is rich and beautiful, full of mystery and danger. One day, Cutuk’s father goes back to the igloo with the first load of meat, leaving Cutuk on the tundra with a moose carcass: “I held my breath. Listened to the silence. The land at cold temperatures waited in molecular stillness; sound traveled far, though very little of it lived here anymore. My heart boomed. My ears filled with a waterfall of ringing. The land’s thousand eyes watched.”

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The Olive Season: Amour, A New Life, and Olives, Too...!

Carol Drinkwater

Overlook Press: 336 pp., $24.95

I don’t allow myself too many of these guilty pleasures: books about buying a farm in Europe and returning to some blissful state of civilization that includes champagne, homemade olive oil and the delicious food so abundant in France and Italy. Actress Carol Drinkwater described buying a Provence villa and olive grove in “The Olive Farm.” In “The Olive Season,” she and her French TV producer husband take up the ancient art. But he is often away, so many decisions and much of the labor go to a newly pregnant Drinkwater. There are stepdaughters, local gentry and bureaucrats who dole out permits. The book’s heart is Drinkwater’s fall (her soul’s deliverance) from glamorous youth to vulnerable, yet flexible, middle age.

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Gutted: Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life

Lawrence LaRose

Bloomsbury: 278 pp., $24.95

TRY to forget that Lawrence LaRose’s last book was “The Code: Time-Tested Secrets for Getting What You Want From Women Without Marrying Them!” and that within a year after publication, he found himself tongue-tied, in love, married, with a house. In “Gutted,” we learn that the newlyweds bought a complete wreck -- “A little TLC?” he muses. “I’m thinking more like CPR” -- in historic Sag Harbor, N.Y., where the median price is $550,000. “Since its construction in 1950, this simple home had been the unwitting and hapless victim of one punishing choice after another: green asbestos shingles covered over by yellow aluminum ... disheartening layers of linoleum topped by terrifying ones.... The place looked positively forlorn, more in need of Paxil than a coat of paint.” Having fled a small New York apartment, the couple suffers romantic delusions about the renovation process. These are demolished almost as quickly as the house’s interior, which LaRose calls “domicilicide.” Things deteriorate rapidly after he takes a job with a local contractor (earning less than his wife’s receptionist), thinking he can learn a thing or two about carpentry. In a low moment, he refuses when his wife asks for help mixing mortar for tiling: “Boo-hoo-hoo. Just stick with it. You seem to think you can do everything else without me, Miss Independent.... Say the magic words,” he demands. Finally, she says, “Okay, I need a man.” “That’s more like it,” he replies. But there are serious lessons and real-life values. LaRose applies a David Sedaris-style humor and his fancy-pants education (Jacques Derrida and Harold Bloom) to one of the benchmarks of this crazy American life, and triumphs.