Enigma variations

THE UNSETTLERS: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America, by Mark Sundeen. (Riverhead, $16.) Sundeen profiles three families - whom he calls pioneers, of a sort - who chose to live off the grid. They share an important commonality: "They had each taken on a fundamental aspect of how the world is broken, and had attempted, with all their might, to address it - in ways that felt sustainable, maybe even replicable." ENIGMA VARIATIONS, by Andre Aciman. (Picador, $16.) Aciman chronicles a lifetime of desire, love and loss. The central character, Paul, has an early infatuation with a craftsman in Italy that provides the story line's loose framework; the plot skips ahead to find him years later, nearly unrecognizable in an acrimonious relationship. Aciman's novel is a masterly portrayal of arousal and the selves forged by passion. LETTERS TO VERA, by Vladimir Nabokov. Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd. (Vintage, $20.) For over 50 years, Vera was a "song," a muse, a protector for her husband. (She was the one to save an early draft of "Lolita" after Vladimir tried to destroy it.) "It is the prose itself that provides the lasting affirmation," our reviewer, Martin Amis, wrote, "and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his divine energy." LONG BLACK VEIL, by Jennifer Finney Boylan. (Broadway, $16.) It's August 1980, and a band of college friends are looking for mischief in an abandoned Philadelphia prison. But when one of them goes missing, the night ends in tragedy. Years later, the student's body is found, and one of the survivors risks exposing two long-held secrets to protect the truth. As our reviewer, Marilyn Stasio, put it: "To the author, the prison is more than a setting, it's also a powerful symbol for the closeted life she once led." PRINCE CHARLES: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, by Sally Bedell Smith. (Random House, $20.) A sympathetic portrait of Charles comes down squarely in his favor, particularly with regard to Diana. He emerges as a thoughtful, intellectually driven man in Bedell's telling. The author, who has written at length about the royal family, offers a cleareyed view of the monarchy, its privilege and its faltering morals. ON TURPENTINE LANE, by Elinor Lipman. (Mariner, $14.99.) Faith Frankel is 32, perhaps more than a little bored, and has set down roots in her Massachusetts hometown. But mysterious objects in her new bungalow draw her into the neighborhood's past. Lipman's screwball romance is full of delightfully weird characters, from Faith's neo-hippie fiance to her father, an amateur artist churning out Chagall copies.

During a dinner party-with two of his lovers sitting at the table-Paul, the protagonist of this urbane novel, muses on the possibility of multiple lives occurring simultaneously: one lived in ordinary time; another that bursts and fizzles; another that is achievable but that somehow we end up not living. Handsome, bisexual, and a member of New York's creative class, Paul is haunted by too many choices. The story inhabits his interior world of sexual desires; New York City, though richly rendered, is a pale backdrop to his finely parsed ruminations and recriminations. His work is barely mentioned, though we know it allows him to arrive late after tennis and leave early for lunch and dinner dates. But this isn't a prurient tale; years pass while Paul hesitantly pursues a male tennis partner, a former college girlfriend, a young female writer. His sexual experiences and attitudes are colored by his unattainable first love, a cabinetmaker he met as a teenager in Italy, where his parents had a summer home. VERDICT Aciman's (Tell Me Your Name) sophisticated and erudite novel is constructed of chapters that feel like interlocking stories. Despite the plot's sexual feints and infidelities, the tone is curiously humorless. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James -Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.