DISCOVERIES

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An American in Paris

The Cordial Traveler Inside Guide

Veronique Vial

Riggs Publishing Media: 112 pp., $19.95 paper

“Flattery can get you more chocolate filling in your crepe, if not pate in your face.” “Montmartre is a great place to pick up a painting, but you probably won’t find any Grateful Dead posters!” These and other bits of whimsical advice, written in Vial’s signature loopy, fountain-penned script (recognizable from “Men Before Ten a.m.” and “Women Before 10 a.m.”), complement her black-and-white photographs of an American dude in Paris. You gotta love the Hawaiian shirt and goofy expression, as much as you love the trench-coated and black-bereted beauty he dogs in a few of the photos. But it’s Paris, Vial’s hometown, that steals the show on these gorgeous pages -- Paris seen through the enthusiastic, unpretentious eyes of the tourist. The passing Metro, the little dogs on tight leashes that lead to possible affairs, the park benches, the street cleaners, the fountains that dare a dreamer to plunge in! Somehow the outsider is folded into the city’s arms, accepted in a way the locals could never be, blessed like a wayward naif who comes to dinner in the wrong shirt. For all the laughs in her captions and lightheartedness in the images, there’s more than a bit of Kertesz and Cartier-Bresson in the moments Vial captures.

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Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

A Novel

Angus Wilson

New York Review Books Classics: 360 pp., $14.95 paper

Angus WILSON wrote this, his second novel, in 1956, when he was 43. He was a satirist of British life who became well known for his depictions of gay culture, particularly where it breached the ramparts of the intelligentsia and the upper class. “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” unfolds against a backdrop of Regency rooms and committee meetings, a stage on which characters test the permeability of personal and social lines of demarcation.

These lines, still so obvious in postwar England, make (in this and other British novels) a very containable little world, ready for upset and perfect for a novel. At the center is the distinguished medievalist professor Gerald Middleton, 60, semi-retired and trying desperately to fade into respectable old age. But no. Too many skeletons in the academic closet (a nasty assemblage of the personal and the professional) and too many public problems posed by his estranged (if at least full-grown) children. One son, a famous journalist, has taken up with a scuzzy young Irishman; another son is having an adulterous heterosexual affair with a blowsy bohemian. As Gerald gets sucked into the maelstrom, puppeteer Wilson has much fun poking holes in the moral pretenses of the wealthy and broad-minded (a crowd not unlike our own limousine liberals). It’s Dickens for the smart set, or Edmund Wilson with a dash of savage silliness.

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You Poor Monster

A Novel

Michael Kun

MacAdam/Cage: 340 pp., $23

“For those who lived in Maryland, for those who knew how to crack open a crab and find the juiciest meat within its claws (twist, twist, careful now, pull, gentle, pull), for those who knew the squawk of a seagull watching you as you worked, Shoogey needed no more of an introduction than Elvis Presley.” Meet Sam Shoogey, storyteller, liar, sweetheart. Is he a novelist or isn’t he? Did he play football at the University of Maryland? Did he ever fight King Gilmore? Did he shoot seven men on the battlefield, one of them in the nose, “turning their bodies to fertilizer and their thoughts to pure blue air?” You want to believe him because you love him, this man whose motto is “Sic biscuitis disintegrat,” or “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.” It’s the Great American Dilemma in novel form -- where it can’t hurt anybody, right? (Lie to us. Set our imaginations wandering and our souls free from Calvinist moralizing, and we will believe you.) You won’t forget him. “Shoogey was Shoogey, like Dillinger was Dillinger, Picasso Picasso, Gandhi Gandhi. But mostly Dillinger Dillinger.”