Orange Prize-winning author Valerie Martin has a compelling new novel called Trespass. It is a provocative meditation on freedom and safety, foreignness and boundaries, an obvious comment on our current cultural climate, and a story that rejects time.

I read Martin's excellent collection of short stories The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories last year. As the title might suggest, the stories surround the creative process and the dynamics of power and personality and intimacy as channeled through the artist’s eyes.

Trespass picks up with Chloe Dale, also an artist - an illustrator, whose contented existence is disrupted by her son’s new romance. Set against the backdrop of the impending US invasion of Iraq, the story thrusts Chloe and her husband out of their comfortable, suburban, vaguely liberal world and their comfortable, suburban expectations for their son Toby when he brings home a difficult, intelligent, unmannered, and exotic new girlfriend. Salome is a Croatian refugee who is to Toby an intoxicating mix of radical ideology and old world tradition and to Chloe, immediately suspect. Her distrust starts out as the protective mother sort, but the intensity is unrelenting and her fixation only increases.

Chloe registers Salome as an intrusion, and as the plot progresses and the entanglements increase, Chloe becomes more and more alienated from the life she has created with her family and retreats further into her artistic process. Martin’s commanding narrative voice and her characters ambiguity allows her to frame this novel with moral and political overtones without making it a lesson.

I’m just back from a lovely vacation. I spent last week in Los Angeles catching up with some old friends and wandering around the town with a side trip to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree National Park. The weather could not have been any nicer and I am well rested and ready for the fall. Of course I checked in on my much missed predecessor Joe Murphy.

I am happy to report that Hollywood Joe is doing very well, loves his job, and has a swanky apartment in the Hollywood Hills. Ok, ok, the carpet is plush and baby blue, but the view is fantastic! Of course we talked books half the time I was there. Joe’s currently reading John Julius Norwich’s first volume on the history of Byzantium. He’s completely enthralled by Norwich’s writing and read many a passage out loud. He is pacing himself reading Byzantium: The Early Centuries so he doesn’t wear himself out on the Apogee and makes it all the way to the Decline and Fall.

We toured many a fine eating establishment together including The Apple Pan, a U-shaped lunch counter that specializes in burgers, fries, and pies. The Banana Cream Pie was worth my flight. Joe also took me around to a slew of fantastic bookstores in LA. And I ventured off on my own and visited even more. Some of the highlights were Hennessey and Ingalls, Skylight Books, and Vroman’s Bookstore.

I read a few short novels starting with Dan Rhodes’ newest work Gold. This was a charming story that ended on a strange note that I haven’t quite reconciled. But his writing is as always clever and funny and very enjoyable. The first book of his I read was Anthropology: And a Hundred Other Stories. This is a fantastic collection of very short stories, each, in fact, are 101 words. But it’s not just a clever notion; Rhodes backs it up with some strange, poignant, and funny musings.

I also read Georges Bernanos’ Mouchette. This was quite a contrast to the light-hearted nature of Rhodes work. This stark and unforgiving novel tells the story of the 14 year old Mouchette, she is the "little savage" to the townspeople and she believes it too. It is a tragic and lonely story. Bernanos’ intensity in this short novel made me want to get a copy of his Diary of a Country Priest right away. Robert Bresson made movies of both of these titles and they are part of the Criterion Collection.

School’s back in session and so is my weekly missive. And there is no better way to start up again for the fall then to write about a book that arrived in stores this week. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is a sprawling, intimidating, and thrilling novel that tackles the long and complicated Vietnam War.

I was eager to get the book this summer and when read the first 3 pages just for a taste I found it so utterly sad and affecting that I couldn’t put it down. All other books I was reading were immediately demoted and I was locked into reading all 600 plus pages. These pages tell parallel stories of entanglement and confusion.

Mostly it is the story of a young CIA man Skip Sands who is under the wing of his Kurtz-like uncle who goes by the name The Colonel. Skip is training to be Psy Ops and spends his days locked in an effort to make sense of information that seems to have no provenance while his own person gets merged with the jungle and his alias and the force of nature that is his uncle. His story is flanked by that of two restless, dangerous brothers Bill and James Houston who are slowly alienated from humanity and then spit back out into their desert hometown on Arizona.

Johnson captures gentle and funny moments as his characters hurtle or plod through their fortunes and reveals brutal and ugly details with the same off-handed gravity, which is of course unsettling, but edifying. Tree of Smoke is an undertaking, long and daunting, but deeply rewarding.