Briefly Noted

“Light Perpetual,” “The Five Wounds,” “A Cure for Darkness,” and “We Had a Little Real Estate Problem.”

Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford (Scribner). This ruminative novel revolves around a hypothetical: what if five children killed in the London Blitz had instead survived? Spufford visits his characters at key moments in their lives, from 1944 to 2009. One becomes a shady property developer who gets rich during the Thatcher years, while others suffer as Britain’s postwar safety net is dismantled. One marries a skinhead; another, who almost becomes a rock star, struggles to reconcile herself to her life, musing, “Being somebody, loving anyone, it rules the rest out, and so it’s quieter than being young, and looking forward.” The novel’s ending verges on moralistic but offers a moving view of how people confront the gap between their expectations and their reality.

The Five Wounds, by Kirstin Valdez Quade (Norton). This début novel opens with Amadeo, an unemployed alcoholic in small-town New Mexico, preparing to play Christ in a brutally realistic annual reënactment of the Crucifixion. Though he spends the following weeks nursing wounds from the nails, the mystical melodrama of the penitentes ritual soon fades beneath more mundane concerns. As he struggles to get a windshield-repair business off the ground, his mother hides a cancer diagnosis and his teen-age daughter tries valiantly to be a good mother to her newborn son. Quade places richly textured characters in a world of small-bore preoccupations that illuminate large questions about love, power, desire, and redemption.

A Cure for Darkness, by Alex Riley (Scribner). “Like thick curly hair, mental illness runs in my family,” the author of this wide-ranging history of depression treatments writes. Interweaving memoir, case histories, and accounts of new therapies, Riley anatomizes what is still a fairly young science, and a troubled one. He surveys treatments as diverse as cocaine, famously advocated by Freud, and electroconvulsive therapy, which has lately undergone a revival. The book also delves into the state of care in developing countries, where psychiatric training lags but community-driven therapy shows promise. As Riley, quoting the W.H.O., observes, “When it comes to mental illness, we are all developing countries.”

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, by Kliph Nesteroff (Simon & Schuster). This critical history of Native American comedy traces its development through the past hundred and fifty years. For many Native Americans at the start of this period, the only legal way to escape the deprivations of reservation life was touring in Wild West shows, which obliged them to reënact scenes of their tribes’ subjugation. The styles and the fortunes of the comedians who have emerged since then vary greatly, but Nesteroff also unearths many commonalities, such as an awareness of the gulf between the desires of white audiences and Native ones, and the influence of tribal humor, as embodied by figures such as “sacred clowns”—jester-like figures who “point out the backwardness of society.”